15. FightFlight
Chapter fifteen
Fight or Flight
Marcus came back with three men I’d never seen before, but the bond I shared with Callum, Eli and Jasper was evolving and I was learning to recognize some things the way a wolf would. Whatever fucked up cringey kind of mystic creature Marcus was, two of them carried all the same markers.
Two more Marcus-types. The kind you brought in after the last one got his face broken across a chamber floor.
Cold-eyed, both of them. Older than Marcus.
The shorter one already had a weird bag of random shit in his hand before his boots cleared the doorway.
The taller one swept the corners of the room.
Slow. Practiced. Then produced a similar small leather pouch I’d watched Marcus carry for three years, and they moved the way Marcus moved when he was working a room.
The third man didn’t have a weird leather bag of shit.
He didn’t have anything in his hands at all. He stayed half a step behind Marcus and didn’t look at his cringey brethren, didn’t look at the candles, didn’t look at the door.
He looked at me.
And he didn’t blink.
His eyes were the wrong color of brown. Too steady. Too quiet. The kind of eyes that had been sitting still in tall grass for as long as they needed to.
I had seen that look on Callum.
I had seen it on Jasper.
I had seen it on Eli, too. The quiet version of it.
Wolf. I thought, and the threads of our bond hummed awake.
Marcus nodded to the warlocks without speaking. They crossed the floor and got me off the mattress carefully around the silver rope at my wrists, neither of them willing to touch bare skin, both of them watching the corners.
Stay, I said to the shadows. Hide. Wait. The shadows folded back into the corners when I told them to.
The wolf noticed. His expression barely changed. Something sharpened at the corner of his eyes. He looked back at Marcus and gave a small nod.
He had read me. I knew it the way I would have known a draft in a sealed room.
He had stood close enough to taste the air around me and found something in it that did not belong to Marcus, and instead of fear or hunger his face had done a small precise thing that I had watched Eli’s face do across a kitchen table, the thing a careful man’s face does when a fact rearranges everything in his mind.
This wolf was not Marcus’s. Marcus did not have wolves; Marcus had warlocks, and a leash held by someone else.
This one belonged to whoever was at the other end of the leash, and he had just sent word up the line that the woman in the chair was carrying something none of them had planned for.
We went down the hall.
I counted while they walked me.
Iron-banded door. Plain wood. Sigil burned into the third lintel. Cypress boards under my feet the whole way, the boards giving the small flex of a raised pier. Old wood.
Left-handed wolf behind me. When had I noticed that?
Practiced handlers on either side.
Nobody in this hallway expected me to leave it freely.
I had learned this hallway the way I learned everything now, by taking it.
Three years with Marcus had made me a woman who memorized exits out of habit, who knew which floorboard in any house would give her away, and the habit had outlived the relationship and come with me into worse rooms than the ones he used to keep me in.
So I counted. Doors. Sigils. The flex of cypress over a raised pier, which told me water, which told me south, which told me a thing about where in the world this house was sitting that nobody walking me down this hall would have wanted me to know.
None of it was a plan yet. It was the parts a plan gets built from, and I gathered them the way you gather kindling in the dark, by feel, trusting there would be a use for them before the cold got me.
The room at the end of the hall had a chair in it.
Old wood. Leather restraints at the wrists and the ankles and the chest. A small table beside it.
Copper bowl. Vial. A flat white cloth covering something the men working wouldn’t want me seeing until they were ready.
The chair sat under the lamps waiting for me like everybody involved still wanted to pretend this was procedure instead of violence.
Nothing says civilized interrogation like leather restraints and a copper bowl.
Somebody had cleaned this room recently and cleaned it hard.
Bleach at the back of the throat, salt under the bleach, and under the salt a third smell I was only now learning to name, the dead-mouse sweetness that clung to everything Marcus and his kind handled.
You do not scrub a room like that for an interview.
The second chair against the far wall told me the rest. Whatever was going to be done to me in the first chair, somebody had been invited to sit and watch it done.
