Chapter 39: Alexander [1]

Alexander sat motionless, a shadow in the safehouse’s dim back room. He folded his hands over his lap, his face a perfect mask of nothing at all. Across from him, the girl bound to the chair glared with enough raw hatred to strip paint from the damp stone walls. She was maybe thirty-one, he guessed, older than most of the recruits he handled. Her face would have been striking under any other circumstance—not Raven’s face, nothing was Raven’s face, nothing ever would be again, but striking regardless. Her body held promise, plump thighs straining against the cheap fabric of her commoner’s dress, her breasts full enough to fill a man’s hands if she weren’t currently tied to a chair looking like she wanted to spit teeth. She didn’t speak. She just glared, jaw locked, her wrists raw against the rope.

He understood the hatred perfectly. He’d kidnapped her. He wasn’t confused about that. But there was a justification sitting underneath nearly everything he’d ever done, a clean, reasonable-sounding explanation he could produce on command. This was no different.

Felt. That was the reason she sat in this chair at all. The boy had wanted in, chasing some thrill he’d never earned, and Alexander had let him join on that basis alone. Half-baked recruits were still bodies, and the cause needed bodies regardless of their conviction. Then the boy had actually seen what the cause looked like up close—the fire, the aftermath, the parts that didn’t make it into the speeches—and decided, predictably, pathetically, that he wanted out. He’d gone straight to the authorities after his first job, sat down in some precinct to file a report on the people who trusted him. At the last possible second, he’d lost his nerve and walked out before submitting it. Coward’s math: brave enough to almost betray them, too much of a coward to actually finish. Alexander kept people watching every new recruit for exactly this reason, a standing arrangement, a man inside the police force who fed him anything worth knowing. When that man reported a fresh recruit walking in and walking back out, the conclusion wrote itself.

So he’d taken the sister. Simple. Efficient. Effective. The boy had everything—money, a doting sister who’d apparently paid for his education out of her own pocket, a decent life he threw away chasing a thrill he was too soft to stomach. None of that mattered anymore. Now the boy worked, properly, motivated by the one thing that actually motivated people: the certainty that refusal got someone they loved killed. Alexander didn’t call this cruelty. He wasn’t even sure it qualified as strategy. It was basic maintenance, the unglamorous administrative work of keeping an organization with real secrets from leaking them through the mouths of people who never should have been trusted.

The boy wouldn’t talk, not about anything real, not even under pressure. He cared about his sister too much. It didn’t matter. They were both going to die eventually, both of them. Not from any particular malice on Alexander’s part, nothing personal, just the plain, unavoidable arithmetic of never letting someone with insider knowledge walk free. He might let the sister go, shipped off to the Eastern Kingdom where border control ran tight enough that once she was out, she was out. A mercy, in its own narrow way. He told himself that was a mercy.

He sighed, a long, tired sound, and pressed both palms flat against his face. Doing this alone was exhausting in a way he never fully accounted for. Becoming what he’d become—because he wasn’t blind to it, whatever else people thought—had been genuinely terrible, in the specific, private way only he ever got to witness. He used to have someone to keep him honest. Someone who’d catch him drifting toward exactly this and pull him back before he crossed all the way over.

Raven. His sweet Raven. Why did she have to leave him? He remembered the specific curve of her ass under his hands, the perfect, athletic firmness of it. The surprising weight of her tits when she was on top of him, the way her short dark hair fell against his chest. Why did she have to be the one who left?

Yes, fine, he bombed a school. He could admit that much to himself in the privacy of his own head. But nobody died. Zero casualties, that was the whole design of it, a message and nothing more. The entire student body was conveniently off-site on a field trip that day, planned that way on purpose. A few teachers, sure, working late, unlucky timing, but no students, none. Which was basically zero casualties if you were being reasonable about what the number actually needed to mean. He dragged both hands down his face, breathing through something that wasn’t quite grief and wasn’t quite rage, some ugly hybrid he’d stopped trying to name.

He’d told his brothers and sisters in the Talons the bombing was about sending a message to the Academy, about visibility, about making the nobles feel unsafe inside their own walls for once. That was the official version, the one he’d delivered with total conviction. The real reason sat underneath that one, smaller and far more pathetic: he wanted a reason to get close to her again.

To see her.

Kiss her, hold her, feel the tight muscle of her thighs wrapped around his waist, hear her tell him, just once more, that he wasn’t the monster everyone else already knew he was.

He knew what she’d actually say if she ever saw him again.

She’d call him a monster to his face, plainly, without hesitation, and tell him he was too far gone to save.

He knew that.

He told himself he knew that, and some smaller, more honest part of him understood it was the truest thing he’d thought all day.

The door banged open before he could sit any longer inside that particular thought.

Felt. Alexander straightened instantly, the exhaustion sliding off his face like it was never there.