Chapter 42 #2
I glance around the lobby. Dinah is out sick today, and with no guests tonight, we’ve had the staff stay home with pay, and our security too.
It’s only Andrea and Sedge and possibly Tristan here, and I can feel it—the emptiness of the space, the vacancy of it.
All this vastness, this outlay of wealth and intention, and it might as well be a crumbled Greek theater now, a hollow monument to what used to be.
The vacancy is an extrapolation, a reflection, the kingdom mirroring the king, and while I’m mostly numb to it, I recognize in the staff’s faces a certain kind of melancholy.
They helped Lyonesse grow and thrive, their satisfaction was in the satisfaction of our guests, and now all they can do is sit in the stale air of an empty building and wait.
For their sake, I hope this is temporary, that we soon have all the assurances we need to go back to normal. That Lyonesse is filled to the brim with its wicked children once again.
I take the elevator down to the treasury floor, and they open to the usual: a large vestibule capped with glass double doors and lit with blue lights. Beyond is a second set of doors and the server room.
I don’t see Andrea.
“She didn’t come in today, I’m sorry,” says a quiet voice from the corner closest to the elevator doors—the corner I couldn’t see as I stepped out.
I turn to see Sedge standing there in trousers and a cardigan, his pale hair pulled back into a neat ponytail, his light gray eyes shining blue under the lights.
“She didn’t text Ms. Lim either. But I’m sure you’re familiar with how to spoof a phone number, sir. You know how easy it is to do.”
The wrongness of the moment is a veil pulled between us, or perhaps it’s a veil pulled back, and now I’m really seeing Sedge for the first time.
My mild-mannered assistant of almost two years, his inscrutable expression no longer closed off but blank; my assistant who should not be down here, who has no reason to be down here, no reason to spoof Andrea’s phone number and casually ask for my help in the treasury in her name.
I didn’t plan for this. I didn’t see it.
And I have…nothing for this moment.
No favors, no secret armies, no extra information.
Nothing.
My body—used to danger after eighteen years of courting it for paychecks and revenge—summons what I need in a scatter of neural sparks. Amygdala to hypothalamus, hypothalamus to sympathetic nervous system. Epinephrine and glucose and cortisol are dumped wholesale into my blood.
“Sedge,” I say calmly, meeting his gray-blue gaze as my pulse kicks and my muscles coil.
“I could have used Andrea or Dinah to access the server room,” he says, stepping forward.
His eternal iPad is tucked neatly in his hand, resting against his hip.
“But then I would have been known to them, and there was no reason for them to be collateral damage afterward. Not when I like them both—yes, even Andrea—and you’re the problem anyway.
You’re the one who can’t be left alive.”
The elevator doors slide closed behind me, but the car stays in place. The elevator and the fire door on the other side of the server room are the only ways out of this basement—I’m not sure how feasible either exit is right now.
“I don’t see a gun,” I say, “or a knife. So I presume you have a different way of coercing me?”
He nods, his finely worked features catching the gleam of the blue lights.
High cheeks, straight jaw. There’s something underneath the blank expression, something that I can’t quite catch.
“The Falstaff routine worked on me for a while, but after the saint’s death in Fez and what happened in Albany, I didn’t think risking a physical fight was in my best interest.” He flips the iPad around and holds it up to show a security feed of the grotto, of an unconscious Tristan bound and gagged next to the pool.
Someone stands next to him with a long braid and a scapular.
Veronica.
She’s looking down at a phone in her hand.
“She’s been instructed to kick him into the water if you don’t do as I ask.
She’s watching us now to make sure you’re cooperating.
” Sedge lifts a hand, and Veronica must see it on her phone, because she lifts her own hand in response.
“I felt like this was more elegant than me waving a gun at you, sir. But I am sorry.”
I give myself a beat to accept that this is inconvenient, that I won’t survive anything happening to Tristan, that I’m feeling terror like I haven’t since all those saints came pouring into the church in Albany, and then say, “Okay, Sedge. You have my compliance.”
I cling to his sir , to his sorry . To the thing under his careful neutrality that might just be reluctance or regret, either of which I can use.
Sedge’s expression doesn’t change. “We’re going to access the servers, and you’ll show me how to get the information I want.”
