Chapter 1 #2
“More people. Not fewer.” I sit up enough to face him.
“That wasn’t a glass cracking. My power went hunting for how to take you apart and I caught it by a thread.
Tomorrow night that goes into a live assault with me.
Marcellus is running the field. Julian drew the route.
Mira’s three feet from me when it could happen again.
” I keep my voice level. It costs. “If I’m a risk out there, the people next to me don’t get to find out the hard way. ”
“Marcellus,” he says. “He commands the field. If there’s a scenario where you lose it mid-assault, he builds the contingency.”
“Julian maps around it. He can’t route around a variable nobody told him about.”
“Seraphina first.” His fingers press once against my hip. “Elena’s had her running magic over you for weeks and we never told her what she was looking for. She keeps calling it the anomaly. Give her the truth and she’s our best chance at understanding it.”
“And Mira. She built the control into me one morning at a time. If my power is doing something her training didn’t cover, she’ll see it first.”
“Four.” Flat. Finished.
I know this man. I know this pattern. I know the logic and I know where it breaks. “Marcellus, Julian, Seraphina, Mira. Operational need, every name. Tight enough to defend if the circle ever has to answer for itself.”
“Five,” I say.
His eyes find mine.
“Five,” I say again. “Simone.”
“Simone isn’t tactical.” Careful. He lets it sit. The silence hangs between us and I’m the one who fills it.
“No. She isn’t.” I don’t let my voice shake.
“She’s my sister. I raised her. After I was turned, I kept my distance to keep her safe.
Sent money. Never a real answer. Then Konstantin took her anyway.
I’m not doing that with this.” My voice goes hard.
“And I’m not doing it to her. If something goes wrong out there, my sister is not finding out from a debrief. ”
He waits. Pushes my hair back from where the heat plastered it to my temple, and I have to look at the wall until I can breathe around it.
There. Said it. Can’t unsay it now.
“Five,” he says. Quiet. “Marcellus, Julian, Seraphina, Mira. And your sister.”
“And my sister.”
“Tomorrow. We tell the four first. Your sister last, on her own, if you want to do that one yourself.”
Through the wall, the compound keeps at it. The cart in the corridor. Marcellus giving orders. The blood warmer hissing.
Konstantin modified this body in a lab and signed his work and thinks he knows every line of code in it.
He called me his investment in a letter sealed with a serpent swallowing its own tail, and he’s been three moves ahead of us since before I knew his name.
But he’s watching the weapon he made. He has no idea what I’m carrying.
Two of them, already strong enough to move through me without asking, and he doesn’t know they exist.
My whole life the threat was something I could see coming. The fist. The blade. The man across the cage. Now the most dangerous thing in any room I walk into is me, and I can’t put that down, and I can’t leave it home.
I’m not alone this time. We take his facilities. We crack his estate. We go to him.
Maximus draws me back against him. His mouth at my hair, the length of him cool against my spine. The fear loosens an inch. I let my eyes close.
And low, where they are, it wakes again.
Faster than before.
Goddamnit!
It rises up through me toward him, toward the cold center of him, and it is fast, faster than I am, moving before I understand it’s started.
I grab for it. Haul it back with everything I have left, and it comes, slow and fighting, and the room stays still and his arms stay easy around me like he felt nothing.
But in the half second before I caught it, I felt it find the seam again. And pull. A fraction, a thread of force along the fault line, before I tore it free.
“Are you okay,” I say, reaching for him. “I felt it pull something in you.”
He is quiet for the length of one heartbeat. Two.
“You were faster than it,” he says. Even.
Certain. The voice he uses on frightened soldiers and cornered witnesses, the one that makes people believe him.
“I felt pressure. Cold, and then gone. Nothing pulled loose.” His hand covers mine and holds it flat to his chest, to the steady unhurried rhythm underneath.
“Listen. Whole. You would feel it in the bond before I felt it in my body.”
I listen. The heart under my palm doesn’t stutter and doesn’t race, and his arms are easy around me, and every instrument I own says he’s telling the truth.
The fraction may have been enough to matter. I don’t know.
So I lie against him. The compound runs its night rotations below us.
Marcellus’s voice has stopped coming through the stone, which means the pre-assault inventory is done and the man has gone to Elena.
The corridors are quiet. The blood warmers cycle.
Somewhere in the medical wing Dalton is running his overnight checks and somewhere in the conference room Julian’s tablet is charging with the strike plan loaded and somewhere in the east garden Seraphina is sitting on the bench where she sits every night, reading the compound’s ward signatures.
Everyone is where they should be. Everyone is accounted for. The family is whole and present and sleeping and the war starts tomorrow and I am lying next to my husband carrying two children who tried to kill him an hour ago.
I lie against him and listen to his heart beat whole under my palm and wait to learn whether I just killed my husband in our bed.