Chapter 8 #3
“You’re courting me. I assume that grants me some authority over our relationship.”
“It grants you all of it.” The words hung between them, and Nica lowered the toast. He didn’t take it back — of course he didn’t; the man made declarations as though retreat were a language he’d never learned. She reached for her coffee. “What are we doing today?”
“Nothing, if you prefer. You did not sleep.”
“How would you know?”
“The lights remained on.” A pause. “I was outside.”
“Flying?”
He looked at her, and she looked back, and the silence stretched until her heart pounded.
He still wouldn’t tell her what she’d seen — the scales, the heat, the healing, the enormous shape in the fog.
She should have demanded answers before she ever sat down at his table.
She definitely should not be wondering what he wore beneath the sweater.
“I need to return to WMS,” she said.
“No.” The answer came instantly, and her temper sparked.
“That wasn’t a request. The records are there. Crowe’s physical intake files are in Margaret’s office. Some of the provenance notes were never scanned.”
“Margaret can identify them.”
“Margaret is concussed.”
They went back and forth like that until they settled on the number of armed men required to escort her across the city.
“Six,” Demetri said.
“Two.”
“Six.”
“Three.”
“Six.”
“Four, and they stay outside.”
“Six, and two remain at your side.”
“You are impossible.”
“Yes.”
She glared; he waited. The man could probably negotiate a hostage release without shifting in his chair. “Fine,” she said. “But no one touches anything without gloves. And we leave the moment I have the files. And you are not going to loom behind me while I work.”
“I do not loom.”
She looked at him.
Demetri lifted his coffee. “Fine,” he said. It was the first lie he told all morning.
Whitfield, Marsh it didn’t move.
Of course. Another shot cracked below. The building’s lights flickered and died.
Emergency lighting washed the office red.
A third shot. Then silence, thick and wrong, the kind of silence that has a body in it.
Something scraped along the office wall — not outside the door, inside the wall.
Nica went still. Someone was striking the drywall from the other side.
Once. Twice. A blade punched through, the edge glowing faintly blue, and dragged downward, cutting through plaster and studs as though the wall were paper.
Margaret screamed. Nica grabbed her and pulled her behind the desk as a section of wall fell inward and a man stepped through the dust — black clothing, a half-mask, a long knife — and his gaze went straight past them to the red binders.
Nica snatched the heavy brass desk lamp and swung.
The base struck his forearm. He cursed; the knife slashed; pain flashed across her sleeve, the fabric opening from elbow to wrist, blood rising in a thin line.
The man grabbed a binder, and Margaret launched herself over the desk — “Those are original documents!” — and struck him with an archival box, and the attacker shoved her so hard she hit the bookcase, her head cracking against the wood, and crumpled.
Rage burned through Nica. She drove the lamp into the attacker’s knee. He folded with a shout, the knife sweeping toward her face — and a hand closed around his wrist.
Demetri stood behind him. No sound. No warning.
His eyes burning ruby red. The attacker twisted, and Demetri broke his arm; the crack filled the office.
He caught the man’s throat and lifted him off the floor — not struggled, lifted, one-handed.
Scales moved over his hand, dark red, bright as garnets beneath the skin, his nails lengthening into black claws.
Nica forgot the pain in her arm. Forgot Margaret.
Forgot everything except the impossible shape of Demetri’s hand around a man’s throat.
“Demetri.” His head turned, and the face she knew remained — almost; his pupils had narrowed to black vertical slits.
The claws pressed into the attacker’s neck, and blood appeared.
“Demetri.” Her voice shook. His eyes found hers, and the creature behind them stared out — recognition, possession, a fury so vast it made human anger look small — and then his gaze dropped to the blood on her arm, and a sound tore from his chest, low and inhuman, a sound she felt in the floor.
“Don’t,” Nica whispered. Demetri went still. “Margaret needs help.”
Control returned by force. The scales receded, the claws shortened, his eyes stayed red one heartbeat longer before turning gray. He dropped the man, kicked the glowing knife out of reach, and knelt beside Margaret.
Two security men rushed through the broken wall. “Paramedics,” Demetri ordered. “Now.”
Nica crouched beside Margaret, who breathed — shallow but steady. Blood ran from beneath Demetri’s jacket sleeve, a cut at his ribs, deep; the glowing knife had touched him.
“You’re hurt.”
His attention snapped to her arm. “So are you.”
“It’s a scratch.” He rose and crossed to her, and his hands closed around her — not an embrace, an inspection, moving over her shoulders, her face, her neck, her ribs, fast and careful and shaking. “Where else?”
“Nowhere. My arm. That’s all.” He caught her wrist and turned it gently.
The cut was shallow, ugly but not dangerous, and the breath left him all at once.
Then he pulled her against his chest, hard.
His heart hammered against her cheek, too fast, his body burning, both arms locked around her as though he could put her inside his own ribs where nothing could reach her.
“I am fine,” she said. His hold tightened. “I’m fine.”
“He touched you.” The words vibrated through his chest. “I should have killed him.”
Nica lifted her head, and Demetri looked down at her with no apology, no civilized denial — he meant it — and a chill moved through her that had nothing to do with fear. Not entirely. “You stopped.”
“Because you asked.” The simplicity of it hollowed her out.