The Devil You Know

by Kit Rocha

  “Word to the wise, man—she means it.”

  “I know.” Mace pulled up a stool and sat, facing him. “So. If you were sparring with Maya, why didn’t you get her to help you down here?”

  Gray stifled a groan. “No. I mean, I never want her to see me like this, but now? She’d assume that I pushed too hard with her training and that it was all her fault.”

  Mace snorted. “Well, it’s not. It’s yours.”

  Gray scoffed, taken aback by the blunt words. “I forgot what an assface you can be sometimes, man.”

  Mace waved that off, his face screwed up into a grimace of disgust. “Shut up. I can’t do my job if I have to tiptoe around your feelings, and this job? It’s the one thing I’m good at.” He paused, then dropped his gaze. “The only thing I have left.”

  Feeling properly chastened, Gray inclined his head. “Fine. I’m sorry, I overdid it. But it was just a little training, nothing major.”

  “Nothing major,” Mace echoed, then sighed again. This time, when he spoke, it wasn’t tough love that filled his gruff voice but something gentler, scarier—quiet compassion. “Your condition is progressive. You’ll have good and bad days, but on the whole, time isn’t your friend. You’re deteriorating. It’s a process, and it isn’t going to stop.”

  The room was so cold that Gray shivered, and he rubbed at his bare arms. He wasn’t stupid. He knew he was dying—but that was just it. He knew it, the way he knew the universe was infinite or that the world was billions of years old. It was a formless thing, an unfathomable fact he recognized to be true without truly comprehending it.

  Because it was fucking incomprehensible. How was he supposed to feel this impossible truth in his gut, where it counted? Death had to remain distant, a nebulous thing that Would Happen Someday but didn’t bear closer scrutiny. Anything else was paralyzing. If he faced it, he couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, because every breath he drew was one fewer left in his life.

  He wasn’t just going to die; he was dying, hour by hour, bit by bit. It was happening to him every day, this slow slide that he still couldn’t manage to comprehend.

  And, despite his determination not to add to Maya’s collection of perfect, incandescently terrible memories, she was going to watch it happen.

  So he did what any cornered animal would do—he fought. “I feel fine most of the time.”

  “Yes.”

  The sheer lack of argument drained some of his anger, his frustration. His panic. “I feel fine most of the time,” he said again, then went on. “But I’m still dying.”

  “But you’re still dying.” Mace smiled, commiseration in the truest sense of the word. “It’s the great irony of the human condition. We all die, but none of us know how to do it.”

  “So … what do I do?”

  Mace arched an eyebrow. “Didn’t I just say no one fucking knows?”

  “Jesus Christ, Mace.”

  “All right, all right.” He eased his chair closer and laid his hand on Gray’s shoulder. “You take the time you have left, and you live it. I’ll get Conall to go in hard on the Protectorate medical archives, see if we can find anything that might help. Even if we can’t save you, we can probably give you more time.”

  There was that panic again. “I don’t want to be helpless. I don’t want to be lying in a bed, hooked up to a bunch of shit, not knowing what the hell is going on. I don’t want to be gone but still breathing.”

  “I wouldn’t let that happen to you,” Mace soothed. “To any of you.”

  No false hope. No maybes. Perversely, it helped. “Okay. I guess I just have to…” He trailed off.

  “Gray?”

  He couldn’t hold back his slightly morbid grin. “I was gonna say learn to live with it, but shit. I guess not.”

  “That’s it.” Mace rose. “Get out. Get out of my clinic.”

  Gray had been through things that would have broken most people—being orphaned, growing up alone and terrified—and he’d faced it head-on. He’d never turned away from a hard truth in his life, and he wasn’t going to start with his death.

  He just hoped he didn’t bring Maya down with him when he finally fell.

  AVA

  There was a man brooding on the roof of her sister’s building.

  No, best to be precise.

  There was a dead man brooding on the roof of her sister’s building.

