Page 98 of What We Bury

“You wanna talk about it?” Micah asks, not looking up from his crates of mixers and tonic bottles.

I hate how much I want to. How badly I’d like to set the whole ugly tangle on the bar and ask if anyone knows how to cut it loose. But saying it out loud means admitting he was right—that I want more than I’ll ever let myself take—and that’s a door I’m not opening in a room with witnesses.

“Not particularly,” I say, staring at the grain of the bar. “Let’s just get this over with.”

As if hearing me, the door at the back of the room opens and Odin walks in.

The first thing you recalibrate when you meet him is the age. He carries the presence of a much older man, but he can’t be far past thirty-five—dark hair cut precise, a thread of gray at one temple, a face built to give nothing away. One eye is pale gray, almost colorless. The other tracks a half-second behind; a glass piece, good enough that most people never clock it. He’s never told me how he lost the original. I’ve never asked.

Odin isn’t his name. I don’t know what his real name is. None of us do. What I do know is that he funds the operation, that his money has the bottomless quality you only get from sources you’re not allowed to ask about. He’s the reason we have resources. Protection. He’s the reason we are all sitting in this room right now, waiting to explain how a routine operation turned into a bloodbath after we let a girl get a knife in her hand.

“Gentlemen.” He settles into one of the stools at the bar and Micah immediately sets a drink in front of him. “I understand we have a situation.”

Milo slides in last, coffee in one hand, tablet under his arm, grinning like the building isn’t on fire.

“Present and accounted for,” he says. “Did I miss the lecture, Big Daddy?”

Odin doesn’t smile. “Sit down. You’re about to get one.” His fingers tap once on the bar. “Walk me through how it got fucked up.”

I take a breath. This is my responsibility. I plan the operations, I run the team, I keep it clean. When it isn’t clean, that’s mine too.

“Target was confirmed. Surveillance solid. We had his patterns, his schedule, his?—”

“I’ve read the briefing.” Odin doesn’t raise his voice; he never has to. “I want to know what happened on the ground. Why is there a civilian?”

The wordciviliandrops into the quiet and sits there. That’s all Sage is to him. Not a person. Not a survivor. A variable that wasn’t supposed to be in the equation.

“She was collateral,” Holden says, leaning forward. “Wrong place, wrong time. Davis lured her to the beach and started his routine. We were already in position.”

“And instead of extracting her and proceeding as planned?”

Silence. I feel it settle on my shoulders where it belongs.

“There wasn’t time,” Knox says. Quiet. “She moved before we could pull her out.”

Odin’s eyebrow rises a fraction of an inch. “Explain.”

“She took my knife.” Knox’s voice is flat. Factual. “Stabbed him. Repeatedly. There wasn’t time to intervene.”

“There wasn’t time?” Odin’s gaze sharpens on Knox. “Or you chose not to?”

The question hangs. Holden shifts. Milo’s grin fades.

“Both,” I admit. “We could have stopped her. We didn’t.”

“Why not?”

Because she needed to know what it tasted like. The revenge. The agency. The right to put a hand through her own monster instead of spending the rest of her life surviving him.

“She needed it,” I say instead. “More than we did.”

Odin studies me for a long moment, expression unchanged.

He turns to Milo. “Fenrir tells me she knows more than she should.”

Milo’s hand goes up halfway. “In my defense, she asked beautifully.”

Odin’s brow quirks. “I need to hear that she’s contained.”