Justice of the Supreme War God

Chapter 28: Have Fun PART 1

The villa smelled like dinner.

It reached Diana before she'd cleared the entrance — something layered and warm, the kind of smell that operates below conscious processing and communicates directly with a more fundamental part of the brain, the part that tracks shelter and sustenance and safety. She registered it and then immediately, deliberately, set it aside.

Marcus was in the kitchen doorway when she came through the hall, dish towel over one shoulder, his expression carrying the same composed, unhurried quality it always carried, as though the universe had simply arranged itself in a way that placed him there and he was entirely comfortable with the arrangement.

"You're back," he said. "Good timing. Sit down."

Diana set her bag on the entrance table and kept her coat on.

"I'm not hungry," she said.

"You said that yesterday," Marcus said, "and the day before, and the direct consequence of that was a hospital stay."

"I'm aware of what happened, thank you."

"Then sit down."

Diana looked at the kitchen doorway and at the man standing in it with the patient, immovable quality of something structural, and felt the specific, compressed frustration of a person who has been carrying a significant amount of directed anger and has arrived home to find that its intended target has made dinner.

She stayed where she was.

"You know what I keep thinking about?" she said. Her voice had the controlled, even quality of something that had been organized during the drive home. "The last several days. Everything that was happening with Strong Inc, with Lucas Steel, with the — all of it." She paused. "And throughout all of it, while I was losing four months of work and driving across the city and sitting across from Reynolds while Liam undid everything in real time —" she looked at Marcus directly — "you were here."

"Yes," Marcus said.

"Cooking," Diana said. "You were here, cooking."

"Among other things."

"Cooking," she repeated, and the word carried a weight of precision, as though she was filing it into a specific category in a specific document. "And then when I collapsed, you took me to a hospital. An expensive hospital, by the way." She tilted her head slightly. "Which I now have to pay for. On top of everything else."

"Your insurance —"

"I know what my insurance covers," Diana said. "I know what Meridian General charges for an overnight admission and it is not inside my standard coverage and it is one more thing on a very long list of things that have gone wrong in the last week." She held his gaze. "I didn't marry you for you to cook food I don't eat and take me to hospitals I can't afford. I married you to maintain a specific appearance for one year. That's it. That's the total of your function in this arrangement."

Marcus said nothing.

"You should have been more useful," Diana said, and the words were crisp and final, the tone of someone closing a drawer. "When it actually mattered. When there was an actual problem. You should have done something."

She was watching his face as she said it. Looking for the reaction she'd been looking for every time — the crack, the defensiveness, the wounded retreat. She found the same thing she always found, which was nothing, and the absence of a reaction was its own kind of infuriating.

"You need to eat," Marcus said. "Sit down."

Diana almost laughed.

"I can't," she said. "I have plans."

Something that might have been a question moved across his expression. Brief. Controlled.

"Dinner plans," she added. She picked up her bag from the entrance table. "I'm going back out."

"With who?"

Diana looked at him.

She had the name ready — she had been holding it ready since the car, with the specific, forward-positioned intention of someone who has prepared a thing and wants to know what it will do on impact.

"Ryan," she said.

The kitchen was very quiet.

Marcus Hayes stood in the doorway with the dish towel over his shoulder and received the name with an expression that did not change. His face held its composure with the practiced, structural quality of someone who has trained for exactly this — for the moment when something moves through your chest like a blade and you keep your face level because the mission requires it and you have never once in your operational life allowed what you felt to determine what you showed.

Inside, in the space behind his sternum where he kept the things he didn't put on his face, something moved.

It was brief. It was sharp. It was the specific, quiet anger of a man who had spent twelve years building something in a direction and had just watched the person at the center of it agree to have dinner with the wrong person.

He filed it.

He kept his face level.

"Have fun," he said.

He turned and went back into the kitchen.