Poisoned | Viper

by snootka

Summary:

Viper exists for herself.
Viper doesn't talk to anyone.
Viper is relentless.

However, it is Reyna who sees her moments of weakness.

And Viper hates her for that, even if she is not able to tell why.

Chapter 1: ONE

The hum of the engine was the only sound that broke the dead silence aboard the vulture.

Nobody was talking, maybe not even breathing, because the silence somehow seemed to be a safe boundary between the agents.

"You were supposed to watch the flank."

Viper's voice cut through the barrier like a knife's edge, and the safe cocoons of silence each of them had created broke.

It was surreal, but you could compare it to a glass dropped on the floor, where it shatters to thousand of pieces.

She didn't look at anyone, her eyes were fixed on the floor, but Phoenix knew she was talking to him anyway. He rolled his eyes, leaning against the side of the helicopter. The engines whirred, lifting them thousands of feet off the ground, but at the same time the agents couldn't shake the feeling that Callas's tone pinned them to the ground.

Everyone felt the tension. Raze suddenly became interested in the view through the glass, Jett began playing with the corner of her vest while Skye used her powers on to heal Sunwoo's bullet wound.

"Raze asked for help," Phoenix finally replied, though neither he nor Viper looked at each other for a second. The conversation was going on somewhere in the space between the two of them. "It was three against one, what was I supposed-..."

"You were supposed to stick to the plan."

The man huffed.

"So I should let her die?" His tone was almost mocking, as if he couldn't believe what he had just heard. Because he probably couldn't. "She didn't stand a goddamn chance against them."

Sabine didn't even flinch, just brushed off the crumb of ash that remained on her knee.

"We were on our way. She'd hold them off, drag them to one spot when we outnumbered them from behind," she said. Her tone was sure.

"Or she would be shot in the head because we wouldn't have made it in time."

"Jett was left alone with defusing the spike."

"And Raze with three morons on her back."

There was a heavy silence. If you hung a knife in the air, it would stay still.

Sabine looked up, her lips drawn into a tight line, but didn't speak until she met Phoenix's gaze on her way. She wanted to be sure that he would look her in the eye.

"The plan exists for everyone to stick to it," she said, emphasizing each word so strongly that each syllable echoed through the vulture like darts cutting through metal. "I can't lead a team that doesn't follow orders. So next time think about it before you decide to fucking freestyle and someone loses their life."

She nodded her head at Jett, who curled up in her seat. Skye also did not look up from the wound, which was slowly turning into a scar.

"I'm not going to blindly follow something that could change at any moment," Phoenix hissed. His eyes flashed warningly, but the chemist seemed to either not see it or ignore it completely.

"Then why don't you just admit that you didn't even look at those papers instead of playing the hero? Because if you read the damn plan, you'd know that there are at least fifteen different variants of it." Her voice didn't even tremble. "But you didn't do that, did you?"

Silence fell.

Phoenix went quiet.

And Viper knew she was right.

"Next time before someone tries to negate the effectiveness of my orders, I will personally shoot your heads."

No one dared to say a word as the woman left those words behind her and sat down in the co-pilot's seat with her back facing the others.

Reyna, in the pilot's seat, also said nothing, holding the steers as she was doing before, remaining passive throughout the situation.

The silence from the beginning of the journey returned, but this time it seemed to ring in the team's ears. It wasn't interrupted until the end of the flight, but Sabine liked it that way.

***

Viper in terms of making coffee has remained unchanged for years. She had her own ritual, the patterns of which she could recite when she woke up in the middle of the night.

This was the case this time as well, when she poured two teaspoons of brewed coffee into her favorite mug, while the water in the kettle was slowly boiling.

Both, the kitchen and the living room she could see, were empty. The agents went back to their rooms, mission-weary, tired and aching, but she... She was making coffee. Maybe she was hoping it would calm her down, maybe she just needed a shot of caffeine and a hint of her daily routine.

"You didn't have to be so arrogant."

Viper acknowledged Sage's presence by giving her a half-second look. But she did nothing more than watch the kettle tremble.

"I wasn't being arrogant," she announced, tapping her fingernails on the surface of the counter, impatient with the fact that she couldn't take her coffee and retreat into the shadows like she always did.

Sage folded her arms over her chest.

"Next time before someone tries to negate the effectiveness of my orders, I will personally shoot your heads," she quoted. "Don't you think that's too harsh?"

"I said what I thought. Since when is honesty bad?"

"Since when a leader doesn't accept the unexpected changes and errors."

Sabine didn't seem affected by this. When the kettle clicked, she automatically poured boiling water to her mug filled with coffee.

"Agents have to be a team," she announced. "You can't blame me for trying to keep them in line."

"By threatening them?"

"Who told you?" she asked, stirring the coffee as if nothing had happened. "Reyna?"

The healer sighed.

"What does it matter?"

Sabine nodded.

"So it was Reyna."

"Don't change the subject."

The spoon rattled against the rim of the cup as the chemist dropped it suddenly and raised her hands ostentatiously in defense.

"Oh, sorry, I'm going back to it right now." She finally placed her hands on her hips when she decided the gesture was eloquent enough. "Then why don't you stop acting like their mother and accept that everyone here is a grown adult and needs to learn to face the consequences of their actions?"

"They have a right to make mistakes," Sage protested, but Viper just snorted.

"Mistakes? Come on, Jett would have been dead long ago if I hadn't fired at the last minute, and our pretty boy says it's not his fault at all. Are you going to let him know we almost lost an agent, or are you going to pat him on the shoulder as usual and say that 'it can happen to anyone'?"

"But she's not dead."

Viper smiled almost mockingly.

"I'm not going to thank for that someone, who thinks he's a fucking comic book hero because radianite allowed him to smoke a cigarette without using a lighter."

"If it wasn't for that radianite, many missions would be over before they even started," Sage stated. "You can't say Phoenix is useless only because he made a mistake."

"Yeah, here we go again." She nodded. "Indulge everyone, because nothing happened."

"I'm not indulging anyone," Sage objected. There was an anger in her eyes that Sabine wasn't afraid of at all. In fact, she got a strange satisfaction from it. "I just think you were too harsh and you should give them some time."

"Oh, please." Viper took a sip of her coffee, her tone not changing a bit, not a hint of irritation creeping into her voice. She sounded like she was having a casual conversation over the morning paper. "We live in a world where our own clones want to kill us and turn our land to dust in the process, and you want to wait until your birds learn to fly?"

"They gain experience."

"Not if they can get away with anything," Viper cut short, taking another sip of coffee. "And I'm not going to let you soften them up with your comforting and patting their heads in reassurance, because in case you haven't noticed, we're at war."

"Which we won't win with only the help of ordinary people."

Sabine pursed her lips. Anger burned in her eyes, but she didn't say a word.

She had never been jealous of not being exposed to radianite and not being able to acquire supernatural abilities. She believed in her intellect and extensive knowledge, but... But sometimes she had the impression that for others she was only human. Just like any other that could be replaced.

"Viper, listen..."

Sage was silenced with a hand gesture. The mask of indifference on Viper's face seemed to slip momentarily, but it lasted less than a second, as it always did when it hit a sensitive spot.

Which Sage knew all too well.

"You are needed-..."

"But I can't fly or electrocute or heal incurable wounds," she stated. "And that makes me a bad leader."

"I didn't say anything like that."

"But you thought so." Silence again. "Brimstone mostly sits in the office, so he doesn't bother you. And I'm not perfect like you, am I?"

She tightened her fingers on the handle of her cup and walked past Sage down the corridor into without even waiting for an answer. She didn't need it.

She went down the stairs, slid open the glass door, and entered a room she could call her own. She felt safe here, away from others, with only herself, the hum of air-conditioning, hundreds of test vials and stacks of notes marked with round stains of dried coffee.

She didn't want to listen to anyone else. She felt tired from today's interactions, her muscles ached and she was damn sleepy, but she could be just like that in the lab.

She put her mug on the nearest table, put a white coat over her green turtleneck, and found her glasses under a pile of papers.

She laid out the plans, then disappeared into the back room to fetch everything she needed. Her backpack needed a few upgrades, and that was what she was going to focus on for the day.

And she did, quite well, until the evening, when she had to turn on the office lamp, because the daylight coming from the large windows was no longer enough. She was welding two wires together, and the latest toxin prototype bubbling somewhere nearby when a series of footsteps broke the silence.

"I'm telling you, the air could be cut."

Viper looked up from her notes. She recognized Raze's voice, and telling by the fact that her workshop was located next to the lab, she was probably accompanied by Killjoy.

She sighed. Todays incident will probably follow her to her grave. She felt as if even the walls were gossiping about her.

It didn't annoy her so much as... it bored her. She was aware that she was often the topic of conversation for agents who didn't know her... Actually at all.

Because she worked on it herself. She moved into the shadows whenever she could, functioning mostly at night, out of everyone's line of sight.

She was a shadow in HQ and she knew it. Her only regret was that the rest of the agents hadn't do it as well. It would be much easier.

The no-fraternization rule was beginning to fade more and more, and it was starting to annoy Sabine more and more. Not so much sticking to protocol as the fact that it was her rule.

Hers, not Sage's.

That's why it was starting to be ignored.

"What is she like?" Sabine didn't want to, but she heard the question, probably directed at Killjoy. "You know, when you two mess around with robots and stuff."

"She's specific." Klara's voice was muffled but still clear enough to hear through the open door. Apparently, they were unaware of the presence of the chemist. "In a good way."

"What does it mean?"

The clang of falling metal echoed. Probably a screwdriver.

She could imagine Killjoy shrugging.

"She is direct. And honest, sometimes too much. She can praise, although she is not... Effusive."

Sabine agreed with Klara. She tried to focus back on the notes, but for some reason they suddenly became unintelligible gibberish, and her gaze landed each time on the door, where she could still see the elongated shadows of two silhouettes.

"Is she nice?"

Callas tightened her fingers on the pen. The grip only loosened when she felt the familiar numbness. With her other hand, she began to massage the stiff muscles in her wrist.

"She's neutral. Sometimes I don't even know what she means until she says it."

There was silence for a moment.

"Today I thought he was going to murder Phoenix."

Sigh.

"Yeah, I heard. But he wasn't without fault either."

"Killjoy?"

"Hmm?"

"Are you afraid of her?"

Sabine's pen rolled off the counter and landed on the floor. She cursed under her breath, but picked it up quickly and dashed to the glass door, slamming it shut enough to fake her own entrance to the lab.

Because she hadn't heard the whole conversation, had she?

Or she didn't want to hear the answer to that last question at all. Even if she didn't want to admit it.

Had she really seen fear in their eyes as they flew the vulture? Or was it only now that autosuggestion had worked that she was imagining something that had never happened?

She tried to remember Raze's face, but couldn't make out more than her silhouette turned towards the window.

She pressed two fingers to the bridge of her nose, feeling the familiar ache rise in her temples.

She only shook herself when her phone vibrated in her pocket and the sound of an incoming text message carried through the lab.

It was from Brimstone, direct one. He asked her to come to the office.

She didn't feel like doing it at all, because she knew what she was going to hear, but of the two things, she seemed to prefer that instead of avoiding Raze for the rest of the day and pretending she didn't care about what Killjoy replied.

***

"If you want to relate to what everyone else is going to relate to today, then you can let it go."

Her words echoed as soon as she crossed the threshold. Brimstone turned from the cork board, to which he was pinning some papers and photos, held together with a knife red thread. From a distance, this pattern always reminded Callas of a spider's web.

The man sighed, because in fact, he was going to do what the woman said.

"Okay, you're right." Sabine laughed without a hint of joy. "But the difference is that I'm on your side."

"If you agree with Sage, then I don't think you are." She placed her fingers on her temple, which gave more and more of itself. "Anyway, say what you have to say and let's get it over with."

Liam leaned on the base of a desk littered with various papers. Callas looked there with the corner of her eye and saw the printed forms of mission report.

"I'm not saying that what Phoenix did was good. In fact, I'd scold him myself for what he did."

"But Sage told you to be nice because he's an inexperienced kid and he's still learning?" She sighed. "If you're going to give me reprimands, then go ahead and do just that."

Brimstone sighed and collapsed heavily into an armchair.

"Can you just apologize to them?"

Viper walked over to the desk, casually sliding over a few papers with her fingertips. Her green eyes followed the planned next mission and strings of red thread.

"And can you not make me play good cop and bad cop?" she asked. "If it wasn't for the fact that Sage allows everything and constantly softens something that should leave a lasting mark in their memory, maybe they wouldn't make such mistakes."

"So you're going to teach them a lesson in the form of threats?"

"For the love of God, it's not-..." She trailed off. She blew air out of her mouth. "I'm not going to write out cause of death report, only because someone didn't read the damn plan."

"You are their commander. They respect you anyway, although they may not show it."

"Or they're afraid of me."

The ex-soldier folded his hands under his chin, watching the woman, who looked around the room for a moment, as if gathering her thoughts. The man raised one eyebrow in surprise at this sudden confession, but Viper just shrugged.

"It's okay. Someone has to be the bad guy."

"That's not true."

"Maybe it's true, maybe not." She sighed. This conversation was tiring her, and as if that wasn't enough, the dull light wasn't helping her migraine one bit. "Anyway, they won't hear an apology. Not from me."

"Viper..."

"No, Brimstone. They had one job – to stick to the plan. They didn't, so I'm not going to apologize to them for doing my duty as a commander. I don't know how you or Sage run these missions, but I don't allow myself to fuck around with this job, because the squad doesn't give a shit about my orders." She headed for the exit, but before grabbing the handle, she stopped in front of the door. "I don't care what they think of me. I don't even ask for the apology I deserve. So why don't we just get this over with and go our ways, shall we?"

She didn't wait for an answer and left.

Maybe the chain of irritating events would have ended, if a pair of violet eyes hadn't caught Viper's attention in the darkness of the corridor leading to her quarters.

Reyna's silhouette showed up soon after, revealing that she was holding an empty tea cup and stopped mid-step for a moment, as if aware that Viper would not pass her by without a word.

And that's how it happened.

"Thanks for a fun-filled day," Sabine's tone was mockingly high, her smile so exaggerated it was dripping with sarcasm. But then it fell off within a second. "Especially since I was doing my fucking duties."

Callas walked by Mondragón, squeezing between her and the wall, as if she wanted to avoid even the slightest touch of their shoulders.

Chapter 2: TWO

Sabine woke up because of a headache.

Not that she wasn't used to them, because she'd had them in her skull a lot lately, but the pain was still sharp, pulsating and damn irritating.

She sat on the bed, groping her way to the nightstand drawer. Her hands ran over several packages, most of them empty and with an expiration date... well beyond the last few months.

She wasn't able clean it up. For... a long time by now.

So she just dug out one of the boxes, which she thought was relatively full, and squeezed one pill out of the blister.

The darkness of the night didn't allow her to see much, but she could see the medicine perfectly placed in her own hand. An oblong tablet that should help, but it, in fact, hasn't even bit since immemoriał time. Perhaps she was counting on the placebo effect, as she always did.

After a moment's thought, one portion of the medicine was joined by another.

She knew she shouldn't do that, but the pain was digging into her temples too much for her to have a moral chat with herself, so she just reached for the water by the bedside and swallowed the meds.

It didn't matter that she won't feel even a hint of relief. She had become so used to this scheme that she had ceased to notice how meaningless it was.

Sabine just liked schemes.

She sat on the bed for a long moment, focused on the coolness of the sheets, which was touched by the cold wind from outside the window. Focused way the material fell over her calves and thighs.

And then she threw it off, not caring that the sheets slid off the bed and landed on the floor. She got up, glanced at her watch out of the corner of her eye. The numbers on the display also made her narrow her eyes and grimace.

She scooped up a pack of cigarettes from the windowsill and stuffed the nearby lighter into the pocket of her sweatpants.

Maybe it was selfish, but she never smoked in her own bedroom. She always went out onto the balcony by the main living room of the HQ, so that the cigarette smoke would fit into the view of the city, and this is how she wanted to remember this view. With a gray streak circling here and there, as if to remind her that this city isn't perfect.

That nothing is perfect.

She always smiled at the thought.

Barefoot, she stepped out into the corridor, the cold desks piercing her skin. This coolness provided her with a sense of some minimal relief.

Or she made it up to force her own brain to reduce the pain.

She opened the balcony, a gust of evening wind played with her hair, stubbornly pushing a few strands into her eyes. She brushed them away carelessly, knowing that they wouldn't stay in place.

She pressed the trigger of the lighter with her thumb, the flame warmed up the tip of her finger, and she instinctively tried to pull it away, but it went out before she could place the cigarette in her mouth.

She did so a few more times, but the worn lighter stubbornly refused to give her the opportunity to soothe her body with the drug. It was old, the mechanism could be broken, and it probably shouldn't have annoyed her as much as it did, but she shoved the item back into her pocket anyway, holding herself back from crushing it in her hand.

She had already taken the cigarette out of her mouth and was about to turn back. But she didn't even take a step.

"Need some light?"

Sabine froze, cigarette in hand, her entire body rigid except for her head, which turned toward the accented voice.

Reyna held the lighter in her outstretched hand, and Callas could feel the woman's gaze boring into her, waiting for her to move.

Zyanya never came here. Or, most likely, Viper was here always by herself only. Always. It was her scheme.

And she liked schemes.

Which was why, fixing her icy gaze on her unwanted companion, she pursed her lips into a thin line as she always did when she was thinking. She didn't even notice when her free hand reached into her pocket and began to twirl the broken lighter between her fingers.

She knew Reyna was still watching.

She took the lighter from her and, after scorching the tip of the drug, inhaled the smoke almost immediately.

She handed it back a second later, not meeting Mondragón's eyes for a moment.

"What are you doing here?" With those words, she exhaled smoke through her nose, which warmed her body familiarly.

Reyna gave a short, restrained laugh, more to herself than to Viper.

"As far as I remember, that's not how you say 'thank you'." She stated dispassionately. She had expected such a reaction, so she didn't even try to sound offended.

"I'm not going to thank you for that." Viper took the cigarette from her mouth and exhaled the smoke. The soreness in her throat returned, and to her delight, at least one scheme worked as it should. "What are you doing here?"

Asking again was the essence of what could be said about Sabine Callas. Namely, that Sabine Callas always got what she wanted. And now she wanted answers.

Reyna didn't comment on the first part of the chemist's statement. Instead, she took a drag on her own cigarette.

"Same thing as you. I'm spending the evening on smoking cigarettes that I don't even like." She shrugged.

"I like to smoke."

"No, you don't."

Viper realized that Mondragón was purposely leading her into the conversation. Perhaps Sabine even felt respect for the fact that she tried.

"I'm not going to gossip with you," she announced as another puff of smoke filled her lungs. Which, perhaps, she really didn't really like.

"Do I tell you to do so?"

Sabine only looked at her barely a second time during this conversation. Her expression was like a wax mask in the twilight of the evening. She hid the tiredness lurking in her features.

She sighed.

"What's your point?"

Reyna finished her cigarette, then stuffed it into the ashtray Fade had once pinned to the railing. The light of the glowing tip was extinguished in a second, leaving the figure of the woman in darkness.

"I didn't want Sage to scold you like that."

Viper raised an eyebrow and laughed briefly. It almost amused her.

"Well, you did great."

"I'm serious."

"Me either."

Silence fell. But Reyna was the first to bend.

"We were just talking," she said, though she wasn't going to look at Viper any more than Viper was going to look at her. "She asked about the mission. About the general stuff."

Sabine showed nothing. Zyanya wasn't even sure if she was even listening to her, but on the other hand, there were only two of them on the balcony. And one cigarette, making its life.

"And the first thing you told her was how bad Viper threatens her poor teammates."

"Don't put in my mouths words that aren't mine, Sabine."

Viper shivered slightly, the corner of her mouth twitching in a nervous tic. She reached into the ashtray that separated the two of them.

"First of all, don't call me Sabine." She pressed the cigarette down so hard that it went out, and only the still lingering smell of it testified to its presence. "And secondly, somehow that was the first thing Sage wanted to discuss with me."

"Maybe that's what alarmed her the most."

Sabine snorted.

"Alarmed? Seriously?" She looked at Reyna only to smile sarcastically.

"Don't be so picky, I just worded it wrong," the Mexican bit back. "She was worried about the atmosphere in the team, better?"

No, it wasn't better.

"For God's sake, why are you making me some fucking hangman? Why don't you just put me next to guillotine right now, will you?"

"Viper, no one says you're-..."

"They do," she hissed. "Everyone says so, and don't even try to deny it because you went to Sage yourself."

"I went to Sage to answer her questions."

Sabine felt the sharp pain hit her temple again, but only winced slightly.

She locked her gaze with Mondragón so she could see perfectly how she drawled each word without a trace of hesitation.

"Sage never says I did something right. She never says I ran a mission right or that my move on the battlefield was good. She never said a nice word about me right to my face, though that's usually on mine and Brimstone's mind to plan a strategy on which the lives of several people depend,' she reproached, though her tone was terryfyingly monotonous. "She's considered a fucking savior, she's always on every agent's tongue in her glory. When she wants to talk about me, she's just waiting to get something that will sting me, and you gave her another chance, so I won't talk to you about what other people think, because you know who I am in their eyes compared to Sage."

Reyna listened to this confession, pretending to be unmoved, because then, in the darkness, her facial expressions were not very visible. And though she had taught her facial muscles to be indifferent, surprise was born inside her.

Viper never gave anything away. And Reyna had just witnessed her stone mask cracking, even if it was immediately flawless again in the matter of seconds.

Viper let go of the railing around which she had twisted her fingers.

Before Reyna could reply, the balcony door slammed and Callas vanished into thin air like gray streaks of cigarette smoke in the evening breeze.

***

"How is it like to get shot?" Neon's voice was a little shaky and muffled by the hum of the treadmill she was running on, but Jett turned to her anyway.

"What do you mean 'how is it'?" Jett was out of breath too, though she didn't run as fast as Valdez. Her ponytail bounced steadily.

"You know, it must be a weird feeling. Skye said it crushed your collarbone."

There were only two of them in the gym, not counting Deadlock, who was sitting on one of the training mats, scrolling through something on her phone, so their voices echoed slightly. The conversation was about anything and everything that would make the hour-long run go by faster.

"I'm going to do adobo today," Neon suddenly blurted out, probably also directing the words to Deadlock, who looked up from her phone. "Eating fast food for the last week has made me feel delusional."

Jett burst out laughing.

"Do you know where Viper is?"

Iselin's sudden question interrupted the conversation of two women who were just stopping the treadmills. Neon opened her water bottle and took several greedy gulps.

"What do you need her for?"

Nicole rested her elbow on the handles of the treadmill as she watched Deadlock get up off the floor, still staring at the phone like an oracle until she shoved it into her trouser pocket with clear annoyance.

Iselin was new to the squad, she joined protokół barely a few weeks ago, and wasn't very talkative unless she needed something. None of the agents, however, had a problem with her dryness, because everyone, in fact, went through the same thing at some point.

Still, there was true frustration in her voice now.

"I had a training with her scheduled for three o'clock."

Jett looked at the clock hanging over the doorway. It was half an hour later.

Maybe it wasn't a big late, because, to be honest, no one really stuck to their schedule that strict, but not Viper.

Viper was never late. Absolutely never.

"Maybe some scheduling error? Brimstone doesn't sleep well sometimes and stuff." Neon shrugged, although she didn't quite believe in this scenario herself. "Did you try to text her?"

"More than once," the Norwegian snorted. She looked at the clock again. "Fuck it. I'm not going to explain myself later."

Jett frowned.

"What are you going to do?"

Deadlock stuffed her hands into her pockets.

"Go get her."

Moments later, Jett and Neon were alone in the gym.

Because, in fact, Deadlock was going to talk to Viper. And not about that one workout, but at least the last four, where the chemist hadn't graced her with her presence for even a second.

It wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't for the fact that Brimstone cared about the condition of the agents, kept them in good shape through training schedules, both in hand-to-hand combat and individual ones, matched to the skills of individual agents. Therefore, Cypher, under his command, helped to montage the cameras that allowed to monitor their progress.

And Iselin couldn't make progress if Viper hadn't stepped in the gym for a good week.

So when the door to her quarters opened, Deadlock didn't even wait for an invitation. She pushed them harder so that she could lean against the doorframe and prevent the woman from closing them.

"Wow, so you're alive after all," she snorted as a good morning, but the mocking tone was of no use. Sabine just rolled her eyes. "Are you going to attend the training sometime, or should I kick your ass here and now?"

Iselin's fingers tightened on the inner material of the trousers. She was angry. Or rather she was furious. Her jaw was clenched so hard that Callas could see the muscles in her face tense beneath her skin, and she could tell from her voice that she was close to screaming.

"Don't yell, I've got a headache," Callas commented. "I will not be there today."

Deadlock snorted.

"I had time to fucking figure it out."

Iselin wasn't afraid of Viper, didn't feel hounded by her presence, and wasn't going to yield to her and run away like a dog with its tail between its legs. Her and the woman had exchanged maybe two sentences in those few weeks, and they weren't even incomplete.

But she'd heard the rumors, heard what the agents were saying about her, even yesterday's action had caught her ear.

And she guessed that unlike the others, she didn't care.

"Next time I will be on the training."

"Bullshit," Iselin leaned her hip against the doorframe, her gaze wandering inside Callas's bedroom. It was as pedantic as expected. "What's so important that you didn't deign to touch the floor of the gym with your foot, huh?"

Viper looked tired, though her eyes followed the blonde's gaze so closely, as if she wanted to know where she was directing her gaze. This, however, did not lessen the amount of frustration that tormented the Norwegian.

"I said don't yell."

"I will, because if it goes on like this, I will get fired faster than i got here, because it will turn out that I didn't want to move my ass."

"We're not going to fire you, so don't yell about something that isn't a problem."

"The problem is you make a fuss about rules that you yourself don't follow."

"I think you're forgetting who you're talking to."

Viper didn't like to use that argument because it always made her chest prickle at the thought of intertwining her professional life with her personal life. But she also didn't like it when someone raised her voice when a migraine was raging in her head. And she honestly didn't care if she was going to be summoned to Brimstone again. Even if he had to scold her from top to bottom, she would not lose her job, because Sabine's strategic skills matched his own perfectly.

Iselin didn't like that answer. Her eyes widened, Viper couldn't tell if it was more shock or surprise. For a moment, Callas thought he was going to lunge at her with his fists.

She probably considered it.

"That doesn't justify being a fucking bitch."

Viper didn't answer for the first moment. She eyed the younger one, not flinching at the furious gaze or her hands clenched into fists in her trouser pockets.

Deadlock, however, did not intend to wait for this answer, because she turned on her heel and left slamming the door. As if just seeing Viper was something that made her blood boil.

Sabine stood as she did. For a minute or two, perhaps she wondered if the Norwegian was right, but then she also turned her back to the door and headed for the bed, where she crouched.

She gathered up the blood-stained tissues, crumpled them into her hand.

It was kind of funny how there was a contrast between the chaos of the lab and her bedroom organized to a single speck of dust.

Before she sat on the bed with perfectly arranged sheets, pillows and bedspread, and her notebook with equally perfect notes landed in her lap, she wiped her bleeding nose with the tissue one last time and tossed it in the bin so that any thing which was not perfect would disappear from her sight.

Her bedroom, according to Deadlock's guess, was indeed pedantic.

***

"I guess Viper won't come for adobo," Neon muttered as she saw Iselin walk through the corridor like a thunderbolt, then past the kitchen, heading for her room. The slamming of the door was also quite obvious.

Fade just glanced that way, but nodded.

"No, I don't think so."

Tala nodded, stirring the thick sauce with a spoon casually.

"I'm surprised she's still alive."

Fade lifted her mouth from her coffee mug. It was freshly made, steam rising above the surface.

"Deadlock or Viper?" The corner of her mouth lifted slightly as Neon snorted with laughter. Tala didn't seem to notice, though, busy tending the stove.

"Both."

Fade nodded with a hint of lurking amusement, but said nothing more for a long moment. She looked here and there, noticed Reyna's figure in the corner of the spacious living room, reading a book.

She didn't seem interested in what was going on in the kitchen, so Fade finally broke the silence.

"Why did you even want to invite her?" she asked finally, taking another sip of coffee as Tala turned her head to her. "Not that I mind, I'm just curious."

Valdez quickly broke eye contact, her hand going back to the wooden spoon, though Fade had a feeling the sauce didn't need stirring at all at that point. She stood there for a moment, preoccupied with the sauce, while being perfectly aware of Hazal's gaze fixed on her.

Finally she shrugged. And she didn't answer, so Fade realized that Tala didn't have it.

"What do you think about her?"

It was Hazal who shrugged now, but for a few moments Neon saw the concentration on her face. She swallowed her coffee again.

"She kind of reminds me of me. You know, before the protocol. But I think that unlike her I… I want to live."

Neon began to stir the steaming sauce in the saucepan with less passion. She tilted her head slightly, a fragment of her bangs partially covering her face.

Hazal couldn't help but want to push back those blue strands.

"You think she doesn't?"

She didn't look at Fade. But Fade was staring at her.

"I think she just doesn't care anymore."

Neon focused entirely on cooking. The kitchen counter was dotted with various spices, which stood open in jars and containers, and just as she had seemed amused by this fact before, now Fade got the impression that the mess in the kitchen was tiring her. That the kitchen bothers her in general.

She put the mug down next to the stove and placed a hand on the younger one's shoulder. She knew that Tala thought a lot and that many things affected her, so she was about to say something, but in the end she didn't say a word, because Valdez herself broke the silence.

"She doesn't know what she's missing," she laughed, though Eyletmez could see that much of that laugh was forced. "My mom's adobo puts everyone on their feet without exception."

Fade smiled gently, not forcing Nicole to make eye contact, which the younger of them tried to avoid at all costs.

"For sure it does."

Her hand still hadn't left the Filipina's shoulder, and it gripped it tighter, and Hazal could have sworn the corner of the duelist's mouth lifted up as if in relief.

Hazal could also swear she was getting worse at keeping her mouth shut by the minute.

And after a short time, she couldn't take it anymore.

"Tala can we talk?" she said. Quietly, with Reyna in mind, but loud enough to get Neon's attention.

"We're talking," she replied, but her gaze was fixed on the saucepan.

"Not now. And not here." Fade slid her hand off Valdez's shoulder as she saw movement across the living room. Reyna got up from her chair, as it turned out later, in search of the remote control, and although she wasn't looking towards the kitchen, Hazal preferred to focus on some neutral activity. She placed the empty cup in the sink and began scrubbing it. "Later, in the evening. Whatever."

"But-..."

"Oh my god, I'm so hungry!"

Both women turned to Jett, who had just entered the kitchen.

Chapter 3: THREE

The noise of the TV failed to drown out the sound of cutlery clinking against plates, or the intermittent chatter about what a hopeless driver Phoenix is in GTA and whether Yoru would be able to win against him in a race if it were held in real life.

Neon, however, was watching this from the corner of the kitchen, where she had just been pouring juice into a glass for herself for... a good few minutes. However, no one seemed interested in this fact, so she simply rested her elbows on the countertop, right next to the full glass.

She wasn't even sure what kind of juice it actually was.

Fade didn't join in the conversation. She passively watched Yoru and Phoenix arguing, occasionally glancing at the phone as if she was waiting for something. Only this betrayed her impatience, her body posture showing nothing more than boredom.

She also glanced at Neon. Tala had the impression that Fade was waiting for some sign that she couldn't understand or... or was afraid to understand. That's why she busied herself with washing the dishes with much more fierceness than necessary – to avoid that piercing gaze on herself, which had been drilling a hole in her stomach for god knows how long.

"It was really delicious."

She almost jumped up, and the sponge fell out of her hands. She turned her head.

Reyna was holding several plates in her hands, but in a moment she was busy putting them in the dishwasher. She didn't comment on Neon's hand-washing, and the younger woman was truly grateful for it.

"Thanks. Mom's recipe doesn't fail," she smiled slightly, the corner of her mouth trembled, however, betraying uncertainty.

Reyna saw her gaze wander to the untouched extra portion prepared with the cutlery right next to the stove. Perhaps barely for a moment, perhaps by accident, but even so Zyanya couldn't shake the feeling that Neon, aside from her apparent uptightness, had something in her mind about that too.

"Don't worry," Zyanya said cautiously, but the younger woman shrugged her shoulders. She sponged the dishes as if her life depended on it.

"It's okay, I expected it."

"Did you?"

Tala sighed, put the plates down deep in the sink and turned off the tap. For a moment she stared at the tiles, in which the light from the TV screen was slightly reflected.

"Okay, maybe I had some hope. I just don't get it, that's all."

Reyna nodded, but Neon wasn't going to look at her.

"Are you mad at her?"

"Yes," she hesitated. "No. I don't know." She sighed again. "But never mind, I'm glad you guys liked it."

She sent the Mexican woman a brief smile, which was probably meant to be a conversation-ending element, and probably would have been, had it not been for the fact that Reyna felt a bitter aftertaste in her mouth, something she couldn't name.

It was possible that it was simple sympathy.

"If you want, I can give her that. I was about to head out anyway." With a movement of her head, she pointed to the untouched food. It was still gently steaming.

A gentle spark shone in Neon's eyes. It was a nice change from the unseeing gaze wandering around the living room all evening.

Reyna had never been good at reading emotions from something else than heartbeat, but she knew she liked the current one from the sprinter much more than the one a dozen seconds ago.

"You don't have to, it's not a big deal." Neon waved her hand. "Maybe next time it will work."

"I'll take it." Before the younger one had time to protest, the tattoo-marked arm reached for a plate. "Because it really was fucking delicious."

She walked out of the living room toward Viper's room. The slight smile she had just gave Neon faded as soon as she stepped out into the hallway.

***

She had had enough.

Her fingers were beginning to stiffen from the cold of the damp towel, and she could feel the chill searing through her neck all the way to her bones. She sat hunched over the closed toilet, her spine also began to recoil in protest at the uncomfortable position, which she could not change because the cloth pressed against her nose refused to stop soaking with blood.

Maybe it was a good thing that the mirror was hung higher than she could reach with her eyes from this point, because she was world convinced that she wouldn't have been able to look at herself.

She took the cloth away from her face for a moment. The warmth of the room hit her skin, contrasting with the icy cold she used to try to force her own blood vessels to contract.

The temperature difference made her head spin and she only groaned in frustration.

Why the hell wasn't it ending?

She could feel the blood dried under her nostrils and on her upper lip. She could also feel the sickening taste of it lingering somewhere in her throat, and she had a feeling that she wouldn't get rid of it so easily. Her own stomach contracted in warning spasms.

She stared at the tiles between her feet. She tried to count them, to focus her gaze on anything that would force her brain to spin higher; she felt like only solution was shaking herself and persuading herself to get a grip. She wanted to break out of this bubble, in which it was icy and hot at the same time, in which she could taste and smell blood, making her nauseous.

And against this, she could not move a single limb.

She sighed heavily, squinting her eyes against the light pouring from the single lamp, which was the only one she could bear. She took the towel off her neck and wiped her forehead with it, then grabbed the edge of the sink and gently pulled herself up.

Because if she didn't, she would probably fall asleep on the spot.

Just as she thought - mirror reflected exactly how she felt. Her skin was pale, dull, as if the blood she had lost had taken away all color. The bland light highlighted the bags under her eyes that she so meticulously masked with concealer every day.

Obsessively, even.

The morning routine always included concealer under the eyes.

Sabine looked sick. And for some reason it made her furious.

She furrowed her eyebrows. The figure in the mirror did the same. She clenched her fingers on the sink until her knuckles turned white, because although she was all too restrained, she developed the urge to smash that glass with her bare fists.

She was right – she couldn't look at herself.

She threw a dirty towel and a cloth under the tap right after she had rubbed the last clot from under her nose and made sure the bleeding had stopped.

She would take care of the laundry tomorrow. What she needed now was to think properly.

Clinging to the doorframe and a few pieces of furniture at a time, she made her way to the bed, where she sat down heavily as the darkness swirled in front of her eyes again.

And just then she heard a knock on the door.

"Oh, for fuck's sake," she snarled.

She felt like pretending she wasn't there, or sleeping, or doing whatever else prevented her from approaching the door. She knew that if the matter was an emergency, no one would entertain knocking.

And yet, surprising herself, she sighed and, pressing the bridge of her nose, added:

"Come in."

The door swung open. And then, for the first time, Sabine realized how pathetic she must look. She was hunched over on the bed, strands of hair that were usually perfectly smooth now stood out, some of it stuck to her forehead, which was still covered with cold sweat, and all this in her bedroom, which did not allow an ounce of natural light in through the closed blinds.

The poor lighting, however, did not prevent her from recognizing Reyna's shimmering purple eyes. Viper sighed.

"What's it this time?" she croaked out.

She realized she didn't sound very confident, but she didn't have the strength to try to change that. Reyna, however, didn't ask anything, only lowered the plate she was holding so that it was in Callas' line of sight.

"Neon made adobo. She wanted you to try it," she said dryly. She didn't seem to show any sympathy, although even a blind person would have noticed that something was wrong. Sabine was partly pleased by this. She didn't like pity. "She was sad that you didn't come."

Viper pressed her fingers to the base of her nose again and tightened her eyelids. She tried to suppress the metallic aftertaste that came dangerously fast on her tongue.

"How was I supposed to know she was cooking something?"

Reyna set her plate down on the nearest cabinet. There was no denying that she did it quite loudly with full awareness.

That sound pierced Viper from head to toe, driving thousands of pins throughout her body. She looked at Reyna fiercely, but the woman didn't seem to care.

"If you ever left the damn room, you'd know," she stated. "The smell carried throughout the headquarters and somehow managed to attract everyone but you."

A smell that would probably make Sabine nauseous.

"I'm not hungry."

"Of course," snorted Mondragón. "When you have to do something for others, you back out to the shadows."

Viper stood up. The edges of the furniture danced in her eyes, but anger seemed to have added to her strength.

"You have no idea how much I do for the protocol," she growled. Her fingers entwined on the bed frame for support. "I put my whole life into it."

"For the protocol of course," Reyna agreed. "And for the agents? For the atmosphere? For ordinary human empathy?"

"Don't play the damn lawyer over some stupid dinner." Viper had the urge to sit back down on the bed, but stubbornly stood to avoid being lower than a duelist.

"Stupid? Maybe it's stupid to you when someone tries to bring here a little bit of their home that they damn well miss," she hissed.

"The agents knew what they were signing up for."

"And this is your response to making someone sad?" Reyna laughed hollowly. "Just admit that you don't know how to apologize, Viper."

"What do you guys have with all of this apologizing?" She raised her voice at the expense of the needle of pain drilling into her head once again. "I'm not going to apologize for something that doesn't require it!"

Her yell clanged against the walls of the darkened room. For a long moment they said nothing, and Sabine figured it was the echo of the carrying voice that closed Reyna's mouth.

Only then, however, did Mondragón's eyebrows draw together. First slightly, then more and more. Callas didn't understand this until she heard the next sentence.

"You're bleeding."

Viper reflexively wiped her nose with the top of her hand. She looked at her pale skin and indeed - there were smudged red streaks on it.

"Fuck."

With a quick step, she headed back to the bathroom. She heard footsteps behind her, knew the woman was following her and she wanted so bad to slam the door in her face, but the fact that blood was starting to drip onto her perfect floor put those plans to rest.

"Viper, what the hell?"

Sabine didn't turn around. Reyna stood in the threshold, her gaze wandering between Viper herself bent over the sink and the stained towels she had left there.

"What, you didn't see blood before?" she hissed. She picked up the smaller of the cloths, dripping with water, and pressed it back to her face.

Only when she dared to look at Reyna did she see that the Mexican woman's expression had changed. She looked... uncertain.

"Can I help you somehow?" she asked.

Her tone dropped, and the coldness was replaced by something Viper didn't like at all. It was replaced by pity.

"No." Chemist's voice was muffled by the fabric. "Leave me alone."

"Is that why you don't go to training?"

Sabine pulled the towel away from her face just to breathe air not soaked in that metallic smell. The red trickle flowed slowly anyway and soon stopped on her upper lip.

"Are you going to interrogate me now? I didn't want to go so I didn't go, that's all."

"You should go to the doctor."

Viper clenched her jaw.

"I am the doctor." Reyna endured a look that could have killed. "And you should go now."

"I'll go when you'll stop bleeding."

And without waiting for anything, Reyna sat down on the closed toilet behind Viper, as if to confirm that she was not going to take even a step toward the exit.

Sabine did not respond. In fact, she kept her lips shut so tightly that they were beginning to hurt, but she turned away from the woman and began rinsing her face all over again.

She was angry to the point where she could feel this anger gathering in her veins like boiling lava that would sooner or later explode. She felt it forming slowly, accumulating, rising without end. Fury navigated her fingers sliding over the skin of her face, and with fury she intended to function.

But the fury was exhausting. She clenched her eyelids.

After minutes or hours of enduring the violation of her personal space, she let the air slowly out through her mouth and met Reyna's face in the reflection of the mirror. But when she dared to utter a word, her gaze fled somewhere to the side, away from the shimmering purple irises.

"You can bring a towel, it's on the bottom shelf in the closet. I need to put a compress on my neck," she said dryly.

Reyna, however, sensed notes of tiredness in her voice, in places her voice trembled, or was obscured by hoarseness, and at the very end the Mexican woman heard almost a surrender there.

Viper felt bad about it, and Mondragón knew it.

She went to get what Sabine asked for without a word. Without a word, she also returned to the bathroom and dampened it with cold water, feeling the chemist's gaze on her, gouging a hole in her person as she looked at her in the mirror reflection, pressing one of the towels left in the sink to her nose.

Without a word, she also applied the dampened compress she had brought to Callas' neck, which the woman accepted in silence.

And so they stood. Not looking at each other, not even exchanging a single glance. Sabine breathed deeply, her anger leaving very slowly, as Mondragón could still hear the rapid beating of her heart, which gave her no rest.

Reyna could see her shoulder blades moving steadily under the material of her sweater, contradicting what her heart was showing.

She held the wrap stubbornly, though her fingers tingled from the cold.

The silence rang in her ears.

She didn't expect Viper to thank her. She hadn't even imagined it and hadn't counted on it. And in fact, somewhere in there, she was still angry at who Viper was, how she behaved and how she carried on conversations, always putting herself above others.

But now, in this bathroom, she seemed different. Smaller. Maybe a little more fragile when her body wasn't covered by an outfit and the twilight illuminated her unhealthy pale skin.

Zyanya hesitantly let go of the edge of the sink she was clinging to. She didn't look in the mirror for fear of seeing that frustrated look in the reflection when her hand settled on Sabine's shoulder.

She remained there for a while. Callas remained silent, focused on her breathing and the coolness of the towel still held by Reyna. Reyna was also silent, even as she felt sympathy once again that day.

She didn't quite understand it.

Nor did she understand how the same hand placed on her shoulder moved a little higher and began carefully stroking the strands of black hair that stuck to the sweaty nape of Viper's neck. She barely brushed them; she wasn't even sure if she was really touching them or if her fingers were just stopping just above them.

Viper twitched.

Reyna had no idea why she did it, but it was too late to take it back. She left it as it was, for a few minutes immersed in the space that surrounded her.

The bathroom, though modernly decorated, now seemed gloomy, with one lone lamp illuminated near their faces. Every breath carried through the room, every swish of Callas' lungs she felt with the entire surface of her skin.

She wanted to ask. She didn't.

She just touched Sabine Callas' hair, not knowing why she was doing it.

Viper didn't say anything. She didn't move. Maybe she didn't feel her touch? Maybe Reyna actually only thought she was doing it?

A bloody towel fell into the sink.

The hand in her black hair froze into stillness, but the gaze of Callas' green eyes was fixed on her mirror double. She efficiently avoided Zyanya's figure in the reflection.

"It stopped," she announced, still avoiding her gaze.

Reyna nodded her head. She took her hand away.

She opened her mouth, but no words came out. She closed them, then repeated the scheme several more times. The silence between them lingered and she felt like breaking it, although she didn't quite know how.

"Viper-..."

She didn't manage to say anything else.

"I'm fine." The cool tone returned, the hoarse voice blurred. Or it only seemed that way to Reyna, because she couldn't accept that Callas looked exhausted. "You should go now."

The voice defied objection, non-negotiable. Viper considered the conversation over and just showed it.

"Thank Neon from me. Tell her that adobo was great."

Zyanya stretched her hands, which for some reason she had clenched into fists.

She crossed the threshold of the bathroom and, trying not to hear Viper's uneven breathing, left her alone.

***

She knew it was a bad idea. Or even a terrible idea. In fact, the worst one she could have come up with.

Nevertheless, her feet led her by themselves to the office next to which Sage's quarters were located.

She didn't quite know why. She didn't quite know why she was felt the need to talk to Sage, but she knew she had to do it. She also didn't understand her own anger that she felt at the sight of the familiar door.

She didn't want to play pleasantries, she just went inside, and the door slammed open with a crash against the wall.

Sage sprang from her seat, still with the book in her hand. An accusatory grimace appeared on her face in a second.

"What has gotten into you!" Sage rarely raised her voice. Practically never. "You can't just break here like this-..."

"Have you seen Viper lately?"

Reyna didn't realize she was driving her own nails into the inside of her hand. She looked at the Chinese woman expectantly, not doing much about her fuss, which blossomed more and more clearly on her face with each passing second.

There was no denying that at the sound of Callas' nickname, something similiar to a grimace flashed across her face.

"Are you bursting in here as if something was burning only to ask me that question?"

Sage threw the book she was holding onto an armchair. Reyna's gaze did not even go in that direction, stubbornly fixed on the woman.

"Did you see her or not?" Although she didn't intend to, the question sounded like a growl.

"I did."

"When?"

"After the last mission." Sage folded her arms over her chest. "Can you explain to me what the problem is?"

With the rest of her willpower, Reyna spread her hands. She took a breath in, then another. She relaxed her jaw, which she didn't even know she had clenched.

"Did you know why she didn't come to training?"

"No, because It's not my duty to watch her. She's an adult."

"She has nosebleeds."

Reyna watched the surprise on Sage's face with a kind of strange satisfaction. Quickly, however, that emotion faded and was replaced by something Zyanya couldn't define.

"Again, I won't watch her. If she decided it wasn't serious enough to come to me, I'm not going to push her."

Reyna nodded, laughing soundlessly.

"Serious enough? She wouldn't come to you even if she had her own guts out, you know it pretty well," she threw out. "You helped Fade, even though she didn't want it either," she said.

"But Fade changed her mind." Sage surprisingly... seemed not to care how dismissive she sounded. Her expression didn't change; it was still bizarrely blunt and... insensitive. "I know that Viper won't." she said.

"Are you taking revenge?" Zyanya finally asked, her voice dripping with disbelief and frustration. "The always caring Sage is finding layers of venom sleeping inside her?"

The Chinese woman didn't look at her, turning sideways to the duelist and looking out the window, beyond which there was nothing interesting.

"Don't be ridiculous."

"Me?" bit off Zyanya. With a nervous gesture, she combed her fingers through her hair, "You're the one who doesn't care about your teammates, even though you're a fucking healer, Ling!"

Sage turned abruptly on her heel. Her eyes flashed with anger, but Reyna wasn't about to give in.

"Viper doesn't want my help, do you understand? She doesn't want it, never has and never will. End of story." She grunted. "Now get out."

"The doctor acts selflessly, Sage."

Reyna clenched her fists back and walked out slamming the door.

Chapter 4: FOUR

Reyna didn't like getting ready for missions. She didn't like all the fuss, the hurried review of plans, booking hotels and all the rest that wasn't a mission in itself, involving strategy and communication.

And although she was used to holding a rifle, which was becoming almost an integral part of her body, she hated going into the armory.

The room was larger than their kitchen, filled to the brim with cabinets full of ammunition, dozens of hangers on the walls, with weapons resting on them like the silence before a storm, and every step clattered from the metal containers like a lightning strike.

She always struggled to endure this sight, because she knew full well that her body was feeding off the harm this equipment inflicted.

Ironic, looking at how good of a shooter she was.

But her step didn't become unsteady, her shoulders didn't crease, her head still held high. She stepped through the door, as she usually did, heading straight for one of the walls, getting her rifle and setting it down next to the cabinet from which she later pulled ammunition.

Her solitude didn't last too long, however; her sensitive hearing allowed her to hear footsteps in the corridor, then outside the door. Footsteps that were perfectly recognizable by their quick, but sure, tone.

Footsteps at the sound of which Reyna knitted her eyebrows.

Without change, however, she took the box labeled with her own nickname off the shelf and placed it next to the rifle. She also flawlessly entered the code on the padlock when Viper entered the armory without exchanging a word with her.

Reyna watched her from the corner of her eye as she stacked the magazines of ammo in their designated places in her box, but her mouth remained stubbornly closed until the chemist also removed her box and placed it on the floor in the other corner of the room.

"What are you doing?"

The question sounded a bit like a reprimand, but Viper turned to face her with the kind of expression that usually accompanied her.

Reyna sometimes really hated her mask.

"Tomorrow we're flying to Split, what do you think I'm doing?"

She answered with a question to a question, nothing more than simple indifference could be read from her voice.

"Are you flying with us?"

Now it was Viper who furrowed her brow, turning her favorite gun in her hands. She checked the magazine, and when it was empty, she replaced it, tossing the empty one into a container in the corner.

"I'm in command, Reyna," she commented. She approached the wall with the guns, aware that Mondragón was watching her. "Brimstone fixed that spectre? There was some sort of reloading problem last time."

Zyanya pressed her vandal into her box with a little more aggression than it needed.

"In this condition?" She ignored her question. Sabine made her own decision, takimg the phantom off the rack. "You could barely stand on your feet yesterday, for fuck's sake."

Viper stowed the rifle in her box.

"It's just a headache," she replied. She didn't look at Mondragón, who was becoming increasingly irritated by this ignorance. "Do you have a spare visor?"

"Can you talk to me, or you will pretend you can't hear what I'm saying?"

Callas rested her fingers on the edge of her suitcase. The crouching position was not very stable.

"What's your point?" She finally made eye contact. Her face was still too pale, her lips slightly cracked, which she no doubt tried to cover up with intense crimson lipstick, "We have a mission in less than twenty four hours, I'm the commander and we're packing for it. I'm making sure we don't run out of anything."

There's that ignorance again. Reyna slammed the lid of her box shut.

"You pretend it's nothing," she said.

"Because it is nothing."

"Are you going to say the same thing when you will start bleeding in the middle of a shootout?"

"I won't."

"What if you will?" Zyanya rested her hands on her thighs to avoid clenching them into fists. "Did you bleed today?"

Viper stood up, found an additional visor, and put it in its place. She acted as if Reyna was barely an ornament in the room, as if her presence was as invisible as the air.

"No."

"You're lying."

"Is that so?"

"I know how the human heart behaves when someone lies. Yours somehow sped up," her tone shifted from neutral more toward a growl. Sabine couldn't protest, so she fell silent. "Why can't Brimstone replace you?"

"He's busy."

"He's always busy."

"That's why it's enough reason for me not to bother him with such nonsense."

Reyna muttered.

"You call your health a nonsense?"

Sabine sighed. As she always did – as if talking was an unimaginable effort for her, in addition to being boring. She put the padlock in her case and started typing the code to it.

"If you want to say something, then say it, if not, then don't. Think what you want, I don't care and right now I have neither the time nor the will to talk about what I should or shouldn't do. So just focus on not forgetting any stuff, will you?"

Zyanya felt like shaking her.

"Don't you realize what you're doing, or what?" Her voice was on the verge of shouting. "Yesterday you bled all over the bathroom, didn't leave your room all day and looked like you had the intestinal flu for a week, and now you're going to talk to me about packing some fucking ammo?"

"I'm a doctor, Reyna," she hissed. "I know what I can, and you're not the one to be interested in that."

"Well, that's right, you are a doctor. So why are you acting like an irresponsible shithead?"

"Call me a shithead one more time, I'll throw fucking acid at your feet at the first opportunity."

Reyna snorted.

"Unlike some of us, I'm immortal, I don't give a fuck."

Sabine rose from her knees to put her packed box against the wall, Reyna did the same, stubbornly copying her every move.

Callas snorted a mocking laugh.

"A spoiled brat, that's what you are."

Zyanya had had enough. She grabbed the chemist's arm as soon as it came within her reach and, clamping her fingers on it, pinned the woman against the wall with a loud thud. Her lips tightened, her eyes flashed sparks of rage, but Sabine continued to smile as if the whole situation amused her.

She put her hands in her pants pockets, her gaze traveling between Mondragón's face and her hand, clenched into a tight fist.

"So what, are you going to hit me?" She seemed to ignore the woman's nails digging into her arm through the fabric of her sweater. "Apparently you shouldn't twist the knife in the wound."

Zyanya let go of her in an instant, Callas' shoulder blade slamming against the concrete behind her.

"Fuck you, Sabine."

Viper didn't escort her away with her eyes as she marched out of the armory.

***

Reyna didn't meet Viper until the day of the mission. She didn't meet her on the balcony in the middle of the night where she smoked cigarettes, she didn't meet her in the kitchen where she made coffee, and she didn't meet her at the gym as well.

Viper dissolved into the air of HQ, and Reyna was unable to knock on her door.

She didn't care. She didn't care about being given a bland look and a voice full of resentment again.

She didn't want to see her.

That's why, when Viper started the autopilot and settled more comfortably in the pilot's seat, Reyna didn't take the seat next to her. It remained empty for the entire flight, which Zyanya sat through with her eyes fixed on the wall and her fingers clenched on the rifle handle.

She only woke up when she turned on the communicator, and, as usual, Callas' stern voice rang in her ear like the swing of a blade.

"Let's go."

No one spoke a word, no one protested. Fade, Neon, Reyna and Killjoy merely adjusted the weapons on their shoulders, waiting for the vulture's main flap to drop all the way down with a hydraulic swish.

Viper adjusted her belt with snake bites and stepped out in front, holding the visor at head height.

She felt a sense of calm, however, only when they all settled into their chatting positions, which they confirmed with a brief message on the general connection.

A sigh of relief left her lips, she let out the air she didn't know she'd been holding in, and her shoulders relaxed a bit, even under the weight of the gun.

She stuck her shoulder to the wall and waited.

It was quiet. It was way too quiet. She realized that it was just the silence before the storm and it was a matter of time before she heard a series of shots, but she never liked this moment.

Waiting for something that was supposed to come and she just had to wait.

She swallowed. She corrected her position, leaning one hip against the same wall as her shoulder, and leaned out of the corner, observing site B's area. The balcony she was standing on gave her a full aerial view of where their clones might have intended to plant the spike, but the entrance to it was not closed.

Her hearing was sensed for footsteps.

And she waited.

Inhaling, exhaling, one after another. Her breathing was so quiet that sometimes she wondered if she was still alive, because the only noise was the hum of her backpack's filters.

The improved mechanism was working for now.

Fade watched over site A from the front, Reyna from the back, Neon with Killjoy over the middle.

Inhale, exhale.

Silence before the storm.

The noise of the filters, the singing of the birds.

Inhale, exhale.

"I don't think they're going to visit us today."

In the blink of an eye, Viper pulled away from the wall, her finger went to the trigger, and the gun was aimed at the head of... Reyna.

"What the hell are you doing here?" she hissed, refraining from shouting only to avoid giving away her position to the enemy. "You were supposed to be at the back entrance to the A, for fuck's sake!"

Reyna shrugged her shoulders.

"I've walked everything all over, there's no one here."

Sabine's eyes widened in shock.

"Are you serious? Get back into position right fucking now." She turned away from Mondragón only for a moment to lean out from behind the wall and make sure they weren't being watched. "Why is it so hard for you to listen to simple commands?" she said.

"Because you don't allow us to make our own decisions."

"Those decisions save your asses, Reyna," the whisper was careful, but balanced on the verge of a growl. "And the team exists for everyone to have a role."

"Are you going to redo the situation with Phoenix and threaten to shoot my head?"

Although her mouth was covered by her mask, Reyna knew that Sabine was ceding every word.

"Don't provoke me and get the fuck out of here."

The silence and the war of glances that followed lasted no more than two seconds, as the communicator crackled and Killjoy's voice rang out soon after.

"They're on A! We're rotating with Neon from the middle, but Fade is alone, hurry up!"

Sabine's gaze, not knowing when, went over Reyna's head. She squinted

A red light was flickering in the corner of the balcony.

Hidden camera. Cypher from the Omega Earth knew they were here from the very beginning.

She felt her heart drop to her feet. She also felt a familiar warmth near her nose, which began once again to flow slow down to her lips.

"Fuck," she hissed. She pressed the button that activated the communicator and adjusted her grip on the weapon. "Got it, we're on our way."

At the last second, she turned to Mondragón.

"Move your ass before you screw up something else."

***

Fade got hurt.

Sage wasn't with them, but Viper had managed to control the bleeding enough that her life wasn't in danger anymore, so after all she just needed to rest. Fortunately, the others were returning in one piece, and overall action was successful.

The initiator was asleep, covered with several blankets, leaning against the wall of a vulture that was transporting the silent team to a hotel rented by VALORANT in Tokyo.

No one said anything. Sabine stared at the clouds in front of her, glancing dispassionately from time to time at the map displayed on a small screen next to the steers.

The first-aid kit was still on the floor, from which she pulled out gloves, a needle and thread and an antiseptic, but she didn't even bother to hide it back.

She was silent because she knew that if she started talking, history would repeat itself.

She was also silent when the silence was broken by Neon.

"She could have died," she said briefly.

"She'll be fine." It was Reyna. Sabine smiled to herself, realizing the absurdity of the fact that it was Mondragón herself who had taken up the conversation. Viper would have given a lot to see the expression on her face now, but she didn't move from her chair. "She just needs to rest," Reyna added.

"Apparently you were supposed to be there with her, in the back," the sprinter replied. She sounded angry, and that pleased Callas a lot. "So where the hell were you?"

Silence.

"Cariño-..."

"No. Not cariño, Reyna," heard Callas. Neon was pissed. Viper was tempted to turn her head, oh hell, how tempted, but she stubbornly stood her ground, smiling to herself. Yes, she was getting satisfaction from this. "I read the plan, you were supposed to scout with Fade on A, her in front, you behind. So where were you?"

"I made a mistake."

"That's your answer?" Sabine knew that Reyna was, in a way, treating the young duelist like a younger sister, and although it was rude of her, she was glad that Reyna had to explain herself. "She got shot, almost in the artery. It was supposed to be a simple mission, so Sage didn't go, and we almost lost Fade because you made a mistake?"

Killjoy remained silent, fixing her gaze on the phone screen. Sabine could see her reflection in the glass. Funny how no one dared to speak up.

Because yes, it was Reyna's fault.

"Yes, I did."

Sabine nodded her head appreciatively, as if she were a spectator watching the whole scene, sitting in the audience and eating popcorn.

"Where. Were. You."

Sigh. The radar was flicking sleepily.

"On B."

"Why?" Neon was angry and sort of... disappointed.

"I had some idea, but it didn't work." The answer fell. Sabine wanted to laugh in her face. It seemed to her that her ego would compensate for the strategy. "I'm sorry."

Tala did not speak until arriving at the private hotel, and Viper was convinced that she and Reyna had not exchanged a single glance.

***

Sabine was relieved to take a single cigarette out of the pack, tucking the rest into her sweatshirt pocket. Evening had long since doused Tokyo in darkness, but addiction was a bitch, so she stepped out onto the public balcony to give it a relief.

Before she put the cigarette between her lips, she spoke up.

"It hurts, doesn't it?" The question was a bit indistinct, but she knew that Reyna heard every word, although she grimaced, unmoved by Viper's appearance in the same place. "The feeling that you screwed up."

Sabine fired off the tip of the drug.

"You have a new lighter," Zyanya said dispassionately. Callas looked at the small object in her hand, then put it in her pocket. "That one was broken."

"Yes, it was," she agreed.

They smoked, aware that this conversation would not be a pleasure. They inhaled and exhaled the smoke that danced on the air between their faces for heck knows how long.

Sabine spoke up first after a long pause, extinguishing her cigarette in the ashtray only to immediately take another one out of the pack.

"You shouldn't have touched me like that back then."

Reyna's gaze quickly jumped between Callas and the second cigarette she was holding.

"And you shouldn't smoke so much."

Sabine shrugged her shoulders, and Zyanya wasn't sure if this was a display of indifference to herself or to Sabine.

"And you shouldn't touch me," she repeated.

Reyna nodded her head. Well, yes, once again – Sabine Callas always got what she wanted. And once again, that fumbling ignorance.

"If it was so bad, you could have said something," she said.

"It's hard to say anything with a towel on your face," she replied firmly. "You shouldn't and that's all."

"You seemed to need it," Reyna reflected. Her voice was calm and the fact that she didn't seem frustrated didn't please Viper. "It was empathy, you know that word?"

The chemist snorted.

"Don't be sarcastic."

"And that's being said by the most sarcastic person on the planet." Reyna put out her cigarette, but unlike Sabine, she didn't fire up another. "Did you need it or not?"

"Don't push it."

"Yes or no?"

"I won't tell you."

Now it was Reyna who snorted with laughter. Sabine didn't budge an inch, and the laughter, although usually contagious, didn't move any of the corners of her mouth.

"You're funny, Viper." She shook her head. "You're capable of throwing so many insults at someone only to act like a stubborn five-year-old later. Don't you get tired of it?"

Viper ignored the second question, of course she did.

