Page 44 of Queen of Volts

What Harvey didn’t understand as a child was that, in his family, no favors were free.

Zula Slyk’s weary eyes narrowed. “You’re a little old for these errands, aren’t you?”

“I’ve still got a lot to make up for,” Harvey managed. Something painful shot through his chest, but he couldn’t tell if it was the omerta or his own guilt. He tried to imagine his parents’ reactions to hearing him twist the Faith in such a way.

They would’ve been proud, he thought sickly.

Zula’s expression softened, and she opened the door. “I have a broken faucet.”

Harvey followed her inside what appeared to be a newspaper office, with worn gray carpet, a press, and several empty desks. On a weekday afternoon, an office like this one should have been busy with people at work, but Zula was alone, just as Harrison had promised she’d be. It made Harvey wonder how she’d ended up that way, if anyone would mourn her after he left.

She led him upstairs to a cramped apartment treated more like a storage unit than a home. The clutter had layers—stacks and piles, the sort of dishevelment that could be measured in years of accumulation. Much of it paper.

Easy to burn.

Sweat trickled down Harvey’s neck as she led him to the bathroom. “It hasn’t worked in years,” she said, then she turned the gunked-up handles to show him. No water poured out. “I’ve been using the one in the kitchen.”

Harvey stared at Zula, at the woman he’d been ordered to kill, if only because he felt he ought to. The sweater she wore hung on her, its elbows patched. Her nails had been bitten down, the skin around them uneven and scabbed. She didn’t take care of herself, just like she didn’t take care of her home. So how had such a recluse received one of Bryce’s cards?

“Years is a long time,” he said quietly.

She gave him a harsh look. “Just fix the faucet—Idon’t need fixing.” She reached into the hall closet and pulled out a toolbox, then set it on the lid of the toilet. “You can fix my kitchen radiator next, if it makes you feel that much better.” Then she left him to his work.

Harvey crouched on the bathroom floor, and his hands shook as he opened the cabinet beneath the sink. He didn’t know if it was better or worse that she’d left him alone. He would’ve only felt sorrier if she’d spoken to him, if he’d gotten to know her. But when alone, his thoughts drifted.

To Bryce, always to Bryce.

Stories are tools, Harvey, Bryce had told him four years ago, not long after they’d first met. Harvey remembered, even then, how much he’d been drawn to him. How the red of Bryce’s eyes made him more curious than horrified, and how that in turn made him shameful. He’d just broken up with Reymond Kitamura then—by all accounts, not a nice boy, either. But the unholiness of Bryce’s talent seemed worse.Not every Faithful believes every story. You don’t have to choose to believe the ones about malisons.

But it wasn’t so simple, choosing what to believe and what to ignore.

Harvey was quite good at fixing things, over his years of good deeds. He laid down on his back, his head beneath the sink, and gazed up at the rusted pipes. He liked working with his hands. It was honest work, not the sort he did with his smile.

Working with his hands could usually distract him, but not today. He trembled with each twist of the wrench—it might as well have been the twist of a knife into Zula’s side. Nausea coiled in his stomach, but when he paused to steady himself, the omerta’s grasp tightened around his neck, forcing him on.

If I hadn’t made that deal with Harrison, Bryce would have died, Harvey reminded himself.Vianca would have killed him before Harrison killed her.

His mother had always told him that evil collected evil. If Harvey hadn’t loved Bryce, he would never have made that deal, and he wouldn’t be tricking an old woman into her own murder now. He wouldn’t be standing complicit as Bryce waged war on the whole city.

He should’ve let Bryce die.

Harvey dropped the wrench, letting it clatter to the grimy floor tiles.I won’t do this.

The omerta answered. Harvey didn’t resist it—in fact, he welcomed it, even as the pressure pushed at the corners of his lungs and it felt like his chest was collapsing, his ribs folding down like an accordion.

The pain was a relief. After all, Harvey liked fixing things—he was good at it. But for years now, Bryce had only seen Harvey not as a friend, not a lover, but a tool, and Harvey didn’t know how to change that. He had nostrengthto change that.

But if he died here, he wouldn’t need to—it would simply stop. The omerta would even do it for him. It wouldn’t be as easy as falling asleep and never waking up, but at least his death would not be his responsibility.

Fifty seconds of suffocating passed. Tears and fog blurred Harvey’s vision, and a pain shot from the top of his spine and over his skull. It pounded behind his eyes, like they’d burst from their sockets.

Still, he waited. He didn’t have the breath to sob.

Then, suddenly, the omerta lifted its hold. Shocked, Harvey sat up abruptly, knocking his head painfully on the sink, and leaned over, gasping. He vomited into the toilet.

“No,” he whispered shakily, his cheek pressed against the toilet seat. He wiped the tears from his eyes. “Please.”

Bryce had told him how omertas worked, how he’d felt Vianca’s chokehold until he did what she ordered, or how his body sometimes acted of its own accord. But it was as if this omertaknewwhat Harvey planned. Like it wouldn’t let him do this, not until he finished what he’d been sent here to do.