Page 37 of Daggermouth

The Veyra guard forced her into a high-backed chair facing the desk, then withdrew, door closing with a vacuum hiss.

Maximus didn’t look up.

He signed a document with an antique pen, then pressed his thumb to a scanner. The silence stretched on, punctuated only by the slow pulse of her own pain. She wouldn’t be the one to break the silence, wouldn’t give him any reason to think she feared him.

Instead, Shadera considered leaping across the desk, and wrapping her broken hands around his throat, but the weight of her injuries pinned her in place.

He finished with the paperwork, then sat back and regarded her in silence. The mask made it impossible to read him, but she felt the weight of his attention as surely as a gun barrel at her temple.

When he finally spoke, the voice was cultured, refined, but empty of warmth.

“You are Shadera Kael,” he said. “A Daggermouth.”

She said nothing.

“Daggermouths have killed many of my men over the years. You personally have destroyed Veyra property valued at millions of credits. You attempted to assassinate my son.” He let the words hang in the air, as if listing the items on a shopping list.

Her lip curled. “I’d do anything to make the Heart bleed.”

It probably wasn’t the wisest response if she was hoping to live, but she didn’t expect she’d see her thirty-first birthday at the rate she was going.

His mask tilted. “You have damaged the future of this city. It’s a far greater injury than any you could inflict with a bullet.”

He stood then, slow and calculated, every movement calibrated for effect. He circled the desk, stopping just in front of her. The mask’s eyes bored into her, reflecting back the animal heat of her hatred.

Without warning, Maximus reached up and removed his mask, and the air in the room seemed to freeze.

Shadera saw this for what it was. His attempt to assert dominance, to flaunt his power. To tell her without words—he was the Heart and the laws did not apply to him.

His face was nothing like Greyson’s. There was no glimpse of softness, no humanity left. Maximus Serel was a blade honed to its final edge—skin stretched tight over high, predatory cheekbones, eyes a colorless gray that revealed nothing. His hair was a perfect silver, not a strand out of place, and the lines that scored his face were proof of a long life of repeated victory.

He gazed at her with the interest of a man examining a new strain of disease under glass.

Shadera forced herself to meet his eyes, refusing to look away even as the old terror surged up from her childhood. There’d been stories, always, of what Maximus did to the rebels he caught before he took them to the execution platform. Of the torture he inflicted before taking their final breaths for all of New Found Haven to witness.

He reached down and gripped her chin, forcing her head up. His fingers were cold, soft—evidence of a life lived in luxury. He turned her face left, then right, as if cataloging the wounds.

“You look nothing like I expected,” he said, releasing her. “I remember your parents, you are the product of their fraternization between rings.”

She swallowed back a snarl at his words, using every ounce of strength she had left not to let the rage explode from every pore.

Shadera bit her tongue to stay silent.

“Why are you still alive? Do you know?” he asked, folding his arms over his chest.

“I don’t care,” she snapped, spitting a clot of blood at his shoe. “I’m not afraid of the Heart, and I’m not afraid of your unmasked face. You don’t scare me,Mr. President.”

Maximus knelt, the movement so smooth it was almost a dance. He wiped the blood from his shoe with a handkerchief, then tossed the cloth into her lap.

“My face is not what you should fear, Shadera Kael.” He straightened. “You arenothingbut a cockroach, and the only reason you’re not dead is because I have use for what you do next.”

He turned away, replacing the mask as the doors to his office hissed open.

Greyson Serel entered the room and Shadera’s body reacted before her mind did. She bolted upright, pain radiating through her side as she stared at the man she’d shot point blank.

“You,” she growled at Greyson as Maximus returned to his seat behind the desk, regarding them.

Greyson’s back straightened, his eyes darting to his father then back to her, his own surprise evident in his body language.