“And then?”
A pause. Something like unhappiness, maybe. Like a thwarted hope that this wouldn’t be necessary. “You should understand that you will die no matter what, but your beloved’s life is still in your power to save. If we’re satisfied, Tristan can live.”
“I’ll die no matter what,” I echo. “And here I thought you carried a torch for me.”
Sedge’s cheeks darken to purple in the blue glow, and he looks away. I don’t press. I have to do this right. I have to do it perfectly, because if I don’t, Tristan dies, and I can’t?—
I can’t have that. I won’t.
I walk over to the thumbprint scanner, then to the retina scanner. Once upon a time, I could have used my watch to get in, but even before the saints took it, Isolde divested it of the chip that worked as a key, so . The old-fashioned way it is, I guess.
“You must work with the saints,” I say as the retina scanner flashes. The first set of glass doors click open, and we walk through. “Has this always been the case, or did Cashel flip you?”
Sedge’s voice carries just a tinge of sadness. “I’ve always been faithful to the Church. From the beginning.”
There is a fingerprint scanner for the second set of doors, and I slide my first finger against the glass pad, considering my options, my mind flipping through bad idea after bad idea.
Fuck. Sedge.
I can’t believe I didn’t see this.
“The attack on the club, the one that prevented my going to Ireland for Isolde,” I say, careful to keep my tone wondering and casual. “Was that you? Who let Drobny’s men in via the fake background checks?”
“It was,” Sedge admits softly.
I remember the double feint. The misdirection. Sending Drobny’s men down to the server room so they could draw away enough security and more easily attack me upstairs.
“It was a good plan, Sedge.”
We’re walking through the second set of glass doors now. When I turn back and look at him, I see something conflicted in the normally level set of his mouth.
“Adam,” he says after a minute. “My real name is Adam.”
“Adam,” I repeat.
He blushes again.
We’re able to step on the pressure-sensitive floor of the server room with impunity since we used my biometric data to access the space.
If we hadn’t, the system would have sensed an unauthorized user and initiated a lockdown protocol, sealing off the space with aluminum shutters and turning the room into a giant, exitless cage.
As we walk, I give the glass-cased rows of CPUs a fleeting glance, along with the mounted cameras on the ceiling, before I speak again. “So you worked for Cashel from the beginning. As a saint?”
“Not quite,” my assistant says.
I lead him to the nearest access terminal, which also happens to be in a row that the cameras can’t see between.
Sedge hasn’t checked his iPad again since we started walking, I’ve noticed, and he hasn’t waved up at the cameras again either.
Like communicating with Veronica isn’t all that important anymore.
“Not a saint…perhaps you were purely administrative then? Or clerical? Ah, I see.” There’d been a tremble in his mouth at the word clerical .
He seems a little irritated with himself for giving this away.
“It must have been quite something to be a priest at Lyonesse,” I observe lightly, kindly.
“Hard to be further away from holiness than here. Although if you were working for Cashel, I assume you’d already bargained your holiness away piece by piece.
A murder here, a theft there, a handful of plenary indulgences for your troubles.
It can be disheartening after a while, I’m sure. ”
Sedge—Adam—doesn’t ruffle at my teasing tone.
In a way, it seems to relax him, that I’m the same Mark, that I don’t seem to hold my impending death against him.
His mouth softens the tiniest bit as he shakes his head.
“I liked it here,” he says a little quietly.
“I’ve been sent so many places—parish churches, army bases, corporations, militia enclaves—and this is the first place where I thought maybe… ”
I don’t prompt him after he stops speaking.
I merely open the case for the terminal and start logging on, taking care not to look in his direction.
I keep my face as he’s used to it being—cool, unbothered, any wickedness contained to my mouth or perhaps a flashing look—which is harder than it seems right now, when all I want to do is murder anyone who’s laid a finger on Tristan. Who’d even think to threaten his life.
I’d like to murder myself while I’m at it for not seeing this, for not seeing Adam right under my fucking nose, for being outplayed in my own home yet again.
For spending the last eighteen years learning how to block, shoot, grapple, and kill when right now, my enemy isn’t a combatant at all but a slender executive assistant who looks on the verge of tears when I glance over at him.
Who looks like he’ll blow apart like a rose in July.