A Dept Paid In Blood

Chapter Six: Countdown

Reyes had left almost nothing behind. That was the first thing they learned, and it told them more than anything he might have said if they'd caught him. His room was clean. His files were clean. Whatever he'd been sending to Rhys, he'd sent it the smart way, the way that left no trail for anyone to follow afterward.

"That's not luck," Damian said, standing in the middle of the empty room the next morning, looking at a bed that had been made with the kind of precision that suggested Reyes hadn't planned on ever sleeping in it again. "That's someone who knew this day was coming for a while."

Elena stood in the doorway, arms crossed, still feeling the ache in her ribs from the training session two days before. "Which means whatever he gave Rhys, Rhys has had time to use it."

"Or save it. Men like Rhys don't spend information the moment they get it. They wait until it's worth the most."

That thought sat between them for the rest of the day, quiet and heavy, the way certain thoughts do when there's nothing useful to do with them yet.

By evening, Damian had pulled together the six men he trusted most — the ones who had been with him since before his brother died, the ones whose loyalty he'd tested in ways Elena suspected she'd never fully know about. She wasn't invited to that meeting, and she didn't ask to be. Some doors, she was starting to understand, weren't closed to keep her out. They were closed because what happened behind them wasn't really about her at all.

The house changed after that. More men at the gates. Cameras that used to point outward now pointed in as well, watching the hallways, the kitchen, the study where a fight had turned into something else two nights ago and then very quickly turned into something else again. Nobody said Reyes's name out loud very often. It sat in every room anyway, the way a smell lingers after someone's left.

Elena noticed the smaller changes too — the way conversations stopped half a beat too late when she walked into a room, like everyone in the house was still deciding how much of this was her fault. She didn't blame them for wondering. She'd wondered the same thing herself, lying awake at two in the morning, running through every conversation she'd had with Reyes and finding nothing in any of them that should have mattered.

Elena spent the next three days learning things she hadn't expected to need to know: the names of Rhys's most trusted men, the layout of his compound from an old set of blueprints Damian's people had gotten years ago and never needed until now, the specific way Rhys liked to seat people at a table so the ones he trusted least sat closest to him, where he could watch them eat.

There was also a list of who would be sitting in that room, real names beside the names strangers knew them by, and small notes in Damian's own hand beside a few of them — which ones had the shortest tempers, which ones had never actually pulled a trigger themselves and liked people to forget that. Elena memorized all of it the way she used to memorize a house before a job, filing away every detail that might matter later, because in her experience, the detail that mattered later was never the one you expected.

"Why would he want his enemies close?" she asked, looking at the seating chart Damian had drawn from memory.

"Because a man across the room can plan something without you noticing his face while he does it," Damian said. "A man three feet away can't hide anything for very long. Rhys likes to watch people fail to hide things. It's the closest thing he has to a hobby."

On the last night before they left for the summit, neither of them slept much, though this time it wasn't the folder keeping her awake. She found him in the study a little after midnight, not reading anything, not doing anything at all, just sitting in the dark the way he had been the very first night she'd met him.

"You do this a lot," she said. "Sit in rooms with the lights off."

"It's easier to think when I can't see my own face doing it." He didn't look up right away. "My brother used to say I looked like our father when I was thinking hard about something I didn't want to do. I never liked being told that. I still don't."

She sat down across from him, close enough that the dark didn't feel quite so large anymore. "Is that what tomorrow is? Something you don't want to do?"

"Tomorrow is something I have to do." He was quiet for a moment. "You don't have to come. I could still find another way to walk in there with something to lose that isn't a person."

"You already tried that argument in the vault. It didn't work then either." She reached out, not entirely sure why, and found his hand in the dark. He didn't pull away. "I'm not doing this because you're paying me anymore. I stopped keeping score somewhere around the part where you took a punch from me and called it good teaching. Maybe somewhere before that, if I'm being honest, which I'm apparently only capable of being at midnight, in the dark, when you can't see my face doing it either."

Something that might have been a laugh moved through him, quiet and short. "That's a low bar."

"You set it. I'm just telling you where it landed."

He turned his hand over so their palms met properly, and for a long moment neither of them said anything else. When he finally leaned in, it wasn't fast, and it wasn't a question either of them needed to ask out loud. The kiss was careful in a way nothing else about him had been since the vault — like he was handling something he was afraid of breaking.

When he finally pulled back, he didn't say anything clever. He didn't say anything at all. He just rested his forehead against hers for a moment, like he needed the extra few seconds before he could go back to being the version of himself that tomorrow was going to require.

Neither of them mentioned it again once the sun came up. There wasn't time. By nine in the morning, they were in the car, the ring cold on her finger, the folder full of names and blueprints and everything Damian's people had learned about a man who wanted him dead, and somewhere ahead of them, past two hours of empty road, Nikolai Rhys was waiting to see exactly how far grief had changed the man he used to know.