Chapter 5

It wasn't mercy.

I want to be clear about that, even now. Standing over him with three dead men on the floor and my arm steady and my breathing almost normal, I didn't spare him because I felt something. A man that is dead tells no tale, and I wanted all I could get from him.

I looked back at him again, and he still wasn't moving, so I said, “On your knees.”

He looked at me for a long moment. Not afraid. Calculating. He still thinks in straight lines; even now, with the gun held to his forehead and the blood gathering around his ankles, he still thinks in straight lines.

He knelt.

He was different when he was in the cellar. Smaller. The odor of wet rock and copper hung heavily in the air, and overhead was a single light, which moved a little but was not touched by anyone.

"Where are the rest of them?" I asked.

"There are no more. Not down here."

“That wasn't the question.”

His jaw shifted. "Four men upstairs. Two in the east corridor. One outside your father's study."

I filed it. Who gave the command and why?

"I told you—"

"You told me nothing." My voice came out flat. Not angry. The flat was worse, and he knew it. "You gave me a speech about feelings. That's not an order. Who gave it?"

He turned his eyes to the ground. “Somebody you haven't known before.”

"You'll introduce me."

He said nothing.

So, I was standing up, bending over him, near enough that I could smell the finely woven silk from his jacket and the sweat under it. With a free hand to his chin, I tipped his face up so that he had to look at me.

Two years. Two years of patiently carried-out heat. Morning Mass, where he inquired about my day as if serious. His kiss on my temple when we were in the dark telling me I was safe.

I had believed it. That was what stuck in my chest, like a splinter.

"You're going to walk me out of this compound," I said. "And you're going to do it quietly, because you're more useful standing than you are dead, and right now that is the only thing keeping you breathing. Understand?"

"Nyra—"

"I didn't ask for a response. I asked if you understood."

His eyes held mine for a beat. Something moved through them, not guilt exactly, not regret. Something closer to resignation.

"Yes," he said.

I straightened. Stepped back. Held him at gunpoint and dragged him by the neck until he came upright, so he was slightly ahead of me and I could see his hands.

We went from the cellar door through a doorway into a corridor outside.

The compound was quieter now than it had been at the burial. That restless, measured energy was gone. What was left felt held. Like the building itself was waiting.

My body moved as it does in here. Quietly. Efficiently. I knew the number of turns without getting a tally; I knew which floorboards were loaded and which were not; I knew where the light fell and where it did not. After three years of living in the outdoors, I had no traces of it remaining. All the way there, patient.

We came to the east stairs. Just before the turn, I shoved Marcus into the alcove.

There was a guard approaching the corner. A man with that face, or one of my father's men. I had a good look at his gait. I observed how he walked. He was a little bit off course in his path. The slant of his eyes.

Turned.

My father used to say that a trained man always looked at the exits first. That his allegiance was restricted to the boundary line and what was beyond it had already been sorted out. This latter one was looking at the exit.

I let him pass.

Marcus felt me tense. He was smart enough not to speak.

We went down the back corridor down to the ground floor, and I was already doing the arithmetic: four upstairs plus two east corridors, one outside the study, three dead below—plus what I hadn't known yet, and I had to get Silas; I needed a room with no ears. I had to think without the gun in my hand and Marcus in my peripheral sight watching me do the arithmetic.

When I came near, the door at the end of the corridor opened.

Raze.

He stood in the frame and looked at me and then at Marcus and then at the gun and then back at me. His expression didn't change. This was the quietness of a man who had gone through all the plays of this game and merely waited to see which one would be performed.

"You took longer than I expected," he said.

I felt a hot force pass through me in my chest. Not relief. Not gratitude. An unnamed thing that is unclean.

"There were three of them," I said.

Marcus's face came into his line of sight. Slower this time. "Just three?"

Marcus said nothing.

Raze looked back at me, and the question in his eyes wasn't about the cellar. It was about the man I had decided not to kill and whether I was sure and whether that decision was mine or something else.

"He knows things," I said.

"I know." He stepped aside to let us through. His hand brushed my arm as I passed, not a grip, not pressure, just contact. Just long enough to land.

He had already known.

I didn't stop walking, but the thought settled in my chest, cool and heavy.

He had already known Marcus was down there, and he had come to the door anyway, not to rescue me—he had never once believed I needed that—but to be at the door when I walked out.

That distinction mattered.

I wasn't sure yet what it meant that it mattered to me as much as it did.