Chapter Four- Blood and silence
1254 Words
Enzo was in the east corridor.
Sera reached him before Lucian did.
Not because she was faster. Because she was already in the hallway and her feet moved before her mind caught up the medical instinct overriding everything else, the part of her that had been trained to run toward emergencies rather than away from them.
She knelt beside him.
Single gunshot. Close range. The kind of wound that didn't leave room for maybe.
She checked his pulse anyway.
Nothing.
She sat back on her heels and looked at him at a man she had met once, briefly, who had tried to have her branded a traitor and was now dead on the floor of the estate he had spent seven years betraying and felt the complicated thing that it was.
Not grief exactly. Not relief. Something in between that didn't have a clean name.
Footsteps behind her.
Lucian.
She heard him stop.
Heard the silence of a man absorbing something he had already prepared himself for but that hurt anyway.
She stood up. Stepped back. Gave him the space to look without her in the way.
He stood over Enzo for a long moment.
His face gave nothing away.
But his hands she noticed his hands. Perfectly still at his sides. The particular stillness of something held very tightly in place.
"How long?" he said. Not to her. Not to anyone specifically. Just the question released into the room.
"The wound is fresh," she said quietly. "Twenty minutes. Maybe less."
He nodded once.
Chiara appeared in the doorway behind them. Her face was controlled but her eyes were doing something complicated.
"Someone came in through the south entrance," she said. "The camera feed was cut twelve minutes ago. Whoever did this knew our system."
"Of course they did," Lucian said. Flat. "Enzo built our system."
Silence.
"I want every entrance locked," Lucian said. "Every man on the perimeter doubled. Nobody comes in or out without my direct authorization." He turned. "And find me the gap in the feed. I want to know exactly what they didn't want us to see."
Chiara nodded and disappeared.
Lucian turned to look at Sera.
She met his eyes.
"Viktor cleaned up his evidence," she said.
"Yes."
"Which means he knows you were getting close to finding out."
"Yes."
"Which means he has another source inside." She held his gaze. "Enzo wasn't working alone."
Something moved across Lucian's face.
Dark and certain and cold in a way that made the temperature of the room feel like it had dropped several degrees.
"I know," he said quietly.
She didn't sleep.
She sat in the medical room at two in the morning with the lights low and her anatomy notes open in front of her and her mind doing anything but studying.
Dante was out there somewhere.
Enzo was dead.
Someone else inside this estate was feeding information to Viktor Sorin.
And she was sitting in the middle of all of it a medical student from Lagos who had walked into a building three days ago thinking she was solving a simple problem and had ended up somewhere she didn't have a map for.
She closed her textbook.
Pressed her palms flat against the desk.
Fear is just information, her mother's voice said. What you do with it is the part that counts.
"What do I do with this mama," she said quietly to the empty room.
The door opened.
She turned.
Lucian.
He was carrying two mugs. He set one in front of her without asking and sat in the chair across the desk and wrapped both hands around his own mug and looked at her with an expression she hadn't seen on him before.
Tired.
Not physically. Something deeper than that. The tiredness of someone who had been holding something heavy for a very long time and was starting to feel the weight of it in their bones.
"You should sleep," she said.
"So should you," he said.
"I can't."
"Neither can I." He looked at the mug. "Tea. Chiara keeps it for emergencies."
She picked it up. Took a sip.
They sat in silence for a moment. The comfortable kind, the kind that didn't need filling.
"Tell me about Lagos," he said.
She looked up.
He was watching her with genuine curiosity. Not strategic. Not calculated. Just interested. The way people were interested in things they hadn't encountered before and wanted to understand.
"Why?" she said.
"Because I have been sitting in this room thinking about Enzo for two hours," he said simply. "And I would like to think about something else for ten minutes."
She looked at him.
At the tiredness underneath the control.
At a man who had just lost someone he trusted however that trust had been broken and was sitting in a medical room at two in the morning asking about Lagos because grief needed somewhere to go.
She understood that.
"It's loud," she said. "Lagos. People think cities are loud everywhere but Lagos is different it's a particular kind of loud that has rhythm to it. Like the city itself has a heartbeat." She paused. "I grew up in Surulere. Small apartment. My mother, me, Dante. Not much space but never quiet." A small smile she hadn't planned. "I used to study with earplugs in and somehow it was still the best studying I ever did."
He was watching her.
Really watching her.
"You miss it," he said.
"Every day," she said. "But I needed more than it could give me." She looked at him. "You understand that. Needing more than the place that made you."
Something shifted in his expression.
"My mother was Nigerian," he said. Quietly. Like something he didn't say often. "She grew up in Abuja. She used to say Lagos was too loud and too fast and she loved it desperately anyway." A pause. "She died when I was nineteen."
Sera said nothing.
Let the silence hold it.
"I'm sorry," she said finally.
He nodded once.
They sat with that for a moment.
"Lucian." She set her mug down. "We are going to get Dante back. And we are going to find Viktor's other source. And this is going to be over." She held his gaze. "I need you to believe that."
He looked at her across the desk.
In the low light of the medical room at two in the morning he looked nothing like the man from the window in the financial district. Nothing like the cold controlled presence that had looked at her like a problem to be solved.
He looked like someone real.
"I believe it," he said quietly. "When you say it I believe it."
Something shifted in the air between them.
Warm and careful and fragile in the way of things that hadn't been named yet.
She looked at him.
He looked at her.
And then his phone rang.
He answered it immediately. Listened for ten seconds. His expression changed completely.
He stood up.
"We found the gap in the camera feed," he said. His voice back to full control. "There is a face."
She was already standing.
"Who?" she said.
He turned the phone screen toward her.
She looked at the grainy image.
And felt the floor disappear beneath her feet.
Because the face on the screen caught in half shadow, partially turned away, but unmistakable to her was someone she knew.
Someone she trusted completely.
Someone who had no business being inside the Mori estate at midnight.
It was Dante.
- Writer
