Page 187 of Problematic

I kept my face empty.

Scarn watched me from the corner of his eye while his guards spread out. Two near the elevator. Two at the windows. One near my bar. One behind me, brave in the way men with borrowed guns always were until shadows found their lungs.

“Problem?” Scarn asked.

I set the ruined mask on my desk. It landed with a bent, hollow scrape. “No.”

His smile widened. Liar, his face said. My gaze moved once across the office. Main console down. Backup line down. Private comm relay dark. The decorative ward panels Vale hated because they ruined his clean aesthetic had no ember under the glass.

Cell service blocker too, then.

Of course.

Vale’s tablet lay on my desk, black. He would never leave that thing behind. He was attached by the hip to that tablet. It was his life, how he fed, how he did his job . . . which only meant one thing: He had already been captured.

Scarn strolled toward the windows as if he owned the view. “You always did love dramatic architecture. All this glass. All this height.” He tapped one knuckle against the pane. “Makes a man feel untouchable.”

I watched his reflection, not his face. “Men who feel untouchable all bleed the same.”

He laughed.

The sound scraped across my nerves.

“There he is.” Scarn turned, spreading his arms. “The nightmare of New Abaddon. The mask. The myth. The little assassin king with a city full of teeth and no one close enough to bite back.”

A guard behind me shifted. My nightmares slid along the floor toward his boot. He stopped moving.

Smart guard.

Scarn’s eyes flicked down, then back to me. “Careful.”

“You have my attention,” I said. “Spend it before I lose my patience.”

“Oh, I have more than your attention.” He lifted the phone again, but he kept the screen angled away for now. Cruelty with manners. “By now, I have amassed a small army around your mate.”

The word hit. I didn’t move. My body did. One small flinch in my left hand. One tiny betrayal from bone and tendon before I locked it down. Scarn saw it. His smile went soft with victory.

“There,” he murmured. “I wondered if the rumors were exaggerated. The great Lux Draven brought to heel by a powerless flower girl.”

The office temperature dropped. My nightmares moved under my skin, restless, hungry, clawing at the inside of me for permission. They wanted his sleep. His sanity. His tongue choking in his mouth while he saw every death he had ever feared.

I gave them nothing, because Liv’s life balanced on a phone in his hand.

“Say what you came to say,” I said.

“So, this is how it’s going to work.” Scarn stepped closer, comfortable now, fed by my restraint. “You are going to surrender. You are going to become a prisoner of the South. And we will let her live.”

One of his guards smiled.

I memorized his face.

Scarn continued, voice warm with satisfaction. “Your territories become ours. The tower, the crossings, the docks, the old ward stations, the southern gate, the northern routes. All of it. New Abaddon bends, or Olivia Heart dies on a public street before her shift at a flower shop.”

The bond burned so hard my vision thinned.

I could feel her somewhere below the skyline, unaware, angry, hurt, alive. I held onto alive until my hands hurt.

“You think you won the war,” I said.