"I won't tell you, because I don't want to and I can't," she announced indifferently. "The rule of fraternization, remember?"

"And you're at it again." She might have expected that. But she cut off the subject. The next one, however, came to her mind almost immediately. "You were bleeding. On a mission."

Viper turned her head. For a moment, surprise showed on her face, but after she put out her cigarette, it was no longer so visible.

"I didn't."

"You did." Viper's eyes flashed with the uncertainty so rarely seen in them. "Don't lie to a vampire about blood."

Sabine rolled her eyes. But just when Reyna thought the woman would respond with something, Viper once again reached into her pocket with a crumpled packet and a new lighter.

"Don't smoke so much," she commented again.

Callas sent her the look of a bored teenager who gets a scolding from her parents.

"Just yesterday you told me to go fuck myself." The third cigarette was already resting against her lips. "So don't lecture me now."

But just as she was about to light it up, Reyna reached her hand to her face, pulled the cigarette from between her lips, then threw it on the dirty terrace floor and pressed it down with her shoe.

Viper froze for a second with the lighter in her fingers.

"What the hell?" She looked first at the trampled cigarette, only then at Zyanya. "What the fuck do you think you are?"

Her gaze could burn, could burn a hole in Mondragón's body, but she was not afraid. After all, she was immortal.

She didn't care about the raised voice or the curses.

"I said something."

Viper pressed the lighter back into her pocket and took a step towards Reyna to be in her line of sight, which remained as indifferent and calm as at the very beginning of the conversation.

"Listen, for fuck's sake. I don't know who you think you are, but you've clung to me like a turnip to a dog's tail and it's slowly starting to piss me off already."

"I try to take care of the people I work with. It's not a crime, is it?"

"Oh, get lost, Reyna. I don't need a goddamn babysitter."

"This is your way of showing any affection?" She asked. "Pushing everyone around you away?"

"You don't know anything about me, Mondragón," she hissed. She surprised the woman by using her real surname. "So don't fuck with something you don't know about."

"Then don't give me a reason to," Reyna replied. "For now, your nosebleeds are fitting in that role."

Viper pressed her lips together and turned to leave.

"Fuck you."

Zyanya felt like telling her she was repeating herself, but the slamming of the balcony door entered her word.

Chapter 5: FIVE

"I've heard you got an argument with Reyna."

That was the second thing Tala heard when Fade opened her door. The first was a shy 'hey', followed immediately by a 'sure', when she asked if she could come in.

Neon didn't answer right away. She just looked at Fade from top to bottom, and her gaze stopped on a bandage taped with several plasters right next to her collarbone.

The loose t-shirt made Fade even more fragile in Neon's eyes, but she quickly blinked and that impression disappeared.

"Killjoy said you had woken up," she explained, in case the reason for her visit in Fade's opinion was other than to check on her health. "How are you feeling?"

Her question was evasive, but Hazal did not protest.

Instead, she shrugged her shoulders.

"I'm fine," she said. "It stings a little, but that's all."

Neon nodded, accepting this information. She folded her arms across her chest and walked a few steps around the room, as if she didn't quite have a clue what she wanted to do with either herself or the presence of the initiator, who was watching her movements.

She didn't have much room to maneuver, the room was quite cramped. To her misfortune.

"So... What happened between you two?"

Although Fade did not use a tone that could be considered persistent, Tala sighed anyway. She took one more step toward the window and at first glanced out through it for a few seconds before passing Fade with a shrug of her shoulders.

"Nothing much, just some argument, like you said."

By her body language, Hazal sensed that she was tense. She tightened her fingers on her own elbows, and her gaze wandered here and there, as if she either didn't want to talk or didn't want to look her in the eye.

"As far as I know, it was about me, so..."

Fade probably hoped that the younger woman would finish her sentence, but she didn't. She paced around the room, unable to find a place for herself and Hazal could only follow her with her eyes.

She knew it shouldn't take long. Neon was not a person who kept her emotions inside for long, it didn't take her long to crack and throw out what was weighing her down.

With each passing second, however, Eyletmez had the feeling that Neon was fighting more fiercely than usual. That something was holding her back if she couldn't look her in the eye, and for a moment she even wondered if the matter wasn't much more serious than she thought.

Tala remained silent, staring at the floor, as if the pattern in which the boards were arranged was something mesmerizing.

"Tala, look at me." The younger woman didn't flinch. "Tala."

She raised her gaze slowly, her eyelids heavy. She wrapped her arms tighter around herself, as if suddenly cold, and Hazal's initial consternation quickly turned into worry.

She furrowed her eyebrows when she saw that in the faint light of the hotel room, Neon's eyes glistened from lurking tears that were gathering dangerously fast under her eyelids.

"Tala, what's going on?"

She asked again. Patiently, but without pressure. The duelist first pressed her lips together like a stubborn child, but opened them as she saw the growing fear on Eyletmez's face.

A single tear ran down Neon's cheek as they made eye contact. It lasted only a moment, as the younger one shrugged her shoulders a moment later and once again began circling the room.

Fade gave her time and breathed a sigh of relief, hearing Neon's exasperated intake of breath after a minute or two. She still wasn't looking at her, her gaze focused on the window, against which raindrops had begun to trickle.

"Reyna ignored orders," she said. Her fingers clenched on her own forearms so tightly that Fade could see her knuckles turning white. "She was not where she was supposed to be."

Hazal sighed. For a split second, she felt like walking up to the younger woman and at least putting a hand on her shoulder, but for some reason she just watched her. Her brown eyes turned to her, and she almost trembled as she saw the tears that flowed into them incessantly.

"You could have died." The statement fell. Neon swallowed. "You could have died because she had some fucking idea." She laughed hollowly, sniffled a second later and wiped away the one tear that wet her cheek.

Hazal took a step toward her in defiance of her body. Her henna-marked hand touched the younger woman's shoulder, and she felt her tremble as she let out each successive breath, wobbling dangerously on the verge of crying, which she still had under control.

She looked at where their skin touched.

"But I'm fine, right?"

"What if you weren't?"

Fade relaxed her shoulder as she exhaled. She collected her words for a moment, unsure how to put them together so that they made any sense.

"We both know the risks of this job, don't we?" Neon stubbornly kept her lips tightened, her fingers and arms still hugging her body tightly. "If something were to happen, Reyna-..."

The Filipina pulled out from under her hands rather abruptly, as if the touch had suddenly begun to burn her.

"I don't care about Reyna." She shook her head. "And I'm not talking about risk, Fade."

Hazal took her hand away, which froze in mid-air, still surprised by the sudden lack of contact.

"Then what are you talking about?"

Neon tried to chase the tears away with intense blinking. She bit the inside of her cheek and only then did the corner of her mouth lift in a cautious half-smile accompanied by another shrug of her shoulders.

"About you," she said finally.

The silence in the room was broken only by their breathing. Hazal didn't even feel the pain anymore, Hazal only felt her heart pounding in her chest.

"About me," she repeated, rather quietly, because perhaps she was afraid that if she said it too loudly, it would be harder to take in the word.

"Don't pretend you don't know what I mean."

Neon's voice was agitated, her fingers tightening on her skin more and more.

"But I don't know, Tala."

"About feeling something I shouldn't and I can't bear," she choked out, feeling the lump in her throat only grow larger, and she was getting closer and closer to the limit of her endurance. Her eyes were beginning to burn, her nails digging into her skin. "I can't bear... that you keep giving me a reason to think about you. That you look at me in such a way that I can't look you in the eye, or touch me in such a way that I don't know if I should like it because of these fucking rules, because after all, I shouldn't, and I..." She sniffled and wiped her face with the top of her hand. "But I want to like it, Hazal. I'm not mad at Reyna for not sticking to the plan. I'm mad at her because she put you at risk, and I... I don't think I could take it if something happened to you."

Fade listened to all this, feeling her heart drop to her feet as she was watching Tala's hunched figure with tears drying on her cheeks. She walked up a step or two and cautiously, as if again preparing to be ignored, found her hand and intertwined their fingers.

Neon let it go.

"I think I love you, Hazal." The sentence hung in the air, followed closely by the younger woman's shuddering exhalation. "And I don't know what I should do about it."

Again, a shrug of the shoulders.

The initiator could no longer look at it. She couldn't stay silent any longer either, so before Neon had time to turn around and leave, which she probably intended to do, Fade put both hands around her face and forced her to look at her.

She herself probably didn't quite know what she had done, because for a few seconds they simply exchanged glances that wandered across their faces, not knowing what they should focus on.

Fade watched the younger woman's drawn-down eyebrows, tear-dampened eyelashes, wet marks on her cheeks, her eyes searching for any kind of answer, and she didn't collect a word for a long moment before her tongue stopped being a weighing stone in her mouth.

"Together we'll figure something out." She nodded, assuring both herself and Valdez. Neon opened her eyes wider.

"Together?"

Fade laughed softly. Now she was beginning to gather tears as well.

"I think I love you too, Tala." The smile that Neon gave her later shone with such sincerity that Hazal's knees softened. They both felt the relief flooding their bodies like a cool shower on a hot day. "Can I... Can I kiss you?"

Neon nodded, perhaps a little too eagerly, but Fade didn't mind. Still holding her wet cheeks in her cool hands, she brushed her lips with her own so gently that at first she wasn't quite sure if she had actually done it.

Only when Neon moved her hands to the nape of her neck did Fade feel her lips more clearly. Their warmth, their softness.

It was a nice feeling.

Yes, it was a nice feeling.

The fear remained, but on that evening it was barely a speck of dust in their eyes. After all, they would work something out together, right?

***

Hiding what they felt about each other went easy for Fade and Neon. No one suspected anything when they returned to headquarters, no one asked about anything, and they didn't meet any unfavorable stares, so they considered their secret safe from the eyes and ears of everyone at HQ.

They knew that the rules continued to exist, and although they didn't fully know the consequences, they probably didn't want to experience them at all. They had learned not to speak, look or behave in a suspicious manner as long as the door to Neon's or Fade's room was closed.

This evening, however, was a little different. Headquarters was already asleep, and they were alone in the main living room with only each other's presence and the sound coming from a laptop on which they were watching some silly comedy. It was quite dark outside, with only the blue light of the screen illuminating their faces and the empty popcorn bowl reflected in the glass surface of the coffee table.

And... Fade's hand, which had been drawing tiny circles on Neon's knee for a good hour, and Neon herself looked in that direction more and more often when she wasn't concentrating on the movie.

Because Fade, unlike her, was focused on it the whole time. Only her fingers, as if separate from the rest of her body, were in constant motion, drawing patterns here and there and thus driving Neon to the point where she made at least seven braids on the fringes of the bedspread, just to force herself to focus on the plot of the damn comedy.

Because it was no big deal. Hazal could take her hand away at any time, arrange it naturally by her side, and no one would notice anything.

Or at least it wasn't a big deal until the Turkish woman moved that touch a little higher, gliding her fingertips over the material of Neon's leggings and stung her with a look that Neon knew about, but stubbornly pretended to the contrary.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw her face, turned toward her, as if Fade was waiting for Neon to let her make that eye contact.

Her henna-tattooed fingers moved to the inside of her knee.

"Hazal, this is not a good idea," she said. She tried to sound confident, but her voice trembled slightly anyway. Fade, however, did not stop her pacing. "Hazal."

"Do you want me to stop?"

Fade's voice was hoarse, as if she hadn't said anything or swallowed saliva in a very long time. However, Neon couldn't ignore the part of the voice where she heard something else. She knew this something, but she didn't want to admit to herself that it was so, because she would probably go crazy.

She cast a quick glance to where they touched.

"It's not that," she whispered. She was still stubbornly not looking at Fade, but she knew that if she did, she might not stop. "Maybe we should go to your room?"

Her body tensed momentarily as Hazal inched closer on the sofa, their thighs came into contact with each other, and Hazal herself graced Neon's neck with one very slow kiss. She allowed it, but the initiator continued to see anxiety lurking somewhere in the tensed muscles of the younger woman's neck.

"Everyone is long asleep," she stated, covering the younger's jaw with small kisses. "No one will come here."

"What if they will?" she whispered, but a quiet moan tore through her lips immediately afterwards, as Fade apparently decided that a warm tongue on her pulse point would change her mind.

Neon knew she was losing.

"They won't." A single finger wandered under the sprinter's chin to turn her head in her direction. She gave in to it, meeting a pair of heterochromatic irises that glittered in that blue light quite like a cat's. "And now you're going to let me kiss you, aren't you?"

"You're awful."

Fade merely smiled to herself and drew the younger woman close to place said kiss on her lips.

At first it was quiet, unhurriedly savoring the taste of their own mouths, sipping every single sigh that wasn't muffled by the movie humming somewhere in the background. Later, however, Neon's fingers tangled into Hazal's black-and-white hair, just as she put her leg across her thighs, straddling her hips and quickly finding her mouth back.

"Did you got some courage?" asked Fade, placing her hands on Valdez's loins as if to hold her there.

Or at least that's what it seemed to Neon, until the initiate's cool hand slipped under her washed t-shirt making for pajamas.

"To be honest, I don't fucking know what I'm doing, Eyletmez," Tala replied, smiling nervously, just above the lips of Hazal, who reciprocated the smile.

"You don't have to know."

Tala rolled her eyes, but pressed her lips to Fade's mouth with a purr of satisfaction. Her hands continued to wander somewhat cautiously, moving along her jaw, her neck, or her collarbones, which she could touch thanks to her tank top.

Hazal's skin was cool in contrast to her own, and Neon lovingly pressed her body against hers, forcing them both to sigh softly at this sudden contrast in temperatures.

Fade caught the younger woman's sides more eagerly, her fingernails drawing across her skin, staggering in various winding patterns as the material of her shirt was wrapped around her wrists.

Neon had never worn a bra to bed. Hazal wasn't going to fail to take advantage of that this time as well, so her hand quickly found its way to the Filipina's bare breasts, whose hips twitched in response.

The plot of the movie was going on somewhere behind their backs.

They had forgotten about it, about the popcorn, about where they were and what they had been doing earlier. Somewhere there was a warning red light smoldering, but Tala extinguished it as soon as Fade flicked her nipple with her fingertip.

She carefully followed every touch, swallowed her saliva several times as she watched the initiator play with the elastic of her leggings, hook her thumb over it, pull, then let go just to see how she would react.

Hazal was devouring the fact that now she could.

Neon, on the other hand, surprised herself by waiting for something Fade had in mind all along. She moistened her lips with her tongue, feeling the elder's thumb painfully slowly slip past the border of her pants. Too slowly.

She had never been patient.

"Hazal..."

Hazal's heart sped up at the sound of that word. The elastic of Tala's pants dug into her thumb, which touched a section of the sprinter's abdomen.

But she waited anyway.

And so she teased.

"Yeah?"

"What the fuck!?"

Neon almost fell off the couch, Fade straightened up and machinely shook hands.

Viper stood in the treshold.

Her gaze wandered from one woman to another. She held an empty coffee mug in her hand.

The dead silence lasted until the chemist set it down on the countertop.

"Go to hell, all of you."

She turned on her heel, leaving the echo of her words behind.

Notes:

Some fadeshock this time, but don't worry, it's for the plot 😏

Chapter 6: SIX

"Viper, wait!"

Sabine didn't even think about turning around, much less answering anything. Her footsteps pounded out a steady rhythm between the walls of the headquarters, arguing with the chaotic ones belonging to Fade.

She stopped only when Hazal's fingers caught her arm, and she violently jerked it away, as if the touch hurt her. Or offended her. Or both at once.

"What do you think I should wait for," she hissed, her gaze trailing Hazal with pure fire. "I've seen enough, don't you think?"

"It's not what you think." That was the first thing that came to her mind, she felt panic begin to creep in and her palms begin to sweat.

She screwed up. She screwed up so badly that she had no idea what she was actually going to say.

Viper raised an eyebrow, her laughter lacking humor and sounding more like a cough.

"You want to tell me that I didn't see you two fucking on the living room couch?" she said.

"We were just kissing."

"Sure, yes, because it makes a big difference."

Hazal took in a breath only to let it out slowly later, although she herself had no idea whether it helped her calm down or whether she just told herself that just to untie her tongue, which seemed to have been stuck in a knot for a while.

"Listen, we're adults," she finally said, trying to keep her tone in check. Maybe she only thought about it, but rage seemed to flash in Callas' eyes like a storm in a teacup. "We're not able to keep treating each other like... like individual pawns in the team, after all we've been through together."

Viper's gaze didn't soften even for a moment.

"Just say that you're another person who doesn't give a shit about my rules, Fade," she growled. She tightened her fingers on her shoulders. "Everyone damn well knew what they were stepping into by joining the Protocol, everyone had to give up something."

Fade clenched her jaw.

"In your opinion, we should give up our lives?" she countered. She wanted to remain calm for her own and Neon's sake and didn't want to play with the fire that Viper undeniably was, but her tone rose a tad. "Are we supposed to be like some fucking robots who gather into a squad when something bad happen and after the mission go back to the hangar and wait for orders?"

"You said that, not me."

Fade huffed in disbelief. The chemist's figure did not hunch, did not soften in any way, and was so frighteningly steady that Fade felt nothing but anger toward her.

"This is unfair," she said.

The rage was rising inside her slowly, but she could already feel her hands clenched into fists and a hoop tighten around her throat.

Viper snorted at this statement.

"Unfair?" She repeated. The characteristic mocking tone pierced Fade and left shivers on her skin. She knew she was losing this battle, and she was damn scared of the outcome. "It's unfair that you're more interested in putting your hand down Neon's pants than the lives of the thousands of people you're supposed to be fucking helping."

Hazal drove her nails into the insides of her own hands. She felt like slapping her, giving her an unceremonious smack in the face.

She knew she couldn't. Only words were left.

"Are you making me the last egotist because I feel something?" she asked. "Because I can't turn off my emotions, lock them all up in some damn bottle and hate everything and everyone that disturbs it, because the world suddenly needs me?" She threw out, but before she had time to think, she added. "Just like you do?"

Viper didn't even bat an eyelid. But Fade knew she had hit just where she intended to.

And she felt satisfaction about it.

"I'm making you an egotist because that's what you are, Fade." Her tone didn't tremble, didn't crease. "If it were otherwise, I wouldn't have seen what I saw."

"No, you're making me an egotist, because you can't feel." Fade raised her head more proudly after these words. It will hurt Viper again, good. "Because you envy what you can't have."

Viper squinted her eyes. For a moment they measured each other with their eyes.

"You're wrong."

The sentence was short, because Hazal knew she was right, which Callas wasn't about to admit to her.

"So why Reyna can react normally and you can't?"

She shouldn't have said that. But the shock flashing across the controller's face was worth it. At least for the first three seconds.

"Bravo, brag with it even more," she clapped her hands obscenely. "Why don't you tell me that Brimstone knows, too?" She asked. "But it doesn't matter, he'll find out soon anyway."

"You won't do that."

"You say that as if you don't think I'm a monster after all," she smiled hollowly. "If you end whatever you started with Neon at this point, Brimstone won't find out anything. And I'd better not have to repeat myself."

She was about to leave, but Fade's voice stopped her.

"Then I will tell about you and Reyna," she said.

"Me and Reyna have nothing in common, so if you want to just sit and keep quiet in his office, then go right away."

"Is that so?" Fade tilted her head. Her eyes shone warningly.

"The way you two smoke on the balcony, sit there God knows how much time and always piloting together gives a pretty reliable foundation."

Viper turned away, her arms again intertwined on her chest.

"If you think he'll believe it, you're more stupid than I thought."

"So you don't deny it?" she pointed out. Viper only laughed.

"Because I'm not going to let myself be blackmailed, and I won't hesitate one damn moment for you to never sleep a single night again."

Fade hated her power. She hated the effects it had on her body and mind. But she also hated that Viper was going to take away something that made her life valuable for the first time.

She didn't mean her job or her friends.

But Neon.

And it was with her in mind that she said those words, which left Viper silent for a moment until she passed her in the hallway, leaving only:

"I'm not afraid of insomnia. So do the right thing and get out of my way."

***

Brimstone was writing something on the blackboard with a marker, and Reyna couldn't even recognize the words he scrawled there. Not that his writing was messy, but more because she was sure that she was on the verge of exhaustion, and her eyelids would start to stick together any minute.

The meeting was boring as hell. He supposedly discussed important things, took stock of the armory and the hospital section, but Mondragón had been just scribbling some random patterns in her notebook for quite a while, not even trying to take notes, possibly looking around here and there, as if hoping that anything outside the window would interest her more than this chatter.

She took her job seriously, but... but sometimes she felt that some procedures existed just for the sake of existing and taking up their time.

Judging by the faces of the other agents, they were all of the same opinion.

Yoru rested his head on his hand and rotated a pen in his fingers, Raze sat with her arms folded across her chest and was probably unaware of where she actually was for at least half an hour, Jett swayed right and left in her swivel chair with the look of a child left in school after lessons as a punishment, and the rest... played interested, although their nods were so stiff that it was obvious they were fake.

It amused her until the very end of this all-important meeting, even when she slid her chair behind her and headed for the exit, but it soon stopped.

"Reyna, can I have a word with you?"

She turned around and immediately noticed Brimstone's gaze on her, which seemed to hold nothing but trouble.

But she turned back, looking somewhat longingly at the other agents, who were relieved to divide down the corridors to their quarters.

"What's the matter?"

She rested her hands on her hips immediately after closing her notebook with meaningless scribbles in it instead of notes.

"Viper wasn't here today," he said, though Reyna could see he said it carefully, as if he knew the topic was... touchy. "I just wanted to ask if she told you anything."

"She didn't," she replied shortly. However, a note of irritation crept into her voice. "Why do you assume that I am the one who should know?"

Brimstone sighed.

"I know you two are not going along well with each other. I thought maybe this had something to do with it."

"So you're claiming she didn't come to the meeting because we had a fight?" She snorted. "Come on, we're not five years old for her to act like a child."

"I'm not claiming, I'm just asking," he replied. "You know yourself that Viper is... specific."

"Does being specific have anything to do with not attending meetings? Don’t get me wrong, but I don't see the connection between one and the other."

Brimstone fell silent for a moment. A moment later, he waved his hand in what was probably meant as a gesture to end the conversation, but before Reyna had time to ask if she could go, the man grabbed a bundle of papers from his desk and handed it out toward Mondragón.

"Hand this to her. I need a few of her signatures, and she's probably in the lab right now." Reyna got the impression that she had won the previous exchange of words, and that was probably the only reason she accepted the papers. "And by the way, settle among yourselves whatever you have to settle. People are starting to gossip, and the endless arguing between the two of you doesn't reflect well on professionalism."

Reyna clenched her fingers tighter on the file of papers, but did not bite back. Without a word, she left the man in the meeting room and went where he directed her.

She never liked this place. There was a chill blowing in the lower parts of the building, which was supposed to prevent damage or explosions of various substances such as fuel or acids, in addition, she could feel her own footsteps behind her, because they carried such a loud echo that they almost rang in her ears.

She didn't come here often, not just because she didn't want to, but because the lab was Sabine Callas' asylum.

Sabine Callas, who was ready to murder anyone who entered here uninvited.

Still, she slid the glass door open. She found the usual: bubbling vials of unspecified substances, a timer placed on one of the desks right next to a pile of individual sheets of paper torn from a notebook and two mugs with traces of coffee, and a little farther away the disassembled backpack of her outfit, to which she had connected some cables.

What she didn't see was Sabine herself. But just because she didn't see her didn't mean she didn't hear her.

The sound of intense coughing carried along the tiled walls, and a light shone in the small bathroom, behind a half-closed door.

Reyna left a bundle of papers on the first countertop she reached.

Sabine became aware of her presence, glancing toward her out of the corner of her eye as she leaned over the sink coughing, blood dripping from her lower lip and staining the pedantic, white porcelain with its red.

Reyna ignored her furious gaze and walked over, then brushed her hair away from her face and simply stood next to her, holding the dark strands in her fingers.

Fortunately, there was no mirror in this bathroom. So she stared at the tiles, already sure what it was like to feel the black strands of Sabine Callas' hair between her fingers.

She didn't say anything. She wasn't going to, or at least not at this particular moment, when the relative silence had become so comfortable.

She tried not to look at Viper, but she did so anyway. Her pale forehead was again covered with cold sweat, her fingers slipping on the edge of the sink as she spat scarlet from between her lips accompanied by the wheezes of her own breath.

They were silent.

Reyna brushed away a single strand that had slipped from her hand.

Viper spat blood one last time. And it was she who broke the barrier of silence.

"Not a word," she croaked, straightening up carefully. She wiped her chapped lips with the palm of her hand, but seeing the red streaks on her skin, she turned on the tap and quickly got rid of them.

The sound of the water distracted Mondragón from staring at the tiles.

She let go of her hair, but disobeyed the command.

"And you’re still gonna say it's nothing?"
Her voice was not so much worried as annoyed. Annoyed to the point where Reyna was unable to determine the source of the anger bubbling up inside her.

Sabine washed the blood off the sink and passed the Mexican woman at the threshold as if she hadn't heard her. Of course she did, because what else could Reyna have expected?

It did not escape her notice that the chemist's step had lost its steadiness. She walked wobbly, even if she tried to disguise it by supporting herself on countertops, chairs and every possible edge, until she reached the place where her backpack lay.

She fixed her gaze on it. She stubbornly did not sit down, even though the chair was right behind her. The duelist felt like pressing on her shoulders and forcing her to do so.

She did not move from her place.

"Why did you come here?" asked Callas. She coughed once again, trying to get rid of the unpleasant taste from her throat.

Reyna had no idea whether she was more furious or terrified. She nodded her head, as if to say 'oh right, here we go again.”

"Check why you weren't at the meeting," she replied. She had to restrain herself to hold her tongue. "And now are you going to answer my question, or are you going to pretend again that only you have the right to get some answers?"

Viper did not take her eyes off the backpack. It was unseeing, her eyes were cloudy, as if behind a sheet of water. But she rolled them anyway, because that's the way she was.

"Brimstone needed something?"

Reyna shrugged her shoulders and snorted.

"Signatures."

With a movement of her head, she pointed to a pile of documents. Sabine nodded slowly and swallowed her saliva. She reached for the first pen in her line of sight and started seeking through the stapled pages, but Zyanya's hand pressed down on them with a thud, preventing any movement.

"Stop fucking ignoring me," she hissed.

Sabine put down the pen. The plastic casing clattered against the desk top.

"You somehow ignored the fact that our agents are fucking each other all around the headquarters," she said. Her voice was still hoarse and tired, and immediately after saying this sentence the woman took a larger breath, as if she had run out of air for a moment. "If you ignore such things, you’re ignoring me. If you ignore me, I ignore you."

"That's probably not the most important thing right now, looking at the fact that you were spitting out your own lungs a moment ago, don't you think?" The question sounded more like a growl, but Zyanya didn't try to soften it.

Viper wiped her nose with the back of her hand, flipping a few loose pages of her notes unwillingly, as if to show that she didn't mind Reyna's presence. As usual.

"Imagine, that for me it's important whether the people I work with respect me," she pushed Reyna's hand away from Brimstone's papers, which the woman probably only allowed for the sake of sanity. Viper signed a few of them and straightened up, crooking minimally. "And I'm beginning to get the impression that there are less and less of them who do," she said.

"So you’re saying that I don't respect you because I let them enjoy the life they deserve?"

"I think I've heard that somewhere before."

Her tone was, as usual, icy cold. Callas' gaze, however, was not so sure, and Zyanya couldn't shake the feeling that Sabine’s sight was wandering it here and there, unable to focus on a single point.

"Stop answering every question with sarcasm. It's getting boring."

"Then don't make me do so."

They measured each other with their eyes for a while, and only the bubbling of a substance in a glass vial and the steady beeping of a computer that was importing something into a backpack broke the silence.

This time Viper spoke up first.

"Go away, Reyna."

The sentence was more mouthed than spoken with a dose of sarcasm. Viper was tired.
And Reyna knew of this fatigue. All the more reason for her not to move even a millimeter.

"What. Is. Wrong. With you," In succession, saying these words, she tapped her finger on the tabletop, as if to accentuate each one.

Viper sleepily followed the movement with her eyes. She blinked.

So did Reyna, although her gaze analyzed Sabine's face a bit more closely.

"It's none of your business," she said. She swallowed her saliva. "Stop digging into it."

"I will stop when I figure out what's wrong with you."

Viper did not respond for the first moment.

Then she looked at Reyna as if she were seeing her for the first time in her life, and her hand settled on the desktop with a thud. By doing so, she hooked a single sheet of paper dropped to the floor, though she looked as if she didn't quite know what had happened.

She grunted, staring dully at the papers lying on the floor.

Mondragón wasn't sure if it was the lab light that did it, or if the chemist's skin had gone pale in seconds.

"Viper?"

"Go now," she croaked out.

She took a step or two, turning her back on Reyna. This time, with trembling hands, she dropped the notebook, which fell on the tiles with a clatter. From here, Reyna could see Callas' palms covered anew with a layer of sweat.

"Viper, I think you should-"

She didn't have time to finish because Sabine Callas fell unconscious to the floor.

***

Neon was sitting on her bed when Fade entered her room and tried to look at her. The younger one did not return the gesture.

She corrected herself more comfortably in her cross-legged seat and nervously played with the octopus plushie, with her eyes fixed on the floor.

There was no denying that she had been crying shortly before this visit. The dried tears on her cheeks shimmered in the light of the bedside lamp and Fade only sighed at the sight.

"Oh, Tala..."

She crouched down in front of the bed and tried to reach her hand to her face, but Neon turned her head away, as if she was afraid the touch would hurt her.

"You shouldn't do that," she said, her throat still tight. "Actually... we shouldn't do anything," she whispered.

Fade, however, did not retract her hand, she placed it on her cheek more carefully and gently, because she knew that Tala did not want to move away after all.

And she was right, because the younger one, with an exhalation still trembling from crying, snuggled into the touch.

"Hey, I don't regret anything, okay?" She moved closer to the edge of the bed and also sat cross-legged on the cold floor. "I don't regret... you, I would never," she said.

"But if I hadn't told you then-"

"That I would find out later," she interrupted her. Tala squeezed the tentacle of the plush octopus, shrugging her shoulders. "You can't get away from such things," she said.

"I think Viper says otherwise." She swallowed her saliva, still stubbornly not looking at Eyletmez, even though she was literally at arm's length. Hazal let out a breath at the sound of that codename. "And now they're going to fire us."

"They're not going to fire us."

"She's Brimstone's right-hand man. She won't keep it to herself, especially when she found out like this," she expelled. Tears reappeared in her eyes and Fade just watched them slowly form at the corners of Neon's eyes. "I believed she was different, but now I know she won't let this go. She wouldn't be able to."

Fade, despite the fact that she was quite comfortable, rose from the floor and sat next to Neon, and when she found her hand, she intertwined their fingers and squeezed as a means of reassurance.

"None of us will be fired, I promise," she said.

"You don't know that."

"I know, Tala. We just have to... be more careful."

Philippine furrowed her brow at those notes of hesitation in the elder's voice and looked at Fade for the first time since this conversation began. She did not let go of her hand, but the one clenched on the mascot moved to her own thigh.

"What did she say to you?"

Fade took in a breath and let it out slowly. She tried not to recall that moment, but the image of Callas' stony, defiant face came before her eyes anyway.

"She told us to break up." Neon's shoulders slumped in an instant, as if someone had momentarily sucked all the energy out of her body. Fade only nodded, trying to ignore the younger woman's horrified gaze on herself. "Then Brimstone won't find out," she said.

"She blackmailed you?" the question although said almost in a whisper, resounded with anger and... disbelief.

"To be honest, I blackmailed her too."

"What?"

Hazal squirmed more out of annoyance at the mere mention of this element of her conversation with Viper than an uncomfortable topic.

"I'm not afraid of her, Tala. But even if I'm not afraid, I can't ignore who she is on record. No one can."

Neon let out another shuddering breath.

"So... what now?"

She shrugged her shoulders, but it was not a gesture of indifference, but more of helplessness. Fade watched all this, but tried not to think about it as the younger one hunched over on the bed, her gaze wandering somewhere without much purpose, as if she was again doing her best not to look at her.

"Cypher will help. He's not too fond of Viper, so he probably won’t mind editing some camera videos if she would like to see it," she said. Neon just nodded her head. "He'll cut out the inconvenient parts if I ask him to. And Reyna knows about us and is on our side. She would be able to humble Viper."

"Do you really think she can be humbled?"

"By me and you probably not. But Reyna isn't afraid of her and doesn't see her as a threat, so I think she'll handle that."

Neon nodded again. Fade, however, did not like this silence, so she squeezed her hand again, trying to snap her out of her trance.

"Tala?"

The sprinter pressed her lips together at first. Only later did she sigh heavily.

"I just... I didn't think it would be so difficult," she said quietly. "Complicated."

A single tear ran down her cheek, but she quickly wiped it away. Maybe she was ashamed to cry again, or maybe she didn't want to because she didn't have the strength to do so.

"Do you regret what we did?"

The question almost hung in the air. Neon swallowed her saliva, let go of Fade's hand and wrapped her arms around herself, even though the room was warm. She knew Fade's answer to the question, which is probably why she was so reluctant to give hers.

"I don't know," she finally admitted. She tightened her fingers on her shoulders, sniffled and ignored the next few tears that appeared to Hazal's eyes. "Don't get me wrong, I want this so damn much. I want you, me, us, all of this."

"But?"

"But I'm scared. Of what it will bring us. Of how I won't be able to handle it or hide in corners or pretend that I don't care about you," she threw it all out in one exhale, as if she was afraid that if she didn't say it now, she wouldn't say it ever again. "I'm mad at Viper and at these damn rules, but what if they make sense? Maybe the fact that we're closer than we should be is actually distracting us?"

Fade listened to all this in silence. She only spoke up not when Neon stopped talking, but when the words that had been weighing on her lips finally formed into some meaningful sentence.

"Do you want to end this?" she said it much more weakly than she intended, her voice not at all indicating that she was convinced by the idea. "I'll respect whatever decision you make, just..." She sighed. "I just ask that you be absolutely honest with me."

Neon didn't respond.

First for a second, then two. Then, for five consecutive minutes, she clenched her fingers against her skin so tightly that her knuckles turned white and her gaze stubbornly fixed on the wall.

The silence, however, lasted too long. And it was too eloquent.

Too obvious.

And it was an answer.

Out of the corner of her eye, Neon saw Fade violently rubbing her cheeks. She knew very well why she was doing this, and it shut her mouth even more. She was unable to look at her.

The initiator nodded her head.

"I understand everything."

Neon wasn't able to get anything out, not even a stupid 'sorry'.

But then it was too late, because Hazal Eyletmez had left. And Neon didn't know if she was going to ever return.

Chapter 7: SEVEN

The first thing she heard was the roar of the rain pounding against the windows.

But these were not the windows of her quarters. Nor even the windows of the laboratory.

She furrowed her eyebrows, her gaze went somewhere around her and stopped at the drip stand that appeared to accompany her.

Like a silent companion on a rainy evening. The stainless steel shimmered slightly, almost soothingly.

Her throat was dry, her eyesight had not yet sharpened, and her body was seized by a chill, as if all the heat had evaporated from her body over the past hours.

Perhaps that was true.

She pushed back the blanket to see the sleeve of her favorite turtleneck pulled up and a I.V. placed in the bend of her elbow.

Oh no.

Viper tossed the covers off her shoulders, but didn't have time to sit up and get rid of it, because first she heard footsteps echoing, and then the curtain separating her from the rest of the medical section of the headquarters shifted with a rustling sound.

"It's just electrolytes."

Reyna's voice was too stiff to guide the chemist in her attitude. Mondragón reached behind her with her hand and closed the curtain again.

Callas looked at her for barely a moment, still focused on the sight of the transparent tube disappearing somewhere in her vein.

"Sage-..."

"I told her you fainted. She didn't ask about anything else." Sabine nodded, a stone seemed to have been removed from her body as her shoulders slumped in an expression of relief, but her face showed nothing more than determination. Reyna noticed this and spoke up in time. "Don't get up."

"I have to."

Viper raised her head and supported herself on one arm. Reyna pressed her hand against her shoulder without saying a word, with her lips tightened as if her life depended on it. Or at least it did during the time they measured each other's gaze, until the duelist got annoyed with the pressure Viper was putting on her hand.

"Sabine, stop it, for fuck’s sake."

Sabine looked to the side.

"I told you to-"

"Yes, to don't call you like that, I remember," she snarled. She was annoyed, her irises flashing purple warningly in the faint hospital light. "But I guess that's the only thing you're reacting to anyhow."

Surprisingly, she stopped looking at Viper herself, let go of her arm, then walked over to the window and stuck her gaze out into the rain. Sabine could see her reflection in the glass.

"How long was I gone?" She grunted, her dry throat hurt.

Zyanya watched the rain. The light coming through her clothes shimmered sleepily, reminding her of the existence of the radianite heart.

"Too long."

Viper rolled her eyes. Her head turned the other way, focusing on the creases of that damn curtain.

"You're acting like a child."

"Me? Look at you, damn it," she snorted. Crossing her arms over her chest, she turned away from the window and Viper, and, though she didn't want to, cast a brief glance in her direction. "You're here because your ego outweighs your rationality. How much are you going to drag this out?"

"Stop it," Callas said. Straightforward, to the point, but still too weak for her. "I just need a little more time."

"Time for what?" Zyanya put emphasis on the last word, straining the question through her teeth. "Start fucking talking to me, because I feel like I'm fighting against a wall."

"I already told you that I need more time," she said.

"And I've already asked what you need this time for."

Sabine looked with hatred at the hanging drip bag. If it wasn't there, if Reyna wasn't there, she could just leave.

That would be for the best.

"I don't have to confess to you," she said.

"I don't give a shit, do you understand? You're going to tell me right here and now what you're doing in this fucking lab and what the fuck is going on with you."

Viper had had enough.

"You want to know? Fine." It was the first time she had given in to her emotions to such an extent, but she didn't want Reyna to be here, to watch and barrage her with questions, to ask what, how and when. Viper just wanted the damn drip to stop. "My body is falling apart, satisfied?"

"I had enough time to fucking notice," she hissed, notes of mockery sounding in her tone.

Viper, however, did not bite back. She didn't respond with sarcasm or even roll her eyes. Her gaze was stuck somewhere on the wall behind Reyna.

She fell silent.

Reyna did not like this silence. Even very much.

Her mask of rage cracked and then fell to her feet.

The noise of the rain began to disturb her, the steady dodging of droplets from the transparent bag suddenly seemed frightening to her for an unexplained reason.

"Viper, what... what do you mean?"

Sabine Callas remained silent. She pulled the blanket to cover the I.V., herself avoiding Reyna's gaze, even though she knew it was stuck directly on her.

"Viper."

The chemist lifted her gaze and... shrugged her shoulders.

"By communing with toxins, my blood cells are disintegrating," she said. "They break like fucking soap bubbles, they don't deliver oxygen where they should, and because of that, everything else falls apart." After a moment, she added. "In the lab, I'm trying to invent something to prevent the complete breakdown."

Reyna stared at her as if she had seen a ghost. She didn't understand medical jargon, but the words came clearly enough to make the figure of Sabine Callas seem strangely fragile and delicate for the second time. Covered with a blanket, with fluids running down her body, her eyes lost somewhere behind a veil of thoughts.

"Can you do it? Maybe Sage-..."

"No." Viper interrupted immediately. "I can handle it. I don't need her."

"You always say that," Zyanya sighed. She probably picked up on that gesture, but pressed the bridge of her nose, trying to gather her thoughts so that they made any sense. "You always say you can handle everything yourself, that you don't need anyone. Viper, I know you hate Sage, but asking for help in this case is..."

"A necessity?" Callas suggested. She immediately shook her head, smiling cynically. "Not at all."

"It is."

"You're acting like a child again."

"And you act as if you can't accept that we are a team and we are supposed to help each other."

"I can help others and I can accept help. But not from Sage."
"Do you want to risk never taking a full breath in your life, or just falling asleep and not waking up again?"

Viper let out a breath.

"I don’t care. I'm not going to talk to her."

Reyna didn't hold back a snort of laughter.

"And I'm the one acting like a child?" she asked. "I don't know what you're all about, but you're adults, the matter is serious, and you're not going to do anything about it because something once happened, ages ago, and you two can't get over it?"

Viper's eyes lit up. But she said nothing. As usual, she considered the conversation over on her part, and as usual Reyna had to try to suppress the urge to force Sabine to talk if only by force.

She sighed.

"Are you at least making some progress? Anything known about what works and what doesn't?" The question was asked with a resignation that Zyanya had to agreed to. "Prototypes, anything?"

Viper was silent.

For a moment.

Her eyes continued to burn with a hatred that did not dim for a moment, driving daggers into Mondragón's body.

"Get out."

"No way."

"Fine." Viper rose to a half-sitting position, tossed off the blanket, which slid to the floor with a rustle. Without much thought, she peeled off the patch holding the venflon in place and, to Reyna's horror, removed the tube, immediately pressing her other hand against the bleeding area. She didn't even squirm. "So I will."

***

When another bullet slammed next to the bot's head, Fade felt like throwing the rifle to the floor.

Training was not going well for her. The bullets seemed to take on a life of their own, and their marks decorated the wall almost as a testament to the fact that her eyesight was not going to cooperate.

Perhaps it was because she had occupied the shooting range for ... too long to be able to hit bots.

She wasn't going to leave it.

Because it was only here that she could think about everything. And by ‘everything’, she meant everything that had occupied her head since she woke up. Her relationship with Tala was that ‘everything’.

How long did it actually last? Three weeks? Maybe a month?

And here she was, left alone as usual, because she wasn't lucky enough to avoid Viper's eyes the one and only time she thought they might take a chance. That time when Hazal found someone who made her feel safe and loved for the first time in... hell knows how much time.

Viper took that away from her. Because of some fucking rules.

She furiously took out the empty magazine, threw it on the floor and replaced it with a new one she had clipped on her belt.

She felt her fingers numb from squeezing the trigger, and her neck and shoulders stiff from holding the gun. But after all, no one cared. After all, she had to be reliable. Infallible and scared of anything humanlike.

Fucking robots in the hangar.

She opened the crosshair. She didn't react to the sound of the door opening, or even a grunt.

The shooting range had several positions, so she wasn't going to bother with company even more. Or at least she wasn't going to, as long as that company started directing its steps toward her.

"The bot is more to the left."

She ignored this advice and only clenched her teeth. She knew that voice all too well, cold and downright mechanical. It was like an icicle, biting into every bit of her skin, and Hazal felt like shaking it off in disgust.

She couldn't see exactly what the Viper was doing, but after a moment she heard the sound of a gun being checked and reloaded.

Shots from her side didn't ring out, however.

"You don't have many kills." Viper remarked. Hazal cursed the screen above her station, which displayed the number of holographic bots shot down for all to see. "Maybe the conversation will go better for you?"

Fade didn't take her eyes off the crosshair. She could feel her fingers starting to tingle from the fury slowly building up inside her. She didn't want to bring Nightmare in now, but she had no control over the familiar chills on her skin that dangerously heralded the visit.

"You are the last person I want to talk to," she said.

"But the only one you're currently here with." The reply came. "I don't think you have anything to talk about with Neon anyway, do you?"

Hazal fired, three bots lost their heads. She knew it was a provocation. She immediately regretted saying anything.

So she decided to keep quiet from that moment on.

The score on the screen jumped up, Viper muttered something under her breath, as if in approval of this result.

Hazal tried not to react, although when she placed her finger back on the trigger, it trembled slightly. She told herself it was from fatigue.

"Don't act like you can't hear me." Callas included notes of a growl in her indifferent tone. Eyletmez found it damn funny that Viper hated to be ignored when she herself loved to ignore others. "Are you two still fucking or not?"

She was about to remain silent, but couldn't stand it.

"Fuck you, Viper."

When Fade turned on her heel and finally met her gaze, Viper didn't look particularly offended, but more... surprised. Her brow raised slightly, her arms folded over her chest.

"Don't think I'll let you talk to me like that ever again."

Hazal snorted. She threw the rifle to the floor. Viper followed the movement with her eyes, watching carefully as the weapon fell under the initiator's feet with a deafening sound.

Fade only now saw that Callas' ghost was lying on its stand untouched, even though she had loaded it herself.

The chemist didn't come here to shoot.

"Honestly? I don't give a shit what you let me do. I don't give a shit what you think of me, who you are and who you think you are," she howled. "You took from me what you wanted and what I cared about for the first time, so I have no brakes against saying out loud what I think of you."

Viper snorted a short laugh. Fade didn't let that intimidate her. Not this time.

"Oh, please enlighten me."

Now it was on Fade's lips that a mocking smile blossomed, although the corner of her mouth trembled, driven by fury.

"You pretend to devote your entire life to the protocol, but you treat us like fucking robots to waste on the war. You forbid us to feel, think and behave like human beings, because it's easier to command a bunch of brainless soldiers than people who won't run after you into the fire just because you say so," she snarled. She was panting heavily, the Nightmare crawled onto her fingers imperceptibly. She did not stop it. "You are a selfish bitch, scared of human reflexes, who is so afraid of making mistakes that she pretends they have no right to exist around her, and all you can do is punish and point out our weaknesses. You are a hypocrite who exists for itself, and your greatest fear? This hospital-..."

She cut off. The gunshot had stunned her, although she wasn't sure when it had actually been shot.

Instead, she was sure that Viper was still holding the smoking ghost in her outstretched hand, and her mouth was clamped shut. Her whole body looked like some kind of fucking marble statue.

It wasn't until the echo of the shot rang through the shooting range that Fade felt something warm begin to flow down her jawline first, then her collarbone.

Reflexively, she put her hand to her ear. It was bleeding. The bullet had scratched a piece of cartilage and dug somewhere in the wall behind her.

She turned around. The circular mark was on the concrete and smoke was still smoldering sleepily from within it.

She looked at her own fingers, staring in disbelief, then at the fresh blood, then at Viper, who had managed to put the gun down on the stand. Her movements were stiff.

Like a robot.

Her ear pulsed with dull pain.

Fade stepped back, aware of the blood soaking into her clothes. She shook her head and, heading with her back to the exit, choked out only:

"You're fucked up, Sabine."

***

"I already told you it was an accident," growled Fade, tightening her fingers on her lap. Sage's power permeated her body with waves of gentle tingling, but Hazal hammered her nails into her skin anyway as if it was causing her pain. "It was unlocked, I didn't notice, it went off by accident. The end."

Sage sighed and sat down on a swivel chair that was right next to the hospital bed. She reached into the metal cart with all the medical supplies.

"Fade, we both know you can handle weapons," she said. She put on latex gloves, they crackled slightly on contact with her skin. "You wouldn't do something like that, even if you wanted to."

The ear had stopped bleeding and the pain had eased to feeling only a dull pressure, but the healer armed herself with gauze and a smaller bandage anyway. Thanks to Sage, there won't even be a scar left from the whole incident.

Fade looked somewhere to the side. Seconds later, she returned her gaze to Sage, trying to act like she wasn’t lying.

"Everyone makes mistakes, right?" she asked. It sounded sarcastic, but she couldn't suppress it. "This one was mine and I'm just paying for it. Let's end this topic."

Ling busied herself with bandaging her ear, and that was the only reason Fade didn't see the sparks of anger that crossed her usually calm face.

"It was Viper, wasn't it?"

Hazal didn't answer. It had been too long without Fade’s answer for Sage to believe that she wasn’t lying.

"I already told you how it was." Fade moved her hands from her lap to the edge of the bed, as she felt her skin begin to burn from the nail marks. "I'm not going to change my mind," she said.

"If she hurts you-..."

"She doesn't," she interrupted. Perhaps too sharply. "Are you done?"

Sage wanted to say something, but in the end she just took off her gloves and dropped them into the metal container, nodding.

Hazal didn't need anything else for a sign, so she stood up and, almost yanking the curtain off the rack, headed for the door.

On the way, she encountered Reyna, who slowed her step during this half-second meeting, as if trying to understand the initiator and her rage that could be sensed a mile away.

They passed each other, Hazal didn't even look at her, but clenching one fist in her sweatshirt pocket, she grabbed the door handle to announce her exit later with a loud slam.

Reyna escorted her out with her eyes, but then walked over to Sage, gathering used medical supplies from the bed onto the table. There was no denying that the Chinese woman broke that eye contact rather quickly, and her movements accelerated, as if she wanted to get away from there as quickly as possible.

Zyanya, however, approached her. She expected Ling to ignore her, but she wasn't moved by it. She didn't feel like talking herself, but she felt that there was something hanging in the air that she should know about.

"Have you seen my communicator somewhere?" she asked. Originally that was all she had in mind, but the sight of an angry Fade still lingered somewhere before her eyes.

Sage did not turn away from the cart.

"It's lying on the windowsill."

It was just as she said. She must have left it then while she watched Viper.

She reached out with her hand and picked up the small object. She rotated it in her fingers for a while. Maybe she hoped that Sage would yield first, but that didn't happen.

"What's up with Fade?"

A bit more abruptly than necessary, the healer set the cart aside in a corner and took the supplies to a nearby sink.

"She claims she accidentally shot herself," she announced dryly. Reyna, however, was not about to force herself to be polite either.

"'Claims' means you don't believe her?" she asked.

Their recent conversation continued to ring in both of their ears, although Zyanya was the one who cared less.

Sage busied herself scrubbing her tweezers and scissors with disinfectant soap.

"And you would believe it? That she's careless enough to shoot herself?"

If only Reyna knew how different the tone with which Ling carried on a conversation with Fade was from the one she gave her.

"So what do you think?"

"That it was Viper."

Mondragón snorted a short laugh. She thought it was a joke, but Sage didn't laugh. Not for a moment, and her face remained as insensitive to Reyna as it had been moments before.

"Do you hate her so much that you frame her for attacking agents?" she snorted. "Why would she do that?"

"And why do you suddenly care so much about clearing her of guilt? One day you're trying to scratch each other's eyes out, and now suddenly you want to make her look innocent."

"Because your accusations are baseless. Just because Fade comes back with a gunshot wound doesn't mean it was done by the very person you hate," she hissed. "And just because Viper is cold and has some attitude doesn't mean she's crazy."

Sage turned off the tap.

"I guess in that case you didn't hear her during the mission." She turned on her heel. "My priority is their suffering? Some vermin are born to die, like rats in a lab? Would someone who kills people just like us be able to say something like that without blinking an eye?"

"Oh, come on, you say that as if you've suddenly pity for those who want to blow up our home."

"It's not about pity, Reyna, it's about humanlike behavior," Sage replied. She stopped being interested in scrubbing the utensils, suddenly she didn't care anymore. "Viper had a shooting range exercise written out for back then, I checked a while ago." With a hand gesture, she showed the tablet, which was lying on the edge of the couch. Reyna did not look in that direction. "She wouldn't hesitate to use a gun to scare someone, and she can shoot well enough to just scratch Fade instead of blowing her head off," she said.

"And you think she would use those skills because someone provoked her?"

"Yes, that's what I think. In fact, I'm sure of it."

Zyanya felt Sage starting to irritate her again. She was no different from their last conversation, and although her voice was a bit softer, as if she was trying to show her calm, Reyna knew it was fake.

"You don't know what happened there. Even if it was Viper, you have no idea how it happened."

"So you admit, that she could have done it?"

Reyna clenched her teeth.

"I'm not admitting anything, for fuck’s sake," she growled. "I'm just saying that you don't know the whole situation, so you have no right to accuse anyone."

Sage folded her arms over her chest.

"Then go ask Fade. I think if she finally decides to tell the truth, it will be disappointing for you."

***

Fade tried to pass Neon in the hallway so that her bandaged ear would avoid her gaze, but it didn't happen.

She felt the younger woman's gaze on her as she headed to her quarters without stopping, and clenched her eyelids in the hope that the two of them would survive the meeting in silence.

"Hazal?"

She stopped mid-step. She didn't mean to, but she stopped and immediately regretted it. She clenched her fists in the pockets of her sweatshirt, feeling Neon's gaze burn a hole in her back.

She was sure that Tala looked exactly as she always did, since their meetings among the agents had to be limited to blank stares and stern words.

The worst part was that Fade saw it all. She saw that Neon was in pain and hated the sight of it, even if the decision to end what was between them was the initiative of the younger one.

And she had the feeling that they both hated the decision equally.

Neon often walked hunched over, although she perhaps had the best physique of them all, her eyes had lost their sparkle, and she seemed much smaller since she had taken a liking to oversized hoodies instead of fitted shirts.

Fade drank more coffee than before and showed up less often among the agents if she knew Neon would be there.

They felt the tension. And ever since it surfaced, it hadn't let them rest.

"What happened to you?"

She turned away because she didn't have the willpower to stare at the wall incessantly. Neon's voice was hoarse, tired. Fade wasn't sure if it was a sign of fatigue or that the younger one had recently cried.

She would have preferred the first option.

"It's nothing."

Neon's eyes widened in panic, she didn't believe her. She stepped closer, jumping her gaze from Hazal's face to her bandaged ear, as if she didn't know what to focus on more.

"Don't lie," the younger woman's voice was almost reproving. "How did it happen?"

"I didn't notice that the ghost was unlocked."

It was not a lie. Neon, however, furrowed her brow.

"You never shoot with a ghost."

Fuck.

"I felt like it this time."

"You're lying again."

The statement was thrown so confidently that Hazal felt foolish.

"I can lie if I want to."

"And are you sure you want to lie to me?"

Fade sighed and fell silent.

She poked her gaze into the younger woman's figure, her hunched shoulders hidden by a blue fleece sweatshirt begging for an embrace.

But she didn't move from her seat.

"I told Viper what I thought of her. She didn't like it, so she shot before I could dodge," she said. She herself was surprised at how flat that statement sounded, considering how much rage she held inside.

Neon looked at her as if she had seen a ghost.

"She... shot you?" she croaked out, laughing briefly in case it was supposed to be some unfunny joke. But it wasn't.

"She did. Right before she asked if..." She wasn't sure if those words would pass through her throat, which tightened with anger at the mere mention. "...we are still fucking."

Neon's shoulders slumped even more. In disbelief, or perhaps... disappointment. Her stomach tightened into a knot at the thought that she wanted to treat Viper with adobo. To give a treat to someone who made such comments about her.

Tears welled up in her eyes, starting to burn her.

Even more so when her gaze wandered to Hazal and her injured ear.

"Fade, I-..."

"I don't regret it," Hazal interrupted her, then sighed. Perhaps anger was beginning to take the form of tears in her as well. "I wanted her to know that. She made herself what she is, and I won't pretend it’s otherwise."

Silence, louder than words, sounded in the hallway. And they stood there, suspended in that still space like stone statues.

Until one of them began to crumble, as the arms under the fleece sweatshirt began to shake, and after a moment Neon sniffled and tears appeared on her cheeks.

She stood like that for a while without saying a word. She probably hoped that she could still hold it back, that a few deeper breaths would be enough.

It wasn't.

She burst out crying in the middle of the headquarters' corridor, her uneven breathing bouncing off the walls like the most painful echo.

"I'm sorry, Hazal," she whispered, the broken sobs snapping some of the voices, but enough for Fade to understand. "I'm so sorry..."

She lifted her glazed, reddened eyes to the older one and first put her arms around her, but when their gazes met, Fade didn't even realize when the younger one's body slammed into her impetuously, and her hands clamped down on her clothes as tightly as if she was never going to let her go again.

It was as if she was afraid that when she let go, Hazal would disappear, her hand stroking her blue hair as well, and her arm embracing Neon as tightly as she probably could.

"I'm sorry," she croaked out once again. "I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry..."

Fade hugged her tighter.

"Shh, Tala. Calm down, it's okay, everything is okay, I'm fine."

In response, she got another series of endless I'm sorry's, so she just let Tala cry, along with the tightening of her fingers on her sweatshirt, along with the hot tears that soaked her clothes and her chaotic breathing, punctuated by sobs. Fade stroked her hair in a soothing, calm motion.

It was... good. Yes, it was good.

But after all, Hazal has never been lucky with good things.

Chapter 8: EIGHT

Viper was not sensitive to words. Not usually, because usually she liked to make their author retreat with defeat in his eyes, aware that Sabine Callas doesn’t give up so easily.

And Sabine Callas liked her role of an unbreakable statue.

She told herself this, calligraphing stoichiometric calculations in her notebook, by the warm light of a lab lamp. She even told herself this when her favorite pen ran out of ink and she threw it against the desktop with more nerves than she should have.

She twisted her fingers into her hair, pulling at it, trying to get herself together.

She picked up a new pen.

She started tapping the cap against the paper.

She stopped. This sound irritated her.

The result of her calculations didn't make sense, so she opened a drawer and took out a calculator.

She didn't want to think about Fade's words. But she thought about them anyway. Each word resonated in her head like an echo trapped in a bottomless well from which she couldn't get out.

She ran her eyes over her notes. She typed the calculations into the calculator, but they didn't match. She must have made a mistake earlier.

She had come to terms with the idea that agents had only negative things to say about her. And those things usually flowed over her, she forgot about them almost immediately when she heard them. She existed on, moving those memories somewhere to the back of her mind, where they didn't interfere with her focus on more important things.

And now she couldn't do that.

She started tapping her pen again. She dashed through the pages, looking for her mistake.

She left the notebook alone and retreated to one of the smaller rooms. The cantina was sufficient for one countertop, a kettle, and one cabinet with coffee and... wine.

She didn't drink. She didn't like how alcohol disturbed her mind, so she usually avoided it. She once got the bottle from Brimstone for her birthday and it stayed that way, untouched and forgotten.

Now, however, she took it out and soon after put it on her desk next to her notebooks and perfectly opposite her chair.

She shouldn't care, she shouldn't... feel. The cold she felt about herself never warmed up and was destined to stay that way.

The glass reflected the light of the lamp, she could see her distorted reflection in it.

She could force herself to do what she usually did. To forget.

Or to take the easy way out and get drunk.

Her gaze stabbed the bottle, as if she was waiting for an answer from the world. With her foot she pounded out a nervous rhythm on the tiles, her fingers began to look for something to occupy them.

"Fuck it."

Sabine opened the bottle.

***

Reyna didn't want to talk to Fade. Not after the initiator trusted her enough to share information about her relationship, and Reyna... She defended the person who was ready to make Fade's life a living hell.

She didn't even know why she did it. Why she objected to Sage's statements, or why she was so irritated by her accusatory tone when she spoke about Sabine, as if she was so sure that the chemist was heartless that she would not accept any other version of events.

Viper said many things, did many things and probably thought about many things in a way that a person not driven by the demons of the past doesn’t. She was broken in her own way and suppressed some of her feelings. Reyna knew that. Her constant coldness, the distance she kept around herself, her insensitivity and her habit for being direct had been traits glued to the Viper character for as long as Reyna could remember.

So why did she disagree with Sage?

She slid open the glass door to the lab.

Early on, she saw Viper bent over a desk collapsed with stacks of papers, so Reyna was even more surprised that she didn't react to her entrance. She had certainly heard it. She had always heard everything, after all. If not the footsteps on the tiles, then the noise of the door opening would surely have caught Viper’s attention.

So maybe Viper didn't want to react. Reyna could only hear the sleepy clicking of a pen hitting an open notebook, as she later found out when she decided to come closer. Reyna was able to creep, but this time she deliberately made her steps clearer.

Viper still didn't turn around. But the pen only clicked, she didn't write anything down, as if her mechanism had jammed, and her gaze was stuck in the tangle of words and calculations fixed on the paper.

She wasn't going to welcome her.

"Did you really shoot Fade?"

For the first time, she did not use a cutting tone. Even annoyance had evaded into a corner somewhere, replaced by... disappointment. And perhaps a touch of disbelief. Zyanya was quietly asking the question, gazing at the chemist's silhouette.

Sabine laughed briefly, her shoulders shaking with the gesture.

"Maybe," she said carelessly. Her hand went to her temple and rested her head on three fingers spread apart, as if it had suddenly become too heavy to hold up. "So? Are you going to give me another lecture?" she asked. Her tone was so mocking that it balanced on the edge of laughter.

She flipped a page in her notebook. She didn't write anything on it, Zyanya knew that Viper was just looking even if her profile was covered by her hair, not tucked behind her ear as it usually was.

"Viper, look at me," she said. On an exhale, almost with a sigh.

"No," parried Callas. She laughed at the same time. Reyna's request apparently seemed damn funny to her.

However, there was something strange in that laugh. Something unhealthy. Unnatural.

"I said something," she said.

“So did I. But go ahead." Viper turned around in the swivel chair, immediately dropping all her weight onto its backrest. She spread her arms to full shoulder width. "Here I am. Scary, right?"

Reyna took a step closer, Viper's feet no more than one tile length away. Sabine didn't like this, so she stood up and swept past Zyanya with an unchanging smile.

"Why did you do that?"

"And why did she do that?" Scoffed Viper in response. She put her hands in the pockets of her lab coat and walked around the table in the middle, where a dozen tubes and vials were joined together. She tapped one of them, bubbling, with her fingernail. Only then did she answer. "Why did she step into my brain and start digging in there without my permission, hm?"

She turned to Reyna, sending her a defiant look. The corners of her mouth were still up.

"Fade knows the nightmares of all of us, your head is not the only one she's gotten into," she said.

"I don't give a shit." Viper returned to her desk, Reyna followed her, which didn’t escape the chemist's attention. Reyna, on the other hand, didn’t miss her shaky step. "Are you going to follow me around like a damn dog or what?"

