The Viper's Queen

Chapter 9: The Heirloom

Varek shut the bedroom door before I could turn around.

The lock clicked. One solid sound.

I stood facing the wood for a moment. I pressed my palm flat against it. Not pushing. Just feeling how solid it was. How cold.

I pushed off and let my legs take me to the window.

The storm was still going. Rain running in sheets down the cliff face below. The ocean at the bottom was just black. No bottom to it. No edge.

I reached around my back and fought the clasps of the armor. My fingers were still shaking from the car and the clasps weren't helping... stiff and hard to grip, designed for someone who wasn't falling apart. A hook caught my knuckle. Blood came up from the skin.

The clasps gave.

The armor slid off my shoulders and hit the floor with a heavy thud.

I stood there and just breathed.

In. Out. In. Out.

Deep red marks lined my ribs where the armor had pressed in all night. I didn't touch them. I knew what bruised ribs felt like and these weren't there yet. Which meant tomorrow they would be.

The bathroom mirror was not kind.

My hair was stuck to my face. The cut under my eye had dried dark. The diamond collar was still locked at my throat... cold and heavy and completely wrong against everything else.

I turned the tap on cold and splashed water on my face until I stopped seeing the inside of the car. Until I stopped feeling his thumb against my wrist.

It mostly worked.

She was killed. On purpose.

Syris's voice in my head. Dry and quiet and completely sure of itself.

I held the edge of the sink and let myself remember.

Not the parts I chose to carry around with me. The other part. The one I kept behind a locked door and only ever opened by accident.

My mother hadn't been burning when I found her.

She'd been on the floor. Completely still except for the veins... thick and black, moving up her throat under the skin, branching out like cracks in old concrete. Dark blood from the corners of her eyes. Her mouth opened but no sound came out.

The fire came after.

The fire was just a cleanup.

I stood over the sink with both hands gripping the cold porcelain and I let that sit in me until it stopped trying to take me apart. That was how I had always handled it. Not by pushing it away. By standing inside it until my body understood that it was a memory and not a present threat and gradually stopped responding like it was both. It took longer than it used to. My hands were still shaking when I finally opened my eyes.

I opened my eyes. I was breathing too fast. I slowed it down the way I'd learned to do in thin-walled apartments when being scared was something I couldn't afford.

I reached behind my neck.

Under the diamond collar there was a thin silver chain. Cheap. Old. My father had tried to tear it off me the night we ran from the fire. I'd bitten his hand to keep it.

I found the clasp tangled in my hair and worked it open.

The chain fell into my palm.

A small locket. Silver that had gone dark with age, dented on one side, scratched all over from ten years of surviving the outer rim.

My mother had pressed it into my hand right before the black veins reached her jaw.

Not run. Not I love you.

Hide it.

I sat on the edge of the bed with the locket in my hands and the storm loud against the glass.

I pushed my thumbnail into the tiny gap where the hinge had rusted shut. Pushed harder. My nail split. Blood from the cut on my knuckle smeared the silver.

The latch gave.

The locket fell open.

No photo inside. No hair. Nothing soft at all.

Just metal. And pressed deep into it... a mark. A design. Sharp angles and no softness anywhere in them. A snake wearing a crown, coiled tight around a broken sword.

I turned it over.

It didn't look like any gang sign I knew. Didn't look like any of the syndicate brands I'd learned to recognize growing up. It looked older than all of that. Like something that had existed before the gangs and the syndicates and the burning of Sector Four and would still be there long after.

My mother had hidden this inside her clothes long enough that the chain had left a permanent mark on her collarbone.

I thought about that for a moment. The kind of person who wore something against their skin every single day and never once showed it to anyone. Who pressed it into her daughter's hand with the last clear thought she had left. Not run. Not I love you. Hide it. Whatever this mark meant it had been important enough to protect with her last breath. Which meant somewhere out there it was still important enough that someone had spent ten years making sure no one who carried it stayed alive.

Hide it.

Someone knocked on the door.

I snapped the locket shut and closed my fist around it and was on my feet before the keypad finished its green flash.

Tor filled the doorway.

He was holding a dinner tray. It looked completely wrong in his hands, blood still drying on the collar of his shirt, rifle on his back, and a plate of food extended in front of him like a man who had been handed a task he found deeply offensive.

"Eat," he said. He walked past me and put the tray down hard on the table by the window. Turned to leave.

"I'm not hungry," I said.

"Wasn't a question." He didn't look back. "You stop eating, the armor doesn't sit right. Armor doesn't sit right, you take a bullet somewhere soft. You die. You become a problem."

He reached the door.

I stepped in front of it.

Tor looked down at me from his full height. He did a quick calculation behind his eyes... how much effort it would take to move me, whether it was worth it... and apparently decided it wasn't.

"Move," he said.

"Who killed her," I said.

His face didn't change. "You're crashing from tonight. Eat the food."

"Syris knew about the poison," I said. I kept my voice level. I'd gotten good at keeping my voice level when everything underneath it was on fire. "He told me what it was called. He said it shuts your lungs down. He said the Sovereign board controlled it."

Something moved in Tor's jaw. Just one tiny pull of muscle. There and gone before I could blink.

But I caught it.

He knew that name.

"Syris is a liar," Tor said quietly. "And the questions he plants get people put in the ground next to him."

He moved to step around me.

I opened my hand.

The locket sat in my palm. The silver caught the lamplight. The hinge is still open. The snake and the broken sword visible in the shallow groove of the metal.

Tor looked down at it.

The room changed.

Not slowly. All at once. Like someone had switched something off.

All the color left his face. Not gradually... just gone, fast, the way a light went out. His eyes went wide. Wide in a way I had never seen from a man who walked through gunfights without his heart rate changing.

He stepped back.

Not on purpose. His body just did it. His heel caught the edge of the rug and he stumbled. The rifle strap slipped off his shoulder. The gun hit the floor with a loud crack.

He didn't pick it up.

He stared at the locket in my hand like it had reached out and grabbed him by the throat.

"Where did you get that," he said.

His voice came out hollow. Like something had been taken out of it.

"My mother gave it to me," I said. "The night she died."

"That bloodline is gone," he said. He was still staring at the crest. His hands... the hands that had taken apart hit squads without shaking... were shaking now. "They burned the last one ten years ago."

He looked up at me.

For the first time since I'd met him Tor's eyes weren't flat and dead.

They were terrified.

And I understood then what that meant. Not just that the crest was dangerous. Not just that my mother had died for it. But a man who had walked into gunfire without blinking was standing in front of me shaking because of a mark pressed into a piece of old silver. Whatever I was holding in my hand... whatever bloodline my mother had hidden and died to protect...

It was Something That Changed Everything.

And I was the last one left who carried it.