FOUR KINGS, ONE GIRL.

10

Chapter 10

I did not cry.

I wanted to. I could feel it sitting behind my eyes, that specific pressure of something too large to hold, but I pressed my teeth together and breathed through my nose and looked at my father's face in that photograph until I felt nothing except cold.

Draven was watching me.

I handed the photograph back to him and said: Show Kane.

Then I walked to the far end of the path and stood with my back to all of them and looked at the dark tree line at the edge of campus and let myself have thirty seconds of falling apart where no one could see it.

I counted them out. Thirty seconds.

Then I turned around and walked back.

Kane had the photograph. His expression when he looked up at me was stripped of its usual control, something raw underneath, and he said: Sienna. I did not know he was connected to this level.

I know, I said.

I am sorry.

It was the second time he had said those two words to me and the second time they had landed without armor on them. I nodded once and looked at Axel.

What do we do with the phone, I said.

Axel said: I have a contact who can extract data without triggering any remote wipe. We get it to him tonight.

River said: And my brother lands in the morning. If the photograph matches anything in Dean's network we will know by noon.

Draven said nothing. He was looking at the photograph still in Kane's hand with the expression of a man doing quiet violence to his own composure.

I crossed to him and stood close enough that our arms touched.

We will find out what happened to him, I said. That is a promise.

He looked down at me. He said: You should not make promises about things outside your control.

I said: Good thing I have four people helping me control things then.

Something in his face shifted. He looked at the others and then back at me and he said very quietly: I have been doing this alone for three years.

I know, I said. You are not anymore.

Kane drove me to a new room that night. A guest suite in the staff residence building that Axel had cleared and checked and declared secure. It had a real lock and a window that looked onto a lit courtyard rather than a dark alley and it smelled like fresh linen instead of three days of being afraid.

I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the floor.

The knock at the door came twenty minutes later. I opened it.

All four of them.

Standing in the corridor like they had arrived separately and met by accident and none of them had planned this, which I did not believe for a second.

River said: We are not staying. We just needed to see you walk in somewhere safe.

I looked at the four of them. At Kane with his hands in his pockets and his grey eyes steady. At River with his shoulder against the doorframe and that real version of himself showing through. At Axel filling the corridor with his size and his careful attention. At Draven at the back, slightly apart the way he always was, watching me with those dark eyes.

I said: Come in.

Kane said: Sienna, you do not have to.

I said: I know I do not have to. Come in.

They came in.

The room was not large. Five people made it smaller and warmer and something else entirely. River sat on the floor with his back against the wall. Axel stood near the door, old habit. Draven took the chair by the window. Kane sat beside me on the edge of the bed and did not touch me and somehow that was more present than if he had.

I said: My father lied to my face. In that office. He sat across from me and talked about protecting me and he has been part of this the whole time.

Nobody tried to fix it. Nobody said something comforting and hollow. They just sat with it.

That was the thing about these four men that I had not expected and could not have prepared for. They did not try to manage what I felt. They just stayed inside it with me.

River said: What do you need right now.

I thought about it honestly.

I said: I need to not think about it for one hour. I need one hour where it is not the biggest thing in the room.

Kane said: Done.

River looked at Draven and said: Tell her something. One of your literature things. The ones that sound like they are about books but are actually about everything.

Draven gave River a look that would have flattened a smaller man. Then he looked at me and after a moment he said: There is a passage in a novel I have been teaching for two years. The argument is that the only genuine act of courage is not the large dramatic one. It is the small daily decision to remain. To not leave. To stay in the room when leaving would be easier.

He paused.

You have been staying in the room your whole life, he said. Tonight is not different. You are just doing it in front of witnesses for once.

The hour that followed was the strangest and most ordinary thing that had happened to me since arriving back on campus. River made bad jokes. Kane refuted every single one with precise logic that somehow made them funnier. Axel said almost nothing and laughed once at something River said, that low brief real sound, and the room felt it like a small earthquake. Draven argued with Kane about a book Kane had clearly never read but refused to admit to not having read.

I sat in the middle of all of it and felt the thing I was most afraid of feeling.

At home.

At ten they left one by one. River squeezed my hand at the door. Axel checked the lock from the outside and told me through the door that he would be at the end of the corridor. Draven paused in the doorway and looked at me for a moment and then said: Sleep. His voice doing that thing where it was the whole sentence.

Kane stayed last.

He stood in the middle of the room after the others had gone and looked at me sitting on the bed and said: You are the most unexpected thing that has happened to me in a long time.

I said: Is that good or bad.

He said: I have not decided. I know it is not nothing.

I said: Kane. Sit down.

He sat beside me. Close. His arm against mine, the warmth of him real and solid.

I said: When this is over. When we know who is behind all of it and what happened to Draven's brother and what my father is actually involved in. What happens to us.

He was quiet for a moment.

He said: What do you want to happen.

I said: I asked you first.

He turned to look at me. His grey eyes at close range were not cold. They had never been cold. They were just careful, the way anything valuable learns to be.

He said: I want this. Whatever this is. I want it when it is complicated and when it is not. I am not interested in easy.

I said: Good. Because nothing about this is going to be easy.

He kissed me once, slow and certain, and then pulled back and looked at me like he was memorising something.

He said: Get some sleep. Tomorrow is going to move fast.

He left.

I lay in the dark of the new room and stared at the ceiling and thought about my father's face and Draven's brother and a room that had been sealed for three years and a phone that might hold the answer to all of it.

My own phone buzzed on the nightstand.

Unknown number.

I opened the message.

One line.

You found the room. Good. Now check who gave Kane the access code to get in. Ask him where he got it. And ask him why he already knew that floor existed before tonight.