Page 98 of The Silent War

I didn’t thank him. Admiration was not what I wanted. Agreement was.

He lifted his glass. “Perhaps there is strength in it. To raise one’s own blood. To write your hand into the spine instead of letting it write you.”

The rest of the meal blurred. He asked about books I’d read. I asked about ports his family controlled. Polite exchanges, practiced phrases. Yet the word he had said—theirs, ours—stayed in my chest like a stone.

When I rose from the table, he stood as well. Formal. Already a shadow of tomorrow’s negotiations.

“I look forward to seeing how far you’ll take these terms,” he said.

I inclined my head. “As far as I must.”

After dinner, drinks were offered. Which only meant one thing. He wanted me to charm him, entertain him.

Chapter Thirty

LUCA

Bastion was out.

Half a bottle of whiskey and a night of holding the city together had ripped him under in thirty minutes. He was on his side, arm thrown across the sheets like he expected her to be there. He twitched now and then, some fragment of a fight replaying, but he slept. He deserved to.

When he drank like that, I never let him sleep alone. Not since we were teenagers. Heavy whiskey meant his chest slowed, meant his body sank too deep, meant I lay awake cataloguing every breath and waiting for the one that didn’t come.

Pride said he could handle it. My paranoia said he’d choke, quit breathing, leave me with silence I couldn’t crawl out of. So even when he passed out face-down, I kept a hand near him.

Four-oh-eight. Two hours since we walked in. I couldn’t sleep.

So I reached for the phone.

Habit. Compulsion. Religion. Call it any word you want; it was the one thing I trusted when my control stopped feeling like control and started feeling like drowning.

Swipe. Open. Her dot steady, right where it should be:Alexander’s penthouse. Security we vetted. Staff we replaced. Windows we upgraded. Locks we changed. If she had to sleep anywhere that wasn’t between us, it would be under our systems. Under my eyes we controlled.

She was safe.

It should have been enough.

It never was.

My thumb hovered over the microphone icon. The line that turned location into proof of life. One second, I told myself. One breath. Just listen. The way I listened when we were kids and Bastion and I pressed our palms to iron bars to make sure the other was still breathing on the other side of the dark.

I told myself no.

I clicked anyway.

Static. Then the softest inhale. A held pause. The gentle fall. Again. Again. The rhythm I knew better than my own pulse.

Good girl.

I took my first real breath all night. The vice around my ribs loosened. I lay there with the phone to my ear, and I counted her breaths like prayer.

Then the other sound slipped in.

A voice.

Male.

Not Alexander. Not family. Not anyone who should have been there.