The Oblivion

Chapter 17.

The jet's cabin hummed with a silence so absolute it felt like a physical substance. Layla stared out the window at the endless blanket of clouds, her reflection a ghost superimposed on the white. Kieran sat opposite her, a dark silhouette against the portal light, his attention laser-focused on his tablet. He hadn't spoken a word to her since they'd boarded. The glacial space between them was a wall she didn't have the tools to scale.

Her body was here, flying east at six hundred miles per hour, but her mind was stuck in that penthouse sitting room, replaying his words on a loop. 'A gathering of predators. You will be the only human.' She'd faced tough negotiators, furious clients, even a troll once who'd literal steam coming from his nostrils. This was different. This wasn't business. It was being thrown into a tiger's den wearing a suit made of raw steak.

The jet began its descent. The city emerged from the haze, a familiar grid of grey and green. Her city. Her life. It looked small, suddenly. Insignificant.

A black car was waiting on the tarmac, engine purring. Kieran descended the steps ahead of her, not looking back. Just before he ducked into the car, he paused.

"The car will take you home. Be ready at eight AM. We begin tomorrow." He said it to the open air, then was gone, the door sealing shut behind him. The other car, for her, felt like an afterthought.

Her apartment building was a relic from a past life. The elevator groaned its way up to the fourteenth floor. She fumbled with her keys, the silence and stale air in the hallway pressing in on her.

She opened the door.

The smell hit her first. Stale coffee, old takeout, and underneath it all, the faint, gone-off scent of a life abandoned. The air was still and heavy, like a funeral shroud settled over everything. Her cat, Mercury, trotted over excitedly, his small meows the only comfort in the quiet.

Mark's half-empty coffee cup was still on the counter, a brown ring staining the granite where the liquid had evaporated. A museum piece of her failure. She dropped her bag by the door, the sound too loud in the dead space, bending to scoop the loaf of grey into her arms, his purrs vibrating through her chest.

She walked through the rooms, turning on lights, banishing shadows. Her home, once a sanctuary of mismatched furniture and lavender candles, now felt like a crime scene. Everywhere, she saw the evidence of his half-life here. A jacket slung over the back of a chair. A pair of his running shoes by the door, laces splayed. The bathroom still held his razor, his deodorant, the ghost of his smell on a towel.

She'd been too busy closing the Elmsworth deal to properly close the door on her marriage. Now, with a week until she had to walk into a den of ancient, powerful Fae, the domestic wreckage seemed both pathetic and overwhelming.

"Okay," she said aloud, her voice swallowed by the quiet. She placed Mercury on the ground, and repeated, "Okay."

She went to the kitchen, found a box of heavy-duty black trash bags under the sink, and started. There was no ceremony to it. She wasn't weeping over photographs. This was an autopsy. She started in the bathroom, sweeping his things into a bag—toothbrush, half-used cologne, a hair gel he loved that she always hated the smell of. The bag grew heavier.

She moved to the bedroom. His side of the closet was a time capsule. Suits he wore to his finance job, polo shirts, jeans. She pulled them out, armful by armful, and dumped them into a growing pile on the bed. The physical weight of his absence was staggering.

Her phone began buzzing on the dresser. It was her brother. She stared at it, and let it go to voicemail. A moment later, a text chimed.

'Hey sis. Just checking in. Haven't heard from you in a bit. I'm sorry about the money thing. Call me.'

Layla's throat tightened. She hadn't told her brother about Mark and Eva. She barely spoke to him at all lately, his life consisting of constantly rescuing him from bad life decisions, and a revolving rollercoaster of debt. Her life was splitting into two parallel tracks: the crumbling human one here, and the terrifying, glittering one Kieran was dragging her into. They didn't intersect. Didn't coexist.

She grabbed another trash bag and attacked the dresser. Socks, underwear, t-shirts, she shoved them in without thought. Her fingers brushed something hard and cold in the back of a drawer and pulled it out. A velvet box. Her heart stopped.

It was a pair of cufflinks, silver and onyx. Expensive. She'd saved for weeks and given them to him for their first anniversary. 'To anchor you,' she'd joked, because he was always losing the cheap ones. He never worse these ones. She held them in her palm, the cold metal leeching into her skin. A pathetic relic. She closed her fist around them, the edges biting into her flesh, then dropped them into the bag with a final, dull thud.

She worked for hours, a methodical, numb machine. The living room was next. His books, his video game controller, the hideous decorative bowl his mother had given them. Bag after bag filled and tied, box after box taped and lined up by the front door like monstrous, bloated sentinels.

As she tied the last bag, her lawyer's number flashed on her phone screen. She answered quickly, tucking the phone between her ear and shoulder as she wiped dust from her hands.

"Layla? It's Diane. I've received the preliminary response from Mark's counsel."

Layla stared at the line of black bags. "This'll be good."

"They're contesting the division of the retirement account. Claiming his contributions during the last two years were significantly higher due to his bonus structure."

A dry, humourless laugh escaped her. "He was able to get those bonuses because I was paying all the household bills while he 'invested in his career'. I have the bank statements."

"I know. We'll fight it. It's just going to drag things out." Diane paused. "How are you holding up?"

Layla looked around at the hollowed-out apartment. "I'm... streamlining." She ended the call, the word tasting like ash.

Exhaustion hit her like a truck. She didn't have the strength to drag the bags and boxes down to the dumpster. They could stay there, a monument to her emotional evisceration, for one more night. She ordered Chinese food she didn't taste, ate it while sitting on the bench beside the kitchen sink, the stark comparison to the food at Silva and the hotel felt like a joke, and showered in water so hot it turned her skin red.

Wrapped in a towel, she stood before the full-length mirror on the back of her bedroom door. The woman staring back was pale, with shadows under her bright eyes, and slightly sunken cheeks. She looked small. Breakable. The kind of person predators would easily tear apart. Not the strong woman from five years ago who set out to prove how formidable a human negotiator could be.

She thought of Kieran's family. His mother's "curiosity." She imagined their eyes on her, dissecting her human frailty, her cheap towel, her non-magical, mundane life. A tremor started deep in her core. Then she thought of Kieran in the restaurant, his arm a steel band around her, his body pressed to hers. His voice in the elevator: Your recall is more than adequate. The way he'd warned her about the estate, not with malice, but with a cold, brutal honesty. He was the danger, but he was also, inexplicably, the one giving her a map to the minefield.

A different kind of heat spread through her, confusing and undeniable.

Instead, that treacherous pulse beat between her legs.

She dropped the towel, quickly dressed, and crawled into bed, the sheets cold and unfamiliar. Sleep was a fractured thing, filled with dreams of a golden field, small lights dancing through like lost stars, running through endless marble hallways while unseen, elegant laughter echoed around her.