Melissa put the knife in my hand without a word.
The blade was warm from her palm. Azure turned her back to me — still Ingrid's shoulders, Ingrid's neck, Ingrid's bald head — and I got the edge under the rope at her wrists. The fibres parted clean. One cut. The loops fell open and dropped to the stone between her heels.
Her hands came free and she was round and into me before I'd lowered the knife.
I held her.
And it was wrong in a way I hadn't braced for. The height was wrong. The shoulders under my hands were narrower than Azure's and the arms across my back were somebody else's arms, and I was holding a body I'd watched get shoved through a door a few minutes back while a girl I knew lived somewhere behind it.
Her heart was going hard enough that I could feel it through both of us, a fast steady knock against my chest through the borrowed body.
I had to reach past Ingrid to find her.
