THE BLASTED CONTRACT COIN BOOK 1

CHAPTER 28 REALITY CHECK

POV Lucian

Sterling wouldn't allow me to stay unconscious for long.

He hit me instantly with a sensory weave, a sharp, agonizing spike of pure pain that lanced through my nerve endings, dragging me back to reality with a scream trapped behind my teeth.

For that level of sensory manipulation, he didn't require physical contact. My shadows, having been entirely released from my conscious control while I was blacked out, didn't make a damn bit of difference to him. His magic bypassed the dark entirely, striking straight at the nerves. He didn't need to see me to hit me with his weave.

I struggled against the blinding white pain, managing to forcefully drag my scattered shadows back under my cloak.

It was a swift, brutal reminder from the twins and Gideon: Do not break our sister.

I spat a mouthful of dark blood and a broken tooth onto the stone. I massaged my jaw, listening to the bone groan under the pressure.

"I f*****g deserved that one," I muttered, looking up into Gideon's towering, furious frame. "I am sorry. Thank you, Gid."

"You had better go report this directly to Alistair," Gideon growled, his eyes glowing a dangerous, predatory red in the now re-lit torchlight.

The cellar walls were lined with proximity torches, costly things, specially crafted by a high-tier weaver who could weave the fire to spark and relight whenever humans were in the vicinity. They flared back to life now, casting long, dancing shapes across the stone.

"Lucian, you go tell Alistair the 'kindness' directive failed," Gideon barked, stepping directly between the prisoner and me.

"We are required to keep this rat breathing, and clearly, we cannot trust you within arm's reach of his throat."

"I can remain," I said, attempting to push myself up against the iron bars of the cell. "I will not try to kill him again."

"No, the f**k you aren't. I am guarding him now. From death, and from you. I will not allow a single variable to compromise this useless, parasitic piece of filth, because his heart is currently my Little Bird's heart."

Cillian, curled into a defensive ball on the straw and wheezing for oxygen, let out a weak, pathetic strain of words.

"Hey... easy on the... insults. My feelings... are remarkably fragile."

"Shut up!" we all commanded in unison.

Cillian flinched, pulling his limbs in tighter, but I could still catch the faint spark of a rogue's grin through his grimace. The rat was profile-perfect for a street grifter, undeniably terrified, but a survivor to his core. He understood exactly which cognitive buttons to push to keep our family structurally off-balance.

Gideon turned back around, leaning his massive frame over the prisoner until his shadow completely eclipsed the man.

"I will not let anything happen to you. Not because I care if you draw breath, but because I am not letting her heart stop again. You are a biological extension of her now. I will treat your safety with the exact same metrics of care I would give her detached limb," Gideon stated, his voice dropping into a register of absolute promise.

He stepped away from Cillian, approaching Mercy where she stood by the gate. He leaned down and kissed the crown of her head with an immense, tender devotion. I watched them, and not for the first time in my life, I felt a profound, hollow ache open up in my chest.

I wished I possessed the capacity to do the same.

Physical touch did not come naturally to me. I craved it with a desperate intensity, yet I feared the absolute vulnerability of it even more. Gideon was the only human being who had physically touched me in years, even if today it had been delivered via his fist. I found myself deeply envying his absolute freedom of movement as I nursed my fractured jaw.

"Very... touching," Cillian wheezed from the floor.

"I've always wanted a bodyguard who looks like he consumes boulders for breakfast."

Gideon didn't even grant him a glance.

"Keep talking, rat, and I will personally discover how many teeth you can lose before Mercy's jaw begins to ache."

That metric effectively silenced him.

I looked back at Mercy. She was leaning against the iron framework, her face as still and unreadable as a frozen pond, but her pale fingers were still ghosting over the bruised skin of her throat. The sight of it made my stomach churn with nausea. In my haste to punish the problem, I had nearly committed an unforgivable sin against our house.

"Come on," Sterling said softly with tender understanding.

"Alistair is waiting for the status report," Caspian finished.

The physical transition from the dark, freezing basement to the sunlit corridors of the main house felt like crossing between entirely different dimensions. The plush, velvet carpets completely muffled the sound of heavy boots, and the warm, golden glow of the morning sun felt almost offensive after the raw violence we had just left below.

We reached Alistair's office. The heavy double doors stood wide open, revealing the operational nerve center of the Syndicate. Poppy was there sitting at the edge of the seat, biting at her nails in sheer anxiety.

Alistair was seated behind his massive maple wood desk, the rhythmic, scratchy bite of his fountain pen against parchment providing the only sound in the room. He didn't immediately look up, but the ambient air grew heavy as his native Authority expanded to greet our presence.

I slumped heavily into a velvet armchair, my jaw throbbing in time with my pulse. Mercy took the seat directly adjacent to mine.

I watched her out of the corner of my eye. Under normal parameters, Mercy sat like an unsheathed blade, shoulders pinned back, spine perfectly vertical, hands resting on her knees like stone monuments.

But today, she didn't.

She sank deeply into the velvet cushions. Her shoulders were slightly, uncharacteristically rounded, and she rested the back of her head completely against the upholstery, her vacant gaze fixed entirely on the ceiling plaster. It was a posture of profound, systematic exhaustion. The structural change had not gone unnoticed by any of us, but it seemed to have been entirely unnoticed by her. The machine was slipping, and she didn't even realize it.

Alistair's fountain pen stopped. The silence in the room became absolute.

He looked up, his dark, calculating eyes sweeping across our ranks. I wrestled desperately to pull my shadows back under my cloak, but I was getting thoroughly exhausted from the continuous effort; a few dark, ink-like wisps refused to obey, pooling stubbornly around my knees and bleeding down my legs onto the carpet.

Alistair registered my bruised, swelling jaw and the stark line of blood drying on my high collar. He registered the twins' frayed, chaotic, energetic signatures.

And then, his gaze locked onto Mercy. He didn't miss it, the way her usual, rigid discipline had softened into something dangerously fragile. He c****d a single dark eyebrow directly at me, a silent, razor-sharp inquiry.

What happened down there?

I gave him a slow, microscopic shake of my head. Not here. Not in front of her.

"The directive failed," Mercy stated, her voice returning to that familiar, flat drone, though the delivery sounded significantly thinner than usual.

"Feeding the prisoner is mathematically insufficient. The debt is deeper than basic sustenance. The gold coin did not respond to the transaction."

Alistair leaned back in his chair, crossing his long fingers over his chest. He kept his gaze pinned exclusively on Mercy, studying the unusual way her frame leaned into the fabric of the chair.

"Then we alter the environment," Alistair declared, his voice ringing through the office like a low, commanding bell.

"If the asset requires a baseline sense of security to balance the scales of the contract, he will never achieve it inside an iron cage. He needs to return to his natural habitat. We initiate the 'Forced Proximity' protocol immediately."

I glanced over at Mercy. She didn't flinch. She didn't move an inch. She simply continued to stare blankly at the ceiling, her chest rising and falling in a slow, heavy rhythm that wasn't entirely her own.

"Understood," she murmured, stood, and walked out of the office without another word.

The machine was still processing the words, still executing the orders. But for the first time in our collective lives, Alistair and I were looking directly at the fragile girl buried beneath the steel.

We were seeing structural cracks where none had ever existed before, and for the first time since the founding of the Syndicate, we were all truly afraid of what it meant.