Mira snuggled under the sheet, reluctant to open her eyes. A subtle scent of cedar mingled with a whiff of antiseptic ointment caught in her nose.
"Good morning, Mira," soft and magnetic, a man's voice drifted by her ear.
Her eyes popped open.
Startled to find herself resting on his chest, she recoiled. But he tightened his arm around her. "Relax," he continued in his lazy croon. "It's ten thirty in the morning on the thirtieth of September. You're at my place in Konstinbul."
She gulped, her hands clenched into fists as she tried to push him away. Yet, sore in every muscle and joint, she could barely hold herself up, her head too groggy to think. Her breath hitched, followed by a fit of coughing.
Patting her back, he straightened, his other hand caressing her cheek. "We'll bring you in for a scan later, ok?"
"Who are you?" she ventured, struggling to keep the quaver out of her voice.
"Don't you remember?" He lifted her chin with the crook of his thumb. She shut her eyes with force and despised herself at the same time for being such a halfwitted ostrich who shoved her head into the sand when danger looked her in the eye. Gingerly, she peeled open her eyes.
"Hello, Mira," he said, his onyx eyes smiling, his breath on her skin. "We meet again."
Words trembled on the root of her tongue but wouldn't come out, her mind scrambling to pick up the pieces.
Escaping from the Customs, she was captured by the man nearly shot in the shoulder. In his bunker under the sea, she helped him suture the wound. While she was left alone in his car, while she could have made her escape, karma caught up. She got malaria from the mosquito bites she didn't think were serious, along with an asthma attack. And the rest, she wasn't sure if she had dreamed it up.
"How's your shoulder?" she mumbled, curling up her knees to stifle the shudder.
"Better, which I need to thank you for."
"I only did what you asked."
He chuckled. "But you didn't have to."
Dodging his gaze, she glanced down only to find herself in another fit of panic. "My clothes," Her eyes widened at the white shirt clearly too big for her, and her small breasts looming under it without the chest bond. "You… You…" She squirmed in his grip.
"You had a complication, which I suspect to be myocarditis caused by the plasmodium falciparum parasite found Dominican Peninsula, and the reason why we need to take you in for a scan today. Sorry about your clothes," he paused for another chuckle, which didn't sound sorry at all. "To save you, it was, um, necessary."
"Should have just dug a hole and left me there to die."
He laughed, removing her hand from her face. "Didn't you mention that you want to study medicine?"
Taken aback that he took to heart what she had spilled so casually, Mira batted her eyes.
"You should get used to the human body," he added, a smirk flitting in his onyx gaze that made her flush.
And yet Mira was stubborn. "Get used to stripping others, perhaps," she retorted. "Not being shucked like corn!"
His chest rose and fell with another laugh. "That's good. You're in a good spirit, and that's always important for recovery."
"Nothing comes even close to be good!" she whimpered, her frail voice trailing.
"And yet you can still be funny about it." He lowered his head to find her eyes.
She risked a glance up and met those eyes deep set in a chiseled face that seemed out of the world. Another fit of cough seized her. Her whole body shivered. As if every bone had been pulled out of her, she felt like her like a pulp, a pool of barf on his chest. She stifled a sob, stewing in self-loathing.
"Here," He held up a glass of water to her lips. Too weak to fight him, she sipped, her wheezing breath shallow and ragged.
"We'll get you something to eat," he said, holding her cheek in a palm. "And we leave for the clinic."
"I'm not hungry," she hummed. All the banter, if that's what it was, had consumed the last bit of her. She leaned her weight on him, too tired to keep her eyes open.
"I know," He stroked her hair. "But you need to. When was the last time you ate?"
She had a sandwich so stale she couldn't bring herself to finish when she was held at the Customs. Now with hindsight, she should have finished the stale sandwich. "I don't know," she murmured.
He didn't say another word and lifted her into a bridal carry.
"Put me down," she protested under her ragged breath, her hands pressing his chest as if that could push him away. "You'll stretch your wound!"
"You're lighter than a kettlebell."
"Which can be heavy!"
He only chuckled, carrying her down the sweeping stairs. Despite his composed look, his jaw clenched. Veins bulged in his neck, the skin tightening around his larynx and accentuating the involuntary movement that betrayed the pain he must have been enduring.
Her heart fluttered; her breath hitched. She wanted to ask him why but couldn't find the courage.
He circled to the kitchen in the back and stopped by the pantry. Putting her on the marble countertop under the cabinets, he freed a hand and grabbed a canister in metallic finish from the open shelve. "I hope you like chocolate." Flipping open the lid, he held the canister to her. "Dark, milk, hazelnuts, almonds, or strawberry?"
"Hazelnuts?"
"You don't sound too sure."
"I also like strawberry."
"So take both. You need sugar."
Lifting her eyes at him, Mira took a bite.
"Good girl," he crooned.
Under the glow of an industrial chandelier with exposed bulbs, she noticed for the first time the dimple on one side of his cheek when he smiled like this, and it left on her heart a mark such as she had never seen. She averted her eyes upon meeting his.
A harrumph rose behind them, turning their heads. A young man yawned, as he sauntered over toward them. "Thought I heard you," he grumbled, wheatear-like curls straggling about his oval face, young and flawless.
"I'd apologize for waking you," said Warshon unapologetically. "But I was going to wake you anyway."
