JACE'S POV
She pulled the door shut behind us before I heard the lock catch, and the sound of it landing told me more than anything else so far. It was a room built to hold someone, and it was not the first time it had been used for that.
I didn't lift my head right away. Some old, careful instinct told me there was information in staying exactly as small as the moment demanded, in giving nothing away before I understood what was being asked of me. She didn't like that. I felt her hand fist in my hair , tilting my face up toward hers with more strength than her frame suggested she'd have.
I made myself hold still. I have had considerably worse things done to my hair by considerably less interesting people, and some detached, professional part of me simply took over and did the necessary work of looking calm.
She was not what I expected. I don't know, precisely, what I did expect, someone harder, maybe, someone whose face matched the efficiency of the men who'd dragged me there. She was sharp instead, watchful, dressed like she'd stepped out of a boardroom rather than a warehouse raid. She was looking at me with an expression I recognized immediately and completely, because I had spent a decade being looked at exactly that way by people who wanted something and hadn't yet decided whether to admit it.
I filed that away. It seemed, under the circumstances, like the single most useful piece of information available to me.
I asked her what they were doing Alec. She said his name back to me slowly, tasting it, "I'm not doing anything to him," she said. "Whatever I'm going to do, it's to you. Not your insignificant little friend."
I hated her in that exact second, purely and simply, and understood, even hating her, that the fear underneath it had almost nothing to do with what she might do to me specifically. I didn't know about this building. I didn't know if Alec was safe two rooms away or bleeding out on a warehouse floor, and there was nothing I could do about either possibility, bound to a couch in a room I hadn't chosen. Before I could think further her mouth found my throat.
"What do you want from me," I asked her. I heard the fear in my own voice, and let her hear it too, because I didn't yet know if fear or composure would serve me better with a stranger like this one.
"A kiss," she said, and took it before I'd finished deciding how to answer. I didn't respond. I recognized the game the second she named it plainly instead of pretending it was something else.
I had spent half my life being wanted by people who dressed the wanting up in another language; a shoot, a story, an opportunity. I had been kissed for cameras since I was seventeen, kissed so many times in rehearsal that the act itself had gone strange and hollow to me somewhere along the way.
So, when she kissed me a second time and pressed me back against the couch, I answered her. Not out of fear, but rather out of careful survival calculation. This was nothing. I'd done it before, with people far more disgusting than her. I'd learned a long time ago how to give people the version of me they wanted to see. If letting her believe she had some kind of hold over me meant I stayed in this house instead of being sold off to another stranger, I could live with that. Better to be the pretty thing she had decided to keep than the merchandise someone else might decide to take.
So, I kissed her back. Not because she had won. Because I had decided it was safer if she thought she had.
"Your first kiss," she said, pulling back to study me, something delighted moving behind her eyes. "Wasn't it?" she asked, delighted, and tipped my chin back up to hers.
It was not.
I let her believe otherwise anyway. It cost me nothing, and it seemed, in the moment, like the simplest way to keep the room exactly as comfortable as it currently was. A small, harmless lie, one more in a long line of small lies I'd told to keep other people's expectations satisfied. I flushed, and dropped my gaze, let silence answered the question for me.
CLAIRE'S POV
I found Celeste in the kitchen, arguing quietly with Arden over a burner phone, and I dropped into the chair across from her with the particular satisfaction of a woman who has already won and simply wants to watch the other person realize it.
"Don't," Celeste said, without looking up.
"I haven't said anything."
"You're smiling. It's worse than talking."
"The western accounts," I said, sweetly, "whenever it's convenient. No rush. I'm not in any hurry to enjoy this."
She set the phone down hard enough that Arden excused himself without being asked to. "I hope he was insufferable," she said.
"Devastatingly so. I may keep him a while longer."
Something crossed her face at that, quick, there, gone, the same kind of thing I'd have missed in anyone but her, and I almost asked about it before Arden's phone buzzed again, and whatever I might have said got swallowed by the far more urgent problem of Rourke.
His screen was turned toward her, and whatever was on it had already drained the last of the amusement out of the morning.
"Rourke," she said, standing. "Someone found him under the print floor an hour ago. He's not answering anyone's questions ever again."
I was on my feet before she finished the sentence. A man dies quietly inside a building we controlled top to bottom since midnight, and it is never, in my experience, a coincidence worth ignoring.
Rourke, as it turned out, had been found in the holding cell under the old print floor an hour before dawn, and he was no longer in a condition to answer anyone's questions, ever again, about anything. Someone had gotten to him inside a building we'd controlled top to bottom since midnight, which meant one of two things — a hole in our own people, or a reach on Dario Voss's part longer than either of us had accounted for. Neither option was one I wanted to sit with for very long.
"He was the only one who could put names to half of Dario Voss's buyer list," Celeste said, already moving, already thinking three steps past the body and into the problem it created. "Someone didn't want him talking. Someone who knew we had him."
She looked at me, and for once neither of us bothered pretending the morning was still about bets and bedrooms.
"The other captive," she suddenly said, remembering him suddenly, sharply, the way you remember something you'd set down and nearly forgotten you were holding. "They put him in the Guest wing, north side. Arden walked him up an hour ago."
I studied her. "You look like a woman about to make this my problem instead of yours."
"It's our problem," she said. "Dario Voss doesn't kill a mid-level informant inside our own walls over nothing. He wanted us to find this exactly the way we found it."
Celeste's POV
I didn't trust anyone else now, so I went to find Alec myself rather than send someone. He held himself like a man who had already decided fighting wouldn't save him, and was choosing instead to watch, to learn, to wait. The stillness of someone who'd survived by being underestimated his whole life and had gotten good at it.
I cut his bindings in the doorway of the room they'd given him, and told the guards to move him closer to our residence. To bring him food and to leave him alone as long as he didn't try anything foolish.
"What happens to me now?" he finally talked for the first time since he arrived.
"That depends entirely on how useful you turn out to be," I told him.
I meant to leave it there. We had a body in the print room and a mole somewhere in our own walls and no particular interest, that morning, in one more captive. He caught the door before it closed.
"Someone died," he said. Not a question. "that's why you're moving me. I heard it in how everyone's walking."
I studied him for a moment longer than I needed to. Most captives asked about themselves first. He'd asked about the house instead. "It isn't your concern."
I filed him away in my head the way I filed everything, a name, a few facts, a problem to be solved later, and went back out to find whoever inside my own house had decided Dario Voss's money was worth more than my trust.
The print floor smelled the way rooms like that always do afterward, copper and bleach fighting each other for which one got to be the last thing you noticed. Rourke had been arranged, not simply killed, throat opened clean, hands folded over his chest like a man laid out for a wake he hadn't earned, a single playing card tucked into his breast pocket where any of my people would find it.
The queen of spades. Dario Voss's calling card, the same one he'd left pinned to Kane's chest seven months ago in a warehouse not unlike this one, when he wanted me to understand precisely whose fault my grief was.
I stood over Rourke's body longer than I needed to, because I recognized the message underneath the message: I can still reach whatever you think you control. Dario Voss had gotten a man killed inside a building my own people had swept floor to ceiling before dawn, which meant either a hole in my own ranks or a reach on his part I hadn't accounted for, and neither possibility was one I intended to sit with quietly.
"Someone inside," Claire said, arriving at my shoulder, all the morning's teasing gone out of her voice entirely.
"Someone inside," I agreed.
I did not tell her, standing over that body, that some ugly, unguarded part of me was almost grateful for it. That a fresh outrage from Dario Voss gave me somewhere new to put seven months of grief that had never fully found a floor to land on.