Justice of the Supreme War God

Chapter 35: Hell Part 1

The sitting room had rearranged itself around the absence Marcus left in it.

Diana stood near the center of the room with her coat still on and the remnants of a conversation she had not finished — or rather, had been in the middle of losing — and looked at the doorway he had walked through with the specific, contained expression of a woman recalibrating.

Elizabeth was watching her.

Diana turned back to her grandmother and found the same still, measuring attention she had been operating under since she walked through the front door, and decided that the most useful thing she could do in the next thirty seconds was change the subject.

She couldn't think of a different subject.

"He heard everything," Diana said.

"Yes," Elizabeth said simply.

"You could have closed the door."

"I could have," Elizabeth agreed, in the tone of a woman who had made a deliberate choice and was entirely comfortable with it.

Diana pressed two fingers briefly to the bridge of her nose and said nothing.

Through the front window of the sitting room, in the drive below, Marcus stood beside his car for a moment.

Inside, Elizabeth watched him from her chair with the quiet attention of a woman conducting a final assessment.

He didn't look back at the house. He stood for perhaps five seconds, with the characteristic stillness of someone absorbing something without performing the absorption, and then he opened the door and got in and drove away.

Elizabeth turned from the window.

The Flemish painting rested against the wall beside the door where he had placed it — handled correctly, positioned correctly, the care in its placement communicating the specific attentiveness of someone who understood what he was holding.

She picked up her tea.

He came back through the sitting room door seven minutes later.

Diana was still there, which Elizabeth had anticipated, and Marcus appeared to have anticipated as well because he came through the door with the collected, unhurried composure of a man who had stepped outside for air rather than to escape, and addressed Elizabeth directly.

"The painting is authentic," he said. "Sixteenth century, Flemish, oil on panel. The panel construction and pigment application are consistent with Northern European workshop practice of the period." He set the work carefully against the wall beside the door with the correct two-handed handling. "The provenance documentation appears to match the physical evidence."

Elizabeth looked at him with the interested, evaluating expression of a woman checking the quality of an answer against the quality she had anticipated.

"Did you run into any trouble at the port?" she asked.

The question was delivered with perfect conversational neutrality.

Marcus looked at her.

"No," he said.

Diana, who was still in the room, made a small sound that was the compressed equivalent of a scoff — the involuntary, brief noise of a woman whose opinion has registered itself without her permission. She was looking at Marcus with the expression she kept for people she had categorized and was in the process of watching confirm the categorization.

No trouble. She had seen him disable Ryan's bodyguards in the entrance hall. She had heard the sound carry upstairs and come down to find two men on the floor. She had watched him walk into Lucas Steel's house before sunrise and come home to make eggs. And now he was standing in her grandmother's sitting room having apparently transported a piece of art from a commercial port to a private residence and encountered no complications worth mentioning.

She didn't know what had happened at that port.

She was fairly certain no trouble was doing considerable work.

Elizabeth studied Marcus with the sharp, accurate eyes that had been studying people since before most of the current room's occupants were born.

"Well," she said. "Name your f*e."

Diana looked at the painting. She looked at Marcus. She composed an expression that was ready to receive whatever number he named with the appropriate, controlled disdain, because there was going to be a number, and it was going to be the kind of number that confirmed what she already knew about him, which was that he was here for what he could extract from the people around him regardless of what he said about not needing money.

Marcus looked at Elizabeth.

"I did a favor for family," he said simply. "I don't need to be paid for it."

He turned, nodded once at Elizabeth — the slight, respectful inclination of a man taking his leave from someone he considered worth the gesture — and walked out of the sitting room for the second time.

The front door opened and closed.

The room was quiet.

Diana stood in it with the number she had been ready for sitting unused in her chest and nothing to replace it with.

Elizabeth picked up her teacup.

"Sit down, Diana," she said.

Diana sat.

They talked for forty minutes.

Or rather, Elizabeth talked and Diana navigated, which was how their conversations had always worked — her grandmother moved through topics with the patient, comprehensive attention of a woman who had decided what she wanted to communicate and was going to communicate it regardless of the conversational resistance she encountered.

She did not say Marcus's name again.

She didn't need to.