Underground Warrior (16 page)

The others said plenty, in that endless stretching of uncertainty. Greta said, “Poor thing,” and Arden half moaned a protest of, “No!” Val, who knew Sibyl’s self-defense abilities, murmured, “That explains a lot.” Mitch said, “Okay, now that’s just eerie. How’d she know that?”

Smith rolled his eyes—“She eavesdropped, doofus.”

And still Trace said nothing. He had nothing to say to her. He didn’t like her anymore. He couldn’t stand to look at her—except, he
was
looking at her, studying her. His bruised face, raw along one jaw, held more confusion than condemnation.

Still, the first words he spoke, he was still staring at her. “Get out.”

No…
Sibyl shut her eyes, surprised that the movement sent hovering tears down her cheek. But as she shifted to move back, Trace—with a grunt of pain—caught her wrist gently. His hands could break bones, but not hers. He turned his gaze to the others, to brook no confusion. “Get out and leave us alone.”

“Look,” said Smith. “I’m sure there’s—”

Trace growled low in his throat.

Smith let Arden pull him after the others, shutting the door behind him, leaving her alone with the man she’d only hours ago thought of as her champion.

She met his gaze far more steadily than she felt. She wasn’t sure she could speak, though.

Luckily, he could, releasing her wrist as he did. “That’s ridiculous.”

What?

“You’re no killer.”

“What if you’re wrong?”

He snorted. “I’m not.”

He looked blurry now. Was she crying? She hadn’t cried so much since her daddy died. “You’re not,” she agreed, smiling as he brushed the tears off her cheek with a rough thumb and a caught breath—it still hurt him some to move. So he wouldn’t have to strain himself, she settled farther down on the bed to his level, face to face on the pillow. The bed smelled of him. Of safety. “But I was convicted of it anyway.”

“So talk to me. What went down?”

“My real name—my first name—was Isabel.”

And for the first time, Sibyl told her story to a willing listener. An accepting listener. One who even, maybe cared about her, more than her past. With every detail, she felt a horrible, stagnant weight falling off her and vanishing, and the bond between her and Trace growing.

She explained the skipped grades and the scholarship to the same academy Dillon Charles attended—“I knew you were smart, but
damn,
” murmured Trace. She told him how her father took a job doing night security at the school. Then she described the horror of her father’s death in a fire, the Kafka-esque nightmare of finding herself accused and convicted of both arson and manslaughter. And somehow, it didn’t hurt as much as it used to. The memories felt diluted, worn out by overuse. The tragedy had happened almost half a lifetime ago.

For her.

Trace, on the other hand, looked increasingly ill, even before he learned that his biological father was the judge who’d convicted her. She traced a finger up and down the hard curve of his naked shoulder, hoping the mere contact would assure him that she didn’t blame him. He was
not
his father’s keeper.

“It didn’t make sense,” she explained softly, across the mere inches between their faces. “Not only wasn’t it fair, but the conviction, the sentence—they didn’t even make sense to the other girls in juvie. First, I tried solving my daddy’s death myself, but no matter how good a hacker I became, I was still incarcerated. The police hadn’t investigated much beyond the planted evidence. They figured I’d done it, the wrong element from way over on the working side of town, envious of what the rich folks had, not realizing my father was in the building. That’s what they said.”

Trace’s haggard face, bruising on one cheekbone, scraped on the jaw, bristling with whiskers, had never looked so handsome as it did drinking in her explanation. His light eyes had dropped from her face, seeming to ache with her.
I love you,
she thought, and the thought delighted her.

But now wasn’t exactly the time.

“So then I decided, if I couldn’t find out who’d set the fire, I could find out why my mother and I had such a hard time getting counsel, and why the appeals courts were so set against me and, later, why I wasn’t getting parole. I wasn’t always a conspiracy theorist, you know. The Comitatus taught me to be. Because when I dug deep enough, I finally found them. Just because you’re paranoid…”

Doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.

“And you never found out who set the fire?”

