Chapter 258: The Wrong Savior.
The elevator doors slid open onto the administrative floor. Empty hallway. Just the two of us.
"If Sinn sent that psycho to clean house at the mansion," Mercury said as we walked, her voice low and tight, "that was my last mission."
"Yeah." That was all I gave her.
We were built different. She could walk away. I couldn’t. The government was still giving me cover while I worked toward the only thing that mattered, and I couldn’t quit that any more than I could quit the countdown ticking behind my eyes.
She stopped. Turned fully toward me. I stopped with her. Sinn’s office sat a few steps ahead, door shut.
"This is getting messy, Bram." The usual noise had dropped completely out of her voice. Her shoulders were rigid. "Today’s not the first time this government showed it doesn’t give a shit whether we live. The Fallen City was a suicide run. You were right to ask how I survived. I hated the question, but you were right. Nobody was meant to come back from that. Nobody."
I stayed quiet. I wanted the whole of it before I measured it against the thing still pushing me forward.
"If this is the road we’re on," she said, eyes locked on mine, "we can still step off. Both of us."
There was one variable she wasn’t running.
"If Sinn ordered Code to wipe everyone at that mansion," I said, holding her gaze, "you honestly think he lets you walk?"
"Fuck." The word left her on a sharp exhale. Her jaw tightened.
"So let’s not guess." I started for the door. "Let’s go hear it from him."
Sinn was already behind the desk when we walked in. We took the seats across from him. I watched him decide where to start—eyes flicking between us, hands resting flat on the polished wood.
"Code told me you stopped him from killing Melissa," he said. No greeting. No lead-in. Straight to it. "Why?"
I looked at him. Some part of me had expected him to at least pretend, bury it under something first. He’d skipped the pretending entirely.
"Code killed every person in that mansion." I let it sit. "Everyone, Sinn. The whole compound." His name, from me, for the first time, no rank attached. "I’m the one who should be asking you."
"Those people were opposing us. Standing in the way." He didn’t blink. "Bodies are the price of a new world. Always have been."
"Fuck you." Mercury was on her feet in one sharp motion, chair scraping back. "I don’t work with psychos." She turned for the door, everything I’d told her in the hallway already gone.
"Mercury." Sinn’s voice climbed.
She stopped at the threshold, looked back over her shoulder. "You can send him after me too. Go ahead. But I’m not spending one more day working for someone this stupid."
"Stop."
He was up out of the chair, but she was already gone, the door swinging shut behind her with a solid click.
Sinn stood there a moment, then came around the desk and settled on the edge of it. Mercury had reacted the only way Mercury knew how. I stayed exactly where I was, hands resting on my knees.
He put a hand to his head, visibly gathering himself—fingers pressing against his temple, eyes closing for a beat. When he had it, he turned back to me.
"I know what you want to ask. Why I gave Code that order."
"Mhm."
"That’s part of the answer right there." He pointed at the door she’d just walked through. "People don’t respect me, Abram."
"Respect isn’t something you buy."
He smiled, small, and pushed off the desk.
"You’re sharp. But there’s something you haven’t learned yet." Hands went into his pockets. "Respect can be bought. It just comes out the other side as rented fear."
"Exactly."
"And rented is all I need." He said it easily. "Picture it. Imagine I’d killed a Veyron in that house today."
"You’d already be dead," I said. No softening.
"So was that the reason?" I asked. "Is that why you wanted Code on the team so badly?"
"No." He shook his head, hands still buried, walking a slow circle back toward his chair. "Thing is, I’ve been at the bottom my whole life. Men like Bala used me like a rag whenever it suited them. ’General Sinn, hold the walls. General Sinn, defend the line.’" He dropped back into the seat. "Wiped their feet and put me back in the drawer."
He looked at me across the desk.
"I know your story, Abram. The two of us are almost the same story told in different worlds. That’s exactly why I respect you the way I do."
I didn’t answer. I just watched him.
Because I knew the shape of what was happening to him. The system had taught it to me in the plainest terms. Corruption doesn’t arrive from outside. It comes from within—the moment you convince yourself the price is worth it. I knew that road. I was walking a version of it.
One girl, then another, then a system quietly rebranding attachment as strategy until I looked up and had a harem and a reason ready for every name on it. Same mechanism. Different path. And I had no clean ground to lecture him from.
"We both clawed up out of the dark," Sinn said. "And now that I’m here, I can erase anyone who stands between me and staying here." He laid both hands flat on the desk, heart out on the table between us. "Anyone."
"You’ve changed," I said. Then I stood up and left him sitting there with the thing he’d just admitted.
I walked the hallway and tried to put my mind back on the people who actually held a place in it. Sherry, out in the stray town with Becky, standing over a body I’d sent them to find. Mercury, somewhere in this building, furious and not wrong. The rest of the girls, each of them still lodged somewhere in my chest whether I had room for them or not.
I reached the elevator and pressed the button. The doors opened.
Mute stood inside the car, and he smiled at me.
"Hey, you."
"Hey." My own last memory of him answered before I did.
I’ll be visiting you soon.
I stepped in. The doors slid shut, sealing the two of us into the small moving box, and I understood—with a certainty that settled cold in my stomach—that there was nothing coincidental about this at all.
He hadn’t been waiting for the elevator. He’d been waiting for me to be alone.