The First Test

Chapter 10

Lena's POV

They arrived in the afternoon.

Three men; suits sharp, faces arranged into the studied blankness that comes from knowing that emotions can be liabilities. I heard them before I saw them, voices in the main hall, low and businesslike, the kind of conversation one has with people who have skipped all preliminaries.

I was sitting in the sitting room with a book that I hadn’t opened and remained perfectly still.

Mara appeared in the doorway moments later. "He wants you in the drawing room," she whispered.

I put down the book. "Why?"

Her eyes told me she knew more than she was sharing. "Because he asked for you."

The drawing room was more imposing than the informal rooms that I'd been shown – high ceilings, dark paneling, furniture arranged with the unhurried confidence of a room that's made for display. The three men stood in a loose cluster near the window. Damian stood apart, nearer the fireplace, his hands thrust into his pockets.

He looked at me when I walked in.

It wasn’t warm. It wasn’t cold. It was the way one looks at an object that one has placed in a particular position and wishes to verify is still there.

"Gentlemen," he said, never taking his eyes off me. "This is Lena."

The three men turned; their eyes drifted over me with that same assessing, cataloging quality that was beginning to feel familiar. I held my face neutral and my spine erect.

One of the three men, older, with a shock of silver hair and the build of someone who had once been physically imposing and now had merely grown large, spoke. "She is young," he said, conversationally, as if I wasn't there.

"She is," Damian said.

I said nothing.

The older man smiled, not warmly, "Come here, sweetheart, and let me get a look at you."

The room was quiet. I felt it then-the prickling atmosphere that signals a test disguised as an invitation.

I didn’t move.

The older man held his smile. Damian watched me with an expression I couldn’t read.

"I said, come here," the man repeated, with a thinly veiled threat added to his pleasantness.

I looked at him directly. "I heard you."

A pause. Then one of the younger men-sharp featured-let out a soft puff of breath that I was sure was suppressed laughter.

The older man's smile wavered slightly. He looked back at Damian. "She's not very obedient."

Damian remained silent for a moment, his eyes on me; there was something about them now-not angry, but attentive, more so than earlier. It was like a man watching the outcome of a game he had no hand in and was uncertain of the winner.

"No," Damian said at last. "She is not."

The words were spoken without an ounce of apology.

The older man seemed to recalibrate. He looked back at me, attempted the smile again. "I don't bite, girl."

"I don't know you," I said, my tone even. "So I'll remain here."

Another pause. This one longer than the last.

Then Damian stood up straight and stepped away from the fireplace. "Shall we proceed?" he said in a tone that closed the matter decisively.

The discussion turned back to business-coded and opaque, designed to exclude anyone not involved in the matter at hand. I stood near the door, not invited to join the group seated or dismissed, merely placed in a strange limbo between welcome and rejection.

I used the time to observe.

The older man was clearly the leader of the three; the others subtly deferred to him in every slight action, angling their bodies toward him, waiting for him to speak. But they deferred even more subtly to Damian, with the kind of ingrained ease that suggests practice.

Damian was the most powerful person in the room, by an immense margin. That wasn't new information, but seeing it in action gave it new weight.

When the three men left, twenty minutes later, Damian and I were alone.

He looked across the room at me. "You refused."

"Yes."

"I did not tell you to."

"You did not tell me not to," I said. "You did not tell me anything. You just put me in the room."

There was a flicker behind his eyes. "Most people would have complied."

"I am not most people."

A long pause. I waited for the punishment-a cold, cruel remark; but he was watching me with the same intense, unreadable gaze he’d displayed earlier.

"No," he said, softly. "You are not."

He left the room first.

I stood alone in the large space, heart pounding against my ribs, and realized that my hands hadn't trembled at all.