Because underneath the fury, there was a harder truth that she couldn't ignore.
Dave had eliminated every single immortal who posed a threat to her.
Tarik was dead. His heart ripped from his chest. The monster who had attacked her in the bar, and had bitten Dimitri and nearly killed him, was dead.
Tarik's four friends were also dead.
The ones who had surrounded her at the harbor, the ones who had stomped on her hand with all the weight of an immortal body, who had come with violence in their eyes and murder on their minds.
They were all dead, while she and Dimitri were alive.
Dave was brutal and ruthless and manipulative, but she owed her life to them.
"The question is why Dave did that," Dimitri said. "Petrov thinks they are in love with you."
She frowned. "In love with me?"
"His words, not mine."
"Dave. The eight-bodied merged consciousness that shows no individual emotions is in love with me."
"I told you that's what Petrov suggested."
"Petrov needs to lay off the vodka."
Dimitri huffed a laugh. "That's essentially what I told him."
She shook her head, but her mind was picking the idea apart. "He or they are not in love with me, Dimitri. They are not protecting me because they love me. They are protecting me because of you."
Dimitri nodded. "I agree."
"Without you, the Eight don't get the drugs they need to keep their sanity. They need you and Petrov to calibrate their doses, monitor their chemistry, and adjust the compounds when something shifts. If the Eight lose you or Petrov, they lose their lifeline."
He didn't interrupt. He just watched her with that quiet intensity that meant she had his full attention.
"And if you lose me," she continued, "what happens to you? Dave must have concluded that you would sink into depression and stop caring about the work, maybe stop functioning altogether. Dave is smart enough to understand that your emotional stability depends on me being alive and safe." She met his eyes. "I'm not the asset. I'm the asset's infrastructure. Dave is protecting his supply chain."
"That's exactly what I told Petrov," he said.
"Then we agree."
"We do." He paused. "Mostly."
"Mostly?"
He was quiet for a moment, his gaze drifting toward the stairwell at the end of the hall, then back to her. "Your reasoning is sound. It's probably the primary explanation. But I have a feeling there's more to it."
"Like what?"
"I can't put my finger on it." He shook his head. "Dave is something that has never existed before. A consciousness born from the merging of eight separate minds, running on drugs that we designed to stabilize the merge, but that may have had effects we never anticipated. Applying human labels like love is probably wrong, but assuming that his behavior can be fully explained by cold calculation is probably wrong, too. He's evolving, Mattie. Every day, I see something in the Eight that wasn't there the day before. What if the merged consciousness has developed something that we don't have a word for? Something that's not love and not calculation, but some third thing that we can't understand because nothing like Dave has ever existed before?"
She didn't have an answer for that, and the question unsettled her.
Dave was their protector. Dave was also, possibly, their puppeteer. And somewhere in the gap between those two roles lay something none of them understood.
"Whatever Dave's reasons are," she said, "we need him. And he needs you. That's the equation we work with."
"I agree."
