The Viper's Queen

Chapter4:The First Threat

The gun didn't move.

Neither did I.

I stared down the barrel and my lungs just stopped. The draft from the hallway hit my bare skin and I couldn't feel it. I couldn't feel anything except the fact that the distance between me and that gun was not enough.

Varek didn't shoot.

But he didn't lower it either.

"Push the door," he said.

His voice was completely flat. No anger in it. No anything.

I put my palms against the cold steel and pushed. The hinges groaned like they were complaining about it.

Varek lowered the gun. He let out one slow breath. Fresh blood dripped from his split knuckles onto the concrete floor.

"Inside," he said. "Close it."

I stepped over the threshold and pulled the door shut behind me. The lock clicked. The smell hit me all at once — bleach fighting a losing battle against something much worse underneath it. I knew what that smell meant. I'd grown up around enough of it to know.

Varek turned his back on me.

He walked to a metal tray against the wall, grabbed a cloth, and started cleaning the blood off his hands. He didn't look at me. His eyes stayed on the man tied to the chair over the drain.

"You didn't flinch," Varek said.

I didn't say anything.

"Come here," he said.

I crossed the room on bare feet and stopped just before the drain. This close I could hear the man in the chair breathing. It sounded wrong. Wet and slow, like something inside him wasn't working the way it should. His left eye was swollen completely shut. His right eye found me and stayed there.

"He sold our northern routes to London," Varek said. He rolled his sleeves back down. "Two crews lost. Twelve men in the water."

He stepped forward and grabbed the man's jaw and turned his face toward me. "Look at her."

The man looked.

Varek looked at me. "Tell him what they do to rats in the outer rim."

My throat was dry. "They hang them by the ankles," I said. "And bleed them out into the gutters."

"Exactly," Varek said.

He reached behind his back and pulled out a knife. Not shiny. The blade was dark and scratched — the kind of knife that had been used a lot and wasn't bothered about looking good anymore. He moved behind the chair and grabbed a fist of the man's hair and pulled his head back until his neck went tight.

He pressed the flat of the blade against the man's throat.

"Watch," Varek said. He wasn't shouting. He didn't need to.

I dug my nails into my own wrist. My stomach was turning hard. But I kept my eyes on the blade. My father had told me that when I was small enough that I didn't understand it yet.

You don't look away from dangerous things, Maevia. You watch them. Always.

The man in the chair started fighting the zip-ties. The metal legs of the chair screamed against the bolts in the floor.

"Wait — Elias," the man choked out. "Elias bought the routes. Elias is already—"

The window didn't break.

It turned to powder.

A bullet came through the steel mesh and hit the man in the chair through his right eye. The back of his head just — I'm not going to describe what happened. I looked away. My whole body went cold.

The sound of the shot reached us half a second later. A massive boom that shook the floor under my feet.

Then every light in the basement blew at once.

Hot glass rained down around me. The room went completely black.

"Down!" Varek's voice cracked through the dark.

The window frame came apart. Gunfire started tearing through the upper half of the room. It was so loud I felt it in my chest. In my teeth. Bits of the wall exploded around me and the air filled with dust so thick I couldn't see anything even when the gun flashes lit the room for half a second.

A red dot of light swept across the floor.

It found me.

Settled right in the center of my chest.

The wall beside my head turned to dust. Something sharp cut across my cheek. I felt the sting of it and then nothing because something enormous hit me from the side.

Varek drove me down to the floor with his full weight. He grabbed my gown and dragged me behind the chair — behind the body still tied to it — and pushed me flat against the wet concrete and dropped onto my back.

He was so heavy I couldn't breathe.

His chest heaved against my back. I could feel his heart going. Fast and hard, nothing like the calm man who had stood over that chair two minutes ago. The smell of engine oil and something that made me think of rain was all around me.

"Stay down," he said against my ear. Low and quiet.

He shifted just enough to get his gun up over the dead man's shoulder and aimed blind into the dark.

The gunfire stopped.

The silence that came after was almost worse. In the pitch black the only sound was blood dripping through the iron grate two inches from my face. I counted the drops without meaning to. My brain needed something to hold onto.

Then a heavy sound from the hallway.

The keypad on the basement door beeped twice. A strip of green light cut through the dark.

Someone had run the override from outside.

Varek's whole body went tight against my back. His grip on the gun changed. I felt it in his arm — the tendons pulling, the weight of the decision.

Then he breathed out. Short and sharp.

A flashlight beam swept the room.

Tor stood in the doorway.

He moved the light slowly across the broken glass and the bodies and the two of us on the floor. It stopped on my face for just a second before going back to Varek.

"Perimeter is hit," Tor said. His voice was the same as always. Like nothing could shake it. "Four confirmed down on the east fence. Two more in the tunnel." A pause. "She hurt?"

"No," Varek said.

He stood up in one movement and pulled me up by the arm. His hand stayed there — fingers around my elbow, not tight, not gentle. Just there. Like he hadn't decided yet what it meant that he was still holding on.

Maybe he hadn't.

"The name," Varek said to Tor. "He gave me a name before they took him."

Tor waited.

"Elias," Varek said.

Something moved in Tor's face. Tiny. So quick I almost missed it. His eyes went to me for just a second and then back to Varek.

"I'll pull the footage," Tor said.

Varek's grip on my elbow tightened just slightly. He looked at me in the dark the way he'd looked at me in the office — like he was counting something. Like he was trying to work out how much I already knew.

"Get her upstairs," he said.

He let go of my arm and walked toward the door.

I stood in the broken glass and the dark and the smell of everything that had just happened and listened to his footsteps disappear down the corridor.

I pressed two fingers against the place on my elbow where his hand had been.

Still warm.

I didn't know what to do with that so I filed it away with everything else I was collecting and followed Tor out of the basement.