There were those notes of laughter again. And only then did Reyna smell it.

That smell, bitter, a little sour.

"Are you drunk?"

She grabbed her lab coat-covered arm wanting to turn her toward herself, but Viper jerked away efficiently. She corrected her coat, covering more of her tank-top, tightly hugging her slim figure.

"Maybe, maybe not," she replied, shrugging her shoulders once she had moved a safe distance away.

Only now did Reyna hear Viper sound indistinct, as if the words were clumping together on her tongue.

"A moment ago you were lying under an IV, and now you're getting drunk? Are you serious?"

Zyanya was not angry. Zyanya was horrified. Sabine shrugged her shoulders again, her gaze wandering here and there. She probably couldn’t pick one point where she could focus it.

"It is none of your business, Reyna. It's my life."

"Which you're making shorter out of your own stupidity."

The words came out before she had time to think about it. She wanted to take them back, really wanted to take them back.

But Viper only nodded, her body wobbling under the influence of alcohol, a smile blooming on her lips that Reyna couldn't read other than 'I knew you'd say that.’

Reyna didn't manage to say anything.

"You know what? You're right." She laughed again. At first she hugged her arms, but then she gave up on that and let them loose. Before Zyanya knew it, Viper had thrown off her coat, which landed at her feet. "All of that because I was stupid, right?"

Her hollow voice echoed.

The scars covering her skin seemed to shimmer in the cold fluorescent light. Chemical burns tightened the skin on her forearms, the scars were pale, deep, shallow, extensive or minimal. When she raised her arms, one stretched across her collarbone over the fabric of her clothes, and although Reyna knew they were healed, her own skin stung her with pain. A few round bullet marks, a few from a knife blade.

"All of this because I was, damn stupid, Reyna?" she repeated.

Her voice no longer sounded so overbearing. It wasn't so sure, although she probably tried to mask it with laughter. It was still distorted, but now more hoarse. When she turned her head to the side, Zyanya saw black ink decorating her neck.

She never knew that Viper had a tattoo. But she immediately understood its purpose.

It covered the skin where the acid reached.

Suddenly the turtlenecks and eternal long-sleeved shirts made sense.

She was unable to speak up.

"I'm trying, do you understand?" she croaked out. "I'm trying to survive all the time. All the damn time just to see this in the mirror at the end of the day. A disgusting monster I became only because I wasn't precise enough." Her shoulders began to tremble, Reyna had no idea if it was fury or fear. "And now? Nothing is working. I don't care what Fade, Sage, or anyone in this fucking building thinks of me, because I'm dying anyway, for fuck’s sake."

The words rang out clearly, loudly, and Viper turned her head to the bubbling vial, as if for the first time it bothered her that someone was looking at her.

Reyna swallowed her breath. Her gaze went up and down Callas' arms anyway, who seemed to sense it and folded them over her chest, unconsciously trying to cover herself.

"Viper, medicine has moved on. I’m sure there is... some way that would be a solution. You just have to let yourself be helped, and somehow we'll manage..."

"We?" Viper lifted her coat from the floor with one jerk. "There is no us, Reyna. There never was. I'm no one to you, just like everyone is to everyone else in this damn protocol. We don't know each other, we shouldn't know each other and we won't, do you understand?"

Zyanya could see Viper's chest rising quickly as she spewed out these words at rifle speed.

"We are a team, whether you want it or not."

"That's right, we're just a team. Not some fucking family," she bit out, tossing her apron onto the back of a swivel chair. "Which I don't belong to."

"Because you don't want it yourself." Viper turned her head at these words, again attending to the vial left on the stand, her green eyes fixed on the bubbles that floated toward the surface. "And your research isn't giving any good results, is it?"

Sabine clenched her jaw, then her eyelids. Reyna saw it from the side, and though it might have only seemed to her, tears seemed to have flicked in the corners of Viper's eyes.

"This is no ordinary disease. It's not something that can be treated like some stupid flu," she said, weaving her arms across her chest, and her fingers tightened on one of the scars. "I'm not going to make myself a guinea pig for someone who has never seen a case like this."

"You think they wouldn't try to help someone who is saving their world from ending?"

Viper snorted.

"We are not heroes, people don’t know of our existence. And even if they knew, I wouldn't be one of them. Heroes don't look like me."

"Viper-..."

"People like me end up like this." She spread her hands. The laughter that broke from her throat was pathetic and all it could show was fatigue. Tiredness of living in a body that wanted to kill her. "Trying to save a life that never had a fucking meaning."

Reyna saw that Viper was looping in her thoughts. Maybe it was the alcohol's fault, maybe not, but the chemist probably didn't realize how miserable she looked.

"You can't say that," Zyanya replied hoarsely, but still calmly. She had the indispensable impression that Viper was on the edge of something, although she couldn't exactly see what it was yet. "We've already talked about this, that-..."

"I shot Fade."

Viper's gaze was icy cold at first. Only a moment later it melted a tad as she shrugged her shoulders and the corner of her mouth tried to lift as if in an attempt at a half-smile.

It was as if she was capitulating, admitting her guilt, not trying to whitewash herself this time.

"She pissed you off," she said.

"Would you do the same if she pisssed you off?"

Reyna opened her mouth to say something, but immediately closed it. She felt ashamed that she couldn't lie, although she shouldn't have at all. Sabine only nodded her head.

"That's what I thought." She intertwined the fingers of both hands together, as if trying to stretch them. She crooked slightly. "So maybe I'm actually insane?" She looked at Zyanya, shrugging her shoulders. Her eyes glistened with tears, but she didn't wipe them away, stubbornly letting them build up. Somewhere there lurked a disturbingly impotent smile. "Maybe I've lost my mind, and I don't even know it?"

Her finger slid across the desk top with her notes. She clutched a couple of sheets of paper together with that motion, staring at them involuntarily as they reached the edge and fell to the floor with a rustling sound.

"Sabine-..."

"Viper."

Reyna agreed to this correction without a word.

"Viper, this is not a conversation for now. You're not sober." Unwittingly, Reyna's gaze went to the still proudly standing bottle of wine next to the office lamp. Viper also looked in that direction. "Go to bed, we'll talk tomorrow."

Sabine did not respond. She was focused on dropping more notes off the countertop, as if the sound of the falling pages hypnotized her.

"I shouldn't have told you anything," she said.

Zyanya herself didn't know whether Callas sounded more angry at herself or at her.

"Because you're afraid to admit that you're not perfect?"

Several notebooks fell with a clatter onto the tiles.

"Because you treat me as if your heart has suddenly turned to jelly." She heard. Viper squinted, turned off the lamp. Later, it joined the lying piles of other objects as well. The bulb shattered into dust, the casing rattled on contact with the hard ground. Zyanya didn't flinch. "You shouldn't soften up, Reyna."

A growl sounded in this sentence. Sabine turned her back, Zyanya saw the snake writhing its black ink across her neck and between her shoulder blades.

And so she saw the movement of her wrist, which indicated the rubbing of her cheeks.

"You should be cold."

The dropped pen rolled under Mondragón's feet just after it had traveled half the room in flight pressed with impressive fury.

"Insensitive."

Only now did Zyanya see that Viper's hands were trembling.

"Because, after all, people like you don't deserve to live." The stool on which the mug with the under-drank coffee stood was knocked over with a single jerk. The mug shattered, the coffee staining the tiles with brown freckles. Reyna didn't even look in that direction. "People like you don't fucking deserve it."

Reyna knew Viper didn't mean her at all. She meant herself.

She tried to approach. Approach the shaking, trembling figure of Sabine Callas, whose cheeks had begun to glisten from hot tears of pure rage, to Sabine Callas, who was ready to demolish the laboratory through overpowering helplessness.

"Monsters should die in fucking agony, Reyna. Choke on their own rotten insides and wait when it's all over."

Sabine stood in the middle of the mess she had created for herself. She was panting heavily, as if after an exhausting run, tears ran down her cheeks, stopping on her lips, reddening her eyelids. She wiped her nose, but nodded, satisfied with the effect.

If it hadn't been for Reyna she probably would have grabbed one of the pens lying on the ground and gone back to work as if the sheets of paper littering the lab floor had always been there, and the shiny coffee stains were a decoration along with the specks of glass from the light bulb.

But before Sabine had time to say or do anything, she felt arms clamping down on her body, warm and tight.

She reflexively jerked away.

"Don't touch me," she hissed, her hands resting on the sides of the duelist, who didn't move. She tried to push back, drove her nails into Reyna's clothes and pulled. "Don't fucking touch me!"

Zyanya said nothing. Just as Viper liked, she remained silent.

"Let me go!"

Sabine's screams were of no use, even when Reyna's shirt began to soak up tears, and her body was constantly being pushed away and scratched in fury. Beaten up by Sabine’s fists she kept throwing at Reyna.

Zyanya simply waited. Taking all the hits, listening to the mumbled curses, inhaling the smell of alcohol, mixed with a scent she could only associate with the laboratory.

"Let me go," she whispered after a few minutes. Her voice was nothing like the monotone, emotionless one she usually used. It was helpless, fierce and shaking. "Reyna!"

Reyna tightened her grip, feeling Viper jerk her whole body, screaming something Zyanya couldn't understand because her skin was drowning her words out. She yanked for another minute.

And then she began to cry.

Her knees bent, relying completely on Reyna, and Mondragón got the impression that she wanted to curl up inside herself and disappear from her sight as quickly as she realized that she was no longer in control of her emotions, which, after all, she had always kept in check.

That she wanted to curl up, to wane, to be absorbed into the space that surrounded her so that she became invisible.

They squatted on the floor, tightly hugging. Then they sat down on it, not far from the now-cold coffee stain.

Sabine was no longer lashing out. She didn't jerk like a wild animal in a cage, as if she had resigned herself to the fact that Reyna wasn't going to leave the lab, regardless of whether she started screaming or throwing her fists at her.

"I hate you Reyna," she whispered, tightening her fingers on her neck. Zyanya didn't even feel the pain of the nails digging into her skin. Viper's throat stifled a sob, but Reyna waited patiently. "I hate you so fucking much."

Zyanya embraced her tighter.

"I know, Viper. I know."

***

Reyna didn't know exactly how much time they spent on the cold floor between scattered notes, a shattered mug and all the rest of the mess that piled up around them like pyramids.

But an attack of hysteria mixed with alcohol finished Viper off enough that she fell asleep with her head on her shoulder just in the midst of the chaos she had caused. Reyna left the mess behind, carried Sabine to her quarters and watched her chest rise steadily for a minute, maybe two when Reyna laid her down on the bed.

She grabbed the door handle. She turned around one last time.

She couldn't leave.

Even when night had long since fallen outside the window, when she herself felt fatigue encroaching on her body and mind and the need for rest began to flicker in her head like some damn red light, Reyna couldn't leave.

Viper couldn't tell her to get out. She couldn't force her to leave.

Reyna regretted it for the first time, because it would probably be easier for her to pretend that the whole situation hadn't made an impression on her, than dozens of gears turning in her head at all, trying to think of any solution.

She closed the door, but that didn't mean at all that she had left Viper's bedroom.

She rested her forehead against the cold door.

She turned back, and sat on the bed, driving her gaze into the wall opposite as intensely as if she hoped to burn a hole in it.

The sleepy glow of the diamond in her chest was the only source of light in the room that Reyna could not leave. That was solely because she had witnessed the huddled figure of Sabine Callas, who now slept next to her, break before her as she had never broken before.

Or at least never in someone else's presence.

She moved her hand over the smooth surface of the bedclothes and rested her head against the headrest. She couldn't twitch even a finger, even if her gaze dropped longingly to the door every now and then.

Reyna remained on guard duty.

***

She only realized she had fallen asleep when she was awakened by the rustling of the bedclothes and a few wriggles of the mattress, which also moved her.

This was not her bedroom, but she quickly realized that.

She turned her head in the other direction. Viper's figure was barely a slightly more distinct shadow against the window. She sat on the edge of the bed and probably wiped her face with her hand, although Reyna wasn't sure. She was sure, however, that Sabine was unaware of her presence, and to Zyanya it seemed unfair at first, until the chemist opened the drawer.

She did it so mechanically, habitually, that Zyanya squinted and her fingers tightened on the bedclothes.

Viper sighed, then growled as if annoyed.

For the first few seconds, Reyna didn't know what she was throwing on the floor. A few rectangular shapes stood out in shadow as she happened to glance at them before they fell to the carpet.

Until Viper rummaged through the full blister and squeezed a pill out of it. She took it in her mouth and sipped it with water standing on the cabinet. She swallowed.

Reyna got down from her side of the bed carefully, as quietly as a cat, and slid her fingers over the bed frame before standing by the corner.

"Viper?"

Sabine's hunched figure straightened as if something had stabbed her in the spine, and for a split second she looked at Reyna with a hint of horror.

They looked at each other.

For a few moments.

In silence.

Reyna crouched on the carpet, her hands began to search for boxes, light as a feather because they were empty. She felt Viper's gaze on her, but barely for a moment.

When she looked up, Callas was poking her gaze into the window.

She took one package in her hand, her fingernails gliding over the lines of text, which was illuminated only by the glow of Zyanya's crystal.

"What is this?"

Sabine bestowed her with a fractional glance. She sat straight as a string, clenching her fingers on the edge of the mattress. She shrugged her shoulders.

"Painkillers, don't you see?"

Zyanya sat back on her heels, gasping in disbelief. With a flick of her forearm, she scooped up the empty packages scattered around, which formed quite a mound between Reyna's knees and Viper's feet.

"I mean what is this."

She pointed to the boxes with a hand gesture. Empty boxes. There were at least ten of them.

"I said they are painkillers, what more do you want to know?"

"Are you an addict?"

Viper returned her gaze to the window.

"No."

"It doesn't look like it."

"Don't make me a junkie because I take meds like any other person, okay? It's not some damn heroin."

Sabine stood up. She didn't want to have this conversation, and it showed, because shortly thereafter her hand reached for a lighter and a pack of cigarettes, as always lying on the windowsill.

Reyna followed her like a shadow, but her fingers tightened on Callas' wrist as she reached for a single cigarette from the already half-empty pack.

"Let go," she instructed. Straightforward and to the point.

Reyna, however, could still smell the alcohol on her breath.

It was strange to see the Viper cover herself with an icy shell again after Reyna had witnessed her breakdown a few hours ago.

Maybe she didn't remember what happened in the lab.

Or she pretended not to remember.

"Put it down, I'll let it go," Reyna announced. She saw Sabine clench two fingers tighter on the cigarette. "Put. It. Down."

Viper jerked her hand. Zyanya's grip didn't relax one bit; on the contrary, it grew in strength.

She knew that forcibly she had no chance with her.

The cigarette, untouched by the fire, fell to the floor.

"Satisfied?" Viper hissed. "Now let go." With a movement of her head, she pointed to her wrist.

Reyna didn't flinch.

"Are they helping you?"

The drug packages still lay in a pile by the bed.

"Yes."

"You're lying. Why do you take them if they don't help?"

"For the fucking fun of it," she snarled. That mocking smile appeared on her lips again. "Are you done?"

"How long has it been going on?"

"Since when it’s not your business," she said.

"You're acting like the biggest bitch." The grip on Viper's wrist tightened, Sabine jerked reflexively. "I just want to understand, and you're biting back like I'm wasting your air."

"I told you all I could, what else do you fucking want from me?"

"Why are you poisoning yourself with drugs that don't do anything for you?"

"Because it hurts, damn it! Every time I take them I hope that it will just be different and that I'll buy myself more time before I get another nosebleed!"

Immediately she tightened her lips, as if she was afraid that the next words would get out before she could stop it.

Reyna let go of her wrist. Viper reflexively rubbed it, relaxing the tense muscles and numb skin. She looked at Zyanya for a moment, but then her gaze fled somewhere to the side.

"You're hurting yourself."

"Shut up."

"No." Reyna didn't do much about the furious gaze. "Not after you hide from everyone what's happening to you, how you bottle up your own emotions and poison yourself with fucking pills because you want to pretend that reality is different."

"I said, shut the fuck up," Viper snarled.

"You got hysterical in the lab because you're terrified, and now you're back to your usual bitchy lifestyle?" Reyna growled. "I'm supposed to forget about it just because you did it?"

"Yes, that's exactly what you're supposed to do."

"You can fucking dream about it."

"Get out of my room."

"Viper, damn it, it's not-..."

She didn't have time to finish, because she felt Sabine's lips crash with hers, and the chemist's fist clenched on the material of her shirt, drawing her toward her.

This was not a gentle kiss. It was a violent, almost painful gesture, where for a few seconds Viper's cracked lips touched Reyna’s softer ones so hard that they began to hurt.

Zyanya reflexively pushed Sabine away, who let go of her clothes and slumped slightly backwards as her balance was taken away.

"What the hell was that!?"

Her voice carried between waves of wheezing silence.

Sabine shrugged her shoulders and wiped her mouth with the outside of her hand. Her face expressed nothing more than usual.

“I told you to shut up.”

Chapter 9: NINE

Reyna did a lot of thinking.

She didn't like the fact that she actually couldn't stop thinking, even though it would have been a lot easier than struggling with the storm in her head since the morning.

Because honestly... What the hell was that?

She knew that the Viper had defense mechanisms far more complicated than one might think. She also knew that she probably didn't understand them for the most part, and although she really wanted to, she had no chance of understanding them until Viper herself explained them to her.

She could try to make sense of her constant sarcasm, her silence, her pretending not to feel anything. She wasn't quite able to defend her from shooting Fade, but heck knows, maybe there was an explanation for that too.

But the kiss... had none.

If the sudden crash of their lips without an ounce of feeling could be called a kiss at all.

Viper defended the rules like a lioness. She was able to recite every paragraph of the protocol awakened in the middle of the night, her gaze never escaped any unprofessional behavior.

Fade and Neon were currently at the bottom of the hierarchy of agent tolerance in her eyes because of what she had found out, and she... she did that.

She sighed heavily. She felt her head start to ache as she entered the hangar with the vulture. The smell of gasoline, which was currently being pumped into the tank before today's mission, was wafting through there.

She shifted the case with her weapons into her other hand. She saw the figure of Viper already from the entrance, who was sitting on her case and browsing something on a tablet, in a half-unbuttoned outfit. Sleeves hung loosely at her sides, gloves lay on the floor, ready to be connected to the toxin tubes.

The black, thermo-active t-shirt underneath revealed barely part of the scars that Reyna had seen in all their glory less than twenty-four hours earlier.

She took a breath, then another.

She wasn't sure she wanted to have this conversation. Not because she was afraid of its finality, but because she didn't have the strength to pull information from Callas' throat that she herself had never given her.

Reyna didn't like to ask.

And Viper always made her cower before her, begging for any scrap of information like a hungry dog for a piece of meat.

She grunted.

"Can we talk?" she asked, setting her case down right next to Viper's one.

Viper, who didn't lift her eyes from the device for a second. On the contrary – swiped her finger across the screen.

Reyna saw that it was Icebox's plan. Sabine always looked at the layout of the various elements of a mission site, no matter how many times she had been to a specific location. Perhaps the controller she was becoming as soon as she left the vulture was coming back to her.

Everything perfect, everything prepared to the last detail.

"Viper," she said. Sabine twitched the corner of her mouth, but the rest of her remained as steady as she had been moments before. "I know you can hear me, don't act like a shit."

Viper seemed to have decided to act just that. She clicked something on the screen, carelessly viewing a 3D model of a cluster of containers that was the perfect place to plant a spike.

"I'm not going to move from here until you answer me," she announced. Although she didn't want to, it sounded like a growl and out of the corner of her eye she saw Jett walking past them with a quicker step than necessary with her box in her hands. "And look at me when I'm talking to you."

She didn't, of course not. She merely clamped her fingers tighter on the edges of the tablet, and Zyanya could only see the top of her head.

Reyna perhaps shouldn't have done it, but she grabbed Viper's arm and pulled her up, forcing her to stand up.

Sabine, however, didn't get indignant, didn't even squirm. She let herself be put upright, like a rag doll, and although she didn't say a word, she didn't avoid Reyna's violet eyes. She looked at her bravely, as if another war of gazes had begun between them.

"Is this funny to you, or what?"

She significantly tightened her fingers on Viper's shoulder as the latter answered her again with silence. A shadow of pain flashed across her face at the grip, but she still kept her mouth closed.

"Reyna, let her go."

Mondragón tore her gaze away from Sabine's face. She turned her head toward Brimstone, who, hell knows when, stood next to her with his arms folded over his chest.

"You don't understand..." she began.

"And I don't need to," he replied. He looked meaningfully at Zyanya's fingers still entwined around Viper's arm. Reyna let go, clenching her jaw. "Be so nice and stop jumping down each other's throats every five damn minutes, huh?"

It probably would have been best if Reyna had accepted the reprimand with humility and simply apologized and marched off in her own direction. But looking at Sabine, at that perpetually stony face and the icy stare with which she was probably trying to prove to her that no matter what Zyanya did, Viper would always be above her, she couldn't help herself.

"You don't know what she did," she said dryly. Liam raised an eyebrow, while Reyna saw with satisfaction that spark of terror in Callas' eyes. The corner of Reyna's mouth lifted for a split second, but she immediately returned her gaze to Brimstone. "So don't lecture me," she said.

"So what did she do?"

Reyna wanted to tell. She really wanted to tell about everything. About what was wrong with Sabine, about the fact that she kissed her and even about why she was so fond of her turtlenecks. She wanted to say it all and at the same time watch Viper's stony face cease to exist and her throat tighten with fear just because Reyna had no idea what she should feel.

How she should behave when she desperately needed answers that Viper refused to give her.

She opened her mouth. Her gaze jumped unintentionally between Viper and Brimstone. Sabine tilted her head.

Like a predator waiting for its prey to come close enough for it to sink its fangs into its neck.

That one gesture almost screamed 'come on, do it.' She was provoking Reyna to finally show her cards and claim the full prize. Zyanya saw this perfectly.

Because perhaps that would be the right solution. Get all her thoughts out and end the convoluted maze, the war of looks and conspiracy of silence she had been waging with Viper for a good few weeks.

But although her mind was screaming, she only said:

"It doesn't matter anymore, anyway."

She poked her gaze into Viper saying those words that almost didn't belong to her. Her tongue worked separately from her mind before she could guide it to the correct path.

Sabine's shoulders relaxed. She herself looked as if she had taken a breath for the first time in a long while, but showed it only by a slight grimace and a tighter clutching of her arms to her chest.

Zyanya gave a grunt. Brimstone sighed, hanging his hands by his sides as if fatigue had suddenly set in.

"I don't want to see similar situations with other agents, do you understand?" he asked. With a movement of his chin, he indicated Neon circling nearby and Jett, who was finishing her breakfast, sitting on the lapel of the vulture and Sage, just entering the hangar with her suitcase. It was impossible not to notice that several of their gazes fell on the three of them. "I don't care if you kill each other in the gym or at the shooting range, but to others you should be a role model who doesn't stab the other person in the back at every opportunity."

***

"Everything okay?"

Jett's question was somewhat blurred by the fact that she had just chewed on a sandwich, but Neon stopped abruptly anyway on her way to the vulture's interior with her box in one hand.

"Why wouldn't it be?" she replied with question after question. Only a moment later did she realize that she may have answered too quickly. As it turned out, it was too late.

"Because you look like you swallowed a stick."

The answer came so confidently that Neon felt embarrassment slowly creeping into her skin. She thought she hid her emotions quite well.

"Everything's fine," she concluded, shrugging her shoulders.

She stepped inside the vulture and placed her case on the rack. She heard Jett's footsteps behind her, who was shaking her hands on her pants and apparently showing her interest not very discreetly.

"Okay, spill it."

The younger one huffed.

"What exactly?"

Sunwoo rolled her eyes. She leaned her shoulder against the edge of the machine door.

"Neon, I'm not blind."

Tala sighed, but her gaze involuntarily wandered to the three figures, which from her point of view now seemed tiny. Brimstone said something, she couldn't hear what, but he walked away with a step she could attribute to a teacher giving a reprimand.

Not surprisingly, Reyna and Viper stood looking at each other in silence for a few seconds until each went her own way.

She wasn't afraid of Viper. Or at least she thought she wasn't. What she did know, however, was that she would never again feel the way she had before in her presence. Even if she had previously seemed to her simply one of the most introverted people in the Protocol, now she was something unapproachable to Neon, incomprehensible and constantly looking where no one else was looking.

Neon felt watched by Viper, even if she herself saw her barely a few times a week.

Or she had developed paranoia.

Jett followed her gaze in the same direction, turning her head. She led Callas away with her eyes, who exited the hangar and disappeared around the corner. She had probably gone to smoke.

"I don't like tension in the team, that's all," Neon stated. "Especially before a mission."

Jett returned Valdez's gaze, pointing behind her with her thumb.

"This?" She almost laughed. "Don't tell me you're not used to it." When Neon responded with silence, Jett retorted. "I mean, we shouldn't even take this seriously anymore. These two have been fighting like rabid dogs for as long as I can remember, seriously," she said carelessly.

Neon had been a Protocol member for a shorter amount of time than Jett, so indeed, Jett might have known more about the subject. She nodded her head as if accepting this information.

The sight of Fade passing her with a bandaged ear and an angry look flashed before her eyes. She sighed.

"Do you know what they're about?"

Sunwoo snorted a short laugh.

"They themselves don't know what they're about, so how would I?" She shrugged her shoulders. "Viper is bitchy, Reyna can't stand her then, so she's bitchy too. That's the way it goes."

"I couldn't blame Reyna," muttered Neon. "I wouldn't be able to stand Viper either."

The white-haired woman tilted her head.

"Since when do you have a thing for Viper?" Jett furrowed her brow. "I mean... not that it's hard to have something for her, it just seemed to me that... you know, you're on neutral ground."

"She..." She shot Fade, she wanted to say. She let out a breath. "She's tiring."

"Oh, that means you're going through that stage, too."

"Stage?"

"The stage when each of us begins to understand that it's impossible to get along with Viper."

When Jett said those words, she had no idea that Reyna hated her supernatural hearing at that exact moment.

***

Zyanya didn't feel like piloting at all. In fact, she didn't feel like doing the mission at all. The fact that she was under Brimstone's command made things a little better, because the last thing she would have wanted was Viper dictating her orders.

Which didn't mean she'd be lucky to get anything else, because at the sight of the chemist seated in the co-pilot's chair she felt like throwing a bunch of Spanish curses.

She sat down, silently waiting for the hum of the running fuel pump to stop and for the agents to board. She didn't have to look at Sabine to know that her gaze was directed ahead, fixed on the glass as hard as if she could shatter it with the force of that very look. Nor did she have to look at her to imagine the expression on her face.

She knew she was wondering what Zyanya had done, but she was still stubbornly trying to unravel it in her own head before deciding to give in and ask.

The sleeves of her outfit still hung loosely, her gloves lay on the dashboard, and her outfit was still half unbuttoned. The scars starting from the short sleeves looked more serious in the harsh white light of the fluorescent lights, fading only during the flight.

Not knowing why, Reyna wondered if anyone, ever looked at them. Maybe someone asked. And if so, what was Viper's reaction?

"You could’ve told him," came the dry statement.

Not a question, there was not an ounce of doubt in it.

Reyna looked at Viper, but Viper didn't look at her.

"I could," she admitted. When she realized that trying to make eye contact wouldn't end any differently than usual, she sank back in her chair and pretended to watch her nails.

"So why didn't you do it?"

Reyna shrugged her shoulders.

"I don't know."

She didn't lie, although Viper might have assumed so. In fact, she wanted her to think so, so that for once she would be the one who had to figure out what was true and what wasn't. To give her a puzzle that she would have to solve several times just to get several answers, contradictory ones at that.

To make her feel like Reyna did when the questions were about Viper.

The taste of her own medicine on Sabine's lips would have to be something new to her.

"I understand."

No, you don't understand, Reyna wanted to say. You only pretend to understand because you can't stand that you don't have all the information. That someone doesn't give you the answers on a golden platter.

"And why did you kiss me?"

She heard rustling from her side. Viper put her hands in the sleeves of her outfit, zipped it up completely, although there was no need to do so yet. She bent her leg at the knee and placed it on the chair, her back fully resting on the backrest.

"I don't know."

Zyanya nodded.

"I understand."

"No. You don't understand."

She wasn't going to admit that Viper was right. She wanted her to get entangled in her own trap more than anything else. Just at that moment, in the vulture, at the controls, in the co-pilot's seat.

"Is that so?" Reyna snorted. "That's my business anyway."

"If it's your business, why are you starting the topic?"

Zyanya didn't know whether she was more amused or annoyed.

"I think I have the right to know why someone kissed me," she said.

"You're proving that you're even more stupid than I thought you were."

Reyna had already seen the scene. Her fist clenched on the collar of her black-and-green outfit, pulling Sabine up from her seat, her surprised face, perhaps with a hint of fear or even horror.

Viper had no right to call her stupid. She was aware of her flaws, but she wasn't going to let herself be told that she was stupid.

She clenched her teeth.

"And you are living proof that I still have some remnants of self-control."

"Sounds like a compliment."

***

"We are here just to collect data. I don't want any noise and unnecessary dead bodies. You only attack when you are attacked." Brimstone's commands were always straightforward and downright stodgy. His voice cut through the noise of the slowing engine, and the commander himself seemed satisfied with the nods from the agents. "Killjoy, you're coming with me. Get the bots ready." The German woman activated her wristband. "Viper, Neon, you're standing at the entrance door to the server room. Reyna, Jett, you split to the west and east while we connect the flash drive. Sage, you stay close to the server room, but keep your head down in case treatment is needed."

The man looked around at everyone, as if waiting for some sign of protest, but got nothing of the sort, so he just nodded and turned on the communicator, which flashed a blue led. The team followed the movement.

For an old Kingdom bunker, the lock on the door was woefully weak in the clash with Neon's power, which proved to be the case barely a few minutes later. The echo of their footsteps carried through the underground corridor as they made their way up the stairs, their own breaths ringing against the titanium-lined walls, but even so, no one uttered a word until they were in their positions.

"Can you make it through?"

Heard Viper behind her back. She was leaning with her shoulder against the remains of the door, the rest of which, still sparkling with small flashes of lightning, lay not far from her feet.

"I don't, but the bot does."

Viper ticked off another mission point in her mind. That was a relief.

But even if everything was going well for now, she wanted it to be over.

She glanced over at Reyna, who was just leaning out of a corner overlooking the staircase they had climbed here. The crystal in her chest shimmered steadily, illuminating her face from below in the general twilight.

It wasn't long before the duelist gave up her position and walked past them to the other side, doing exactly the same thing.

Viper never noticed how quietly she was able to walk.

When she didn't find anything on that side either, she closed the crosshair and passed them, intending to explore the corridor that departed directly from the server room and wasn't supervised by Jett at that time.

The problem became one dragged look, which Reyna sent to Viper, just within those two seconds.

Viper answered to it reflexively, although her gaze immediately darted off somewhere to the side.

"You're a fucking hypocrite."

She furrowed her brow, reflexively turning to face Neon. She saw the younger one tighten her fingers on the butt of her rifle, and her gaze, to Viper's displeasure, was fixed directly on her.

"What?"

"Don't pretend. At least for once, damn it, don't pretend." growled Tala. Viper, however, did not respond, so Neon only corrected her grip on the rifle before speaking again. "You know very well what I mean."

Sabine felt like parrying with laughter. And she would have done so had it not been for the fact that her mask tended to spread her voice much more clearly than if she had spoken without it.

"No, I don't think I know," she said.

"You're lying." Neon almost spat out the word. The tips of her fingers gleamed warningly, minimal electrical discharges flashed blue.

Viper noticed it.

"We'll talk at headquarters."

It wasn't a command, but a statement. Announcing something that was going to happen because Viper wanted it to. But Neon didn't seem to hear her.

"I can't have my happiness because you're taking all of it for yourself," she hissed. "Because you, after all, fucking can, right? You can do everything for fuck’s sake."

Sabine tried to focus on the clicking of the keyboard behind her. She couldn't explode now. Neither she nor Neon could. But she had no idea what the duelist was talking about, and she hated not knowing.

"Get to the point," she instructed before she could stop herself.

A short, soundless laugh from Neon seemed strangely dark to her for some reason. As if it heralded something bad.

The silence before the storm.

"You and Reyna," chuckled Tala flatly. The corner of her mouth lifted in a smile of satisfaction. "You two are fucking, aren’t you?"

She used the word on purpose. Because, after all, Viper loved it. Viper didn't speak on the subject of feelings, because she couldn't. To Viper, the affection Neon had for Fade was nothing more than fucking.

But she was happy to hear the startled snort, as if her breath was stuck in Viper's throat.

"I beg you pardon?"

Neon leaned the barrel of the rifle against the floor.

"What, too rude? I thought that was one of your favorite phrases."

Electrical discharges ran down her forearm in a flash.

Viper felt like shouting to Killjoy to hurry up.

"Don't be childish and don’t insult me," she commanded coolly. She wasn't going to give in to her emotions, not now. Angry Neon was unstable enough. "I don't care about your sick assumptions so take that rifle in your hand and fucking focus," she said.

"Just like Reyna does?" The younger woman bit back. She felt the fury rising in her body, but looking at Viper, knowing what she had done, knowing what she was like, she couldn't curb it, even if she should. "Especially now that she's drooling like a damn dog?"

"Stop making theories that are devoid of any sense, okay?"

"The only thing that is devoid of sense is your never-ending obsession with making brainless idiots out of us."

"Ah, so that's what you're up to," muttered Viper. Her hard tone made every cell in Neon's body twitch. "Give it up, this relationship had no right to exist anyway."

She only had time to notice the dangerous glint in Neon's eyes, one or two lightning bolts jumping across the tiles, when shots rang out.

***

Tala instantly opened the crosshair. A few shots, a few deaths.

Her backpack hummed loudly, the shots echoed, but it still failed to drown out her thoughts. She hated Viper. Since that very day, she could say it openly: she hated Viper so much that she didn't even have a clue if she felt anything other than that very angry, boiling hatred at that moment.

With a growl, she targeted several armed intruders. In her ear she heard the data being collected, but she didn't seem to have coded it. She heard a swish and then the clang of a shattering vial behind her back. The hiss of toxins lasted only a moment, as some man's pain-filled scream drowned it out.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Reyna, gusts of Jett wind occasionally picking up her hair to dance.

Damn hypocrite.

She clenched her teeth until her jaw began to ache. Her backpack beeped warningly, she could feel the electricity running completely freely across her skin.

Viper couldn't understand feelings. She never tried to understand them, because it was too pathetic for her. She would never be able to understand that only Fade touched her without fear. That only Fade didn't wince when an uncontrolled sizzle of electricity sometimes touched her hand, even though it hurt.

That only Fade made Neon not feel dangerous.

She felt tears begin to well up under her eyelids, but quickly chased them away, focusing on her target.

Several figures in armor entered the corridor from around the corner. Brimstone brought the smoke up so that everyone had time to reload.

Neon didn't want to reload. She threw the vandal in the direction of the previously broken door, which adorned the floor like a veritable post-apocalyptic decoration. The weapon fell on the metal with a deafening sound.

Sometimes she hated her power.

But now she seemed to need it.

The lightning wheezed incessantly, Neon just listened to the sound of falling bodies, like a symphony that was the essence of her rage. Yes, that's what it was all about. About venting the fury that was eating her up from the inside.

Until the explosion stunned her, and she saw the shards of her backpack slamming into the wall like some fucking darts.

And until, along with that sound, she heard a scream that undeniably belonged to Viper.

***

Viper groaned in pain but also in relief when she was finally able to sit down, her back slumped against the vulture's wall. She also leaned the back of her head against it, swallowing her saliva.

Zyanya put the rifle somewhere to the side, and clicked the communicator with her other hand.

"Hurry the hell up," she growled, and without waiting for a response, she took the device out of her ear and put it somewhere to the side.

Viper's arm pulsed with a burning pain, and she felt cold sweat running down her forehead and neck. The smell of burnt material almost made her nauseous, but she hadn't said a word since she was led out of the bunker.

At least now she knew how a person struck by lightning feels.

She let out a shuddering exhale, involuntarily following Reyna with her eyes as she circled the deck and opened every possible storage she could find.

"The first aid kit is above," she advised. Reyna turned abruptly from the locker near the co-pilot's seat. "What?"

"It was somewhere else last time," Zyanya commented, but as instructed, she opened the cabinet higher than the one she did before.

"I know, I changed its place myself."

Viper wanted to shrug her shoulders reflexively, but only hissed when a blade of pain pierced her from her collarbone up to her neck.

"What the hell happened there anyway?" asked Reyna, hastily opening the metal box.

You could tell from her voice that she was furious, but for the first time Viper didn't quite know if that anger was about her or the mission in general.

"I don't know."

Reyna snorted. Sabine followed with a lazy glance as Mondragón put on her gloves.

"You don’t know? Just to remind you, you were electrocuted, for fuck’s sake."

"And that's why I don't remember," Callas replied straightforwardly. "Because I got electrocuted."

Reyna hated it when Viper said something to her as if she thought she was a stupid child. Her tone was almost teacher-like, relentless, repeating statements or trivial facts was her favorite way to try to elevate herself.

"You talked to Neon," she stated. She took the disinfectant, but immediately put it away when she realized that access to her skin was prevented by her chemist's suit. "I don't know about what, but I know she was pretty pissed off when the shooting started," she said.

"And you're assuming it was my fault."

"And wasn’t it?" reflected Reyna.

She took off her gloves, and leaned over Viper. She helped her back away from the wall enough to find the zipper of her costume and slid it down so that it fell freely to her hips. Part of the material was still fuming sleepily.

Viper didn't even look at her.

"First of all, I'd do it myself," she growled, pointing to her suit with her eyes. Zyanya only threw her a hard look of defiance.

"Your arm says otherwise."

Sabine ignored this sadly undeniable fact.

"Secondly, it wasn't my fault," she said. Zyanya rolled her eyes, no longer even trying to focus on this until she heard her next words. "It was yours."

The crackle of the latex matched Reyna's huff. She felt like slamming the lid of the first aid kit shut at that moment and returning to the battlefield. If the slowing orbs from Sage hadn't been so necessary for them, she would probably be in Reyna's shoes right now.

And even if Reyna herself knew what Viper and Sage's relationship was like, she liked this scenario in the most selfish way there was.

"You've got to be shitting me."

Viper fell silent. Quite as if she had suddenly given up on the idea of talking. Reyna feared that was exactly what had happened, but it couldn't stop her from disinfecting the wound.

She sighed with the antiseptic in her hand. The chemist's T-shirt was still on her body, but there was no way to remove it without straining the wound, so she began rummaging through the first aid kit for scissors.

"Because of your weird plays, Protocol thinks we're sleeping with each other."

She didn't need to be specific about who she had in mind, but it was obvious enough.

"I have no control over someone else's thoughts and a silly rumor isn't the end of the world."

Sabine quickly skipped her gaze over the scissors Reyna was holding and her fingers tightened on the fabric of her remaining clothing, stretching it to cut more easily.

"These thoughts were made by your behavior." As Reyna made the first cut, Viper felt every muscle in her body tense up, but she managed to maintain a relatively firm tone. "Neon said you were looking at me in an inappropriate way."

"Because I was checking to see if you were going to pass out, damn it. I guess it's not surprising, looking at how you've been feeling lately."

Viper was about to reply something, but was interrupted by the distinct footsteps of agents who were just coming by the vulture's main hatch.

"About damn time," Reyna concluded, trying to suppress the growl in her voice.

She stepped away from the Viper, leaving the first aid kit behind and dropping the scissors in it. Apparently she was relieved that Viper's wounds would be handled by someone more qualified to do so.

Or she had simply had enough of this pointless conversation.

Sage put her gun down right next to Reyna's weapon, but didn't even have time to take a step when Sabine spoke.

"She won't touch me."

The heads of all the agents turned towards her. All except Neon, who walked to the cockpit, mutely announcing that she had no intention of participating in either this conversation or the entire event.

No one paid any special attention to this.

"What are you talking about?" Brimstone did not hide his surprise, but Viper did not even look at him. "You need healing."

"She. Will. Not. Touch me," she repeated. Her forehead glistened with sweat and her breathing quickened, but the statement came as confidently as if Sabine had announced that the Earth orbited the sun. "Reyna, finish what you started."

Reyna did not move from her seat. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Jett and Killjoy discreetly go their own ways across the deck.

Sage sighed and unfastened one of the healing orbs from her belt, as if Viper's words had not reached her. And even if they did, they made no impression.

"If I don't take care of it right away, you might get an infection," she announced dryly. The orb began to shimmer with blue light. A moment later, Viper felt the pain turn into a dull pressure. "And I don't think you want that. Reyna, get the bandages and scissors ready."

Reyna continued to stand motionless for a moment. Only later did she wake up and do as she was instructed.

Sage wanted to ignore the rage flashing in her green eyes and leaned over Callas with scissors in hand, but the chemist jerked back and clung with her back to the wall as best she could.

"I told you to not fucking touch me," she growled.

Reyna furrowed her eyebrows, because perhaps it was just an impression, but she thought she heard panic in that sentence.

"I have to help you, whether you want it or not," Sage replied. In her stoic tone, the irritation she had so far tried to mask began to smolder.

Viper, however, snorted with laughter.

"Sure, just how did you help me back then? No, thank you. So don't play the heroine and fuck off from me for once."

"Sage, let it go."

Ling surprisingly turned to Brimstone, who nodded in confirmation. She pressed her lips together and stepped away from Viper.

"Reyna, you're on it."

Viper measured Liam with an icy gaze, but didn't protest. Brimstone shook his head as if disappointed, but Sabine wasn't going to care.

***

The wound only needed to be disinfected and secured, so Zyanya felt a little more confident than before, when Sage had not yet used the power.

But she still had the feeling that Viper was watching every scissor move she made. That she was following her every move to show that she didn't wish it at all, and that she was accepting it solely because she had chosen the better of the two bad ways.

She shuddered when her skin was completely exposed to the generally prevailing cold.

And to the sight.

To the damn sight.

The team sat quietly in front of the vulture. No one spoke, no one breathed.

Viper, however, was exposed to Reyna's eyes, in only her bra and lower half of her outfit, and she didn't quite know whether she wanted to avoid her gaze at all costs or, on the contrary, focus on it to see how she would react once again to Viper's body being destroyed.

By the knife scar under her ribs, the bullet mark next to her belly button and the chemical burn on her lower abdomen.

She wanted to read it from her. Disgust, maybe discomfort or anything else, some emotion that Viper could attribute to her and didn't manage to at the time, when she was drunk.

She hissed quietly when the peroxide water touched her skin.

It bothered her that Reyna was watching. That Reyna saw it all, that she saw her body, which Sabine hated. It bothered her that Reyna didn't seem disgusted in any way and didn't move away immediately when she had the chance.

"Sorry," muttered Zyanya, more to herself than to Callas. The chemist felt her breath on her neck. It was just making her realize how much Mondragón was interfering with her personal space. "I'm almost done."

Viper felt like pushing her away, whether she was actually finished or not.

Because Reyna wasn't moving away at all. She was touching her skin with a soaked compress, rubbing the blood gently, too gently to not make Sabine feel uncomfortable.

She needed no mercy.

She only grunted when Zyanya finally stepped back and removed her gloves, tossing them somewhere nearby. The bandage held and protected the wound from damage until Sage's power healed it completely.

She hastily began straightening the sleeves of her outfit, anything to cover herself with, but didn't even have time to put one hand in when some gray material was thrown over her lap.

Viper didn't take with her any spare clothes.

"Take this."

She lifted her gaze to Reyna, who, immediately after walking away from her locker, closed the first aid kit with the intention of putting it away. She straightened the T-shirt in her hands.

"This isn't mine."

Zyanya shrugged her shoulders.

"Because it's mine."

Sabine once again rearranged the material in her hands, as if she didn't know what to do with this information. However, the chill that was settling on her skin took up the decision for her and, being careful of her injured arm, she dressed.

The clothing was gathering on her hips, apparently too big. She slumped in her seat.

Reyna seemed to be waiting for something. Sabine didn't know what for.

Or at least not for the first moment.

"Thank you."

Reyna nodded appreciatively and went to put the first aid kit in the storage above the pilot's seat.

Chapter 10: TEN

The computer seemed to mock her. Once again.

Viper put her elbow on the desk and propped her temples against the palm of her hand, staring at the command lines flickering with more and more new numbers that showed the machine was thinking.

Sabine thought it was thinking for too long. And it was beginning to annoy her that she wasn't able to do all the things on her own, simply on a piece of paper with a pen and calculator. She didn't like waiting.

And she didn't like relying on something other than herself.

Her gaze wandered to the bedside table and her watch. The hour laughed at her, pointing out the fact that she was turning into an empty shell again, devoid of needs. Maybe it would have ticked her off if not for the fact that Sabine knew she had already become one.

And that was a long time ago.

It was getting to two in the morning, but she only moved her coffee mug to the other side of the desk and took a sip. The coffee was cold, actually disgustingly cold and unsufferable.

She drank it anyway.

She knew she had skipped meals again. But she tried to tell herself anyway that the soon-to-be-empty coffee mug was something that would at least partially replace food.

After all, she was just an empty shell of a human being, as her clock rightly pointed out.

Only when the computer buzzed familiarly did she tear herself away from the sight of the vial on the stand, which shimmered green through the substance it contained, illuminating a section of the chemist's face.

She furrowed her brow.

The result was positive.

She stood up from the chair.

The result was positive.

She walked the length and breadth of her room, breathing deeply as if she hadn't done so in years. She even felt like smiling sincerely, but the muscles in her face hadn't done it in so long that the thought quickly fled somewhere into the darkness of her bedroom.

She almost yanked a drawer from her desk, took out gloves and a syringe, and searched through a set of needles.

She sat in a chair, staring at the arsenal, then at the flashing message on the laptop screen.

The result was positive. After so many attempts, it was fucking positive.

Sabine put on her gloves, took out a clamp and adjusted the strap on her arm. She tried not to look at the cluster of test tubes in the corner of the room, one on the desk, one right next to her feet. Variations of her own toxins, not good enough to help.

She tried not to look at it all, because the result was positive.

She disinfected the bend of her elbow. She opened the vial and without thinking stretched the substance in the syringe.

Perhaps she was afraid it would think it over more. Perhaps she was afraid in general of what the hell she was actually doing. Perhaps it was the worst idea she could come up with, and perhaps she had just passed a death sentence on herself.

But the result was positive, right?

She brought the needle closer to the vein. She controlled her trembling hands on one exhale.

"You better fucking fix it."

Sabine Callas pressed the plunger.

***

She was awakened by the sun streaming into her eyes. But even if this pattern was familiar to her, she knew that something was not as it was every morning.

Her cheek was pressed against the floor, the cold floor. Like the rest of her body, numb from standing in one position for God knows how long, it tingled, giving a sign of stiffened muscles.

She didn't remember falling. She didn't even remember the feeling of the substance entering her bloodstream.

Everything that happened after the needle came into contact with her skin blurred in Sabine's memory into one big black stain full of nothingness, throwing her back to the moment when she rose with a groan to her knees and leaned her shoulder against the mattress of the bed.

She took a few deeper breaths.

And then she noticed it.

She didn't feel any pain.

Her lungs weren't burning with living fire, her temples weren't crushing her skull with the migraine that usually penetrated her body like a flare of lightning. She didn't even feel tired.

She stretched her palms, dragged herself up. Nothing hurt, burned or stung.

The feeling was so surreal that when she finally stood up, she had to stay in that position for a while. Absorb the rays of the sun falling on her skin, feel the floorboards under her bare feet, take in the air-conditioned air.

Sabine Callas stood and for the first time felt something more than exhaustion.

***

"It's yours."

Reyna turned away. The towel she used to wipe her sweaty neck froze for a second, and she furrowed her brow, as if Viper was the last person she expected to see at the gym. She didn't quite know how she was supposed to treat her presence in a place where she had seen her... maybe a month ago?

These speculations were not unfounded after all.

Her gaze slid from Sabine's face to her outstretched hand, where she held a piece of cloth apparently with the intention of handing it over. Although her face was impassive and Reyna could assume at a glance that she was no different from the Sabine Callas she had always been, the Viper seemed visibly distracted by the fact that Reyna was not at all going to let her go as quickly as she wanted.

Reyna recognized her t-shirt, but instead of reaching out for her property, she shoved her hand into the pocket of her sweatpants and looked around the room for a moment. She seemed to be gathering her words.

"You don't have to give it back," she announced after a moment. She reached for a bottle of water that stood by the barbell, but didn't open it until she had finished her thought. "You can take it."

Viper furrowed her brow. Again, Reyna didn't know how she should understand it. Shock? Consternation? Displeasure?

"I have my own clothes," she said firmly. This fact could not be denied. "I don't need a donation."

"This is your way of showing how thankful you are?" she muttered, half amused, half annoyed. Viper followed her every step as the Mexican woman circled the area of the two of them, and apparently Viper's outstretched hand with her clothes no longer existed for her. "I said take it. It's just a stupid T-shirt."

"Take it back," Viper pressed. Her fingers tightened on the material, but she lowered her hand. "Just fucking take it."

"Make me."

Such shock ran across Viper's face that Reyna felt like capturing it in a photo. Even if she probably wouldn't have had time to do so, because Viper soon burst into laughter. With her usual joyless laughter.

"Are you kidding me?"

Mondragón shrugged her shoulders.

"No. Make me, because I don't want it and I'm not going to get it back."

"What the hell are you talking about? Take the damn shirt, I don't have time to play some weird games with you, Reyna."

Sabine took a step forward, but at the same time Reyna took a step back. Effortlessly, in one fluid movement, she avoided even a flick of Viper's hand, who stood in mid-step.

"You really won't admit that you can't stand it when someone does something good for you?"

This time her tone shifted from annoyed to something approaching sympathy.

Viper didn't like sympathy.

"Take care of your training instead of wondering about my psychology, okay?"

She cast a quick glance at the barbell, Reyna too, and when her gaze returned to Viper, the latter stubbornly held out her hand again.

"Actually, it's not my training. It's our training." She bit back. "So I have the right to talk to you."

Viper wanted to deny it at first. She wanted to bite back with a simple, undeniable 'that’s not true’, as she always did when she knew she was right. But just as her body had been relatively relaxed coming here, now she had the feeling that every muscle in her body had stiffened.

This time it was Reyna who was on the winning side, and 'that’s not true' melted into nothing in Viper's throat as quickly as it had appeared there.

She thought fast. She had to.

"From what I can see you're doing great on your own."

Her silence, however, lasted too long by fractions of a second. Reyna smiled to herself, and Viper knew that smile of triumph, and in that same second wanted to rip it off her face. It made her realize that she was losing.

"Yes, because you didn't come, so I was bored." Zyanya had her answer prepared, Sabine knew it. "So either make me take the shirt or let me finish my training in peace."

Viper lowered her shoulder. She stared at Mondragón as if by that act alone she was trying to force her to back down. To end the stupid game and take the damn shirt along with that annoying smile of hers that blazed with satisfaction.

When that didn't happen, however, the chemist slung the garment over the ropes of the ring she was standing next to.

"Fine."

Reyna nodded and had already turned on her heel to return to her previous activity. Viper was pleased that the woman was so wrong. It was exactly what she had expected. Her mistake in judgment.

Sabine shrugged off her lab coat from her shoulders, took off her shoes and finally stepped onto the mat in the t-shirt and sweatpants in which she usually spent her awake nights. She was aware that Reyna was no longer interested in her previous training, and her eyes dug into Viper's back like shining daggers.

"What are you doing?"

There was a note of laughter in that question, but that laughter sounded as if Viper had just said some complete foolishness and was trying to make Reyna believe it was true. Disbelief. That was the point.

Sabine shrugged her shoulders.

"I'm making you do it, as you said," she announced. The consternation on Reyna's face was so satisfying. "After all, this is our training anyway, right?"

"You were injured yesterday."

The answer was as simple as a wire.

"But I'm not anymore."

"It's risky."

Viper folded her arms across her chest. Now there was something in her smile that Reyna felt like tearing off with one word, one sentence or one action. Anything.

"So... You're scared," she concluded. She looked at her nails for a moment, ostentatiously, even provocatively. "If that's the case, just take what's yours and stop wasting my time."

God, Viper was so annoying sometimes.

Annoying like a scab that itches, but when you scratch it, it starts to bleed. Annoying like a splinter stuck in your fingertip that you can't catch.

Annoying in a way that Zyanya couldn't define.

When they started talking her tone was always pretentious, no matter what the conversation was about. She was always over the top, always wanting the other to bow down to her, because that view filled her with pride.

Viper was unapproachable, and she considered herself as such.

"I'm not going to fight you over some stupid shirt, Viper," she said.

"I don't see any sign of a burn, do you?" muttered Callas in reply, pulling the shirt away from her collarbone in a meaningful gesture.

Reyna clenched her jaw.

God, that damn tone of her voice.

"I don’t want to hurt you."

"Just because I'm a controller doesn't mean I can't hit," she announced. "So move your ass, I don't have all day."

Zyanya argued with herself. An annoying scab, a sore splinter. The desire to show that she would not yield, that she would never yield, no matter how fiercely Viper intended to believe otherwise.

The desire to press the chemist to the floor and beat her this one time, to observe the disappointment on her face, maybe even the surrender. The disappearance of that smile with which she drilled into her spine causing a frustrating pressure that could not be gotten rid of.

She didn't respond. But she stepped into the ring, getting a nod from Viper. She was satisfied that she had made her point, but Reyna tried to ignore it.

"You still haven't answered my question."

She broke the silence, beginning to slowly circle the mat. Viper did the same, although unlike Zyanya, she was looking under her feet, as if fascinated by the way the material was sinking beneath them.

"And I'm not going to answer it," she said. Reyna clenched her fists. She didn't know whether she was more annoyed by Viper's reaction, or by the fact that she expected a different outcome from what she always did. "It's my business."

"You consider everything as your business."

"Maybe."

"That kiss too?"

Something in Viper's face twitched, but before Zyanya could assign a name to it, it disappeared. The face became calm again, like the surface of some damned lake.

"Are you going to drag this out for the rest of your life?" she asked. Bored. She narrowly missed sighing. "It was stupid, that's all. People do all kinds of stupid things, don't they?"

"Putting salt in your tea instead of sugar is stupid, not kissing someone, for fuck’s sake."

Viper shrugged her shoulders.

This clicked something in Reyna, and that exact moment was when she decided to end this pointless circling and attacked.

She wanted to hit Viper on the calf to knock her off balance, but Sabine jumped aside as if she had been expecting it all her life. Of course. Of course she wanted to piss her off to take advantage of it.

She stepped back, laughing briefly at this defensive move, Sabine reacted with nothing in response except a gentle relaxation of her shoulders. Like a boxer before a match.

She directed an attack on her shoulders, Viper's forearm collided with hers in defense, Zyanya felt Callas' ankle hooking into hers and trying to force her down, so she shifted her body weight to the other side, lifted her leg and disentangled herself from this grasp through a circular motion with her hip. She pivoted while the centrifugal force held her and slammed her elbow between Viper's shoulder blades, snatching a ragged breath from her.

However, the woman quickly recovered, her fist passed the Mexican woman's ribs by centimeters, but Viper didn’t manage to avoid a painful kick to her thigh that forced her knee to bend against her will. Zyanya managed to grab her one wrist hard enough to immobilize it, but with her other hand she failed to brake the other, striking Callas side.

Viper was so fucking annoying.

She was sick and tired of her plotted movements. She was sick of the fact that every single move was backed by a strategy that Viper could create in her head in a second. She was sick of the fact that she now understood that the nickname didn't come out of nowhere. Viper acted like a snake.

Quick, precise. She controlled Zyanya from a distance the way she controlled the battlefield.

That's why this moment, when what she wanted finally happened, was for Reyna like the highest prize in the most prestigious competition.

Sabine was panting hard, her hair scattered in a mess on the mat, a blush of exertion appeared on her face, but what was most precious to Reyna focused her attention the most. Fury.

Fury on the face of Sabine Callas, who jerked, trying to pull her wrists from Reyna's steel grip, even though she knew she had no chance of victory this time. Her back clung flat to the floor, her chest rose quickly, and sometimes even Reyna got the wonderful impression that the Viper was sucking in her breath, hoping thereby to increase the distance between their chests.

Reyna blocked Viper’s legs with her thighs. She continued to hold her hands above her head and boasted of her victory, blowing hot breaths far too close to Callas' cheek than she would have liked.

That's exactly what Reyna cared about. About taking away Viper's personal space and making her uncomfortable. Just like Sabine was doing, leaving Zyanya without any answers every damn day.

"Bitch," spat out Viper.

Zyanya only laughed.

"You don't know how to lose."

"Fuck you."

"Answer my question."

"I'm not going to talk to you about it for fuck's sake."

"Because what, you're going to kiss me again?"

Sabine hated this feeling. Being cornered on all sides by another person. The fact that it was exactly Reyna who was the man breathing her air at that moment, who was preventing her from getting out from under her body and enjoying the fact that she was defenseless.

Those violet eyes of hers were looking for surrender on her face, Sabine knew it. Zyanya looked up, down, and reacted to every jerk of hers by pressing her thighs harder or clamping her fingers on her wrists so that they almost hurt.

"Let me go," she hissed. As usual, she ignored the question.

"I asked you about something."

Although Reyna felt like almost spitting out that sentence, letting that growl escape her throat and once again raising her voice, taking up arms against the snake itself, her tone was composed, only slightly breathless from the effort.

Viper turned her head to the side. She wasn't going to look at her, she wasn't going to yield. If Reyna wanted to spend the whole day like this, she could go ahead.

She pressed her lips together.

She remained silent. Reyna did the same.

They were silent in that damn uncomfortable position, listening to their own ragged breaths. Reyna kept looking at Viper, who was perfectly aware of this, but also perfectly aware of how much she wanted to ignore it.

Zyanya's breathing on her neck was unbearable. She was unbearable.

Reyna let go. The knuckles of Viper's hands hit the mat with a thud as the Mexican woman almost pushed them away. She got up from the ground, unwillingly throwing Sabine a deadly glance as she backed up on her knee, shrugged her pants ostentatiously and brushed back her hair, as if trying to pretend that nothing had happened.

Because for Viper, indeed, nothing had happened.

"If you're not going to talk to me, you'd better read the details of the next mission," she said. " You can't avoid some things, Callas. No matter how much you want to."

Viper didn't know what Reyna was talking about yet, but she didn't worry about it until the evening.

***

"I'm not going."

Brimstone leaned out from behind his laptop just as the door slammed. All he had to do was tilt the screen, and Viper appeared in his field of vision. Her arms were folded across her chest, and although she was holding herself steady for the moment, the man could feel all the air around her vibrating with rage.

He should be used to it by now.

"It's nice to see you too, Viper," he said.

"I'm not going," she repeated. She hissed each word through her teeth, but Brimstone only spread his hands in a helpless gesture.

"What do you mean by ’you’re not going’

"The next mission. Pick someone else."

She backed out toward the door. Because that's exactly how she did it. She stood her ground and slammed the door, making it impossible to object.

"I thought you realized that this is not a wish concert by all these years." Viper paused with her hand hovering over the door handle. She didn't want to look at Liam, but she knew she had to. She had to be credible. "What's wrong with this mission?"

Sabine's first thought was 'everything’. But, fortunately, she bit her tongue fast enough to prevent Brimstone from getting suspicious.

"I don’t feel well," she said.

"From what I saw, you had a training session with Reyna scheduled for today. I passed her on my way to the kitchen and she looked like someone who had just gotten their ass kicked."

Fuck.

Of course Reyna had to screw everything up. She must have been there just when Brimstone was there, she must have ratted her out in that idiotic way, because she knew, damn it, she knew that Viper would come to negotiate. Viper was even convinced that Reyna was simulating pain, because she didn't look anything more than a little out of breath the last time she saw her.

She had anticipated all this, and now she was probably just waiting to throw Viper that one look. A fleeting one, but with a clear message: I won.

"Reyna will be there," she stated. Liam raised an eyebrow, as if waiting for this thought to unfold, and Sabine was happy to use his own weapon against him. "You said yourself that we fight often. She pisses me off, I piss her off. This mission can't succeed."

"So this is a sign that you must learn to work together, because your colleagues will earn a bullet."

Brimstone's voice was chilling. Viper didn't like it. He never considered himself better than her, never showed it. They were always equals.

"So now my opinion doesn't count?" she asked. Resentment could be heard in her voice but with that characteristic amused tone. "Because you decided to play some kind of pacifist?"

"You want honesty? Fine." The man closed the laptop and rested his chin on his folded hands. "I'm tired of pacifying you like two frisky kids who can't set priorities for themselves. If an explanation doesn't help, I'll reach for the moves necessary for the good of the team and the success of the mission."

Viper tightened her fingers on her shoulders. Just so she wouldn't stack them at her side, because standing stiffly with clenched fists she would probably look pathetic.

"What do you call moves? Forcing me to play some idiotic fake-dating show? Or matching me up with Reyna on purpose, because you suddenly stopped liking the fact that not everyone in the protocol adores everyone, as if that were some kind of crime?"

"It's just an addition," Brimstone replied. "I chose you because you're the best at it."

Viper felt like laughing in his face.

"Don't bullshit me. Killjoy, Deadlock or anyone else is not stupid. Making horny idiots out of a few guys' is not an outstanding role."

"It is, if the role requires manipulation."

"Are you kidding? It's a mere distraction, nothing more."

