Crimson Veil

Chapter Thirteen — Crimson Night

✦ Eve's POV ✦

The attack came at the second hour past midnight.

I was in the ward. I had stayed late again — it was becoming a pattern that Theron had stopped commenting on, which I took as acceptance — working through the week's treatment records by lamplight while the stronghold breathed around me in its nighttime rhythms.

The first sound was wrong in a way that took me a moment to identify. Not an alarm bell — something sharper, closer, the specific crack of something structural giving way. Then shouting, abrupt and cut off. Then the ward doors flew open and Bowen was inside.

I was on my feet before I had consciously decided to stand.

"Stay here," Bowen said, with the flat efficiency of someone who meant it completely. "Door stays closed. You don't open it for anyone who isn't me or Sev or the Commander."

"What's happening—"

"Stay here." He was already back through the doors, and I heard him take a position just outside, and then the sounds of the stronghold rearranged themselves into something I had never heard before — the particular chaos of a building under attack from within.

Not from outside. From within.

I understood that in the way I understood things that came through the gift without me choosing them — the emotional register of what was moving through the corridors had the specific quality of people who knew this place. Who had keys and access and the institutional knowledge of where things were. This was not an external assault. This was something that had been living inside the stronghold and had chosen tonight to show itself.

I did what Bowen had told me to do. I stayed.

I pulled the supply cabinet away from the wall to block the back door. I gathered the things from my kit that could serve as something other than medical implements if necessary — nothing much, nothing dramatic, but something. I turned down the lamps to their lowest setting so the ward was dim rather than dark, and I crouched behind the main treatment table and waited and listened.

The sounds in the corridors rose and fell. I heard fighting — actual fighting, not drills, with a different quality to it that I had learned to recognize since the skirmish. I heard shouting in at least two languages. I heard, at one point, a sound that I did not want to identify and did not try to.

My gift was pressing against the shielding with the intensity of a storm against a wall. The emotional volume from the corridors was enormous — fear and aggression and the sharp bright quality of pain in multiple bodies — and I held the boundary as hard as I could and breathed through it the way Mira had taught me.

Still water. Still water. It is not yours.

The ward doors opened.

I was on my feet with my back to the wall and my hand around the heaviest instrument in my kit before I had time to think about it.

Adam Voss came through the door with two of his men and a third over his shoulder.

And behind him — four more soldiers, moving fast, and the last one through pulled the doors shut and dropped the bar across them from the inside.

Adam's eyes found me immediately across the dim ward. One fast sweep, head to foot, the specific assessment of someone checking for injury. Then he was moving to the nearest bed and laying down the man he was carrying and the ward became a field station in the space of thirty seconds.

I was already moving.

"What happened?" I said, reaching the bed and beginning assessment before the question was finished.

"Internal," Adam said, beside me. "Faction soldiers. At least thirty, embedded across four divisions." He was watching my hands on the patient. "They moved simultaneously."

"How many casualties?"

"Still counting." His jaw was tight. "Treat him first. Side wound, deep. He went down fast."

I worked. The wound was serious — worse than Kael's had been, deeper, with a quality to the bleeding that told me something important had been nicked that shouldn't have been. I called for Theron with my voice pitched to carry and heard movement from the back of the ward where he had apparently been sleeping in the small room off the corridor.

Three more wounded were brought to beds. Then two more. The ward filled with the controlled chaos of emergency medicine — voices calling for supplies, the sounds of pain being managed, the particular focus that descended on me during serious work that cleared everything else out and left only the immediate and the necessary.

I was deep in it — both hands inside a wound, concentrating with everything I had — when I heard it.

A sound at the barred doors. Not knocking. Something more deliberate. The specific quality of someone testing the give of the bar.

Every soldier in the ward went still.

Then Adam was across the room — I didn't see him move, I simply registered that he was somewhere else and then he was at the doors — and he said, quietly enough that only those nearest heard: "Two of them. I can hear the breathing."

Caine materialized from somewhere and took a flanking position.

