38. Vale
Vale
Lena leaves before any of us can stop her.
Not far. Just into the hall, one hand pressed hard to her mouth, the other still streaked with drying blood. But the door shutting behind her feels louder than it should. Final, almost. As if the room has been divided into before and after, and all of us are standing on the wrong side of it.
For a moment, no one speaks.
The Apostle is only a shadow on the laptop screen, but somehow his presence still fills the room more completely than the body cooling on the floor.
Then he says, “You need to reason with her.”
Knox looks at the screen.
The Apostle continues, calm as ever. “She will be angry. She has cause. But anger cannot be allowed to dictate her choices now. She needs my protection.”
“Actually,” Knox says, “she needed a father twenty years ago.”
The silence that follows is immediate and absolute.
Even Havoc turns to look at him.
Knox doesn’t seem to notice. Or he notices and no longer cares. His face is set, his voice level, but something has shifted in him all the same. Not the controlled pushback of a man questioning orders. Something more fundamental than that.
The Apostle says nothing.
Knox goes on. “You don’t get to disappear her entire life, wait until she’s useful or endangered enough to reclaim, and call it protection. If she listens to anything you say from here on out, it will be because she chooses to. Not because we pressure her into obedience for you.”
I have seen Knox challenge bad judgment. I have heard him argue tactics, refuse foolish orders, make Elders regret confusing rank with competence. But this is different. He’s not asking for clarification. He’s not trying to improve the Apostle’s plan.
He’s drawing a line.
Havoc’s mouth curves faintly, though there’s no humor in it. Approval, perhaps. Or simple satisfaction at seeing someone else say the thing all three of us are thinking.
“Some job you did hiding her. Her name is all over the files,” Havoc tells him. “You weren’t very good at hiding her tracks.”
“That’s not her name,” the Apostle says.
“What?” I say.
“Lena—that’s her mother’s name. She named our daughter Helena after herself.”
Everything makes more sense now.
“I tried to get her name removed but couldn’t get to all of it,” the Apostle continues.
“Where is she now? Her mother?”
“Dead,” he says simply.
Knox continues to scowl at the Apostle even though we still can’t see his face.
Havoc laughs. “So, you not only abandoned your daughter, you condemned her to this life, and now you want us to play your good little soldiers? Bullshit.”
Something inside me tightens at that, because I know exactly how much it costs him to say it. The Brotherhood does not encourage men like us to speak to Apostles this way. It does not encourage men like us to think of wanting anything outside duty at all.
Yet here we are.
The Apostle’s answer, when it comes, remains measured. “You are letting your emotions muddle your judgment. Now, I don’t know what you’ve got going on with her?—”
“Stop,” Havoc says. “Don’t finish that sentence.”
The Apostle sighs. “Don’t be foolish. She’s my flesh and blood, I’ll never do anything to hurt her.”
“Don’t you get it?” I say. “You’ve already done too much damage, and until you understand that, you won’t get her back. Heck, you still can’t be bothered to show your face.”
I wait for the shadows to dispel but it doesn’t work. He remains hidden.
I turn back to the screen before the silence can harden further. “My father—” I begin. The Apostle’s head shifts slightly. “How is he involved in this?”
I’ve been holding that question back since the moment Lena was taken, since the attack outside her building, since hearing a voice I had buried with the dead. Now that it’s in the room, it feels heavier than I expected.
The Apostle says, “I don’t know.”
I can’t tell if he’s lying or not.
Havoc looks at the screen. “That is a surprisingly useless answer from a man who has spent the last ten minutes rearranging everyone’s understanding of history.”
The Apostle doesn’t respond to him. His attention stays on me. “If he is involved with the people moving against Lena, I haven’t found the link. If he’s acting separately, I don’t yet know why he chose now.”
I look away from the screen, toward the blood on the floor, toward the door Lena disappeared through.
“Convenient,” Havoc says softly.
The Apostle’s voice doesn’t change. “No. Merely true.”
I don’t know which is worse.
Knox says, “Then until you know more, you don’t get to tell us what she needs.”
The Apostle is quiet for a moment. When he speaks again, his tone has cooled. “You are already involved more deeply than is wise.”
“Too late,” Havoc says.
Yes, I think. Far too late.
Whatever this was when it began, it’s no longer a mission.
Then his attention shifts from him to Havoc, and finally to me, though all I can see is the vague outline of his face on the screen.
“One more thing,” he says.
None of us answers.
“If any of you hurt her, no rank in the Brotherhood will protect you from me.”
Havoc’s mouth curves faintly. “Good to know.”
Andrew doesn’t react. “I will be watching,” he says.
Then the screen goes black.
For a few seconds, none of us moves. The room feels different without him in it, though not lighter. The dead man is still on the floor. His words are still lodged in my head.
Andrew’s revelations have changed too much too quickly, and yet the only thing I can think about with any clarity is Lena on the other side of the door, alone with all of it.