"Which requires knowledge of how human behavior works, the ability to adapt to the situation and careful observation of the opponent. It requires control." Viper continued to look at him harshly. "You can do all of these things. And I know your mind doesn't go out of action mode as soon as you leave the battlefield."

Sabine nodded her head in pity. It showed that she had seen through him before he had time to realize it.

"No matter what pretty words you put it in, you've made me a showgirl," she said. "My job is to flutter my eyelashes and sway my hips just when someone is looking, so that they don't focus on what the rest of us are doing. The truth is that I'm supposed to pretend to be an dumb idiot whose interests are good wine and silly TV series because she's so disgustingly rich that nothing else in her life matters."

Brimstone sighed.

"Viper, it's not like that."

"It is exactly like that. You're just foolish to admit that you wanted to teach me a lesson." She turned back toward the door, ready to walk out and leave the man with this brutally honest presentation of the facts. He didn't answer her. She knew it was because he didn't know what he should say. And that was great, she liked to have the last word. "I will go. But this is the last time I will take part in a mission you set behind my back."

Viper didn't want to bring up that conversation until it was absolutely necessary. She didn't want to think about it, just as she didn't want to think about Reyna.

But Reyna reminded herself, because when Sabine saw the familiar T-shirt slung across the door handle to her quarters, she could only curse under her breath. She took it and slammed the door.

***

"What happened on the mission?"

Neon slammed the fridge door, hearing a familiar voice behind her. Her fingers squeezed the mineral water bottle tighter, the plastic squeaked patiently. She didn't turn around for the first few seconds, however, because perhaps she hoped that the lack of a response on her part would be eloquent enough.

On the other hand, she knew that Reyna wouldn't leave the kitchen, even if Neon ignored her for the next few minutes.

And she didn't feel like having that conversation. That's not why she went out for a run, only to come back and be thrown into the well again with the one and only topic she was trying to escape from. Even more so now, when her body was sticky with sweat, her lungs were burning with living fire, and she felt like her legs had turned to jelly in the last hundred meters separating her from the headquarters.

"Let Viper tell you," she replied, reaching into a cabinet.

She took a glass out of it and set it on the counter. Her tone was a bit more pinched than she would have liked, but she honestly didn't care anymore. The mere memory of the shooting two days ago was enough to make her regret not going straight to her seat after entering.

"I know her version, now I want to know yours."

Reyna was calm, but something in her voice told Neon that calm wasn't the only emotion sitting in her head. Tala shrugged her shoulders and finally turned to face Zyanya with a glass in her hand.

"What for?" she asked carelessly, almost sarcastically. "In fact, you don't need to know it at all, because you believe Viper only. Otherwise you wouldn't have come here for what you came here for, so say what you need to say and leave me alone."

"What's gotten into you?"

Reyna sounded as if she sympathized with her. Neon set her glass down on the countertop with a clang, and her initial carelessness turned into sparks of anger.

"Into me? You're the one suddenly switching sides," she growled. "Yes, I got pissed off on a mission. Yes, I broke the stabilizer because I couldn't listen to that damn hypocrite insult me anymore, and yes, because of me she got hurt. Satisfied?"

"Neon..."

"Since when did you become her advocate, Reyna?"

"I'm not on anyone's side."

"Bullshit."

"You don't know everything."

"Then fucking enlighten me!"

"I can't." Sigh. Neon carefully watched every twitch of Reyna's face, she wanted to catch the moment when the latter would try to lie. "Although I would like to, I can't."

Tala huffed.

"So you are sleeping with each other."

"Stop clinging so tightly to that sentence, Neon. It's not true."

"And you stop treating me like a dumb kid who doesn't know what's going on around them," hissed Valdez. "I'm not blind, okay? Viper never talked to anyone. She existed for herself and only for herself, and her presence at headquarters could only be recognized by the sound of the coffee machine."

"And she still does."

"You keep going to her. If you don't go to her then she goes to you, if you're not standing together at the door to the server room, then by some miracle she's the only one you care about. Of all the people who could have patch her up at the time, she chose you, even though you had no idea what to do. And then you give her your clothes because she seemingly forgot," Neon tossed out, and she calculated each of the sentences on successive fingers of her hand. Zyanya was horrified by the amount. The number of events that were perceived in the wrong way. Which... contradicted the rules. "Shall I keep listing?"

The question hung in the air.

"You misunderstood it."

Neon shook her head.

"All I understand is that rules don't exist for the privileged," she said. She passed Zyanya at the threshold without even looking at her. "Congratulations, because you are one of them."

Reyna was left alone in the kitchen.

Chapter 11: ELEVEN

Summary:

Go check out this wonderful art to have the visualisation: https://x.com/rotepandasocken/status/1698085996347244784?s=46&t=VG0Go8LvcBPDpvCVF3IHMw

It was the main inspiration for this chapter, it's important and you need to see it.

The building smelled brand new.

That was the first thing that came to Viper's mind as soon as the first steps of her high heels bore down the polished floorboards. Perhaps she had just thought about it so she wouldn’t think about anything else.

Neither about the fact that she didn't want to be here, among the bloated rich dickheads who thought they were little more than materialists, sleeping on money while greedily reaching for more. Nor about the fact that she had to be here with Reyna.

They haven't spoken a word since leaving the vulture. Somewhere, sometimes they sent each other short glances to make sure they were of the same mind. Somewhere Viper may have felt Zyanya's gaze on her, following her like a shadow, and somewhere Viper felt like turning a woman's head by herself and forcing her to stop.

She didn't. She only sighed when they entered the elevator. Viper found Reyna’s gaze in the mirror hanging there. They stood on opposite sides, both with chins raised, both proudly presenting themselves and playing the roles they had been assigned.

She wanted to roll her eyes. And preferably get out of there, even before the door slid all the way open.

"Can you stop staring?" she finally asked.

Reyna, however, stubbornly did not listen. She endured the pretentious stare and even the reproachful tone. She leaned her shoulder blades against the cool wall, the cold of the metal passed over her skin, but she only shrugged her shoulders.

"I admire my taste." Viper lazily moved her eyes over the successively litting up buttons with the numbers of the floors they passed. She didn't understand Reyna, and Reyna noticed it. "I picked out the dresses for us," she said.

"That doesn't mean you have to stare like that. So stop it or I'll personally make you do it," she added.

Reyna raised her eyebrows, surprised. She folded her arms over her chest and looked as if she knew something Viper hadn't even mentioned.

And Viper didn't like this look.

"Really? No surprise, no question why did I do it?"

"I don't give a shit who picked the clothes, Reyna. Let's just do what we have to do and get out of here."

Viper wished the elevator would get to that damn high floor already.

"I wouldn't want to burst your perfect bubble, but we have to act like a couple," Reyna announced. The fact that she seemed amused by the situation was like a splinter in Viper's skin. She didn't care. She didn't care at all. While Sabine felt as if with every carelessly thrown word Reyna said burned her insides with living fire. "So let it go, for once. Relax, whatever."

"We're on a mission, this is no time to relax," she replied coolly. "Just because Phoenix and Killjoy are doing the dirty work in another room doesn't at all mean you should turn off your brain."

The elevator finally declared that they had reached the right floor, and Viper was relieved to emerge from this cramped place in which she had far too little personal space than she needed.

The downside was that she was immediately struck by the melancholy jazz music, the hum of conversation and the clink of glasses. That was, in a word, something that indicated a bland party, devoid of any energy, that was intended mostly to advertise.

Because that's what the whole thing was supposed to be about.

Viper didn't read the entire mission description for the first time, because long paragraphs of text about blending in with the crowd were not in her climate. To blend in with the crowd is to blend in with the crowd, what's the point of dressing it up in some nice words.

The event was open, so anyone who looked rich enough could attend. The new research center for biological experiments was a potential storehouse of profits for the rich who would decide to buy out shares in exchange for investment, so a lavish party with umbrella drinks and food on silver trays wasn't so stupid after all.

The problem became a suspicious transaction and the detection of the presence of radianite barely a floor below. The bosses were attending the event, so Viper and Reyna's role was to... spice up their day so that no additional security checks would come to their minds.

Machinically she corrected the material of her dress, and her green eyes peered into the crowd. They were searching. Bosses, barons, suits, ties and expensive cufflinks. Men of an age that allowed them to make such a fortune, with devilish looks on their faces and sly smiles. These were the targets.

Her focus, however, vanished, as if cut off by a knife, when she felt a hand on her waist. Her first instinct was to attack, but as soon as she jerked back she heard a calm:

"Couple, remember?"

Zyanya's fingers gripped her side tighter and Viper had no choice but to clench her teeth and somehow survive this.

At least the woman's hand was warm.

God, she hated Reyna so much.

She hated how confident she felt in this place and at this time. How confident she felt in the purple tight dress that showed off her body in the best possible light, and she didn't feel at all embarrassed or limited by this fact. On the contrary. Sabine had the feeling that Reyna felt better than ever.

And her? Viper knew her appearance. She knew that her skin had blemishes, and although the biggest ones were covered up by one long sleeve of her dress, she felt... exposed. In this case, however, that was exactly how it was supposed to be. She was supposed to tempt, she was supposed to show off.

She could do it, just as she could suppress those feelings. She was always sure of herself. And she wasn't going to let it be any different now.

"If I had known I could get such a sight, I would have come much earlier."

They both turned toward that voice. Maybe it was a professional thing, but Viper knew the owner was not one of those targets. She wanted to ignore him, because that way they would save time, but before she could even take a step, she felt Reyna pull her closer.

Their hips made contact, but Viper didn't look in that direction.

She pasted the most believable smile she could afford on her face and allowed herself to be pulled closer just because separating into two different directions at the very beginning would have looked too suspicious.

And that's a shame.

The man was young, somewhere around his twenties. He was leaning nonchalantly against one of the ornate pillars supporting the ceiling, and the fake umbrella in his drink was swaying sleepily. His suit looked expensive, but not expensive enough for Viper to qualify him as someone worthy of their attention.

And even if, she had to smile, damn it.

"Oh, that wouldn't be necessary," Reyna said, waving her hand in a careless manner. Exactly the kind of gesture she expects from rich people. "We won't stay here long anyway, you would be lonely here most of the time."

Why did she have to riddle him? He was nobody important and Reyna didn't usually play with food.

And although Viper knew she would look like an impatient child, she felt like pulling her by the arm in another direction.

She couldn't. Because it was that arm that wrapped around her waist as if Reyna had seen through her and noticed this attempt to escape even before Viper could do anything.

"Every second in the company of beautiful ladies is a second of value." The man raised his drink higher, perhaps as a toast, perhaps as a gesture of showing respect, or perhaps because while doing so he sent Reyna a look from which most women's knees would probably buckle. "To what do I owe this visit?"

Viper didn't want to stand here and listen to this pseudo-flirtatious argument from this...individual who probably thought he could have anyone. He seemed pathetic to her and… desperate to get at least some female attention.

She had to come up with something. Something quick and direct, because god witness her, she was losing a particle of intelligence with every second in this company. She grunted.

"My fiancée and I wanted to enjoy ourselves before the wedding preparations," she announced. She had no idea why exactly that was the first thing that came to mind, but she wasn't going to dwell on it for too long, either, as this damnably annoying smile of this man faded a bit and then disappeared completely, as if it had never been there. "That's why we're going to get something to drink."

She didn't wait for an answer, or for Reyna, who perhaps intended to somehow salvage the situation. Her grip eased, so Viper grabbed her wrist and pulled her along, leaving only the cold of her own voice behind.

On the way she looked around, but it looked like she didn't see anyone relatively suspicious for the time being. For this reason, she sat down on a bar stool and rested her elbows on the counter. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Reyna taking the seat next to her, which unfortunately she couldn't point out to her.

She was once again invading her space.

The room was separate from the room where the main refreshment table had been placed, but it was still sizable. Behind Viper's back were tables, some open, others separated by a wall for more privacy, but all covered with impeccably ironed tablecloths and polished napkin racks.

She felt sickened by the excessive pedantry, even if she was a pedant herself.

The bar itself also sparkled with money. The glass liquor cabinet, the backlights on the shelves, the warm yellow light, giving the room a 1940s vibe, but with a hint of modernity.

There was no one at the bar but them for the moment, and Sabine squeezed between the end of the counter and the wall and managed to avoid Reyna's gaze anyway.

"What?" she barked when she realized that Reyna wasn't about to take her eyes off her figure.

Finally, she answered the gesture. But when she saw that Zyanya leaned her shoulder against the counter, on her hand rested her head, and, worst of all, that smile that she so longed to rip off her face appeared again, she regretted doing it.

"Fiancée?" The fact that Reyna included notes of amusement in this question drilled into Sabine's ego. "Time flies so fast, don't you think?"

"Oh fuck you," Viper bit back. "I had to say something, because you seem to have forgotten our task."

"Why are you so uptight, serpiente?" Zyanya asked the question calmly, unmoved by the challenge or the lightning bolts hurled from Sabine's eyes. "Our job is to confuse a few idiots and play around for a while. Why don't you take advantage of that?"

Viper put her hands on the tabletop, the material of her elbow-length glove sliding pleasantly over it.

"Don't call me that," she snarled. Zyanya only shrugged her shoulders.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm horrible, you're sick of me and stuff," she added. She rolled her eyes, and the words came from her mouth with a certain amount of boredom. "But we have to behave in a certain way. If you sit stiff as a post, no one will believe in our... engagement."

Viper snorted. She didn't like that Reyna was a bit right, even if from the very moment she entered here, Sabine seemed to think that the woman didn't pay much attention to such details.

She also didn't like the fact that at these words she actually relaxed her shoulders, although she didn't want them to at all.

"Should I start groping you for the crowd's enjoyment?" she said.

"Let's start with you not panicking when I touch you."

"I wasn't panicking," she said.

"You weren't calm either. I can hear your heartbeat, so don't try to deny it."

Viper rolled her eyes.

"What's the plan?" she asked. It sounded almost as if she wanted to say something like 'make yourself useful’.

"I'll get you a drink, it's a good start."

Sabine cast her gaze to the liquor cabinet. The glass reflected the light, but she still knew that the labels were among the more expensive ones. She didn't speak, so Reyna nodded. She hopped off the stool, the clatter of her stilettos echoing off the wooden floorboards, as she turned her back on Callas and set off to find the bartender.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that guests were beginning to stream into the bar area; women, men in lavish creations and probably fat wallets. They took a few tables, a few people took seats at the bar, and no one seemed to be paying attention to Sabine Callas, casually tapping her fingernails on the countertop.

She didn't wait too long, because barely a minute or two later, Reyna reappeared in her line of sight. She carried two orange drinks in her hands, and the plastic umbrellas sunk into them swayed with her every step.

It was only now that she had a chance to look at her creation. The tight, dark purple dress shone slightly, but not excessively. Her shoulders and back were covered with netting that showed through the darker color of her skin, but the whole thing left no doubt that Reyna had worked on her body.

It was... adequate.

She looked away. Because why would she care.

"This is already a step forward," Zyanya said, placing her drink in front of Sabine.

The chemist first focused on the umbrella, but a moment later realized that she had missed the point of the words.

"Meaning?"

"You were staring."

At first she wanted to answer with her standard 'it’s not true'>. She came up with a better idea.

"I admired your taste," she replied with a hint of mockery, as was always her habit.

Reyna snickered at the quote, but unlike Viper, she didn't do it sarcastically.

"So... you were staring," she said.

"You told me yourself to do it."

Sabine took a sip of her drink, and Zyanya decided not to drag it on. It was fine as it was, as long as the chemist didn't arouse suspicion, and sipping her drink with a melancholy expression on her face, her role came out quite well.

Viper looked as if she was thinking about nothing and as if she was thinking about everything at the same time.

Reyna sipped her drink, taking a cursory look around. Viper did the same, but putting her one leg on the other and embracing the foot of the glass with slender fingers, she seemed more discreet. More aware of her body and gestures, perhaps even her facial expressions.

It's not that Reyna was watching her with any intention. She was simply curious about how the slender, cold snake functioned. What its eyes were seeing.

"Do you see anything?" asked Reyna, deliberately not looking at the woman at that very second. She began turning her umbrella in her fingers, folding and unfolding the thin paper, as if this activity allowed her to concentrate.

"One seems to have moved to the main hall. He's still talking. When I go there, wait five minutes and join me."

Sabine finished her drink and climbed off the stool. The semi-transparent material of the dress on her side highlighted the shape of her thigh.

Reyna never noticed it.

Or the drinks were too strong.

"Wait." Callas turned away. "Let him get involved in the party. And I'll order us each another one."

Viper didn't know why, but she didn't protest. Maybe being here in an inebriated state was just what she needed to quell her irritation with the whole thing.

***

The man they had taken as their target must have been a damned fabulist, because not a moment later and they each had three empty glasses in front of them, their gazes already bored and their muscles starting to go numb from sitting in one position.

"At least the drinks are good," muttered Reyna.

Viper responded with some perfunctory muttering, and leaned her shoulder blades against the wall, as if suddenly her upper half of her body had become too heavy to hold on to on its own.

"I should go there," she mumbled after a few moments.

The man continued talking, but Viper watched the scene as if she were watching an episode of some cheap soap opera. Although it was unusual for her, she felt bored. Blah, blah, blah, the same thing over and over again. Frustration began to disappear from her body.

Or she was drunk.

No, she couldn't be. Reyna continued to annoy her.

She didn't know for the moment exactly what, but she certainly did. Probably with her calmness. The fact that Sabine was getting used to the way she sat next to her, breathed her air and just was. Zyanya irritated her with her existence, and Sabine couldn't stand that the alcohol was starting to make the sense of irritation slowly fade away, giving way to indifference.

Maybe she was drunk after all. A little bit.

The thought of intervening drifted from Sabine's mind when Reyna spoke up right next to her.

"Did you take that shirt?"

Her voice was hoarse, as if she hadn't said anything in a long time. In fact, it was very possible, since Callas had no idea how much time had passed. Her communicator was silent, so they just waited, and the heartening fact was that her 'fiancée' didn't sound completely sober either. Her Spanish accent was stronger, as if English was suddenly no longer as accessible as it was every day.

"Why do you need to know it so badly?" she sighed.

To her surprise, she sounded more intoxicated than she felt. And so she managed to include some frustration in the question, and she was very happy about it.

Zyanya shrugged her shoulders.

"Just because."

"I took it."

The vampire nodded.

"Good."

"I'm going to go take a look. Join me in five minutes," she instructed abruptly. She sounded almost as if alcohol had never touched her tongue. Weird skill, but whatever.

Mondragón merely escorted her with her eyes to the passageway between the room and the bar, and turned a plastic umbrella in her fingers. It was the third in succession, as the previous two lay abandoned and worn out at the foot of the glasses, like a pile of the fallen.

It was an amusing experience to look only at Sabine Callas as people were all around her.

Zyanya, however, complied with the order. She sat at the bar, on a mission, having as her partner the least communicative person who walked in this world, and she complied with the order.

Was it because she was too drunk, or because she cared about the mission? Or maybe on at least one positive response from the unattainable Sabine, who... whose strand of hair Reyna wanted to put behind her ear again, because it looked unnatural, crossing her forehead like a scratch.

Fuck, she shouldn't be drinking so much.

After all, it was barely a week ago that they beat each other up. Barely a week ago she wanted to wrap her hands around Viper's throat and force her to stop being like that. Mean. Annoying. She wanted to rip the smile off her face and force her into submission this one time.

Oh, after all, it would be so beautiful.

She wanted to fucking break her.

She wanted to...

Five minutes passed.

She left the empty glasses behind, flipped her hair more to the back. The umbrellas still lay on the countertop, defeated, broken and crumpled. She cared less about anything at that moment.

She leaned her shoulder against the cool wall in the corner of the main room. Her gaze was drawn to the champagne spilled into glasses on a silver tray. She took one.

After all, it couldn't be worse anyway.

Her gaze wandered here and there. Some people were dancing, some were talking, some were eating, some were drinking. Boring.

She started looking for the green dress, maybe that icy gaze. Or maybe those hips she looked at even when she didn't want to.

Alcohol went to her head. She talked out of sense. She thought out of sense.

She even felt like laughing at her own absurdity.

Viper was a bitch. Viper was a fucking bitch, mean, insensitive, lacking in empathy. All you could see in her eyes was a coldness that hypnotized the other person before they had time to realize it. She was beating them psychologically, dragging them to her side, forcing her word to be the last one, and Reyna knew it and hated it more and more every minute they had a chance to talk.

God, she hated Viper.

The champagne was swaying in her hand, the bubbles humming, and Zyanya could smell it.

She finally found her. She was talking to some man. Reyna didn't care who he was or what they were talking about. At least for now. She decided to simply blend in with the crowd, because after all, that was their job. She was a bland figure among bland people at a bland party, so it all should fit.

The role of an anonymous guest fit her. The chill of the wall permeated her uncovered back, she took a sip of alcohol even though she knew she shouldn't. But actually... why not?

With the same thought, she took another. The alcohol was bitter, she felt how pleasantly numb her tongue was, her head began to hum, and she knew that the state of intoxication had surrounded her like a tight cocoon before she had time to realize it.

Her purple eyes focused on Viper. She stared, just that and only that. She was trying to figure out what Callas was doing or had done that the guy was already wrapped around her finger so pathetically that Zyanya almost felt sorry for him. He seemed enchanted, his gaze greedily wandering over her uncovered shoulder, slender neck and lips covered with lipstick. He was drunk, but good for him.

He fell into the snake's trap and didn't even see about it. At least he won't feel pain when the viper's venom fills his veins.

And Viper? Viper loved her role as a predator. She shifted the weight of her body to one side, and the man's gaze momentarily traveled to her hip, wrapped in fabric so teasingly that....

She looked away. She didn't even realize when her champagne ran out. Fuck.

The bottom of the empty glass no longer interested her, the situation had changed. Because the man now no longer stood at such a distance as before, Reyna was sure that Viper was able to sense his breath, his scent and... and the touch of his hand, which glided along her pale shoulder as naturally as if he had been waiting for this moment all his life.

Sabine didn't react at first. And neither did Reyna, although her gut told her it would be safer to put the glass she was holding back on the tray.

It was certainly expensive, and she wouldn't want to crush it.

The diamond in her chest gleamed warningly, but a deeper breath was enough. She wasn't crazy.

Yet the vision of breaking the neck of this pervert lit up in her mind like a newly installed light bulb.

Sabine squirmed when the man's finger wandered under her chin. He thought he was stroking a cat, but he was playing with a snake. Reyna shouldn't react, it's nothing like that.

After all, Viper won't let herself get hurt. She knew how to fight, she would be fine. And he won't touch her, because he has no damn right to do so. He will never touch her. Viper won't allow it.

She moved away from him, said something. He didn't respond, his smile was drunken and his movements slowed. Reyna read an unambiguous message from the movement of her lips.

'Don't touch me.’

That was enough. Reyna tilted her head.

A light bulb went through her mind.

***

She swatted away his hand, once again. It was icy cold, but sweaty, Sabine saw that thin layer of sweat and felt her fingers themselves begin to form fists unwillingly.

"Don't play such a virgin," he mumbled. Viper smelled the stench of alcohol. She counted down the seconds to punch him in the sternum and take away this moron's breath, which he was already catching with difficulty. "I know very well what you want, you just won't admit it." His smile elicited nothing but disgust from Sabine. "You women often play so unavailable, and I-"

"Leave this pretty lady alone before I break your neck, can you ?"

Reyna's voice was low, thick as honey, but not at all sweet. It was filled with venom.

Viper turned her head away. Reyna hugged her waist again, pulled her closer, and Viper was either drunk or her skin was almost boiling hot. She didn't manage to push her away, she changed her mind as soon as she looked at the look of this man’s face.

She always thought vampires were cold.

Funny.

The man looked at Viper first, because maybe he expected an explanation, or wanted her to apologize for the interjection, but on Callas' face he found no support, no razor he could grasp, as long as he had the woman to himself. And it was this emptiness in her eyes, in which also smoldered a disgust he had not noticed, that forced him to finally turn his attention to the other woman.

Although her violet eyes were somewhat darkened by alcohol, Viper saw a kind of fury in them. Probably the same one that appeared during a fight, but... but the fact that the rest of her was devilishly calm made Reyna look like the last thing you see before you die.

Intriguing.

The man frowned, but continued to stand his ground. It didn't escape Viper's notice that he was doing absolutely everything to prevent his and Zyanya's gazes from meeting.

Reyna tightened her lips. And then her face seemed to soften as she smiled at Sabine as if she had always done it.

She was a good actress.

"May I, Sabine?"

Zyanya bowed slightly, and Sabine herself did not understand her intentions. Or at least not until Reyna captured her hand and placed a gentle kiss on top of her lips. So gentle that she almost didn't feel it.

So gentle that it almost didn't fit her.

So delicate that Sabine wanted to wipe it away as soon as it appeared and tell her that her gaze, sent from under her lashes, did nothing. That she didn't feel shocked for a split second by what Reyna had done because the damn drinks were too strong.

It simply surprised her.

And that also irritated Sabine.

She agreed, letting herself be dragged to the dance floor, although her feet seemed to have a life of their own. She shouldn't drink so much, damn it.

"Aren’t you feeling too bold?" she hissed, clutching her body as Zyanya, without much hesitation, embraced her waist again and intertwined her other hand with hers.

She would never have assumed that Reyna could dance, but she didn't want to think about it. In fact, she didn't want to think about anything right now except that the woman's warmth definitely violated her sense of invulnerability. The material of their clothes was far too thin for Viper's liking.

The music was slow and dull, but the people around them didn't seem to mind. Most of them were already wound up at this stage of the party anyway.

"We're a couple. We're not going to dance by the hands like kids in school," she bit off.

The fucking audacity.

Viper tried to relax. And not to think. After all, the communicator continued to be silent.

"You called me pretty?"

Reyna snorted.

"Not at all."

"Don't make an idiot out of me. I'm drunk, but not yet deaf."

"Well, that's right, you're drunk."

"So are you."

"God, I hate you."

"I had this guy almost eating from my hand, why the fuck did you ruin it?"

Reyna forced Viper to take a turn. After all, they couldn't just stand there and talk, and swaying continuously for several minutes could look unbelievable.

"You told me to do it."

"Yes, to look around, not to play fucking bodyguard."

"Do you ever say 'thank you'?" Reyna squeezed her hand tighter; it was warm, but more relaxed than usual. Her tendons, for once, did not resemble stone. "Another moment and he would have started groping you," she said.

"And why would you suddenly care? I could handle it."

"Oh, fuck you, Viper."

That sentence didn't sound very confident, looking at the fact that Reyna had already been feeling the effects of the alcohol she had consumed for some time, but it was enough to make Viper tense up again.

Fuck.

Reyna had to handle it all. And she was slowly losing it. Viper’s attitude got under her skin, painfully burning, but in a way that was not so much painful as frustrating. It was as if her skin itched all over her body, and she couldn't scratch because it was sitting too deep for her to reach there.

All she could do was stand her ground. Be that itch for Viper. She touched her waist, sometimes stroked it. She would take that space away from her just to annoy her, because that anger on Sabine's face was something Zyanya lived for.

All it took was for her to lean in, for her to turn her gently, or weave their fingers more tightly together, and Sabine's heart would speed up. Fury. It was enough that she kissed her hand for Viper to also feel that itch, frustrating and unattainable.

Now she was the one playing with the snake, and the alcohol coursing through her veins acted as a blissful anesthetic to all those sharp stares, driving into Zyanya's skin like thousands of pins.

Good thing she had a high pain tolerance.

"I have to go to the bathroom."

With a satisfied smile, Zyanya followed Sabine with her eyes until she disappeared around the corner.

Maybe snakes weren't so scary after all.

***

Sabine didn't come back for a long time.

Reyna was leaning against the wall next to the bathroom. She cooled her hot body, she wanted to feel the coldness with her whole skin, because maybe that would sober her up.

Sabine's skin was soft.

Stop.

She wanted to slap herself in the face.

If only she could tame her. To show so clearly that he has no power over her. Break and crumble her shell of arrogance, to then enjoy victory over someone who couldn't lose.

She would kill for a view like this.

She sighed. She was getting bored.

She entered the bathroom, as opulent as the other rooms. She didn't find anyone at the sinks, so she went in further.

“Viper?”

Her voice echoed, and then she heard the sound of something falling to the ground. She didn't know what it was, the cabins were built to the floor, but she recognized the familiar:

“Shit.”

Reyna frowned as she walked to the door where she thought the voice was coming from.

"Open the door."

"In a minute."

She didn't like that tone. He was suspiciously tense, which usually meant something bad, because Viper always spoke calmly. Taking it easy in her unique, mean way.

“Open it now, or I'll open it myself.”

She knew Viper had been there far too long to do what one usually did in the bathroom. She yanked the doorknob significantly.

She heard a thud. She suspected that a garbage can had fallen over.

With one movement, she ripped the handle off, and the not very strong hinges creaked, opening the cabin without a fight.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Viper moved the syringe away from the skin of her thigh. Reyna saw a beading drop of blood in the place where the needle had been inserted a second ago, her eyes widened in horror and shock, which she certainly conveyed clearly in her look, standing in the doorway of the cabin and looking first at Sabine sitting on the closed toilet, then on the syringe she threw into the trash can.

"Nothing. I needed it."

"Excuse me?" Viper stood up, ready to pass Mondragón, but she blocked her exit by placing her hands on the side walls. “It looked like your damn snake bite.”

“Because that was my snake bite,” Sabine said. Then she shrugged. “But it’s updated.”

Zyanya exhaled in one ragged breath.

“Are you out of your mind?” she asked. Her shock was no longer a shock and, probably due to the alcohol, she felt her anger starting to build up again. “Do you want to kill yourself or what? Where the hell did you even get that?”

“Where we had weapons. Now stop yelling."

Thigh strap. Sure.

“No, if you want to kill yourself.” Zyanya repeated furiously.

She wasn't entirely sure if she sounded angry due to the alcohol and the damn fog she still had in her head, but she definitely didn't sound calm. And that was what she cared about.

“I don't want to kill myself, now shut up,” Viper snapped. “If anyone comes in here…”

As if on cue, the door howled mournfully. Not knowing what to do, Sabine's first instinct was to grab the fabric of Zyanya's dress and pull her into the cabin where she was sitting earlier. The Mexican woman's back hit one of the walls, but no one said anything.

She closed the door. She blocked them. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Reyna open her mouth to say something, so her hand immediately landed on the woman's mouth and she silently mouthed 'shut up'.

And that was a good thing, because as it turned out, the conversation of several women revolved around nothing else than radianite. Reyna hit recording on her communicator, but her eyes never left Viper.

“Delivery should be on Saturday.” They heard it. “I don't know who he wants to sell this to, but as long as he buys me that damn Ferrari, I don't care.” A burst of giggles.

Reyna only now noticed that the cabin wasn't very... spacious. She could feel Viper’s breath on the part of her face that wasn't covered by her hand. She was warm, with the acrid smell of alcohol on her lips, heart still racing after the argument that had started. Her fist was still gripping the neckline of Reyna’s dress so tightly that her pale knuckles turned even whiter.

Her jaw was set, listening.

“He apparently has a new dealer, but he won't tell me anything,” the voice didn't sound disappointed.

Sabine heard first the sound of a faucet and then the sound of a paper towel being torn off.

Zyanya didn't like the fact that she couldn't move. Her back pressed flat against the wall, Viper locked her legs by placing her knee between them, and to top it all off, she silenced her in the most humiliating way.

Reyna stared at her, probably focusing on that more than the information they had just obtained. Her focus was… on Viper.

On her figure, clinging to her own in such an unbearable way that she wanted to even lick Sabine's palm just to have her pull away in disgust. Childish way, but at least it would work. Maybe she would stop looking at her like that too. Focused, with a razor-sharp glare that always appeared when they argued, though that sharpness seemed to blur more and more with each passing second.

She wanted to do it. Argue like the last piece of shit to win.

To take away her terribly affecting gaze, her unbearably warm body, her disgustingly defined lips and that damn hand from her sternum and move the hell away.

She thought about champagne, which she probably shouldn't have drank.

At least she could see that Viper was feeling the effects of the alcohol too. The green irises seemed to be misting, although Reyna thought they sparkled with something unknown in the dull bathroom light.

The women left and the front door slammed. Reyna brushed Callas' hand from her face. She turned off the recording.

“What the hell was that?” she growled.

“What do you think it was? If you can't shut up in time, then you obviously need help," Viper shot back.

“You're fucking annoying, do you know that?”

"And who says that?" she hissed. Her fist gripped Zyanya's clothes even tighter, forcing Reyna to bend over her a bit. “I'm the one who has to deal with you glued to me all evening. I have to pretend that the way you're looking at me doesn't piss me off and that you're not showing off that damn body of yours like a fucking peacock."

“Are you saying I have something to show off?” Zyanya raised an eyebrow.

Sabine's fury was worth it.

“Do you hear yourself?”

“You didn't deny it.”

“What the fuck does that have to do with all of that?”

Zyanya didn't answer as the bathroom door opened again. Someone entered one of the cabins and someone turned on the tap. Viper's gaze said clearly: 'Speak a word and I'll break your neck right here and now.'

And Reyna would like to do it in the shittiest, pathetic way possible. To speak only to make her angry, because that was all she could do at that moment. To rage like a child whose toy has been taken away.

Reyna could watch, smiling like a winner. Watching Sabine Callas fall off the podium for once. Shake her arms, grab her and don't let go, like a damned predatory snake hugging its prey.

She wanted to fuck her up. She wanted to fuck her up so badly it was almost hurting her physically, she wanted to...

Oh.

Oh.

Fuck it.

In one fluid motion, she grabbed Sabine's face in both hands and smashed their lips together. Sabine tensed in a second, and her mouth felt like a hard stone for the first second. Hard, cold stone.

But the stone was not cold all the time, and the hard surface crumbled.

Or at least that's what Reyna thought. There was always fierceness in Viper, so the kiss was far away from gentle and would never become so. Reyna could get used to it because she had just won her trophy, she had just broken her, just like Viper didn't let anyone do so.

The chemist pushed Zyanya against the wall and bit her lip, tearing a snarl of surprise from her throat.

And she didn't care if anyone heard it. Let them hear that damn snake losing the fight.

Is this how she wanted to play? All right.

She did the same, but her fang pressed harder against the delicate skin. A drop of blood stained Viper's mouth, Zyanya smelled it, intense, almost chokingly addictive. She felt dizzy.

Or maybe it was just the alcohol.

“Did you just fucking bite me?” Sabine hissed, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, looking at the red marks almost in disbelief.

Her breathing was rapid, her heart was pounding in Reyna's ears like after a race. Good. Let her struggle and know that not everything is as simple as she thinks.

“You did the same thing,” Zyanya growled. Viper always wanted to get her own way, of course she did. “Besides, you deserved it.”

"Bitch."

“Oh, shut up already.”

She drank the blood from Viper's lip with a strange sense of relief, her hands gripping her waist so tightly that she might have left bruises, but deep down that was what she wanted. For Sabine to remember the day she fell. That damned, irritating Sabine Callas, whose teeth she could feel on her own lips, whose lips were hot and intoxicating even to her.

“Fuck, Sabine,” she growled. She leaned down and with one movement forced her to turn her head. Reyna's lips leaned down to her neck as soon as it was within reach. Mondragón's fangs slid across her skin. “You're insufferable.”

Sabine knew it.

But the moment she was ready to snap back at Zyanya, almost spit out that she hated her, that she hated her so much that nothing else could control her at that moment, the communicators in their ears crackled.

“The party's over, we've got everything.”

Sabine had just finished this party when she suddenly pushed Reyna away from her, leaving her in the bathroom with only the clicking of her high heels.

Chapter 12: TWELVE

Viper was just waiting to open the door of the hotel room.

She knew perfectly well who she would find behind them, and she couldn't wait until her fury could finally flood Reyna like boiling lava. She was waiting for it. For a rash of emotions. To lash out, to yell, to insult Reyna with the worst names before she could open her mouth, because that's what she deserved.

Because Reyna allowed herself too much. Reyna shouldn't treat Sabine like one of her stupid, unsuspecting victims, who fell into the trap of her eyes and flirty tone whenever Zyanya appeared in sight. Oh no, Zyanya should respect her opponent, she should be aware that she is playing with fire in human form and Viper was ready to show her that.

That she is an unprofessional, puffed up and overconfident bitch, the sight of which provokes reactions in Sabine that no one else does. That indescribable anger, rage even, that frustration lurking somewhere under the skin, but too deep for it to be scratched out.

"We need to ta-..."

Zyanya didn't have time to finish, because Sabine's fists clenched on the front of her clothes, pulled her inside and pinned her against the wall with all the strength she could muster. The force with which Reyna's back collided with the wall surprised even Sabine herself.

Sabine, whose eyes were shining with pure fury.

"What the hell were you thinking?"

Reyna's eyes jumped all over Viper's face, she could see her straining every word, and the muscles clenching her jaw twitched under her skin like strings Reyna was unconsciously pulling.

"Be careful, or I'll get déjà vu." She felt Callas clench her fingers tighter and knew Viper was close to simply entwining her fingers around her throat. The fact that she didn't do it so far was almost flattering. "Can you stop throwing your fists at me for no reason?"

The door slammed behind them, the mechanical lock clicking almost soberingly.

"Fuck you Reyna, you're the one who kissed me," Viper bit back. "Do you even realize what you did?"

Reyna raised her eyebrows in a gesture of mockery.

"Are you really that eager to blame it all on me? Wow, that's completely not your style."

She deliberately put emphasis on that one word. Deliberately, so that Sabine's fury wouldn't fade. She enjoyed watching it. Those fires, dancing in her eyes, when her whole body was bubbling with anger so much that the air around them almost trembled. She liked it because it gave her a sick sense of victory over Sabine Callas.

"I didn't ask you to kiss me," growled Callas.

"And I didn't tell you to answer that kiss," she replied calmly, albeit with a hint of provocation. Because she was waiting for the Viper to lose and, at least this once, admit her mistake, yield for at least those few seconds and say that she was the one who did something wrong. Viper, not someone else. "And yet you did it. Why?"

Sabine squinted, as if she couldn't believe what she had just heard. Or... as if she had run out of arguments. She had no ready answer, no prepared escape route.

Reyna took this as a green light. Now she was over her, even if pressed against the wall with Callas' fists on her still unchanged dress, with Callas who could grab her by the throat if she wanted to.

Interesting. Could she have won?

"Cat got your tongue?" she asked. Mockingly, but sharply enough to include a kind of demand in that question. Time for a bit of bitter truth. "You're poisoning yourself with your own toxins, and you claim you need it when your body gives up. You hate Sage, even though no one knows the true version of events, and you would rather die than come forward for help, because your pride reaches further than rationality. You respond to the kiss of a person you hate only to pretend that nothing is happening, because it's more fucking convenient for you and-..."

Sabine had had enough. Too many questions, too many demands for answers. Viper didn't like to answer, Viper liked to leave only questions behind.

And another one joined the previous ones when the hand so tightly clenched on her clothes moved to the wall next to Reyna's head just so Viper could lean in and... kiss her. Again.

She didn't even say her favourite 'shut up' because maybe somewhere in the back of her mind there was a scenario that Reyna would start talking again, asking again and demanding answers in that annoying, prying way.

It was simpler that way.

Or at least it would be if Zyanya gave in. For once, she would have stopped stepping with her boots into her life and avoiding the traps that Viper had so carefully laid out for her. If she would just now wordlessly respond to that kiss, instead of doing it so reluctantly.

Viper didn't like to wait. She wanted now, quickly, to forget and to lock lips with her for a while, so that she would have an excuse to avoid her in the corridors of HQ like a ghost.

So her kisses took on an intensity, a fierceness with which she wanted to silence her. Her teeth, her tongue, all screamed 'shut up' in a wordless act to which... Zyanya finally began to respond. Restrainedly, but there was a moment when something clicked and Reyna began to slowly soften against her will.

"That's not an answer, Sabine," she rasped out.

Reyna wanted to stop Viper’s hands, which were roaming around her shoulders for no particular purpose, those slender fingers digging into her skin, as if Viper wanted to leave her there, force her into immobility, leave her in that comfortable steadiness.

But she didn't. Because, after all, that was how she could break Sabine and get into that insides, secured by her with a thick chain.

"No, that's a question," Sabine replied, a kind of desperation echoing in her voice. She wished she had been quiet, said nothing and simply let what was about to happen to actually happen. "And for fucking once, just say yes."

Reyna growled into her mouth. This was a bad idea. It was a terrible idea.

"You're killing yourself."

Viper seemed not to hear. She pressed their lips hard, as if she wanted to drink those unnecessary words from her mouth, as if she was hungry for the silence she was going to get with this. Her lips were barely a breath away from her own, and the weight of those words, along with the warm, still slightly alcoholic breath, settled on her lips like a fog.

"This is my business."

Viper's hands slid down her arms, searching for the clasp from her dress, and she growled in annoyance when she couldn't find it. Zyanya didn't stop her, but she didn't help her either. She didn't like her passivity, her certainty in that she was convinced Reyna couldn't stand up to her, or... Or she didn’t want to.

Reyna pushed off the wall, forcing Viper to take a few shaky steps backward at her dictation. She hissed, feeling Callas' teeth relentlessly snagging on her lips, as if she saw through her and knew she was about to speak up.

"Do you walk around pissed off all the time because you really hate us, or because it's easier that way?" she hissed, patiently enduring Viper's fingers greedily pulling at the fabric of her clothes. "You don't have to say anything, show anything. No one knows anything about you..."

She cursed under her breath as Sabine significantly drove her nails into her hip. She showed that she would not talk. That this was not the time to talk.

"Shut up. Shut up and touch me."

There it was.

A childishly simple ploy that was so banal that it almost argued with Dr. Callas' intelligence. However, instead of laughing, Reyna felt her rage rising.

For Sabine who had always resorted to silence whenever she had the chance. Even now, by placing Reyna's hands on her hips herself, pressing them there as if she wanted to leave them there permanently, she was resorting to something that didn't require words, but focused on body, flesh and almost embarrassing primal need.

Reyna bit the inside of her cheek almost to the point of blood, feeling the soft flesh beneath her clothes, enduring Viper’s kisses on her neck that didn't falter for a moment, the fingers playing with the clasp of her dress, while only anger continued to bubble up in her head.

And the desire to win. Victory over the marble.

"Viper-..." She began.

However, she broke off just as quickly as the zipper on her back was undone and the chill of the hotel room hit her bare skin.

Sabine didn't measure the distance, hit the edge of the bed with her calves and sat down on the mattress by the force of gravity. She propped her hands behind her, blinked, and a strand of her hair escaped from behind her ear.

Perhaps she sobered up for a moment, looking at Reyna, who had managed to get out of the dress wrapping around her ankles and stood over her, as if someone had suddenly stopped time. Maybe even both of them thought for a moment about what was happening as the alcohol coursed through their veins and they acted like ravenous wolves.

It was supposed to give them oblivion, a break from reality, intricate as a damn maze. And the wolves were hungry for a little peace and quiet.

They looked at each other in silence, of course.

The bedding was cold. The room was small. The mattress was soft.

So many details, and all Reyna saw was that minimal tilt of the head, that one spark in Sabine's eyes, sitting on that damn bed in that damn room.

The provocation. She wanted to see if she would chicken out. There was a kind of ferocity smoldering in her green eyes that Zyanya longed to take in and crush into dust. To show that she could fight too.

The radianite crystal glowed, she saw Sabine's gaze wandering in that direction, but she embraced her jaw with one hand, forcing her to rise up her head. Callas didn't like this act of prowess, she squirmed a bit and this gave Reyna even more pleasure.

"Take it off," she instructed, her voice wavering between a growl and a hiss as she pulled on a piece of green fabric.

Viper smiled at the corner of her mouth, thinking she had won.

Zyanya found it amusing.

She watched as Sabine stood up, dropped her glove somewhere on the floor, and then reached to fasten the dress itself. She struggled with this for a moment, but spurned Reyna's hand.

She wanted to do it herself.

She wanted to do everything herself and on her own terms.

However, when she did, she didn't look so confident, although Reyna could see that she tried to mask it with that razor-sharp look of hers, which sort of... ran off to the side every now and then. Because Sabine didn't want to look her in the eye.

She pulled herself toward Zyanya, clamping her hand on her tattooed arm, focusing on the hard muscle beneath the layer of warm skin, concentrating on kissing deeply, hard and dizzying, pulling from her vampire lips a few shameless moans that Viper could collect like medals.

With a growl of surprise, she let Zyanya climb onto the bed, hover over her with her elbows on either side of her head and leave several almost painful kisses on her collarbones.

At least then she didn't say anything. So that meant it was good. Appropriate.

She wanted to show her impatience. After all, she didn't care about tenderness or all that foreplay, which only postponed the inevitable. Foreplay was for lovers, which Viper and Reyna were not and never intended to be, because it would be too complicated.

She moved her hips, pressing their bodies more closely together, still feeling the material of her underwear and Reyna's breath on her cheek. She only looked at her when the demand forced its way through her lips.

"Fucking hurry up, I'm not made of glass."

Reyna pressed her lips to Sabine's mouth, but supported herself with one hand more to rest the other on the chemist's stomach. She could hear her breath being sucked in, her heart raging in her chest, pounding against her ribs in the sick race that was just happening before her eyes.

"I still hate you," Reyna said, almost forcing the words into Viper’s mouth. "And that won't change anything."

Sabine laughed briefly, mockingly and as dryly as ever.

"It would never change anything. You're a pain in the ass, Reyna," she bit back.

She tensed her body to keep from twitching when Zyanya's nail moved down her abdomen, leaving an invisible mark. Wrapping her thigh around her hip, she urged.

"You too, serpiente."

Viper didn't want to react so visibly, as the reactions were indicative of sensitivity. But she involuntarily arched her neck back anyway when Reyna's fingers found themselves where they should be. No unnecessary touches, no unnecessary tenderness. Plain, mindless sex.

She pressed her lips together like a stubborn child as the touch triggered reactions she had almost forgotten existed. She couldn't make a sound, she didn't want to. So she just clenched her hands on the battered bedclothes, deliberately avoiding with her eyes the place where Reyna's hand disappeared under the material of her underwear.

If she dared to do so and direct the gaze of her jade eyes to Zyanya herself, she would see a mixture of several emotions on her face. Her eyebrows were drawn together in concentration, her mouth was half-open, and her breaths were settling on Sabine’s neck. The muscles of her arms were working under the skin, and although the sight was pleasing to the eye, Viper did not touch her.

Because this wasn't about touch. This was about relief.

"Inside," she demanded.

She poked her heel into Zyanya's buttock, as if in confirmation.

"So you don't use 'please' either?"

Sabine didn't answer, because although Reyna asked the question, she didn't expect an answer at all.

Viper clenched her fingers more tightly on the sheet, gathering the material into a fist, but remained stubbornly silent. Occasionally she let out a little louder breath, but every moan and sign of her feeling good was lost in her throat before it could pass her lips.

She knew Reyna was watching the whole time, because she wanted to see her break. Reyna waited for her to fall like that damn wolf for a piece of meat. Her movements were swift, Sabine could feel the heat emanating from the vampire's body and, not knowing why, she wanted to shrug it off, gather it from her skin and throw it out the window, because she hated how it was making her feel dizzy.

She hated Reyna. And it was out of this hatred that her orgasm came quietly, and she turned her head to the side just in time so that no violet eyes could see it.

The muscle in her thigh gently trembled, she immediately took her leg from Reyna's hips and wanted to turn on her side first. Bury herself in that cold quilt, escape the heat and pretend nothing happened. Maybe even ask Reyna out of the room so she wouldn't have to look at her when she was so... exposed.

But she didn't. She reached her hand lower, her fingernail hooked significantly into the material of Reyna's underwear just above her hip, and her gaze specifically focused there and not on Zyanya's face itself. Because she was probably afraid to look there and see what she was thinking.

This sex was not supposed to be about thinking.

Reyna gasped quietly when the touch of Viper's cold fingers reached where she intended. Her elbows bent slightly at the sudden sensation and she looked between her thighs unwillingly.

Sabine's scarred wrist was where Zyanya never thought it would be.

And Zyanya hated the way her thighs trembled.

She also hated how her legs involuntarily widened and her hand tightened on Sabine's hip for balance.

It felt... good.

And probably that's why she couldn't help but feel angry.

"Fuck," she gasped. Pleasure hit her head like an electric shock that vibrated her every muscle. "Harder."

She clenched her eyelids and raised her head, looking up at the hotel window for a moment, so Sabine, that Sabine who irritated her in a way no one else did, couldn’t triumph.

And so she tightened her fingers on that pale hip, and so she was afraid that Viper would see the pleasure on her face and take advantage of it, because after all, that's what she was best at.

In using people's weaknesses and the smallest details against them.

Maybe she had already communicated something. With that one moan, behind the rapid breathing, or the almost blinding glow of her vampire heart. Trembling muscles, half-open mouth from which she blew invisible clouds of warm breath.

Sabine was so close and yet so far away. Her body was right next to her own, and yet she was so damn inaccessible.

Goddamn snake.

She stifled a moan in her own throat. That one final moan that Sabine would remember as her next achievement, along with a gasp of surprise when she reached right there in the hotel room, bent over Viper while the alcohol was still coursing through her veins.

Viper took her hand from under her underwear almost immediately, carelessly wiped it on her own thigh, and she was probably the one who wanted to say something first, but it was Zyanya who retreated before her. She sat back on her heels, adjusted her breathing, machinically combed her hair and wiped her face with the back of her hand before sliding off the bed, her gaze searching for her clothes on the floor.

The sudden chill that enveloped her body was unpleasant. Everything suddenly fossilized, emotions subsided and all that remained was an icy wall between her and Viper, which never really disappeared, no matter how realistic the feeling of it being gone was for those few moments.

Zyanya felt herself turning stone. She didn’t know whether she liked it or not.

"I'll go now," she said, not looking at Viper for a second.

That would probably complicate things even more. But if she did, she would see Sabine sitting on the edge of the bed, somehow trying to cover herself with a white, crumpled sheet that was barely a shade different in color from her skin.

Skin that had just been so close that now the fact that it was so distant in the span of a few seconds seemed surreal to Zyanya.

However, she looked at her.

She shouldn't have.

Viper just nodded her head. Stiffly and mechanically, as her mask returned again with redoubled force.

"I'll see you in the morning."

Heard Reyna as she put the damn uncomfortable stilettos back on. And just as Sabine liked – she left her alone.

Chapter 13: THIRTEEN

The headache was unbearable.

Viper could only stare dully at the window and limp more in the pilot's seat. She didn't feel like hearing the noise of conversations or questions, she didn't even fill out the damn report, because since she woke up, all she cared about was being in a separate space alone with herself.

She didn't meet with the rest of the agents. She didn't even eat breakfast. She was here early enough to watch the sunrise and just... wait.

No one asked about her, because she had gotten everyone used to her disappearances and she liked it very much. No one cared about her, no one worried about her, so with that she bought herself peace and quiet, which lasted and lasted since the morning, when the cold sun was still pressing through the windows of the vulture.

She was ready to fly away even now.

She was just sipping the coffee she had made before anyone woke up. It was already cold, which is probably why there was still a lot of it left.

"I didn’t see you at breakfast."

Viper heard Killjoy's voice, so she didn't tense up as much, but she didn't put down her coffee, as if to show that she was busy with something else and that the conversation would be rather short.

"I'll eat at headquarters," she replied, trying to ignore the fact that the German woman leaned her loins against the co-pilot's seat, stepping into that safe space she craved. "The mission went alright?"

Killjoy shrugged her shoulders. She took the bait and changed the subject, but Viper wasn't sure she hadn't done it for the sake of sanity. It didn’t really matter to her.

"There were some more serious safeguards, but we broke through."

Viper nodded.

"That's good, I'm glad."

Klara wanted to say something, and Sabine saw it. That focus showed she was thinking about how to choose her words appropriately, how to approach her.

At least Killjoy was finding any authority in her. That's probably why Sabine felt that substitute of relief.

"And how did your mission go?"

Klara knew it was a sensitive subject. She probably regretted the question almost as soon as it was asked, but Viper... just took a sip of coffee.

"Fine. Nothing special."

Killjoy sighed. The nervous movement of her fingers groping against the leather armrests did not escape Sabine's eyes, but she didn't urge her. She pulled her knees more toward her, putting her lips in coffee once she decided to look at the younger woman.

"I heard what Brimstone did," the German woman finally said. "I want you to know that I think it wasn't right of him too."

Viper raised one eyebrow. She wasn't used to anyone taking her side, and surprise took form in her momentary suspension before she managed to respond with something.

"He did what he thought was right," Viper acknowledged.

Her tone indicated annoyance, even if the whole thing screamed outright morbid calm.

"Maybe," chuckled Killjoy. "But it still wasn't fair to you."

"The mission was successful, that's what we cared about." Viper trailed off for a moment, as if collecting her words as she stared at the sunset beyond the horizon. "I had to push trough."

"Don't you think he should apologize to you?"

Viper smiled bitterly.

"What I think apparently is not important." She was silent for a moment, then added. "Not anymore."

Killjoy didn't know what to answer, but that was fine by Viper. She didn't require anything from her in response, because it was hard to respond to something like that anyway.

To the fact that Viper felt more and more left out with each passing day, and that her relevance in the team ceased to exist.

It hurt. But Sabine felt only a dull pressure where her heart was beating. A pressure of anger, maybe disappointment and frustration. She herself didn't know if it was more a matter of habit or the fact that she was less and less willing to fight for the respect due her.

"Thank you for coming," she said when she sensed that Killjoy didn't know what to do with herself and was just playing with her fingers, waiting for some sign. "It was really nice of you."

Klara nodded.

"No problem."

Now it was Sabine who mused for a moment. The coffee in her cup swayed sleepily, she curled her feet more under her. She clicked her tongue, then stuck her gaze into the glass, as if she wanted to digest her own words even before they were spoken.

"Are you scared of me?"

Killjoy blinked. She corrected her glasses and smiled uncertainly.

"Why should I be?" She answered with a question to a question.

Viper shrugged her shoulders.

"Just asking." She put down her coffee. It wasn't a smart move. It wasn't a move in her style. She shouldn't have asked about it, she made a mistake. "Nevermind, forget about it."

Because why should she care, right?

Why should she care if the only person for whom she was a role model also saw her as a monster?

***

The first thing she saw was Sage's face. Sage's face, with her lips clenched, her arms entwined on her chest and her back straightened almost to excess, as if she had a wooden stick instead of a spine.

Only later did her gaze jump to Brimstone, who didn't look much better either, and not knowing when Viper felt like a caged animal that had been placed in the middle of the room for the crowd's enjoyment.

"Killjoy fixed Neon's stabilizer."

Viper's gaze returned to Sage, though she didn't want it at all. She didn't want to look at her or talk to her, and she intended to show that as best she could, so she shrugged her shoulders.

"That's probably a good thing," she replied carelessly.

Although it was a statement, Sabine specifically included notes of a question. I guess she was counting on Brimstone to finish the thought for her and she could leave the damned office, which now seemed too small for the presence of three people.

"It was one of the better technologies produced. We still don't know how it could have exploded just like that."

Brimstone rested his hands on the desktop. Sabine felt he wanted to say something, but perhaps Sage's presence did not help him at all. He couldn't be as honest with Viper as he was without Sage. She still didn't see why the Chinese woman was here.

"You say that as if I should know. Do I look like an engineer to you?"

"You look like someone who was around Neon when it happened," Brimstone finally said. "I know lately you've been walking around tensed up, but-"

"Neon lost control because of anger," the healer spoke up, breaking her own silence.

Viper's gaze drifted to Sage, and when her eyes stopped burning with hatred, she felt like laughing in her face, but all she did was... feel betrayed.

"Is this some kind of damn prosecutors' club?" Sabine half laughed, half snorted. She cast her gaze to Liam and kept it on his figure, even when he himself turned his head away. "And you? Suddenly changing sides?"

"You misunderstood us."

"Ah, so now you exist as 'us'?" she sneered. "Just tell me that you have found a new friend with whom you are gossiping about me."

"I'm not gossiping about anything, I just-"

"You just called me on the carpet like some shithead, and to keep you from feeling stupid, you took a fucking chaperone," she interrupted furiously. "You seem to have forgotten who the hell you built this place from scratch with."

"Don't insult me," Sage said.

Viper felt her gut turn over at the sound of that voice.

"Shut up." She didn't care what Sage thought at that moment. This wasn't about her. She wasn't going to focus on her for a second. She turned back to Brimstone. "It's Neon who is the radiant, not me. I won't treat her differently from the rest just because she can't control her powers."

"Or is it you who can't control yourself?"

The question was spoken and fell to the floor with a deafening crash that almost rang in Viper's ears.

She raised her eyebrows and turned stiffly to Sage. Ling kept her lips clamped into a narrow line, her eyebrows were drawn together, and anger was painted on her face.

And it was a very good thing.

Viper was alive to the fury of the calm Sage, whose nerves were already taut by a few harsh words. She was so pathetically weak that Sabine sometimes even found it amusing.

The impermanence of someone who, ironically, was supposed to be a fortress.

"What the hell are you suggesting?"

"You threaten agents with death, and then shoot one because they said something inconvenient," Ling replied firmly. "Aren't these symptoms of madness, Viper?"

Viper's eyes widened, but not because Sage's words struck or hurt her.

No, it didn't hurt.

Sage couldn't hurt her, Sabine hadn't allowed her to do so for... a long time. Since then, since her every word or act went trough Viper as if it had never been there.

Her eyes widened when she saw that Brimstone was leaning over the desk and remaining silent. Only his clenched hands on its edge indicated that he too had heard the words.

But he remained silent. And that already hurt. The person she trusted, the person with whom she had created this place and devoted her entire life to it, was sticking her eyes into that damn desk, not even looking at her.

Viper herself had wondered about her mind more often lately, but that didn't explain anything. Okay, when she got drunk, she said some words she might not have said sober, but no one, especially Sage, had the right to throw something like that right in her face.

"You're not gonna say anything?" she croaked out. She sounded much more pathetic than she intended. "I've just been accused of sabotage and being a insane, and you won't say anything?"

The man sighed.

"Sage is kind of right," he said slowly. "You haven't been... yourself lately."

"Me?" she hissed. "She's the one who has been complaining to you so as to make your brain like water, when you yourself would have done exactly the same thing in my place."

"I wouldn't have shot my own man," he said.

"Fade blackmailed us all. She crossed a line that I don't tolerate, and I don't think you're going to tell me that I don't have the right to defend my privacy."

"Brimstone wants to say that-"

"I told you to shut up, Sage." Viper felt her hands clenched into fists, but she relaxed immediately after those words. The corner of her mouth twitched suddenly and uneasily. "Or you know what, speak up. Tell me what you did then, go ahead. I'd love to hear what Brimstone wants to say about that."

Sage's rage was pure in her eyes, but she didn't say anything. Victory.

Liam looked first at Sage, then at Viper. His gaze, however, remained on Viper a little longer.

"Sabine, you have to leave," he said.

"I'm not going anywhere."

"You're bleeding." She reflexively wiped her nose. The top of her hand was red, and the blood glistened slightly in the light of the office. "I'm suspending your participation in all missions until further notice."

Sabine felt like spitting blood at his feet. But that would betray her emotions. And yet she didn't want that.

"I don't give a shit."

Her voice was hoarse, stifled and raspy, though she herself didn't know if it was the fault of the hemorrhage or the rage flooding her veins.

Her words were a lie, but she left anyway.

***

Reyna knew Viper was avoiding her.

She hadn't come to breakfast at the hotel, the coffee maker stood untouched, and none of her favorite mugs that she always brought with her stood by the sink, ready to be packed away. She couldn't even remember if Viper had bestowed even a fragment of a glance on her before she left her room at night.

Not to mention that Sabine's figure seemed to have be in the walls of the headquarters since they returned. Reyna had no idea what Viper was doing, where she was doing it or when. She looked for her in the lab, in her bedroom and in the kitchen, but it was like chasing each other in a maze, because Viper seemed to know perfectly well where to be so that at that place and time Zyanya wasn't there either.

She shouldn't have been surprised by this fact, and yet there was a sense of strange discomfort inside her caused by the fact that... she couldn't understand her. Or at least not to the extent that would allow her to give a minimal explanation of what had happened the night before.

Sabine hated her. She hated her so much that she hated to talk to her, asked her out of the room and showed how she didn't tolerate her space being violated.

And then she would speak her thoughts about herself out loud, expecting Reyna to turn on her heel and leave, buying Viper another handful of time by this. She would fall asleep with her head on her shoulder in the trashed lab.

And then she would kiss her, claiming she didn't know why. Later, she would return to hatred.

And then back to physicality again.

Sabine Callas was full of contradictions.

And she noticed another one of them when, finally, she saw her silhouette in the hallway, and those furious footsteps could not have belonged to anyone but Viper.

She didn't have time to get a good look at her, much less read anything from her face, because Viper passed her so quickly that for a moment Reyna thought maybe it was just her imagination.

But no, footsteps sounded further down the hallway.

Zyanya looked at the papers she was holding in her hand and at the door to Brimstone's office a few meters in front of her, then back to where Viper was walking. She was visibly furious and apparently also after visiting the office.

She pressed her lips together. She remembered the conversation with Neon in the kitchen.

'You keep going to her.'

Was that true? Was Reyna actually spending so much time in Viper's company that people were starting to notice something that was actually... Hell knows what it was?

