27. Atara
Atara
I've counted the exits four times now, which is its own kind of depressing.
Three months ago, I counted citations and the change in my coffee budget.
Now I count the doors a man could walk through to kill me.
I take a sip of champagne I have no intention of finishing and let my eyes keep moving — the bar, the terrace, the service corridor, Lorcan and I fought over for forty-five minutes in the war room.
“You're doing the thing,” Lorcan says beside me, low enough that the couple drifting past us can't hear it.
“What thing?”
“You're working. Stop. You look like you're about to audit the centerpieces.”
“The centerpieces are hiding three of your men and we both know it.” I smile at the couple like I've just said something delightful. “I'm allowed to admire the staging.”
He doesn't smile back. The corner of his mouth moves about a millimeter, which from him is roughly the same thing.
He's in black, no tie, and he's been holding my hand on and off all night in a way that has nothing to do with affection and everything to do with the word mine being legible from across a room.
I should hate it. I should really, really hate it.
“Stop looking at me like that,” I murmur.
“Like what?”
“Like I'm dessert.”
“You're in red,” he says, as if that explains everything. To him, it apparently does.
A man peels off from the bar and angles toward us, and my radar pings before he's halfway across the floor.
Senator Whitfield. I recognize him from the guest list and from the way three of Lorcan's accounts quietly route through his committee.
He's somewhere north of sixty, silver and tanned in the way money lets men be, and he is looking at me like he's already decided how the conversation ends.
“O'Shea,” he says, but he says it to my collarbone. “You've been keeping secrets.”
“Senator.” Lorcan's voice is perfectly flat.
“And who is this?” Whitfield's gaze travels down and back up, slow, like he's pricing a car. “My God. Where have they been hiding you, sweetheart?”
“In the accounts you keep losing track of,” I say, sweet as anything. “You should really read the line items before you sign. Page nine is doing a lot of work for you.”
It takes him a second. When it lands, his smile goes stiff, but his eyes drop right back to my chest like they're magnetized, like I didn't just tell him I've read his dirty laundry by the page number.
Lorcan moves. Not fast — he never does — he just steps in so his shoulder is between the Senator's eyeline and me, close enough that Whitfield has to tip his head back.
“You seem to be having trouble with where to put your eyes,” Lorcan says, quiet and almost pleasant. “Look at her like that one more time, and you can keep the committee. You won't need the eyes.”
The Senator opens his mouth. Closes it. The tan goes a shade grayer.
“Good man,” Lorcan says, and just like that, he's bored. “Go enjoy the bar.”
Whitfield retreats. I wait until he's swallowed by the crowd before I exhale.
“You didn't have to do that,” I say. “I had him.”
“I know you had him.” He takes my glass out of my hand and sets it on a passing tray. “I did it because I wanted to.”
“That's not a good reason.”
“It's the only one I've got tonight.” He holds out his hand. “Dance with me.”
“We're working.”
“We're standing in a corner counting doors. We'll see more from the floor.” His hand stays where it is. “Dance with me, Atara.”
One dance. The board doesn't move in one dance. I put my hand in his.
He pulls me into the middle of it before I can change my mind, and the band shifts into something slow and low, all brass and brushed drums. His hand settles flat against the small of my back and presses, just enough, so there's no polite gap between us.
None. My whole front is against his, and I can feel him breathe.
“This isn't dancing,” I tell his collar. “This is you holding me up and turning in a circle.”
“You're following fine.”
“I'm being dragged.”
“Same thing, with you.” His mouth is at my temple now, and when he turns us, his thigh slides between mine for half a beat, and my breath does something embarrassing. He notices. Of course, he notices. “There it is,” he says.
“Don't.”
“Don't what? I'm dancing.”
His thumb is moving on my spine, slow, a small dragging circle that I feel everywhere it isn't. I'm very aware of the dress, of how little of it there is, of the heat coming off him through two thin layers of fabric. He turns us again and dips his head, and his lips graze the shell of my ear.
“When this is over,” he says against my skin, “I'm taking you home and taking my time. Hours. I've been thinking about it all night instead of the trap, which is a problem you're going to answer for.”
“You're impossible,” I manage.
“I'm motivated.”
I look up at him, and for one stupid second the whole room drops away — the doors, the guns, the man we came here to kill. It's just his hand on my back and his eyes on my mouth and the want sitting low in me like a coal. This is the worst possible time to feel this. I feel it anyway.
Then his hand on my back goes still.
