Chapter 10
REMINGTON
Islept.
Not the shallow, transactional kind I'd grown used to—the sort that sat on the surface and never mixed with anything real. This was heavier. The kind that pulled you under and held you. I went willingly, which should have been my first warning.
The dreams came in layers.
Flowers first. My mother's garden. The conservatory table spread with stems, her hands moving with quiet authority. Hellebore. Ranunculus. The smell of cut green things and afternoon light through old glass.
Safe. The dream felt safe.
That was how I knew it wouldn't last.
Then St. Paul's.
The basement.
No transition. One frame to the next. The conservatory became a concrete room with a single bulb, and I was sixteen and shackled to a chair by my left wrist, and the air smelled like damp stone and rust and something underneath both that I'd never named and never forgotten.
They'd left a knife on the table.
Not a combat knife. A utility blade—cheap, functional, hardware store. Placed within reach of my free hand with the deliberate care of someone setting a place at dinner.
If you want to live, cut off your pretty nose.
Your pretty nose. Because they knew. They'd studied us the way entomologists pinned insects—without affection, with the patience of people who considered cruelty a science. They understood what each boy carried. What we feared. What we valued. What could be turned.
For me, it was the face. The Graves jawline. The looks that had followed me since childhood like a second inheritance—the thing the world noticed first, the thing that had already begun defining who I was before I'd had any say.
They needled me about it constantly. The golden boy. The heir. As though my birth certificate were a provocation they intended to punish.
And underneath the taunting, the thing I never said: I knew what they'd do if they broke me. They'd use me to reach the family. The fortune. The name that opened doors they needed opened. I wasn't just a boy to them. I was a key to a vault they couldn't otherwise touch.
I sat in that room for three days.
Knowing they were watching. Cameras. A man behind a door, taking notes. Every second of hesitation recorded and filed in whatever dossier they were building on the boy they planned to turn into a weapon.
I could hear the others through the walls. Not boys being beaten—worse. Boys meeting the things they feared most, in rooms designed to contain fear and multiply it.
Each of us had received a test calibrated to our weakness.
Snakes. Water. Suffocation.
Fears. Real, primal, hardwired. Things St. Paul's had identified and weaponised with the cold efficiency of an institution that treated cruelty as curriculum.
They'd saved the vanity test for me.
Not fear. Vanity. Because Remington Graves—heir, golden boy—must surely value his face above all else. Must surely break at the prospect of losing it.
What they never understood was that I didn't give a damn about my looks.
They were a convenience. A tool that made things easier the way money made things easier—not because I valued them but because the world did, and I'd learned early to live in the gap between what I cared about and what the world cared about on my behalf.
I sat in that room for three days with the knife within reach, and I almost did it.
Almost picked up the blade.
Not because I'd broken. Not because I couldn't take the solitude. Because fuck them.
If I disfigured myself, what use was I? If the golden boy's face was destroyed, what leverage did they hold? A scarred, noseless heir was worthless to anyone trying to infiltrate the circles where appearance and breeding were the price of admission.
I almost did it as sabotage. A strike against my own utility.
In the end, I didn't.
Seventy-two hours. The knife. The screams through the walls. When they opened the door on the fourth morning, I walked out with my face intact and something inside me that had been whole when I went in that would never be whole again.
I never told the others.
When we compared notes—whispers in the dark, stolen minutes between surveillance gaps—I lied. Made something up. Darkness. Confinement. Something that sounded like fear.
Because I was ashamed.
They'd been tested by the most honest thing there was—real, primal terror. The things that squeezed your chest at three in the morning.
St. Paul's had looked at me and decided the worst thing they could do to Remington Graves was threaten his looks.
The shame wasn't that they'd been wrong. It was that I'd spent three days wondering if they were right.
I woke up.
Grey light. Damp shirt. Fists on the mattress. The dream still on my chest like something with weight and patience.
Counted breaths. Four in. Hold seven. Eight out. The mechanics of calm, applied to a body unconvinced.
Phone on the nightstand. My mother's number. Her photo—garden, smiling, dirt on her hands. The woman who taught me to cut stems at an angle and cried at the school gate and had no idea what happened behind it.
I almost called.
Thumb hovering. Screen waiting.
Put it down.
Not today. Not until I had something to say that wasn't a lie and wasn't the truth, because the truth would destroy her and lying was what I'd been doing for twenty years and I was finished with both.
Dressed. Out. The seventh in the morning cold, hands in pockets, pen against my thigh.
The door unlocked as I approached.
No intercom. No coughing Frenchman. Just the soft click of a lock disengaging—the building deciding, on its own authority, that I belonged.
I pushed through into the silence. Moved toward the kitchen.
Kane wasn't there. Ellsworth wasn't there.
A man sat at the long table, surrounded by a constellation of metal parts, springs, wire, and tools arranged in a logic visible only to him.
Compact build, close to the ground the way machines built for stability hug the earth.
Grey-red hair that hadn't seen a comb recently and wasn't sorry about it.
Spectacles on his forehead. Hands moving through components with the absent fluency of someone who thought in metal the way others thought in words.
He didn't look up.