  Ava perched in the shadows, balanced effortlessly on the edge of the building in spite of the three-inch heels on her boots and the heavy bag slung across her body. Her favorite point of entry into the warehouse was on the opposite side of the roof, and she’d expected a clean shot at it.

  Instead, it was being guarded by a ghost.

  Several months ago, Ava had made a tactically questionable decision. After undergoing years of torture and captivity, she’d escaped only to discover that her beloved sister, far from being dead, was alive and well and living a comfortable life with a new family in Atlanta.

  She had not taken Nina’s apparent abandonment well. In retrospect, she could acknowledge her emotional response to this discovery had been … less than ideal. Ava did not like admitting to having acted irrationally, but the string of increasingly reckless decisions she’d made while in the grip of rage and grief had been unfortunately extreme.

  A rational person might have approached Nina. Ava had decided to have her retrieved. Of course, most of the people you could hire to kidnap someone with Nina’s unique capabilities were hardly the sort of people she’d have wanted manhandling her sister, no matter their current degree of estrangement. But Captain Garrett Knox had presented such an intriguing prospect. So irrationally noble. So nauseatingly idealistic. So conveniently on the run from the TechCorps.

  So emotionally compromised.

  Security on the TechCorps intranet wasn’t the hardest she’d ever cracked, though she gave Tobias Richter full credit for being the nastiest. The traps he’d laid were elegant, devious, and vicious. She’d learned a thing or two by narrowly avoiding them.

  During her deep dive into exploring Captain Knox’s pressure points, she’d learned of his ultimate weakness. Being forced to witness the slow and brutal death of his team’s medic had left Knox with an almost compulsive need to protect the remaining members of his squad. Ava had leveraged that against him.

  Which made the fact that said medic was standing ten meters away problematic.

  It also made him a threat to Nina.

  Moving silently, she eased the strap over her head and set her bag and its precious cargo down on the roof. The shadows were deep this late at night, with the moon’s silvery glow falling at a sharp angle, but it shone on the medic.

  Whatever the TechCorps had done to him had been brutal—and recent. Time would ease some of the deep lines of pain carved into his face and the way he stood as if everything hurt. She’d been an emaciated wraith with dead eyes for those first six months after escaping, too.

  The outside would heal. The inside? Well, some things not even time could fix.

  A piece of gravel scraped under the heel of her boot, only a whisper of sound, but he stiffened, his head turning.

  His gaze locked on her, pale and flashing in the scant moonlight. Ava drew her gun in one smooth movement and aimed for his head, her finger already caressing the trigger. It was a struggle not to shoot. Her instincts screamed for it. Every muscle trembled, her body eager to eliminate the danger before his presumed risk could become a tactical certainty.

  It was the logical thing to do. But Nina would be disappointed if Ava shot Knox’s unarmed friend in cold blood just because he was clearly here to hurt them.

  Trying to avoid disappointing Nina was exhausting.

  The medic was still watching her. Ava eased her finger off the trigger enough that she wouldn’t shoot him by mistake and tilted her head. “You’re supposed to be dead.”

  “Likewise.” His voice hovered somewhere between interest and boredom. The one thing it lacked completely w
as concern—for his own welfare, or for her sudden appearance.

  Ava knew that numbness well. Worse, she knew how lethal it could be. “So, James Mason. I know why I’m still alive. Why are you?”

  The corner of his mouth ticked up, and he turned back toward the distant lights of the Hill. “I thought you were supposed to be the smart one.”

  “And I thought you were supposed to be a decent man. And yet, here you are. Clearly a danger to your friends. And my sister.” Anger flattened her voice. “I assume you at least dealt with active trackers. Do you know how to scan for passive ones?”

  He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he turned his entire, surprisingly big body toward hers. He was slender but quite tall, and those attributes combined gave him an air of slim, wiry strength. Of course, his center of balance was too high. If she had to take him down, she’d go in low, knock him off his feet and over her shoulder.

  She was halfway through analyzing the best places to kick him while he was down when he arched one eyebrow at her, a look of wry disbelief, as if he couldn’t believe she was still calculating the most efficient way to murder him.

