A Dept Pain In Blood

Chapter Five: What the Fight Uncovered

With the summit only days away, Damian told her she needed to know how to fight.

"I know how to run," Elena said. "Running has kept me alive so far."

"Running works until it doesn't. At the summit, there will be a room full of armed men and exactly one door. If something goes wrong, you won't have anywhere to run to." He nodded toward the open space at the far end of the study, where the rug had already been pulled back to bare floor. "So we start today."

She wanted to argue. She also understood, in the part of her mind that had kept her alive through eleven break-ins and however many close calls before that, that he wasn't wrong. Knowing how to disappear had never once taught her how to survive a room she couldn't leave.

She hadn't expected him to be a good teacher. She had expected him to be patient the way dangerous men were sometimes patient — showing her once, expecting her to catch up. Instead he was careful, correcting the angle of her elbow, the balance of her weight, over and over, without once losing his temper at how many times she got it wrong.

By the third hour, careful had turned into something else.

She landed a real hit — not a training tap, a real one, her knuckles catching his jaw hard enough that his head turned with it. He didn't back off. If anything, something in his eyes sharpened, like she'd finally given him something worth paying attention to. He came back faster, harder, and she met him at the same speed, because some old instinct in her refused to be the one who slowed down first.

They ended up on the floor. She wasn't sure, afterward, which one of them had put them there. Her lip was split. His knuckles were scraped raw. Both of them were breathing hard, and neither of them moved to get up right away.

"You're better than I expected," he said. There was blood at the corner of his mouth, and he didn't seem to notice or care.

"You're heavier than I expected." She was still half underneath him, and she was suddenly, completely aware of it — of his weight, of how close his face was to hers, of the fact that neither of them had said anything about moving.

Something in the air between them changed. It wasn't the training anymore. His eyes moved to her mouth, and hers moved to his, and for one long second neither of them looked away.

That was the second the study door slammed open.

Reyes stood in the doorway with a gun already raised, and for a heartbeat Elena's mind refused to understand what she was looking at, because Reyes didn't point guns at things inside this house. Reyes stood by doors. Reyes said Miss Marlowe in a voice that meant nothing at all.

"Don't move," Reyes said, and his voice was different now too — flatter, colder, a voice she hadn't heard him use before. The gun wasn't pointed at Elena. It was pointed at Damian.

Damian went very still above her, every trace of the last few minutes wiped clean off his face like it had never been there. "Reyes. Put that down before you do something you can't take back."

"I've already done it," Reyes said. "I did it three weeks ago. I'm just the last one to admit it."

For one terrible second, nobody in the room moved. Elena's whole body had gone cold and sharp, the way it always did right before a job went wrong, every exit in the room mapping itself out in her head without her even choosing to think about it. There was the door Reyes stood in. There was the window behind Damian, too high to reach fast enough. There was nothing else.

"You've had access to everything," Damian said slowly, like he was working it out loud even as he said it. "Every meeting. Every route. My father trusted you before he trusted me."

"Your father trusted the wrong things," Reyes said, and something moved behind his eyes that looked almost like grief. "I'm not going to explain myself to a dead man's mistake. Not tonight."

Elena felt Damian shift his weight, just slightly, just enough to put himself more fully between her and the gun. She didn't think he'd decided to do it. She thought his body had decided for him, faster than either of them could argue with.

Reyes saw it too. Something crossed his face — not quite regret, but close enough to it that his hand wavered for half a second. Elena thought, for one strange moment, that he might actually lower the gun. That some old loyalty to the house, to the family, to whatever he'd once believed in before he stopped believing in it, might win out over whatever had put him in this doorway with a weapon raised. She was wrong, or she would have been, if the sound down the hall hadn't come first.

Somewhere down the hall, a door opened, footsteps, one of the other men calling Reyes's name. Reyes's eyes flicked toward the sound, and in that flicker of attention, Damian moved.

He didn't get there in time. By the time he was on his feet, Reyes was already gone, out through the study's side door, into the dark of the grounds, and the sound of an engine turning over somewhere near the east gate told them both everything they needed to know about how far he'd get before anyone could stop him.

Damian stood in the middle of the room, blood still at his mouth, staring at the door Reyes had disappeared through.

Elena's hands hadn't stopped shaking, though she hadn't noticed until she looked down at them. Not from fear, exactly. From how close the last five minutes had come to going a dozen different directions, all of them worse than the one they'd landed on.

"Well," Elena said, pushing herself up onto her elbows, her own heart still slamming against her ribs. "I guess we found your traitor."

"We found half of him," Damian said quietly. "The easy half. Now we have to find out how much damage he's already done — and whether Rhys knows everything Reyes knew, or just enough to be dangerous with it."

He held out a hand to help her up. She took it, and for a moment neither of them let go.

"Four days," she said.

"Four days," he agreed. "And now we do it with a hole in the one wall I thought was solid."