Page 82 of The Viper
“I don’t know.”
“Then what do you know?” she demanded, voice cracking. “You disappeared. I couldn’t reach you. Now I’m sitting in a fortress, talking about men who break into my house and say your name. Tell me what’s going on.”
I pressed my fingers to my temples. “It’s complicated.”
“It always is with you.”
The words stung. Not because they were cruel, but because they were true.
I stood, pacing to the window. The early morning light had grown stronger now, washing the room in pale gold. Beyond theglass, the harbor shimmered faintly in the distance. Everything looked so peaceful, it almost felt cruel.
I kept my forehead against the window glass. “It’s not nothing,” I said. “But I don’t know how to explain it without … without making it sound worse.”
“Try me,” Hannah said. Her voice had that hoarse, brave edge I knew too well—the sound you make when you’re holding yourself together with your teeth.
“You already know Lucas,” I began, turning back to her.
“I do,” she said.
I sank to the mattress beside her, the blanket rasping under my palms. “He’s … a lot.”
“He’s a soldier with eyes that count exits,” she said, and even in her exhaustion she was efficient, accurate. “And the way he looks at you, Lexi? I noticed that, too.”
Heat rose under my skin. “I know.”
She studied me for several long seconds, something softer loosening in her expression. “You love him.”
It didn’t feel like a question, so I didn’t treat it like one. “I do.”
Hannah exhaled, a fragile little laugh that had nothing to do with humor. “Then what? We learn how to live with … this?” She gestured vaguely at the room, at the house, at the invisible war that had reached into her bedroom.
A knock brushed the door. It opened three inches and Atlas filled the gap.
“Sorry to interrupt.”
He held a steaming mug and a folded sweatshirt in hands that looked capable of gentleness and ruin in equal measure. “Tea. And something warm.”
As he stepped closer, the light caught on a wedding band—new, bright gold, still holding the faint polish of recent vows. It gleamed against the roughness of his hand, an unexpected softness on a man who looked otherwise carved for battle.I couldn’t help wondering what kind of woman he’d married—someone strong enough to meet that steadiness head-on, maybe, or someone who’d learned how to calm storms without breaking herself in the process.
“Thank you,” I said.
He crossed the room with quiet precision, set the mug within Hannah’s reach, and nodded toward the sweatshirt. “If you stay here, you won’t be bothered.”
Hannah’s fingers closed around the mug like it was a lifeline. “Is Lucas?—?”
Atlas’s gaze flicked to me before returning to Hannah. “He’s with Noah and his team. We’ll brief you when there’s something worth saying.”
It wasn’t evasive so much as merciful.We’ll brief you when there’s something worth sayingmight as well have been stamped into the marble downstairs. Dominion Hall didn’t gossip. It contained.
“Thank you,” I said again, because it was the only safe sentence in my mouth. Atlas’s eyes—steady, assessing—lingered on my sister’s face a heartbeat longer, as if recording the exact shade of her bruises for later vengeance. Then he stepped back into the hall. The door clicked.
Hannah lifted the mug and hissed when the heat touched her split lip. I took it, blew across the surface until steam stopped spiraling, then handed it back. She sipped, eyes shut, and in that moment she looked like she had when we were kids—barely asleep, pretending not to be afraid of thunder while I counted in the dark and tried to decide who to be for both of us.
“You asked what I know.” I tucked the blanket more snugly around her shoulders. “Dominion Hall is … complicated. Big money. Ex-military brothers who built something powerful. They have enemies.”
“Do you trust them?” she asked.
“With my life,” I said, and heard how young I sounded.