  Odd. He’d seemed rather intelligent in his file.

  Ava had no intention of letting his amusement distract her from risk assessment. “I’ll assume even Knox is smart enough to have dealt with the passive trackers. What about radioactive isotopes? The military bases out west inject those to track their genetic experiments.”

  He made a quiet, mildly disgusted noise and gestured behind her. “What’s in the bag?”

  She didn’t take her eyes off him. “A debt I owe. Stop dodging my questions. I understand Knox is too soft to eliminate a threat to his family, but I’m not. Tell me why I shouldn’t shoot you now and get it over with.”

  For the span of several heartbeats, he merely stared out at the patchy lights of the city. “Do they ask you that?” he said finally. “Every time you show up, unannounced, to be creepy all over their idyllic existence?”

  She couldn’t argue with his characterization of her activities. It felt like a profoundly accurate assessment. “Only the smart ones. Mostly Dani. That’s why I like Dani.”

  “Fair.” He nodded decisively. “I make it a point never to lie, so I’m not going to answer your question—if that even qualified as a question. You do whatever you have to do.”

  It would have been nice if he’d given her an excuse. Or at least a plausible explanation for Nina. If she shot him now, while he was just brooding on the roof …

  Her finger drifted toward the trigger anyway.

  And he moved.

  His speed was uncanny. He had the gun out of her hand before she realized he’d lunged. Ava didn’t fight to keep hold of it. She slammed the heel of her hand toward his nose, assessing his response even as he swung up an arm to block. She used his distraction to kick her gun out of his hand and barely escaped large fingers closing around her ankle.

  He fought dirty. No testing feints or honor, and he knew where to jab to make it hurt. She barely avoided a blow that would have numbed her arm to the elbow and jammed the hard heel of her boot down where his instep had been a fraction of a second earlier. There was no style to assess here, no thought or strategy behind his movements.

  This was pure feral instinct. Cunning and ruthless. So damn fast. Survival in its purest form.

  Nothing was deadlier. She should know.

  It was over in seconds. His massive hand closed around her throat and she let it, absorbing the impact as he slammed her back against the wall. Her boot knife was already in her fingers, and she let the lethally honed edge kiss the skin beneath his Adam’s apple. When he swallowed, a tiny, red line appeared.

  “So,” she said, studying him curiously. “You do care if you live.”

  “Do I?” Casual words, devoid of anger or fear or even exertion. “I thought I was proving a point.”

  “I’m sure you did.” His grip at her throat was precise. A casual, efficient warning. She likely wouldn’t even have bruises. She supposed a medic knew exactly how much pressure was required as a threat and how hard to squeeze to incapacitate. “Not everyone cares, you know. Not right away. Richter must have had you, what? Eight months, at least? Plenty of time to carve the will to survive right out of you.”

  “Ah, the voice of experience.”

  “Not particularly. It wasn’t the pain that broke me. It was what I did to make it stop.” She raised one challenging eyebrow at him. “What did you do to make it stop, James Mason?”

  For the first time, he eyed her with something that almost looked like … sympathy? “The point is that I’m in control now. If that changes, I’ll reassess. Either that satisfies you, or…”

  Her pulse beat a little faster against his palm. Not because of the physical threat, but the damnable pity in his eyes. Choking her out was fine, but if he thought he could feel sorry for her …

  She locked her elbow to keep her arm steady, mostly to keep from slicing his throat to escape that look. “Or what?”

  “Or we resolve this now.” The arm not raised to her throat flexed, and the dull edge of a blade pressed against her left flank, just over her kidney.

  She glanced down. The knife had a familiar hilt, twin to the one she was holding to his throat. He’d gotten her second boot knife at some point, and turned it against her.

  Impressive.

  Not impressive enough, granted. No matter how surgical his strike, she had a better chance of living long enough to get treatment for a kidney laceration than he did of surviving a slit throat. She had the tactical advantage and, at this point, all the rationalization she needed to follow through on the kill. Surely Nina couldn’t argue that a knife jabbed in her kidney wasn’t provocation enough for self-defense.

