SHATTERED THRONE

The Face at the Door

Mara doesn't move.

Sela is still watching her from the corner of the clinic's narrow back room, and Mara can feel that watch like a blade against the skin of her neck — careful, patient, waiting to see what she'll do with information that could end both of them. The dawn light coming through the boarded window is the colour of a bruise. Everything smells of antiseptic and old wood and the particular staleness of a place that holds secrets badly.

"Someone matching my description," Mara says. She keeps her voice level. This is already a skill she is learning: the voice goes level when the mind goes loud. "How long ago?"

"Forty minutes. Maybe fifty." Sela's hands are folded in her lap. She has been crying quietly since they arrived, the kind of crying that doesn't announce itself, just leaks. "The orderly told me when I stepped out. A woman. Dark hair. Green coat. She said she was looking for her sister."

The word lands wrong. Her sister. Her sister is sitting in this room, and this woman at the door is not her.

"That's Petra," Mara says. Not a question.

"Or someone Petra sent."

"Same thing." Mara pushes herself upright. Her ribs protest — the man at the estate had gripped her hard enough to leave half a handprint in bruise, she can feel it every time she breathes. She breathes anyway. "They moved faster than I thought. Dorian doesn't waste time grieving a failed plan. He pivots."

Sela's jaw tightens. "Mara—"

"Mira." The correction is automatic now. She said it four times last night, each time feeling the name settle a little more like a stone into the bottom of a lake. "My name is Mira Lane. Say it until it's the first thing you think of when you look at me. Because if you hesitate — if you call me the wrong thing once in front of the wrong person — everything ends."

Sela doesn't say anything. Her throat moves.

"Say it," Mara says, not unkindly.

"Mira." Sela's voice breaks on the two syllables, and for a second — one unguarded second — she looks exactly like what she is: a twenty-six-year-old woman who has been blackmailed for six weeks and who burned her twin sister's life and is only now understanding the full weight of what that means. "Mira Lane."

"Good." Mara reaches for her jacket, the one Sela brought from the van, and checks the inner pocket. The drive is still there. Caiden's drive, with the original audit files that are only half a weapon because Dorian has built a trap around the other half, a fabricated document that will detonate if she moves wrong. She closes the pocket. "I need you to do something difficult."

"I know."

"I need you to go home."

Sela stares at her. "That's the difficult thing? Going home?"

"Going home and acting like nothing has changed. Going home and having breakfast. Going home and calling our father's solicitor about the appeal hearing and sounding bored about it, like you always have." Mara watches her twin's face and hates how well she can read every fracture in it. "You have been performing for Dorian Voss for six weeks. You can perform for six more hours."

"And you? Where do you go?"

Mara doesn't answer immediately. The orderly — a heavyset man named Gregor who asked no questions because Harmon Bell paid him enough not to — is somewhere at the front of the clinic, and she needs to understand the layout of the exits before she decides anything. She crosses to the door, eases it open a centimetre, listens to the particular quiet of a building with only one person moving through it.

"I go somewhere that isn't here," she says.

"That isn't an answer."

"No." She glances back. "It's not."

Sela stands. For a moment she looks like she's going to argue — she has always been the one who argued, the louder twin, the one who filled rooms — and then the fight goes out of her and she just looks exhausted and small. "I didn't want this," she says. "I need you to know that. Whatever you decide to believe about me, that part is true. I didn't want any of this."

Mara holds her gaze for a long breath. "I know," she says finally. "That's the only reason you're still in the plan."

She means it as comfort. She's not sure it lands that way. Sela picks up her coat from the chair and doesn't look at her when she leaves through the rear door into the grey morning.

Mara turns back to the room and gives herself thirty seconds.

Thirty seconds to feel it. The wedding dress she never finished wearing. The cliff. The cold. Caiden's hand pressing hers in the dark of the estate hallway — run, he said, and she ran, and she is still running, and she will be running for a long time. Thirty seconds, and then she puts it somewhere in the back of her chest where it can calcify into fuel.

She uses twenty-eight and then she is moving.

The service corridor runs along the east side of the building. Mara keeps close to the wall, counting doors. Gregor said the alley exit opens onto a street two blocks from the old harbour market — early vendors, crowds beginning, easy to disappear into. She has forty euros and the drive and a name that isn't hers and a mind that is already, even now, sorting contingencies into ranked lists.

She reaches the exit door.

She pushes the bar.

The alley is not empty.

Caiden Voss is leaning against the opposite wall with his arms folded and the collar of his dark coat turned up against the cold, and he looks like a man who has been standing there for some time, and he looks like a man who slept nowhere last night, and he looks — this is the thing she cannot account for, the variable that keeps refusing to fit her model — he looks like he came because he was afraid she was gone.

"The woman in the green coat left twenty minutes ago," he says. "I circled the block to make sure she didn't loop. She didn't."

Mara stares at him. Her hand is still on the door bar, cold metal under her palm.

"You've been watching the building."

"Someone had to."

"I didn't ask you to."

"No," Caiden says. "You didn't." And then something shifts in his face — not softening exactly, more like a wall developing a c***k it can't seal — and he says, very quietly: "There's something you need to know about the fabricated document. The original isn't held by Dorian. It never was." He pushes off the wall. "My mother has it. And last night, she sent me a message asking why there's a death certificate being filed for a woman named Mara Ashlen, when she watched a woman with that exact face walk out of an alley and get into a van at two in the morning."

The cold morning presses in around them both.

Dame Heloise Voss has known Mara is alive since before dawn — and she has said nothing to Dorian.