Chapter 131: Chapter 131: While He Was Gone
After, the room was quiet.
Maeve lay on her back with one arm behind her head, relaxed and unbothered, the sheet drawn up loose. She looked like someone who had gotten precisely what she came for and had no second thoughts about any of it.
James lay next to her on his back, staring at the ceiling, quiet in a different way. He was still putting the last hour somewhere in his head and the slot for it didn’t fit cleanly.
Maeve turned her head and looked at him.
"Don’t make it weird," she said.
"I’m not making it weird."
"You’re already making it weird."
He didn’t have an answer for that one either. She huffed a short laugh through her nose and went back to looking at the ceiling, and neither of them said anything else for a while.
James woke the next morning in her bed.
The curtains were half drawn. Light came through the gap in a thin line across the floor, and somewhere past the wall the world had already gone on without him, busy with whatever it had decided overnight that Floor 15 meant.
His phone was on the floor where it had fallen. He could see the screen lit even from the bed, missed calls and messages stacked behind the glass. He left it for a moment and lay there with the simple fact that he had stayed the night.
Maeve came back into the room already dressed, drying her hands on a towel, looking entirely like herself. There was nothing shy in her and nothing soft. She caught him being careful, watched him try not to look awkward, and was visibly amused by the effort.
She did not ask what they were. She did not offer a single thing about after, or next, or what this had been. She just moved through her own house like a woman who had wanted something, taken it, and was satisfied.
James did not regret it. He just had no idea how a person was supposed to act in the morning, and it showed.
Maeve tossed the towel over a chair.
"You should go," she said, "before the world decides you’ve been kidnapped. You’re the most-watched man in the country this week. Someone’s already wondering where you slept."
He got up and dressed, then finally picked up the phone and checked it properly. Too many notifications. Nothing in the pile made him stop, though. Nothing that needed him in the next ten minutes.
At the door, Maeve leaned on the frame.
"The press thing still matters," she said. It was offhand, but she meant it. "Don’t let Marcus run the whole room. And don’t let TRB put words in your mouth either. Whatever you say up there, say it because you chose it."
"I know."
"I know you know. I’m saying it anyway."
She let him out.
James checked the phone for real on the way home.
The pile was about what he expected. Missed calls from Finn. A run of messages from Marcus about the room and the timing. A wall of news alerts breaking down the floor clip by clip. Updates threaded off the Ganner statement, the blood-debt line getting repeated everywhere now.
It annoyed him more than it worried him. After Floor 15, everyone wanted a piece, and most of them could wait.
There were messages from his mother in the stack too.
He scrolled to them. They didn’t read as anything. A normal one earlier in the evening. Then another, shorter. The last one was three words, plain enough that he read past it the first time without it catching on anything.
He tapped her name and called.
It rang out.
He told himself she was busy, or asleep, or had the phone in another room. He put it away and watched the streets go by, and the closer the car got to home, the more the small things started to not sit right.
The road outside the house was too quiet for the hour.
There was a black vehicle parked along the kerb that he did not recognize, sitting where no car usually sat, no one in it that he could see.
He noticed each thing on its own and did not let any of them add up, because none of them on its own meant anything.
Then he reached the door.
The door was not shut.
It hung an inch open, and the frame beside the lock was splintered, the wood pale where it had cracked.
That was the first thing that landed all the way.
James did not call out. He pushed the door with his fingertips, slow, and it swung in with a low groan of stressed hinges.
Creeeak.
The house was wrecked.
Furniture was overturned and broken. A chair lay on its side with one leg snapped off. Glass from something covered half the floor and crunched under his first step. There were marks gouged deep into the wall across from the door, long clean lines cut into the plaster like something with edges had dragged through it.
Crunch.
Men were on the ground.
Three of them, maybe four, in dark formal clothes and gear that did not belong on anyone who came to a Dublin house for an honest reason. One lay unconscious near the wall. One was on his side, groaning low, an arm folded wrong beneath him. One had not moved at all, and James could not tell from the door whether he was breathing.
They were not robbers. James knew that in one look. Everything about them, the clothes, the gear, the way they had come in, said this had been something else.
He did not have time to land on what.
Because then he saw his mother.
She was on the floor near the kitchen doorway, on her side, one arm thrown out.
For one second James did not know.
For one full second his whole body went somewhere cold and certain, every part of his control snapping toward her and nothing else existing in the room, the men and the wreckage and the broken door all gone, only her on the floor not moving—
She was breathing.
Fainted. Not dead. Her back rose, fell, rose again.
That second had been worse than the whole wrecked room behind it.
And it was only because his eyes had been pinned to her that he did not notice the rest until the breath came back into his lungs and he finally looked up.
Nyra was in the air.
Her wings were fully out. Not folded, not hidden under a jacket, not tucked away at the breakfast table. They were spread wide and dark behind her, holding her off the floor in the middle of the ruined room, the feathers catching the grey light from the broken window.
She was breathing hard. Her small hands were open at her sides. Her eyes were down on the men on the ground, fixed on them, and there was nothing soft in her face at all, nothing of the child who pulled his sleeve and asked him to promise. She watched them the way something watches prey it has already put down once and would put down again if it twitched.
James understood none of it.
Not why they had come. Not what they had wanted. Not what they had said to his mother, or what they had tried, or who had sent them.
He only saw his mother on the floor and Nyra in the air with her wings bared to a room full of strangers.
"Nyra."
Her head turned toward him.
