19 Kaia #3
The Order had taught me a hundred ways to put a body where I wanted it.
I’d learned them in the lower house on padded mats, restraint maneuvers for the days a patient’s blood ran too hot, leverage to turn a stranger’s center of gravity against itself.
I had used them gently, always gently, telling myself it was mercy.
I used this one without one ounce of mercy in it.
I crossed to Tommy and I dropped my weight and turned my hips and used every pound of his two-hundred-and-something frame against him, and I threw my mate down the stairs.
He went backward through the open iron gate and into the stairwell, tumbling, out of the Saint’s radius, out of the crushing dome of cold—and I heard him hit the landing below and snarl my name, the gold-eyed sound of a wolf who has just realized what’s happening and cannot stop it.
I ripped a silver stylus from my breast pocket.
The service weapon. A tool I’d carried over my own heart for years, the symbol of every door I’d ever helped lock on a woman who trusted me.
I jammed it into the gate’s keypad to the hilt and dragged it sideways across the contacts. Sparks fountained up white into the dim corridor, and the lock screamed and the magic in the frame seized and fused, metal and ward melting into one solid mass.
Locking Tommy out. Locking me in.
Below the bars, he hit the gate. His fists came through the gap and closed on the iron and hauled, and the bars groaned, and his face came up into the light—gold-blind, blood-streaked, ruined.
“Kaia.” The pressure of the Saint was already pulling at me, the ambient edge of it, a hand spreading flat against the front of my skull, and I felt the first hot trickle start from my own nose. I didn’t wipe it.
I held his eyes through the bars and I made my voice the steadiest thing I owned. “Save your brother. Bring the walls down.”
“I’m not—” He yanked the gate. It didn’t give. His whole body shook with it. “I’m not leaving you in there, I’ll tear this—”
“You can’t get through in time and you know it.
” The trickle reached my lip. Iron, my own blood, the taste of it.
“Finn’s on the rig and Reed’s fire is draining him by the second and the only hands that can pull him are yours.
Go. Go, Tommy. That’s the job.” The thread between us went bright and I poured the rest down it, the part I couldn’t fit through my throat, the watercolor and the tree and the whole impossible life. “Go.”
For one second he held the bars and looked at me like the world was ending.
Then the wolf in him made the calculation the man couldn’t bear to, and he let go.
He turned and went down the stairs at a dead sprint, and Sloane’s voice cut across the junction behind me, sharp and shaking, into the comm: “Tommy—comm’s live—I have the sequence—when I call zero you pull, not before, do you copy—”
The channel crackled open, and through it, under the static, came another voice.
Wrecked. Blood-choked. Barely a thread.
“Tommy.” Finn. Coughing. “Drop the wards. Even if it—” a wet sound, a breath dragged through a ruined throat, “—even if it means killing me. Do not let them touch Reed. You hear me. Drop them.”
And the strangest thing I have ever seen happened at the master terminal six feet from me.
Sloane went rigid.
A violent shudder ran the length of her spine, head to heel, like a current, and her hands jumped off the keys, and for one second she stared at the comm earpiece like it had bitten her.
Her pupils blew wide. Her breath came short.
Her knuckles whitened on the edge of the console like she was about to tear it off its mount and go through the floor with her bare hands.
I had no idea what that was. I had every idea what that was.
“Sloane.” I kept my voice low. “The sequence.”
The Saint’s pressure thickened. The dormants behind the Wardens were weeping now, low and frightened, and Eli’s eyes had found me across the junction—found my gold eyes, the storm in the air, the Steward who had reprimanded him on the lawn standing in the middle of a fused gate with blood running down her chin—and his mouth had fallen open in something that wasn’t fear anymore.
I wiped the blood from my lip with the back of my hand.
Then I turned my back on the locked gate, on Tommy’s footsteps fading down into the dark, on Sloane shaking at her keys, and I faced them.
Alchemist Joss. The Third Saint. The Wardens. The whole machine I had served and fed and lied for, every morning of my small gray life.
Joss was still smiling. “You think you can stop me, Steward?”
Joss stared at my eyes. At the gold that was surely drowning them, at the storm pouring off my skin into the room.
His smile became strained. I watched his worldview come apart behind his weeping face, because the centerpiece of three hundred years of sacred work had just opened her mouth full of teeth.
“You—” His voice failed. The syringe trembled in his waxen hand. “You’re suppressed. Recite the catechism, Steward. Remember your duty—”
I dropped my hands to my sides.
The voice that came out of me was an octave I had never in my life touched, low and even and absolutely without fear.
“The wild rose,” I told him, “is done being trimmed.”