37. Lena
Lena
The ties around my wrists give all at once. Blood rushes back into my hands in a painful throb.
And then I look behind Vale, and time stops.
My kidnapper beelines toward Vale so fast that for one frozen second, I don’t understand what I’m seeing.
Vale has only just cut my hands free. He’s still bent toward me, one hand on the ropes, his body turned partly away from the fight, when the man breaks from Knox and Havoc and lunges straight for us.
Everything happens at once after that.
Havoc yells to catch our attention. Vale turns at the last second, catching the man's wrist before he can grab Lena, and the two of them slam into the side of her chair hard enough to knock it crooked.
"Vale!"
In the struggle, the man's hand closes around the knife on the floor near my feet.
Vale is trying to hold him off with one bad wrist and a body that has already taken too much. Knox and Havoc are coming at them from behind, but the man is between them and us, fighting with the kind of desperation that makes him stronger for a few seconds than he has any right to be.
My ankles are still tied. My hands are not.
I lean down, fingers closing around the handle of the knife.
Vale sees me and his face changes immediately. “Lena, no.”
But the man is still on him.
I don’t want Vale hurt. Not again. Not because of me.
So I raise the knife and call out, “Hey!”
It works. The man turns toward my voice.
I only hold the knife out because I need him to look at me, need him to stop pressing Vale back, need to give the others one second to reach him.
But he’s already moving. He twists toward me too fast, still carried by the force of the fight, and before I understand what’s happening, he drives himself onto the blade in my hand.
The impact jars through both my arms.
His face changes, rage breaking into surprise, then pain. For one terrible moment we’re staring directly at each other, close enough that I can see the exact second he realizes what has happened.
Then Knox yanks him backward.
The knife tears free of my grip with him. I gasp and fall back against the chair, my bound ankles useless beneath me, while Vale catches my shoulder and steadies me before I hit the floor.
The man staggers once, one hand going to his side.
Blood spreads between his fingers.
I stare at him, unable to move, unable to make sense of the fact that he’s bleeding because of something I did when I had not meant to do anything except make him look away.
“I didn’t…” My voice comes out thin. “I wasn’t trying to…”
“I know,” Vale says quickly, still holding me. “I know.”
The man sinks to his knees. Knox is beside him at once, more from instinct than mercy, while Havoc stands over them breathing hard, his expression stripped of every trace of humor.
“Who sent you?” Knox demands.
The man barely seems to hear him. His eyes find me once more, unfocused now, and his mouth works around a breath that sounds wet and wrong.
“The Brotherhood…” he says.
Knox leans closer. “What about it?”
The man swallows blood. “Is corrupt,” he whispers. “And will fall.”
Then he collapses onto his side, and the room goes still.
For a moment, none of us moves. The man’s last words seem to hang in the room after he’s gone, as if death has not quite taken them with him.
The Brotherhood is corrupt and will fall.
Knox is still crouched beside the body. Havoc stands over him, breathing hard from the fight.
Vale has one hand on my shoulder, the other still close enough to catch me if I sway again.
All three of them look stunned in a way I have not seen before, not by the death, not even by what I did, but by what he chose to say with his last breath.
I barely hear it.
I’m staring at my hands.
There’s blood on them. His blood. Across my fingers, under my nails, smeared over my palms where the knife handle slipped when Knox dragged him away. I keep looking down at it, waiting for my mind to catch up, waiting for the room to make sense again, but it doesn’t.
I killed him.
By accident. In self-defense. Because he was trying to hurt Vale.
None of that changes the blood.
A faint electronic click cuts through the room, and the laptop on the table at the side wakes up. The screen glows.
Vale’s hand tightens on my shoulder. “Apostle Andrew.”
The name pulls my attention upward through the haze.
I can’t see the figure properly from where I am, only the screen angled toward the others, a dark shape against darker light. But I know enough now to understand what that means.
“Wait,” I say, my voice sounding very far away to me. “Apostle?”
The man on the screen speaks before anyone answers me. “Is it done?”
Knox rises slowly from beside the body. The look on his face makes the room colder. “You knew about this man,” he says.
“Yes,” the Apostle replies. Calmly.
As if there’s not a corpse bleeding out on the floor between us. As if I’m not still tied at the ankles, shaking, with blood drying on my hands.
Knox’s voice drops. “How do you even have access to his laptop?”
“The Brotherhood is everywhere.” The answer is smooth enough to make my skin crawl.
Then the Apostle adds, “You can see me, but I cannot see you. Mikhail made sure of that.”
Havoc’s head comes up. “Mikhail?”
The Apostle says nothing.
Havoc takes one step toward the table. “You mean the man you sent us to kill.”
Still nothing.
The silence after that is worse than an answer.
Vale is the first one to look away from the screen. His good eye fixes on the dead man’s chest, where his shirt has torn open during the fight. For a second I think he’s only looking at the blood. Then his expression changes, and he lifts two fingers slightly toward Knox.
Knox follows the gesture. His brows draw together.
I look too.
There’s a tattoo high on the man’s chest, half-obscured by blood. A small black emblem, simple enough that I might have missed it if Vale hadn’t pointed it out: a circle broken by a vertical line, veiled at the center by three narrow strokes.
Havoc’s face goes still. “That’s Veiled Order.”
The Apostle doesn’t answer.
Knox looks back at the screen. “Why does Mikhail have their mark?”
Silence.
