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“I have known for some time.”

“You absolute—” His face contorted. He was trying not to weep. It was the worst and most beautiful thing I have ever seen. “You were supposed to be smart. You were supposed to be a thousand-year-old genius.”

“It appears I am not.”

“Baby, are you okay?” he said, and the words were so unexpected, and so precisely what I had been about to say, that I laughed. I could not help it. I laughed in the cold, in the dark, in a warehouse full of hunters, with my heart in a knot.

“I am asking you that,” I said.

“I’m fine. I’m pissed. I got hit with a taser and I bit a guy’s ear. I’m gonna kill you. You said wait. You said trust. You sent me fifty words and never called!”

“I know.”

“I thought you were done with me!”

“I know. I know.” I took a step toward him. “I was afraid, Lex. I was afraid of what you would do. I was afraid you would come for him on your own. I thought if I—”

“Stay right there,” said a voice.

I stopped.

A door opened at the far side of the room. Two men in gray came out, then a third, with something long and dark held across his chest. They fanned out on either side of me in a semicircle, silent and practiced.

Behind them, unhurried, came a man in a long gray coat.

He was tall and gaunt and elegant, with silver at the temples and a deep tired handsomeness in his face, like an actor who had once played kings. He carried nothing. His hands hung at his sides. His eyes were a pale, clear, weary blue.

“Mr. Volkov,” said Gideon Roake. “At last.”

Something struck me between the shoulder blades.

It was not a blow. It was a burn. A cold white fire that went through me as through paper, from spine to heart, and I felt my knees fold and my hands go out. I struck the concrete on my palms. The world went very bright and very far. I smelled, in the blaze of my own pain, the clean unmistakable smell of oiled silver, and blood, my blood, running warm down my back.

“Maksim!” Lex screamed.

I could not answer. The floor tilted. The last thing I saw, before my sight went to gray, was the doctor stepping forward, gently, almost kindly, to stand over me.

“Forgive the theater,” he said. “I find it helps to begin with an apology.”

Chapter 29

LEX

Chair

They’d tied me with wire.

It was not rope but wire, thin and springy, twisted around my wrists and ankles with the ends tucked under so that I couldn’t find a loose one. Every time I flexed my hands, it bit. My arms were bent behind the back of the chair and my shoulders were on fire from Game Five, and the dried blood on my forehead itched, and I couldn’t scratch it.

I watched Maksim go down.

I’d like to say I stayed calm. I didn’t. I screamed his name so loud that the lamps rang. I threw my whole weight against the chair and it creaked and the wire cut, and someone behind me laid a hand on my shoulder and said “Easy, son,” and I twisted my head and bit it. He swore. I heard a satisfying crunch. A gloved fist came down on the side of my face, and the room slid sideways for a second and settled.

“That’s enough,” said Roake, mildly.

He hadn’t raised his voice. The man behind me stepped back.

He was standing over Maksim, who lay face-down on the concrete with a long, thin, pale-handled knife protruding from his back. There was a lot of blood. It ran in dark rivulets across the floor, and it smoked. Where it touched the cold air, it steamed, as if it had been drawn from something much hotter than a man.