I kept working. I kept my hands steady and my focus on the wound in front of me and I did not look at the doors.

There was a crash. The bar held. Then another, harder.

"Ashcroft." Adam's voice, behind me, still even. "Can you move your patient?"

"Not yet. Three more minutes."

"You have two."

I worked faster.

The third impact splintered something. The bar held but the door frame around it began to give. Bowen and Sev and two other Black Division soldiers took positions. Caine drew something from his belt that caught the low lamplight.

Two minutes and forty seconds. I tied the last suture, packed the wound, pressed the soldier's own hand over the dressing. "Hold that," I told him. He was conscious enough to comply.

I stood up and stepped back just as the doors came open.

What happened next had the quality of something I would remember in fragments rather than sequence — the controlled violence of trained soldiers in a space they knew, the sound and the motion of it, the way the Black Division moved through the attackers with an efficiency that had nothing to do with aggression and everything to do with a kind of terrible competence.

Adam was at the center of it.

I stayed behind the treatment table and watched, because there was nothing else to do and because I could not look away from it. He fought the way he did everything — without waste, without flourish, with the complete and focused attention of someone for whom this was simply a problem to be solved rather than a performance to be given.

I saw him take a blade.

It happened fast — a second attacker he hadn't fully accounted for, coming from the left, and the knife caught him across the chest before he turned it aside. I saw him register it — a single blink, a fractional pause — and then he kept moving.

He kept moving.

The fight was over in less time than it had taken to begin. The attackers were down. The ward was loud with breathing and the particular silence that followed violence.

Adam was standing near the door.

I came out from behind the treatment table and crossed the ward.

"Sit down," I said.

He looked at me.

"You took a blade to the chest," I said. "Sit. Down."

A moment. Then he sat on the nearest bed with the manner of someone making a calculated concession rather than obeying an instruction, and I didn't care about the distinction, I just needed him sitting.

The wound was across his left pectoral — a s***h rather than a stab, which was the only good news. Deep enough to need attention, not deep enough to have done the serious damage a direct thrust would have. I cleaned it with hands that were completely steady and tried not to think about the two seconds between when the knife moved and when he turned it aside, those two seconds in which I had not breathed.

He sat still and let me work.

"You should have blocked that," I said, because I had to say something.

"I know."

"The second attacker came from your left. You left your left side open."

"I know, Ashcroft."

"You have cracked ribs on your left side that I specifically told you—"

"I know." His voice was even. Not defensive. Just — acknowledging.

I tied off the last suture and set the needle down and did not immediately step back. I was very close to him — close enough that I could see the specific quality of his stillness, the way he was holding himself carefully, the thing underneath the composure that was not quite what I expected.

"You're angry," I said, quietly. Not at me. The anger had a different quality to it than any of the accidental readings I had gotten from him before — it was directed outward, at the situation, at whatever had happened tonight that had led to this.

He looked at me.

"I'm not reading you," I said. "Not deliberately. You're just — it's visible, right now. On your face."

Something in his expression shifted. The composure adjusted, and what was underneath it was — briefly — something rawer than I had seen from him before. "Thirty embedded soldiers," he said. "At minimum. In my stronghold. And I didn't know."

Oh.

Not anger exactly. The specific, consuming weight of feeling responsible for something you feel you should have prevented.

"You didn't know," I said, carefully, "because they were very careful and because someone with significant resources has been building this for years." I held his gaze. "That's not the same as a failure."

He looked at me for a long moment in the low lamplight.

"You should rest," I said. I stepped back and began cleaning up the tray. "The wound needs to be checked in the morning."

"Ashcroft."

I turned.

He was looking at me with those dark eyes and whatever had been briefly visible in his expression was contained again, back behind the wall where it lived. But the quality of his attention was — something I didn't have a word for. Something that landed differently than being seen usually did.

"I'm glad you were in the ward," he said. "That you stayed."

I had stayed late because of a habit I didn't examine too closely.

"Me too," I said.