We find her in the hall with her back against the wall, one hand covering her mouth, the other curled tightly at her side. She has wiped at her face, but not well enough to hide that she has been crying.
She looks up when we come out, embarrassed almost immediately, as if grief is something she ought to apologize for.
Knox stops in front of her. His voice is gentler than it was in the room. “Did you mean what you said?”
She stares at him through wet lashes. “Which part?”
“That you choose us,” Knox says, ever practical. “And I want you to think it through practically. We can never provide you with the level of protection he can.”
“He can go screw himself,” Lena says between sniffs.
Knox says nothing for a moment. Then, “You don’t have to decide that tonight.”
“I know.” She swallows. “I still mean it.”
Something in his face eases, though he tries to hide it.
She looks at all three of us then, and the effort it costs her is plain. There’s blood dried on her hands, a red mark on her cheek, and grief in her face for a mother she barely remembers and a father she has only just learned has been alive all along.
“I meant every word I said, and more,” she says.
Havoc is leaning against the opposite wall, arms folded, expression unreadable in the way it only is when he has stopped performing. Lena stops in front of him and lifts a hand to his face, fingers brushing the corner of his mouth where it’s split from the fight.
“You don’t have to make yourself easier for me,” she says softly.
His eyes change.
Only a little. Enough.
“You can be as strange and difficult and inappropriate and batshit crazy as you actually are,” she continues, tears still clinging to her lashes. “I don’t want some perfect, sanitized version of you. I love you like this.”
For once, Havoc has no immediate answer. He looks at her as if she has handed him something he doesn’t know where to put. Then he gives a short, almost disbelieving laugh and says, “That’s a terrible lapse in judgment.”
“Probably,” she says.
His hand comes up and closes around her wrist, not to move it away. Just to hold it there for a second longer. “But useful,” he murmurs.
She smiles through the remnants of tears, and I see the exact moment he gives in enough to kiss her. It’s brief, almost careful, and when she steps back from him he looks more unsettled than before.
Then she turns to Knox.
He has been standing very still, as if any movement might become an admission. Lena goes to him more slowly, perhaps because she knows him well enough now to understand that he needs time even when he wants the same things the rest of us do.
“I love you,” she says.
Knox’s jaw tightens.
She takes his hand before he can hide it behind his back. “You don’t always have to be the one who holds everything together. Not with me.”
He looks down at their joined hands.
“You can be tired,” she says. “You can be afraid. You can be gentle. I won’t think less of you for any of it.”
For the first time since I have known him, Knox looks almost stripped of language. His thumb moves once over the back of her hand. “Lena.”
“I mean it.”
He studies her face, searching for something, perhaps the place where comfort turns into pity. Whatever he finds, it seems to satisfy him, because his shoulders lower by a fraction. “I love you too,” he says, so quietly I almost don’t hear it.
Lena’s face crumples for half a second before she steadies herself and kisses him. His hand rises to the back of her neck, careful even now, and when they part he keeps his forehead against hers for one extra breath.
Then she comes to me.
I’m not ready.
She stops close enough that I can see the faint tremor in her mouth. “I love you,” she says.
My chest tightens painfully. “Lena?—”
“No.” She shakes her head once. “You don’t get to decide for me that wanting you is wrong. You don’t get to keep punishing yourself forever and call it penance. I am your penance. You just have to accept me.”
“I do,” I groan. “God knows I do, Lena.”
I think of Tomas.
Of my father.
Of the fire.
Of every year since, spent believing survival itself was something I had to answer for.
Then I think of Lena saying she loves me as if that fact doesn’t require me to become someone else first. I cover her hand with mine. “I love you too,” I say, and the words come rougher than I intend.
She exhales like she has been holding that breath for all of us.
When I kiss her, it’s with more care than hunger, though the hunger is there too, always now. She tastes of tears and stubbornness and the strange impossible life that has opened around us in the last few days.
When we step apart, none of us seems quite sure what to do next. So naturally, my mind returns to the worst part.
I look toward the room behind us, toward the dead man and the black laptop screen, and say, “What he told us about the Veiled Order doesn’t sit right.”
Havoc’s expression shifts at once. Knox’s face closes slightly, not in disagreement, but because the thought has been circling him too.
I continue, because if I don’t say it now, I will only keep turning it over alone. “Too much of what happened fits the fear I’ve had for a while now. The Brotherhood’s mission may not be what we believed it was. Or at least not entirely.”
Lena, who has been listening quietly, wipes at her face again and says, “Then I’ll be your moral compass.”
All three of us look at her.
She gives a small, tired shrug. “You clearly need one.”
For the first time in what feels like hours, something almost like ease touches the room. Knox’s mouth shifts faintly. I let out a breath I did not know I was holding.
Havoc, of course, is the one who ruins the solemnity. “I’m fine with that,” he says, “as long as your moral guidance doesn’t prevent us from doing all sorts of dirty things to you.”
Lena stares at him for one beat.
Then, despite everything, she laughs.