CALDER MACE MOVES

CHAPTER TEN:

The call came at 5:40 in the morning, and Lyra knew before she was fully awake that something had gone wrong, because Dimitri never raised his voice, and through the wall she could hear him raising it.

She was in the hallway in under a minute, still in the shirt she'd slept in, and found him already dressed — fully dressed, at that hour, like he hadn't gone to bed at all — standing at the top of the stairs with his phone pressed to his ear and an expression that made her stomach drop before he said a single word she understood.

"Where," he said. Not a question. A demand. "How long ago." A pause, and something in his face went to stone. "Get the house locked down. Now. I want eyes on every entrance before the sun's fully up."

He hung up. I looked at her standing there in the hallway. For a second she thought he wasn't going to tell her anything at all, that the door she'd seen open in him last night in front of the mountain photographs had already swung shut again.

"One of my men was found two blocks from your father's restaurant," he said. "Two hours ago. Dead."

Lyra's hand found the wall behind her without her deciding to reach for it. "Who?"

"His name was Petrov. He'd been watching the building since your father died. Standard precaution." Dimitri's jaw worked, once, like he was chewing down something before he let it out. "He was shot once. Close range. Whoever did it wanted him found. Wanted us to know."

"Know what?"

"That they're not finished." He said it flat, almost gentle, the way you'd deliver news to someone you were trying to protect from the full weight of it. "That they can get close enough to my people to make a point of it."

Downstairs, she could already hear movement — men she didn't recognize coming through the front entrance, low voices, the particular controlled urgency of people executing a plan they'd rehearsed before. June appeared at the end of the hall in pajamas, hair a mess, eyes wide with the specific alertness of a teenager who'd learned to wake up fast when something in a house felt wrong.

"What's happening?" June asked.

"Go back to your room," Lyra said. "Keep Theo with you. I'll explain in a minute."

June didn't move right away — looked between Lyra and Dimitri, reading something in the space between them that Lyra didn't have time to hide — then finally retreated, and Lyra heard her door click shut down the hall.

"You're locking the house down," Lyra said. "What does that actually mean?"

"It means no one leaves without an escort. It means the gates stay closed and the perimeter gets doubled. It means your siblings don't go outside, don't go to school, don't do anything that puts them somewhere I can't account for."

"For how long?"

"Until I know it's safe."

"That's not an answer, that's a blank check." Lyra felt the fear turning into something sharper, something she recognized from years of holding a failing restaurant together while people who should have helped her told her to wait, be patient, trust the process. "You don't get to lock two children in a house indefinitely and call it protection without telling them — telling me — what they're being protected from."

"I am telling you." His voice had an edge now, controlled but present, the first time she'd heard him actually strain against his own composure. "A man is dead two blocks from the place you grew up in. I don't have the luxury right now of softening that for you."

"I don't want it softened. I want it explained." She stepped closer, refusing to let the height difference between them turn into the kind of leverage he was used to having in every room he stood in. "You keep doing this — giving me half of something and calling it enough. A photograph. A story about a mountain you won't finish. Now a dead man and a locked gate. I am not a problem you manage in installments."

"I am trying to keep you alive."

"Then let me help you do it instead of hiding behind me!"

The words came out louder than she meant them to, echoing down the marble hallway, and for a second neither of them said anything. Somewhere below, the movement of his men had gone quiet too, like even the house was listening.

"You don't understand what you'd be helping with," Dimitri said, quieter now, but no less hard. "You don't know these men. You don't know what they're capable of, and I would rather you resent me for keeping you in the dark than lose you to information you weren't ready to carry."

"You don't get to decide what I'm ready to carry." Her voice shook, just slightly, and she hated that it did. "My father made that decision for me my whole life. He decided I wasn't ready to know about a debt, a ledger, a storage unit with my name on it. And it got him killed, and it nearly got me killed the night the men came to the restaurant, and I am done — done — being protected into a corner by men who think love looks like silence."

The word hung between them before she'd meant to let it land there. Love. She hadn't chosen it on purpose. It had simply arrived, true enough in the moment that she couldn't take it back.

Dimitri went very still. The stillness she was starting to recognize as the loudest thing about him — not absence, but a held breath, a decision being made behind a face that gave away nothing until it decided to.

"I have to go," he said finally. "I have men to deploy and a dead man's family to see paid. We'll finish this conversation tonight."

"We'll finish it now."

"Lyra." Her name said the way he'd said it once before, quiet enough that it didn't sound like an order. "Please."

It was the first time he'd said please to her. She let him go because of it — not because she'd run out of things to say, but because something in the word had cracked slightly, and she didn't know yet what to do with a version of him that asked instead of decided.

She went back to her room once the house had gone quiet again, sat on the edge of the bed, and pulled the burner phone from where she'd hidden it beneath a folded sweater in the drawer. The screen lit at her touch. One saved contact. No name.

Her thumb hovered over the call button for a long moment — thinking of Petrov, two blocks from her father's restaurant, thinking of a ledger with her name on it in her father's hand, thinking of a house locked down around her like a cage disguised as a fortress.

She pressed the call.

It rang twice.

Then a woman's voice, steady and unsurprised, like she'd been sitting by the phone for exactly this moment:

"I've been waiting for you to call.