Chapter Twenty-Eight
I sat in the back of the armored Range Rover expecting to enter Lex Luthor’s den. We pulled into the sort ofsubterranean garage that only existed in spy novels.
The men in suits hadn’t asked further questions, and I hadn’t prompted. Once I was in their care, I was either dead meat or an honored guest. There was no advantage to annoying them. There was an NPC quality to the driver and the passenger as I eyed them, trying to get a sense of their personality from any micro-expression, the tick of a jaw, the flex of a knuckle. They had none.
The driver killed the car, and I waited for him to open my door.
I’d done this. I’d chosen this. But I didn’t feel ready.
“Come on,” one of the men coaxed. The moment my feet hit the sealed concrete, they began patting me down. The driver grabbed my phone from my back pocket and handed it to the passenger. He ran his hands up and down my legs, and I began to sweat. The sølje was tucked into my waistband. My heart skipped as he paused at my pocket.
Shit.
He didn’t ask me to empty my pocket. His hand plunged directly into it to fish out a tiny golden poppet. He looked at the figurine, then at me. I kept my mouth shut, but my stomach rolled. The poppet had gotten me into trouble once, but it had gotten me out of impossible odds on more thanone occasion.
I guessed I was going to have to be my own guardian angel.
I couldn’t think of a single time in my life I’d been more outwardly anxious. I wasn’t oblivious to the fact that I was concealing the cold sweat poorly. There was an obvious tremble to my hands. I tripped over every other word. One of the NPCs looked over his shoulder, pausing with an almost-human quality as he pressed his thumb into the keypad that would lead us from the garage to whatever lay beyond. He inhaled slowly. His glance remained obscured by the sunglasses that were no longer necessary.
When the security system’s melodic beep chimed his acceptance, we both dropped whatever could have been. I wouldn’t be making an excuse as to how I was a lost tourist on unknown land. I wouldn’t be escaping through the side door. I’d made my bed, and I’d arrived to lie in it.
I wasn’t sure what I expected when the door opened.
Magma, maybe.
I readied myself for computerized walls, for robot servants, for a mysterious, sexy woman dripping in diamonds to serve champagne.
Instead, they led me through a dimly lit hall that felt surprisingly cramped. It was dark and disorganized, like I was pinned between my grandma’s laundry room and closet as I shuffled to get to the kitchen in the middle of the night. I didn’t protest as one guided my arm through the gloom, though a nostalgic part of me waited for someone to ask me to take off my shoes.
We rounded a corner before I saw the first sign of light.
It wasn’t an ominous, cavernous blackness. It was the lights-off hall of someone who couldn’t be bothered to keep the breakers on. I made out the dark gray shapes of open-concept couches and furniture in obscure shades of shadow. It was a big home, but not one filled with lasers and iron suits and weapons.
This was bored money.
The homeowner paid me no mind as I entered the room.
A pool of dim yellow light illuminated a man in his forties or fifties. He propped himself over his book, scarcely interested enough to look up at our arrival. He had a close-cropped salt-and-pepper beard, wore a black button-up shirt, and had features that did nothing to hide his lines of age, nor obscure the fact that he’d lived a full life, while still embracing the body and posture of someone who commanded a presence. He looked up from a rounded glass drink that may have been vodka or may have been water.
He glanced beyond me to address the lead NPC.
“Who did you bring?”
The driver hadn’t released my elbow. He wasn’t rough as he tugged me forward. “She claims she’s…” Perhaps he possessed enough sentience to realize how ridiculous it would sound to parrot what I’d said on the road. He had an impressive control of his throat, as his redirect sounded nothing like a nervous swallow. It was more like he’d been inconvenienced by a loose granule in his throat before coughing it free enough to say, “She’s seeking an audience with you. She says you have a common goal.”
The stranger looked up from his clear drink and examined me. “You believed her?”
The NPC released my elbow. He straightened his shoulders. “I did. I mean, I do, sir.” He procured the poppet and plopped it onto the countertop.
The man eyed the figurine; then his gaze slid from it as if he couldn’t be bothered. He flicked two free fingers of his drink-grasping hand, and the NPCs disappeared. I couldn’t ascertain whether they’d left or just vanished. I wasn’t fully certain I’d so much as heard them close the door. But at once, we were alone.
“Well, come in,” the man said with the sort of exhausted sigh that came from any introvert who neither wanted nor expected company.
I stopped myself from confirming that he was the serpent. This was his lair, after all. I would only win his game once I learned his rules.
I ran through a million thoughts in a fraction of a second. The first was that there was no way a titan lived in these lights-off conditions. I panicked that I’d come upon an innocent man who had no concept of gods or demons or wars. I forced myself to remember that Estrid’s…honingwhateverhad brought her to Ella. I reminded myself once more that I was in an obsidian cube half-buried in the earth. This was no humble man’s home.
“And you are?” he asked with the sort of wearied irreverence that had me questioning my presence for the millionth time. He was handsome, but not astonishingly so. He was well dressed, but not notably. He studied my face long enough for me to count the crinkles of lines in his. He reminded me of a black-and-white actor who’d stepped from the movies, as if his life had been perpetually frozen in the most glamorous, desolate point in a film. He was aged and beautiful, but in a way that was both confusing and hopeless. Nothing about this man or his home screamed wealth, murderer, or kidnapper.