I made myself look at the second chair the way I had made myself look at everything since the dark room.
Steadily. All the way. Because the things you refuse to look at are the things that get to decide what happens to you.
The cringe Marcus knock-offs set me in the first chair without speaking.
Leather over the silver rope. This was the first time in days my wrists had been unbound from one another, and the pain in my shoulders was both welcome and excruciating.
Chest restraint snug. Ankle restraints tighter than they needed to be.
The shorter one took the small cruelty because he wanted to.
I let him have it. You’ll get yours, bitch, I thought, the bond in my chest stayed steady.
That was new, the steadiness. There had been a time, and not a long time ago, when a man pulling a strap too tight on purpose would have closed my whole throat, would have sent me back into the small animal place where I just waited for the hurting to be over.
The strap still hurt. The wanting-to-cry still rose.
But it rose against something now, a floor that had not been there before, three threads of it laid down under me while I was not looking, and the floor held my weight, and I did not go down into the small animal place.
I sat in the chair they had built for breaking me, and I was, to my own quiet astonishment, not broken.
Not yet. Not by these men, who thought a copper bowl and a leather strap were the worst things a person could be faced with.
Marcus stood beside the second chair, hands in his pockets, his face the careful blank face he put on for company.
“Sweetheart,” he said.
“Don’t,” I said.
He didn’t. The door opened a beat later, and the man Marcus had been waiting for walked in, and the room got very quiet very quickly.
***
He didn’t sit.
He was older than I had pictured. Lean, with silver-streaked dark hair cropped close to his skull. The kind of smile that never reached his eyes.
Dark suit. Expensive shoes. A watch at his wrist that cost more than most of his employees’ salaries, and he wanted them to know it.
He didn’t acknowledge the room. He didn’t look at the cringe dudes. He didn’t speak to Marcus.
He stopped four feet from my chair and looked at the nip bruise on my jaw and the deeper bruise at the dip of my collarbone; my gifts from Callum.
Inside my chest, the three threads went very still.
It was the kind of still I’d never felt from them before. Not warm. Not tight. Just listening, all at once, in a way they had never listened before.
The man in the dark suit looked at the bruises for a long second.
He went still.
Not the still he had walked into the room with.
The first still had been arrogance — the still of a man who owned the room before he stepped into it.
This was different. Calculation. Recalculation.
The still of a man whose afternoon had just been reorganized for him by something he had not planned on encountering.
I had spent my whole adult life learning to read powerful men, because reading them had been the only insurance I could ever afford.
I read this one now, and what I read frightened me more than Marcus ever had.
Marcus was appetite. Marcus wanted, and a man who only wants can be predicted, can be starved, can be steered.
This man did not want anything I could see.
He had walked in owning the room, and he had looked at the bruises Callum left on me, the print of another claim on a body he had been told was an asset, and he had simply, silently, begun to do math.
There was no heat in him at all. The most dangerous thing in that room was not the warlocks or the wolf or even Marcus.
It was the quiet arithmetic going on behind a face that had decided, long before he ever walked through that door, that feelings were an expense he could not afford.
His mouth didn’t move. His eyes didn’t widen. But the weight on his back foot shifted a quarter of an inch, and the count of three of my breaths went by before he moved again.
He turned his head a small distance toward the wolf at his shoulder.
The wolf stepped forward.
He didn’t touch me. He stopped close enough that the cringe dudes moved out of his way without being told to.
He stood there for the length of one of my breaths, reading something.
The air. The place at my center where the threads had gone still.
Then he stepped back and gave the man in the suit the smallest possible nod.
The man in the suit took the nod without looking at his wolf.
He kept his eyes on the bruise.
His face didn’t change. Whatever was moving behind it, he wasn’t going to let it move where I could see it.
He stood there for the length of three more of my breaths, and his eyes flattened in a way they hadn’t been flat a minute ago, and whatever arithmetic he was doing behind that flatness, he wasn’t going to do it where I could see it either.
He turned his head toward Marcus.
Marcus’s hands came out of his pockets.