11. ~Lucien~ #2
That much I’m certain of, and that part is simple.
What isn’t simple is the question Hale stumbled toward before her composure failed her: why was a federal agent with a navy curtain of hair and an unsettling, studying stillness so very interested in our girl, specifically, from the first hour he arrived?
He watched her the way the killer watches—with patience, with appetite, with the cool fixed attention of a man taking measurements. I noticed it. Vex noticed it from the depths of a coma-cracked half-sleep and surfaced just long enough to point a blade and pronounce him distasteful.
She is rarely wrong about people; it’s the closest thing she has to a sense of smell that works.
Bishop fled the instant Riot leaned on him, yes.
But a man only runs that fast and that far when running was already half-packed in his luggage—and I find I would very much like to know what Agent Bishop was so eager to be elsewhere from, and whether the timing of his flight and the cooling of a particular trail are quite the coincidence everyone seems content to call them.
Pryce clears his throat.
“Detective Hale, I’ll ask you to step out. There are elements of this discussion the institute will conduct privately.”
“I should be present for this conversation,” Hale says, and to her credit the words come out steady even as the rest of her does not. “I am the lead investigator on?—”
“Why?” Riot says.
It’s the first word he’s spoken since we sat, and it drops into the room with the weight of a stone into still water.
He hasn’t looked up. He’s leaned back in his chair, ankles crossed, a pen turning idle and hypnotic through the scarred valleys of his knuckles, the very portrait of a man with nowhere to be and no one to fear.
“Your partner ran off like a coward in the dark,” he goes on, conversational. “Seems to me the lead investigator on the case just became the only investigator on the case, and the only investigator hasn’t investigated a thing worth a damn since she got here.”
“He must have been threatened,” Hale snaps. “Soren wouldn’t simply…he was solid. Steady. There’s no version of him that just flees in the night unless someone made him. Who would possibly?—”
She stops.
Her eyes narrow, and they swing, slow and certain, to the man spinning the pen at my right hand.
“You threatened him.”
Riot doesn’t stop the pen.
“Nothing’s true till it’s proven true,” he drawls. “Or however the saying runs.”
“Innocent until proven guilty,” I supply mildly.
“That one.”
“She said she hated him.” Hale’s voice climbs. “Your—the patient. She looked right at him and said she didn’t like him, and not one week later he’s on a plane to the other side of the planet. You expect me to call that a coincidence?”
Riot shrugs, the pen never breaking its lazy rotation.
“If the trash takes itself out,” he says, “I don’t see how that’s anything to do with me.”
“That is not a denial,” Hale grates.
“It’s not a confession either, sweetheart.
” Riot finally lifts his pale eyes to her, and the room temperature drops a degree at the lazy menace in them.
“Tell you what. You find me a body, you find me a witness, you find me anything but a feeling in your gut, and I’ll sit real still while you read me my rights.
Until then—” the pen resumes its turning “—a grown man chose a job on another continent. Happens every day. People decide a place isn’t good for their health. ”
I have to apply genuine effort to the project of not smiling, because this is far more entertaining than a homicide tribunal has any right to be, and because I know precisely what happened in the small hours of this morning.
Riot is the reason that man ran for the hills.
There’s no question in my mind—our Omega looked at Soren Bishop and declared, in three flat words, that she found him distasteful, and Riot heard a death sentence and went to deliver it, and the only reason Bishop is on a plane instead of one of Silas’s tables is that the man was wise enough to choose the continent over the coffin.
Typical of him, the brute.
He’d have happily made the agent vanish and laid the disappearance at the feet of whatever phantom is doing the actual killing.
Tidy. Efficient. Appalling.
I find I don’t especially mind.
“Detective.” The CEO’s voice cuts back in, and it has changed register—gone silken and pointed, the tone of a man who has decided to end something.
“I’ll say this once, as a courtesy. Your father has done a commendable job furnishing the bureau with an investigator of such…
expertise. Such connections. Doors open for you that open for very few.
With pedigree like that behind you, I’d assume you possess the elementary skill of reading a room that does not wish you in it. ”
The blow lands exactly where it was aimed.
I watch it land, because watching things land is my trade, and I see the precise instant Hale understands what’s been done to her.
He hasn’t insulted her competence. He’s done something far crueler—he’s reminded her, in front of the men she’s been trying to command, that whatever competence she has is beside the point, that the chair she’d have liked to be offered exists in her father’s name and not her own, that every door she’s walked through was unlocked by a key she didn’t cut.
