24. Touch Him and Suffer #2
Three bodies on the basement floor. Sabine's entire armed escort, gone in the space of eight seconds.
I walked Sabine backward until her shoulders hit the wall. The stone was cold behind her and I was cold in front of her and the room had narrowed to the two of us and the boy in the chair and the bodies on the ground.
“Luca,” I said, without looking away from her.
“Yeah.” His voice was steady, which told me more about what Sabine had raised him to endure than I wanted to know.
“How old were you when Sabine found you?”
A pause. “Eleven.”
“She pulled you out of a fire?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know how the fire started?”
Silence. Longer this time. “No.”
“It was set by a contractor named Hale who was retained by Sabine three weeks before your parents died. The contract is in her office, third drawer, behind the false panel. Hale was paid to start the fire, extract you from the building, and deliver you to Sabine at a secondary location. Your parents were not part of the extraction plan because your parents were not useful to her. You were. Your bloodline carries a sensory gift that makes you an exceptional tracker, and Sabine needed a tracker she could raise from childhood to be loyal without question.”
Luca's breathing had changed.
I looked at Sabine. “Tell him I'm lying.”
She said nothing.
“Sabine. Tell me he's lying.” Luca asked brokenly.
She closed her eyes.
“I can't,” she said.
The room held that for a long time.
“They were in the way. Your parents were ordinary people with no gift and no value and they were raising a child they didn't understand in an apartment that was falling apart, and you were going to waste in it.
I gave you a life. I gave you training and protection and a trade and a future. I gave you everything they couldn't.”
“You killed them.” Luca's voice had gone very quiet.
“I removed an obstacle. You have been fed and clothed and educated and alive for thirteen years because of what I did that night, and I am not going to apologise for keeping you breathing.”
The sound Luca made was not a word.
I looked at Sabine pinned against the wall and watched her arrive at the understanding that she had lost the boy regardless of what happened next in this room, and I watched that loss register on her face.
“Leave New York. If I find you in my territory after sunrise, there will be no conversation. There will be no courtesy.” I said.
“You think this ends with me.” She opened her eyes.
“Vane doesn't need me. He never needed me.
I was convenient. You remove me and he finds another contractor and another architect and another way in, and the next one won't bother with rogues and debt chains. The next one will come for the boy directly.”
“Nico is mine to protect.”
“The boy is a door, Reed, and doors don't stay closed because you're standing in front of them. Vane wants what's behind that door and he has wanted it since before you were born, and nothing I've built around Nico is worse than what Marcellus will build once I'm gone.”
The silver came from somewhere I didn't see. She drove it into my stomach with the full weight of her body behind it. The silver went in clean and the pain was immediate. It spread outward from the entry point through my blood and into my bones.
My grip on her wrist loosened and she pulled free.
Her other hand went to her belt and the capsule she broke against the floor filled the basement with silver-laced smoke that burned my lungs and my eyes and blinded Amara at the doorway.
The smoke was thick and acrid and by the time it cleared enough to see, Sabine was gone.
I could feel the silver working through my system, the slow corrosive spread of it interfering with the healing mechanisms that should have already closed the wound. My hand went to the handle and stopped because pulling a silver blade without preparation could drive fragments deeper.
Amara was beside me. Her hands were steady. “Don't move.”
“I wasn't planning to.”
“This is going to hurt.”
“I'm aware.”
She gripped the handle, braced her other hand against my abdomen, and pulled. The blade came out in one clean motion, and the pain of it was a white-hot lance that went from my stomach to my spine to the base of my skull.
Blood poured from the wound and it was not closing. The silver had compromised the surrounding tissue and the healing was fighting against the residue.
Amara pressed her hand against the wound. “You need blood.”
“Later.”
“You need it now.”
“Later, Amara.”
She looked at me with the expression she used when I was being difficult and she had decided to allow it for a limited period of time. She wrapped the wound with fabric torn from one of the dead contractors' jackets and helped me to my feet.
Luca was still in the chair. His face was wet and his eyes were fixed on the floor and the blood on his cheek had dried into a dark line that made him look younger than he was.
I crossed the room and cut the cords on his wrists.
“You're coming with us,” I said.
His eyes came up. “Where?”
“Blackthorne. You'll be safe there.”
“And then what?”
“Then you decide what happens next.”
“Are you going to kill me?”
“No.”
He looked at me for a moment. Then he looked at the three bodies on the floor, at Amara with blood on her coat, at the silver blade on the stone beside my feet.
“Okay,” he said.
Amara helped him up. He was unsteady. She put a hand on his arm and guided him toward the corridor, and the care in the gesture was genuine because Amara had been turned at an age when maternal instinct was still a living thing in her body, and it had survived the turning the way certain instincts survived, by becoming quieter instead of disappearing.
Sabine was right about one thing.
Removing her did not remove the architecture. Vane had built the campaign. Sabine had been the mechanism. The mechanism was gone and the campaign remained, and the next iteration would not announce quietly.
“Amara.”
She paused at the corridor entrance, Luca's arm still in her grip.
“Take him to Blackthorne. Tell Mateo and Rowan I'm an hour behind you. Tell them the wound is managed.” I pressed my hand against my stomach and felt the slow, grinding work of my blood fighting the silver. “And tell Nico, if he's awake, that I'm coming home.”
She looked at me.
“I'll tell him,” she said, and took the boy through the door.
I stood in the basement and bled and thought about what was coming, and what I was willing to do about it, and whether the line I had drawn for myself six hundred years ago was going to hold when the war arrived at the only door that mattered.