Chapter 5: The Possession

The steel door didn't just open.

It flew off its hinges.

The bang of it hitting the wall was so loud I felt it in my chest. Flashlight beams cut through the dust everywhere at once, wild and bright, making the shadows jump.

I squeezed my eyes shut and waited for a bullet.

"Clear the door!" Tor's voice. Raw and rough. "Move!"

Boots hit the floor all around us. Heavy and fast, not careful at all. The flashlights dragged over the broken glass and stopped on the dead man in the chair before finding Varek and me on the floor. Tor stepped into the light. His vest was wet with blood that wasn't his.

"The lawn is quiet," he said, spitting dust off his lips. "Two down in the hall. Three outside."

Varek shifted.

He stood up, grabbed a fist of my gown, and pulled me up with it. Not careful. Not rough either. Just the way you'd pick something up that needed moving.

My knees buckled the second I was upright. My bare feet found something wet and warm and I went sideways.

Varek caught me by the waist.

His fingers dug in hard. He pulled me against his chest and started checking me fast, pressing hands moving over my ribs, my sides, down my arms. His palms were covered in blood. He left red marks all over the white silk. He was looking for a hole. Looking for somewhere I was bleeding that I hadn't told him about.

I noticed that. The way he wasn't asking. The way he was just checking himself like my answer wouldn't have been good enough anyway. Like he had already decided he needed to know for certain.

"I'm fine," I said. I tried to pull away.

He ignored me.

He grabbed my jaw instead and turned my face up toward Tor's flashlight.

He looked at the cut on my cheek. The one from the wall exploding beside my ear. A small muscle in his jaw jumped.

"You're hit," he said. He pressed his thumb against the cut.

It stung so badly my eyes watered. "It's nothing," I said.

He didn't answer. He just kept his thumb there, pressed into the cut, and looked at my face in the harsh white light of the flashlight. Not like a doctor checking for damage. Like something else. Something I didn't have a word for yet.

His hands were shaking.

Not a lot. Just a small tremor I could feel where his fingers touched my face. I don't think he knew he was doing it.

I have seen a lot of dangerous people in my life. Growing up in the outer rim put you in the same rooms as them whether you wanted to be or not. And the thing about dangerous people... the thing nobody told you until you already knew it... was that they were always the most controlled ones in the room. Right up until they weren't. That small tremor in his fingers was the first crack I had seen in him since the moment he walked into that dark office and dropped my father's ring on the marble floor.

I filed it away.

I raised my hand without thinking about it. My bloody fingers found his wrist.

Varek went completely still.

He looked down at my hand on his wrist like it was something he hadn't expected to see there. Like it had appeared from nowhere and he didn't know yet what to do about it.

The room stopped moving around us for a second.

Then Tor racked his rifle and the sound of it snapped everything back to normal.

"They got through the thermal grid," Tor said. He nudged the dead man's boot with his own. "This was planned. They knew exactly which room. Exactly what time."

Someone on the inside, I thought. Someone who lives here.

I looked around the basement without moving my head. The men who had come in with Tor. The staff I had seen lined up in the entrance hall with their eyes on the floor. The woman with the straight back who had locked me in that bedroom and walked away without looking back. Any one of them. All of them. None of them. There was no way to know yet and I knew better than to guess before I had something real to work from.

My father had taught me that too.

Assumptions get you killed faster than bullets, Maevia. Wait for the fact.

I filed that and kept my face still.

Varek let go of my jaw. His hand moved to the back of my neck instead. His thumb pressed once against the top of my spine. Slow. Heavy. Like he was making sure I was still there.

"Lock it down," Varek said. Quiet. Not a shout. He didn't need to shout.

"Level four?" Tor asked.

"Full blackout," Varek said. "Kill everything. Jammers up. Anyone on the lawn shoots first."

Tor pulled his half-empty magazine, caught it cleanly, slammed a new one in. "The hit squad?"

"Bury them," Varek said.

Tor nodded once. Turned to go.

"Wait," Varek said.

Tor stopped.

"This wasn't Elias," Varek said. He was looking at the broken window. Rain was coming through the gap in the mesh now, washing the blood slowly down the slanted floor in thin pink lines. "Elias uses car bombs. He uses fires. He doesn't do this." He pulled me closer against his side. Not thinking about it. Like it was just where I went. "This was Syris."

Tor's eyes moved to me for a second.

Then back to Varek.

"Syris has been quiet," Tor said carefully.

"He was waiting," Varek said. "Waiting to see what I brought home." He looked down at me. Something moved in his face. Something I hadn't seen there before. "Now he knows."

The weight of that landed slowly. The way cold did. Starting at the outside and working inward until it reached somewhere it couldn't be ignored anymore. Someone had watched him bring me here. Someone had decided I was worth sending a hit squad through a thermal grid for. Not because of anything I had done. Because of what I represented. Because of what signing that paper in that office meant to the people who didn't want Varek stable.

I was already a target and I hadn't even unpacked.

The rain kept coming through the broken window. The estate had come alive above us. I could hear it... boots on the upper floors, doors, the crackle of radios.

I slowly became aware that I was still holding his wrist.

I let go.

He noticed. He didn't say anything.

"The war," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. "It starts tonight?"

"It started the second you signed that paper," he said.

He looked at me one more time. Then he released me fully, stepping back, cold air rushing into the space where he'd been. "You wanted your father in a medical room. He'll be there by morning."

I stared at him.

"You kept your word," I said. I didn't mean for it to come out like a question.

"I keep all of them," he said. He said it simply. Like it was just a fact about the world. "The good ones and the bad ones both."

He turned away. Already pulling out his phone. Already moving to the next problem.

I watched him go.

I looked at the dead man in the chair. At the drain. At the red marks his hands had left all over my white gown, pressed hard in every direction, looking for a hole that wasn't there.

He keeps all of them.

I added that to the list of things I was collecting about him. The list that had been growing since a ring rolled across black marble and stopped next to my knee.

In the outer rim you survived by knowing which people kept their word.

This one did.

I didn't know yet if that made things better or worse. What I did know was that somewhere above me in a medical room that hadn't existed an hour ago my father was going to wake up with a doctor beside him because a man who cut off fingers and buried hit squads had said so.

In the outer rim that was the closest thing to safety that existed.

I followed Tor out of the basement and didn't look back.