Chapter 7: The Viper's Whisper

I didn't turn to look at him right away.

I took another sip of my champagne and looked at the room and let him stand there and thought about whether I wanted to have this conversation at all.

I decided I didn't.

"You have three seconds to walk away," I said.

He made a sound that was supposed to be a laugh. It came out wrong. Rattling. Like something loose moving around in his chest.

He didn't move.

He leaned closer instead.

"There was a fire," he said.

My hand stopped moving the glass to my mouth.

Just stopped. Completely. Like my body had heard something my brain hadn't finished processing yet and had decided to pause everything until it caught up.

"Sector Four," Syris said. Quiet. Unhurried. Like we were talking about the weather. "Ten years ago. Electrical fire. That's what the report said."

I kept my eyes on the room.

I kept my face still.

I was very good at keeping my face still. My father had made sure of that. Don't react Maevia. Never let them see what's happening inside. Keep it behind your eyes where nobody can reach it.

My father.

Who had apparently known something about this.

"They told you the roof came down on her," Syris said. His breath moved the hair near my ear. "But you got there before the smoke got too thick. You made it into the bedroom."

Don't react.

Don't react.

Don't react.

I said to my self.

"You saw the veins," he said. "Black ones. Up her throat."

The champagne sloshed over the rim of my glass.

Cold drops on my knuckles and I barely felt them because something was happening in my chest that I didn't have a name for. A cracking. A slow terrible cracking of something I had built very carefully over ten years to keep exactly this kind of thing out.

I had never told anyone what I saw in that bedroom.

Not my father. Not anyone. Not one single living person.

I had kept it in a locked room inside myself and I had never opened the door because opening the door meant making it real and making it real meant sitting with what it meant and I had never been ready to sit with what it meant.

This stranger knew.

This man in a wrinkled white suit at a party I didn't want to be at knew the thing I had kept locked away for ten years like it was just something he had in his pocket. Casual. Easy. Like it was nothing.

"How do you know that," I said.

The words came out wrong. Too quiet. Too small.

"Because you don't buy that kind of poison in the slums," he said. "Your father didn't hide you out there because of a shipping debt." He paused. "He was hiding you from the people who killed your mother."

And there it was.

There it was.

I stood there and felt the ground shift under my feet even though I was standing on solid marble and nothing was actually moving. I felt it shift anyway. The whole picture of my life rearranging itself into a different shape. One I hadn't known about. One that had apparently been there the whole time underneath everything I thought I understood.

The deadbolts.

My father checking every window before bed every single night without explaining why. The midnight moves to new apartments with no warning and no reason given. The drills. The form over and over in the cold garage until my shins bled and he kept saying again Maevia again until you don't have to think about it. The strict rules about the same routes. The check-ins every four hours without fail.

I had thought that was just him.

I had thought that was just how he was. Careful. Cautious. Paranoid maybe. The kind of father who worried too much because he had already lost one person and didn't want to lose another.

I had thought it was love.

It was love.

But it was also something else.

It was a man who knew something terrible and had spent twenty years making sure I was equipped to survive it without ever telling me what it was. All those rules. All that training. All those nights I rolled my eyes at the drills and thought dad this is too much this is unnecessary nobody is coming for us we're nobody.

We weren't nobody.

We had never been nobody.

And he had known that the whole time and he had looked me in the face every single day and said nothing.

I didn't know how to feel about that.

I genuinely didn't know. It sat in the middle of my chest — the love of it and the betrayal of it all twisted together into something I couldn't separate. He had been protecting me. He had been lying to me. Both of those things were completely true at the same time and I didn't know which one to feel first.

"The poison," I said. My voice was very careful now. "Someone had to pay for it."

"Someone always does," Syris said. His eyes drifted across the room. Not pointing. Just drifting. Toward the heavy doors on the far side.

The meaning of it landed slowly.

Then all at once.

I was still working out what to do with it when the air behind me changed.

I didn't hear him coming. I never heard Varek coming. But something shifted — the air pressure, something — and then his smell reached me. Rain and bergamot and underneath both of those something darker.

A hand shot past my ear.

It closed around Syris's throat.

Varek didn't slow down. He walked forward and the hand went with him and Syris's feet left the floor and his back hit the marble pillar with a sound that cut right through the music and the noise and everything.

The room stopped.

Every glass. Every conversation. Every person.

Varek held Syris against the pillar with one hand. His knuckles white. His face giving nothing.

"You're breathing my air," he said. So quiet.

Syris hung there going dark in the face. His eyes stayed completely calm. Like a man who had planned for this exact moment and was waiting for the next part.

He tried to smile.

"She knows," Syris rasped.

Just that. Two words.

Varek went still.

Not his normal still. Something different. The still of a man who has just heard something hit the floor that he can't pick back up.

He looked at me.

I looked back at him.

And I kept my face completely still the way my father had taught me.

The father who had kept me in the dark for twenty years.

The father who had known everything and said nothing.

The Same father who had given me every tool to survive a war without ever telling me there was a war.

I kept my face still.

But behind my eyes I was somewhere else entirely.

"If you speak to her again," Varek said. Still looking at me. "I will come for everyone you have ever cared about. In the order that hurts most."

He let go.

Syris dropped. Fixed his jacket. Rolled his neck. Picked up a fresh glass from a passing tray like nothing had happened.

He looked at me over the rim.

Didn't say another word.

Turned and walked into the crowd and disappeared.

Varek turned to face me.

He looked at my face. Running the calculation. Working out how much I had put together.

"What did he say to you," he said.

I looked at him for a long moment.

This man who had my father somewhere in this building in a medical room.

This same man who Syris had just implied knew something about my mother. And The man whose face I was only now learning how to read.

"That the champagne here is excellent," I said.

I took a sip. Held his gaze over the rim.

Something moved behind his eyes. Not anger. Something that lived between anger and something else that didn't have a clean name.

He put his hand on my waist and turned me toward the door.

"We're leaving," he said quietly.

I let him steer me.

I thought about twenty years of deadbolts and drills and check-ins every four hours.

And about a man who had known everything and said nothing.

Then about the fact that another man this man Syris apparently knew things too.

And I was standing between them.

Like seriously nobody had asked me anything.

Nobody had ever even asked me anything at all.