“The window was minutes,” I say. “If I’d pulled you out, briefed you, assembled a team, Carson would be dead.”
“And if you’d taken thirty seconds to tell me you were going?”
I don’t answer. Because thirty seconds existed. I chose not to spend them.
“I was with a survivor,” she says. Quieter now. “Marcellus walked into the wing and told me you’d left the compound alone to intercept an assassination team. That’s how I found out. From Marcellus. In front of the survivors.”
“I told Julian to wait until you came up from the wing.”
“Marcellus didn’t wait.”
Silence.
“You sat in a chair for four hours watching me on a screen,” she says. “I didn’t even get a screen.”
Silence. The corridor holds us.
She pushes off the wall. Crosses the distance between us. Her hands come up to my face. Her thumbs on my cheekbones. Her fingers along my jaw. The calluses on her palms from years in the ring. The pressure of someone who isn’t being gentle.
I close my eyes. The relief arrives so completely that my breathing changes before I can stop it. The bond floods with what she’s sending, and underneath the anger it’s the same thing I sent her when she walked through the compound door after the farm. The thing that doesn’t have a name because the name would make it smaller.
Her palms against my skin. Warm. A degree warmer than before the strike. I register it the way I register every shift in her. Filed. Not yet understood.
“Next time,” she says, “you tell me. Even if the window is closing. Even if I’m needed somewhere else. Thirty seconds, Maximus. You give me thirty seconds.”
“I will.”
“And you wear the cameras.”
I open my eyes. She’s looking at me. The anger is still there but it’s sharing space with something else. The look of someone holding the person who came home.
“I’ll wear them,” I say.
Her thumbs trace my cheekbones once. She holds my face for three more seconds. Then she drops her hands.
“Go finish the messages,” she says. “I’ll check on Carson.”
She turns toward the lower level. I turn toward the study.
The messages to the lords are still on the screen in the study. I sit at my desk.
The power that launched that canister is still in my chest. Quiet. Waiting. Accelerating on a timeline I don’t control.
Carson is in the lab. Celeste is with him. The messages are ready.
I press send.
Chapter
Twenty-Two
The conference room has never held this many lords at once.
Julian arranged the chairs in a half circle facing the display wall. No table between the seats and the screens. I clocked that choice when I walked in. A table gives people something to hide behind, somewhere to set their hands, a surface that says this is a negotiation. Without it, there’s nothing between the lords and the footage except air.
Julian and I prepped the footage an hour ago. Two hours of body cam recordings cut to twelve minutes. We kept the rooms. The cots. The IVs. The clipboards. The children’s wing. We cut the breach. The combat. Alexei’s weapon.
“They don’t need to see how we got in,” I said. “They need to see what was inside.”
