Justice of the Supreme War God

Chapter 19: The Paste PART 2

The villa was quiet when Marcus came in from the garden at three in the afternoon.

He had spent the better part of the day in the kitchen and the garden in rotating intervals, which the household staff had initially regarded with suspicion and eventually with cautious acceptance. Claire, the head maid — practical, fifties, with the particular competence of someone who had managed large households long enough to identify which occupants were actually worth the trouble — had stopped giving him sideways looks sometime around noon.

The paste had taken most of the afternoon to get right.

It was an old formulation — something he'd learned from a field medic in a mountainous region where pharmaceutical supply chains were aspirational rather than functional, modified over years for different applications. The base was rosemary and calendula from the garden, combined with two components he'd had sourced and delivered that morning through channels that would have surprised anyone who assumed his days consisted of sitting quietly and waiting to be managed.

He had added something to make it fragrant. A small adjustment. It would help with compliance.

He was decanting it into a clean glass jar when he heard the front door.

Diana's heels on the entrance floor had a specific sound when the day had gone badly — not harder exactly, but more deliberate. Each step placed with the concentrated force of someone keeping everything internal through the mechanism of controlled movement.

He heard it now.

She came through the kitchen entrance and Marcus turned from the counter with the jar in one hand.

"How did —"

"Don't." She didn't stop walking. Her coat was still on, her bag still over her shoulder. She looked at the jar in his hand for approximately half a second with the comprehensive dismissal of someone who has no remaining capacity for anything that isn't the crisis in her chest, and looked away. "Whatever that is, I don't want it."

"It's for the spots," Marcus said. "The ones on your —"

"I heard you." She stopped near the doorway and turned just enough to include him in her peripheral vision without fully facing him. "I don't want it. I don't want your kitchen experiments or your garden projects or your —" she made a short, sharp gesture that encompassed the jar, the counter, and apparently him specifically — "whatever this is." Her voice was clipped to the bone. "I want to go upstairs and I want you to stay down here and I want the rest of this day to be finished."

"Diana." His voice was quiet. "What happened?"

She turned fully then, and looked at him with something that was too exhausted to be full contempt but was making a reasonable effort.

"You are not my husband," she said. "You are a signature on a document. That means when I walk through this door, you don't get to ask me what happened. You don't get to look at my face and read things into it. You don't get a seat at any table that actually matters to me." She held his gaze for exactly the amount of time required to make sure the words had landed. "Mind your business, Mr. Hayes."

She left.

Her footsteps went up the stairs and the house absorbed the sound of them and went quiet.

Marcus set the jar on the counter and looked at it for a moment.

Then he picked it up, walked to the hallway, and found Claire at the linen closet near the base of the service stairs. She was folding something with the methodical efficiency of a person who treated every task as though it was going to be inspected.

"Mrs. Hayes's evening skincare," Marcus said, and held out the jar. "Add this to her routine tonight. She uses the routine before bed — after the toner, before the moisturizer. Just a thin layer on the left cheek."

Claire looked at the jar. Then at him.

"She's not going to ask about it?"

"She's not going to know about it," Marcus said. "It's a glass jar. It fits with the rest of the bottles on the tray. She won't look twice at it."

Claire took it with the expression of a woman deciding whether this was unusual enough to object to and concluding that it wasn't. She turned it in her hands, removed the lid, and bent slightly to smell it.

Something in her face shifted — the scent reaching past her professional neutrality to something more human underneath.

"That's quite nice," she said, almost to herself.

"Calendula and rosemary," Marcus said. "And a few other things." He turned back toward the kitchen. "She'll thank you in the morning."