Chapter 4
Chapter
Four
The corridor is forty feet long. I’ve crossed battlefields faster than I cross it now.
Every step is a fight between the part of me that commands and the part that can’t move.
The commander would cross at pace, open the door, assess, contain, debrief.
The rest of me can’t make my legs work faster than a walk, because the woman on the other side of that door has been dead, and the dead don’t come back and the dead don’t stand up and the dead don’t ask for you by name while the blood is still wet on the floor of the building you broke to reach them.
The dead do none of those things. Catherine did all of them.
Marcellus falls in at my shoulder and says nothing, which is how I know my face has stopped doing the work of hiding what’s in me. He has seen me walk toward armies. Not like this. He doesn’t name it.
At the door he stops and doesn’t follow.
I put my hand on the frame. The cold of the metal is the one real surface in the building. Everything else has stopped being certain, and the corridor smells like antiseptic and concrete and the faint mineral note of stored blood from the medical supply room.
Then I open the door, and three hundred years come apart in my chest.
She’s standing in the middle of the room.
Dark hair. The stillness of our kind. And the face I’ve kept, the face I last saw go slack and unknowing while my blade was in her, the face that comes for me in the worst hour of every bad night.
Composed now. Older in the eyes than the girl I turned. But hers. Catherine’s.
I’ve rehearsed grief for this woman ten thousand times. I’ve never once rehearsed her voice.
“Maximus,” she says.
My name in her mouth. The same voice. The certainty that I had ended that voice myself, and it’s saying my name in a sealed room at the back of a comms hub I tore apart without knowing she was in it.
I don’t move. I’ve led armies, and right now I can’t make my body cross ten feet of floor.
The part of me that’s doing the math, running it at the speed that has kept me alive through all of it, comes back with one name and then stops working.
Konstantin. It isn’t a deduction. There’s no other name.
Past the name, the math has nothing, because I put a blade through her heart, and a blade through the heart is the one wound none of us comes back from.
I drove it through hers myself and felt the stop.
Whatever’s standing in front of me shouldn’t be possible.
“You’re real,” I say.
“I’m real.” Her chin lifts, and the cost of it shows. “You thought you killed me.”
“I did kill you. I felt it.” The words come from the locked place. “I held the blade until you stopped.”
“You did.” No heat in it. “And then Konstantin came for what you left behind.”
“How long has he had you?” The commander asks it, because the man can’t speak.
“Since that night.” Flat. “He healed what you did. And then he kept me. You’d be amazed what he can do, given a body and a reason and enough time.
He had all three.” Her eyes move over me, the blood on my gear, the war coming off me.
“You came in with an army. I heard the fighting, and I heard it stop. I didn’t think it was for me.
I stopped thinking anything was for me.”
And there it is, the thing that gets under the math and the guilt and stays where I can’t reach it.
Konstantin came for what I left behind. He has had her the entire time I’ve been grieving her, healed and hidden and kept.
I don’t need to ask what a man like him keeps a thing like that for.
You keep a weapon for the day you mean to use it.
Every defense I’ve ever built, and he went for the one I set before I knew to guard it.
I stand in the doorway of the room where he kept her. The room is warm. Climate-controlled. There are books on a shelf, titles I can’t read from here but can tell are recent. A chair by a window that has no glass, just a view of a concrete wall. The bed is made.
We move her under sedation. Protocol for any recovered asset, and Dalton won’t clear a transport otherwise, and I’m grateful, in a place I don’t examine, not to have to speak to her again until I have my feet under me.
We bring her in as we brought Simone in.
Medical wing, far end, a room with a door that locks from the outside and a bed and the careful arrangements we make for people we don’t yet understand.
Dalton runs his panels. Elena hovers at the edge of his work with the focus she gets around what shouldn’t be possible, and there have been a great many of those under this roof lately.
A modified vampire. A pregnancy that shouldn’t exist. Two unborn children with telekinesis of their own.
A bonded pair whose connection rewrites biology.
Everything on that list sleeps in my bed.
And now a woman who was killed and kept and modified by the same man who modified my wife, a woman whose heartbeat lived in my memory as a ghost and who is standing in front of me.
