All Chapters of The Viper's Queen: Chapter 21 - Chapter 28

The privacy screen went up before the doors sealed. Tor raised it without being asked. He always knew. It was one of his things... this specific ability to understand when the back of the car needed to be a different country from the front. The city moved past the windows. Varek was looking straight ahead at the privacy screen. The muscle in his jaw was going. I had learned to read that jaw over the past two weeks the way I had learned to read weather and locked keypads and the specific silence of a building holding its breath before something bad happened in it. That jaw meant something was coming. I had been right. I let the silence sit for a moment. I watched the city move past the glass. Let him build it in his own time because interrupting a man before he said the thing he had decided to say only made him say it harder. "You exposed yourself," he said. Not ang

The war room was cold and the maps were still spread across the stone table from before the Parley and the shell casings were still holding the corners down like nothing had changed. Everything had changed. I sat in the chair across from Varek and looked at the city etched into the black obsidian and thought about what a night it had been. The Parley. The Latin. The blade in the table. Silas in the courtyard. Syris's voice through the phone was cold and tight and not knowing yet that his inside man was face down on wet stone. One day. I had done all of that in one day. With a chest tube. With cracked ribs. With blood that had been moving slowly into my bandaging since the Parley room. In a dress that weighed twice what it should and heels that had no business being on anyone's feet in a gunfight. I had done all of it and I was sitting in a war room at whatever ungodly hour this was with my hands around a cold

The vial wasn't anything special to look at. Small. Thick glass. The liquid inside is pale yellow and slightly too thick to be water. The kind of thing that looked more like something you'd find in a school science lab than the only reason I was still breathing. Aris had put it on the tray beside the table. Evidence. The quiet proof that it had worked. I stared at it for a while after I woke up. Then I looked at the chair. Varek was in it. Same position as always. Arms on his knees. Eyes open. His shirt had been changed. His leg was stretched out in front of him at an angle that meant it was hurting and he was managing that by not moving it and not mentioning it and apparently waiting to see if I was going to let that go. I wasn't. "Show me the leg," I said. He looked at me. "

I was up before him. That surprised me a little. Varek was the kind of person who seemed like he existed in a state of permanent readiness... like sleep was just a different mode he switched into and out of and he could come back from it instantly whenever something required his attention. But when I passed his door on the way to the war room it was closed and quiet. Good. He had earned it. The war room was cold and empty and I turned on just the one light over the stone table and spread the port maps across the obsidian surface and stood over them with cold coffee and the city cut into the black glass beneath my hands and thought about everything that needed to happen. The eastern ports. The freight lines. The customs bypasses. The fourteen dock workers who had been on Varek's payroll for six years and before that on the Sovereign payroll and before that were loyal to my father's operation. Syris had the papers. He didn't have the people. That was the gap. I stood