They had something between them that Reyna couldn't call anything specific. It was a nameless thread of complicated, meaningless feelings based on... anger, irritation and hatred.

And yet they slept together.

So that's why Reyna walked into Brimstone's office with a file of papers in her hand.

She didn't expect to see Sage here. And she was not happy about that fact at all.

"Report," she announced, placing papers on the desktop, right in front of Liam's hands.

He didn't even speak, just nodded. He was thinking about something, and honestly? Reyna didn't want to know what. She felt strangely... watched.

Sage's gaze almost hurt her and she felt like asking her about it.

God, she was starting to think like Viper.

"Thanks," murmured Brimstone, but he didn't even look at the papers lying in front of him.

Reyna turned around and saw Sage with her eyebrows drawn together, arms clasped over her chest. Brimstone, on the other hand, looked like he was fighting the worst case of migraine on the planet.

"Someone died or what?"

She asked half-jokingly, half-seriously. She hoped it would lighten the atmosphere, but it didn't seem to have worked. The air still seemed strangely heavy.

"What happened in the server room?"

Brimstone finally sat down. Or rather, he sank heavily into his chair, and not knowing why, Zyanya felt as if she had regressed to her school days.

She shrugged her shoulders.

"I did everything according to plan, if you ask me," she said.

"You know that Neon was talking to Viper at the time, right?"

"What does that have to do with anything?"

"What was the conversation about?"

She felt Sage's gaze on her more clearly than ever and knew that the Chinese woman was waiting for the moment when Reyna would open her mouth on the subject. She knew that Sage felt a sense of satisfaction that Brimstone was in the room and that this put Reyna under the watch.

But she won't let herself be framed for something she didn't do.

"How should I know? I was on the lookout with Jett, as you ordered," she replied with a hint of irritation. She played offended on purpose so as not to show that she knew what the two were trying to get out of her. "Can someone explain to me what's going on here, or are you going to continue this pointless interrogation until night?"

She wanted them to admit their accusations themselves.

"You were alone with her in the vulture when she was injured. Did she tell you anything?"

Zyanya was pleased by Sage being quiet.

"At first you reproach me for jumping at each other's throats, and now you assume she confesses to me?" She shifted her body weight to one side and tilted her head. "Decide which version of events you accept."

They jump at each other's throats and kiss. And then they end up in bed. That's exactly what happened. The damn maze was so pathetic that Zyanya could no longer see whether the whole thing frightened or amused her more.

"I want to accept the real one," Brimstone said firmly. Surprisingly, he didn't sound like he was angry, more like... determined. "So if you know something, this is the moment to share it."

She didn't recognize herself, and that was the worst of it all. That she had allowed herself this moment of strange, unlikeable weakness, which now could weigh on her continued being in the Protocol.

"I have nothing to share," she countered.

She kissed Viper after pushing her away earlier. The reason she kissed her was because... well, what actually? Because she was angry? Because she was drunk?

Because she just wanted to shut her mouth and show her that she could also play dirty?

"Are you sure about this?"

"I have nothing to share," she repeated emphatically, almost growling. Because she had nothing to share. And even if she had, she wasn't going to give it away. "And if you don't want us to stop trusting you, then don't treat us like shitheads who don't realize the seriousness of their own job."

She left him with those words and with Sage.

But she just felt like that shithead as she stood in the middle of the hallway and her gaze involuntarily shifted to the corner that led to Viper's room.

As she passed her she was furious and didn't want to look at her. Her eyes were flabbergasted, she trudged ahead with a quick step, and although Reyna couldn't see her face, she was sure she was twisted by anger caused by... Brimstone.

Or Sage.

Or both of them.

They wanted information from her, Viper didn't want to give it, so she was furious.

No.

Viper always deflected questions with her sarcasm and mind games that allowed her to have the last word in any conversation.

Since they didn't ask then... they already knew something. Or they were guessing. And Viper didn't like it.

She cursed under her breath and soon after found herself at a familiar door.

"Viper? Are you there?"

She knocked again. For a moment she got no answer and thought she wouldn't get any more, but her thought that this was where Sabine was hiding nevertheless didn't disappoint.

"No," She heard. She rolled her eyes. "Go away."

"Okay, I'm going in."

She had already seen that the door was not locked, and she wasn't really going to wait for permission. Before Viper had time to speak, Reyna found herself inside and... froze.

Viper was not sitting at her desk in front of her laptop. Nor was she lying on a bed with a book or notes.

Viper was sitting on the floor with her shoulder blades leaning against the bed, her neck propped against the edge of the mattress, and blood dripping from her nose.

She was not rubbing it off. Reyna didn't see a single tissue, towel or anything nearby with which Callas could have tamed the hemorrhage.

She just sat there and... bled. She was breathing deeply, her gaze fixed on the ceiling even as Zyanya stood just above her, her entwined hands on her thighs.

Her T-shirt was stained with maroon spots, red streaks were even on the skin of her neck, where they stretched all the way from her nose, through her lips and chin.

"I told you to go away." Viper shrugged her shoulders as soon as she saw Reyna's gaze scanning her figure. "There's nothing to see here."

"Where are your towels?"

"It doesn't matter, they don't help."

"Where the hell do you have the fucking towels."

Viper pressed her lips together, not even grimacing at the taste of blood that momentarily welled up on her tongue. She closed her eyes.

That was her way. Choosing silence and pretending not to exist.

Reyna, however, was not going to fall for it. Not this time and not after so many identical situations.

She walked over to the closet from which she had pulled a towel during the last hemorrhage and took the first one that fell into her hands.

She dampened it with cold water and knelt down beside Viper.

She was no longer looking at the ceiling, but neither was she looking at Zyanya until the towel was in her line of sight, and she maintained that contact for only a moment before turning her head in the opposite direction.

"I don't want to," she growled.

Reyna could see the tendons of her neck tensing under the movement. She put all her effort into it, her chest trembling restlessly, as if on the one hand she was ready to fight and on the other she didn't have the strength to do so.

"I don't give a damn what you want."

Reyna caught Viper's chin with one hand, forcing her to look at her. Callas jerked, but to no avail, as the grip was strong and she was tired. All she could do was, with fury in her eyes, try to kill Reyna with a mere glance.

She tried to turn her head when the cold material touched her skin, rubbing gently the clotted blood. She was unsuccessful.

"I'm not hurting you, Sabine," she finally said. "If you want to hit me, do it, but I won't move from here until I'm done."

The tone was defiant. It contrasted with the tender movements of her hand as she wiped the blood from under her nose and lower lip.

Sabine let out a breath. She was tired. The snake had not attacked this time, but lurked in hiding to gain strength.

"You shouldn't do that," she croaked out.

She swallowed her saliva and squirmed gently as the cold towel slid over her neck, and she still couldn't move her head.

"I don't want you to bleed on the damn floor, stop-"

"You were at Brimstone's now, weren't you?" Zyanya tightened her fingers on the fabric, and her movements stopped for a moment, as if the question had momentarily knocked her off her feet. "They asked you about me."

It was no longer a question, but a statement.

Reyna considered lying.

"I went there to hand in the documents."

Viper snorted a hollow laugh. Her lips were still tinged with red.

"No one hands in the documents for more than a minute," she announced. She fell silent for a moment as Reyna moved a towel over her mouth and surprisingly refrained from rolling her eyes. "They asked you if I was crazy?"

Zyanya stepped back. The last word hurt, spoken with such carelessness that she felt a shiver run through her.

"What are you talking about?"

Viper grunted.

"He suspended me in missions for a while. Because 'I'm not myself'." The quote rang through with laughter devoid of merriment. "Sage supported him, and now he's probably looking for supporters of his opinion, so he asked you about me."

The explanation was so simple it almost hurt.

Zyanya remained silent until she finished washing the blood off Sabine's skin, and Sabine liked the fact that she could only stare blankly ahead and wait for either of them to dare to say something.

Reyna did just that when she dropped her towel on the floor and sat down next to Viper, copying her position. Viper didn't quite understand, but she didn't say a word, even if she didn't look at her, continuing to stare at the front door.

"I don't agree with Brimstone," Reyna said. She leaned her neck against the mattress as Viper did.

"What if he's right?"

"He isn't."

"You're more sure of that than I am," she said.

"So you're saying you didn't protest when he said that?"

"I did," Sabine admitted. "But that doesn't mean he wasn't right."

Sabine fought like a lioness for herself. She didn't allow herself to be told lies, she didn't allow herself to be accused of something she didn't do. Yet her persona suddenly became as changing as a kaleidoscope in Zyanya's eyes. Full of contradictions.

She just... pretended not to care about anything. She was aware of herself, aware so much that she knew how to deny something she herself believed to be true so that someone would believe her protest.

She knew every mechanism. She knew how to play, attack and confuse.

"Because he wasn't."

"Are you saying that because we slept with each other?"

Zyanya didn't expect to hear this question from Viper's mouth. Honestly... she didn't think she'd be the one to start this topic, which was like a skin burn from uncomfortable high heels.

She took a breath, and her gaze moved lazily across the ceiling, as if she was looking for something there. Maybe she was. For some good answer.

"No." A moment of silence. "I say it because I think so."

Viper nodded, though Reyna didn't see it.

She continued to smell the blood, heard that familiar wheezing and heartbeat, now lazy and as if on the verge of strength.

Viper must have been exhausted.

"It was inappropriate," she said suddenly, and the thread of silence that had managed to form was cut by her cool tone like a knife.

The memories were a bit hazy, but Zyanya remembered enough. The taste of alcohol, then the echo in the bathroom and those damn kisses. The smell of fresh bedding in the hotel and the feeling of picking the forbidden fruit that grew and grew until now.

"It's true," she said.

"And we shouldn't go back to that."

"I think we should, though."

"What for? Do you want to reminisce like the good old days, or reproach me for what I did wrong?"

Zyanya bit her tongue to throw in some crass remark. Not now. What she needed now was to play it out in such a way that Viper would give her something to cling to and draw on to answer the questions left by Callas.

"Putting your hand in my pants wasn't good. Not that I protested, but..."

"But you didn't, so the fault lies on both sides, end of story."

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Viper pinch the bridge of her nose again, heard her let the air out through her mouth. She couldn't tell if she did it out of pain or annoyance.

Reyna, however, was not a person to chicken out. She promised herself she wouldn't do it this time.

"I want to know why you did it," she said.

"And what do you think I did?"

She was sure that if Sabine hadn't been tired of bleeding, she would certainly have smiled in that characteristic mocking way of hers.

"Don't play dumb, you know very well what I mean."

"Do I?" Viper readjusted her back. The bed frame creaked slightly. "Maybe I just want to hear how it sounds in your mouth."

Reyna rolled her eyes.

"Why did you want to have sex with me?"

"Because you were handy? I thought it was obvious."

"There were a hundred people at that party. You had everyone at hand." There was a moment of silence as Zyanya gathered her words so that the next question would leave no doubt. "Then why did you do it with me?"

"And why not?" Viper said in a tone as if they were talking about the weather. "I could ask you the same question, and I don't think you have the answer, so let's end this topic before someone hears too much."

Viper, while saying these words, was not aware... that it had already happened.

Chapter 14: FOURTEEN

Neon was right.

And for one brief moment this realization seemed surreal and unthinkable to her, but immediately afterwards... everything began to make sense.

But at the same time... it didn't have it at all.

That Reyna and that Viper?

That Reyna and that Viper? They couldn't talk, couldn't do anything but try to kill each other with the worst possible methods, and although Neon knew that her assumptions were not unfounded, now that she was sure, this situation seemed absurd to her.

Absurd, ridiculous and almost pathetic.

They slept with each other. Neon didn't know when, but she didn't need to at all, because they slept with each other while Viper spat blackmails in her face.

Now Tala was above Viper, and this feeling filled her with such euphoria that she felt like standing in the middle of headquarters and shouting what she knows, so that every agent within range of her voice would know what a hypocrite Sabine Callas was.

Her thoughts revolved so intensely towards this subject that she didn't even notice that she had been staring at the wall for a good few minutes, biting her lower lip so hard that another moment and she would have tasted blood.

She didn't even know when her feet alone led her out of the room in search of those one cold eyes, which now didn't seem as invincible to her as before.

And as soon as she found them, three words escaped her lips without her willpower.

"You fucked up."

The sentence rang out evenly with the silence, which by now had been broken by the working coffee machine. Viper's gaze lingered on the filling cup, but her brow rose in surprise.

"What are you talking about?" she asked.

She sounded bored, and for some reason that made Neon even more pleased.

"I was right," she said. Sabine took the cup in her hand, as if to show that she wasn't going to care too much about what the younger woman had to say. "And you know perfectly well what I mean."

"Do I?"

"You've spilled the tea yourself."

"I don't have time for another part of your weird assumptions."

Neon restrained herself not to snort with laughter. She folded her arms across her chest and leaned against the edge of one of the tabletops.

"Don't you want to know what I found out?" Viper's moment of hesitation wouldn't have been so apparent if Tala hadn't been looking for it. The coffee mug paused for a second on its way to her lips, but she still didn't turn to face the younger woman. "Well, unless you prefer to find out from others, your choice."

Viper's eyelid twitched. She cleared her throat after taking a sip of coffee.

"So what is it that you know so well?"

Neon was just waiting for this moment.

"You slept with Reyna."

Viper furrowed her brow and then... laughed.

"You've been trying to tell me that for a long time," she stated. The mockery in her voice sounded clear. "I'm not going to admit to something you made up."

"Don't play dumb, Viper," growled Neon. She clenched her fingers tighter on the edge of the tabletop, though she didn't even know it. "I heard your conversation. 'Why did you want to have sex with me,' is that how it went?"

If Sabine had functioned like any other human being, perhaps she would have twitched, or choked on her coffee or at least her eyes would have widened in panic, but... but Sabine was different. Sabine only tightened her lips into a narrow line and remained silent, pretending not to care about anything.

However, that didn’t stop Neon. She laughed briefly, coolly, so coolly that she herself felt the chill on her skin.

"How the hell do you function?" she asked. Viper didn't answer, but Tala didn't want that at all. "How do you look in the mirror and don't see only egoist there? You make rules that you could kill for, but by some miracle for you they don't exist, because I can't even touch a person I care about, but you can already spread your legs in front of Reyna."

"Stop saying this made up nonsense, I warn you."

Now it was Neon who snarled.

"Because what, you won't admit that you're acting like a damn hooker yourself?"

Sabine's statue crumbled in a second. The coffee mug was placed on the countertop, but it wobbled, tipped over, and its contents spilled over the surface and began to run down the cabinets to the floor.

Viper's fingers no longer held its handle, but the front of Neon's shirt, in whose eyes Sabine saw sparks of fear and shock. Good. Let her be afraid. Let her be so afraid that she would never dare to speak even a single syllable to her again.

"The truth hurts?" spat Neon at last, her gaze involuntarily falling on Callas' fists clenched on her clothes.

"You don't know shit." Sabine canted her head, and that one extraordinarily disturbing smile appeared on her lips. Because she knew Neon was scared. Because Viper usually fought with words. Being so close, she violated Tala's safe space, making her feel cornered. "And you won't say anything to anyone."

"Are you sure?"

Although Neon was shorter, she tried to look down on Sabine, which for some reason Viper found remarkably amusing. However, she did not laugh, the corner of her mouth was raised as before, betraying nothing more.

"You have no proof," Sabine announced. Her voice was so cool and sickeningly confident that Neon felt the skin on the back of her neck crawl. "My word against yours." Sabine shrugged her shoulders. "If you rat me out, I'll rat you out. And who do you think will sooner lose this job; a co-founder or an underaged kid who hasn't even worked here for a year?"

"You only think you're god here, Callas," growled Neon. "You are like all of us, but you can’t admit that.

"I, at least, don't have powers I can’t control." She let go of Neon's clothes with such force that the younger one almost staggered backward. "So don't do anything stupid and never get in my way again, as long as you want Fade to stay here for more than the next twenty-four hours."

***

Neon stared at the wall, not even looking in the direction of Killjoy, who was putting the final touches on her stabilizer, humming something under her breath. Maybe she had forgotten that Neon was in the workshop, or maybe she saw that Neon wasn't in the mood to talk and wasn't going to push.

Something about Clara was different. Something that wasn't there in anyone else at the headquarters, and it was probably only for this something that Neon opened her mouth at all that evening.

She was only supposed to come to pick up the stabilizer. But the strange emotion won.

"How do you get along with Viper?"

Killjoy moved the screwdriver away from the backpack and straightened up in her chair, correcting her glasses with her free hand. An uncertain smile graced her lips, as if the question had somehow embarrassed her. More strangely, Neon's gaze was so unyielding that Klara felt as if she was being watched under a magnifying glass.

"I don't really know how to answer that question," she chuckled seemingly carelessly, with a half-smile.

Still, she felt that Neon expected more. That's probably why she stuck her nose into the wires of the backpack again, even if they no longer needed any updates.

"Don't you see who she is?" asked Neon. There was no reproach in her voice, but for some reason Klara knew that she would have included him there if she could. "Doesn't it bother you?"

She shrugged her shoulders, flipping through a few cables absentmindedly.

"And you can't see who she is?" she muttered. Suddenly she felt sick of working, and Tala's presence annoyed her for the first time in her life. "She's an outstanding scientist, with a brain bigger than all of ours put together, and just because she can be cocky sometimes doesn't mean she doesn't have other values in her."

"Are you saying that because she's your idol?"

Now it sounded like a reproach. Killjoy closed the main stabilizer cover and wheeled the swivel chair to the other corner of the room to open the laptop. Neon wasn't very interested in what she was typing there.

"I say that because it's true, Neon," she said, still staring at the computer screen. "I respect her work and her. I think everyone deserves it, don't you think?"

Tala pressed her lips together. She leaned her back against the wall behind her, as if suddenly maintaining an upright position had become too difficult.

"Didn't she ever seem... a little unpredictable to you?"

Killjoy sighed.

"If scientists were predictable, they wouldn't be scientists." On the other hand, silence fell and German's fingers hovered over the keyboard, as if she was considering whether what she was going to say was definitely a good idea. But when she saw Neon's gaze fixed dully on the wall, and a thousand cogs seemed to be turning behind her eyes, she gave up. "What do you really want to ask?"

A moment of silence.

"Are you afraid of her?"

Killjoy snorted with laughter and leaned more against the back of the chair. Her gaze jumped between Neon and the loading system running the backpack on the computer.

"Why is everyone asking this lately?" She folded her arms over her chest. Neon, however, did not lower her gaze. She looked at Klara the whole time, as if she was looking for the moment on her face when the latter might lie. "No, I'm not afraid. Viper is... different, but she's not someone I should be afraid of."

"Don't you think she treats you differently than the rest of us?"

"Maybe it's because I treat her differently than you do?" she replied. "I don't question her decisions, I don't pretend I don’t see her when we pass each other in the kitchen, and I'm not afraid to say 'good morning' when the opportunity presents itself?" she added. Her laptop beeped several times, she typed in some command, pressed ENTER, and then closed the laptop's flap. "Viper is not scary. You're the ones who think she is."

Neon felt a little like she had been punched in the face. Viper wasn't scary? Viper wasn't a monster, and her fist clenched on her clothes was just a figment of her imagination? Fuck, she felt like telling Killjoy everything. What Viper said, who she was and what she did to Fade and her.

People like Sabine Callas are not supposed to be defended. People like Sabine Callas explain themselves for their own behavior.

"She has changed, Killjoy. She is no longer who she used to be."

"And that crosses her out?" Klara seemed angry. Neon expected it, but that didn't stop her. "I'm supposed to forget what she's done for me and what she's taught me, just because she's different and because you want me to?"

"I just want to warn you," Tala said.

"I don't need you to decide who I will talk to." Killjoy disconnected all the wires from her backpack and took it in both hands, eloquently extending them toward Neon. "Viper won't hurt me, I know that."

Tala accepted the stabilizer and nodded. She didn't say a word until she was on the doorstep

"I used to think so as well.”

As she left the workshop, she wondered if Killjoy was looking at her or trying to stop her in some telepathic way. Whether she is looking to Neon for an explanation of her words and whether she is at least a little curious about them.

Imagining Viper being... human was almost impossible. That Viper who was threatening, who was harsh and insensitive, who perpetually played psychological games with everyone she encountered. That dangerous Viper who did Fade harm and was capable of doing it again.

And Killjoy didn't see it coming. For Killjoy, this very Viper was a fucking role model.

Neon had no idea whether she was more furious at the German woman for not wanting to see this truth, or precisely at Viper for pulling the wool over Klara's eyes just because it's hard for an idol to admit their mistakes to someone who is caught up in them like a picture.

But she was certainly furious with Reyna, because on her way out of the workshop, which was located right next to the lab, she just happened to run into her.

Mondragón was holding some kind of bowl, Neon didn't know what was in it, but she didn't need to at all. She didn't care.

"Are you going to visit your monster?"

Reyna turned away, as if she wasn't sure if the question had actually been asked between them, or if she just thought it.

Neon held her backpack in her hands, but Reyna could see that her knuckles were turning white from that grip. The furious beating of her heart also said too much for Zyanya not to guess what Tala was thinking about.

She sighed and reflexively looked at the still steaming lunch. She immediately turned back to Neon, but too late for the younger woman not to notice.

"Neon, I don't want to argue. Not again." Reyna didn't sound confident. And she certainly didn't sound like she wanted to give Tali some kind of reprimand. She sounded more like she was disappointed. "I don't want our contact to look just like this," she said.

"Now you're worried about it, seriously?" snorted Neon. "Besides, I think we can both see that you've fucked this up a long time ago."

The younger's gaze fell meaningfully on the food bowl.

"Neon, it's not what-"

"You're making an idiot out of me again," interrupted Valdez firmly. "That, after all, you're only concerned about the welfare of the team, that everyone would do the same, and that's bullshit, because no one goes in there of their own free will."

Neon's finger pointed without a shadow of a doubt at the door to the lab, and her gaze flickered between it and Reyna, who... felt as if her skin was suddenly covered with a thousand pins.

She had argued with Neon before, and the fact that the subject hadn't changed didn't prove anything good. And worse, it didn't indicate that it would be easy to fix.

"Why did you sleep with her?"

The simplicity of this question hurt like a kick in the ribs. It wasn't 'did you do it'. Neon knew. And although Reyna knew in her heart that the younger woman wouldn't give her away, for some reason that wasn't her biggest concern at all.

But she deserved an answer, even though it was the most trivial and probably also the most pathetic of all. If she wanted Neon to ever again be able to find support in Reyna, she had to say anything.

"I was drunk. So was she," she said calmly. "We don't remember how it happened ourselves."

Neon snorted.

"So now there are some 'we', great, let's keep it up." She put down her backpack and leaned it against the wall, as if she felt that this conversation would not end soon. "And I understand that you don't know how it came to carrying her lunches either?"

"I'm not going to explain it to you again."

"And when? When you give her your next shirt, or when you carry her dinner?"

"I won't talk to you like that."

"Viper is a psychopath. And you're not going to change that with your visits, or with whatever lie you're going to tell me now."

"Neon, stop this immediately."

"Stop what? Be honest?" She hissed. Fury flashed in her eyes like lightning. "You're like a guard dog in front of the den of the dragon that slaughtered entire villages, Reyna. But please go, the way is clear. But if you're going to fuck, let me know, I'll post a 'do not disturb' sign."

Neon didn't wait for an answer, because she probably didn't want one at all. She just picked up her backpack and turned on her heel perfectly at the fork in the corridor, and Reyna could only lead her away with her eyes until she disappeared around the corner.

***

"What is that?"

Viper raised her head from above her notes, and her gaze darted away from the vial placed on the stand only for a moment, measured Reyna with her eyes and returned to her previous source of interest.

"Food," she explained, setting the bowl down on the nearest desk. "Have you eaten anything nutrient at all in the last twenty-four hours?"

Several coffee mugs spread out like Christmas decorations around her workspace did not escape Zyanya's attention. Apparently, the fact that her presence was only marked by a working coffee machine had a grain of truth in it.

Viper, however, only snorted.

"You don't have to mother me," she chuckled. She tapped the surface of the page with her pen for a moment, but when the thought came back to her, she started scribbling something down. "It was Neon, wasn't it?"

"It doesn't matter."

Viper laughed more to herself than to Reyna.

"It does, because you're doing it again." She pushed herself away from the edge of the desk, the noise of the chair's wheels echoed. She pointed to the food with a hand gesture. "Then take it away before it's too late."

"Too late for what? Until you starve to death?"

"Until Neon will completely hate you because of me," she said. "Because you're giving her a reason to do so again."

"I don’t care."

Viper stopped in her rapid stream of words as if Reyna had suddenly put a wall in front of her. She tilted her head slightly, biting the inside of her cheek for a moment, but stood up finally and began looking for something in the various cabinets, although Reyna got the impression that she was only doing this to avoid looking at her.

"I'm not going to eat it," she announced when she finally pulled a calculator out of the cabinet. "So you can go now."

"I'm not going anywhere until you lick that damn bowl clean," she said.

"Me, or that monster you came to visit?"

While saying this, Viper was typing in some numbers on her calculator, and her voice, although not trembling, for the first time since this conversation began, did not sound as if she was planning to stab Reyna in the back.

It was more... as if she was the one being stabbed.

Reyna let the air out. She tried to make out something more beyond the veil of black hair and clenched lips, but Viper fell silent after asking that question as if she never intended to speak again.

But as soon as she opened her mouth, Viper sensed it.

"Don't try to tell me that they respect me after all, or that they don't mean it at all," she said, transcribing calculations from a calculator onto some single sheet of paper with a circular coffee stain. "I know what people say, I accept it."

"Do you?"

Viper did not answer. She probably wanted to shrug her shoulders, but abandoned it at the last moment. Probably as usual, she decided that silence was more comfortable.

Reyna realized that every uncomfortable question ends that way. However, she did not pursue it. Because she herself knew well that some words are difficult to erase from memory, no matter how hard one tries.

She did, however, pick up a bowl of lunch in the form of rice with chicken and vegetables, and moved a stack of papers from one of the desks to the very end of it. She placed the food at one edge right next to the microscope, and pulled two chairs over as well.

Viper was watching her, she could feel it. But that's what she wanted.

Before Sabine had time to comment anything, Zyanya grabbed her wrist and pulled her to the table.

"Sit down," she instructed.

Sabine folded her arms over her chest.

"I won't-..."

"Sit. The fuck. Down."

She snorted a hollow laugh and did as she was told. Her gaze, however, did not touch the food bowl for a moment and even less did the fork. Sabine cast her gaze to Reyna, who was sitting across from her. At first her posture was stiff, but when Viper leaned against the back of the chair, Zyanya also relaxed.

"Now what?" She asked.

She put her foot down and seemed amused by the whole situation. But not because nothing brought Sabine more amusement than watching Reyna try to prove to herself and her that she had at least partial power over Viper.

Behind that amusement, however, was a pain that, though unspoken, crept up in individual crooked smiles and that mocking laugh.

"Now you're going to have dinner."

"Because what?"

"Because I say so. Eat."

Viper ostentatiously put a strand of hair behind her ear. Her gaze jumped here and there and stopped on Zyanya only at the end, as if by doing so she wanted to show her that she was the least important thing in the room.

"You cleaned up my lab after that incident. Why?"

"Why not? I was bored."

"That's nonsense, but I will let you think I believe that." She nodded. "Why did you want me to leave your shirt to myself? Because I don't think it was to make Neon even more angry."

"Can you question me after you've eaten?"

"No," came the short answer. "So?"

"Oh my god, it's just a stupid T-shirt," she added. Reyna rolled her eyes, but rested her head on her hand. She reminded Sabine of a schoolgirl being questioned in front of the blackboard. "Maybe because that would make you say that stupid 'thank you'?"

"I already told you that," she said.

"You say it so rarely that it shouldn't surprise you," Reyna remarked. "Are you done?"

"Why are you doing this?" Viper seemed not to have heard most of what was being said. "We slept together, everything about that is over, so why?"

"Eat the damn dinner."

Viper furrowed her brow. She realized that in that answer Reyna had made a deal of sorts. Her fingertip lingered on the handle of the fork, the metal rang against the pottery, and Reyna's violet eyes followed her every move.

Sabine ate her meal in silence, although her gaze never strayed from Zyanya's face. Silently, she checked whether she would stay and whether she would not break this unwritten agreement.

She pushed the empty bowl away from her.

"I know what it's like to be an outcast, Viper," she finally said, the war of glances continuing. "And I know that sooner or later, a person breaks. Piece by piece, in silence and in the belief that, after all, they can handle it."

"Come on, you don't know anything about me."

"Bullshit," spared Reyna. "I would go out, pick up a rifle and turn into a merciless killing machine, and when I avoided death and went home, I heard that the people I fight for have me as a monster anyway. Just like you." she said coldly. "We are similar whether you want us to be or not, so you can never tell me that I don't understand anything."

"And what, you want to convert me, like some damn Samaritan?"

"I want to tell you that being a cold-hearted bitch is not a lifelong solution," Reyna replied, still as irritatingly calm as before. "And telling yourself that you don't feel anything just because others think so won't help you survive."

Now it was Viper who laughed.

"If someone thinks the sky is green, how do you tell them it's blue when they've spent their whole life believing otherwise?"

"With logical arguments. The truth."

"Truth during war has no power, Reyna. People will only live by what gives them hope, even if it's totally meaningless."

"So you want them to perceive you as the monster who you are not?"

Viper shrugged her shoulders. That strange, distinctive smile still wandered on her lips, although it was no longer as pronounced. Perhaps it only appeared when Viper was playing?

"What's wrong with that?" Her gaze fled somewhere to the side. "It's easier that way. No one goes up to a dog that bites, right?"

"What were you injecting yourself with at the party?"

Viper raised an eyebrow at this sudden change of subject. She hadn't expected Reyna to play her own game, and these flashes of surprise were at Mondragón's mercy.

Question for question. That's exactly what Viper was doing.

Surprisingly, Sabine either fell into this trap without realizing it, or was aware of it, but chose not to protest.

"I was testing the prototype." Seeing Zyanya's urgent gaze, she finished. "It doesn't work."

"Did you sleep anything today?"

Viper sat boldly and patiently. But the next question crossed an acceptable boundary for her. She sighed, then simply got up from her chair, showing that the discussion was over.

"I'm going to smoke," she announced flatly and shrugged her hands into her lab coat, then stuck one of them into her pocket, taking out a pack of cigarettes.

She turned around. Reyna was still sitting in her seat, and her cutting gaze apparently did not impress Callas.

"If you won’t ruin it with your lecture about how I shouldn't do it, you can come with me."

Chapter 15: FIFTEEN

Viper hated running.

In fact, running was something that, of all physical exercises, was at the bottom of her tolerance pyramid.

She hated it, whether she knew that cardio exercise was important or not, whether she had it written into her training plan or not.

She realized that keeping fit contributed to the public good, but that wasn't her thing. She liked to exert herself mentally. To deceive the opponent, to deliberately lead them into her traps. After all, that's what controllers were for, right? Running back and forth was attributed to duelists.

She stopped the treadmill and leaned her forearms against the handles as her lungs filled with hot air and she stared at ground tape between her feet, not even trying to wipe away the sweat that ran down her temples.

She took water out of the stand and took a sip. And just then, the gym door opened, and… Brimstone walked in.

Viper furrowed her brow, but didn't say a word. She wasn't going to be the first to greet him, not after what she had heard and what she had experienced. Her goal was to pretend that Brimstone didn't exist as bluntly as possible.

"How's the training?"

Viper capped her water bottle, shaking her head. She was amused by the situation to the point where it was becoming almost pathetic.

"Suddenly you want to know what I have to say?" she snorted. "That's new."

She stepped off the treadmill and picked up the towel hanging over the handles. She intended to find her phone not because she needed it, but because ignoring Brimstone would be easier with it.

The man scratched his temple.

"You know it wasn't supposed to turn out this way," he said.

"But it did," she stated coolly. "Go have a chat with your new best friend and let me finish my training in peace, okay?"

"I did it for your own good."

Viper picked up her phone from one of the benches. She hadn't received any messages, but that didn't stop her from unlocking the screen and involuntarily swiping her finger across the screen as if she actually had something to write.

"You did it for your convenience," she announced, without a shadow of hesitation, resentment, or any other emotion. "My good is protocol. You took it from me, so I'm not going to listen to what you have to say."

Brimstone, however, did not walk away, he was not discouraged by these words, although he probably should have been, after all, that's how it always worked.

"I need your help."

Viper smiled to herself. So that was the point.

She felt like laughing in his face just to make him feel like a fool. Or like a villain who has rethought his behavior and is returning for forgiveness like a hurt dog.

"Help from a madman? You must be very desperate," she muttered, the note of mockery gentle but clear enough for him to feel it.

"Viper, please-..."

"Then keep going." She shrugged her shoulders. She started to gather her things to show that she would not let this conversation take up her time. However, she stopped in the middle and let out a breath. Maybe saying it out loud would give her some relief? "Do you even have any idea how I felt at that moment? Did you think about what I thought when I saw Sage there, when you admitted she was right in calling me crazy and how you pushed me away from the job that was proving to me that I was still up to something after all this time? No."

"I never denied your... effectiveness," Brimstone finally spoke up. "Never, until yesterday. But Sage told me that you had nosebleeds, that you were easily irritated, I decided that..."

"That you would treat me like a kid who was complained about?" She replied. She pressed the phone into her pocket. "Besides, 'I'm easily irritated'? Really?"

She snorted, shifting her body weight to one leg and assumed the most dismissive pose she could afford.

"Remind me, since when did you accept head pats and warm words of comfort as the solution, and all of that military of you went away?"

"Since never, Viper. You know that I take all this as seriously as you do, I just... worry about you, about what's happening to you. I've heard what they're saying, it's worried me, so it shouldn't surprise you that I'm taking some action."

"Actually it should." Viper stuck her hands in the pockets of her sweatpants, her gaze wandering the floor for a moment before she raised her head, arming herself with her mocking smile. "Because you let yourself get softened up like a fucking jelly, Liam. Sage has wrapped another person around her finger, and I'm honestly disappointed that it's you."

"I know you don't like her, but that's not the reason for you to blame everything on her. Suspending you was my decision."

Viper waved her hand. She was one step away from laughing.

"I don't mean the missions, and you know it well," she said. "You've stopped trusting me because she's made me a fucking hangman and is telling you the same thing. And you are starting to believe it, like a naive child."

"You're not going to tell me that your behavior lately has been entirely professional, Viper."

"And even if it wasn't?" She replied. "Even if I get upset, because I have a damn good reason for it, does that make me a bad commander? For fuck’s sake, you were a soldier, you know yourself that sweet nothings don't matter when you're fighting a war."

Silence. Viper muttered something under her breath and took her hands out of her pockets, swiped them against the material. She slipped past Brimstone between the treadmill and the edges of the ring.

"Whatever you need leave the papers on my desk, but give me a fucking break already. And you better know that I'm not doing this for you."

***

"What are you doing?"

Zyanya raised one eyebrow when Viper, not asking for an invitation, walked inside her bedroom with a file of papers in her hand without even looking at her.

"Papers, can't you see?"

Reyna stared at Sabine's silhouette, seated straight as a string at her desk, who was just selecting one of the pens placed in the rack. She slammed the door behind her.

"Don't you have your own room, Callas?"

Viper merely flipped through one of the sheets of paper and clicked the pen.

"Your room is the last one they'll look for me in, so stop being hysterical and let me work."

"Who, the dwarves?" She growled, folding her arms over her chest. She self-consciously followed Viper's movements and noticed, without much surprise, that irritation was building up inside her. "Do I look like a refugee shelter to you?"

"And do I look like I want to stay here? I don't think so."

On the one hand, Viper's venom was as irritating as ever, and Reyna knew the woman was doing her best to get on her nerves, but on the other hand, there was something soothing in her demeanor. It was as if their last conversation was just a memory, and that's where she was going to stay. In that steadiness of hers, which, although tiring, was stable enough for Reyna to want to cling to.

Viper cleared the whole situation in the lab from her head and returned to her indifference, hard shell and wax mask.

Reyna wanted to know what lurked beneath it. Whether yesterday's conversation had any effect. Whether Sabine's moment of weakness, in which the two of them smoked cigarettes on the balcony in silence and Viper remarkably resembled a human being, was just a one-time incident, or whether the snake really wasn't as venomous as she thought.

But keeping her distance was safe. Reyna exceptionally danced as Viper played. And although responding with sarcasm to her ploys came out reflexively, Zyanya couldn't shake the feeling that... she didn't have the strength for these arguments.

"So why did you come here? I don't remember signing up for your visit."

As much as it didn't sound like it, she longed for that quiet evening and the smell of cigarettes when Viper showed some of her humanity.

"I signed up myself," she replied dispassionately. She flipped another page, but feeling Reyna's gaze on her, she rolled her eyes and looked at her. "Pretend I'm not here or something, I don't know."

"Are you kidding?" Reyna asked. "You come in here like someone is chasing you, you crash down with some papers on my desk and I'm supposed to just blow it off?"

"God, do you have to look for problems where there are none? Just let me finish this." Viper rested her head on her hand, looking at Reyna almost with boredom, but there was also a kind of fatigue lurking somewhere in there. It wasn't physical fatigue, though; Reyna got the impression that Viper was thinking about something so intensely that it was just wearing her out. "Read a book, go to sleep, I don't give a damn."

Zyanya folded her arms over her chest and sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. This called for another play that she didn't feel like thinking about. She didn't even feel like looking at Viper, and on the other hand she felt she couldn't take her eyes off her because of... because of all this. Because of how she was.

"Who did you talk to and what did you hear."

It was a demand, because Reyna had no intention at all of asking another question that would go unanswered.

"I'm working," Viper announced. Her gaze fixed on the sheets of paper, she put her foot on her leg, but there was no focus at all in that pose, only... an unnatural tense. "Make it easy on me and don't speak, if, like me, you want me to leave," she said.

"Why are you like this?"

"What are you up to again?" The question was followed by a sigh, but Sabine didn't stop to fill in some sort of chart.

"You don't know how to talk."

Callas still didn't turn around. The pen scraped across the paper.

"I talked to you yesterday, don't make up problems."

"You talked to me yesterday, and today you can't say at least a few words of explanation, why you come to my room first thing in the morning as if something is on fire. Damn it, that is a problem."

"You're not there to solve it, so what’s the point anyway?" Viper's voice was dispassionate and thus irritating. "I didn't ask you to dig into it," she said.

"But you needed it."

"How the hell would you know that?"

"Because I'm not fucking blind," growled Mondragón. "You were hurt by Neon's words, just as you were hurt by the fact that Brimstone took away your command, why is it so hard for you to admit that you just needed to talk?"

"I talked to you because otherwise you wouldn't have given me a break, Zyanya," Viper said. She put the pen down on the desk, the casing slamming against the tabletop as Callas let out a little laugh of anger. "Will you finally leave what’s not your business and give me five minutes of peace, or will you play the therapist I don't need?"

Zyanya measured the bundle of papers with her eyes. The question came to mind on its own, as did the willful ignorance of Viper's sarcasm.

"Where did you actually get these papers? From Brimstone?"

"It's none of your business what I do in my job."

"It is mine, because you're the one in my room."

"Theoretically it's not yours, it's Protocol's."

"Are you going to recite the entire regulations to me so you can win?"

"If you think I wouldn't be able to do that, you're wrong."

Reyna pushed herself off the mattress and stood up. Her step was sure, but it resounded with anger, which came much faster than Reyna assumed.

She didn't want to argue with Viper again, but she could feel that annoying scab starting to itch again, and she was getting more and more eager to scrape it off, even though she knew it would hurt.

She stood over Viper, who raised her head slowly, with that characteristic boredom of hers, painted in her facial expression so often that sometimes Reyna thought it was glued to her face.

"Get out of my room."

Sabine snarled.

"No."

"I said get out of my room, Callas," said Reyna.

"And I said I won’t," the chemist replied dispassionately.

Her shoulders twitched slightly, as if she were trying to shrug her shoulders, but she gave up at the last moment.

"I have to make you do it, really?"

"You won't, and you know it."

Reyna felt like denying Sabine with a single gesture, grabbing her shoulders and leading her out the door like a dog. Just to slam the door in her face and not have to look at the face that seemed to almost never change, no matter what Reyna would do.

Maybe she wanted to let her win this one time, to surprise her, to make Sabine silently accept that Zyanya had listened to her, even if that almost never happened.

Or maybe she wanted to let her win because she was already tired, the hour was early, and she didn't want to ruin her own mood so quickly.

"You have half an hour," she announced, throwing a meaningful glance at the bundle of papers and pen, which Sabine had begun to turn in her fingers again. "And not a minute longer."

Viper, to her surprise, did not comment on her win in any way. She didn't say a word, didn't laugh. She simply accepted it and continued writing something she had interrupted earlier, with her lips tightened into a narrow line.

Reyna walked over to the closet and took out a fresh towel, then headed to the bathroom, which every room was stocked with.

Viper heard the click of the lock and then the hum of the shower, just as she finished marking the various items on the location plan that needed to be secured with smokes.

She didn't look at her watch. She may not have argued about the amount of time she was given, but that didn't mean at all that she intended to follow it.

But even if she didn't look at her watch, the shower stopped humming not much later. The sound of the cabin door sliding open, then the door opening.

Out of the corner of her eye, Viper measured Zyanya's figure.

The woman was probably wearing nothing but a towel, wrapped tightly around her body. Wet hair stuck to the nape of her neck, drops of water glided slowly over her tanned skin.

She returned her gaze to the papers, but wrote nothing.

Reyna was checking something on her phone, although Viper didn't hear any notification sound in her absence.

Sabine's gaze moved over the tattoos wrapping her arm, and although Zyanya was standing with her back, for some reason Viper remembered the pattern on the inside of her hand. The shape of a beaming sun.

She realized she got distracted.

She ran her eyes over the piece of paper. She still hadn't written another word.

Reyna shifted her body weight to one side, her brow furrowed, as if something puzzling had appeared on the phone.

Viper had never thought about what an assassin's body looked like. She never thought about what the body of someone who feeds on death, for whom physical fitness means survival, looks like.

And when she had the opportunity to do so in the hotel room, she didn't. There was no time for that.

She tapped a pen on a piece of paper. Reyna was still standing with her back to her, her finger moving laboriously across the screen as water ran from her hair down her face, down her cheeks, pearling on her chin and falling on her collarbones.

Reyna was... of a different build than Viper. Her body was sharper, more angular where arm or back muscles stood out. It was the body of a warrior. The soldier that she was, who just saved herself and others with her physicality. Who had to trust every muscleto know that it would not let her down.

It was hurt as well. A few scars didn't escape Viper's attention, but she didn't have time to count them because the tapping of the pen stopped at the same moment as the sliding of Reyna’s finger across the phone screen.

"I'm about to assume you like what you see."

Reyna did not take her eyes off the phone, even though she was no longer using it. Her voice was hoarse, but there was satisfaction and perhaps a note of amusement in those low, deep tones.

Viper snickered.

"You wish."

"I'm not the one staring, Sabine," she said.

"Your ego is higher than you can reach, if that's what you think," Viper announced frigidly, her green eyes sliding from Reyna's body to the pen. "So put something on before you pierce the roof with it."

Reyna didn't respond to those words, just tossed the phone on the bed and walked over to the closet again, seemingly reluctantly leaning her elbow against the shelf, as if choosing clothes was proving to be overly tiring.

Viper could bet that Mondragón was smiling in that idiotic way of hers.

She was annoying.

Zyanya, however, finally decided on some sort of T-shirt, but Viper only noticed the material out of the corner of her eye, as it dangled from between the woman's fingers when, for some unknown reason, she decided to accompany Viper.

She did it on purpose. She purposely came so close that Sabine could feel her breath on her own neck, as the warmth of the vampire's body coated her back. A few drops of water fell from Reyna's long hair and soaked into Viper's sweater, forcing her to flinch.

"What are you writing there, anyway?" she muttered reluctantly, resting one of her hands on the edge of the desk.

Her arm settled next to Viper on one side, she felt like shaking it off. Reyna's fingers squeezed the fabric of the T-shirt she still wasn't wearing, and her breath tickled the chemist's neck even through her turtleneck.

Reyna didn't show it from herself, but Viper knew that everything she was doing was designed to make her uncomfortable. Everything, even the fact that when leaving the bathroom she didn't wipe her skin dry to make it shine. The fact that she persisted in not getting dressed, even though she should have, and the fact that she stood close enough that if Viper moved even an inch in any direction, she would surely touch her.

This was the continuation of the argument, but this one was infused with tension that hung in the air, like thick smoke. Calm arguments were more complicated. Full of moments of silence that could be more persistent than words. It was a game they had begun to play, although they themselves didn't know when exactly the round began.

"Nothing that is in your interest."

Reyna muttered something in response.

Viper tried not to stare at her, her gaze fixed so hard on the desktop that another moment and she would have burned a hole right through it, but she knew perfectly well that the only thing burning a hole was Reyna's gaze, who nonchalantly leaned her hip against the desktop and apparently waited for Viper to break.

She was still wearing only a towel, and water dripped steadily onto the floor.

Sabine may have broken down, but she did so on her terms.

"And who's staring now?"

Reyna did not bow to her gaze. On the contrary, she happily responded to the defiant stare. The corner of her mouth lifted slightly, her fang flashing in a vampire smile.

"An eye for an eye, isn't it, Sabine?"

"What are you playing again?"

She saw it perfectly. Mondragón's eyes focused on her mouth for a moment, but quickly lifted higher. Provocation, of course, she thought.

"Nothing that is in your interest."

Viper had to think longer for the first time. About the rules that Reyna had come up with and that, for now, only she knew. She had to figure her out, this sudden change in her mood, her tone of voice, her body language.

She had to figure her out before it was too late.

Did she want to prove something? To tip the winning to her side with moves planned like moves in chess?

Viper didn't know what Reyna wanted, and frustration itself got under her skin in the form of another wave of annoying itching. She pushed the chair away from the desk, the furniture's legs clattered against the floor, but she didn't get up at all, because she didn't need to level with her to stand in a duel.

"Don't provoke me," she said. She furrowed her eyebrows for a second, as if she was tasting the words on her tongue or choosing the right tone.

She had to plan everything.

"Are you saying that I can't?" Reyna eagerly reduced the distance between them, taking Callas another portion of space. The latter accepted this in silence, letting the air out of her lungs, assuming a relatively relaxed posture. "Because what?"

Mondragón slid two fingers under Viper's chin without resistance, something flashed in her eyes that was hard to define, but Viper's first thought was - predator.

And she was not her prey.

So she didn't push her hand away. She showed that she was able to take it and not break eye contact or physical contact, like a frightened rabbit running away from a wolf.

On the contrary, she raised her head higher, proudly. The perspicacity of her eyes really had something of a snake-like quality.

"You won't win, Zyanya," she said.

"Since when you say my name, serpiente?" Reyna tilted her head. Viper, however, didn’t flinch, although in her mind she rebuked herself for the mistake. After all, no mistake escaped Reyna. "And where are your rules?"

A short laugh.

"Fuck you."

Reyna didn't let go of her chin for a moment.

"Oh yes, all you." Her breath on Sabine's face was warm and unbearable. "Be careful, or I'll think you're not so venomous after all," she said.

"I could break your neck right now and you wouldn't even feel it."

"I know." Was that a... laugh? "But you won't, and you know it,."

Quoting Sabine apparently brought her a shitload of fun, because her fingers tightened tighter on the woman's chin, pulling her toward her as if she were about to pull the invisible string stopping her from getting the prize.

Purple eyes scanned her face, searching for something Sabine wasn't saying. An answer the chemist didn’t give, perhaps some pinched text sprinkled with venom.

And then the gaze dropped lower, to Viper’s lips, no longer clenched in a narrow line, but casually closed.

Reyna knew that Viper was waiting for her to make a move so she could counter it. That she was watching everything she did, planning a response in that always-working mind of hers.

And she wanted to see it, that expectant look, which as Reyna's lips approached her own, lost focus, and if Zyanya didn't know her, she would have thought that Viper's shell had melted for those few seconds.

She stopped then, when only a breath separated them.

"And what are you going to do now, Sabine?"

Her fingers let go of Viper’s chin, the closeness vanished. The whisper blurred into the air between them and went away into oblivion.

A chill surrounded Viper again as Reyna moved away suddenly as if nothing had happened, not even looking at her.

Viper sat in the chair stunned for perhaps the first time in her life, trying to understand what exactly this fury she felt was. Did it belong to her at all, or to someone else, some version of her that now seemed to stand somewhere behind a wall, unreachable and foreign.

She felt like crushing the pen in her hand at that very second.

The next second, that urge grew stronger, as the towel wrapped around Reyna's body fell to the floor.

And Reyna herself didn't fucking care.

She laboriously rearranged the material of the T-shirt in her hands, as if she were seeing it for the first time in her life, and although she was certainly aware that Sabine was watching her every move with her fingers clasped around the pen, Reyna didn't lift her eyes.

She pretended that Viper didn't exist as she flipped the material into the bend of her elbow and, completely naked, walked over to the drawer. She pulled the underwear out of it, putting it on with slow movements.

Sabine swallowed her saliva. She felt the urge to knock the pen against the desk, but didn’t do so. She couldn't show that it was affecting her in any way, couldn't show that Reyna had distracted her to the point where the Viper was withdrawing from her position and lowering her head in shame.

The nudity was uncomfortable. The nudity was... intimate.

Their sex was not intimate and was never meant to have anything to do with it.

And now she could see her shoulders, her chest, her scars, her thighs. She had seen it all, and worse, Zyanya knew she had shut Viper's mouth with it, giving her something to think about.

A puzzle to keep her occupied.

Because, after all, they were not lovers. Their bodies were not to be touched, loved or remembered. Their bodies were only meant to be a distraction.

"What's between you and Sage?"

Reyna's voice cut through the silence like the blade of a knife. Sabine pulled her gaze away from her back as Mondragón pulled her shirt over her head.

She wanted to turn her back on the desk, but that would have meant capitulation.

"I'm not going to talk about Sage," she said.

"Alright," Zyanya agreed. She sounded as if she either reconciled herself to Sabine's every word or wasn't going to let a single word of hers sink in, bristling at her own. "So let's talk about you. Why do you hate Sage?"

"Because she deserves it, end of topic."

Undeterred, Reyna busied herself with dressing her pants.

"Did you have a fight? Did she lie to you, betray you?"

"Stop it."

"Maybe it's your ex?"

"Did you hit your head?," she snorted. Reyna shrugged her shoulders. "Never in my life."

"So what, if it's not that?" She corrected the elastic of her sweatpants and picked up a towel from the floor, then threw it on the bed. "Something must have happened after all," she said.

"Just shut up, will you?"

The question turned into a growl, and Reyna saw with a shadow of satisfaction that irritation being born in Viper that usually appeared when the limit of her tolerance was bent.

Reyna, however... couldn't. She endured with a poker face how Sabine stood up, apparently pushed by the anger bubbling up inside her, and how she almost patiently awaited obedience from Zyanya.

"Don't you have other arguments?" Reyna asked. She wanted Viper to snap. Even if she was going to shout in her face what was in her head, cursing every other word, Reyna just wanted her to snap. Even if it meant playing with fire. "All you keep saying is 'shut up,' 'none of your business’. It's getting boring."

"So is your bothering my ass about things that aren't worth it," she hissed. "You're the one pushing your way into my life, you're the one who keeps asking and demanding that I start answering everything just because you want me to. Can't you just, I don't know, let it go? Like any other person would do in your position?"

"So that's the point?" Viper rolled her eyes. "That everyone sooner or later left it as it was, so now you don't let anyone in?"

"I didn't say anything like that," she said.

"But that's the way it is."

"You don't know shit."

"Anything else?"

"I hate you."

"I know."

"And you fucking piss me off."

"Nothing new." Viper felt as if she was bouncing off the wall that Reyna had suddenly become. She dodged her attacks... being insensitive to them. "So what, we'll talk like humans, or-"

Viper didn't want to talk anymore. She didn't want all that was going on around her and was intrusively straining her nerves making her feel like she was stuck in a shrinking cage where there was nothing around her, just Reyna.

She had to get out of here somehow, she had to escape somehow, avoid this squeeze.

Against all odds, she was not surprised when her icy-cold hands drew Zyanya's face to hers. Nor was she surprised when she kissed the woman once again, refusing to let her move away.

She acted almost aggressively, didn't give Reyna time to respond, hooked her teeth on her lip, pressed her lips tighter, even before Mondragón snapped out of her stupor.

And when she did, Sabine felt a hand on her chest along with gentle pressure, even as Reyna... responded to this completely ripped out of context kiss.

The chest began to expand, Viper took in a lungful of lost breath, she gained the leverage. This is how she fought and this is how she won, and after all, this is what it was all about.

About winning.

"You're doing it again," growled Zyanya blinking a few times, panting a few times and swallowing her saliva with her eyes clouded but also shocked, and maybe even anger lurking somewhere in there.

Especially when Sabine leaned over her neck as if she hadn't heard it at all.

"And you’re agreeing to it again."

Reyna heard it somewhere between their raptured breaths, the hum of the radiator, and the steady, high-pitched screech that rang alarm bells in her head. Her radianite heart stopped for a second when the same cold fingers that had previously held her face now encircled her wrist and pulled.

Reyna had nothing in her head but a bundle of curses in her native tongue when she realized that Viper was directing her hand between her legs without the slightest hesitation.

And that very hesitation was necessary. Reyna would have liked to see it, to at least try to explain a little to herself what was actually going on. Where was their argument, where were the documents, where were the questions, and where was the sarcasm and endless resentment? Where the hell did it all go?

"Sabine," she croaked out. She didn't know what exactly she wanted to accomplish with that, but she knew that only then would Viper react. Her own name was like an electric pulse that seemed to reset the entire system. "We should stop."

Viper stepped back a breathing distance, and though she had so often stabbed daggers with her jade green eyes, she now looked at Reyna as if she had never seen her before. Her lips were parted, glistening from the kiss, but still holding some indefinable tension. The woman's eyebrows furrowed as her gaze landed somewhere behind Reyna in the distance.

Zyanya couldn't shake the feeling that this usually sharp gaze had clouded in a way she had seen somewhere before.

"Yeah, I think we should."

Sabine looked at the floor, then returned to Zyanya's face as slowly as if the act required superhuman strength. Reyna tightened her fingers on her shoulders as the chemist's heartbeat suddenly accelerated. She looked for anything on her face. And she found it.

Sabine went pale. She licked her lips, collecting words.

“Because I'm going to pass out right now.”

Zyanya caught the falling body in the very last second.

Chapter 16: SIXTEEN

Viper didn't know how long she had been staring at the wall, but as long as her body didn't flinch, she was able to endure this one unchanging sight.

The bedclothes wrapped her body like a cocoon, and she knew that she had not covered herself with them. Just as she did not get into bed herself. She knew that Reyna had done it, and she also knew that it was Reyna who made the mattress not lie evenly, and that the usual chill in the room was no longer so cool.

"What was the point of that snake bite on the mission?"

Viper wanted to wrap the quilt tighter around herself so she wouldn't hear those words and feel them slamming into her back. She wanted to pretend that she was still unconscious for the rest of the day, if that meant that Reyna would get bored and go away. That she would leave her alone so Viper could forget the whole damn thing.

To think it over, to be silent, to nourish herself with that silence that rang in her ears when she was alone. Wrap herself in it, like in that quilt.

But that damn vampire heard everything.

"I told you it didn't work."

Although she couldn't see it, Viper was sure Reyna nodded.

"I want to know anyway."

She sounded like she was just waiting for Sabine to admit her mistake like a student who gets reprimanded. And Sabine only corrected herself on the bed, tucking her legs to her stomach. In her mind, this question reminded her of an incoming bullet that she needed to dodge, and that's exactly what she was going to do.

"How long have you been here?"

Her voice was muffled and hoarse. She sounded... weak. And worse, that's exactly how she felt.

Pathetic and weak.

"A couple of hours."

It stung. Her eyelid twitched, her fingers froze. That is, she really was weak. This feeling spread through her stomach like a wave of heartburn, only instead of heartburn there was something Sabine couldn't define. Perhaps it was embarrassment, perhaps a little frustration that even after a few hours, Reyna was sitting here. She was, and she wasn't going to leave.

Sabine wanted to push her away. Or hit her. Or both at once. Anything to make that sense of personal failure finally go away.

But she only sighed. A strand of hair fell on her forehead, damp and soaked with the smell of cold sweat. It disturbed her.

"My blood cells are addicted to toxins which are destroying them," she finally said. She wanted to believe she was saying this only to herself or to the window. But Reyna was listening. And Sabine herself no longer knew if she wanted to tell her at all, or if the words were coming out of her mouth without her will. "Snake bite was a test, the next prototype only worked for a while," she said.

"What are you going to do now?"

Zyanya felt these restless movements on the mattress, as if Sabine couldn't find a place on her half of the bed. She felt that she didn't want to respond to her, felt that Viper was even vibrating, trying to curl in on herself, move away more and close her mouth like she always did.

"I'll keep looking." The short answer came. Probably, if she hadn't been lying down, she would have shrugged her shoulders, showing that it was nothing. That this happens. "I don't see any other way," she added, just when Reyna's gaze drifted into her shoulder blades.

Mondragón sighed, Viper could imagine her wrinkling her eyebrows, and those eyes of hers scanning her figure with that annoying hint of pity that usually hurt, like jamming a piece of paper. Small, but painful.

"Viper-..."

"I know what you want to say," she interrupted, then swallowed her saliva. "So don’t, I'm tired."

Viper wished it would start raining. Or for the radiator to start rumbling louder. Anything that would drown out her restless fidgeting and the uncertainty in her voice that for some reason she couldn't get rid of.

Reyna agreed, remaining silent. The silence, however, didn't last long enough for Viper to believe that it would fill the evening better than words.

"You did it again." She sensed that Sabine wouldn't want to answer or elaborate on what she meant. Sabine, after all, loved to avoid, deceive and sweep emotions under the rug like dust. "You kissed me again," she said.

"Leave it, Reyna. I'm not in the mood."

Zyanya knew she had to remain calm. For her and Viper's sake, for at least the apparent few minutes of peace that were so rare between them that something that wasn't an argument almost didn't fit into their pattern.

"And will you ever be?" She replied.

A shrug of her shoulders as Viper rose to sit down, hanging her legs over the mattress. Apparently she intended to leave Reyna with her silence, but to Reyna's surprise, she didn't get up right away. For a moment she was a figure against the backdrop of the window, barely her outline, from which nothing could be read.

"Why did you stay?"

"Are you kidding?" Reyna's voice was calm, although Viper felt that she had surprised her with this question. For Viper, it was not meaningless; for Zyanya, it was quite the opposite. "You fainted before my eyes, what was I supposed to do?"

"Sage?"

"You would’ve killed me if I had called her, you know it well."

Although Reyna didn't see it, the corner of Sabine's mouth lifted in the beginning of a smile.

"Yeah, I probably would."

The mattress twisted, Viper felt Reyna change her position and for a moment even thought she was going to lie down, but instead she got up, walked around the bed and took a seat next to Viper, who seemed not to notice. Now, however, Zyanya knew that it was only an appearance.

Because Viper saw everything. She was just too good at pretending that she didn’t care about no one or nothing.

And Reyna was going to break it.

"How do you feel?"

It worked. Sabine twitched slightly, as if the question had electrified her in a way that nothing else had done. Because, after all, Sabine didn't get such questions, Sabine didn't acknowledge that such a question could be used about her at all.

Those fires of annoyance, now clearly visible in the light of the emerging moon, flickered in her eyes again, she clenched her jaw gently, but immediately relaxed it.

Reyna had no right to ask such a thing and yet she did. And something in Sabine Callas snapped when she realized that she hadn't answered this question in years, after all, no one had ever cared. Not even herself.

"I have to take a shower." She ducked the answer, hiding it behind the fact that she didn't have one. She didn't know how she felt, she hadn't thought about it, and no words were appropriate. So she dodged. "And I should get back to my room," she said.

"Fade can hang around headquarters, you don't want to meet her while coming out of my room," Reyna said. "Use my bathroom. One clean towel is drying on the radiator."

This time Sabine's reaction was scant, as if the previous agitation had exhausted the daily limit for showing emotion. She only nodded and looked for a moment as if she wanted to say something, but after a moment she threw off the remaining quilt and stood up, heading for the next room without hesitation.

Reyna led her away with her eyes. She was trying to understand, really. She was thinking so intensely that the inside of her head was like the inside of a beehive.

When Sabine was furious, she was able to turn it into a frightening calm in a matter of seconds as if someone had suddenly clicked a button because her strategy had changed its path. When she didn't want to talk, she would resort to physicality to leave Reyna with another bunch of questions, but other than the ones she cared about. If not, every conversation ended in anger, sarcasm or both, but it was always her word that had to come last.

Sabine hated Reyna and could show it in many ways, but now, walking to the bathroom, slightly wobbly and uncertain, she seemed... more human. More achievable.

But she didn't say so. She didn't comment anything more, didn't return to the subject. Or at least not now, because the Viper seemed weaker against the light of the bathroom and breaking down her walls now could leave her quite exposed.

Even if Reyna wanted to hear the bang of those collapsing bricks, she let Sabine keep quiet.

The problem arose when Reyna realized that this silence was taking too long. The noise of the shower didn't stop, and the anxiety grew.

She didn't even knock, she knew the door was open, and she didn't give a damn if she was about to be inundated with an avalanche of curses or get unceremoniously slapped.

