Page 240 of Fractured Loyalties
“Did he get to keep anything?”
“His last minute,” I say.
Mara’s eyes flash to mine. She hears the shape under the words. She doesn’t flinch. She just nods, once, slow, like she knew the answer before she asked.
“Who’s left?” she asks.
“Jori,” I say before I can decide to keep it. “I haven’t decided what he is yet.”
She swallows. “He looked at me like he wanted to help.”
“That doesn’t make him safe.”
“What does?”
“Fear,” I say. “Or love. Anything in between is a leak.”
Lydia snorts. “Poetry hour.”
“Find me a map of Volker’s last known place,” I tell her. “Union files might give us a rabbit trail. We cut it now, we don’t bleed later.”
“On it.” She tucks the bag where she kept the tablet under her arm and heads for the hall. “I’ll take first watch outside your door. Shout if you need a witness or a wall.”
We are alone when the door clicks shut behind her. The room feels larger and smaller at once.
Her spine is iron. Her mouth is soft and furious. I touch her face with both hands and feel the shake in her jaw. Not fear. Not only. A tremor that belongs to a woman who learned in one day how to hit and how to stand.
“You’re not bait,” I tell her again.
“I know,” she says. “I’m a fuse.”
She’s right. I don’t say it.
Her arms go around my neck, and the nightclub in my chest goes quiet. I hold her until my hands calm. When I let go, she does not step away.
“Shower,” she says. “Then we talk.”
I nod. “After that, we plan.”
Her mouth tilts. “After that, you sleep.”
“I don’t—”
“You will,” she says.
The word lands like a command I didn’t know I had been waiting to obey. I head for the bedroom with her quietly following me.
In the bedroom, I strip the jacket and shirt and head for the bathroom. The mirror catches the red across my knuckles and the smear of Vale’s ring on my palm. I wash it until the water runs clear.
When I step back out, Mara sits on the edge of the bed with the baton across her thighs. She looks up and gives me a look that isn’t surrender and isn’t a challenge. It’s something new. Partnership with teeth.
“Tell me everything you can,” she says. “Not the half you think I can carry.”
I sit beside her and start with Kinley. I give her the river wind and the bollard and the brass key. I give her the words he used. I give her the way his eyes changed when he realized his choice was not a shield but a blade that came back for him. I give her Vale’s office and the cabinet and the ring I broke under my boot.
She listens without blinking. When I finish, the room stays still, like the air is thinking.
“Thank you,” she says. Not for the deaths. For the truth.