While Dalton works, I give Elena the word I owed her from last night. The pull. The fraction of it that reached me before Celeste tore it back. She writes it down and asks nothing in front of the room.
I stand at the window while they finish.
I watch. I assess. The window faces the compound’s inner courtyard, and the pre-dawn light is starting to gray the edges of the dark, and my reflection in the glass is a man I don’t recognize yet.
The shadows are still at my shoulders. I’m the man I was an hour ago, except an hour ago the woman in that bed was dead and the man in the glass didn’t have to accommodate her return into a world that had already grieved and moved on.
Grieved and moved on. That was the story I told myself.
I look at the man in the glass who believed it.
I never moved on. I moved forward. I walked while the wound stayed open and called the walking healing, and Catherine alive behind me is the proof of the lie.
A wound kept open this long isn’t an accident. It’s an investment.
Free. That’s the word everyone will use. It sits wrong in this room. She’s free in the narrow sense, the door unlocked, the restraints absent, the medical care provided. She’s not free in any sense that counts.
She drifts under the sedation and surfaces and drifts again, and each time she surfaces her eyes find me first, fast, and land, and stay.
I’ve watched people perform for me my entire life. Subordinates performing deference. Enemies performing courage. Allies performing loyalty. I look for the performance in her, and I can’t find it.
That’s what undoes me, standing there. Whatever she becomes under this roof, whatever Konstantin shaped her into across the years I was not there for, right now what I’m looking at is a person who has been kept too long.
Disoriented. Stripped down. Reaching, half-conscious, toward the one face in the room she knows.
The sympathy I feel is real and enormous and has nowhere to go. The man she’s reaching for stopped existing the day he fell in love with someone else.
“Vitals are good,” Dalton says, not looking up. “Whatever he did to her, it took. She’s stable. Stronger than she should be, for the shape she’s in.” He straightens. “I can’t tell you what she is. That’s going to take longer than tonight.”
Dalton steps back and lets me look at her properly. She’s too thin. The gray shadow of starvation sits in the veins at her wrists and her throat, the mark our kind carries when the blood comes measured. The last time I saw it was Simone.
I take it in piece by piece until I get to how she’s sleeping. Curled small, at the edge of the mattress, taking up as little of the bed as a body can, in a room where there’s nobody left to make herself small for.
That’s where the assessing stops. I turned her to spare her one slow death and I handed her to a slower one, and he built every year of the slowness on purpose.
I’ve catalogued atrocities, and hers is the first one I can’t make myself finish.
“Then I’ll leave her to you.” Command voice. The register that costs nothing. “She doesn’t leave this wing without my word. She’s not restrained beyond the door unless she gives you cause. And someone pages me the moment she’s lucid enough to talk.”
“Maximus.” Elena, quiet, in the register she’s earned telling me truths I didn’t want to hear. “Are you all right.”
I look at the woman on the bed, back in the world when she shouldn’t be, the guilt reorganized around her living body and somehow heavier alive than it ever was dead.
“No,” I tell Elena. “But it isn’t a thing you can treat. Page me when she wakes.”
The compound’s routine shifts around the new presence. The medical wing runs extra shifts. Dalton’s reports land on my desk. The staff who saw Catherine arrive, sedated and carried on a stretcher by wolves who handled her carefully, have been talking, and the talk hasn’t settled into a shape yet.
I let the gossip run until it settles. The truth underneath it is simple enough.
A woman we thought was dead is alive, and the man who kept her didn’t keep her for her company.
Whether he meant us to find her, I can’t answer yet.
What she’s for, I can’t answer yet. So she stays contained, and watched, and I wait for Konstantin’s next move knowing I may not recognize it when it comes.
I don’t go to the conference room. There’s work, and there’s always work, and a younger version of me would have buried himself in it until dawn rather than feel any of this.
I don’t go back to the medical wing to sit with the woman I’ve spent my life grieving, though some decent broken part of me wants to, the part that has owed her a vigil since the night I failed to give her one.
I go to our quarters. To Celeste.