Chapter 10: The Secret Kept
1277 Words
The water in the sink wasn't pink.
It was brown.
Varek scrubbed the brush over his knuckles hard enough to bleed. The soap wasn't cutting through it. Syris's blood had gotten into every crease and under every nail and it just sat there, dark and stubborn, refusing to come out.
Still scrubbing when the office door opened.
No knock.
His hand dropped straight to the gun on his hip without him thinking about it.
Tor walked in.
Stopped in the middle of the room like he'd forgotten what rooms were for. Just stood there on the expensive rug staring at the desk.
Varek let his hand fall from the gun and looked at Tor properly.
Breathing through his mouth. Face gone a sick gray color. Cold sweat on his forehead even though the room was freezing. His rifle was missing.
Varek had seen Tor take two bullets to the chest an hour ago and not even blink.
Right now Tor looked like a man bleeding from somewhere no one could see.
Varek crossed the room and stopped right in front of him. Close.
"If she has a hole in her," Varek said quietly. "You don't leave this room."
Tor didn't step back. "She's not hurt." A swallow. The sound of it loud in the quiet. "She showed me the locket."
"What locket."
"Silver one. Old. She was wearing it under the collar." Tor's voice had found some grip but not much. "She opened it. Asked me if I knew the mark inside."
The hum of the servers. The rain on the glass.
Everything else seemed to fall away.
"A snake," Tor said. "Wearing a crown. Coiled around a broken sword."
Varek took one slow step back.
Boots bolted to the floor.
"That line is dead," Varek said. The words came out like gravel. "The Sovereign King and his wife burned in the Sector Four sweeps. Ten years ago. There was no child."
"The girl is twenty," Tor said. Voice coming back now. Harder. Like he'd made a decision. "She grew up in Sector Four. She fights with the Sovereign form... you saw it yourself in the hallway. And her father isn't hiding from a shipping debt." Something moved in Tor's face. Something complicated and old and guilty. "He's a Royal Guard. He's been keeping her buried in the outer rim for ten years to keep her breathing."
The pieces hit Varek all at once.
The fire wasn't electrical. The midnight moves between apartments. The drills until her shins bled. The form that hadn't been taught anywhere in twenty years.
Not debt.
Not bad luck.
A father hiding his daughter from the people who had already tried once to erase her.
Varek turned his back on Tor and walked to the window.
Weight pressed against the frame. The cold glass bit through his shirt. Below him the city spread out in every direction... millions of lights bleeding into each other in the rain.
Ten years cutting people down to get to the top of it.
He had thought he was buying a useful stranger. Someone to stand next to him and make the Tokyo and London bosses think he had something worth protecting.
What he had actually done was drag the person who owned all of it into his bedroom and lock the door.
"Who else saw the locket," Varek said to the glass.
"No one. Just me."
"If London finds out..."
"They won't ask questions," Tor said. "They'll send four hundred men and a bomb big enough to level this mountain. Tokyo will do the same. Every syndicate on the planet will burn Vespera flat before they let the Sovereign bloodline come back."
Varek stared at his own reflection in the dark glass. The rain running down over it.
"Kill the cameras in the east wing," he said. "Wipe everything from tonight off the servers. Her intake. All of it."
A pause behind him.
"Varek." Tor's voice went low and careful. The voice he used when he was about to say something he knew wouldn't land well. "We put her in a car tonight. Hand her to the London board. The debt goes away. We get the east coast ports. No one ever has to know what she is."
Varek turned around.
Looked at Tor.
Tor, who had been with him before the syndicate had a name. Tor, who had pulled him out of three situations that should have been graves.
"If you ever suggest giving her to another man again," Varek said. Perfectly level. Perfectly quiet. "I will pull your teeth out one by one and make you count them."
Tor went completely still.
Then nodded. Once. Turned. Walked out.
Varek poured two fingers of bourbon and stared at the glass for a while.
Didn't drink it. A clear head mattered more than the distance right now. The glass went back down and he took the service lift to the secure wing.
Outside her door the keypad glowed red. The master code ran. The lock gave quietly.
Dark room. Blackout curtains killing the lightning outside. Cold air from the vent. The sound of her breathing... uneven, the ragged rhythm of someone whose body had finally collected on everything it was owed tonight.
She was curled on her side. Face tight even in sleep. A thin layer of sweat on her forehead. The silk gown twisted around her waist. The bruising from the armor already coming up dark along her ribs... clean lines, the exact shape of the plates pressed against her skin all night.
Both hands against her chest.
Knuckles white.
The locket was cutting into her palm. Held the way you held the last thing you had left.
Varek crouched at the edge of the bed and stayed there.
The bruises. The cut under her eye. The chain biting into her skin.
A tightness in his chest that had nothing to do with the kick to his ribs during the earlier sweep.
She owned the city he had bled to build.
The most dangerous thing he had ever locked in a room.
Also holding a piece of cheap silver so hard it was cutting her hand in her sleep and there was nothing to be done about that without waking her.
Putting her in a car tonight was still the right answer. The logic of it was clean and simple and completely correct.
A hand reached out.
Not toward her face. The heavy blanket at the foot of the bed came up slowly... over the bruised ribs, over her bare shoulder. His rough hand caught her collarbone. A small flinch in her sleep, a pull away from the contact, but she didn't wake.
Varek stayed crouched in the dark.
The logic kept running. Same answer every time. Put her in a car. Hand her over. Walk away. Sleep well.
The pulse in her throat was still going fast even in sleep. Her body still running from something it couldn't name.
That fear had a straight line back to him.
He knew that. Sat with it in the dark until it stopped feeling like something he could argue with.
The locket is still cutting into her palm.
Let them try, he thought.
Not a promise. Not a decision exactly. Just the quiet certainty of a man who has found the one thing he isn't going to hand over and is only now working out that it's a thing at all.
The blanket came up to her shoulder. He stood.
Not a sound on the way out. The lock clicked shut behind him.
A moment in the dark hallway. Still.
Then back downstairs to plan a war.
- Writer
