Celeste's POV
The print floor smelled the way rooms like that always do afterward, copper and bleach fighting each other for which one got to be the last thing you noticed. Petrov had been arranged, not simply killed, throat opened clean, hands folded over his chest like a man laid out for a wake he hadn't earned, a single playing card tucked into his breast pocket where any of my people would find it.
The queen of spades. Dario Voss's calling card, the same one he'd left pinned to Kane's chest seven months ago in a warehouse not unlike this one.
I stood over Petrov's body longer than I needed to, because I recognized the message underneath the message: I can still reach whatever you think you control. Dario Voss had gotten a man killed inside a building my own people had swept floor to ceiling before dawn, which meant either a hole in my own ranks or a reach on his part I hadn't accounted for, and neither possibility was one I intended to sit with quietly.
Standing over that body, some ugly, unguarded part of me was almost grateful for it. That a fresh outrage from Dario Voss gave me somewhere new to put seven months of grief that had never fully found a floor to land on.
"The other captive," Claire suddenly said, remembering him suddenly, sharply, the way you remember something you'd set down and nearly forgotten you were holding. "Where is he?"
"They put him in the Guest wing, north side." I told her, "Arden walked him up an hour ago."
And then it hit me. What if he killed him too?
I rushed off to find the location where shorter captive was. I reached the room where he was kept and saw him already staring at me.
He held himself like a man who had already decided fighting wouldn't save him, and was choosing instead to watch, to learn, to wait. The stillness of someone who'd survived by being underestimated his whole life and had gotten good at it.
"What happens to me now?" he finally talked for the first time since he arrived.
"That depends entirely on how useful you turn out to be," I told him.
In the doorway of the room I found Dax, someone I trusted, and told him to move the prisoner closer to our residence. He was to be guarded by him and not left alone. I meant to leave it there. We had a body in the print room and a mole somewhere in our own walls and I had no particular interest, that morning, in one more captive. He caught the door before it closed.
"Someone died," he said. Not a question. "that's why you're moving me. I heard it in how everyone's walking."
I studied him for a moment longer than I needed to. Most captives asked about themselves first. He'd asked about the house instead. "It isn't your concern."
I filed him away in my head and went back out to find whoever inside my own house had decided Dario Voss's money was worth more than my trust.
Claire's Pov
I picked up the page. A clerk's shaky handwriting two names circled, the words hold, pending collection beside each of them.
I looked at Celeste. "So, it was them?"
Celeste nodded. "The pretty one you took a fancy to. And the short one."
"You're telling me the man currently in my bed was important to bring down Dario Voss" I said, "you knew that three days before you let me take him."
"I knew there was a photograph and a date," Celeste said. "I didn't know what it meant. I still don't. That's rather the point of investigating something instead of guessing at it."
"You could have mentioned it."
"You could have asked whose file you were stealing him out of instead of turning it into a wager," she said, and I had, annoyingly, no good answer for that.
I studied my sister for a long moment. I have known her our whole lives, and I know the particular stillness she gets when she's decided something and is only walking me toward agreeing with her rather than actually asking my opinion.
"You want to keep digging."
"I want to know what Dario Voss wanted badly enough to put his name on the order," she said. "That's not sentiment, Claire. That's information. And information about Dario Voss is worth considerably more to us than two warm bodies would fetch on the open market."
"Then whatever he wanted from them matters."
"Enough that he was willing to put his name on the order."
"Exacly."
"Fine," I said. "We keep them. We watch them. The moment either of them stops being useful, they go back to being exactly what they were the night we took them."
"Agreed," Celeste said, too quickly, and something in the speed of it snagged at me even then, though I didn't press it that night. I have wondered since whether I simply didn't want to know the answer yet, or whether I genuinely believed, standing in that study, that my sister's only interest here was strategy. I think it was some of both. Celeste does not lie to me often, but she is considerably better than I am at telling the truth in a way that leaves out the parts that matter most.
I only knew that my sister wanted to keep digging into a dangerous man's business, and that I, for reasons considerably less noble than protecting two strangers, wanted to let her.