But neither of these things happened.

Because Sabine didn't even move from her place. She didn't even turn her head, didn't say anything, perhaps didn't even notice Reyna or pretended that she didn’t.

Sabine stood in the shower, staring at the shower tray as if the red streaks of blood mixing with the water hypnotized her. Blood dripped from her nose, ran down her chin and down her pale body, which was covered with shivers, but she stood with her hands resting on the tiles, frozen like a statue.

The water was icy cold. So icy that a cold vapor formed on the mirror.

Reyna didn't know how she should act. It was no longer a question of nudity or whether either of them felt uncomfortable, because for some reason all of that became irrelevant when the fall of a human being happened right in front of Reyna's eyes.

"Oh my go-..."

A gasp squeezed her throat, but she managed to control it enough to mask the... actually what? Shock? Disbelief? Sympathy? Or perhaps a sense of inner failure, even though she knew she had nothing to do with Callas' health?

Viper shook her head.

"Don't," she croaked out. She closed her eyelids, as if she suddenly believed that when she stopped looking, Reyna would disappear from the bathroom. Yet she didn't ask her out. "I'll be over in a minute."

Reyna could stand still and just watch, or she could leave, or she could start screaming about what the hell Viper was doing, get into another pointless argument, after which only silence would be left again.

Instead, she stepped closer, feeling the cold creep onto her skin, opened the cabin door, and although the icy rain immediately hit her back, she managed to reach the faucet and turn it off.

Viper didn't move from her spot as Zyanya stepped back, stood on the bathroom rug and let the water drip from her soaked clothes onto the tiles in a steady rhythm.

Viper didn't move even when she knew that Reyna's gaze was fixed on her back.

One big scar, that's what they were.

The skin was uneven, stretched, wrinkled, seemed paper-thin in some places, and the first thing that came to Reyna's mind was that nothing but fire could have done this. The damage of which prevented a tattoo like the one on her neck.

However, she swallowed all the questions that were pressing on her lips.

How could she not have noticed this before? Was she too drunk? Maybe too blind to believe?

How could she not notice that Viper's scars were not only eating into her mind, but also into her body, which was living proof of what she had sacrificed for this job?

"You need to warm up," she said. She wiped her forehead of water, ignoring the chill. Viper didn't flinch, she just sniffled, staring resentfully at the drop of blood that slowly trickled down the drain. "I'll get the clothes from your room-..."

"Why do you care?" Reyna, though she managed to extend a hand with a towel toward her, furrowed her brow and froze at that exact second, measuring Sabine's bloody face and her horribly nearby body. "Why do you care about me?"

At first she wanted to laugh briefly, uncertainly and with a hint of mockery, maybe throw in some sarcastic text.

And then she noticed that Viper wasn't asking just to get the question forgotten. She didn't mean to be sarcastic, she didn't sound that way. She sounded as if, although she struggled to get it out of her throat, it was precisely the answer she needed.

Viper stepped out of the shower and wrapped herself in a towel. She knew she looked pathetic, with blood running down her chin and skin paler than paper, and contrasted so much with Reyna's strong stature that she almost felt foolish.

"Because you will never admit that you want anyone to care about you," she said. Viper tightened her bruised lips, her eyelids squinted neither out of anger nor shame. "Right?"

"I can handle-..."

"Yes, you'll handle everything on your own. I hear it non-stop, and you keep telling yourself that." She wasn't aggressive or pushy, and her voice was too calm to bring an argument into the conversation, which... perhaps would have been easier. "Why are you like this, Viper?"

Superhuman hearing allowed her to hear Callas swallow her saliva. Her gaze slid first over the sink, then over the mirror, but didn't stop at Reyna's face, ending on the bloody floor.

"Because I'm not weak. I'm not, do you understand?" Sabine was balancing on the edge of a scream, albeit a weak one. Frustration that anyone dared accuse her of something wrong going on with her, just because she was trying to survive. That someone noticed her separateness and recognized the irregularities, like a blemish on marble. "I've always handled and will always do, I don't need any pity or help, because everything is fucking fine.”

The words were hard to believe as her hunchbacked figure wrapped in a towel stood in the middle of the bathroom, whose floor was increasingly covered with red stains.

"I'll get you something to wear and some tea. There should be tissues in the drawer, try to stop the bleeding."

Reyna wasn't sure what she saw in Viper's gaze before she disappeared behind the door, but for the first time it wasn't rage.

***

There was something strange about watching Sabine Callas exude calm. Admittedly, Reyna wasn't quite sure if this calmness was healthy or feigned, but that didn't change anything.

Sabine in a worn sweatshirt, leggings and thick socks. Sabine with her fingers entwined around a mug of hot tea, the steam of which blew off her face. Sabine, who mechanically tucked a strand of hair behind her ear whenever it started to get in her way.

Sabine, who... hardly resembled Sabine.

"You should stay here for the night."

Reyna almost didn't recognize her voice at first. Maybe that's because she didn't say anything for a long time, because this somehow comfortable silence had been going on for quite a while.

Viper, she drummed her nails on the walls of the cup. But... she did not protest. She didn't get indignant, in fact, her eyelids didn't even twitch, and for one brief moment, Viper was not Viper. Not the fighting version of herself, but more the one where she is a war-weary soldier, wounded and struggling to crawl across the battlefield.

"I'll get out of here in the morning," she said. "And not a second longer."

Fade had a habit of spending entire nights roaming around headquarters, fueled by coffee and chronic insomnia, but Zyanya couldn't get the image of Sabine collapsing and her bloodied face out of her head.

She couldn't leave her in such a state. Regardless of what Viper was thinking.

"Alright."

"Did you talk to Neon?"

Reyna felt like huffing, but she knew that if she did, Viper would see that the subject of Valdez was not as indifferent to her as she had claimed in the lab.

"No."

"You should."

It wasn't an order. It sounded more like... advice. As Sabine took a sip of tea, she almost resembled someone close to Zyanya. Both, from the tone of her voice and her demeanor. She wasn't frigid, quite as if all her ice had suddenly begun to crumble, because perhaps she was too tired to keep it around her. It was only for a moment, perhaps only for the duration of this conversation, but Reyna felt that she was talking for those few moments to someone whom Sabine had kept out of the conversation for so long.

"First she should apologize to me," she replied, resting her head on headrest of the bed.

"She felt betrayed."

"Are you defending her?"

Sabine shrugged her shoulders. The tea in her mug wobbled, she lowered her gaze to it, focusing on the liquid movements of the drink.

"She was kind of right," she said.

"Calling you a monster?"

Maybe it was that Viper was tired and didn't have the strength to come up with another ploy that would leave Reyna with an unanswered question, or maybe she just wanted to speak this brutally honest truth so that both Zyanya and herself would acknowledge her existence.

"Saying you won't change me."

She could have expected many things, but not Reyna's response.

"And who said I want to?"

***

Fade knew something was wrong. Maybe not right away, because when she passed Neon during the day today, there was a little more tension in her step than usual, but otherwise everything was fine. However, when evening came and Tala stood in her doorway, Hazal had no idea whether the younger woman was more angry or sad.

"Hi-..."

The greeting didn't even have time to ring out fully, because Neon collided their lips with each other in a sudden kiss that... that had something different about it than all the others.

Dimaapi held her by the collar of her shirt and pushed her back, forcing a moan of surprise when Fade's hand spontaneously let go of the door, which she didn't manage to close.

Neon didn't want to waste any time. She feverishly kissed, bit and teased Fade's lips, her hands began to wander over her shoulders, waist and stomach.

"Hey, wait," gasped Hazal, trying between words to respond to the younger woman's kisses. Neon seemed not to hear her, entwining her arm around Eyletmez's neck. "The door is open, Tala-..."

"I don't give a shit."

This reinforced the light of that red lamp that had been glowing above Hazal's head since morning. She tried to reach back with her hand, hoping to reach the doorknob, but it only unbalanced her.

"What?" she whispered. "Neon, it's not a good-..."

"If they can have sex during the mission, I'm not going to hide at headquarters."

She tried to kiss her again, but Hazal pressed her hand against her chest. Gently, but to give her enough of a signal.

For the first time, Neon didn't listen. Or she didn't notice it. Or she ignored it, leaning over the elder's neck and attaching her lips to her henna tattoo.

"Hey, hey, hey, slow down." Hazal didn't want to use force, she wanted to understand what was going on, but panic began to creep into her skin with every second the door remained open. "What are you talking about?"

"Viper." Kiss. "Reyna." Kiss again. "If they can do it, so can I."

This broke the boundary of tolerance and Hazal moved away significantly. Neon looked at her, as if in disbelief and something like disappointment, but breathlessly led her away with her eyes as she closed the door and turned the lock.

Hazal stood facing the door for a moment, as if gathering her words. She turned around after a second or two to encounter Tala, who pressed her lips together.

I guess she was ashamed, although the anger she had seen in her eyes earlier smoldered like the tip of a cigarette in the darkness of the evening.

"What was that, Tala?"

The fact that there was no reproach in this question stung Neon's heart. And although she felt a sense of guilt toward Hazal, on the other hand, rage gnawed at her from the inside so much that she was ready to cry.

She folded her arms over her chest. However, she did not look at Hazal.

"They're fucking," she huffed, turning her gaze to the wall. Fade furrowed her brow. "I don't have direct evidence, but I heard them talking."

"And why would kissing me with the door open help?"

"It wasn't... I just... They can do it and we can't?" She asked. She almost howled, and her voice trembled with anger. "How is that supposed to be okay, huh? And why the hell didn't it even surprise you?"

"Are you sure you got it right? Maybe something was, you know, out of context?"

Neon snorted.

"You stand up for them, seriously?"

In her voice sounded disappointment, frustration, maybe something else that was anger that had been building up for weeks.

"You know that's not what I mean." Fade walked past Tala and sat down on the bed, hunching over as if the weight of the words she was about to say were dragging her down. "The rules still are there, you can't just come in here and do all of that, because-..."

"The rules they don't give a shit about, and I'm supposed to stick to them because they said so?" She hissed. "There is something between them, can't you really see that? No one comes to another person just to look at them for entertainment, and strangely enough, apart from Reyna, no one even dares to even breathe around the lab!"

"I know, Tala."

"Then why the hell are you on their side?"

Fade sighed. She honestly didn't believe those words would ever come out of her mouth, because it sounded downright absurd, but the truth was the truth, and she could no longer deny it.

"Because it's safer that way." She drummed her fingers on the mattress, feeling shivers pass through her at the mere mention. "You know yourself how it was last time."

Neon knew. All too well. Her stomach tightened into a knot, but the anger didn't let go.

"So I'm supposed to just keep quiet like this? Pretend to be stupid so that Viper doesn't accidentally shoot me in the head? That's what you think is the solution?"

"And do you see any other?"

Neon felt like punching a wall. Or start screaming. Fade's calmness was frightening and... and made her realize all too well that the older woman disagreed with her.

Fade was not always so conciliatory. In this matter, however, she had no choice.

Because other than the Protocol, she had nothing. She had nowhere to go back to, no home, no family and no job, and there was a bounty on her head all over Türkiye. Here she was protected and here she was fulfilled, trying to make up for her past at least in part.

If Viper took VALORANT away from her, Hazal Eyletmez would be left with nothing.

And maybe it was a bit selfish thinking, but she wasn't going to get into fights with someone like Viper just for the satisfaction. If she had to run away, lose contact with Neon and be left alone once again, she would sooner throw herself off a cliff than agree to it.

"They need to be shown that they don't have as much power as they think," she said. Turning on her heel, she began pacing around the room, as standing still meant that her emotions found no outlet. "Blackmail, whatever-"

"Blackmail doesn't work on Viper. She's not afraid of them, and no one will believe us. They'll throw us both out, because Brimstone won't deny Viper's words." Fade dragged her feet onto the bed and sat down cross-legged. The younger one continued pacing around the room, her step getting faster and faster, and Fade saw it. "Tala."

Tala stopped. For the first moment, Fade thought it was because she had come to the same conclusion she had - that they were powerless. As soon as the younger one spoke up, however, Fade quickly gave up hope.

"Nightmare." Neon turned around abruptly. "You can make her have a nightmare, right?"

Hazal didn't want to answer that question. Of course she was able to do it, and without much trouble. But dealing with the Nightmare was no fun.

Because Hazal hated her power more often than she appreciated it. It was exhausting, took a toll on her mind, and led to insomnia. But as much as she had grown accustomed to the effects on herself, she knew well how traumatic it was at times to encounter the nightmare of someone other than herself.

"Tala, I can't do it."

"But you’re able to?"

"That's beside the point, I can't do it."

"And she could make idiots of us? Humiliate, threaten?" She threw out. Seeing that Fade's expression didn't change much, she let out a breath. "Could she shot you?"

Silence. Hazal tightened her eyelids. A strong argument.

"It's still-..."

"She is a monster. And it's time for her to finally understand that nothing she does will go unnoticed. I'm not saying you should kill her, this is about one sleepless night." Hazal sighed. She pressed her lips together, not quite sure whether she wanted to look at Neon or not after all. "Please, Hazal."

Fade sometimes hated that she was able to do anything for Neon.

Chapter 17: SEVENTEEN

Reyna was awakened by a scream.

At first she thought it was her own, or that it was just a bird calling somewhere outside, as sleep disturbed her sober thinking.

But right after that, the other side of the bed moved violently several times, the quilt was thrown to the floor, and Reyna heard a familiar wheezing and unhealthy rapid breathing, and if she had looked closely, she would have seen that skinny body trembling under the sweaty clothes.

Viper stood up, frantically moved her hand across the windowsill, opened the drawer of the nightstand, rummaged inside and furiously yanked the drawer from inside.

With a clatter, it fell to the ground.

"Sabine?"

Viper stopped over the drawer torn from the cabinet, panting heavily, and the first thing that came to Reyna's mind when she looked at it was the sight of a deer seeing the lights of an oncoming car when it's too late. A terror-stricken animal that sees death in its pure form and the fear is so great that its every muscle freezes in stillness.

Callas' eyes were glazed over. Her face glistened with sweat, her lower lip trembled. Her name spoken by Zyanya only now made her realize that she was not alone.

That the jaws of the nightmare clamping down on her dying body had let go, and she was not falling into nothingness, lower and lower toward the emptiness that had accompanied her all her life and had just now caught up with her.

Now, when she was damaged, weak, sick. Now, when she sometimes had the feeling that death was staring at her from around the corner, but retreating into the shadows, as if changing its mind.

"Cigarettes," she croaked out. She almost didn't recognize her own voice. She felt like spitting the stranger out of her throat. "Where do you have them."

Reyna blinked, trying to focus, to gather her thoughts. She knew that arguing wasn't a good idea, so she simply got out of bed and pulled a pack of cigs from her sweatshirt slung over a chair.

She threw them toward Viper along with a lighter. And momentarily she felt as if she was throwing a piece of meat to a hungry animal.

Because Viper frantically snatched one from the package, she placed it in her dry lips as her thumb tried to press the trigger of the lighter, but the flame flickered on and off, drawing an indistinct curse from her lips.

When she finally succeeded, Sabine clenched her eyelids as she drew calming, poisonous smoke into her lungs, and only then did she stand up and open the balcony.

She acted as if Reyna wasn't there. As if she was shaking off the ashes alone, as she did every evening, as if the strange soothing loneliness was so addictive to her that she was able to talk herself into it for peace of mind.

But she was trembling all over. Shaking, like a branch in the wind, although she either didn't feel it or pretended she didn’t. The evening was chilly, but her fingers wrapped around the metal railing anyway and clung to it tightly as she breath after breath released gray smoke straight into space.

Zyanya sighed, taking out a cigarette for herself as well.

However, she fired it only outside, when the hiss of the ignited tip matched Sabine's breathing. She also spoke up after one or two breaths, as if doing it right away was too risky.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

At one time, she would have thought it was idiotic to ask Viper this question. Because, after all, Viper didn't want to talk. Talking was something that was far from her conversation. Talking about herself... actually something like that didn't exist.

But now, seeing Viper in the clouds of gray smoke with which she was poisoned, Reyna didn't feel it was a bad move.

"There's nothing to talk about." Viper, as usual, didn't look at her and probably wanted to shrug her shoulders, but gave up halfway through the movement, when her muscles began to tremble. "It's just a nightmare."

Reyna nodded.

"Maybe it is." She let out a cloud of smoke from between her lips. "But just a nightmare, it's still a nightmare."

She saw that Viper was shivering from the cold and even wanted to suggest that maybe standing on the balcony in the middle of the night wasn't a good idea, but then she realized... that Viper needed this.

The sobering up. Awareness that she was still here. That the darkness had not devoured her. Reyna knew the feeling well.

"I'm fine."

Now maybe she was. But Sabine could still feel the icy tentacles of the nightmare entwining her hands like a sickening web, the salvo of whispers that vibrated her skin, and that stifling fear, taking away her breath and turning the air into thick tar.

Fade's nightmares were different from the usual ones. They reached into the mind, into the soul. They paralyzed and reminded only of the worst. They brought out the most gruesome details, which were so realistically rendered that they were almost physically palpable.

This one was one of them.

"You know, you don't have to be ashamed of being scared." The words spoken by Zyanya sounded almost nonchalant.

Out of the corner of her eye, Sabine saw the minimal scowl on her face, but it immediately disappeared as she drew another puff of smoke into her lungs.

"I'm not ashamed of anything."

Viper cleared her throat as the hoarseness returned. She didn't sound confident, which is why she didn't look at Reyna. She didn't want to look at her when she wasn't sure what she was saying.

"Is that so?"

Sabine felt like forcing the question back down her throat, but she just turned her head somewhere to the side, wordlessly saying 'think what you want’.

"Whatever I say, you will deny it," Viper replied.

Her nails drummed on the railing of the balcony, and the sound almost added a note of melancholy to the whole scene.

"Is that surprising?"

Reyna shook off the ash, and the white powder disappeared somewhere in the darkness of the night. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed that Viper was trying to put her arms around her, but to do it discreetly enough so that Zyanya wouldn't notice.

"No, rather not." She nonchalantly put out her cigarette, pressing the tip against the cold metal. Later she dropped it on the floor, and when she didn't meet Mondragón's objection, she simply watched it go out. "All in all, it's impressive that you're still trying," she said.

"You don't have to pretend you're made of stone." Reyna's gaze wandered somewhere in the darkness as she machinically inhaled the rest of the drug. "It's hard to be normal after you go out, kill and then go back to life as if nothing happened. Everyone knows that."

"It's probably not the best topic for now, don't you think?" Sabine didn't use resentment or reproach in her voice. It sounded more like a sigh of exhaustion when fighting a killer headache. "You're flying on a mission on Monday, that's not good motivation."

Reyna nodded, silently agreeing to the arrangement. However, when she put out her cigarette, which landed not far from that of Viper, the silence was broken.

"Where did you get those scars?"

She saw Sabine tighten her lips, and it was this one gesture that gave her away. Because maybe if she hadn't, she would have managed to dispose of her, pretend she didn't know what Zyanya was talking about.

But she did know. Because she herself knew well that this sight is not forgotten. The paper-thin skin on her back almost digested alive God only knows when. The trace of a wound that looked fatal, which was nothing compared to the small ones Reyna managed to see before.

"Really?" She asked. "You go from one shitty topic to an even shittier one, wow."

Sabine felt like lighting a second cigarette.

However, there was something in that tired tone that surprised Zyanya. Yes, each of them had scars. Each of them had been shot, scratched with a knife, or even stabbed, leaving marks on their skin, impossible to eliminate even by Sage.

So no one was ashamed of it. Viper was reluctant to show her body, she knew that. But now Reyna couldn't shake the feeling that as she spoke, there was fear lurking around in Vipers voice.

And that lit that red light. Reyna gathered her words not because she didn't know what she wanted to say, but because the very fact that this question arose in her mind made her fingers clench into fists of their own.

"Who did this to you?"

Viper lowered her head. That one short, characteristically hollow laugh of hers rang out into the night of the evening, and her body trembled again from the cold.

"And will you believe me when I say it was Sage?"

***

Reyna hissed under her breath when Skye treated her wound with disinfectant, but only waved her hand when the Australian apologized.

They didn't talk much. Actually... no one said much.

The mission was successful, but there was no agent who returned uninjured. The opponents were fierce, fiercer than usual, so no one said a word, too tired to speak the whole flight back to HQ.

So they sat, quiet as a mouse under a broom in the hospital section, every now and then looking at each other with remorse and compassion as Sage and Skye treated wounds, stitched up cuts and cleaned smaller injuries with eyes full of concentration.

Skye was healed first by Sage so she could help bandage the rest, but still... there was plenty of work to do.

Jett sat in a chair against the wall waiting her turn with a possibly broken arm and a cut lip, her gaze drowsily roaming all over the place. Deadlock pressed gauze against her bleeding nose as Sage sewed up the gunshot wound on her thigh. And Reyna, with a slit in her eyebrow and blood slowly drying on her eyelid, laboriously followed Skye's movements as she secured her shoulder before the shot clavicle would do more damage than it already did.

But still, despite this silence and even the remorse and fatigue ringing in her, something hung in the air. Something unspoken, though raring to resound.

And it resounded when Sage moved away from Deadlock for a moment to straighten her back.

"It's her fault." Although Ling didn't see it, all pairs of eyes turned right on her, unsure if the woman was expecting a reaction or finishing the thought. "Site A was not guarded by anyone," she said.

"Because we kicked their asses there last time," muttered Jett, leaning her head against the wall behind her with a quiet sigh. "If I were them, I wouldn't step into the same shit twice either."

Jett answered calmly, but Sage furrowed her eyebrows, as if this statement upset her. Sunwoo didn't understand what the healer meant, and that was that moment.

"So it is the best to leave the site completely alone?" she replied. "I still don't believe we went according to that plan," she hissed, more to herself than to anyone around her, but she caught Reyna's attention.

"The plan was good," she said. She met the Chinese woman's gaze, but didn't yield, although she felt everyone else suddenly lower their gaze. "Jett is right, from a psychological point of view, the enemy gives up attacking where it lost last time," she said.

"Good?" Sage almost spit out the word. "If it was so good, then explain to me why we barely made it home alive?"

Reyna was tired, but anger crept into her voice on its own.

"Because it happens sometimes?" She asked rhetorically. "You act as if you've suddenly forgotten what our job is all about."

Sage squeezed the alcohol-soaked cotton swab in her hand, momentarily freezing in stillness over Deadlock's wound, who probably wasn't sure where she should look so as not to run into this war of glances between Reyna and Sage.

"Are you saying that because that was Viper's plan?"

Zyanya snorted.

"And you're criticizing it because it was actually a Viper plan?" she bit back. "The security of the disarmament area was perfect, Omen and Brimstone bought us a lot of time by placing out the smokes."

She saw Jett shyly nod, but did so in a way that only Reyna could see. Skye grunted, picked up the first better tool that fell into her hands and headed toward the sink.

She was buying time. No one wanted to be between the two of them.

"They secured the area when we almost lost people," Ling stated. "The strategy is abo-"

"Have you ever been a controller?"

Skye seemed to have dropped something in the sink. She muttered a quiet 'sorry’. Jett stuck her gaze into the water dispenser next to her, as if the bubbles being released there were the most interesting event of the day. Deadlock, on the other hand, as soon as Sage finished patching her up, gathered herself up and left, grabbing her jacket on the way.

"What does that even have to do with anything?"

"Yes, or no?"

"Why should I be? I'm a sentinel, and I'm perfectly content with the responsibility that comes with it."

Reyna's eyes flashed warningly, and she sincerely hoped Ling noticed. Zyanya wanted her to be afraid. Zyanya wanted her to be afraid, although she wasn't sure why.

"Ah, so only your role is responsible?" Sage wanted to open her mouth and deny it, but didn't have time. "So what do you think I am? Cannon meat?”

"Don't put words in my mouth that aren't mine," growled Sage. Reyna was sure that if it weren't for her broken arm, Jett would have fled out of the room in a split second. "All I'm saying is that mission plans can't contain that much risk."

Zyanya felt a burst of satisfaction in her stomach when the moment finally arrived. It finally caught her, finally she could use that argument that Sage so often used to shield others and... and criticize Viper when Viper herself pointed it out.

"So now you're saying that not everyone has the right to be wrong after all?"

If it weren't for the remnants of her composure, she would have smiled wryly. She felt the corner of her mouth lift up on its own as those words bounced off the walls and went straight to the healer. Even the cut eyebrow arch stopped giving a hint, and the shattered collarbone did not cause pain.

Sage knew what Reyna was getting at.

"Viper is a commander," she howled. "She's a commander and a strategist, it's her damn job to ensure the right scheme of action."

Zyanya ostentatiously eyed her own fingernails.

"Actually... it's not." She put all her strength into holding back a smile. "You and Brimstone kicked her out of this position, didn't you?" She didn't wait for an answer, Sage's face petrified with anger was satisfying enough. "And that was your mission. You might as well have thrown that plan in the trash, and yet you stuck to it because you didn't have a better one yourself. So whose fault do you think it actually is?"

Sage fell silent. Skye returned instead, wiping her wet hands on her pants and apparently preparing to heal Zyanya’s cut eyebrow with her power. Reyna stopped her with a hand gesture and got up from her chair.

"I can handle it."

***

Viper often lost track of time. Especially in the lab, where she actually spent more time than in her own quarters, because sometimes she had the feeling that here time flowed somehow differently.

Perhaps that's why the mission day ended faster than she thought, and the sound of the door opening startled her.

She peeled her eyes away from the computer, and although she had so many questions, she didn't manage to ask any of them.

"Can you patch me up?"

Amusement sounded in Reyna's voice.

Perhaps she herself found the situation amusing. Well... she didn't fit in in the white, in places sterile lab, with clotted blood on her face, a bandaged arm and clothes that still showed traces of soot.

Viper's eyes widened at this sight. Immediately, however, her eyebrows furrowed in concentration and she slammed the laptop shut in the same second.

Zyanya looked around laboriously, finally selected Viper's swivel chair and sat down on it with a quiet sigh. She stretched out her legs, leaned her head against the headrest and wandered her gaze behind Sabine, who was gathering the necessary items.

"Comfortable," she muttered, pressing herself further into the seat. She drummed her fingers against the armrest. "Do you recommend it for a sore back?"

Sabine placed a portable stool in front of her.

"Where the hell is Sage?" she asked, pulling on latex gloves once she had slid a stack of papers to one side of the desk to make more room for medical supplies. "That's her job, not mine."

She looked over Mondragón's shoulder, but realized that only the wound on her eyebrow was the problem.

Reyna settled more comfortably in her chair and laughed softly.

"Aw, Sabine, aren't you glad to see me?"

Viper fuked under her breath. A sound that one doesn't know whether it was annoyance, amusement, or a strange combination of both emotions.

"You? No, not at all."

"Oh, fuck you."

"You almost bled my tiles, I'm not going to jump to the ceiling of happiness because of that."

Zyanya snorted with laughter. Viper didn't, too focused on soaking a cotton swab in alcohol as well as avoiding Reyna's gaze, which was clearly wandering over her hands.

She leaned over her, beginning to wipe the dried blood from Mondragón's temples and eyelids. Her violet eyes were sure to bore that penetrating look of hers, but she was focused enough that she managed to ignore it.

Until a certain point.

"And where did that personal space of yours go, serpiente?"

Sabine moved back for a moment and squinted her eyelids.

"Did you inhale something or what?" Reyna just laughed. Briefly and deeply. "And I already told you not to call me that."

"La serpiente sigue siendo venenosa, ¿no?"

"I have no idea what you just said, but if you don't shut up right away, you'll end up with a needle in your eye."

Viper actually only knew the word serpiente. None of the others had ever occurred to her, and she had only learned this one from context.

Reyna, however, said nothing more, allowing Callas to act. She unwillingly wandered her eyes here, there, looking for something in the lab that she could hang her gaze on that wasn't Viper herself.

She was used to the feeling of having her skin stitched up, so the pain was familiar and no more unpleasant than usual, but she drew some shapes on the armrest with a single finger anyway.

"Why didn't Sage patch you up?"

Zyanya only realized the question had been asked when the sound of a stool being put down snapped her out of her reverie. Viper tossed the gloves into the trash, taking one last look at the now-protected wound.

"She was busy."

She wanted to sound confident, but somewhere in the back of her mind she felt that Viper would sense the lie.

She couldn't shrug her shoulders to emphasize her indifference, and probably because of this she got the impression that her answer sounded more artificial than ever before.

Viper nodded, but Reyna had already learned that that didn't mean she agreed with anything at all. The chemist stood up, turning her back for a moment to spread out her papers back where she had placed her medical supplies earlier.

"You didn't want to talk to her, did you?" she asked. Zyanya felt uncomfortable, hearing how confidently Viper said those words. It was as if she already knew the truth and was only asking to see her reaction. "Because of what I told you," she quipped, shoving her hands into her lab coat pockets.

She stared at the countertop as if waiting for Mondragón's reaction, but she wasn't ready enough to look at her.

"I didn't want to talk to her because I didn't feel like it," she said. Zyanya raised her head higher automatically. Perhaps subconsciously she wanted to look more confident. "She started rambling about the mission, I didn't want to hear it, that's all."

Viper nodded, although Reyna knew that this she probably didn't believe her. She also knew that Viper would like to know some details, but would not ask of her own accord. Or at least not directly.

"Did she say something about me?"

However, she was wrong.

The memory of Sage's angry face as she squeezed the cotton swab in her hands, her voice turning into a growl whenever she mentioned the plan.

She knew a safer option than telling Viper all this. Although she could tell. Actually, nothing stood in her way.

But she didn't want to do that. Not if all she was going to get in response was a shrug of the shoulders and disposal of those words with a wave of the hand, as if Viper was used to someone questioning her skills and had already come to terms with the fact that she would never be what she probably would have wanted for others.

She didn't want to see Viper's indifference to being considered an element that only gets in the way.

"No."

Zyanya had no remorse about lying.

***

Sabine found some strange, indefinable peace in watching Killjoy.

She didn't know quite what this feeling stemmed from, but she knew that sometimes... she even envied her. The time KJ still had, which she had not yet wasted. The lack of knowledge about how someone can be destroyed to the marrow of their bones.

"It doesn't want to accept the code."

Sabine immediately returned her eyes to her laptop as soon as she sensed that Klara was going to look at her. She played her part well.

"It happens, it's okay," she said, glancing at the younger woman out of the corner of her eye. The latter slumped in her chair and looked at her computer in frustration. "Try again."

Viper sometimes didn't recognize herself when she was in the company of Killjoy.

Perhaps in Killjoy she saw herself from a dozen years ago. Perhaps there was still hope smoldering in the eyes of Sabine Callas' reflection that the original no longer had.

"I've tried a thousand times." Killjoy rested her head on her hand. The LED of the robot connected to the computer flashed an annoying red, but Viper managed to avoid it with her eyes. "Can you check it?"

Sabine didn't flinch.

"I'm a chemist, not a computer scientist," she stated. "Try again, I'm sure you'll get it."

Killjoy sighed. But she moved her chair closer to the workshop desk, reluctantly taking a screwdriver in her hand. She unscrewed the back cover of the turret before she spoke.

"I should be there with them," she muttered.

Probably more to herself than to Viper, but the latter heard anyway and furrowed her brow. Her nearby hands froze over the keyboard.

"What are you talking about?"

Killjoy shrugged her shoulders.

"I met Jett. She was handing me my MP3 back and we chatted for a while." She rewired the cable to another port and stuck her gaze into the lines of code on the computer screen. "Maybe if I had been there, the robots would have bought them some time or something."

Viper felt the bitter aftertaste of something she couldn't name appear on her tongue.

"It's not your fault." For a moment, she considered putting a hand on Clara's shoulder, but backed off that move. "The mission was difficult, they suffered several injuries. If Brimstone didn't assign you to this task, then it means it was supposed to be like that."

"You would have assigned me?"

Sabine blinked. Killjoy moved away from the robot and corrected her glasses, but waited for an answer.

"It's hard to answer a question like that when it's all over anyway," she said.

"But if you could, would you do it? Hypothetically."

"No, rather not."

"So in your opinion the plan was good?"

Sabine moved away from the desk, the wheels of the chair rustled, and she folded her arms over her chest, staring at Killjoy, who seemed to have lost some of her courage, as she lowered her gaze to her hands. However, she did not seem contrite or intimidated.

"Why do you ask that?" Klara let out a breath. For some reason she seemed frustrated to Viper, even though barely a moment ago their conversation had a light tone. Moreover, she seemed to be thinking deeply about something. "Killjoy?"

"I shouldn't tell you that." Sabine's raised eyebrow, however she showed that she was not about to budge without an answer. "Sage was mad about the mission putting our people at too much risk," she said.

"Sage... got mad?" Sabine couldn't hold back a short laugh of disbelief. "In public?"

Killjoy shrugged her shoulders.

"Jett told me," she explained. "And when Reyna started arguing with her-..."

"About the mission?"

"About the plan." Sabine was sure that consternation could easily be read on her face. "Because it was yours."

"And that's what they argued about?"

"That's what I understood."

What followed was a silence that was so saturated with thoughts that it even ceased to be silence. Viper tried to imagine it all, but slowly began to doubt that she could do it.

Angry Sage? Reyna standing up to Sage about… Her? And all this in the presence of others?

It was so unimaginable that Sabine felt like bursting into laughter.

But she sat silently, and although she probably didn't know what she could actually say, Killjoy bailed her out.

"The plan was good," she said.

"You weren't there."

"I didn't have to," the younger one replied. Mechanically she corrected her glasses. "Every time I went on a mission with you, I knew I would return safely, so it couldn't be any different now."

Viper felt a hoop tighten around her throat. She probably even started to smile, but she was so unused to it that the final smile was probably crooked.

"I probably shouldn't say this out loud about mentors, because you're one too, but sometimes I think Sage... overreacts. And I don't think I can always understand her."

"You don't have to say that, just because I'm here.”

"I'm serious, Viper. I know that you've been removed from command, that..." Seeing the wry look on Viper's face, she cut off. Leaning back in her chair, Sabine met their gazes, though she was probably afraid of it. She was afraid that Killjoy would actually see the faith in her person. Because it felt unnatural for Viper to be the source of faith. "You should talk to Brimstone, explain-..."

"He doesn't want to talk," she interrupted briefly. "And... I don't think I want to either."

"So you want to give up?" Resentment sounded in the younger woman's voice, and somewhere even disappointment smoldered. "Just because he's also a controller doesn't mean he can replace you in everything."

Viper didn't respond. That's because she probably didn't know what one responds in such situations. In situations where she is... appreciated. In situations that haven't happened to her since time immemorial.

"We need you, Viper. Even if you may think otherwise."

Viper had been thinking about those words all day. And she wasn't sure what she should be feeling or if she was still able to feel… Anything.

Chapter 18: EIGHTEEN

Viper felt it.

That Reyna didn't know how she should react to her presence. She felt that Zyanya was drilling her eyes into her figure, trying to read anything before she even spoke, trying to understand what the mug of tea Viper had placed on her nightstand meant. Viper did it as if she was doing it her whole life.

As if it was normal.

As if Viper didn't see anything strange about it.

"What?" she muttered under her breath, mechanically rubbing her hands over her pants as she put down the hot tea, Reyna's gaze still fixed on her. "It's just tea, I'm not going to poison you," she said.

"And that's what's the strangest thing about all of this."

Amusement echoed in Reyna's voice. Viper couldn't quite tell if it was a mockery or an actual joke, or if she included notes of that characteristic venom in that sentence, but she herself didn't hear it.

What she certainly didn't hear, on the other hand, was genuine, unabashed surprise.

"Whatever."

Viper turned away from her and walked toward the door as her fingertips continued to tingle from the heat.

"Hey, I was just kidding." Sabine paused. And when she turned around, Reyna's face showed remorse and maybe... guilt. Viper felt her own lips go numb from keeping them shut. "Thank you."

Viper nodded, though so minimally that Zyanya hardly noticed. But she faced her, intertwining her arms on her chest, and although her gaze originally wandered somewhere around the room, she looked into Reyna's eyes eventually.

"Still hurts?"

With a movement of her chin, she pointed to the still immobilized arm. Reyna involuntarily looked there, but immediately turned back to Viper, as if afraid that if she didn't do it in time, Sabine would give up completely and leave.

"It's passing," she said. "It will be over in an hour."

Viper nodded again. Zyanya felt that Callas was thinking about something, that she wanted to say something that was definitely not what she had said so far. That she had a question that she didn't ask simply because she didn't know how to try on the task.

Viper continued to look around the room for a few more seconds, taking a step this way, that way. She moved her finger across the desk top and only then leaned her loins against it. She let out a breath and for maybe less than a second she put on that mask that Reyna knew.

She did this before every conversation. A mask of nothingness and indifference to everything. The mask of the icy Viper that broke before Reyna's eyes too often for her to believe it was truly real.

"You were arguing with Sage," she announced.

Reyna rolled her eyes.

"We were just talking."

Viper could have been amused by the fact that Mondragón was trying to lie, but instead she straightened her back and sighed.

As usual, she wanted to be higher.

"It's interesting, because Killjoy told me that Sage got mad," she said.

Or just to see if Reyna would lie.

She didn’t. She let out a breath, then opened her mouth as if to say something, but quickly closed it. She repeated the scheme again, still without result, and probably this effect began to frustrate her, because just like Viper she tightened her lips into a narrow line, as if she was never going to speak again in her life.

"Okay, I talked to her." Sabine raised an eyebrow. Zyanya felt like rolling her eyes. "...maybe a little more aggressively than usual, satisfied? Why do you care, you weren't with us then anyway."

"Because I was in the lab," Sabine shrugged her shoulders. "Besides, you came to me yourself, claiming that you didn't talk about me back then, don't you remember?"

Reyna didn't remember. She had forgotten her lie, and that's what gave her away.

Zyanya, however, was not outraged. Maybe it was a matter of fatigue, maybe that developing the conversation into an argument was not something she currently felt like doing. She just sighed and corrected herself on the bed, pulling herself up more into a sitting position.

"I didn't tell you because there was no point in you listening to this bullshit," she said.

"So you decided I had no right to know?"

"I decided that I wouldn't tell you things that didn't matter." Zyanya endured Viper's gaze on her even if, for a moment, she felt like running away from it. "She accused you of faults that weren't true because she was pissed that the mission was harder than we thought."

Viper accepted this answer, but her gaze did not soften.

"You didn't agree with her," she said.

"Because she was wrong."

Viper was silent for a while. Most likely she was thinking how to put the words together so that it would play out as logically as possible.

Nothing came to her mind. Nothing complicated, nothing in her style. So she decided to go with simplicity, even if she didn't like to just reveal what was on her mind.

"You took my side," she said. It didn't escape Reyna that in saying this, Viper avoided her gaze, staring at her fingers clenching on the edge of the desk. "You didn't have to."

Reyna shrugged her shoulders how much she could due to her injury. Viper furrowed her eyebrows slightly, wondering if the fact that she saw embarrassment in Zyanya was real or completely made up.

"You didn't do anything wrong. She should know that."

Viper chewed her cheek on the inside, or at least that's how it seemed to Reyna. For a moment she wanted to say something, but only drummed her fingers on the edge of the desk.

"How are the others?" she finally asked, lowering her gaze to Mondragón's bandaged arm.

"They'll be fine."

Viper nodded.

"Alright."

She quickly retreated to the door, and accepted with a slight wince the fact that a headache was lurking around the corner.

Reyna didn't stop her, but drank the tea.

***

Sabine felt like screaming when the last box of painkillers in her cabinet turned up empty.

She should clean up here. She should have cleaned here earlier, then she would have known, then she would have been able to buy, then... then maybe she would have been stronger. Maybe the pain wouldn't overwhelm her like a stone thrown on her back, wouldn't take her breath away and force her to obey like a trained lion in a circus.

She wiped her face with her hands, feeling them shake. The headache was ringing alarm bells. A persistent siren that flickers red and makes her feel like closing her eyes and never opening them again.

She threw the empty cardboard box on the floor. She clenched her hand into a fist, unclenched it. She clenched her hand into a fist, unclenched it. Her fingers were sweaty, she wiped them in her pants.

She had no medicine. It had run out. She should have figured it out sooner, not now, when the pain intensified with every breath, and she could already smell the aftertaste of blood in her mouth.

She was the weak one again. The one who could be broken easily, because all her strength had gone somewhere around the corner and was watching her from her hiding place, too shy to return.

"Fuck."

She felt disgusted with herself when she heard how pathetic she sounded.

She could tear that voice from her own throat, because it wasn't hers. This version of Sabine Callas was a mere shadow of what she wanted to become, some character, fake and broken with flaws, cracks, malfunctions. She was her greatest nightmare that... was just happening.

After all, it had to work at some point, right? All those damn samples, one of them had to be the good one, one of them had to fix her.

After all, she couldn't end up like this.

Not her.

And not today.

She just has to get over this fucking headache and somehow it will work out. It will settle down.

She left her quarters, hoping not to leave a trail of red stains behind her soon after.

Not knowing when, she found herself in the med section, traversing the room quickly, skillfully. Skillfully, after all, she knew them like the back of her hand.

But in her head there was only noise. The walls were overwhelming her, beginning to crush her. The IV racks glowed with a metallic gleam, unbearable more than the pain, and the smell of disinfectant lapped up the last meal in her throat.

She pushed back the curtain, almost yanking it open. The material touched her shoulder, and she shuddered.

The cabinets were full of medicine. Surely she would find something here. Surely something that would fix her, at least for a while, so that the rasps of a deteriorating body would fall silent and give a little hope that things would get better now.

Her hands were shaking. She rubbed her nose, but encountered no blood on her skin, only cold sweat, which made the browsed packages of pills slip from her hands. More than one of them fell to the floor and met Viper's curses when she picked them up.

Her gaze quickly analyzed the inscriptions, but none of them were sufficient. She rummaged through the boxes, immediately putting them back as if they were hurting her, and the texture of the packaging only reminded her that if she was perfect she wouldn't be here at all.

What she needed wasn't there. There wasn't enough solace in all that damned pile of damned medicine.

She felt like dropping everything on the floor and staring at the chaos while waiting for it to apologize for creating it.

She had to fix herself. There had to be something here to fix her.

Because she wasn't broken, was she? Everything was under control.

Her gaze stopped on the disposable syringes. They were prepared in advance in sterile packages, for any emergencies.

The label convinced her. It might have helped. It gave hope that it was okay. That she was okay. Because she was fine, of course she was.

After all, things were never bad with Sabine Callas.

She noticed how she clutched the syringes tightly, her knuckles turning white and her fingers numb. Her gaze didn't register what she was seeing, because maybe it didn't want to believe it and whitewash Sabine of everything she had just done.

But as soon as she pushed the syringes into the pocket of her lab coat, she heard the hinges creak slightly and someone entered the room.

"Is there any of that disinfectant left?"

Skye's voice caused goosebumps at the back of Viper's neck, and she mechanically wiped her hand on the inside of her pocket, feeling it cover itself with a new layer of sweat. However, she did not turn away from the cabinet she had rummaged through earlier, as that would have been too suspicious.

Instead, she slowly closed the door of the cabinet as she always did, as if the syringes weren't weighing her down with an imaginary weight on one side. For the first time she felt the bitter taste of fear in her mouth, but she mastered her emotions before they could tear through her mask.

She cleared her throat before she spoke; she had to get rid of the trembling.

"I think there is some on the windowsill," she said.

She turned away, as nonchalantly as she could, so that only she knew the tension lurking in her muscles. She was afraid Skye would look too closely, but as it turned out, she was already standing by the windowsill and pulling back the curtain.

Sabine felt like covering her lab coat pocket with her hand. If only for the illusory impression that it would do something.

She did so, heading slowly for the exit.

She felt like turning around this one last time and seeing if she was sure she hadn't left any marks. Whether her shoes were dirty and their prints hadn't left any traces, whether there wasn’t any package scrambling around somewhere within the confines of the cabinet, apparently distant from the rest.

But she trusted herself. After all, she wasn't crazy.

"Okay, I got it. Thanks." Sabine didn't respond. Skye furrowed her eyebrows, and her gaze moved over the chemist's figure, as if searching for something. "Everything okay?"

Viper twitched slightly. She forced herself to have an indifferent expression on her face.

"Headache."

And she walked out, the sound of syringes clinking against each other ringing echoing in her head.

***

Skye probably had never witnessed a frustrated Sage, except for this one return from a mission, so when she experienced it twice again in less than two days she was surprised to say the least.

"Did the gardening left its marks?" asked Sage as she turned away from one of the cabinets.

A smile was on her lips, though Skye could see the frustration lurking behind it. Sage rarely strayed from her calm and friendly aura, and that was true this time as well.

"A little," she replied, shrugging her shoulders. She took out a small bottle from her sweatshirt pocket. "I reflexively put it in my pocket, but it came in handy." Sage only glanced fleetingly at the spray, which Skye put down on the windowsill, and returned to her search. "What are you looking for?"

Ling smiled softly, but didn't stop rearranging the boxes and bottles to one side and the other. On her face, the focus was clearly beginning to turn to frustration.

"Jett asked me to bring her something more, because the fracture in her arm is giving her a hard time after all," she explained. "I wanted to give her morphine, but I can't find it anywhere."

Skye put her arms across her chest. Although she tried to suppress the feeling, she increasingly got the impression that something bad was hanging in the air.

"Maybe you put it somewhere else? You know, there's been a lot going on lately and stuff."

Sage rested her hands on her hips, and with resignation, she first drove her gaze to the floor and then to Kirra, shaking her head. She was silent for a moment, only then her eyebrows drew together in concentration.

"Did you see anyone here?" she asked.

Skye didn't really know if she wanted to speak up, or if sometimes keeping silent on the issue would have been a better idea.

Everyone knew about Sage's conflict with Viper. And at the same time, no one wanted to interfere in any way with their bickering, and Skye was one of them.

On the other hand, Sage, after her sigh, probably figured out that the Australian knew something. There was no point in trying to salvage a situation that was putting Viper in a bad light anyway.

And Skye in the middle of the ongoing war between them.

"I passed by Viper earlier, but I don't think-....," she said.

"She was here?"

Sage outwardly didn't show much, as it wasn't in her nature, but there was something in her usually poised voice now that Skye thought didn't sound one bit... like Sage.

Foster shrugged her shoulders.

"She came for something for her headache." Sage's eyebrows drew together even more, and Skye felt even more that she had done really terrible timing. "But it might as well have been anyone."

She didn't think that would do anything. And she was probably right.

Because Sage didn't believe her. And although Skye wasn't there, it wasn't long before the healer found herself in the kitchen with rage painted on her face more clearly than ever.

"Give it back."

Sabine raised one eyebrow, wrapping her fingers tighter around the coffee mug.

"Excuse me?"

Sage didn't take her eyes off her for a moment. She didn't even look around, didn't pay attention to Killjoy busy playing PlayStation in the living room or Deadlock reading a book. Even when their gazes shifted to both of them in the open kitchen, Sage was only looking at Viper, plunging the knife into her body with every breath.

"I said, give it back," she growled. "You know very well what I mean, so don't play dumb."

"So far you're the one acting irrationally," Viper replied.

The knuckles of her hand whitened gently, but other than that she just threw Sage a look full of resentment.

"You stole meds from the cabinet," Ling stated. She didn't see Killjoy's gaze wander in their direction, which was a shame. Maybe then she would have stopped herself. "I know it was you."

Viper snorted with laughter, shifted her mug to her other hand, and put the second one in her pants pocket.

"Don't be ridiculous. First of all, everyone has access to that locker, and even if it wasn't any of us, be so nice and don't insult me just because you forget where you put your stuff."

Sage was not like Viper. She didn't smile maliciously when she was right, she didn't exalt herself. Sage was staking out facts. And one of them she was just about to pull out of her sleeve.

"Only you would choose a syringe over pills." Something in Viper twitched, but she didn't show it with anything more than pressing her fingertips against the walls of the cup. "You know it works faster that way. And you know morphine is stronger than regular paracetamol."

"Anyone who doesn't live under a rock knows that," she replied. With a hint of laughter, one of her significant ones, one that was meant to mask everything she felt. "I didn't take anything and you won't make me think otherwise," she said.

"Of the two of us, you're the one telling yourself that everything is fine with you," Sage said. "And as far as I know it's not, is it?"

Sabine felt like slapping her in the face. To force her to shut up, to let the shock close her mouth and never dare speak in her presence again.

No one had the right to point out her weaknesses. No one, not even herself. And certainly not Sage, who uttered these words with complete confidence, aware that they would hit where they should. That they would show that she was less than perfect in the presence of other agents, something Viper hated. Sage knew how to deliver that punch.

Viper put down her coffee, and the sound of a mug clashing with the countertop carried even through the living room.

Killjoy hunched over the console, Deadlock flipped another page of the book, though her gaze wandered in a different direction every now and then. It was as if they suddenly regretted being in the same room.

"You don't have the right to talk about it," Viper snarled, feeling her jaw ache from being held in suspense. Her tongue was suddenly a stone, and she wasn't sure if it belonged to her. It was suddenly foreign, though the bitter aftertaste of venom always remained. "You don't know shit."

The healer didn't seem too concerned by the words.

"And that’s the whole problem. You're right, I don't know shit. And I guess I should have been goddamn told that the person I'm working with is not capable of doing the job," she threw out. Her hand was clenched into a fist, although Viper could see she was trying to loosen it. "Are you going to do something about these hemorrhages, or are you just going to continue robbing us, pretending you know everything better?"

Sabine was aware of Killjoy's eyes on her, she was aware that both she and Deadlock were witnessing this discussion and listening.

They were listening about how weak she was. That she was a leader who was falling apart, that she was a flawed product of her own life. That she was sick in the most literal and therefore most human sense of the word.

Killjoy shouldn't listen to this. Not now, when she was the only person who still saw Viper as the open-minded scientist she was a few years ago, instead of the battle-weary soldier who loses the strength to take out a rifle and pull the trigger.

She could fight too. She too could expose Ling to the team at any time.

"I should be informed that the person I'm working with is a liar," she said. There was little emotion in her tone. In fact, for the first time, Sabine's voice sounded completely colorless, even without that note of mockery. The feeling of being exposed crept chills over her skin, but she shrugged it off just enough to keep her attitude in check. "Because I don't think you can deny that you've done something wrong before, can you, Sage?"

Now that note of anger that Viper loved to see flashed through Sage's eyes. But there was also fear lurking there, even if Ling's next words contradicted that.

"If it's so important to you, go on."

Sage didn't want that. Sage was probably more afraid of the truth than Viper, that much was obvious. Because Viper was always the bad one, to her another blemish in the eyes of her co-workers meant little. But for the perfect Sage? A completely different story.

And Viper knew it was just a provocation and only laughed hollowly in response to that answer.

"No," she said. Ling's fury, just as it had been growing every second until then, now broke for a moment, and shock crept into her cracks. "And do you know why? Because I won't behave like you, and unlike you, I know how to determine which things shouldn't be discussed in public."

She took her coffee and left.

***

Reyna could see that something was wrong with Killjoy. She couldn't quite tell what exactly, but the young engineer hadn't spoken a word since the two entered the shooting range, and she was usually the one who felt the need to talk.

Zyanya put her vandal down on the stand and slipped the protective headphones off her ears. Killjoy seemed to notice this out of the corner of her eye, although she took another shot before she spoke. Reyna noticed that it was very close to the center, but Klara didn't seem happy about it. In fact, she immediately copied the older woman's movements.

"Viper is sick?"

She asked this question without any major dose of emotion. She simply removed the magazine and replaced it with another, without looking Reyna in the eye.

Reyna, who blinked in surprise. She herself didn't know whether it was because she didn't expect Killjoy to guess anything, or because she was asking her exactly that.

"Where did that question come from?"

Klara shrugged her shoulders.

"What difference does it make?" she replied with a question for a question. She stuck her gaze into her gun, as if she expected an answer from the object. Or at least that's what it seemed to Reyna, until she looked at her. "Is she or isn’t she?"

Reyna felt trapped. Killjoy was smart, she would sense a lie if she just tried to tell anything other than the truth. Maybe KJ learned it from Viper, but she could read a lot of things from a person. And Zyanya didn't seem to want to be analyzed in depth.

Not on the subject of Viper.

She had no choice but to be honest.

"I shouldn't be the one to answer you," she said.

"Viper won't tell me the truth."

The explanation was so straightforward that it almost hurt Reyna. For although Killjoy looked to Sabine as a mentor, she was aware of some things. For example, Viper hated weakness.

"That doesn't change anything." Reyna sighed. "I can't tell you anything, I’m sorry."

"So you know something." It wasn't a question but a statement, and if Reyna had had time, she probably would have tried to deny it. But as it turned out, Klara had spent so much time in Viper's company that she had learned to infer as she did. "If there was nothing on your mind, you wouldn't have said no," she said.

"You should talk to her about it, not me, regardless of what you think she'll say."

Killjoy corrected her glasses. She wasn't angry, she wasn't disappointed. She was calm, although in her demeanor Zyanya felt that uncertainty, that want of answers that Zyanya had... but which were a secret. Which were an unwritten agreement between her and Sabine, even if Reyna didn't fully know its terms.

"Will she be okay?"

Klara was no longer interested in the shooting practice, and every now and then she would only glance at the target and the holes made in it, but with marked reluctance.

Reyna felt the hoop tighten on her throat. She didn't know what to answer.

Because she didn't know if Viper would be okay.

"Killjoy, I-..."

"Sage claims that Viper stole meds from the cabinet. Morphine. I don't believe it, but if she did, I think that means it's bad, right?"

The barrage of information under which Reyna suddenly found herself caused her to open her mouth, though she didn't get a word out, and for the first moment just looked at Killjoy with furrowed brows as if she was the one waiting for an explanation, not the other way around.

She took the headphones completely off her neck.

"Viper stole the morphine?"

Klara looked to the side. This time it was with Zyanya that KJ felt she had said one word too far, but on the other hand she probably didn't regret it. She had to know the answer, she had to... She had to know if there was something wrong with Viper. Something seriously wrong.

"I don't know the details. All I know is that they argued about it with Sage in the kitchen. Viper claimed she didn't take anything, Sage didn't believe her, nothing new." Killjoy leaned with her hip against the wall, started playing with her fingers and stared at the floor for the first moment, until she realized that Reyna was uninterruptedly staring at her. She sighed, and although she collected the words for a long time, she finally said them. "Sage said something about her having hemorrhages."

Reyna lowered her gaze at that exact moment. Only a second later did she realize that she shouldn't have done that, that she had betrayed too much with that one gesture, and with that one gesture she had taken all her spark away from Killjoy.

Killjoy expected Reyna to explain to her that it was nothing, that they shouldn't worry about it, that Viper was only temporarily feeling worse. And although the engineer probably sensed something, she expected just such an answer.

Reyna couldn't give her that. However, she couldn't keep completely silent when it was just the two of them on the range.

"Viper will think of something," she said finally. She tried to smile reassuringly, but she had no idea if that smile was more like a grimace. "She always comes up with something, doesn't she?"

Killjoy nodded and went back to training.

Reyna didn't want to believe that Viper had stolen the morphine. But she also couldn't shake the feeling that this was the truth.

***

"Did you really take those meds?"

Although she could only see Viper's back bent over the desk and the edge of her nose, Reyna knew she had heard her. She had always heard her, always heard everything, even though it seemed that her hearing was as selective as her ability to answer questions.

Of course she didn't answer. Her hand just stopped motionless, the pen froze over the page for maybe a second, and then went back to work as if nothing had ever happened.

Reyna tightened her lips. She herself didn't know what she should say, what would be the right thing to say. Because that one moment of hesitation from Viper was the answer, and it was an answer that was not so disappointing... as it was frightening.

"Viper, what have you done?" She asked more to silence than Sabine, who didn't even flinch, even as she felt Reyna's gaze drill into her shoulder blades as she came closer. "How-..."

"How could I?" That voice made Reyna close her mouth, because it hardly sounded like Viper. Viper didn't admit her mistakes easily, and now... Now she sounded like she accepted that this is what Zyanya meant. And more than that, she had expected the question. She shrugged her shoulders, and even if Reyna couldn't see her face, she was sure that Viper’s eyes were staring blankly at the tiled walls. "I had no choice."

Something in Mondragón's mind told her that something was wrong. That something was wrong in this attitude of Viper, whose stony figure was becoming less and less actually stony. And she didn't quite understand what didn't fit the pattern of cold chemist until Viper turned to her.

If exhaustion were to be a person, it would be Sabine Callas.

Her skin was pale, almost translucent. Her normally emphasized lips were cracked and her shoulders slumped, as if she didn't have the strength to hold them up.

Her eyes were like glass, glittering, and Zyanya realized that... that Sabine had been crying. Maybe before she came in, maybe a few hours ago, or maybe she barely stopped a second ago.

Maybe she only thought about it.

But even if she did, all the reproaches disappeared.

Everything disappeared except for one question, spoken by Reyna so uncertainly that she was afraid it would sound like she was afraid of the answer. Maybe that was even the case.

"Did it help?"

Viper smiled crookedly. Compassionately, though, not for herself, but for Reyna. That she expected a positive response at all.

"No," she said, probably in order to make herself aware of this fact as well. "It didn't." She hesitated for a moment, put her arms around her shoulders and put on her favorite stone mask again. "I just need to try a bigger dose. Maybe then-"

"No." Reyna said this before she had time to think. And although she didn't expect it, the original frustration returned. "Viper, you're going to kill yourself."

Viper regretted that Reyna's injuries had already healed. Because if they hadn't, she wouldn't have been able to stand with her arms clasped over her chest and look at her with a facial expression that reminded Sabine of pity to such a blunt degree that she had to look away.

It was enough for others to hear today about her... defect. She didn't need to be reminded of it.

"I'm controlling it," she said.

Immediately she tightened her lips, as if she was afraid that if she said anything more, she would break some boundary unknown even to herself.

"Are you?" There was that pity in Reyna's voice again. Sabine didn't know whether it made a hoop tighten around her throat or anger rise up inside her. Maybe both. "Is that why you take drugs in secret from others?"

"Stop it."

"I'll stop when you finally realize you have a problem."

"You think I don't fucking know that?" The sharpness in those tones cut through the air like a knife. Zyanya saw that Viper was trembling. Immediately, she put her hands in her lab coat pockets, as if to hide it, and her icy gaze slammed into Zyanya. "Do you think that's what I want? That I want to get up in the morning and play fucking roulette about whether I'm going to pass out or get a nosebleed?"

"I think you think you don't deserve help."

Reyna watched her reaction carefully. Sabine didn't look away, but Zyanya saw her clench her hands in her pockets and was sure her knuckles were turning white.

Viper wanted to be angry, Zyanya saw that. She wanted to yell at her, scold her, use that magical power of hers to fight everything with words and wipe her pawns off the board like during a chess game.

But no matter how much she cared about just that, she was breaking. Even throwing her words there in anger, she crumbled with every word. Her shoulders trembled, she tightened her lips whenever there was a moment of silence, and in her eyes under that thick layer of ice lurked... fear.

Sabine could not maintain the walls around her indefinitely. But she tried anyway, adding more and more bricks as the old ones crumbled into dust.

"You don't know anything about me," she croaked out. She took her hands out of her pockets only to braid place arms across her chest and tighten her fingers on her forearms.

Zyanya looked as if she was just waiting for this moment.

"You have a habit of pressing the bridge of your nose when you get frustrated. You tap your pen on a piece of paper when you don't know what to write or when you’re thinking. You take inhumanly cold showers. You want people to think you're a monster because you're used to it. You have a favorite coffee mug. Shall I go on listing?"

"The ability to observe doesn’t mean knowledge."

Reyna was silent for a moment. But only for a moment, because maybe she wanted to bring that moment to a silence that would reset all the words.

Silence was there, obviously. Sounded loud as never between the two of them.

"I'll go to Sage with you."

Viper snorted, but in a manner so pathetic and weak that it hardly resembled the gesture that had always belonged to Viper.

"I won't go anywhere."

Reyna sighed and licked her lips, gathering the right words. Viper waited patiently, not taking her eyes off her. She was showing that she would be able to listen to her words, no matter what they were.

"Look, I... I don't know how Sage did what she did to you," she said slowly, though she could feel the thin ice beneath her feet begin to crackle dangerously. "And I'm not going to make excuses for her, but you need her help."

"And what, and I'm supposed to come there and ask for mercy like a beaten dog?" Sabine growled. "Sage is a liar. She's been pretending to be a saint for years because no one knows about what happened, and she's too far gone playing the exemplary heroine to admit that she once hurt someone. Going to her is like stabbing yourself in the back in front of her eyes."

"Can't you really see that everything keeps fucking up?"

Viper snorted a hollow laugh.

"My eyes are working pretty well."

A kind of resignation sounded in this sentence. It was as if Sabine was aware of what was going on, but... but held out no hope that anything could be improved.

As if Sabine no longer had the strength to improve anything.

"And don't you see that..." Reyna didn't even seem to see how she should choose her words anymore. "Damn it, Sabine, you're in the middle of all of this, don't you understand?"

"So you're saying it's my fault?"

"That's not what I said."

"But you wanted to."

Zyanya knew that Viper was trying to tire her out and force her to give up. To cut off the discussion as she had always done.

"It would be enough for you to go to Sage and the whole problem in the Protocol would not exist anymore. You'd be back on missions, we'd get a great controller back, and the jumping down each other's throats with everyone would end."

