I ground my teeth, clawed the sheet, and drew a long breath.
He dipped towards the hollow of my neck and, at the same time, picked up a scalpel from the stainless-steel tray. His free hand clamped my shoulder to hold me steady.
'Mm… don't move,' he murmured.
I swallowed hard, fixed my eyes on the wall, and snapped, 'Just do it.'
A sharp burn ripped through me—strange, hot pain. My breath stalled, but I didn't move a centimetre. Jaw locked, I tried to breathe through my nose. I felt blood running warm from the cut. I pressed my lips together to smother a cry and stared at the ink on his forearm—a spider… and the tail of a snake coiled around his wrist.
To distract myself, I forced out, 'Why do you have s… so many aliases? Most operatives get one, maybe two…'
He drove the scalpel in deeper. My mouth opened on a silent shout; my eyes stung.
'Different ops, different names,' he said. 'I've had m… missions all over the world. That's why they gave me so many. Most of them are t… tattooed on me.'
Panting, I grated, 'Did you find it?'
He slid out a tiny black tracker and held it up—smaller than a bean. He dropped it into the tray, then coolly threaded a needle and brought it to my neck. I flinched, and his hand pinned my thigh, hard, to keep me still. Darkness crowded my vision, but I forced myself not to move while he stitched. His breath burned against my skin. I bit my lip and shut my eyes.
Softly, I asked, 'Hardly anyone knows that w… when I was a teen some of them called me Butterfly. How did you know? Why use that n… name?'
As the needle bit into the flesh below my ear, he said beside it, 'The jellyfish I'd h… heard about was dangerous and vicious. But the girl in front of me wasn't.'
I gripped the bedspread, eyes screwed shut, anchoring myself to his voice. He snipped the thread, dropped the needle into the tray, and added, meeting my eyes,
'You… looked more like a l… little butterfly than a d… deadly jellyfish.'
He wiped the blood from my neck, stripped off his gloves, and tossed them into the tray with the gauze. I pressed a hand to the fresh stitches.
He straightened, gave me a brief look, and murmured, 'We need to go before they hit us.'
I drew a shaky breath and pressed a palm to my chest, forcing myself upright. As I stood, my gaze snagged on the tracker in the tray—why hadn't he burnt it? Maybe he wanted the Union to think it was still transmitting, to throw them off while we ran.
He'd already left the room. I followed. He grabbed a black duffel bag from the coffee table and tossed it to me. I caught it mid-air, weak and wobbly.
'Change,' he said. 'Clean your neck. I d… don't want you reeking of dried blood the whole way.
He paused and looked straight into my eyes:
"Because we have a long road ahead."