“No, but it’s got to be Comitatus related, doesn’t it? Why else would they work so hard to convict me? That’s why I need to get into the archives in Louisiana that Dillon mentioned. They don’t put some of that really important stuff into digital files, or I would have found it, I know I would. But if there are hard copy records on paper? Maybe they’ve got some information about it. What if I can find a way in, Trace? What if I can finally put all this behind me, and stop being such a…such a victim?”

When he lifted his eyes to hers, he looked sick. “I’ll get you in.”

“You know where it is?”

“Some secret rooms behind the old Arsenal—I’ll find a way to get you in. I’ve just got to talk to the others, first.”

Talk to them, and take her side. She felt sure of it! For the first time in over a decade, she knew she could count on someone. “Thank you,” she whispered.

He blinked, somehow startled from his discomfort. Guilt over his dad, she supposed. Guilt over the role the Comitatus had played against her. But he wasn’t Comitatus anymore, so that was okay, too.

Before she got off the bed, she closed those final inches between them and kissed him. Warm. Gentle. Real.

Hers.

Then she brushed his hair off his haggard face and went out to find the others—just outside the door.

“Oh, don’t act so shocked,” parried Smith, when she raised an eyebrow. “Like you don’t do the same thing.”

“You were talking too quietly,” whispered Mitch, before following his friend in. “We didn’t hear much.”

She smiled at his kindness, let them shut the door between them—and, just as Smith had intimated, listened in. Old habits were hard to break and she couldn’t wait to hear someone take her side, for once.

“She was framed,” announced Trace’s voice, just as she’d hoped.

“I know we all want to believe that—” started Smith, but Trace interrupted him. “No, I
know
that. She was framed by the Comitatus. That’s how she first found out about them. And we’re going to get her into the New Orleans archives to make it up to her.”

“I’m guessing Hallmark doesn’t make a card for being framed so, sure,” quipped Mitch. “Breaking her into secret Comitatus headquarters. Close second, right?”

“Wrong!” protested Smith. “I’m not saying that, if they’re guilty, the New Orleans organization doesn’t deserve some kind of comeuppance. But we took vows. Whether or not they’re jerks, we aren’t.”

Trace said something Sibyl couldn’t hear, but apparently his friends couldn’t either, because he repeated himself. “I said,
I
am. Okay? No question they are, too—especially the Judge, and especially Dillon Charles. Either way, I need to fix this, with or without you two.”

“Who are you,” challenged Mitch, “and what have you done with the arrogant, testosterone-drenched side-of-meat who used to hang with us?”

Which is when Trace said, “I knew, okay?”

Outside the door, Sibyl frowned.
Knew what?

The others clearly felt as confused. “Knew what?” demanded Smith.

“Dillon Charles used to be best friends with my brother. Half brother. The one who died before the Judge came to find me. He and my father stayed close. Neither of us liked it, but we spent time together, and he was always bragging about stuff.”

“Stuff like…?”

Sibyl felt suddenly sick, as if the back of her mind was figuring out something the front didn’t yet want to recognize.

“Like how there’d been this charity student at the academy he attended, and how he set a fire to get her thrown out. How nobody even looked his direction. Stuff like
that.
I figured he was just making it up, which was disgusting enough, you know? But it was real, he killed Sibyl’s father, and Sibyl was sitting in jail doing time for it. I didn’t know that part, that someone died, that the ‘charity student’ was convicted. But I knew enough, and I didn’t do anything to help. I didn’t turn him in because of some stupid code. So yeah. We’re getting her into the Arsenal, so she can find proof and hopefully nail that son of a bitch to the wall.”

And now she understood. She knew who’d killed her father, if not why. She understood why the Comitatus covered it up. And she understood her idiocy in trusting anyone with Comitatus blood—even Trace.

She’d thought he was different. And he was…marginally. He’d given up the benefits of life in the Comitatus. He’d disowned his biological father. But Trace’s connection to that damned sword should have given her proof. He was still of that blood, of that world. He’d been just as likely to kick back and ignore the horrors that were being committed by the people of his class, just as the upper class of humankind had done for millennia.

She couldn’t love that.

She could never love that.

Somehow, she managed to open the door without losing her control. “That’s okay,” she said, her voice barely shaking. “I don’t need anyone’s help.”