"Ellsworth left you things in the fridge." Scottish. Thick enough to lean on. "Because all you Americans are always so bloody hungry."
He laughed at his own joke. Short, rough—a cough that had found something funny.
"The name’s Fergus MacLeod. Aye. And you're the pretty one." Still not looking. Fingers threading wire through a mechanism I couldn't identify. "Help yourself. Ham. Cheese. Bread that isn't shite, if you can credit the French with anything."
Fridge. Ham, cheese, baguette that deserved the compliment. I assembled a plate—field habit, eat when food appears—and sat at the far end of the table.
Ate. Watched him work.
"What are you building?"
"Rat trap." The way someone might say Tuesday. "Wee bastards in the east wing. I couldn't care less—rats are smarter than most people and cleaner than a few—but Ellsworth's been on my arse for weeks."
He held up the device. Springs, wire, miniature pressure plate. "Building something that'll shut his gob for good. Humanely, mind. For the rats."
A beat.
"Ellsworth can suffer."
But I heard it underneath. The warmth. The kind that lived between people who'd been together long enough that the insults were structural. Take them out and the whole thing falls.
"So, that's what you do," I said. "Pest control."
He went still.
Looked up. Spectacles came down to his nose. Blue eyes, sharp, not remotely amused.
"Pest control," he repeated. Nose twitching—quick, involuntary, something that happened when offence reached a molecular level.
"Son. I am the finest weapons engineer and tactical kit designer you will ever have the bloody misfortune of needing.
I've built systems for services whose names you don't have clearance to hear spoken.
I've designed ordnance in three active theatres and one that doesn't officially exist. I've been asked, personally, by men who command armies to solve problems other engineers called impossible, and I solved them with a budget that wouldn't cover Ellsworth's monthly tea. "
Breath.
"So, no, Mr. Graves. I don't do pest control. I'm building this because Ellsworth asked, and because even a man of my gifts does favors, and because the alternative is another fortnight of him moaning about droppings, which is a form of suffering that makes your school look like a holiday camp."
Back to work. Speech concluded.
I reached into my jacket. Slid the pen across the table.
Fergus eyed it. Eyed me. Picked it up with the careful grip of a man handling something that might deserve his attention but hadn't proved it yet.
Click. Blade out. He turned it in the light—slowly, the way a jeweller turned a stone. Eyes reading the metal, the edge, the mechanism, seeing things mine couldn't.
Murmuring. Fragments. Spring tension's decent ... steel's passable ... pivot could be tighter ...
"Who made this?"
"I did."
Different expression. Not the territorial irritation. Respect—grudging, provisional. The kind extended to someone who'd attempted something difficult without embarrassing himself.
"You machined this?"
"Workshop in Virginia Beach. No expert. I like to tinker."
"Tinker." He tasted the word. Didn't care for it. One more turn. "Concept's sound. Execution is ..." He searched. "Earnest."
Click. Closed. Slid back.
"You ever want that cleaned up properly, drop it off. I'll see to it."
I wanted to say the blade worked fine—the man in Deira could confirm if he were still breathing—but Fergus was already up.
Scooped the trap off the table. Muttered about testing the spring before Ellsworth found another dropping and declared a national emergency.
Scuttled out with the hunched gait of a man who'd been talking to machines so long that humans had become the interruption.
I sat in the quiet kitchen.
Ate. Let my mind drift toward what I'd ask Fergus to build, given the choice. The pen knife was functional—I'd proved that in Deira. But functional was the floor. A man like Fergus could take a concept and lift it into territory you hadn't imagined until he showed you what lived there.
My phone dinged.
Unknown number. Unmistakable message.
Twelve euros. I owe you. —C
Chelsea.
Something moved behind my ribs. Not the heavy shifting of the dream. Lighter. Quicker. A window opening in a room that had been shut too long. I replied.
Adjusted for inflation and emotional distress, it's closer to fifteen. But I'll accept twelve and a sincere apology to the anemones.
Pause.
The anemones are thriving, actually. They required no apology. Just water and a vase that had been sitting empty for longer than I'd like to admit.
I read it twice. Then:
Pay me back tonight. There's a concert. Come with me.
Dots. Gone. Dots. Long pause. Long enough that I set the phone down and picked up the last of the baguette and told myself it didn't matter.
It mattered.
Depends. What kind of concert? I might not have the right thing to wear.
I grinned. My arena. The one space where the Remington Graves skill set wasn't a weight but a gift.
I'll pick you up at 4. Get ready to shop—my treat. Light dinner. Then the concert.
Pause.
What about the 12 euros?
You're doing me a favor. I was going to spend tonight alone in a hotel room contemplating rats. You're saving me from rodent philosophy. The debt is mine.
Pause.
Yes.
One word. No hedge.
I smiled. The real kind. The one that happened before the machinery caught up and polished it.
See you at 4. Send me your address.
She did. Eighth arrondissement. Naturally.
I sat back in the kitchen. Silence and the hum of the fridge and the clock ticking somewhere deep in the building with the patience of a thing that planned to outlast everyone.
Finished the meal with the unfamiliar feeling of looking forward to something that had nothing to do with an operation, a mission, or a woman whose name I'd forget by morning.
Now. To find a concert.