  Except … Nina might. Because Nina would never believe Ava had been helpless. Nina wouldn’t make the so-often-fatal mistake of underestimating her. Nina would know Ava could have resolved this without killing Mace and would expect her to do so unless vulnerable lives were on the line.

  Not disappointing Nina really was exhausting.

  She eased the blade from his throat and let her arm fall away. “I’m going to scan you for radioactive isotopes. And passive trackers. And everything else I can think of.”

  “Not even planning on buying me dinner first? Shameful.”

  She couldn’t tell if he was mocking her or hitting on her. The latter would be continued evidence of self-destructive tendencies, which made it plausible. She used the flat of her blade to shove away the hand still holding a knife pointed at her kidney. “I’m not the sister who feeds strays.”

  “Duly noted.” He flipped her boot knife and offered it to her, hilt-first. “Welcome home.”

  She could still feel the ghost of his fingers at her throat. That would be a good reminder not to forget he was dangerous. She accepted her knife and sheathed both of them, using the familiar movement to ground her. “It’s not home,” she started, but when she turned she realized she was addressing an empty roof.

  Mace had vanished. Whether silently through the door or just by vaulting over the side she couldn’t be sure.

  But for the first time she understood how irritating that was.

  Ava shook off her annoyance and retrieved the bag. Her usual point of entry beckoned, but breaking into the place felt childishly performative now that Mace had already seen her. Especially when Nina had pressed the access codes on her in spite of her protests.

  The keypad beeped softly in the night—proof that Mace couldn’t have used it to escape. Ava frowned as she slipped into the shadowy hallway and silently descended the back staircase. She could have vaulted off the roof and compensated effortlessly for the several-story drop upon landing, but she was in peak physical condition. The medic certainly hadn’t appeared to be.

  Perhaps she should have stabbed him after all.

  The second floor in Nina’s apartment was silent. No lights shone from underneath Maya’s or Dani’s doors. Ava pa
used before Nina’s and rapped her knuckles gently against the door—three soft knocks, repeated three times. Their childhood signal.

  The knob turned, and Nina peered through the crack in the door. “When did you get here?”

  “Fifteen minutes ago.” Ava tilted her head. “Knox is sleeping?”

  “Hello, Ava.” Knox’s long-suffering voice drifted out of the darkness. “It’s the middle of the night. Lots of us sleep at night.”

  Ava didn’t sleep much, especially when she was in Atlanta. But antagonizing Knox only made Nina sad, so she bit back her instinctive response. “Should I come back tomorrow?”

  “Not at all.” Nina murmured something to Knox, then donned a robe over her T-shirt and shorts and slipped out into the hallway. “Let’s go down to the kitchen. I’ll make tea.”

  Ava followed her sister down the staircase that led into their open first floor. Someone had extended their table with a butcher’s block, and an unusual number of chairs were scattered around it. Ava counted them absently as Nina went to put the kettle on. “I found James Mason on your roof.”

  “Ah. And you’d like to register your objections.”

  “He’s clearly a trap. An effective one, considering his continued presence.”

  Nina leaned a hip against the counter and shrugged. “Some traps are worth it.”

  Ava set her bag on the kitchen island and tried a different tactic. “The TechCorps could be tracking him to your front door right now. If you’re not worried about Knox and his men, consider the risk to Maya.”

  A mug clattered to the island in front of Ava, accompanied by a pointed stare. “Don’t try to manipulate me, and don’t insult me. I know you think I’m soft, but I’m not stupid.”

  No, Nina was never that. Ava accepted the rebuke as a result of her own tactical failure. Combative strategies rarely succeeded with Nina. She needed to be collaborative. “There are some tracking methods the TechCorps might have utilized that you’re not familiar with. I’d like to scan him to be sure.”

  “I’m not familiar with them, hmm?” Now Nina almost seemed to be suppressing a smile. “If you’d like to scan Mace, that’s his decision.”