"If Brimstone had wanted me in command, he would never have taken my position away. Regardless of what would have happened to me, Reyna," she said. "You're the one who doesn't understand that he's already chosen who he prefers as his right hand, and that someone is not me. And I'm not going to go to Sage just because I miss my job."

"And you want to just leave it like that?"

"And what do you think I could do about it?" She snarled. "Chain Brimstone to a chair and force him to give me back my job because earlier he acted like an asshole?"

Reyna was silent for a second. Only then did her eyebrows raise slightly.

"Actually... yes."

Now it was Sabine who raised her eyebrows, as Zyanya turned and moved toward the lab door.

"What are you doing?"

Zyanya smiled at the corner of her mouth, but Viper didn't see it anymore, staying deep in the room.

"I'm forcing Brimstone to give you back your job, because earlier he acted like an asshole."

Chapter 19: NINETEEN

"We need her." Brimstone stepped back from his gun cabinet and furrowed his brow. Reyna didn't know whether he was more surprised by the phrase itself or by her presence, but she wasn't going to think about it. "Viper. We need her."

The man took his sheriff off the shelf and checked the magazine mechanically.

"Did I ever say we don't?" he asked, as if unsure of what Zyanya was getting at.

"We need her on the battlefield, Brimstone."

Liam no longer looked uncertain. His face was covered with solemnity, but when he sighed, Reyna realized it was a sensitive point. Good.

"You know why I can't do it," he said. "You saw yourself how it was last time."

"Actually... I don't." Reyna rested her hands on her hips. She didn't want to sound angry, but it probably came out that way on its own. "We are fighting a war. You can't say that a few harsh words didn’t save our lives a few times."

Brimstone got the impression that he had heard those words before.

"It was you, who told me about that situation with Phoenix, so why are you suddenly outraged now?"

"Because it was just supposed to be a stupid remark. I didn't think you'd get her fucking fired for that."

"Harsh words are something different than shooting a teammate." Brimstone did not act as if Reyna's words prompted him to argue. He was calm, and there was something in that calmness that made Reyna even angrier. "Besides, she recently got a nosebleed in front of my eyes, so it's better if she stays where she is for now. For a while."

"If she knew she wouldn't be able to fight, she wouldn't have disagreed to suspension."

Brimstone laughed soundlessly. The gun in his hand looked almost like a toy.

"Then I guess you don't know Viper at all."

She knew he was somewhat right. Sabine would go to fight, even if her own blood marked her steps, and somewhere deep down Zyanya was aware of that, but on the other hand, that frail figure in the cold-shrouded bathroom gave some hope that Viper was all too familiar with her condition.

And knowing that only work takes Viper's thoughts away from what's happening to her body worked better for her than any pills.

"She's not stupid, she wouldn't jeopardize the mission with her health," she said. "And even if she felt worse, she would get the mission to the end, even if she had to crawl to the spike with her guts out. Like you said, she doesn't let go easily."

Brimstone reloaded the sheriff.

"Even so, I can't take any risks, Reyna." He pondered for a moment, and stuck his gaze into the wall before speaking again, and Zyanya got the impression that saying those words cost him a lot. "She sits all day in the lab, in her bedroom or God knows where. Now I find out that she's taking some serious meds, and more than that, she keeps it a secret. I can't remember the last time I talked to her, and I'm supposed to put the lives of five people in her hands, when not long ago she threatened one of them?"

Reyna felt like snorting.

"Maybe she's like that because you took away the only thing that gave her the feeling of being needed." she threw out. "She cared about this, this job, and since she doesn't have it, she doesn't care about anything else either, including herself."

Liam put down the sheriff and folded his arms across his chest. Reyna didn't cower at this sight, even if she always felt a certain difference in hierarchy in the Brimstone's presence.

"So why is it you who’s here and not her? Why isn't she the one coming to talk?"

"How is she supposed to talk to you when all you two do is throw accusations at her over and over?”

Liam raised an eyebrow.

"Us two?"

"You and Sage. You don't know what happened in the server room. In fact, no one knows." She felt the bitter taste of a lie on her tongue. Because yes, she did know. "There is no proof that she stole the damn drugs, but you blindly believe Sage because you suddenly found a replacement in her.”

"Reyna-..."

"She was the best. That's why you worked with her. And now you ask her to plan a mission, but you don't let her go on that very mission and you think that's fair?"

"Do you really want to watch her bleed out on the battlefield just because job is important to her?"

Reyna let the air out slowly. She weighed the words on her tongue, skipping the uncomfortable parts and leaving the easy ones.

"One mission, a test. Zero enemies, zero shots, zero risks. A simple run through the area, a simple report."

"Reyna, listen-..."

"I don't want to put her in the middle of a shootout, Brimstone, that's not what I mean. She just needs to clear her head, do you understand?" she asked. She looked somewhere to the side, as Liam's gaze suddenly became harder for her to bear. He looked to her for an explanation. "Choose something easy. I'll go with her, she won't be alone and I'll be responsible for everything she does. Just... Don't let her wander the halls like a ghost, or you'll really be left alone in the middle of all this shit."

The man only sighed, but Reyna felt she had won.

***

Viper wasn't sure what she should be thinking as she involuntarily was reading the plan on her phone, leaning sideways against the vulture's lapel.

She didn't even feel that she was biting her lip, that she felt like something inside her was wrong, that her gaze was less focused on the lines of sentences and increasingly wandering somewhere in the hangar space.

"Do you have anything else to take?"

She turned her head away. She wasn't sure when Reyna appeared next to her, but she also wasn't about to show that she had snapped her out of this momentary reverie. She quickly swept her eyes over the two gun cases that were placed in front of her, including one with her name on it.

She tucked the phone into her pocket.

"No. I have the bag inside."

With a movement of her head, she indicated the machine, whose engines were beginning to hum slowly. Zyanya nodded and entered the vulture.

Sabine wanted to keep her mouth shut. To remain silent, as she liked best, and leave things untouched, because that was, after all, the most convenient way. After all, she didn't need to know at all what Reyna thought, what she did and how she did it.

She didn't need to know anything except that it was cold on Icebox, and that she needed to take out the records of the hidden cameras and download them on disk under Reyna's protection and return to headquarters for the next day.

But something in those movements of hers, in that demeanor, made Sabine simultaneously feel like tearing her to shreds, and at the same time... asking how she was doing it.

How she makes Viper think for the umpteenth time on the character of Zyanya, who, after all, was no one important to her. Who should only be a pawn in the team.

Whom Sabine hated, after all.

And probably that's why she spoke up, and her words cut through the hum of the engines and that strange, thick air between them that indicated something had happened, although neither of them knew exactly what.

"Why did you do that?"

Zyanya slid the gun cases into place. They shouldn't need them, but requirements are requirements. Her gaze moved over the name ‘Callas’ and only then did she look at Viper.

"Someone competent was needed. It's an easy mission, so I don't want to sit there any longer than necessary."

An evasive answer. Viper didn't buy it, of course she didn't, but Reyna probably hoped otherwise, as well as that Viper will choose silence.

Surprisingly, she didn't.

"Why did you go to Brimstone?" Viper asked, not feeding on the answer she got before.

Zyanya expected resentment in that tone, a hint of malice, after all she was talking to Viper, but instead, all she found was... curiosity.

She sighed, tapped her fingernail on the protruding handle of the suitcase. She shrugged her shoulders – after all, it was supposed to look careless. She did it carelessly, didn't she?

"Because we have too much work to give up the controller in the team for no reason."

Viper furrowed her brow.

“No reason?”

Reyna knew that Viper was surprised by these words. Actually Reyna herself was too, after all she still remembered her own words. About irresponsibility. About the risks. About how she got mad when she smelled blood on the Split mission, and Viper said it was nothing.

But if she wanted to keep Sabine in her right mind, she had to swallow those fears. She had to... trust her.

"I'll assume you know what you're doing." She pushed away from the ledge, heading toward the pilot seats. Perhaps it was so she wouldn't look at Sabine. So that she wouldn't see the relief that, although she expected it, she was afraid of. Because, after all, she hated Sabine Callas. And Sabine Callas hated her. "So let's focus on the mission."

***

Ground crunched under their steps, and the wind whistled its own sad song between the blocks. The snow was falling thickly and the pervasive silence mixed with the wind was somehow frightening.

Viper looked around, though her gaze focused on nothing in particular. A belt of snakebites rattled slightly, Reyna's armor harmonizing with the sound, making Sabine realize that it was really just the two of them here.

"Killjoy asked about you." Reyna didn't look at the chemist when she asked the question, just clenched her fingers tighter on her weapon. "You should talk to her."

Viper wanted to keep quiet and ignore the question, but felt that if she did, Reyna would continue to wait. No matter how long it would take, Reyna would wait for an answer. She always did.

"And what would I supposedly say to her?" she asked.

Her voice was hoarse from the cold, and she could feel her gloved fingers starting to go numb, so she stretched them a few times and clenched them back.

"Truth," Zyanya replied. "She deserves it, don't you think?"

"I think she shouldn't know about that. Not now."

Reyna sighed. Not because she was tired, nor because she once again had to contend with Viper's newly built walls, which she barely managed to tear down.

"She's not a child, Viper. There's no point in delaying it, because she already knows anyway."

"In that case, I'll tell her later. Since she already knows, waiting won't change anything."

Sabine was glad that they reached the right door fairly quickly, but she didn't assume this time that the discussion would continue. Or she assumed, but didn't want to allow the thought at all.

"She looks up to you," Reyna said shortly after they went inside after entering the code.

Viper didn't respond for the first moment, just settled her gun on her shoulder by habit and opened the sight.

The room was small, a portable headquarters with an armored door, a stack of security devices and stale air that mingled with the chill of the wind pushing through the cracks.

When no one was inside (as it should be), she left her vandal and headed for the computer, which looked almost dead from a distance. Brimstone's idea, she mused. She approved it herself.

Not knowing why, she winced at the thought.

"Maybe."

"She really does," Reyna went quiet for a moment, but then leaned her arms against the edge of the desk where Viper sat and folded her arms across her chest. "She wants to be like you."

Sabine's fingers hovered over the keyboard, and Reyna got the impression that at that very moment she felt like pinching the bridge of her nose. Instead, she merely plugged the flash drive into the computer. There was something artificial in her movements, something so machinal that Reyna felt something inside her begin to ache.

That the Viper was acting mechanically. That every move she makes is learned and overly schematic, because that's how she's learned and used to behave.

"Why are you telling me this?"

She tore her gaze away from the download progress bar and raised it to Zyanya slowly.

"You won't do it even for her?"

The question sounded as if Reyna was hesitant to ask it. And although Viper herself didn't recognize it, Reyna knew she was afraid of the answer. She would be able to deny it, somewhere in there Zyanya felt that Viper would be able to answer that dry 'no' and not even blink an eyelid, but on the other hand she hoped it would be the other way around.

Viper slumped in the chair more, squinting her eyelids.

"Are you trying to make me change my mind because of mercy?"

"Who knows, maybe this will work?"

Sabine snorted at this answer. She herself didn't know whether she was impressed by Reyna's obstinacy or amused by the fact that Mondragón thought she was so easy to handle. Reyna's persistence was impressive in a way.

"It won't," she said. "I already told you I won't go to Sage."

Zyanya once again bounced off the wall built by Sabine. However, she was not the one to give up easily.

"How can you be so sure that you will help yourself?"

"And how can you be so sure that Sage will help me?" she replied. She looked at the computer screen again, trying to show that this conversation meant less to her than Reyna thought. "I trust medicine more than magic, which came from some damn substance that never existed before," she said.

"So you won't even try?" she asked. Although she didn't mean to, irritation crept into the tone of her voice again.

Viper apparently sensed this, because her face tightened as soon as the echo of Reyna's voice stopped in the room.

"This is my life, and I can decide whatever I want. And I want Sage to have nothing to do with it" she said.

"Do you even still care about it?”

Reyna's tone was calmer, and if Viper's thoughts hadn't been drowned out by a jazzy anger that she had brought up the subject at all once again, she might have heard the worry in that question. And maybe even fear.

"And you're going to be the one to talk to me about life?" Viper forgot about the computer, the loading screen. She even forgot about the chill that, just a minute ago, pierced her body with icy blasts. "You don't die, Reyna. You go out, you kill, but nothing ever happens to you, because you can heal yourself or murder your opponent before he can blink. Your heart is made of fucking radianite, so don't fucking talk to me about the value of life when yours is eternal."

Reyna raised her eyebrows. At first she opened her mouth, but then closed it, as if she decided she didn't have the right words for the occasion. Or that she didn't feel like answering anything.

This time it was her who chose silence.

She only glanced up as Viper took the flash drive out of the computer, shouldered the rifle and fell silent, leaving only the singing of the wind between them.

Neither she nor Viper spoke a single word until they reached the hotel.

***

And it was at this hotel that Reyna knew something was wrong. Something unspeakable was hanging in the air that had suddenly become thick.

That the door creaked too much, that the lobby carpet was too soft and that... the silence was too loud between the two of them, even though she herself had chosen it.

Even looking at Viper, watching those stiff but silent footsteps of hers, watching the way she mechanically opens the door of her room as if she didn't care at all, Reyna couldn't find that Viper there.

Not anymore.

This Viper was a statue that nothing touched and nothing hurt. It stood even if it rained, snowed and hailstormed, steadfastly guarding what was inside.

Inside was Sabine. And although Sabine often returned to her hiding place inside the statue, for Reyna the statue itself no longer existed.

Viper, however, did not stay in her room. She took her bag and, without looking at Reyna for a moment, slipped past her on the threshold to her room and sat on her bed as if it were her daily routine, having previously thrown her luggage somewhere in a corner.

Zyanya had been looking at her all this time, trying to understand something or read something from her behavior, but she just stared out the window with her hands folded on her thighs and probably didn't know why she was here herself yet.

But later Reyna realized that Viper wanted to say something. That Sabine was breaking out of her shell again for those few minutes.

"Now you want to talk?" She asked. She didn't want to include reproach in this question, but she didn't seem to be able to stop it.

Viper followed her gaze and pressed her lips together for a moment, as if she were weighing the words herself. Then she continued looking at the window.

The words there were weighing her down, it could be seen. But for the first time, Reyna saw that Viper was somehow wordlessly trying to apologize, but didn't seem to know where to start.

And that put her in a state of hanging between staying silent and saying something.

"I don't enjoy killing," Reyna said, forcing Viper into conversation. She didn't know whether she did so because Viper probably intended to simply remain silent, or because she needed to say it out loud. "I never have and I never will." Viper continued to remain silent, and Reyna decided to keep talking. "I didn't ask for radianite or anything related to it. I just didn't want to live with the idea that I was living like one big ticking bomb, do you get it?" she threw out. "Yes, I may be able to cure myself of this or that, and maybe actually my life is eternal, but it's also not fucking easy if you know you're alive only because someone else died."

Viper shifted her gaze from the window to the floor and then to her own hands. Maybe she felt she should say something, maybe she even wanted to, but she also felt an internal block that turned her throat into a tightened hoop which her breath barely squeezed trough.

Reyna stood and felt the air around her vibrate.

"Just because your life is in danger doesn't mean you should let it end, Viper. And I won't let you do it, because believe me, your one life is better than a thousand of mine."

Viper looked at her for a split second. And there was something of understanding in that look, yes, but also Reyna couldn't shake the feeling that Viper didn't believe what she had just heard. That there was a flaw in those perpetually cold eyes, where most often only ice was to be found. Something warm.

Later, she nodded her head. Zyanya was probably prepared to hear no more from Viper that day, as she had exhausted her limit of talking about an uncomfortable topic. She was even ready to accept that Viper would simply get up and leave, as she always did.

But that didn't happen.

"Sage hurt me," she said. There was hesitation in her voice and that tremor that Viper seemed to be trying to hide in her monotone. "These scars... everything you saw, it's her fault."

Reyna wanted to speak up, to say that, after all, she never denied it, that... For some reason, she believed Viper the first time and didn't need confirmation at all. But she also knew that once she spoke up, Sabine Callas wouldn't return to the subject and would just bury it underground as if it had never existed.

Viper did not look at her. She seemed to be talking to herself, for simple peace of mind, but Reyna knew that her role was to listen.

So Reyna listened, standing in that quiet hotel room facing the person who for so many years had shown she was made of stone.

"At the very beginning of the Protocol's actions, I was on a mission with Sage." She paused for a moment, furrowed her brow. Perhaps she was wondering if she even wanted to continue. Or she was waiting for Reyna to stop her. Neither of those things happened. "It was supposed to be simple, so it was just the two of us, because Brimstone and the others had gone somewhere else for a longer period of time. But we were attacked. The plan was Sage’s, we had a strategy," she continued. "But I thought I had a better idea and deviated from the plan. It didn't work, Phoenix attacked, managed to use his powers on me before Sage shot him."

When she said this, she sounded as she usually did. Empty and dispassionate. Or at least to a normal person. Reyna's superhuman hearing caught every tremor, every anxious breath and strained voice.

Viper swallowed her saliva. For a moment, Zyanya saw that Sabine had become detached from reality and her memory returned to those moments. That reality became unreal and Viper was thrown back to a time when her life had changed. When her hatred for herself grew stronger.

"When we barely made it to the quarters, I could feel my skin burning. How it was being torn apart. Like it was being eaten alive." Viper may not have known it, but she clenched her hand into a fist. "I begged Sage to do something about it, and she... She said it was my fault, because I should have stuck to the plan. She got mad about it because I made the plan fail." The laughter that followed this sentence sent shivers down Reyna's spine. "Sage healed me enough to keep me alive, but not enough to ease my pain just because I made a mistake. She wanted to teach me a lesson like she would to some dumb kid and made me beg her for her damn mercy for days while I was lying in bed delirious from pain, do you understand?"

Reyna heard that rumbling heart, that quickened breath, but after a while she wasn't sure if it belonged to Viper or to herself.

She felt as if she had been hit in the head with a brick.

Viper, who, with bent arms in the middle of Siberia, appeared to be a wounded human being who once again seemed to be crumbling to pieces before Reyna's eyes.

Viper tightened her lips, swallowed her saliva. She probably tried to hold back tears, blinked frequently and turned her head more to the side, stiff and mechanical.

Zyanya's tongue became a stone in her mouth. She kept poking her gaze at Viper, perhaps waiting for something more, perhaps until the latter said it was just a joke and Reyna was fooled like a child. Deep down, however, she knew that wasn't going to happen and that it was her turn to speak up.

"Brimstone knows?"

She almost didn't recognize her own voice. Sabine wrapped her arms around herself as if she had suddenly become cold.

"No one knows." Viper let out a breath. She felt that Reyna was going to ask why she kept silent, so she forestalled her. "It was too humiliating for me. That I couldn't stand up for myself. Back then I actually believed that it was my fault and that I deserved it." She shrugged her shoulders. "And the Protocol was in its very rough beginnings, we needed a healer. Regardless of what Sage did, I knew she was needed. For the sake of the rest. She still is, by the way."

Reyna felt her knees buckle. She felt a wave of cold sweat pour over her, immediately followed by heat. Viper raised her head at her, those cool eyes glazed over, and she... shrugged her shoulders again and smiled crookedly, as if she didn't know what she should do now.

"Fade alluded to this, your biggest nightmare," she said.

"She doesn't know the details, she saw only excerpts, but there was no Sage in any of them. She thinks it was some kind of hospital."

"Is that why you shot her?"

Viper only nodded. She looked as if she was ashamed. As if she just wanted to disappear along with the embarrassing tears that began to run down her cheeks.

"Listen, I just... I couldn't-..."

She began to shake her head, began to think about arguments, about deliverance and grace.

She stopped.

Because she suddenly felt strong arms embrace her so tightly, as if they were never going to let her go. Before she had time to react, Reyna, kneeling in front of the edge of the hotel bed, clamped her hands on her shoulder blades, pressing her body against Viper's so tightly that Viper's breathing stopped for a moment.

"Why didn't you say anything-..." Reyna didn't even notice when her own eyes welled up with tears, but only tightened her fingers tighter on the frail figure, trying to hold her there. To keep her. Maybe even protect her. "God, Viper..."

Viper accepted the embrace. Before she could stop it, she herself began to tremble, clinging to Reyna's clothes as if they were the only thing keeping her from completely falling apart. She began to cry, because maybe in the end she couldn't stand it and had to break as much as ever.

Keeping herself in check was exhausting, and Viper... Viper was tired of it.

"I just made a mistake... I didn't want this, I didn't want to-..."

Reyna listened to each 'I didn't want this', 'I'm sorry' and 'it was just one mistake' in silence. Her hand wove through her black hair and began to comb it in a steady, soothing motion. She bit her lip herself, feeling it begin to break.

She was so blind. So stupid. They were all fucking idiots.

Viper defended the rules like a lioness, because she herself had suffered from breaking them. Viper didn't want anyone else to have to go through what she went through those few years ago. Viper hated it when Sage indulged the agents, because she knew how she herself was treated when she did the same thing.

Viper... Viper was wronged by all of them. And she never said a word of complaint.

A few minutes, or maybe a few hours, passed before the room was filled with nothing but silence. Sabine moved away from Reyna, but there was something different on her face than the usual tough mask. If Reyna didn't know the truth, she would have said that Viper looked weak at that moment.

In fact, she was sure that Sabine Callas was stronger than all of them put together.

"I'm going to go take a shower," she finally said.

Her voice was hoarse and tired, but she gathered herself out of bed. Zyanya, however, for some reason was unable to get up from her knees and just watched Viper gather her things and open the bathroom door.

Only then Reyna did speak up. Viper’s fondness for icy baths suddenly made sense. Fear of fire, of destruction. Too many memories.

And Reyna earlier was foolish enough to believe that Viper simply liked cold water.

"Sabine?" Callas turned around. "Take the warm one. Please."

She nodded.

"I will try."

Chapter 20: TWENTY

Reyna waited in silence.

She waited in silence, staring at the same window that Viper was staring at, in the same room and sitting on the same bed, and for some reason, for the first time, she felt that the noise of the shower from behind the door was not so annoying anymore only because Viper was the one making it.

Reyna felt strangely suspended. She wanted to move, but didn't know which way to go. Each of it seemed wrong to her now. Every word seemed wrong to her, and even the fact that she was sitting was wrong. So she stood up, folded her arms over her chest and clenched her jaw, looking out over the balcony at the cold expanse of Siberia.

Her gaze didn't fall on the bathroom door, and she didn't turn around once, finding in that endless white of snow some kind of calm that contrasted pleasantly with the chaos rumbling in her head.

The door opened, however, and Reyna was relieved to feel the warm steam hit her in her back.

Sabine had indeed taken a warm shower.

She heard the sound of bare feet on the panels, the quiet rustling of clothes that Viper was rearranging in her bag. The dripping of water from her hair onto the floor, the beating of her heart.

Which suddenly sped up.

But Reyna didn't move from her spot, like a guard on his duty she stood stiffly, perhaps even unnaturally. She herself didn't know if she was guarding herself, Viper, or something else. Only later did she feel her muscles burning, tensed so tightly that they were beginning to cause pain. Her fingers were numb from clenching into fists.

She could only hear one heartbeat in this room filled with silence. Silence and the dripping of water. Silence and the sound of bare feet.

She knew Sabine was looking at her. There was always something left unspoken between them, even if it might seem that all the words had already been said, but the gaze always left all too clear traces behind.

However, she didn't know what she should say when she felt Viper's lips on the side of her neck. So gentle that for a moment Reyna wondered if it was Sabine doing it, or if Reyna just seemed to make it up.

It didn't seem so. The warmth of Viper's body clung to her back, even though it was so distant just a minute ago. Until a minute ago, Reyna was only interested in Siberia outside her window.

Zyanya felt every muscle in her body tighten to the limit. She let the air out through her nose, enduring one, bruising kiss on her skin before she could open her mouth.

"Sabine." She hated herself for sounding almost weak. That her voice betrayed her and instead of a reprimand, a plea would have come out if she hadn't realized in time. "Don't do it. Not again."

The second sentence rang out more sharply, Reyna tried to shook off. But the thudding heartbeat did not stop drowning out her thoughts.

She reached back with her hand, trying to somehow reverse their roles and move away before it was too late. Before they would bring it down again to that nameless carnality and the primitive human need to take their minds off what was going on around them.

Viper grabbed her wrist and pressed it against her side as if she sensed Reyna's intentions earlier than they appeared in her head.

This was wrong. It was the wrong thing to do. It would all be so damned wrong once again and Zyanya felt that strange fear of what seemed to be coming envelop her body and grab her neck.

She clenched her hand into a fist, the same one further captured in Sabine's iron grip, which for some reason began to remind Reyna of a snake as well. Her hands were slender, her kisses spread everywhere and Zyanya involuntarily felt invisible venom seep into her veins and make her so... weak.

They had not experienced much physical contact in their lives. In fact, they didn't experience it at all. And just as Zyanya valued humanity, she suddenly began to hate it. How it eats her up from the inside with this primitive need.

"Even if I want this?"

Zyanya felt like slapping herself in the face when she realized she had involuntarily closed her eyes.

"You don't mean it," she growled and immediately cleared her throat, as if she was afraid that this moment of weakness was too much to see. "You don't mean it, and... It's too complicated."

In response, Viper's hand slid over her shoulder.

"Then stop me."

Reyna blinked.

"What?"

"Tell me to stop."

"Sabine-..."

"Do it."

The chemist's green eyes shone in the twilight. Challengingly. And it was almost frightening that just a few minutes ago they were so soft and covered with a layer of tears, and now Reyna felt that Sabine had once again hidden what showed her weakness.

"We are not a couple," she said evasively.

She wished Viper would just nod and agree with her, step aside and stop being... just like that.

"And?" Viper shrugged her shoulders, though her finger slid over the edge of Reyna's neck. "It's just sex."

"Don't pretend you don't know what I mean. The rules-..."

"Leave it."

Zyanya felt a hoop tighten on her throat and felt an irrational need to pour a bucket of cold water on herself so that the environment around her would stop being so... liquid, hot and strangely stupefying, when Viper's fingers, which were starting to cool down after the warm shower really did resemble snake scales gliding over her skin.

"You want this." Sabine tilted her head while saying this sentence. She always did this pose when she was about to attack. It was like a warning signal. "I'm not blind."

Zyanya has learned to understand it. And to be prepared for it. But now all that came to her mind was:

"Shut up."

Viper thought for a long time. She thought over the answer or the action with shining eyes and half-open mouth, from which no words came out for so long, only drawing closer and closer, until Reyna felt a steady, warm breath on her own lips. She felt herself begin to weaken, although she had no idea why.

After all, she hated Viper. She couldn't stand her approach to many things, and even if she knew much more now than before, she couldn't say that all her venom had evaporated in Reyna's eyes, as if it had never been there. Now she was beginning to... understand it.

And that was something that probably scared her.

And it was making what was happening right now even more complicated.

Reyna knew it was going to get even worse. Even more intricate. That this labyrinth of theirs in which they sat would create even more corridors than it already had, and she could only begrudgingly try to find a way out.

And she made it worse herself when she responded to that kiss, which for the umpteenth time should not have happened.

Viper escaped into physicality to forget and for Reyna to forget as well. And Reyna hated herself for not being able to forget either one or the other. She knew she shouldn't do that after what she had learned. After what had happened in that room just moments before, and now they were acting as if that conversation had never existed.

That was wrong.

But she told herself that she would solve it later. Yes, she'll put everything off until later, and then surely what's tangled will straighten out, so now she can. Now she wants to kiss Viper with a sigh full of something like disappointment toward herself.

And maybe a hint of aggression. That Viper was like this. That she has fooled her like a stupid child. That Reyna couldn't defend herself.

Viper entwined her neck with her hands in a commanding manner, as if Reyna had belonged to her, as if she became her property as soon as she touched her lips with hers.

She knew her way around. She kissed hard, her fingers slipping into Reyna's hair before the latter could do anything and... pulling at it in mute request, eliciting a moan of surprise from Mondragón's lips.

She pulled away at the bare minimum to take a breath.

"Just one more time."

Viper nodded.

"Just one more time."

Reyna let herself be led like a blind man and didn't even notice when the back of her knees touched the edge of the bed. She sat on it by the force of gravity, trying to respond to every kiss Viper gave her.

It was all so... out of sequence. Out of order. And at the same time so damn addictive, hot and somehow inappropriate. Just right for adrenaline to bubble through a vampire's veins, intoxicating her like the best drug.

Instinctively, she grabbed Viper by the waist as she straddled her laps.

Zyanya’s hands began to wander on their own. On her thigh, on her side, on her belly before Reyna had time to change her mind and slipped her hand under the material of Viper's shirt.

Maybe she wanted to give it to her in exchange for the pain she hadn't seen before and this was some way of making amends.

Maybe she wanted to apologize to her this way. And to soothe her. To let Viper do what she wanted, to make her feel better.

Her skin was warm.

She hesitated. And Viper noticed it. Viper noticed everything.

"Go on."

Reyna raised her head. Encountering cold eyes had become a habit, and although they said little, Reyna listened.

She touched her chest, suppressing a sound in her throat that showed nothing but that she had just lost. With herself. With any self-denial.

That it was already too late.

She swallowed her saliva.

The clothes soon landed on the floor or some other insignificant place, removed in a rush and a series of clumsy movements.

Siberia was cold, but Zyanya felt only the warmth of those gaping breaths, greedy and ever-present hands that parched her skin, and she let them to do so.

Sabine pushed her, fitting her own thigh between Reyna’s legs along with her hand.

Reyna's back touched the cool bedding. Seconds later, she grabbed the sheets, swallowing a pathetic moan in her throat before it could escape. She looked to the side, just as Viper did back then.

It was too intimate for them to look at each other. And they didn't care about intimacy, just relief, gnawing at them in this brutal world. A moment to breathe. A moment of calm.

For the noise of raging thoughts to finally shut up.

It felt way too good. Nothing, just a white, hollow sound on a single frequency digging into her skull so that everything bad and wrong disappeared. And Reyna knew that it was only for a while. That it wouldn't always be like this. That this was just a temporary weakness, sex for oblivion.

But she still felt like tearing Viper to shreds for making her feel so good. That every movement of her fingers was like another challenge thrown at Mondragón's feet, to keep her quiet and not dare to make another sound. That the sex stupefied her, like a drugged animal.

Reyna didn't dare to look between her own legs, she also avoided looking at Viper's hand. All of this while biting the inside of her cheek, but her eyes were fixed firmly on some unknown point in front of her, as if her thoughts were completely elsewhere.

That was probably the case. But Reyna did her best not to let this thought enter her head.

She arched her neck back, exhaling hot air into the chill of the room. Her hand, entangled in the bedclothes, was beginning to go numb from the force of her own grasp, her nails even through the fabric were digging into the inside of her palm. The other wandered aimlessly, looking for a hold she couldn't find, which was exactly what she needed when an orgasm washed over her body suddenly and almost unexpectedly.

Her eyelids remained clenched for a few more seconds, waiting for her heartbeat to return to normal and her lungs to stop filling up with only shallow, insufficient breaths.

And still she couldn't shake the feeling that Viper was looking at her. All the time when she waited for Reyna to come back to herself.

Only when she opened her eyes herself did she realize that Viper wasn't looking specifically at her face, but at Mondragón's hand, placed on Sabine's thigh, still clenched in half a fist.

It was impossible not to notice the redness on the pale skin left by Reyna's nails.

She quickly withdrew her hand.

"Sorry about that," she muttered.

She swallowed her saliva, feeling how dry her throat was. She supported herself on her elbows, her dark hair spilling down her back and tickling her shoulder blades. Viper, however, continued to stare at her own thigh.

"It happens," she commented.

For a moment she looked as if she didn't know what she wanted to do with herself, involuntarily running her finger over the scratch.

Reyna felt something hanging in the air. Viper's movements became stiff again, and she looked as if... as if someone had just erased her memory.

The soap bubble popped, and the bang was more deafening than Reyna expected.

Viper slid off the bed, threw on her discarded T-shirt and walked over to her bag.

The sound of bare feet on the floor now seemed stranger.

Zyanya should speak up. Say anything, instead of staring at the ceiling.

But she only looked at Viper when she heard the hiss of a cigarette being set off. Viper's face was illuminated by the familiar flame, and a moment later the smell of burning tobacco spread through the room.

She felt like an idiot.

"Listen-..."

"Don't."

Viper's tone was almost teacher-like. Sharp and cool, although a little hoarse. She took a drag on her cigarette and moved smoothly toward the windowsill, where, as it turned out, there was an ashtray.

Reyna hadn't noticed it there before, and now she was staring at it. She was sitting on the bed, naked, still somewhat stupefied and trying to draw something out of what had just happened.

Viper noticed this. She shrugged her shoulders and shook the ash into the ashtray with the professional gesture of an addict.

"Don't talk."

Reyna pulled the quilt over her shoulders.

"You don't even know what-"

"I don't have to," interrupted Viper. Apparently she wasn't bothered by the smoke dancing in the room, because she didn't open the window. "Just don't think about it."

"You don't do it?”

"No."

Another drag on the cigarette. Zyanya did not take her eyes off Viper's mouth around the filter. Sabine caught her eye, but Reyna didn't look away.

Callas raised an eyebrow, let the smoke out through her nose and picked up a packet from the windowsill.

She pressed her thumb against the crumpled opening, walked a few steps and held it out toward Zyanya.

"It will make you feel better."

Reyna snorted, almost amused by how absurd the situation was.

How fucking messed up everything was.

But she accepted the cigarette. She pressed it between her lips and just then a lighter was thrown in her direction. This new one. It landed on the bed next to her thigh.

"Open the damn window," she instructed uncritically, before firing up the cigarette.

Inhaling the smoke, she felt a little like giving up, but just leaned her head against the wall behind her, trying to suppress whatever she was feeling.

Viper obeyed, the cold air quickly chasing the smoke away. Reyna put on her T-shirt and was forced to get up to shake off the ash, just when Viper pushed her fading cigarette butt into the ashtray and moved away from her.

Reyna leaned her loins against the window sill and looked at Viper, who seemed to be following the final life of her cigarette as she alternated with the weather outside the window.

Zyanya grunted at the next disposal of ash, and made the gesture herself almost reluctantly. She furrowed her brow, and if Sabine hadn't been looking elsewhere at that moment, she probably would have concluded that Mondragón was thinking about something.

"Do you want to go back to bed?" she finally asked.

Only after a moment did she realize how pathetic it sounded, but Callas didn't even flinch.

"What for?"

Reyna shrugged her shoulders.

"I don't know, maybe you need... something."

"You're an adult, use adult words," Viper replied, gifting Reyna with eye contact. "But no, I don't need something."

"Alright." She whisked away the ash nonchalantly, but her brow furrowed again, even if only for a second. "How are we different from Fade and Neon?"

"I don't understand the question."

The fact that Viper didn't reproach her for suddenly changing the subject spoke volumes. Viper must have learned that Reyna had taken over this habit from her, and perhaps she didn't want to comment on it.

"They were together," Zyanya said. A cloud of smoke danced around her face and quickly escaped through the open window. "Now they're not, because you decided it was against the rules, but we just had sex, so how are we different from them?"

"So you accuse me of hypocrisy." A hint of amusement sounded in this sentence. The one short laugh that Viper always had in store whenever someone tried to accuse her of anything, and she knew that when confronted with her arguments, they didn't stand a chance. Perhaps even the corner of her mouth lifted slightly in a crooked smile. "I'm not a hypocrite."

Reyna felt like a kid saying that sentence, but nothing better came to mind.

"Then prove it."

Viper leaned her temple against the glass.

"They love each other," she said so straightforwardly that it sounded almost dry. "The feeling is fresh, so they get excited like a child who gets a new toy and all others suddenly cease to exist." She shrugged her shoulders as if they were talking about the weather. "And the truth is that if one person on the team is more important to you than the rest, you don't think objectively during a threat. Neon will throw herself to apply a band-aid to Fade's scratch, when somewhere else someone might be lying with his guts out. That's how the human psyche works."

"So far nothing like that has happened, I don't think…-"

"And you are sure it will never happen?" Sabine folded her arms over her chest. Her hip rested against the edge of the windowsill, covered by an oversized T-shirt. "In our business, feelings are a distraction. The more you get attached, the more your focus drops, and I think Neon's focus has dropped too much for me to ignore."

Reyna put out her cigarette in the ashtray and remained silent. She felt foolish with the fact that she probably... probably understood what Viper meant. And more than that - that she might have been right.

Sabine noticed her uncertainty again.

"And we...," she laughed briefly, as if that one word made her laugh. "There is no ’we', Reyna. It's just sex."

"'There is', you mean it's still going on?"

"And why not?" answered Viper's with a question. So she had lied before. It wasn't just this one time. "We do it to forget all the shit we're in. To adjust emotions, whatever. Fade and Neon take it more seriously, because they involve feelings. That affects their effectiveness. So why not, Reyna?"

The fact that she maintained that supernatural calm of hers gave the conversation an even stranger tone. Without batting an eyelid, she endured Reyna's raised eyebrows.

"Because we hate each other?" She involuntarily laughed.

This was all apparently so fucked up that all she had left to do was laugh.

What was Viper actually proposing to her? Friends with benefits? Except that sometimes she felt like tearing Viper to shreds and with reciprocation? And at other times she wanted to protect her from what had happened and was about to happen in her life, even though the thought was so absurd that Reyna herself didn't want to believe it belonged to her?

"Hate is still better than love."

Viper reached for another cigarette, but Reyna somehow couldn't stop her.

***

She felt like she was on a massive hangover.

Entering the armory with her suitcase, she only hoped to make it to her room as quickly as possible, cover herself with a quilt in protection from the overly harsh light, and pray that the murderous headache would give her peace.

Even if she couldn't. The mission had taken her some time and she knew she had to catch up. She was even prepared to spend the next night in the lab.

The echo of her footsteps was too loud. The echo of Reyna's footsteps behind her was also too loud, and although the vulture had stayed in the hangar, she had the feeling that the sound of the engines had etched itself into her skull.

She saw only a simple pattern in front of her. To her locker, to the door, down the corridor to her quarters. Like a horse pulling a carriage with its eyes focused only on the road.

She shifted her suitcase to her other hand, reaching for the fingerprint panel.

Access denied. She wiped her hand in her pants and applied it to the reader once more. Access denied.

“Goddamn shit," she muttered. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Reyna easily open her locker and put her suitcase in it. Unpacking the contents will apparently be handled at another time. Access denied. "Fuck."

She set the suitcase down on the floor. Perhaps too sweepingly.

The clatter of plastic falling to the stone floor caught her attention far too late.

Because when the oval bottle fell out of her sweatshirt pocket, Viper didn't care. But when it rolled across the length of the room and stopped after bouncing off the boot of Sage entering the armory, Viper felt like taking out her ghost and shooting herself.

She could have thrown herself at her property before Sage, frowning her eyebrows, picked it up from the ground, but that would have been pretty pathetic.

She pretended not to care. The scanner finally accepted her fingerprint, so she turned in that direction at least for a moment to avoid watching Sage eye the bottle.

"Caffeine in pills?" The question carried around the room, but met with no response, although Reyna turned her head for a moment. Viper didn't. "Are these yours?"

If it weren't for the fact that she needed the pills, she probably would have just left, leaving Sage without an answer. She let the air out through her nose and held out her hand.

"Give it back."

It was a demand, but Viper knew she sounded weak. The pain continued to eat away at her temples, and a hoarseness stood in her throat.

Sage tightened her fingers on the package. Her lips tightened into a narrow line and her brow furrowed even more, but Viper didn't flinch, still stretching her hand out in front of her.

"What do you need them for?"

"I don't have the strength for your questioning, and I'm not going to explain anything," she said dryly. The sound of her own voice hurt, so she spoke softly, quieter than she would have liked. "Give me the fucking bottle, Sage."

Viper put the suitcase in the cabinet. The effort caused a series of dark spots in front of her eyes, but they disappeared after she blinked.

She had to lie down. Just for a moment.

"I have to report this to Brimstone."

Reyna didn't move from her seat, but Sabine knew she was listening. She only pretended to rearrange something from place to place.

Viper sighed.

"Did you come here for something specific? Because if not, you can go complain to him now, good luck."

"About how you do drugs and demand to be sent on missions? Yes, that's what I'm going to say."

"It's just fucking caffeine," Viper replied. She closed the cabinet and leaned her back against it, hoping the chill would relieve her suffering and perhaps sober her up a bit. "I bet Brimstone takes it himself," she said.

Sage put her arms across her chest.

"Maybe. But in combination with morphine, rather not."

Viper pinched the base of her nose as another spark of pain ran from her temples through her body. She croaked and was already about to respond with something, when it turned out she didn't have to at all.

"Sage, let it go." Reyna closed her locker door with a slam. Sabine opened her eyes for a moment to see Mondragón herself extending her hand toward Ling. "Give it back and let us rest," she said.

"I know she took that morphine, and you know it too, and yet you're defending her?"

Resentment and sort of... disappointment rang out in Sage's voice. For some reason, it was gratifying for Sabine to make Sage discover that she is not always right after all. And that not everyone is on her infallible, perfect side.

Reyna's eyes shone warningly, almost threateningly.

"She didn't take anything, so fuck off."

Silence fell in the room with a deafening crash. Sage's eyes widened and she immediately blinked, as if she had just been slapped in the face. Reyna said nothing more, invariably holding her outstretched hand toward the Chinese woman, who was holding the bottle so tightly that her knuckles turned white.

But with a stiff movement she handed over the pills, almost pressing them into Reyna's palm, who did not break that eye contact until the end.

She turned on her heel toward Viper, intending to return her property, but lowered her hand as soon as she looked at Callas. She was pale as a wall.

"Are you okay?"

Viper raised her gaze to her slowly, as if her eyelids were heavy. A moment later, she squinted, probably not fully knowing what the question was until she thought about it.

She nodded her head.

"Of course," she said. She was aware that two pairs of eyes were now staring at her, and surprisingly, she tolerated one of them more than the other. "I just need to go to the bathroom."

She passed them both and went out into the hallway.

***

As soon as the armory disappeared around the corner, she started running.

She almost yanked the handle off the door of the nearest bathroom as soon as it came within reach of her hand, and immediately slammed the door and opened the toilet flap, leaning over it a split second before her stomach decided to return her breakfast.

She knelt on the cold floor, clinging to the edges of the toilet with hands slippery from cold sweat.

She didn't know how long it took. A few seconds, a few minutes, or maybe an entire eternity, and it wasn't going to let up until she died of dehydration. She felt her forehead wet with sweat and her hair sticking to the nape of her neck. Her sweatshirt clung to her body. Her back ached from bending over that damn toilet for God knows how long.

Her throat ached from the cramps and burned from the acid and bile, but it wasn't until the series of spasms was over and Viper managed to open her eyes. Than it occurred to her that she knew that metallic aftertaste all too well.

She tore off a piece of toilet paper and wiped her mouth with it, knowing that she would see nothing there but what she would soon flush down the toilet.

The white of the paper was tinged with red.

She reached her hand to the cistern and pressed the button, then moved back, looking for any kind of support. She leaned her back against the wall and closed her eyes.

Only one thing came to her mind.

"Fuck."

Chapter 21: TWENTY ONE

Viper raised her head to look at Reyna, but immediately turned it away when she saw that mixture of disbelief and sympathy on her face.

She didn't want to show Zyanya her chapped and still blood-stained lips. Neither the pale skin nor the sweat that pearled on her forehead and ran down her temples. She leaned the back of her head against the wall and stuck her gaze into the tiles across from her, out of the corner of her eye seeing Reyna kneel down beside her, letting go of the door she had been holding so far.

She knew what had happened. It was impossible not to hear the unpleasant sounds of the last several minutes. Or smell the blood. And the sour smell of half-digested food.

"You shouldn't show that you know something," she croaked out, more to the wall than to Reyna. It was an evasive sentence, but it was exactly what it was supposed to be. "Messing with Sage now is like messing with Brimstone, and Brimstone..."

"Viper."

There was something not right about the way Reyna said it. So wrong that Viper felt like shoving the word back down her throat, because Viper... Viper was not being treated softly and gently.

And that word sounded like that. As if Sabine Callas was made of glass.

And at the same time, there was something in that sound that made her tighten those chapped lips, and her speech broke off as if cut with a knife.

Which didn't mean it was over at all.

"I have to go to the lab," she announced after a few or more seconds of uncomfortable silence. She didn't raise her eyes to Reyna, but she didn't intend to at all, either.

Reyna, on the other hand, raised her eyebrows as if someone had just said something so idiotic that she couldn't believe she had heard it at all.

Worse, however, was the fact that even in that gesture there was that hint of sympathy, which, if Viper was looking at her, became that annoying splinter stuck in her skin again.

"You threw up blood, Viper." Sabine squirmed slightly at this sentence, but continued to stubbornly stick her gaze into the tiles. "You won't work in that state."

"I will," she said. "Just so it won't happen again."

Reyna reached her hand behind her and closed the door. She leaned sideways against the sink, and for some reason Viper felt less comfortable with the fact that she herself was sitting on the floor.

"If you will get up on your own, you'll go."

Now it was Viper who raised an eyebrow. Her low laughter echoed through the bathroom, and if Viper hadn't been embarrassed, she might even have called it pathetic.

"Are you blackmailing me?"

Zyanya shrugged her shoulders.

"If I have to."

Sabine snorted. She pulled her legs up under Reyna's watchful eye and propped her hand against the cold floor. She felt cold sweat coat her and shuddered, but shifted her body weight to one leg.

And she immediately sat back down as black spots danced in front of her eyes. She swallowed her saliva, fending off a wave of nausea, let the air out through her nose and tried again.

It didn't work.

"Fuck," she growled to herself, but Mondragón heard anyway.

Her body refused to cooperate. All her limbs were soft, as if they didn't belong to her, she had no power over them, and all muscle power had disappeared from them. Every movement made her palms covered with a new layer of sweat and her hair stuck to her forehead, but she tried and tried again, even if the result was only salvos of her own curses.

"Viper."

Viper ignored her, this time resting her hand on the slippery wall. She knew it won’t help, but she had to try anyway.

"Viper."

Viper only growled, sitting down on the floor again. Her helplessness hit her every time like a pile of bricks, and she still tried to crawl out from under it.

"Sabine, stop."

If Sabine Callas' gaze could kill, Zyanya would probably already be lying dead on the floor. But she also already knew that underneath that hard shell was fear. Of someone seeing a weakness that Viper didn't want to admit.

"Don't tell me what to do," she croaked out, leaning back against the wall. She hesitated, as if she didn't want to admit that she was losing to her own body, but at the same time she knew she had no chance against it. "I'm not going to ask you for anything," she said.

"I don't want you to ask, I just want you to accept this help."

Reyna knew that answer had slapped Viper right in the face, but also on the other hand, that was what she wanted. It wasn't sarcasm, Zyanya didn't include a single note of malice in this or any previous sentence.

She was calm, aware that it is the calmness in such situations that Viper finds harder to swallow than an argument.

But she did not respond, digesting the statement and all the possible options for ending this situation. She was thinking so intensely that the muscles of her jaw trembled every so often from the constant tension.

Reyna didn't make her wait any longer:

"Let's get out of here."

Reluctantly, Viper ran her eyes over the hand extended toward her.

She had no choice.

***

"I'll be fine now," Viper said immediately as she sat down on the bed, and Reyna took the arm that so far held Viper’s waist tightly. "You can go now, thank you."

Something in Zyanya twitched in surprise at the last word, but she managed to play indifferent to it. As for the first part of the statement, however, she was more skeptical.

"Should I go now so that you'll immediately dig out notes, your laptop and god knows what else from god knows where, and get another sleepless night?"

Viper looked to the side. But only for a moment.

"So you're going to sit here and watch me like some kid?"

Reyna sat down on the other side of the bed.

"Yes, that's what I'm going to do," she said, earning a snort of disbelief and a raised eyebrow from Viper. "Now go to sleep."

She reached her hand to the bedside table, where a book of some sort lay. She had never given much thought to what Viper was reading, since the only book she could think of so far was some kind of scientific publication, but she took it in her hand and flipped through it reluctantly.

"I won't sleep," she protested, trying to talk Reyna out of this idiotic idea with her gaze.

Reyna, on the other hand, was in the process of reading the book's description.

"So you will lie down until you get some rest," she said.

"I won't lie down either."

Zyanya felt like throwing in some text about actually behaving like a stubborn child, but refrained. She opened the book on the first page.

A psychological thriller should be suitable for waiting until one specific snake falls asleep.

"I'm not going away, Viper. Whether you want me to or not."

Viper did not respond. She only let the air out of her lungs. It was unclear whether because she had already given up or because she didn't have an escape route prepared.

But even if her texts were cutting, and she showed with her eyes how much she resented the current situation, she was tired. She sat hunched over, each blink was slow, and Reyna could hear her heart beating sluggishly.

Sabine slid into bed and covered herself with a quilt. Only when she turned her back to Zyanya did she speak again.

"Sometimes you're a pain in the ass."

Reyna smiled to herself.

***

Viper had fallen asleep. Reyna expected it, but somehow it was still surprising that when she put the book back on the cabinet and then closed the door, Sabine was actually asleep. It didn't take too long for her body to decide for itself what it needed. From what Reyna remembered, she left the bookmark after maybe a dozen pages.

She stepped out into the hallway, the door handle locked behind her.

And as soon as she looked in front of her, she felt herself stiffen all over.

For her gaze stopped on the figure of Fade, who stared at her as intensely as Reyna had stared at her, and her fingertips immediately clenched around the coffee mug.

Fuck.

"So it's true," said Fade first. Her voice didn't sound annoyed; on the contrary, it was frighteningly calm. "Neon didn't mishear anything."

Fuckfuckfuckfuck.

"Fade-..."

"I'm going to Brimstone."

Hazal turned on her heel and actually intended to turn back. Reyna stared at her back for only a second before swallowing her stillness.

Now she had to think soberly.

"I know you caused Viper's nightmare."

Fade paused. However, she did not turn to face Reyna, showing that this mention would not stop her in what she was about to do.

She laughed short and low.

"Yeah? And how do you know that she even had a nightmare? I guess you would have had to be there with her back then, right? "

"She told me."

Fade snorted.

"Bullshit. "

"Using your power against your co-workers is a sabotage."

Only this caused Hazal to turn her back. However, she looked neither frightened nor stressed. Deep down, Reyna knew that at that moment Fade was more confident than she was.

She herself had no idea what she actually wanted to do.

"And shooting a co-worker isn't it?"

Hazal squinted her eyes. Something menacing flashed in them, perhaps with a hint of satisfaction that she could finally use this argument.

Maybe she even blamed Reyna for the whole incident as well. But that didn't matter now.

Now Reyna had to play a psychological game with Fade, even if she had no idea how to do it.

"I'm not saying it isn’t," Reyna replied. "I just mean that I can snitch on you just as much as you can snitch on me. Neither of us wants to get fired, so why can't we just... make a deal?"

Fade shifted her body weight to one leg, moved her cup to her other hand, and although so far there was mostly mockery and pity in her gaze, it was impossible not to notice a note of curiosity there.

"You're scared." Fade said it so confidently that Reyna would probably feel uncomfortable if she didn't have a ready answer. "That I will turn you in."

"And you're not?" reflected Zyanya. "We're in the same boat."

"No, we’re not," Fade replied, shrugging her shoulders. "A nightmare can happen to anyone, and you have no proof that this one was caused by me. When it comes to cameras, Cypher is on my side, so your relationship with Viper is more at risk than mine with Neon. Cameras are everywhere and you can see how many times you go to her, and Brimstone is not so stupid not to connect the dots. You're in this boat alone, Reyna."

Zyanya herself didn't know how she felt at that moment. She wasn't afraid of many things, she wasn't afraid of death, she wasn't afraid of walking straight out into an avalanche of bullets, and now she felt panic tighten her throat.

It was a pity those cameras didn't record sound.

She felt caught.

But she couldn't show it, that would be pathetic.

"So what do you want?"

It was a question, although it sounded more like a demand. She wanted to end this conversation before she dug herself into an even bigger swamp than she currently was.

Fade, however, liked the question. She may not have smiled, but satisfaction shone in her eyes along with stoic calm. She knew all these facts while she was still talking to Neon, but she didn't want to tell her. Not when the younger one was blazing with a will for revenge and not thinking fully soberly.

Now the moment was perfect.

Reyna was not Viper. She didn't have the position Viper did, so she was relatively less of a threat and feared more. And if her relationship with Viper had already been seen by someone other than Neon, the assumptions might have become more plausible and tilted to Fade's side.

Yes, the risk of losing her job still existed, but now Fade felt that if she didn't seize the opportunity and force Viper to change trough Reyna, she would never do it again.

Reyna was the link between them. And she was going to take advantage of it.

"You will make Viper to leave me and Neon alone. If she doesn't interfere with us being together or threaten us, you don't have to fear anything from my side."

"And no more nightmares."

"If Viper keeps her word."

"She will."

Fade laughed briefly.

"It's impressive that you believe in it that much."

"It's not your business from here."

Hazal shrugged her shoulders. Yes, Reyna was right, because it wasn't her business, and what's more, she didn't want it to be her business at all. She didn't care to know how Zyanya was going to keep her word.

"Alright. Deal."

"How do I know you'll keep it?"

"I could ask you the same question," Fade replied. "I think we need to trust each other."

She turned away, apparently considering the conversation over. Reyna must have thought so too, because she was ready to go her way, but stopped at the last moment.

"Wait." Fade looked over her shoulder from the end of the corridor, but failed to hide her reluctance at the gesture. "I want to talk to Neon. I know she probably doesn't want to see me, but I want to apologize to her."

Deep down, Fade knew that Reyna was saying this sincerely, and although she knew how Reyna's presence had been affecting Neon lately, she was aware that this was the conversation they needed. Tala didn't talk openly about how much Zyanya meant to her, but Fade knew her own. She knew that Neon saw Reyna as an older sister who was a substitute for her family, left behind in the Philippines, and that the current situation caused her pain, even if she hid it behind anger.

That's the only reason she agreed.

"I'll see what I can do," she said.

***

Neon was lying on her bed playing a game on her phone when Fade entered the room. She immediately raised her head and seemed to want to say hello, but Fade interrupted her.

"I talked to Reyna."

Maybe she knew that dragging out having this conversation wouldn't work out for them, but even if it did, she had no idea how Neon would react.

Neon furrowed her brow and put the phone down. She rose to a sitting position and sat down cross-legged, watching as Fade took her desk chair and set her coffee mug down on the countertop.

"What for?"

"I made a deal with her." It was hard to tell whether Taka tilted her head because she didn't believe it and thought it was a joke, or because it was the beginning of irritation. "Viper will leave us alone."

Neon blinked.

"Just like that?" she asked, and her eyebrows lifted. She moved her eyes over Fade's figure from top to bottom, trying to make out anything from her posture, facial expressions or even the fact that she was playing with her fingers unconsciously, as she always did when she was unsure. "Hazal?"

Fade let out a breath and rested her elbows on her knees, hunching back in her chair.

"No," she replied. "She'll leave us alone if we will leave her and Reyna alone."

Fade saw the spark of anger in Neon's eyes. But also disbelief. She was probably so disbelieving that her short laugh echoed through the room.

"Is this a joke?"

Hazal hesitated to tell Tala every detail, but she probably couldn't keep anything from her. Even if she were to get mad.

She sighed.

"I met her as she was leaving Viper's bedroom." Neon's shoulders slumped; even from a distance, Fade could see her face tighten. Soon after, she intertwined her arms across her chest and drove her gaze into the mattress, as if ashamed to show her anger so openly. She didn't speak up, however, letting Fade finish. "I proposed this deal, she agreed and said she will convince Viper."

Tala bit the inside of her cheek and still refused to look at Hazal for even a second.

"So... I'm supposed to act like nothing happened and pretend I don't know they're fucking after she blackmailed us about only being with each other, attacked you and me and threatened to kick us out of Protocol?"

"I know how that sounds," sighed Fade. Seeing that Neon still wasn't looking at her, and that she was poking her gaze into the bedclothes so hard that she was almost burning a hole in them, she got up from her seat and knelt by the bed. Neon had no choice but to look at her reluctantly. "But maybe this is a solution? We could... we could stop being afraid, Tala."

"I'm not afraid," mumbled Neon.

"Not even a bit?" Hazal smiled slightly, trying to lighten the atmosphere. She put her hand on the younger woman's knee, and the latter pressed her lips together as if she had just been caught. And that's probably why she didn't respond to anything, but she didn't need to at all, either. Fade already knew. "Listen... I think it's not fair and I'm not at all happy that I have to ignore what happened as well. But Reyna can face Viper more than I can. She'll keep her in check, and we can... just be, right?"

Neon was still silent, but after a moment she nodded. Fade continued to see those sparks of anger, maybe even disappointment, in her eyes, but she also saw that they were beginning to fade with each passing second until they finally disappeared completely. She let herself be hugged as well, sighing into Hazal's neck as if keeping her guard up and hardy in the face of all that was going on around them had finally tired her out.

Fade hugged her tightly, and for a moment simply looked over her shoulder at the window, until she spoke again.

"Reyna asked about you." Although she didn't see it, she was sure that Neon tightened her lips at the sound of that name. "She wants to talk," she said.

"But I don't want to."

When the hug ended, Fade noticed that the anger, though diminished, had returned again for a while. She felt bad about forcing Neon into the very touchy subjects, but she also knew, she couldn't ignore them.

"She said she wanted to apologize to you," she added softly. "Maybe you would try talking to her after all?"

"And why should I do that?" replied Neon, shrugging her shoulders, and the exasperation echoed in her voice. "She has already chosen who she prefers to spend time with," said Neon.

"Then maybe she wants to make amends."

"How can you be so sure?" replied Tala, putting her arms over her chest. "Maybe she finally wants to tell me to my face that she doesn't give a damn about anything except Viper."

"You know, apologizing is not likely to be about that."

Neon rolled her eyes, though perhaps she didn't even realize it.

"Okay, fine, if it's so important to you, I'll talk to her," she said.

"It's not important to me, but I can see that it's important to you, Tala. I can see that you need it too."

"Whatever. Can we end this topic?"

Fade sighed. Still, she was not one to give up easily. And certainly not on issues that involved Neon.

She found her hand on the bed by which she was still kneeling beside and squeezed it gently.

"Do you promise to talk to her?"

"Maybe."

"Yes or no?"

Tala looked at their joined hands and let out a breath.

"Diyos, sana ikaw ay."

***

From the threshold of the shooting range, Neon saw Reyna at her post, with her fingers wrapped around the ghost and safety glasses on her nose.

For that, she didn't know if Reyna saw her. And in fact, with each passing second, she wondered if she wanted to be seen at all.

Maybe it was a bad idea after all. Maybe it was even a tragic idea, looking at the fact that the desire for this conversation as she hadn't had before, she still didn't develop it. And the fact that she came here at all was solely due to Fade.

It was a task she just wanted to tick off and forget it even existed. That's probably why she found Reyna before she ran into her by chance.

She shifted her gaze across the shooting target. Of course every bullet was perfectly centered, how else.

For some reason, that's what made Neon grimace. She didn't want to feel jealousy at all. The desire to be just that.

These feelings toward Reyna used to be like that once, when Zyanya was still Tala's role model. Once, that is... before Viper.

"Do you want to join?"

Neon only now noticed that Reyna was no longer staring at the target, but at her, even as she put the ghost back on the stand.

"Don't act like nothing happened," she said. She couldn't shake the dryness from her voice, but she herself didn't know if she wanted to. Probably deep down she knew that Reyna deserved it. "I came because Fade asked me to."

Reyna nodded as if in understanding and took off her safety glasses. She didn't put them away, however, and rotated them in her fingers for a moment under the younger woman's watchful eye.

"I didn't want you to feel betrayed." Neon folded her arms over her chest and nudged the bullet empty casing with the tip of her shoe. It rolled on the floor with a quiet hum. "And I didn't know it would hurt you so much," she said.

"And what did you expect?" replied Neon. "That I would accept your new friend after she openly threatens us? How she lashes out at us and treats us like a squadron of robots? Or that I'll accept her because you sleep with her?"

Reyna endured the younger woman's deadly stare, because she knew she had to if she wanted Neon to feel that Reyna wasn't going to cover up. Not this time. That she really wants to come to an understanding with her, even if they were to bring all the mess out right now.

"I know how this is going to sound, but... you don't know everything about Viper." She stammered for a moment, seeing the growing anger on Neon's face, but gathered her words. "I don't want this to be the only argument for you to forgive me, because yes, she's done a lot of bad things, but she... she's really not a monster," she said.

"Then why does she act like one?" she asked. "You pretend that instead of a damn shark you have a cuddly sheep that demands your rescue in front of you, even if any other person would see there is nothing to rescue here at this point."

"It's more complicated than you think," Reyna said.

"So you have a savior complex?"

Reyna realized she had opened her mouth, but immediately closed it. She couldn't tell the truth, couldn't expose Viper in Neon's eyes. On this one part, she had to remain silent, and she had to hope that this silence would be enough.

Because perhaps saying it out loud was too difficult.

"I don't want to argue about the same thing again," she said. She didn't want to think about how that answer was received by Neon. "I want to talk about us," she said.

"Alright, then let's talk about us." Tala lifted her gaze to the older woman, even if her sight had so far been running somewhere around the shooting range.

It was a silent sign that Reyna could talk.

