Justice of the Supreme War God

Chapter 20: Falling Line PART 2

She spent them looking out the window with her hands in her lap, which was the posture she used when she was thinking hard enough that her body needed to be very still to compensate. She turned the conversation over. She examined it from every angle available to her and found the same thing every time — Lucas hadn't been bluffing. He had the relationships, the reach, and the specific motivated interest required to follow through on every word he had said.

The villa's front drive came into view and she realized she had no memory of the last ten minutes of the route.

Marcus was in the entrance hall when she came through the door.

Not waiting, exactly — he was moving from one room to another, a dish towel over one shoulder, in the middle of something domestic and unhurried — but he stopped when he saw her face and turned toward her with that attentive, settled patience that she had stopped being able to dismiss as easily as she had in the first week.

"There's dinner," he said. "You haven't —"

"Stop." The word came out with more force than she had measured it for. She set her bag down on the entrance table and kept her coat on because taking it off felt like a concession she wasn't prepared to make. "Stop doing that. Stop standing there with your dish towel and your dinner and your — concerned husband routine." She pulled her gloves off one finger at a time. "It's exhausting. You are exhausting."

Marcus said nothing. He watched her with that expression she couldn't crack.

Which made it worse.

"Do you know what happened today?" she said. "Do you have any concept of what the Steels just did? What they are doing? Four months of work. Four months of meetings and proposals and positioning, and Liam Steel walked into my conference room yesterday like he owned the building and destroyed it in ten minutes. And today his father sat in his office and told me — very calmly, very politely — that there was nothing I could do about it." Her voice stayed cold but the edges of it were fraying in a way she would have preferred they didn't. "And I had to sit there and listen to it."

Marcus set the dish towel on the side table.

"Diana —"

"And you," she said, turning on him with the full, redirected force of everything she had been containing since Meridian Avenue, "you sit here all day making breakfast that nobody eats and dinner that nobody asked for and pastes for things that are none of your business and you wander around this house like it belongs to you and you sign contracts you have no business signing and you beat up people who probably deserved it but that's not the point —" She stopped. Drew a breath. "What exactly are you? What are you actually good for? Because from where I'm standing, you have done nothing except make every problem I have significantly larger."

Marcus was quiet.

"What do you do when you're not playing house?" she continued, her voice dropping to something more surgical. "When someone actually needs something from you — something real, something that requires resources and connections and the kind of leverage that comes from actually being something in this world — where are you then?" She looked at him directly. "You're a nobody, Marcus. A very confusing nobody, but a nobody. And nobodies cannot help me with this."

The entrance hall was very still.

Marcus looked at her for a long moment. His face held the same composed, unreadable patience it always held, and Diana was so angry and so exhausted and so hollowed out by the specific defeat of the afternoon that the absence of a reaction felt like its own kind of provocation.

"Say something," she said.

He said nothing.

"Yell at me," she said, and the word came out with a raw edge she hadn't planned. "Get angry. React. Do something. You walk around here breaking people's bones when they come at you and then someone actually says something to your face and you just —" She threw one hand up. "Where is he? Where's the man who snapped Liam's finger without blinking? Because this —" she gestured at him with a sharp, dismissive motion — "this standing there saying nothing like some kind of spineless —"

"Are you finished?" Marcus asked.

His voice was exactly as calm as it had been at the beginning of the conversation. Not cold. Not wounded. Not the careful neutrality of a man suppressing something — just settled, the way deep water is settled.

Diana stared at him.

She was, in fact, finished. The word had run out, the way a storm runs out, and what was left was the quiet aftermath of having said more than she intended to and the discomfort of knowing it.

Marcus picked up the dish towel from the side table.

"Dinner's in the kitchen," he said. "You should eat."