The other took a look at his watch. "It's that late?" He yawned again, his voice offhand. "Fine, fine, I'm up. I'm hungry though."
"Help yourself with the chocolate," Warshon intoned. "We need to talk about Ozal later."
"What about him?"
"Haven't I said later?" He shifted his gaze back to her. "Mira, this is Erdem Aktas, my apprentice. Any questions you have when I'm not around, feel free to ask him."
"Which I haven't agreed!" Dragging his feet up to the counter, Erdem tore open a chocolate bar, his bite angry, his storm gray eyes rolling at the skylight.
Mira looked over the shoulder at him, her lips pursing. "Hello," she said under her ragged breath, so much timidness in her voice she loathed herself for it.
"Hmph," Erdem shot her a sideway glance, both sullen and dismissive. "Don't you have a last name?"
Not sure how Warshon got her first name to begin with, Mira scoured for words.
The young man snorted as he pivoted to his boss. "First, she disguised as a dude, and now she wouldn't even give you her full name. I don't know why you trust her."
"Should I trust you just because I know your name?"
Erdem batted his eyes, his teeth stained with chocolate laid bare behind parted lips.
"Loaded question," Warshon shrugged, then flicked his eyes at the car fob on the countertop next to a tray of polished glassware. "How about you drive instead of pestering my guest?"
"Thought you don't have guests," the young man groused as he snatched up the fob.
Warshon ignored him. Snapping the chocolate bar, he fed the half to her. "Looks like you're my first," he said, a faint smile thawing his onyx gaze. Pinching the other half of the chocolate between his white teeth impeccably aligned, he scooped her up from the countertop. "Let's go."
The chocolate melted, coating her tongue, which must have done the same on his. While the fever had her taste buds obtuse, Mira savored the subtle sweetness as he carried her through the atrium. Passing the stoic bonsai tree, she realized how minimalistic his place looked, with so much restraint as if the house knew its grace and didn't feel the need to announce it. Beautiful alas, it also felt distant, as everything opposite to a home. Like a staging that had never smelled the waft of butter, or celebrated a birthday, it was never meant to be lived in.
Neither man said much in the rover. Suspecting it had to do with Ozal, Mira wondered who this Ozal was. Her memory came back to her of the blood bags initialed with W, E, and N.
If E was for Erdem, could Ozal be the N?
She snuck a sidelong peek at the man who had hauled her back from the sheer cliff of death.
Propping his elbow on the window, he leaned his head on the back of his hand and seemed to have fallen asleep. The rising sun contoured his heart-shaped face as though it was chiseled out of an alabaster by the hands of a god. Contrasting the sharp features were the long lashes and the soft lips, adding in a touch of vulnerability that tuned the profile to perfection.
"Did he get shot because of you?"
She snapped her eyes to the rearview mirror.
Having stopped for the red light, Erdem was staring back at her.
"What did he tell you while I was out?"
A snort rattled in the young man's throat. Tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, he shook his head. "It's never a fair game with you. You know who we are, and we know nothing about you. I asked you a simple question that needed only a yes or no, and you replied with another question I couldn't answer."
"Why couldn't you answer?" In defiance of the drumming in her head that threatened to burst her artery and made her nauseous, she put on a smug smile. "Aw, because there are things about you I'm not privy to, and you want to keep it this way, which I respect completely. So how about you also respect my privacy? And as for your question, I'm afraid it wasn't as simple as you claimed, and neither a yes nor no can come without consequences. If my answer was yes, your boss is taking care of a woman who got him shot. His judgment is clearly unsound. Or perhaps he did so out of some sort of necessity he had to keep you out of? Either way, it'd induce some sort of distrust or mistrust or both between you the two of you, and more reason for you to want to crucify me later. And if my answer was no, well, we both know that's not the answer you want. Denying it would only render me more of a liar to you even if I were telling the truth. Given such conjecture behind your question, lastly, it seems to me your boss hasn't got the chance to tell you what really happened. Ergo, to try and test my conjecture, I raised the question, what did he tell you?"
"What the fuck?" Erdem threw his head over his shoulder. "You aren't sick at all! Aren't you?"
"Huh?"
"The fever and the cough and everything, you faked it! How did you fake it?"
"Green light, Erdem." The lazy croon had them both agape, and the rover was catapulted ahead as Erdem threw his eyes back on the road. "You heard that, boss?" he cried. "Who the fuck with a fever that high talks like that?"
Warshon didn't move or speak, his eyes boring into hers. So intensive was his onyx gaze that she could try to run to the edge of the world and still wouldn't be able to hide from it.
She gulped, stifling the shudder slithering down her spine. All her eloquence from only a few pulses ago seemed to have abandoned her altogether. Renoyld had counseled her to practice the art of knowing when to shut up. Clearly, she had yet to master the craft. "Thought you were sleeping," she managed at length, her face a wince behind her arms ringing her knees.
"I was," he crooned. "Until I heard a rhetorician so fascinating I thought I dreamed her up." His hand felt cold as it slid through her arm and grazed her forehead. "Well, she's definitely having a fever."
"She could have taken some pills," the other grumbled. "Aphrodisiacs, maybe?"
"Erdem!" A rippling growl, bristled and final that the young man didn't speak another word for the rest of the drive.
***