Justice of the Supreme War God

Chapter 21 : Empty Part 2

"I know." Reynolds's voice was not unkind. "And I want you to know that I recognize the quality of work your firm brought to this." He looked at her with the steady, apologetic gaze of a man delivering news he didn't make. "But the way things currently stand, Ms. Morrison, I'm inclined to move toward the Steel offer. And I'd expect our partner firms to follow our lead." A pause. "I'd advise you to consider whether there are aspects of your current situation that could be — renegotiated. To create a cleaner path forward."

He was being diplomatic.

Diana knew exactly what aspects he meant.

She had no counter. She had come here with her competence and her preparation and her four months of work and none of those things were the actual currency in play in this room, and she knew it, and Reynolds knew she knew it, and the conversation had the specific airless quality of a space where the real negotiation had already happened somewhere else entirely.

She thanked him for his time.

She took the elevator down in silence.

In the lobby, she walked past the two guards without looking at them.

The villa's entrance hall was lit with the warm, domestic light of late afternoon when Diana came through the door, and Marcus was there — of course he was there, he was always there, steady and present and untouched by the specific texture of a world that kept moving against her — emerging from the kitchen with a dish and a quiet expression.

"You haven't eaten," he said. "I made lunch. There's still —"

"Stop." The word came out raw at the edges. She set her bag down. She was tired in a way that had moved past tired into something more structural. "Just stop with the — the food. Stop."

He set the dish down on the hall table and waited.

"Do you know what today was?" She turned to face him, and the fury was there but it was thinner than it had been yesterday, worn down by the weight of two consecutive days of the same defeat. "Reynolds is going to take the Steel offer. Everything — the proposal, the meetings, the entire strategy — gone. Because Lucas Steel has eleven years of relationships and a checkbook and a son who walked into my conference room and ruined everything."

Marcus said nothing.

"And you." She looked at him with the exhausted, redirected force of someone who has run out of appropriate targets. "You angered Lucas personally. Did you think about that? When you walked into his house at six in the morning for your little warning conversation — did it occur to you that you were handing him a personal reason to come after my business specifically?" Her voice climbed. "I had problems with the Steels before you arrived. Manageable problems. Political problems. The kind that can be navigated with enough patience and the right moves." She pressed two fingers to her forehead. "And then you arrived and broke Liam's finger at a birthday party and suddenly it's personal."

Marcus looked at her steadily.

"If you were a real man," Diana said, and the words came from the place where exhaustion and humiliation combine into something neither of them are separately, "you would know what I actually need right now. You would know how to help. You would have something — resources, connections, anything — that could actually address what's happening instead of standing there with a plate of food like that fixes anything." Her voice cracked at the edges and she despised it. "You are useless. You are a decoration. You are exactly what my mother said you were — a nobody in a gray suit who can break bones and make breakfast and do absolutely nothing that matters —"

She stopped.

The hallway tilted.

It was subtle at first — a slight wrongness in the quality of the light, a sensation in her legs that she had been ignoring for two days reclassifying itself as something she could no longer override. The room moved in a way rooms weren't supposed to move and Diana Morrison, who had been running on fury and black coffee and absolutely nothing else since the conference room disaster, felt the specific, humiliating withdrawal of her body from the arrangement she had imposed on it.

Her knees went first.

Marcus crossed the hallway in two strides and caught her before she reached the floor.