Justice of the Supreme War God

Chapter 17: What She Doesn't Know

"I didn't marry you so you could go around beating up everyone I have a problem with."

Diana set her coffee cup down with a precision that suggested she was using the action to keep her voice at its current temperature rather than the one it wanted to reach. She stood on the opposite side of the kitchen counter from Marcus with her arms crossed and her eyes direct.

"That is not what this arrangement is," she continued. "That is not what you were brought into this house to do. You are here to fulfill a specific and clearly documented function, and nowhere in that document does it say anything about you appointing yourself some kind of — enforcer."

Marcus listened. He had turned away from the stove and was giving her his full attention in that way he had, which was somehow more unsettling than if he had looked elsewhere — too still, too present, like someone who had been trained to absorb information without letting any of it show on his face.

"Furthermore," Diana said, "I didn't even know you were capable of any of this. You showed up in a worn suit and signed a contract without negotiating a single clause. You looked like a man who had never been in a confrontation in his life." She shook her head once, sharply. "And now you're dislocating Ryan Steel's bodyguards and walking into Lucas Steel's house before sunrise to deliver warnings like you're in some kind of action film."

"The suit is comfortable," Marcus said.

"That is not the point."

"I know." A pause. "The point is the Steels."

"The point," Diana said, clipping each word, "is that there is a significant difference between defying the Steel family by refusing their marriage arrangement, which I did deliberately and with full knowledge of the consequences, and actively antagonizing them on a weekly basis, which is what you seem to be doing without any apparent concern for what that means." She pressed two fingers briefly to her temple. "I can manage the Steels. I have been managing the Steels. What I cannot manage is whatever escalation you seem to be personally committed to engineering."

Marcus was quiet for a moment.

"There's a lot you're not aware of," he said.

Diana looked at him.

The statement was simple and delivered without drama or emphasis, which made it land with more weight than it should have. She studied his face for the tell — the smirk, the bluster, the performance of mystery that men deployed when they wanted to seem more substantial than they were. She found none of those things. Just that same composed, settled patience that she had stopped being able to read as easily as she'd expected.

She didn't know whether to take it seriously.

She was still deciding when Marcus's eyes moved — a brief, precise shift downward and to the left. Not impolite. Clinical almost, the way a doctor's eyes move when something specific draws their professional attention.

"How long have you had those?" he asked.

Diana went very still.

"The spots," Marcus said. "Left cheek, just below the cheekbone. Three of them, close together." His voice carried no judgment, no mockery. Pure observation. "You've been covering them. The foundation is slightly heavier on that side."

The flush arrived before she could stop it and she despised it completely, the involuntary warmth climbing her neck with the specific humiliation of being seen through something she had been precise about concealing. She had spent twenty minutes that morning on her makeup. Twenty minutes with the correct shade, the correct brush, the correct technique that her aesthetician had assured her was undetectable.

Marcus Hayes had detected it in the ambient light of her kitchen before seven in the morning.

"That," Diana said, her voice returning to temperature with effort, "is none of your concern."

"It might be a reaction to —"

"It is none of your concern," she repeated, very clearly. "And you need to stop doing this."

"Doing what?"

"This." She gestured briefly. "Acting like — like you have any investment in my personal — we are not that kind of arrangement. You are not that kind of husband. When we are in this house, there is no performance required, which means there is no reason for you to notice things, or remember things, or —" She stopped herself. "Just stop."

Marcus held her gaze for a moment. Then he nodded once, set his dish towel on the counter, and walked toward the garden door.

Diana stared at the space he'd just occupied.

"I'm not finished," she said.

She followed him.

The Morrison garden in the early morning was all dew and grey light, the flowerbeds still holding the night's quiet. Marcus moved along the herb section near the south wall with the unhurried familiarity of someone who had already learned where everything was, crouching occasionally to examine a plant, pinching a leaf between his fingers to test it.

Diana stood on the flagstone path with her arms crossed and her heels on solid ground.

"You are not to hit anyone else," she said to his back. "No more broken bones, no more early morning visits to people's private residences, no more — whatever this morning was. Are we clear? Because if you continue doing this, you and I are going to have a very serious problem."

Marcus turned a leaf over in his fingers. "The Steels have been pressuring your family for years."

"I am aware of that."

"The arrangement with Ryan. The way your mother responds to their name." He set the leaf down. "You've been absorbing it."

"I handle it," Diana said sharply. "There is a difference."

"You don't have to." He stood and moved to the next plant with the same easy calm. "If you need help, you can ask me."

Diana looked at him for a long moment. Then something in her expression shifted — not softened, but rearranged into something colder and more precise, the particular look she produced when she wanted to make sure the target was clearly identified before she fired.

"Help," she repeated. "You." A short, humorless sound escaped her that wasn't quite a laugh. "You, who showed up to my house in a suit that belongs in a donation bin, who signed a marriage contract in someone else's pen, who — what exactly are you going to help me with, Mr. Hayes? What resources, what connections, what leverage do you imagine you have that I don't?" She tilted her head. "You are in no position to help me with anything. Please remember that."

Marcus said nothing. He crouched beside a low rosemary bush and examined it with the same untroubled attention he gave everything.

The garden gate opened behind Diana.

Heels. Fast. The specific rhythm of someone moving with urgency they're trying to keep professional.

Diana turned.

Sophie — her personal secretary, never late, never flustered, perpetually composed in the way that Diana required of everyone in her professional orbit — was crossing the garden path with her tablet clutched against her chest and an expression on her face that she was very clearly and unsuccessfully trying to keep neutral.