SUPREME WAR GOD The Despised Son-in-Law Returns

Chapter 14: Black Gloves at the University Gate

Lily's POV

My phone buzzed for the fifth time in the bottom of my backpack, and I ignored it again, because it was Dad, and Dad only ever called at dawn to ask whether I'd seen his reading glasses.

The Number 9 bus was packed with sleepy students and dockworkers coming off the night shift. I stood squashed between a man who smelled of squid and a girl doing her lipstick in her phone camera, and I practiced suture knots on my own thumb with a piece of thread, because Professor Halden's anatomy lab started at seven sharp, and Professor Halden locked the door at one minute past.

My plaster had come loose again. I'd sewn through my own finger twice last week practicing on pig skin, and Tess from my lab group said I had the hands of a surgeon and the luck of a pigeon.

The bus braked so hard that the squid man fell into me.

"What's going on?" somebody shouted.

Through the front window, I saw blue lights. Six black SUVs had pulled across the road in front of the university's main gate, the big bronze one with the owl on top, and soldiers in pale grey-blue uniforms were waving traffic back. A white car sat in the middle of the convoy with two tiny flags on its bonnet, white with a silver bird.

"Road's closed," the driver called. "Everybody off, sorry. Walk from here."

I was already pushing for the door. It was twenty to seven.

I ran along the pavement past the soldiers, holding my backpack straps, and I almost made it to the side gate when I heard a scooter horn, then a screech of tires, then a crash like a dropped tray of cutlery.

A delivery scooter lay on its side in the middle of the road. The lead SUV had stopped a meter past it. Two big plastic tubs of rice porridge had burst open across the tarmac, steaming, and a skinny boy of maybe seventeen was trying to sit up in the middle of it. His trousers were torn at the shin, and blood was coming through fast.

Nobody moved. The soldiers just looked at him.

I dropped my bag and ran.

"Don't stand up," I told the boy, kneeling in hot porridge. "What's your name?"

"Jory," he gasped. "The congee... it's for the dorms. I'll get fired."

"You won't get fired for bleeding. Hold still." I pulled the scarf off my neck, folded it into a pad and pressed it hard against the cut. The footplate of his scooter had opened his shin to the bone, a long clean slice. "Tess! Call the campus clinic!"

My lab partner had come running from the gate. She stared at the soldiers, then at me, and then pulled out her phone.

A guard with a sergeant's stripes stamped over to me. "Miss, move away from the vehicle. This convoy is on official business."

"Your official business just ran over a kid," I said without looking up. "Move your car, or move your feet, but don't stand on my patient."

He actually took a step back, I think from surprise.

Behind him, a car door opened.

The man who got out of the white car was tall and handsome in the way a knife in a shop window is handsome. He wore a white uniform without a single crease, and his blond hair was combed straight back and shining. He had pale blue eyes, almost silver, and black leather gloves on his hands even though the morning was warm.

He walked over slowly, stepping around the spilled porridge, and looked down at Jory the way I look at a frog before I dissect it.

"Is he dead?" he asked.

"No," I said. "No thanks to your driver."

"Then it isn't a tragedy, is it?" His voice was soft and pleasant. He tilted his head and read the card swinging on the lanyard around my neck. "Lily Whitmore, third year, Faculty of Medicine." He smiled. "Whitmore. Magnolia Hill?"

I didn't answer. I pressed harder on Jory's leg, and Jory whimpered.

"Ah, it is." He took out his phone with one gloved hand and turned the screen toward me. There was a video playing, from Channel Six, of last night's banquet. I saw Brother Damon slap Lucas Grant across the stage and tear the divorce papers in half, and someone had already put funny music over it. "Two hundred thousand views before breakfast. The Whitmore family with the idiot son-in-law who pushes men into cakes. You're a famous house this morning, Miss Whitmore."

"He's not an idiot."

"No?" His eyebrows lifted, interested. "What is he, then?"

I shut my mouth. Something about the way he asked made me feel as if I'd stepped onto ice.

He put the phone away and took a thick fold of banknotes from his breast pocket. Without bending down, he dropped it into the spilled porridge beside Jory's hand. It landed with a wet slap.

"For your scooter," he told the boy. "Pick it up."

Jory looked at me. His hands were shaking, and they were covered with blood and rice. He reached into the porridge and fished out the money, and the man in white watched him do it the whole time, smiling a little, as though it were a play performed just for him.

Then he set the heel of his polished boot on the scooter's front wheel and pressed down.

It wasn't a stamp. He just leaned. The steel rim folded under his heel like a paper plate, and the tire burst with a bang that made Tess scream.

"Now it's a fair price," he said.

"What is wrong with you?" I was on my feet before I'd decided to stand. My scarf stayed on Jory's leg; Tess dropped down and held it for me. "He's a child! He'll lose his job because you wanted to get to breakfast faster!"

The soldiers went silent. The sergeant looked at the ground.

The man in white didn't get angry. That frightened me more than shouting would have. He looked at me for a long moment with those pale silver eyes, then turned to the young officer standing behind him with a tablet.

"Write down that name. Lily Whitmore, Magnolia Hill."

"Write this down too," I snapped. I held up my phone and took a photo of the SUV's number plate, then another of the driver's face behind the windshield. "I'm reporting your driver to the city police."

"Report him to whom?" He smiled with real pleasure. "I'm the inspection."

He climbed back into the white car. The door closed with a soft, expensive thunk, and the convoy rolled through the university gate with its lights still flashing, past the bronze owl, up the hill toward the old army garrison behind the sports fields.

The campus ambulance came four minutes later. I rode with Jory to the clinic, missed Professor Halden's lab entirely and got a warning on my record. Tess told me at lunch that the man in white was Captain Julian Draven of the Capital Guard Regiment, the Grand Marshal's own nephew, and that the whole faculty was talking about the medical student who'd shouted at him.

"You're either very brave or very stupid," she said.

"I was very late," I said, and she laughed, but her laugh didn't last.

When I got home to Magnolia Hill that afternoon, there was a black car parked outside our gate with a government number plate, already pulling away.

The front door was open. Inside, the dining room was full of people. Grandmother sat at the head of the long table with her dragon-head walking stick across her knees, and she was crying. I had never seen Grandmother cry, not even at Grandpa Arthur's funeral. Yet she was smiling as the tears ran down, holding a thick cream envelope with a gold eagle seal broken open on the front.

Derek was grinning beside her with his cast propped on the table. Vivian stood at the window with her arms folded and her face closed. In the kitchen doorway, holding a tray of teacups that nobody had asked for yet, Brother Damon was looking straight at me, and he was the only person in the room who wasn't smiling or crying. He was looking at the envelope the way Jory had looked at the soldiers.

Mom turned to me with her pearls in both hands. Her eyes were shining like a lottery winner's.

"Lily, darling, sit down." Her voice shook with joy. "You will never guess who saw you at the university this morning... and asked for your hand in marriage."