It’s the oldest wound a capable woman in a borrowed seat can carry, and the CEO has pressed his thumb into it with surgical, unhurried malice.
Her jaw works.
For a moment I think she’ll fight—and some unexpected part of me, the part that recognizes a survivor when it sees one, almost wants her to.
But the wound is too old and too deep, and instead she inclines her head in a small, stiff, furious bow, and turns, and is through the door before any of us can offer a single word.
She slams it behind her hard enough to rattle the panelling.
I find, to my mild surprise, that I don’t enjoy it.
There’s no sport in watching a powerful man break a capable woman over the fact of her father, and the CEO did it not because Hale was wrong—she wasn’t, she’s the only person in this entire institution who has correctly intuited that Vex sits at the center of everything—but precisely because she was getting too close to a truth Blackthorn would rather bury with its bodies.
I tuck that observation away beside the matter of Bishop. The institution wanted competent investigators, and then went pale and twitchy the moment the competent investigators began to investigate competently. Men do not flinch from the light unless they’ve arranged something in the dark.
“Women,” Riot observes, to the ceiling.
I let a smile finally surface, small and private, and I pitch my voice low—beneath the screen’s pickup, I’m fairly certain, and threaded with just enough of an old accent I keep buried that the words come out difficult to parse for anyone not meant to parse them.
“Says the man,” I murmur, “who threatened a federal agent off the continent because our Omega wrinkled her nose at him.”
Riot laughs—a real one, short and rough—and the sound visibly startles both men watching us, who have clearly not yet adjusted to the idea that the convict can be amused. He spreads his scarred hands, unrepentant. “You got me,” he says. “Whatever. Good fucking riddance.”
Pryce, who caught the laugh but not the cause of it, makes the only assumption available to him—that we’re disparaging the detective who just stormed out—and decides, with the ponderous confidence of a man who believes he’s steering, to validate it.
“Detective Hale is a capable woman,” he says, “with a great deal of professional experience. But this—” he gestures, taking in the table, the screen, the gravity of it all, “this is a serious conversation. The kind better handled among men.”
I know bullshit when it’s served to me, and I recognize this particular vintage—the comfortable, ambient contempt of men who mistake a closed door for competence.
The same contempt, I note without saying, that has left this institution unable to catch a killer operating in its own corridors for the better part of a month.
I don’t argue.
There’s nothing to be gained by arguing with a man you’re in the process of robbing, and everything to be lost by reminding him to count his silver.
I simply incline my head, gracious, agreeable, the reasonable physician they’ve decided to trust because he wears the better suit and keeps the calmer voice.
It’s a useful thing, being underestimated in the correct direction.
They look at me and see the safe one—the credentialed counterweight to the convict and the undertaker, the man whose presence makes the other two tolerable.
They have no idea that of the three of us, I am the one they should fear most, because Riot will only ever hurt what’s in front of him and Silas will only ever wait, whereas I plan.
I have been planning since the afternoon she said woof and sat.
Every move since—the gift in her cell, the pole, the pack assignment Riot blurted out like it was his own idea, this very meeting—has been a single long sentence building toward one clause: her, out of this building, in a space we control, where the thing hunting her will have to come out of the institution’s walls and into ours.
And we are so very much better at our walls than Blackthorn has ever been at its.
“Then let me retrieve the files on the deceased,” I say, rising smoothly to my feet, “and we can walk through it together. I think, once you see the pattern laid out, you’ll find the clemency proposal far less preposterous than it sounds.”
It’s the truest thing I’ll say all afternoon, and the most misleading.
They believe they’re about to be persuaded.
They have no notion that the persuasion concluded days ago, in a private notebook and a cold workroom and a guarded medical bay, and that everything from here is theatre staged for their benefit—a careful, patient performance designed to make three obsessed men carrying a sedated woman out of this building look like the institute’s own clever idea.
The pattern I’m about to show them is real. The conclusions I’ll let them draw are the ones I planted for them to find. By the time we’re done, they’ll be grateful to hand her to us, and they’ll believe the gratitude was theirs.
Somewhere three floors below, our girl is breathing slow and steady in a borrowed bed, healing toward the storm I can feel gathering on every horizon. She’d approve of this, I think.
The maneuver. The misdirection.
The quiet theft conducted in plain sight with the victim’s signature on the receipt. It’s precisely the kind of move she’d make—has made, will make again—and the thought that I’m playing her game now, by her rules, on her behalf, is far more pleasant than it has any right to be.
I further lean into my chair, fighting hard to smile, because their plan is about to get into session.