Vale says, slowly, “You sent us after him because he belonged to the Veiled Order.”
“Yes,” Andrew says at last.
Havoc lets out a short, incredulous breath. “That’s not what we were told.”
“You were told what was necessary.”
“No,” Knox says. “You lied to us again and again. Not just this mission but earlier too. All threats were vaguely tied up with the Veiled Order. But that’s all they were, a boogeyman meant to scare us into obedience.”
“He’s not telling us the entire truth,” Vale says, stepping closer as if he can touch the man through the screen. “None of them ever were.”
Finally Andrew speaks. “You’re right about one thing. You don’t know everything about the Veiled Order, and I believe you don’t need to.”
“Bullshit,” Havoc says.
“The Brotherhood overthrew them,” Andrew says. “And then took their infrastructure. Their houses. Their channels. Their language.”
“What the fuck,” Vale says looking astonished.
“The Order had failed,” Andrew says.
“Had it?” Havoc asks. There’s venom in the question.
Andrew’s voice remains level. “It had become divided, compromised, unable to govern itself.”
I think of the masks the three men wore the night I met them. The titles. The files. The Apostles, the Elders, the Shepherds. All of it suddenly less ancient than I assumed, less sacred, perhaps less theirs than they believed.
Havoc looks at the body again. “He said Lena’s father ruined his life.”
Andrew doesn’t answer.
Knox catches it at once. “Her father was Order too, possibly.”
“He was,” Andrew says.
“What makes you so sure?” Havoc asks.
For the first time since the screen came to life, Andrew is quiet long enough that the silence feels deliberate. Then he says, “Because I am her father.”
No one moves.
I think, for one stupid second, that I have misheard him. That the shock of the last hour, the blood still drying on my hands, the rope marks around my wrists, have made my mind take ordinary words and twist them into something impossible.
But the man on the laptop doesn’t take the words back.
My mouth opens, but nothing comes out.
Father.
The word means almost nothing to me. It has always been an empty space, a line on forms, a question I learned not to ask because no one ever had an answer that belonged to me.
Now a shadow on a screen has claimed it.
I hear myself say, “You’re lying.”
My voice is thin. Not because I believe he is. Because I need him to be.
Andrew’s tone does not change. “No, Helena, I’m not.”
“You don’t get to just say that,” I say, trying to ignore what he just called me. Lena isn’t even my real name?
“No,” he says. “I do not.”
That answer is somehow worse than if he had argued.
Havoc recovers first. “You knew where she was. You knew who took her. You knew enough to find us through systems you claim are compromised.” His voice goes low. “And you waited until now to mention that she’s your daughter?”
“I did not know where she was until recently,” Andrew says.
Knox’s expression hardens. “Convenient.”
“Yes,” Andrew says. “It would be, if it were not true.”
I look at the dark shape on the screen and try to force a face out of it, some resemblance, some proof. There is none. Only the outline of a man who says he is my father and has hidden behind the Brotherhood while I grew up in homes that were never mine.
“I ensured she was hidden.”
“You ensured I grew up alone,” I say, my voice catching at the words. “And unwanted.”
That makes him pause. At least, I think it does. His outline doesn’t move, but the silence after my words feels different.
“I believed it was the only way to keep you alive,” he says.
I laugh then, once, harsh and humorless. “That has gone brilliantly.”
Vale’s hand stays on my shoulder. I don’t know if he means to comfort me or steady himself. Maybe both.
Knox says, “Why now?”
“Because the people who have been searching for her found her first.”
“You mean this guy, Mikhail? And the guy who took her on the date then tried to kill her?”
“Their family served the Order before the fall. And he blamed me for what happened to them.”
“And he was wrong?”
Andrew is quiet again.
Knox hears it. “Not entirely.”
Andrew doesn’t answer directly. “The collapse of the Order created enemies on every side. Some grievances were deserved. Others were cultivated by the Brotherhood to keep survivors divided.”
Havoc looks from the body to the screen. “That’s a very polished way of saying there are people who want you dead and are willing to use your daughter to do it.”
“Yes.”
The simplicity of it stings more than the rest.
I look down at the blood on my hands again, then back at the laptop. “So that contract was really about you.”
“Partly.”
“Partly,” I repeat. “Lovely. I’m glad I could be useful.”
“Lena—” Vale begins.
“No.” I pull my shoulder away from his hand, not because I’m angry at him, but because if anyone touches me right now, I may come apart in a way I don’t want witnessed. I start to pull my ankles free from their bindings. “He doesn’t get to say my name like he knows me.”
Andrew doesn’t respond.
“Goodbye, Father,” I say. “May I never meet you again.”
“Don’t do this, Helena. It’s a different world out there. People found out you’re my daughter, I don’t know how. But you’ll need my protection to keep you safe.”
“Actually, I don’t,” I say, glancing at Knox, Havoc, and Vale. “I can protect myself. And I choose them over you, in a heartbeat.”
“Why?” Apostle Andrew asks.
“Why?” I say, glancing at the three of them briefly.
My heart aches, my eyes filling with tears.
There’s so much I want to tell them. “Because they see me for who I am, they keep choosing me even when I didn’t mean anything for them, they put their life and their principles on the line for me.
They gave me everything without asking anything in return. That’s why.”
“Helena—” Apostle begins.
“Don’t fucking say another word. And don’t use that name. I’m Lena.” And with that, I walk out of the room.