Chapter Two - Day one
1273 Words
She arrived at the Mori estate at nine in the morning.
It was nothing like the building in the financial district.
That had been power wearing a business suit contained, deliberate, designed to look like something ordinary. This was power that had stopped pretending. Iron gates. A long private road lined with trees that had been growing longer than she had been alive. A house at the end of it that wasn't trying to impress anyone because it had never needed to.
She stood at the gate with her medical bag on her shoulder and her chin up and told herself she was ready.
She was absolutely not ready.
The gate opened before she could announce herself. Which meant someone had been watching. Which meant someone had known she was here before she pressed a single button.
She filed that away and walked in.
A woman met her at the front door.
Tall. Dark haired. Beautiful in the particular way of someone who had never needed anyone to tell them so. She looked at Sera with sharp intelligent eyes and the ghost of something that might have been amusement.
"You must be the doctor," she said.
"Almost," Sera said. "Final year."
"Close enough." The woman stepped back to let her in. "I'm Chiara. Lucian's cousin. I run things here when he is busy being terrifying." She said it lightly. Like it was a fact so established it had stopped being remarkable. "Come in. I'll show you around."
The estate was enormous.
Chiara walked her through it efficiently the medical room she would use, stocked better than some clinics Sera had seen. The schedule. The rules. The things she was allowed to ask about and the considerably longer list of things she was not.
"How many people live here?" Sera asked.
"Enough," Chiara said.
"That's not an answer."
Chiara glanced at her sideways. That almost-amusement again. "No," she agreed. "It isn't."
She stopped outside a set of doors on the ground floor.
"Lucian wants to see you before you start," she said. "He is in there."
Sera looked at the doors.
"Of course he is," she said.
Chiara made a sound that was almost a laugh.
He was standing at the window when she walked in.
Because of course he was. She was beginning to think windows were his natural habitat something about the light, or the distance, or the particular way standing with your back to a room communicated that you were aware of everything in it without needing to look.
He turned when she entered.
Dark suit today. No tie. The controlled stillness fully assembled and the eyes those impossible unreadable eyes moving over her once in that way he had. Quick. Comprehensive. Like a scan rather than a look.
"You came," he said.
"I made a deal," she said. "I keep my word."
Something shifted in his expression.
"Good," he said. "So do I."
She set her bag down on the chair beside her. Looked around the room bookshelves, a desk, papers she couldn't read from this distance but could tell were important. The room of a man who worked constantly and probably called it living.
"Chiara showed me the medical room," she said. "It's well stocked."
"I take care of the things that matter to me."
She looked at him.
"I am not a thing," she said.
His jaw tightened. The smallest movement. "No," he said quietly. "You are not."
The room was very still.
She picked up her bag.
"Is there a patient or are you just establishing dominance?" she asked.
This time something moved at the corner of his mouth that was almost almost a smile.
"Third door on the left," he said. "Marco. Took a knife to his side two days ago. The wound needs checking."
She nodded. Turned toward the door.
"Miss Adeyemi."
She stopped. Didn't turn.
"Welcome to my world," he said quietly.
She said nothing.
Walked out.
Marco was twenty four and looked like someone who had been in fights since before he was old enough to choose them. He was sitting on the edge of a bed when she walked in, shirtless, with a bandage around his midsection and the particular expression of someone trying very hard to look like they were fine.
"You the new doctor?" he said.
"Almost," she said. She set her bag down. Snapped on gloves. "Let me see it."
He unwrapped the bandage without argument.
The wound was deeper than she expected. Clean stitches someone had done this before, someone who knew what they were doing but the edges were red and the skin around them hot to the touch.
"It's infected," she said.
"It's fine."
"I have a medical degree and you have a fever." She looked up at him. "It's infected."
He looked at her for a moment.
Then unexpectedly he laughed. Short and genuine.
"Alright doctor," he said. "Fix it."
She worked in silence. Cleaning. Redressing. Noting what she needed to add to the medical room supplies. Marco watched her with the curious expression of someone recalibrating an assumption.
"You're not scared," he said.
"Should I be?"
"Most people who come here for the first time are scared."
"Most people who come here for the first time didn't walk in voluntarily." She pressed the new dressing into place. "I negotiated my terms. Fear seems redundant at this point."
Marco was quiet for a moment.
"He likes you," he said.
She looked up. "He doesn't know me."
"That's why." He said it simply. Like it was obvious. "Lucian doesn't find people interesting. He finds them useful or he finds them threatening. He hasn't decided what you are yet." A pause. "That means he's thinking about it. That's as close to like as he gets."
She said nothing.
Finished the dressing.
Packed her bag.
"Change that in forty eight hours," she said. "And drink water. You're dehydrated."
She walked out.
She was halfway down the hallway when she heard it.
Voices. Low and urgent. Coming from behind a closed door to her left.
She would have kept walking.
She should have kept walking.
But one of the voices said her name.
She stopped.
Stood very still in the hallway with her bag in her hand and her heart suddenly loud in her ears.
Her name. Clearly. Unmistakably.
And then another voice not Lucian, someone she didn't recognize saying something that made the blood drain from her face completely.
"She can't be trusted. We checked her background. All of it." A pause that lasted exactly long enough to be deliberate. "She's been working with Viktor Sorin for the last six months."
Silence.
Then Lucian's voice. Quiet. Colder than she had heard it yet.
"Are you certain."
"The evidence is there. She's not a doctor looking for a deal. She's a plant. She came here to destroy you from the inside."
Another silence.
Longer this time.
"Find me proof," Lucian said. "And then bring her to me."
Sera stood in the hallway and stopped breathing.
They thought she was a spy.
They thought she was working for the man who wanted Lucian dead.
And in approximately three minutes someone was going to open that door.
She had two choices.
Run.
Or stay and face a man who now believed she had come here to destroy him with nothing but the truth and no proof to back it up.
Her mother's voice somewhere in the back of her mind.
Fear is just information Sera. What you do with it is the part that counts.
She squared her shoulders.
Set her bag down against the wall.
And knocked on the door.
- Writer