Then she turned and walked out. The last thing she expected was the sound of Trace growling out a curse, then thundering after her.

His hand caught her elbow. “Wait!”

She spun on him. “I thought you were hurt.”

“I am!” His set fists showed the truth of that. So did her memories of the last few hours. “Wait anyway.”

She hesitated, torn between yanking free or ordering him back to bed. She shouldn’t be torn. She shouldn’t care.

But Sibyl had never been one to let something alone, had she? She couldn’t make herself stop caring about Trace, anymore than she could have stopped herself from pursuing her father’s killers.

She could, however, go back to lying about both. It was safer that way.

“Stay with your Comitatus friends. I’ll do this alone.”

“We aren’t Comitatus! Not anymore.”

“But you want to go back.”

“I don’t know what the hell I want!” He gripped the railing, pain even more clear around the outer edges of his eyes, the set of his jaw. “Except you.”

“You can’t have me!”

“To fix things with you.”

She hesitated.

“Let me do this.” Trace wasn’t the kind of man who could wheedle. It came out more like a command. “I want to be one of the good guys, here. For once. For you.”

Sibyl stared up at him where he loomed over her, the word “alone” still echoing in her head.
Let me do this alone. I do everything alone.

That was clearly how the world should work. Would always work. Despite this large, rugged man standing, half nude, in front of her, his fingers now very loose on her arm.

Every minute she spent with him now was just going to break her heart. But she could sacrifice her heart, if it finally led to the knowledge she needed—not just to understand.

The information, and opportunity, she needed to finally avenge herself and her poor, dead father.

So what if she broke her heart while getting it?

After she and Trace parted, she doubted she would ever need her heart again.

Chapter 11

T
race had never considered himself a planner. The fact that Smith and Mitch were willing to help him meant a lot. It just reminded him, yet again, that the guys who were born into the Comitatus didn’t have to be jerks.

Not that he’d stay, even so. The pain of his healing bruises he could handle. They were almost an afterthought. The pain of not being able to help Sibyl? That, he wasn’t sure he could stand.

“This is all about one thing,” Smith explained, leaning over sheets of paper in the study at his girlfriend’s big, Highland Park estate. They had all agreed that, after the attack during their earlier meeting, they couldn’t risk keeping either the swords or themselves at Greta’s house.

They’d made sure to carry both swords out during the middle of the day, when anyone who might be shadowing them—and surely Charles had paid someone to shadow them—might get good pictures of the assumed retreat. Now Sibyl, and Arden’s former-cop friend, Val Diaz, were staying to protect the older lady.

All about one thing.
Sibyl,
thought Trace.

“The sword of Charlemagne,” explained Smith, sliding a picture of Trace’s sword across the table. “Dillon Charles wants that sucker.
Bad
. So we use that in the distraction.”

Mitch made a wait-a-minute, clucking noise against his teeth. “He’s not going to settle for a picture of it this time, no matter how much more convenient it’d be for us if he’d just give in and play stupid villain.”

“No. We’ll have to bring the real sword.” Smith looked up at Trace. “Are you willing to risk losing it?”

Actually, he hated the idea of losing it. He wasn’t sure why. It represented the society he’d come to hate. It had belonged to a conqueror who, according to Sibyl anyway, had had plenty of less-than-chivalrous moments as he forcibly converted much of Europe to Christianity. It had drawn Sibyl’s own blood.

So why did he feel more honorable when he held it? More connected? Why did he continue to have dreams of himself with the sword, some kind of knight of old in valorous battle?

“Are you willing to risk it?” he asked Smith. His friend had been so excited about the possibilities of using the swords to reawaken the chivalry in other Comitatus members, men who hadn’t irreparably lost their honor.

“I hate the idea, but it’s your sword.”

His friends really were his friends. They might give him grief over his rough ways or plain thinking, because, well…they were guys. But they didn’t question his heritage. They’d never question his right to fight beside them.

They had set both swords, the flared sword of Aeneas and the long, straight sword of Charlemagne, on a sideboard. Trace looked at the medieval blade he’d pulled from his great-grandfather’s rotting wall, as if it had called him to it.
Mine.