“Pressure. Here.” He guided my hands before I understood what he was doing, pressing my palms flat against the guard’s ribs. “Don’t let go.”
“I don’t—I’m not trained for—”
“You don’t need training. You need to not let go.”
I didn’t let go.
Damian crossed to the tall windows, moved the curtain two inches with one finger, and looked out at the dark lawn. Whatever he saw made his jaw tighten.
“Marcus.” He said the guard’s name without turning. “How many exits do they have covered?”
“Front and east wing. Maybe west, I didn’t—” Marcus coughed, and I felt the tremor of it under my hands. “I don’t know about the kitchen corridor.”
“That’s where we’re going.” Damian finally looked at me. Not at the trays I no longer carried, not at my uniform stretched across my hips, not at anything I had spent ten years trying to hide. He looked at my face the way a person looks at something they intend to keep.
“What’s your name?”
“Nora.”
“Nora.” He said it like he was filing it somewhere permanent. “Can you carry weight?”
The question landed strange in my chest — not an insult, not the joke I’d braced for on instinct, the old flinch my body had learned before I could stop it. He wasn’t asking if I was weight. He was asking if I could bear it.
“Yes,” I said, and I meant it more than he could know.
“Good. Because I need you to help me get him to the service stairs, and I need you to not stop moving no matter what you hear.”
Gunfire cracked again, closer this time, punctuated by a woman’s scream that cut off too abruptly.
Marcus’s eyes had gone glassy at the edges. “Boss, leave me. Get the girl out. Get yourself out.”
“I don’t leave my people,” Damian said, and something about the flatness of it, the total absence of performance, told me it wasn’t a line he’d used before for effect. It was simply the truth of him. “Nora, left arm. I’ll take the right and his weight. On three.”