It's nothing anyone else would catch. The thumb stops. The arm under my hand turns into a different kind of solid. I've spent three months learning this body, and I know its tells, yet the change in him moves through me before my head catches up.
“Lorcan?”
“Don't turn your head.” His voice hasn't changed at all, which is so much worse. “Keep dancing. Smile.”
So I look past his shoulder instead, and I read the room the way he taught me to. And I see it.
The men move first. Echo, by the east doors, drifts off the wall and turns his back to the room to murmur into his cuff.
Two of the catering staff set their trays down on the same beat and don't pick anything up.
By the terrace, a guard I clocked an hour ago changes the foot he's leaning on.
It should look like nothing. It looks like a closing fist.
“It's early,” I breathe. “He's not supposed to be here for another hour. We planned for the second wave —”
“I know what we planned.”
The crowd by the main entrance does the thing crowds do when something walks in that they're afraid of — it parts without anyone deciding to part it. And then the floor opens up, and I see him.
Silas.
I've only ever seen the photo, grainy and ten years old.
The real one is worse. He's lean and unhurried and dressed better than anyone in the room, and he's smiling like he's arriving at a party that's already going his way.
Two men at each shoulder. More behind. Too many.
That's too many men for a trap to be ours.
“Lorcan,” I say. “Count his guns.”
“I'm counting.” A muscle jumps in his jaw. “It's too many.”
That's the moment I understand we got it wrong. Not the layout — I'd have caught a flaw in the layout. We got him wrong. He didn't walk into our trap. He let us build one so he'd know exactly where every one of our men would be standing when he sprang his.
Silas lifts one hand, lazy, like he's asking for a song.
The first shot doesn't sound like the movies.
It's flat and small, and it punches one of Lorcan's men off his feet by the bar, and the back of him opens up across the white tablecloth in a spray of dark red before the body even folds.
For half a heartbeat, nobody moves. Then the screaming starts, and the room comes apart all at once.
Lorcan's arm clamps across me and drives me down and sideways, and we hit the floor behind an overturned banquet table as the air above it fills with rounds.
Wood splinters. Glass comes down like rain.
A woman near us goes over with a wet, surprised sound and doesn't get up, and the marble under my cheek is already going slick and warm, and I make myself not look at where it's coming from.
“Stay behind the table,” Lorcan says into my ear. He's not panicked. That's the part that scares me — how calm he is, how this is just Tuesday, like I once threw at him. “Do not move until I move you.”
“Maeve —”
“Maeve's at the compound, she's safe, she's not here.” He racks the slide on a gun I didn't see him draw. “Eyes on me.”
He comes up over the lip of the table and fires twice, and one of Silas's men by the terrace drops with a hole where his throat used to be, both hands going up to a wound that won't be held closed.
The other one, Lorcan, takes through the eye, and the man simply stops being a person, drops straight down into himself, and Lorcan is already moving to the next without a flicker.
Kieran is across the floor in the thick of it.
I watch a man come at his back with a knife, and I open my mouth to shout, and Kieran just turns into it, takes the blade through the meat of his arm without a sound, and drives his own up under the man's jaw to the hilt.
There's so much of it — the blood — it comes out of people in volumes that don't seem possible, sheeting across the parquet, turning the gala's careful gold lighting into something out of an abattoir.
A chandelier shears loose under fire and comes down on the dance floor we were standing on ten seconds ago. The crystal explodes outward. Someone who was under it is just gone, folded into the wreckage, a shoe spinning out across the floor on its own.
And I am not freezing.
That's the thing I notice about myself, distant and clear, while the world ends around me.
The old me would be a ball under this table with her hands over her ears.
This me is flat to the floor with her cheek in someone else's blood, and she has already opened her clutch, and her fingers have already found the little black knife Lorcan put in her hands and showed her how to use.
I get my thumb on the release the way he taught me. The blade slides out, silent.
Through the gap between the table leg and a fallen chair, I find Silas.
He hasn't drawn a weapon. He's standing in the middle of the carnage with his hands in his pockets, watching Lorcan work his way toward him across the room, and he's still smiling, and he's moving — slow, sideways, toward the service corridor we pulled men off of.
The one I told Lorcan to leave thin. The one Silas wanted us to leave thin.
I track him. Low, behind the line of overturned tables, knife flat against my forearm the way he showed me, my heart going so hard I can feel it in my teeth.
I don't have a plan yet. I have a direction and a blade and the cold, useful patience that's the only thing this whole insane world has actually taught me.
Not yet, I tell myself, watching him drift toward the dark. Wait for it.
And I wait.