Chapter 47
Saint
The summons comes at noon.
Not a call. A note delivered to my door by one of the Order’s administrative staff.
The young man knocked twice and did not make eye contact when I opened the door.
He handed me the envelope with the energy of someone who has been told exactly how dangerous the person they are delivering to is and has decided professionalism is the only viable survival strategy.
The note is short. The High Chamber. Four o’clock. All relevant parties.
I fold it and put it in my pocket.
I sit on my bed, and I look at the wall, and I think about four o’clock.
Valen calls at twelve thirty.
“I already know,” I say through the phone.
He is quiet for a moment. “I have been working the channels. There are two Order members I can get to before four. If you come in with a full accounting of what Victor was doing, the other girls, and the archive breach, there is an argument to be made that your actions were protective rather than aggressive.”
“Who makes that argument?”
“Azriel will speak. I will speak. Zero has the full surveillance record of Victor’s operation for the past six weeks: every move, every contact, every girl he touched. If we can frame what you did as the Order’s failure to act and your action as the consequence of that failure—”
“They will not see it that way,” I say.
“No,” Valen says. “But they may calculate that letting you go back makes them look more culpable than letting you stay. Silas does not like culpability. We also have the twins.”
“And Amy?”
Valen is quiet for a moment. That tells me he’s already thought about this. “She is not called. She is not implicated. Whatever happens today, she walks out of it clean.”
“Good,” I say. “If not, I have to go with plan B, and that’s not good for anyone.
“Saint. Whatever happens today, you know this was not nothing. What you did. What you got out of it.”
“It’s fine.”
He clears his throat. The closest thing to sentiment Valen will permit himself. “I’ll see you at four.”
He hangs up.
I sit with the afternoon.
I think about her this morning. How she sat up in the gray light. The way she said “yours.” With the same precise, controlled fury she brings to everything she has decided matters.
Azriel will speak, and Valen is going to run his calculations, and Zero is going to produce his surveillance files, and it may even work.
There is a version of this afternoon when the Order looks at the full picture of what Victor Sokolov has been doing on this campus for six months and decides that the asset who stopped him is more valuable than the liability he represents.
I also know there is another version. I have been in enough rooms to understand that institutions protect themselves first and everything else second.
The Order did not build three generations of power by being moved by the right argument.
They built it by understanding leverage, and the leverage they have on me has always been the same.
The silence of four walls that know you and do not care.
I look at my hands.
I think about her body and the way it takes me so perfectly.
I think about eleven minutes of sleep in the dark and waking to find her watching me with an expression I had never seen directed at me before. The way she takes me in her mouth while she plays with her pretty pussy.
I think about what it means to choose something and have it choose you back.
Whatever happens at four o’clock doesn’t matter because I have her and the gift of control as I head to the High Chamber.