"I'm sorry if you felt betrayed. I don't know if you think I want to replace you, but if you do, that's not true. And I also don't want you to hate me, only because you hate Viper," she explained. Neon listened to her, Reyna saw that. "I really want to go back to the way things used to be, Neon. I didn't know it would all turn out this way and get so complicated, but I don't want that to be the reason we'll soon stop saying 'hi' to each other when we meet in the hallway."

Neon nodded and looked as if it had cost her a lot of effort to look at Reyna. Zyanya knew she was only here for Fade's sake and didn't expect the Filipina to immediately throw herself into her arms, yet the strange indifference she probably never experienced from Neon before drove invisible pins into Reyna’s skin.

She treated her like an enemy. Not like a sister.

And worse, the reason was something Reyna couldn't explain to her. She couldn't explain it even to herself to be honest.

"You’re done?"

Zyanya sighed, but nodded. Maybe deep down she had expected such a reaction, but still the coldness from Neon froze her more than usual.

The younger woman, however, did not leave immediately. She stared at the floor, as if pondering something, and crinkled her eyebrows, perhaps choosing the right words.

"Do you like her?"

The question was simple. The simplest, most direct one possible.

And Reyna had no answer. Because everything between her and Viper was too fucked up for her to give it any name.

Not that she ever tried to name it.

And after what happened on the Icebox mission, everything that was screwed up got screwed up twice as bad. The occasional sex?

Sex after which Zyanya hoped Sabine would let her get to herself at least a little? Sex that Sabine herself treated as drowning out the world around her? Sex that, despite the fact that it should never have happened, did happen and Reyna did not associate it as negatively as she should?

Sex that happened right after Sabine Callas showed her most sensitive side and hated the feeling of breaking down in front of Reyna so much that she wanted to lull Reyna's vigilance with it?

"It's... really complicated."

"Yes or no?"

Reyna thought for too long. Maybe just a few seconds, maybe one blink too long, but it was enough to make Neon nod her head, as if in pity, and head for the exit.

"Don't bother anymore. I have my answer."

***

Zyanya felt like slapping herself in the face when she realized that she had stopped at the door to Viper's room.

She stared at them as if she couldn't believe they were there. That she had just headed there after Neon openly told her the reason for her reluctance, and that even that didn't stop her.

She took her phone out of her pocket. It was late in the evening. It's not that she forbade Sabine to sleep, because she knew perfectly well that her biological clock had a serious disorder, but the fact that the chemist hadn't eaten or drunk anything for most of the day was enough to make Zyanya feel justified.

The door was open, so she went inside. A mound of quilts reassured her that Viper was still asleep, but Reyna kept going anyway.

The tea Zyanya had in her mug was originally meant for her, but she put it on the desk without even thinking about it. She even found a mug pad with the Periodic Table somewhere next to Viper’s laptop.

"Viper," she said quietly, to the cocoon of the quilt and the twilight of the room. "Wake up, you need to drink something."

Silence. Reyna sighed, pushed herself away from the desk and walked closer to the bed where Sabine's face was.

"Viper..."

She broke off. Her whole body stiffened.

Because Viper's pillow was caked with blood, which had managed to dry not only on the material, but also on the pale skin under Callas' nose.

"Fuck." Reyna dropped to her knees beside the bed and frantically shook Sabine’s shoulder. "Viper? Viper, can you hear me?"

Nothing. Zyanya didn't even notice when cold sweat coated her hands. She put two fingers to Viper’s neck, not even trusting her own overhearing.

She should have guessed that something was wrong. That Viper had never slept this much. That she should have come here earlier. That she had screwed up.

The pulse was there. Weak, barely perceptible, but it was there. Reyna tossed back the quilt, wanting to clutch Viper’s arm more clearly and shake it a few more times. She pressed the top of her hand to Callas' forehead.

She had a fever.

"Fucking shit, damn it." She wiped her hands on her pants so she could pull her phone out of her pocket. "You're going to hate me for this, but I have no choice." She dialed the number, unconsciously counting down each signal. "Sage? Med bay, now."

Chapter 22: TWENTY TWO

First thing Sabine remembered was the warm, faint light emanating from the lamp above her head. Not counting that, there wasn't much else, except the coolness of the bedding and the strangely familiar smell of disinfectant.

And finally, the silence broke.

"I did a blood test." Viper turned her head on the pillow, feeling the initial stupor begin to fall away behind the wall as soon as her gaze came to rest on Sage. Without looking at Callas, the woman corrected the flow of the IV. "Your results don't look good."

She immediately regretted that their gazes had met at all. She didn't speak, however, sticking her gaze into the wall opposite and pretending that Sage's presence in the room was as important as the air at that moment.

Her silence, however, did not deter Sage. The Chinese woman moved away from the IV and watched for a moment as the fluid flowed into the tubing, until she spoke again.

"I'll have to inform Brimstone about this, you know that?"

Her voice sounded quavering and almost commanding. Viper felt like forcing it back down her throat. She felt uncomfortable with the fact that she was lying in bed under IV and that she couldn't get up and face Sage's gaze.

That she was now lower than her.

"Another thing to complain about?" she said before she could bite her tongue. Not that she tried. "Because I doubt you mean my well being."

"The Protocol must have employees you can rely on."

Sabine would most gladly have spit in her face for that, if only she had the strength to stand up. She only snorted a hollow laugh.

"And it’s you to say that?" she asked, raising an eyebrow. "Don't be ridiculous, Sage."

The Chinese woman was not amused one bit. Her eyebrows were knitted together, and she only glanced fleetingly at the window.

"If you're not in full health, we can't entrust you with other people's lives," she said. For some reason, this reminded Viper of some previously recorded video. A dry, emotionless, recited formula. "Brimstone may have believed you were fine, but the results don't lie."

Viper, if she could, would have slapped her in the face.

"Who the fuck do you think you are?" Sage clenched her jaw tighter, but didn't let herself be provoked. "He's only protecting your ass for a while, because you've made me the worst evil on this earth and you have the nerve to tell me what I can?"

"That's what's best for the team, you know it well." Ling strained every word, but Sabine could see that she was deliberately avoiding her gaze. She was cowering. "Since Brimstone decided he needed me, it means he really does," she said.

"Brimstone thought so because he doesn't know the whole truth," hissed Viper. "I don't think he would want to touch you with a goddamn stick if he knew you were a fucking sadist." Sage tensed up, but Sabine didn't regret a single word. And before she could stop herself, more flowed. "Out of all of us, you're the one who doesn't deserve to be here, and you haven't gotten fired yet just because you were lucky enough to get a power that no one else got. Now get the fuck out and don't exalt yourself in a place you have no damn right to."

Sage was always quiet. Always around the other agents, she was the fortress she kept talking about and always drove Viper crazy, because she was the only one who knew what kind of lies Ling was feeding them all. So every little crack in that calm shell was like the highest reward for Sabine.

And now she has just received another one. Fury flashed in Sage's eyes. She may have even felt humiliated. Good.

However, Sage was Sage, and she clenched her teeth and walked out, leaving Viper alone.

Viper, who remembered nothing from the moment she went to bed. She remembered the coolness of the bedclothes, the rustling of the pages that Reyna turned in her book, and then... she woke up here, hell knows how long later, with that damn tube stuck in the bend of her elbow.

And by now Sage knew that Viper was weak. She knew her secret, she could read the test results, because Viper damn well didn't make it. She had run out of days to come up with something, anything, that would put all suspicion away from her.

Sage was able to take advantage of that. And Viper knew she was capable of it.

She sank her head back against the pillow, unconsciously listening for Sage's distant footsteps in the hallway.

But when those faded somewhere in the general noise, another appeared. They were different, less stiff, though quiet. Viper knew who she would see at the threshold, and she herself didn't know why she felt a sudden wave of embarrassment when Reyna's gaze finally broke into her profile.

She thought she'd ask, that she'd speak up, putting Viper in that uncomfortable, vulnerable position she hated so much. That she'd make her explain herself, like a kid who'd done something wrong. That she would again encounter that look of pity and regret.

But Reyna merely picked up a stool set up in the corner of the room and placed it next to the bed, without saying a word for the time being. Her every move was tracked by Viper, but she seemed to pretend not to see it.

"You scared me," she said after a moment of silence, tearing her gaze away from the window, where they both stared until their gazes met.

Viper wanted to be mad at her. That she had called Sage, that she had let her see what was supposed to be a secret. That she let her do research that would reveal too much.

She wanted to start arguing with Reyna and force her to leave, because that was the scheme. That's what she always did.

But something was not cooperating. Her mechanism broke down, her elaborate plans got mixed up and Viper ended up shrugging her shoulders.

"I didn't want to."

Reyna nodded, and for a moment Sabine thought they would stay that way. That they would stay - in the silence of that hospital wing, surrounded by the irritating smell of disinfectants.

But then she saw that Zyanya was thinking about something. She was putting words together into a sentence, then into a whole statement, trying to hide the fact that the urge to ask this question or say this sentence is eating her up from the inside, but in her opinion the timing is not right.

Viper wanted to urge her on, to get it over with. But just then Reyna grimaced a little in her seat and finally spoke up.

"I know you didn't want me to call Sage. And you may be mad about it, but I didn't have-"

"I'm not mad," interrupted Viper. Reyna blinked, surprised. "I would have panicked too," she added. "Besides... it doesn't matter now anyway."

Zyanya digested this sentence for a moment, and Viper saw the moment perfectly, where consternation appeared on her face.

No wonder. Sabine didn't recognize herself either. Her lack of cutting language, her lack of fighting, gave her the impression that in fact her real character was standing next to her and looking at the fake one lying in bed. That there are two of them and she doesn't even notice when they switch places.

She sighed.

"Sage did the tests. She knows it's not just the occasional nosebleed." Viper swallowed, feeling an unpleasant tightness come up in her throat. "She's going to go to Brimstone with this. And she's going to throw all his cards on the table and get her point."

Reyna moved her chair closer, as if she hadn't heard the previous words. Or she didn't believe them.

"Her point?"

Viper shrugged her shoulders, although the gesture was so forced that she thought it didn't belong to her.

"An agent who can't be relied on one hundred percent is not an agent. I know something that no one else knows about her, so I'm a threat to her, which, by the way, she can get rid of if she just throws my blood results on Brimstone's desk at the right moment."

Reyna clasped her hands in her lap and shook her head.

"He can't fire you. He wouldn't do that to you."

"He wouldn't have suspended me if not Sage," she replied. She sounded tired. She talked about all this as if it were an everyday topic that she was already sick of and wanted to get it over with as soon as possible. "If she's going to be there when we talk then... then I might as well pack up now."

Reyna didn't know how she should react. She didn't know what she should say in such a way that it would be right and to the point. She also didn't know why, at that very moment, the entire image of Brimstone that she had had in her head up to that point was crossed out.

Why she felt downright uncontrollable anger towards the man she had worked so much with, trusted and... who suddenly looked completely different.

"I'll go there with you," she announced.

She didn't even have time to think properly about why she said it at all, but in turn she felt her hand involuntarily clench into a fist.

"I don't need a guard."

Reyna felt like rolling her eyes. All Viper. She, alone, against the whole world.

"It's not about the guard." Viper furrowed her brow. "He wouldn't dare to fire you in front of anyone more than Sage. That would spread quickly and he knows it."

Viper snorted briefly.

"That's supposed to stop him?"

"It's supposed to make him rethink what he's doing," Reyna replied. "If he throws out his co-founder, he'll shoot himself in the knee, because Sage may be able to oversee missions, but she won't come up with anything from the beginning. She's not a controller after all."

"How do you know she can't handle it?"

Reyna shrugged her shoulders, and a slight smile appeared on her lips.

"When Brimstone suspended you and we went on a mission, Sage didn't get off on her own actions. She took your plan because it was the only one she got straight under her nose. It was good, it was successful, but she couldn’t bear it because she didn't dare to make any changes herself." she explained. "And I think Brimstone knows that."

"Wow," Viper commented, laughing briefly and pressing two fingers to the bridge of her nose.

Reyna doubted had ever seen Viper smile before. Nor laughed. So un-ironic, devoid of sarcasm.

And even now on that damn bed, with an IV put up to her veins, pale almost like paper and probably damn tired… smiling, she looked a few years younger. Different. Less menacing. And more... human.

Zyanya involuntarily snorted as well.

"What?"

"Nothing," Sabine replied. She took her hand off her nose and shrugged her shoulders. "I just wouldn't take you for someone who is a specialist in making intrigues, that's all."

"It's not an intrigue."

"Really?" she asked. "Because I think it is a little bit, though."

Now it was Reyna who shrugged her shoulders.

"It's just observation," she concluded. "And I know that the ability to observe is not knowledge, but-..."

"Oh, fuck you."

Reyna rolled her eyes at these words. She didn't know when it stopped being so irritating and causing her to want to bite right back.

Now she just snorted in spirit. She drummed her fingernails on her own thigh and let out a breath of air through her nose, for a moment driving her gaze to the tiles between her feet.

She knew she couldn't avoid the question that was weighing her down. It will get her now or later, but it won't let go. It will squeeze her throat until she finally can't stand it.

For this reason alone, she got up and, under Viper's watchful eye, sat on the edge of the bed.

First she tried to read something from her eyes. Information. Perhaps it would be easier that way if they didn't have to say anything.

But nothing of the sort happened. Sabine just waited, wrinkling her eyebrows and scanning Zyanya's figure from top to bottom. Maybe she had guessed. Or maybe she didn't.

"It got worse, didn't it?"

Viper fled with her eyes. Her laughter disappeared somewhere between the walls of the room as if it had never been there.

The old, familiar Viper, in whom frustration usually bubbled up in silence, returned. Calmly, like a slowly flared flame.

And it was eating her from the inside out.

Now, however, instead of fire, there was glass. Reyna almost regretted her question. For a second or two she wondered what it would have been like if she had never asked it and left it all as it was.

Viper pressed her head more into the pillow and probably tried hard to maintain her indifference. But she was slowly cracking.

She grunted.

"I think... I think it did," she said finally. She swallowed her saliva. "But I'll stop it."

Reyna got the impression that Viper said this more for herself than for anyone else. That hearing it out loud was not meant to convince Reyna, but herself.

But she didn't say it out loud. She left the thought to herself, because I guess... she probably didn't have the heart to stick a needle into the bubble that Sabine had surrounded herself with.

Not now.

Even if she felt like popping it at this very moment.

***

"Do you know why you're here?"

Viper furrowed her brow. Not because she wondered, nor because she was thinking of an answer, but because she was downright disbelieving of what she had just heard.

It sounded so pathetic that she didn't manage to hold back a snort. Her gaze moved over Sage's figure, only then returning to Brimstone, who, although he had a bundle of papers in front of him, stared straight at her.

"Sage couldn't help but tell me," she concluded. She stuck her hands in her pockets, looking around carelessly. "Right?"

She turned to the Chinese woman, who did not answer. She only clenched her hands on her forearms more and probably wondered whether she should speak up now or later.

Sabine was almost amused by this.

"The fact that you're alive is like a miracle with such results," she said after a moment, deliberately ignoring the previous provocation.

"I didn't ask for your opinion."

Ling furrowed her eyebrows, Viper did not, but her fingers tightened on the inside of her pocket.

And just then Reyna entered the office. She didn't ask for an invitation, didn't even say hello. She put a bundle of papers on the printer and took a single sheet of paper in her hand.

She thanked herself in spirit that she hadn't photocopied these damn reports earlier.

The main office may have been Brimstone's main hangout outside his own private office, but it was still for public use. No one had the right to kick her out of there, and that didn't happen.

In fact, she didn't even know if they paid any attention to her at all beyond Brimstone's fleeting glance in her direction.

"Why didn't you say it was so bad?"

There was almost a sound of disappointment in Liam's voice. Disappointment mixed with a reprimand to a disobedient student. What an idiocy.

Viper shrugged her shoulders, refraining from snorting a laugh.

"And what do you think?" she asked. "You suspended me, saying that 'I'm easily irritated' or some shit like that and any opinion actually doesn't matter, because you do what she dictates anyway." She nodded toward Sage, but ignored her confused expression. "Why would I speak up if you don't give a shit about me anyway, Liam?" she said.

"It's because I can't lead a squad that conceals such facts from me," Brimstone replied. Viper heard notes of anger in his voice. And that was good, she let him be angry. Let him know that she is not going to let someone make her someone she isn’t without a fight. "We could take some steps before..." he fell silent for a moment, gesturing with his hand to the papers in front of him.

A scanner hummed in the background. Viper cast a brief glance in that direction. Reyna was playing her part well.

"Before what?"

Brimstone tightened his fingers on the edge of the desk.

"You know very well what."

"I want you to fucking say it," she growled. Sage looked somewhere to the side, Reyna leaned over the scanner. And Viper felt her rage begin to build inside her on its own. "Go on."

Brimstone didn't say it. He was only silent, dully staring at a bundle of papers.

Viper nodded her head. Of course. Everyone here feared this word, like a monster from under the bed that bites naughty children. Everyone avoided this word, even though they should have been familiar with it long ago.

"I'm not dumb. I'm aware that it's not fucking good, and I'm trying to do something about it," she growled. "And maybe it would be easier for me if you guys didn't fuck with me nonstop with your reprimands and pointing out what I'm doing wrong all the damn time."

"Your results show no improvement."

Viper felt the blood freeze in her veins as soon as that sentence rang out in the room. She forgot about Brimstone, about Reyna, even about herself. Once again, the other Sabine stood next to her and watched the whole scene from the side, like a silent audience.

She wanted to hit Sage. To slap her. Grab her by the shoulders and ask her out of the room.

Cold sweat ascended to her forehead. She swallowed her saliva. Her fingers went numb in her pants pocket from the force with which she clenched them on the material.

She was unable to get a word out, and the silence rang in her ears. But only for a moment.

"Shut up, Sage."

All pairs of eyes turned to Reyna. Reyna, who was clutching a pile of papers in her hand, and her purple eyes shone warningly in the semi-darkness of the corner where the light was fainter.

She looked straight at Sage, however. With her lips clenched and her nails almost tearing the paper.

"This conversation is not about you, Reyna."

Purple eyes jumped to Brimstone, who broke the momentary, almost dead silence.

"It isn’t about her either," she replied. "But you won't do anything about it, will you?"

Brimstone measured her with a hard stare. They looked at each other like that in silence, and frankly Viper was impressed that he was the one who yielded first and stopped the silent fight. Pathetic.

Reyna wasn't about to leave, ostentatiously standing next to the printer and laboriously rearranging page after page. No one could ask her out either, as she had as much right to be here as any of them.

"Sage can cure you," Brimstone finally said, pushing Reyna's presence out of his mind.

Maybe he was afraid to look at her, or maybe he decided he wasn't going to drag more people into the conflict than he already had.

"I can do it too. I'm just not as perfect as she is, and I need more time."

"Since this started, you've never died on a mission, have you?"

Viper's gaze immediately went to Sage.

"Can you stop bragging for once?" she asked. Her eyes were icy and she sincerely hoped Ling saw that. And so did Brimstone. "I've had enough. I won't listen to this."

She turned on her heel and headed toward the door. However, just as she was about to press the handle, Brimstone broke the silence.

"You have three days. If you don't get better, Sage will carry out the treatment. If you don't agree, I'll be forced to send you into retirement."

Viper snorted. With disbelief. With disappointment. And even with the pain that cut through her body so suddenly that it almost took her breath away, although it only hurt mentally.

In Liam's eyes, she didn't recognize her friend. She didn't recognize the person with whom she had set up this place, whom she had trusted and who had been this substitute of family for her all along up to that point. At that moment, Viper felt lonelier than ever, because there was only coldness in her friend's gaze.

And she realized that for him, Viper had been replaced.

Not knowing when, she felt her eyelids begin to burn.

"Fuck you, Liam."

She left, slamming the door.

***

When a notification of a new file appeared on the screen, Viper knew who it was from. And she didn't want to read it at all.

But she did it anyway.

Immediately, her phone shattered on the lab floor, its shards scattered on the tiles like a peculiar mosaic.

Or at least that's how it was supposed to be. That's how she imagined the scene, where the screen with the damning text disappears, its content and value vanishing as if it never existed.

Instead, she squeezed the phone tighter and put it down on the tabletop.

Immediately, her tired gaze turned toward the door, catching Reyna trying to enter the lab unnoticed.

Zyanya only sighed and lowered the plate she happened to be holding.

"We both know why I'm here, so don't say anything and just eat that dinner."

Sabine looked in that direction, but her gaze was strangely heavy and after all she just slammed it into the desk.

"They want to kill me," she said suddenly.

Immediately she pressed the bridge of her nose and let the air out through her mouth, as if saying that sentence made her tired.

Or as if it sounded so pathetic that Viper momentarily wanted to cover her face with this one gesture.

Zyanya almost dropped the plate on the floor. Although she didn't know it, in her imagination it would have shattered in exactly the same way as Viper's phone.

She blinked.

"What? Who?"

Sabine shrugged her shoulders. She flicked a pen of some sort across the desk top and ran her eyes over her notes, though she didn't even focus on what was written in them.

"I've survived every mission since it started. Sage claims that when a person dies and is resurrected, their body goes through a... reset of some sort and all the health issues disappear, because it’s like being born again. Starting over or so. She sent me fucking proof that it would work," she laughed briefly, but without even a single note of merriment. She began drumming her fingers on her notebook. "My cells are sabotaging themselves, and they won't do it except when... I'm dead." She swallowed her saliva, but to avoid looking insecure, she took a few steps away from Reyna and ostentatiously rearranged some test tubes. "So... so Sage wants to kill me under medical control, heal the cells that will then be inactive and resurrect me after she is done."

Reyna nodded, although Sabine didn't see it. But even if what she had just heard sounded like the greatest madness, she couldn't deny that-...

"That... sounds reasonable."

Viper tightened her fingers on one of the tubes, but didn't turn around. Her face, as usual, was hidden behind her black hair, although Reyna didn't need to see it to hear her heart speed up.

"So you support her too? Great," she growled.

She put the tube back on the rack a little more nervously than necessary.

"I don't support Sage," Reyna replied. "I support the fact that she can help you. Those are two different things."

"You really don't understand?" asked Viper. Now Reyna didn't sense so much anger there as... disappointment. Or a mixture of both feelings that was beginning to boil dangerously. "If I agree to this, I will be like a beaten dog that comes to its own tormentor for rescue. And she will once again turn into angel in the eyes of others, because she will once again play the fucking savior."

Seeing the lightning in Viper's eyes, Reyna had to take one deeper breath. Maybe two. She didn't want to argue. She couldn't argue.

"I know it's fucked up and... hurtful to you," she said. Viper followed her every move, even if it seemed she wasn't even looking in her direction. "But do you really want to let the fact that you hate her weigh on whether you will live?"

"I still have three days," Sabine stated coolly. It was as if she didn't hear the warm tones in Reyna's voice or pretended they didn't exist. "I can manage to help myself."

Reyna leaned sideways against the wall. Suddenly the lab seemed huge and cold to her. Too huge and too cold to usually be occupied by just one figure in a white lab coat.

She was afraid to ask the question, but knew she had to.

"What if you don't?"

Viper paused turning pages in her notebook, but only for a second.

"You heard what Brimstone said."

Zyanya snorted.

"I won't let you get fired," she announced. "There are no reasonable grounds for that."

Sabine only glanced at her out of the corner of her eye.

"Everyone on whom it depends has long since written me off. For Brimstone, illness means being indisposed, and being indisposed in the military means being useless." she said. Reyna couldn't help feeling that these words were steeped in a bitter aftertaste. Viper was sure she was telling the truth, and that exact same truth was hurting her. "I think I'm able to understand it in some way."

Her coat only rippled under the air conditioning vent as she walked to another part of the lab and sat down in front of her laptop.

"So you're just going to quit? After you cared so much that no one found out, so that you could work here and... stay?"

Zyanya's question bounced off the walls. Sabine pressed her hands into the pockets of her coat, her gaze moving over the transparent tubes connecting the various vials.

"Why should I stay somewhere where they don't want me?" asked Viper, not taking her eyes off the bubbles forming in one of the tubes. “Besides, it doesn't matter anymore."

"Your life doesn't matter?"

There was a kind of reproach in this question and Sabine caught it. She furrowed her brow and turned to Mondragón.

"I didn't say that," she said.

"But that's the way it is. You'd rather walk away than let yourself be helped."

"Did you even hear what I said to you? I'm supposed to just let her do god knows what to my body when I won't be able to stop her and still be grateful for it?"

"She won't do anything more than she has to."

"How the hell can you be so sure of that?"

"Because I won't let her."

In that exact second, Sabine's gaze softened. Unlike Reyna, whose gaze was certain. So sure, in fact, that it flashed a determination that was downright intimidating.

Callas' usually narrowed grimace eyes were now round, as if the invisible rope that had held every muscle in her face had suddenly let go.

Surprise was clear in the green irises.

Now it was Reyna who shrugged her shoulders.

"She'll have to write down the whole procedure anyway. I'll be there with you and make sure she doesn't do anything beyond that."

Viper didn't seem to be sure where she should be looking. She looked as if she had been given some complicated equation to solve and a series of calculations were just forming in her head.

She looked... softer. Although she probably didn't know it, because she didn't try to mask it.

Reyna probably waited for Viper to say something, but Viper just clenched her jaw and nodded, as if accepting something trivial.

"I still have three more days."

Chapter 23: TWENTY THREE

"You should tell him."

Viper turned her head toward Reyna with a cigarette between her lips and only pulled the quilt higher over her breasts to protect her naked body from the cold.

"About what?"

Her question was a bit unclear, but Zyanya understood anyway. She shrugged her shoulders, unlike Viper, unconcerned about her being naked.

"About Sage. He should know."

Her fingers reached toward the package Sabine was holding out to her, which she confidently pulled from the pocket of her pants lying on the floor. Reyna took one and watched as Callas reached for Zyanya's lighter and ashtray from the windowsill.

"What for?" she heard from Viper. A moment later the hiss of a lit cigarette rang out. First one, then another. "Now he won't do anything about it anyway."

Viper drew in a lungful of smoke, and at that moment, a calmness radiated from her figure.

Just now, in the evening, in Reyna's bedroom, where there was the smell of cigs and a breeze from behind the open window, and just a moment ago it was the smell of sex and air too dense and hot.

Now that Viper’s lips were holding a cigarette, and she seemed to be focusing on this activity with her whole self. Even more than on Zyanya's questions. Even more than on the fact that a moment ago her fingers were digging into Mondragón's shoulders, and her hair scattered on the pillow surrounded her face.

Even more than on the fact that it all got complicated again.

Reyna shrugged her shoulders and shook off the ash into the ashtray she held.

"It doesn't matter if he does something about it," she concluded. "He should know the people he commands."

"Brimstone knows less than he thinks he does. About everyone. One withheld piece of information won't make a difference," she stated. She ran her eyes over the tip of her cigarette resting on the ashtray. "And I don't want to go through that again."

Reyna didn't press the point. But that didn't mean the conversation was over.

"And you do know more about everyone?"

Sabine glanced at Reyna for a moment, but immediately looked away. Zyanya was not ashamed of her body, and nakedness was uncomfortable. Intimate. And even though the quilt covered her from the waist down, everything above was all too accessible, even in this blunt twilight light.

It was just sex. And she shouldn't be looking at her. Not the way you look at someone you have feelings for.

She felt nothing for Reyna.

And the fact that this nothing actually appeared was even stranger. Because now there was nothing, not anger. She had no need to scratch her eyes out. She had no need to crush her in the palm of her hand just to show her strength.

Now there was just... just this weird, unexplained nothing.

She shrugged her shoulders to get rid of this momentary suspense.

"I'm observing," she said. "Some people are easy to see through. They are quick to betray themselves."

Reyna turned her head on the pillow, furrowing her brow.

"For example?"

Viper calmly let out the smoke that danced around her face. The corner of her mouth lifted slightly at the question, though it dropped so quickly that Reyna wasn't sure if it really happened or if she just thought it.

"Fade and Neon." Reyna raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. "It was all too obvious even before I caught them in the living room that day."

"You caught them in the living room?"

Zyanya stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray.

Viper nodded.

"All those stares. When Fade walked into the room where Neon was, Neon's eyes shone like two light bulbs. In turn, once they looked at each other, Neon was the first to look away. This was normal. She didn't want Fade to see anything more in her eyes." She shook the ash into the ashtray again, not even looking in that direction. "They always sat next to each other in the vulture, on missions they went in the same direction whenever they could. Neon would sit with Fade in the kitchen while she made coffee in the middle of the night, and Fade would watch Neon racing with Jett."

Reyna looked at Viper, at the precision with which she spoke each word, pausing only for a moment to take a drag of the cig. At how she knew and saw so much... when no one saw her.

Viper was like a ghost in the headquarters, and although Reyna had so far accepted this fact and treated it quite indifferently, now... this vision seemed so damn lonely.

For a second she wanted to put her hand on Viper’s shoulder. For that same second, she was even able to feel her skin under her fingers, uneven and scarred in places.

And before she knew it, she actually did it. She placed her hand on Callas' shoulder, and her thumb involuntarily began to move steadily, stroking a part of one scar.

Viper hesitated for a moment, directing her dying cigarette into the ashtray. Only for a moment, because then as if nothing ever happened, she pressed it to the glass bottom and watched it go out.

Reyna let the air out. She knew this might not be the best time for such a topic, but she also knew that for the sake of them all, she couldn't wait.

"And would you be able to let them do that?" she asked softly.

She didn't take her hand off Viper's shoulder, probably because she had a strange feeling that it somehow held her in place.

Viper furrowed her brow.

"What are you talking about?"

Reyna sighed.

"Fade saw me leave your bedroom the day before yesterday," she finally said. "We have a... deal."

"A deal? A deal like ours?"

Zyanya almost burst into laughter. Maybe she thought it again, but I think Viper smiled too. Maybe a little stiffly and briefly, but she couldn't shake the feeling that she did.

"God, no."

"Then what is it about?"

"About... keeping a secret."

"For God's sake, just say it."

"Fade won't snitch on us if we don't snitch on her and Neon. We're supposed to stay out of each other's way." Reyna finally explained. "Cypher is on her side, so she has the advantage. I preferred not to take any chances."

Viper didn't shake her hand off her shoulder. Probably she pretended to have forgotten about it. Staring at the ceiling for a moment, Zyanya saw once again a thousand thoughts, a thousand scenarios, a thousand options revolving in her head.

She was analyzing. She was making bets on every entrance and exit. Because that's what she was like. Intelligent.

"Fade will keep nightmares on a leash?" she asked after a moment of silence.

"She promised me."

"If they don't fuck with my life, I won't fuck with theirs."

Reyna couldn't resist asking another question.

"So… you changed your mind? You know, about how their relationship affects the missions and..."

"I didn’t," Viper interrupted her. "I still think that someday someone will get hurt because of that. It’s always like that. In the end, someone always suffers."

Reyna turned on her side and rested her head on her hand. There was no chance that Viper didn't see it, she just consciously ignored the fact, with her eyes still fixed on the ceiling.

"It's a bit... pessimistic."

Viper snorted softly.

"I loved a lot of things in life. My job, the people around me, my life. I wasn't born ... the way I am remembered by the beginnings of Protocol. That feeling just died out, Reyna. Just like any other will do someday," she said, but then fell silent for a moment, as if she realized she had bent some of her internal boundary. "Anyway, the deal is stable. But I don't want to have someone's blood on my hands."

Saying this, she turned her head to finally look Reyna in the eye after that long moment, thus showing that these words were serious.

"There will be no blood," Zyanya said. "Neither on my hands, nor on yours or anyone else's."

Viper did not respond. She agreed silently.

And they were both silent like that for several or more minutes. They digested each word and put it in the appropriate drawers in their minds.

The evening was calm, but chilly. It had long since darkened outside, and any light was created only by the single lamp on the desk.

The stench of burning cigs was still in the air. Dense and interspersed with the slowly fading smell of sex.

And perhaps this silence was comfortable, but Reyna had to react, seeing Sabine discard the quilt and throw her legs over the edge of the mattress in search of her clothes with a sigh that could be taken for exhaustion.

"You can stay here tonight."

Viper picked up her T-shirt from the ground and pulled it over her head.

"That's not a good idea," she said, reaching for the pants lying by the nightstand. "I have a lot of work to do anyway."

Reyna should have seen this coming. Sabine in the lab, running away from Sage's mercy so much that she was ready to pay for it with her own sleep. Sabine greeting the rising sun from above her notes and test tubes.

She couldn't stop her. That was just the deal they had. She had to let her walk out of her bedroom leaving behind only:

"Goodnight, Zyanya."

The door closed, leaving Reyna with just those words.

***

"You were wrong," Neon said as she swallowed a sip of water and brushed the sweat-stained strands of hair away from her face.

Jett turned her head and furrowed her brow, smiling uncertainly. She straightened her legs, feeling the flame of fatigue that had hitherto consumed them begin to go away. She was still panting, circling the treadmill on which they had just run with her eyes.

The weather was nice, the sun breaking through the slight chill enough to convince Neon and Jett to move their training to the outdoor treadmill, adjacent to the back of the headquarters building.

They were currently sitting on the ground, normalizing their breathing and squeezing the last drops of water from their bidons.

"Like what?" finally asked Jett, when she thought she was already able to utter anything without feeling like her lungs were on fire.

Neon capped the water bottle and set it down somewhere nearby. She pulled her knees up under her and rested her chin on them, showing that she was carrying on a conversation without much commitment, and that the topic she intended to broach was not much different from talking about the weather.

"That it's impossible to get along with Viper," she said, seemingly unwillingly plucking at the track surface.

Sunwoo laughed briefly and shook her head as if she had just heard something ridiculous. She looked at Tala for a moment, searching her face for some sign that it was indeed a joke, but with each passing second Jett's smile faded until it finally disappeared completely, leaving only surprise in its place.

"Wait, really?"

Neon nodded.

For some reason, this shock of the white-haired woman satisfied her. Because Viper, that unattainable and unbeatable to Jett Viper, had become not so unattainable to her anymore.

For a moment she wondered how to put into words what she wanted to say, to not sound as excited as she was about what she was going to tell Jett.

And it was tempting. She wanted someone to know, someone more than her and Fade. Someone seemingly insignificant, but the fact that they would be aware of what was going on would be a tough nut for Viper to crack.

"You just have to have... a good argument," she said.

"Willing to live is not good enough?" parsed Jett.

Tala couldn't help but smile, knowing that Jett's astonishment there was nothing to the one she was going to inflict on her right now.

"Good argument called Reyna."

Sunwoo tilted her head and furrowed her brow. This uncertainty of hers was an interesting and rather peculiar amusement for her.

The subject of Viper had always been taboo. And breaking that ice she had built up was always uncomfortable for everyone.

"I don't really understand, if I'm being honest."

Neon sat down cross-legged only to fold her arms over her chest and raise one eyebrow.

"You seriously didn't notice anything?" she asked. Jett continued to look at her rather uncertainly, but the spark of curiosity was evident to Neon all too well. Han didn't know what Neon was getting at, and that made the whole situation even more satisfying for Neon. "Viper and Reyna?"

"Other than the fact that they've been trying to kill each other for as long as I can remember? Not much."

"Oh, come on, I'm sure you saw something."

"I may not have seen something about them," Jett stated and let out a breath, and Neon got the impression that she was suddenly looking everywhere but at Neon. I guess she took her example, only instead of plucking the track surface, she started playing with the end of her shoelaces. "But... I saw someone else."

If Tala had been drinking water at that moment, she probably would have choked on it.

"What?"

Jett puffed out her cheeks and continued turning the laces between her fingers. She still wasn't looking at her, but Neon, on the other hand, couldn't take her eyes off her.

"It's just... there are two things I didn't expect from Sage," she finally choked out, and knowing full well that at this point she would either say it all or Neon wouldn't give her a break for the rest of her life, she mustered up the courage to form the words into some... decent sentence. "First of all, I didn't think she could be so... loud," she said. Maybe she didn't see it, but Neon's eyes widened. "And secondly, that... the cause of it could be Deadlock.”

"You're shitting me." For some reason, that was the first thing that came to Tala’s tongue before she had time to think. "You saw how... how they-..."

"In the med bay," Jett interrupted, seeing that Neon was probably unable to finish the sentence. To be honest, even Jett didn't know if she was capable of finishing that one. "I just went to get some cooling gel, and they... God, I didn't want to see or hear it, but the door was half-open and Sage... on the desk, with Deadlock between her legs... and please don’t make me go into detail."

Jett tilted her head back and clenched her eyelids, resting her body weight on her upright arms. Probably she was counting on the cool rays of the sun to get rid of a rather... distinct memory.

Neon sat as if frozen. Her gaze jumped from Jett, to the area around her, to her own shoes, where it examined it so much that she almost pierced both the material and the treadmill surface with that look.

Sage? The calm, always composed and sometimes all too rational Sage... had sex with Deadlock? And it was practically public?

Hell, Tala felt like she was casted in some cheap comedy.

And she could say anything. She could have started laughing, or changed the subject, or talked Jett into another run and pretended the conversation never happened.

Instead, the stubborn silence ringing in her ears was broken with one sentence.

"Reyna and Viper are fucking too."

Jett's facial expression was priceless.

***

The pen nearly shattered on the floor as she crossed another name off the list.

Another attempt, another mistake. Another empty syringe landing in the sink with a quiet but piercing metallic sound that was supposed to be a cure, but turned out to be one of Viper's many failures.

Another drop of blood running slowly down her thigh, where the needle had just been inserted.

Another curse and another wave of frustration that made her feel like scratching out her tired eyes and shattering everything around her into a fine dust.

She lazily ran her eyes over the blood on her thigh. It flowed down in a small stream, later coming into contact with the desk top, where a mess had long reigned.

Papers, calculations, alcohol-soaked cotton balls, a stack of used syringes, blood-stained tissues. There was a coffee mug in the corner, but her tongue was so dry at this point that she didn't even remember the taste.

Now she could only smell the faint aftertaste of blood.

Her gaze drifted to the notebook she picked up from the countertop with a trembling hand. Finding the number of the next tube, she took it out of the rack and moved her leg several times, probably to see if she could still feel anything in it.

The bends of her elbows hurt. Her wrist hurt. She could feel each vein pulsing with pain as if it were being digested cell by cell. Perhaps even that was the case, as her vision began to blur and her hands trembled like an old man's.

But the red light in her head wouldn't stop glowing. That she didn't have time. That she had to keep looking. That the punctured arms, legs and bruises forming from the tentative injections were nothing like that, and she would endure it.

At one point she even stopped rubbing the blood that was oozing from her nose and just ignored it. She could feel it drying up and tightening her skin. But she didn't wipe it off.

Because there was no time for that. Something eventually had to make her feel better. Even if she had to inject the most chemically complex substance into herself, something had to work. Anything.

That's why she took the sterile syringe package into that stiff and unsteady hand, tore it open in one jerk, properly signed it with a marker and rummaged through the drawer looking for a needle.

Once she found it, she strained the contents of the tube with the number twelve. She pushed back the material of her shorts.

Her right thigh was covered with scabs, surrounded by a solid bruise. It recoiled with a dull ache at movement, and Viper couldn't help but squirm when it did it again.

The left one looked better. There, she hadn't yet managed to blemish the skin with the needle, so after a few deeper breaths, she brought the syringe closer to her thigh.

"Put it down right now.”

Sabine didn't react right away. Maybe at first she thought it was just her imagination, that it only seemed to her that Reyna was standing on the lab's doorstep, her purple eyes shining in that semi-darkness that Viper had brought there just to avoid provoking a migraine.

Only later did Mondragón's furrowed brow and her steps toward Sabine make her speak up.

"No," she croaked out. She pelted Reyna with a look that was meant to express determination and mechanically sniffled to keep the blood from oozing. She rubbed the cold skin of her thigh trying to find a vein. "I'll figure something out and it'll be over."

She realized that she looked pathetic at this point. The old t-shirt, over which she had worn some random sweatshirt at the collar marked with blood stains, and the shorts she chose to allow her to give an injection into her leg sagging from the desktop.

Viper knew that her hair was messy, greasy and untouched with a brush since the morning, she hadn't applied any makeup and the color of her skin was comparable to a concreate wall.

She also knew that Reyna could see it. That she could see all the... carelessness in her figure, which, after all, had always been clean and aesthetically pleasing to the point of exaggeration.

But Reyna seemed to... not pay attention to it. She held out her hand in front of her.

"Give me the syringe."

Viper shook off her momentary stupor. Her cracked lips tightened into a line, she wiped her nose with the willow of her hand and corrected her grip on the piston, as if she hadn't heard her at all.

"Viper."

"Leave me alone," she replied lazily, without bestowing a single glance on Reyna. "You're interrupting."

She knew she would find that damned sympathy in her eyes again, and she wasn't sure she was ready to look at it. She didn't want sympathy, when she herself knew well and felt well that at that moment within a few miles radiance she was the most pitiful-looking entity.

Neglected, tired and bloodied. That's what she had become.

Reyna asked no more. With a swift motion, she snatched the syringe from Sabine's shaking hands, and as the latter jerked forward to retrieve the object, Mondragón moved a safe distance away.

Her and her fucking reflexes.

"That's mine," she mumbled.

Viper stayed in her seat, but stuck her gaze to the floor, as if she hoped that the lack of eye contact would be telling enough for this conversation to end.

Zyanya was not impressed. She herself tensed her face, as if preparing to reprimand, but instead of saying something, she turned the syringe in her fingers and moved her thumb over the number on the side scribbled with a marker.

"Twelve?" she asked, and although she tried to sound neutral, disbelief sounded in her voice. Viper continued to poke her gaze into the tiles. "You used up twelve of these?"

Viper shrugged her shoulders, discreetly moving her notebook behind her back. Probably quite successfully.

"I didn't count them," she muttered. "It doesn't matter, give it back.”

"What are you doing?"

Now anger broke through Sabine's hazy irises, and she tightened her fingers on the edge of the tabletop.

"What do you think?" she replied. "I'm trying to fix what's broken in me before my own boss signs off on the procedure for my murder."

"Injecting in yourself an amount of substances that could kill a herd of bears at once?"

"You don't know anything about it, so don't lecture me."

Reyna put the syringe somewhere to the side. The casing rattled on contact with the surface and the sound made Viper squirm.

The migraine was not letting up.

Reyna approached her, deliberately violating a space that Viper probably very much did not want to have violated at that moment.

Her gaze slid to Callas' thighs, and she sensed this and carefully placed her hands on them, trying to cover the injection marks seemingly by accident.

Reyna looked at her face immediately afterward. Viper reluctantly did so too, losing interest in the floor.

"I don’t need to know exactly that to know that there is a safer option as well," she said calmly but confidently. "And certainly better than this."

With a movement of her head, she pointed in the direction where she had left the syringe.

Sabine didn't even blink in that direction.

"And you're at it again," she huffed, pressing the bridge of her nose with a quiet sigh. "I have it under control, okay?"

"Have you thought about my proposition?"

"We won't talk about it while I can still work."

Reyna realized that she was colliding with a wall. That it was pointless to exchange logical arguments now, because Viper does not allow any other option than the one she has in her head.

Therefore, she simply touched her shoulder and squeezed it gently.

Viper allowed her to do so, but did not dare to look her in the eye during this gesture.

"I can really be there with you when this will happen, Viper," she said. "Think it over again, okay? And don't do anything stupid with all of this. Just... be careful."

Sabine shrugged her shoulders. Zyanya wasn't sure if it was because she had already given up, or because those words had completely flowed over her, but one thing she was sure of – Viper would not forget them.

And that was already something.

She had to trust that Sabine Callas knew what she was doing. Reyna thought she was able to do that.

And she knew that Viper needed someone to believe that she knew what she was doing. That's why Reyna was the one who backed down this time.

Reyna removed her hand from her shoulder. Sabine squirmed slightly, feeling a momentary chill in that spot.

Once again she found out that vampires were actually not that cold.

"I'll get you a ice compress for that."

So she saw the marks after all. Instinctively, Sabine wanted to cover them even more, even if it no longer made sense.

The vampires weren't that cold, as a warmth glowed in Reyna's eyes that Viper hadn't received from anyone so far.

Chapter 24: TWENTY FOUR

"You didn't come for your periodic examinations. Is something wrong?"

Neon tore her gaze away from the kettle, only then realizing she had been lost in watching it for a while now. The water was just beginning to boil, so she set the cup she was holding down on the countertop.

She threw Sage only a fleeting glance.

She realized that at that moment keeping eye contact with a kitchen counter was easier than making any with Sage.

She didn’t think she was able to look her in the eye.

She cleared her throat, praying that it would look at least a little natural.

"No, I just... I forgot. I'm sorry."

Neon hadn't forgotten at all. She remembered it all too well, because she hadn't thought about anything else since the morning. About nothing else but the fact that she would have to come to the med bay and act as if she was blissfully unaware of what had happened there quite recently.

There was no chance that she would be able to bear it with a poker face.

"That's okay. I ask because you always come on time."

Neon smiled apologetically and began fiddling with the string from her tea bag, just after Sage passed her on her way to the cabinet, from which she pulled out a tea for herself as well.

When she took it in her hands, however, she turned to the younger woman.

"Are you sure you're okay?" she asked, gently wrinkling her brow. "You look tense."

Neon began drumming her fingers on the tabletop. She hoped this would speed up the kettle work, because she could feel herself starting to choke from embarrassment in Sage's presence.

She didn't dare check to see if her cheeks were as red as she felt.

"I'm fine, seriously," she replied, shrugging her shoulders. "You don't have to worry."

Sage took a moment to look for a mug for herself, and to make matters worse, Neon had the feeling that she didn't buy her behavior at all, although she pretended not to suspect anything.

"If you're missing something or need something, then-"

The kettle clicked and Neon immediately grabbed the handle. Perhaps too feverishly, but it was too late to undo it, so she simply poured her tea and turned with the object toward Sage.

"Do you want some water?"

Sage blinked in surprise, but smiled uncertainly. She held out her mug toward the younger woman and let her pour her tea.

"Do you have a moment today?" queried Sage again, drowning the tea bag several times in boiling water to get the right intensity of the drink. "I wouldn't bother you so much about it, but Brimstone wants all the documents in time. We also need to know if you're alright, you know."

Neon replied with an evasive 'sure' and nodded, focused on the contents of her mug as she had never done before.

She really wanted to get out of there. She felt as if someone was squeezing her ribs, and the urge to throw out so many questions was rising dangerously to her throat.

Why was Sage breaking the rules? Did anyone else know? Why Deadlock? Was it even safe to use the medical section now?

Instead, she tapped her fingernails on the handle of the mug, and with her other hand pulled her phone out of her pants.

She didn't get any message. She didn't have anything special to do either, but that didn't matter at that moment.

She hoped the device wouldn't fall out of her hand onto the floor and it would appear that she was really just swiping her finger back and forth across the homescreen.

"Sorry, I have to go now." She smiled crookedly again, intending to express feigned remorse with this gesture. "I am scheduled up with Reyna for extra training and... well, you know."

She lifted the phone higher, trying to show that she had indeed received some sort of hurried message. Even if there was no such thing and Neon looked at her own wallpaper, seeing imaginary letters in it.

"Oh, right." Sage wrapped her fingers tighter around the mug, but there was little emotion on her face, other than her usual stoic calm. "Call me when you find a moment so I can examine you, okay?"

"Sure thing."

Neon took another sip of tea already as she left the kitchen, and Sage merely led her away with her eyes.

***

"Killjoy, will you leave us alone for a while?"

Killjoy straightened up from above Deadlock's prosthetic hand and corrected her glasses mechanically. However, she nodded toward Sage, grabbed the phone from the desktop and, clicking something on it, left the workshop.

Sage watched the door slide open, but as soon as she heard the distinctive click, she immediately turned to Deadlock.

"We need to talk," she announced firmly.

The door was soundproof, as the noise of drills, robots and falling screwdrivers would carry throughout the lower floor. In addition, the Viper lab was right next door, and she was a lover of silence.

At that moment, Sage was grateful to whoever decided to come up with such a solution.

Iselin leaned back more comfortably in her chair and folded her arms across her chest, keeping an eye on one of her open prosthetic flaps.

The corner of her mouth lifted slightly, even nonchalantly,

"You can stand after all?"

Sage didn't immediately catch the subtext, but in turn Deadlock could see the moment when the puzzle hit its mark.

"Iselin."

Ling tightened her lips into a narrow line, and an instantaneous blush crept onto her cheeks, although overall she bravely did not lower her guard so immediately, trying to adjust her posture to match her tone.

The blonde shrugged her shoulders.

"What? It's simply a sign that next time I have to-..."

"Iselin!"

Iselin, however, only laughed lowly.

Sage wanted to pull that smile off her face. All that temper of hers as she sat right here with her arm hunched over, legs spread, as if she had all the space in the world to waste, and that damn smile that showed she was having a great time at the moment.

Sage's previous blush darkened, and she clenched her hands into fists.

"I'm serious," she finally burbled. "So listen to me."

"Mhm. Alright." Iselin rested her back even more comfortably against her chair. "Do you want to sit down?"

Sage watched in disbelief as the Norwegian woman patted her thigh with a human hand. She gasped in surprise, but stubbornly stood still, bearing Deadlock's gaze on herself.

"No, I don't."

She didn't know whether she was reassuring herself or Deadlock more with this.

Their... relationship didn't last long. A week and a half, maybe two. And that's probably why Sage still felt a kind of shyness in the presence of the blonde.

It started out trivially.

Deadlock came to the clinic at night to get some painkillers, when the wound stitched up the same day was still making its presence known in a blunt way. Sage couldn't sleep, she was reading a book, so she took care of the younger one and looked at the wound to be sure everything was fine.

They simply began to talk. About everything, about nothing, about things important and not, but out of all this something was born that Sage had not felt in years.

Their first kiss could hardly be called a kiss. Iselin barely brushed her lips against Ling's cheek in gratitude when the latter lent her a book, and then... then it just rolled on.

And it still didn't stop.

"This can't happen again," she said. "Thank gods the damn camera broke down a week ago, but we were still taking too many risks."

She folded her arms over her chest just like Iselin did a second ago, maybe hoping it would give her confidence, or maybe because standing with her hands clenched into fists made her look like a child.

Deadlock still hasn't gotten rid of her smirk.

"'It' means what specifically?"

Sage put out one hand to indicate... she herself didn't know what exactly. Probably the whole thing. Or she hoped Iselin herself would guess what she meant.

Or she had already guessed.

"It means it."

"Ah, it." Deadlock nodded in understanding. Sage was well aware that the Norwegian was teasing. "Well, yes, it was actually..."

"Irresponsible."

"Hot."

"Iselin, I swear to gods-..."

"Am I wrong?"

Again Sage felt her face cover with a blush against her will. But she couldn't show that the mere mention of it sent shivers throughout her body. Even those idiotic, proverbial butterflies appeared.

"It doesn't matter now," she said. "It's just that someone could have seen us. Or hear us. Or both. We can't risk doing something like that a second time, do you understand?"

"Alright, whatever you say." Ling saw that Iselin was about to add something, so she waited. "But I have one question."

Sage raised an eyebrow in anticipation of a follow-up.

"If you could cast aside the consequences, you'd do it a second time, wouldn't you?"

Deadlock was visibly proud of the question. And probably of the fact that she already knew the answer. The expression on Sage's face spoke for itself - that shyness, the blush that stretched all the way up to her neck, and that tension with which she tried to cover her excitement and inspire awe.

But Sage didn't just leave her with that.

"When Killjoy is done, with whatever she's doing, come to my room."

Iselin smiled, watching as the healer's ponytail rocked with each of her steps to the exit.

***

Reyna reloaded the vandal with a kind of boredom. Either she didn't feel like doing this training or after a few series without any missed shots, the holographic robots were no longer a challenge for her.

Or at least that's what Viper inferred, watching her out of the corner of her eye when she happened to be taking a break between stages of training.

From what she could see, Reyna should go through the easy, difficult and advanced levels one more time, but Zyanya put her gun down on the stand, took off her safety glasses, propped her elbows not far from the vandal and rested her head on her hand, sighing into the space in front of her.

"Are you done?" Viper asked.

It wasn't meant to be sarcastic in any way; Viper was curious about whether her suspicions were correct.

Reyna turned her face toward her, pulling her gaze away from the screen with her results, and raised an eyebrow.

"You say that as if you don't have an almost identical result yourself," she said. With a movement of her head, she pointed to the screen above Viper's shooting area. Well... she was right. "It's boring."

Viper snorted briefly. The bot reappeared in front of her, moving right and left as it always did, but Sabine ignored it, even as the clock showing the elimination time began its countdown.

"Do you have such a high ego that you think bots are not worthy of you?" she asked. "That's your style."

"Is that a compliment or an insult?" sparred Reyna, smiling in that one way that made Viper unsure whether responding to it in any way would flatter Reyna even more.

So she rolled her eyes. She also sighed in her usual way. It was as if Reyna's presence was wasting her air, although Zyanya couldn't shake the feeling that the chemist either didn't feel like it or had suppressed the amount of reluctance in her voice.

She sounded almost... neutral.

"You'll think it's a compliment anyway."

Reyna smiled to herself. Viper corrected her safety glasses and seemed to want to catch up on time, but she didn't manage to use up a single bullet.

"I'm not saying the training is boring," Zyanya said, shrugging her shoulders, still bent over her stand. "I'm saying that bots are boring."

"Forgive me if the headquarters' equipment doesn't live up to your expectations." muttered Viper, aiming at the head of the bot that had just appeared.

More to herself than to Reyna, but she knew that the latter had heard it anyway.

"Are you good with your knife?"

Viper hit the hologram with no problem, but immediately put her ghost on the stand and took the glasses off her nose. This series didn't make any sense anymore anyway.

"What does it matter?" She shrugged her shoulders. "We shoot," she said.

"In some kind of situations, not necessarily," Reyna replied, lifting her chin higher. "Is that a yes or no?"

"Killing someone with a knife is not difficult. You act in self-defense so your reflexes are better."

"That doesn't answer my question, Sabine."

As always - Callas' face twitched slightly at the sound of her name. Her eyebrows drew together, she rested her hand on her hip and her previous neutrality toward Reyna changed to that characteristic tension.

"What is your point?"

Reyna smiled slightly. Without knowing when, she rotated the knife between her fingers, looking at it seemingly unwillingly, knowing full well that Viper was following her every move, her gaze fixed on the reflections that were lingering on the blade.

She didn't even have time to register when Zyanya managed to pull it out. And now she was playing with it. She was showing off, trying to provoke Viper into something she still hadn't revealed.

But she didn't need to.

Viper raised an eyebrow and folded her arms over her chest.

"Do you want to fight me?" she asked. She sounded as if the question, although asked by herself, amused her. "Because shooting bots bores you?"

"I want to get an answer to my question." Zyanya continued to play with her knife. Her fingertip glided over the blunt edge of the blade before she lifted her gaze to Viper. "Unless you're scared," she said.

"You wish."

"Then why not? It's... boring anyway."

With a movement of her head, Reyna eloquently pointed to the screen with their results. Sabine involuntarily looked there as well.

For a moment, Reyna thought that Viper would take it all as a joke, just mutter something under her breath and, smiling with a hint of that cynicism of hers, leave the shooting range.

But then she heard the swish of the blade being taken out. Zyanya raised her eyebrows and chuckled lowly. Her gaze moved over the weapon, wielded by Viper.

She held it lightly, even nonchalantly, as if she paid no attention to it.

As if it bored her.

And still she continuously had this aura of inaccessibility around her.

"Well, well, well." She pushed herself away from the gun stand, heading slowly toward Viper with a smile of satisfaction lurking somewhere in the corner of her mouth, "So after all you can play."

Viper didn't look directly at the knife Zyanya was holding. Or at least she let her think she wasn't doing it now, poking her green eyes into those violet ones.

She tilted her head. She let Reyna come closer. She even allowed her to make Viper's back touch the wall behind her and believe that this was precisely because of Zyanya.

"You underestimate me," she muttered, squinting her eyes. It sounded like a statement of fact. "That’s a pity."

The next second, she blocked Zyanya's wrist with her forearm. A second, maybe half.

Viper’s gaze went to the tip of the blade, which shone just above her forehead. Then she slowly lowered it to Reyna's eyes, as if the whole thing was some trivial game in which she knew all the rules.

The thud of Reyna's hand against the wall right next to her head also made little impression on her.

She clicked her tongue.

"And that's exactly what I am talking about," she concluded.

Almost flatly. There wasn't even a note of victory in it, nothing.

And that was the most shocking thing about it all. Viper was expecting an attack. She saw it somewhere where no one else was looking, saw it perhaps even before Zyanya had time to think about it.

That's why she was looking for answers now. Breathing the same air, where she could smell gunpowder, she stared at the face of Viper, being so close, yet almost indifferent to the fact.

Almost, because Reyna also heard her breathing. She startled Viper, her heart was beating faster, and no matter how she tried to hide it with her facial expressions, she could not fool her sensitive senses.

"You knew," Reyna said. However, she did not retract the knife or take a step back. "How?"

Viper gloated for a moment at what she saw on her face. Disbelief. Curiosity. Fascination.

Viper had never been an object of fascination.

She quickly got rid of that thought.

"You betray yourself too quickly," she explained. Aside from their breathing and occasional words, silence rang around them. "I said I'm observing. You guys are not observing me, and you... are not looking at my hands."

Reyna reflexively looked down.

It was a split second before a punch to the ribs ripped the breath from her lungs. The grip on the handle loosened. Enough so that, as soon as she straightened up, the blade of her own knife was put under her throat.

She put her arm around the sore spot, smiling crookedly when her gaze, like Viper's a moment ago, stopped on the tip of the blade.

"That was mean."

"Effective," Callas corrected. Now she had both weapons, although she hadn't even had time to use hers. "Focus. What should you do now?"

Reyna never thought Viper would teach her. And she never thought she would let anyone teach her. Reyna taught herself. She was a self-sufficient assassin who didn't need advice and... and she was fooled like a child.

It was only temporary. She got distracted, that's all. Viper distracted her, she knew what she was doing and she knew how to approach her. Hell, she knew everything, and her words about just shooting was a provocation.

The corner of Reyna's mouth lifted. Now it was she who tilted her head, chuckling, as if more to herself.

"So you really are good with your knife." She flicked her tongue over her lower lip, nodding in understanding. "It's worth remembering."

"It's not about the knife itself. It's about how you can use it for more than just killing." Viper's gaze was hard, strong, even... teacherly. "People are afraid of death, no matter from what tool it will come," she said, shrugging her shoulders. "But death from a rifle is quick and sudden. Waiting for a death that doesn't come right away is worse, and if they can avoid it, they'll tell you anything."

Viper lowered the blade, then let it go completely. It fell to the floor with a clatter, and she pushed it under Reyna's feet with her boot.

Reyna looked in that direction but didn't pick it up. She looked at Callas first.

She was expecting some kind of movement from her. She watched her as she was instructed, and when she crouched down to pick up the object from the ground, she didn't take her eyes off her for a moment.

"You get it."

Viper raised an eyebrow, not understanding the message, and uncertainty appeared on her face.

"Get what?"

Reyna shrugged her shoulders. She took her possession in her hand and straightened up.

"All of this. Everything," she stated, and probably wanted to gesture to the general public, but instead, her hand involuntarily steered stubbornly toward the chemist. "All these... little things that no one sees. The behaviors that no one thinks about. That's why you win."

"I won't apologize for that."

Reyna tucked her knife behind her belt. Viper mimicked her move and did the same. Their 'fight' was over before it even started, but neither of them seemed to care.

This time it was Reyna who understood Viper first. She had that expression on her face that accompanied her whenever she thought about something. When she thought so much that thousands of scenarios flowed through her brain like branches of a river.

"You did read that call report, didn't you?" She didn't need Viper to answer, because she knew what she would say. Viper read everything. Viper followed every document. "Are you going?"

Viper ostentatiously moved her finger over the gun, abandoned on its stand in the middle of training. Her brow furrowed, as if the coldness of the gun had pierced her all the way to her bones.

Yes, she got Brimstone's call report for a mission. He always sent them to the people who were assigned to the task. An action plan, maps, recommended weapons. Viper reviewed it all, and yet she still couldn't find the answer there to how he had so easily pretended that nothing had happened.

That she suddenly counted as a team. That Brimstone was now showing some strange act of grace by sending her this message as if things were back to the way they used to be.

Viper knew things would never be as they used to again.

"The mission is about Kingdom," she said as her thumb slipped off the barrel of her ghost. She still didn't lift her head, as if stroking the object somehow soothed her. "It would be nice to throw out some old trash of mine," she said.

"Brimstone-..."

"I know he's going," she interrupted quickly, before Reyna had time to finish the thought. "But he's trying to bribe me."

"Bribe?"

Viper shrugged her shoulders.

"He knows that missions are important to me. He wants to give me missions hoping that I will agree for Sage treatment," she explained. "He thinks I'll be grateful for that, so it's some kind of deal, but nicely disguised."

Reyna couldn't feel the tension whenever the topic of Sage's treatment of Viper came up in their conversation. So far they had differing opinions on the subject, so Reyna didn't want to press the bruise that was already hurting.

She skipped this thread for both of them. She had to trust Viper. Trust her to make the right decisions, the best for herself.

"So what are you going to do?"

Reyna didn't know the whole story of Viper and Kingdom. In fact, Zyanya didn't know if anyone knew it. All she herself knew was that Sabine was valued there, that she worked there with a passion that she may have... now no longer had.

And then she left and never returned when the corruption of that organization came to light. Neither to her job nor to her former self.

Sabine moved away from her ghost. She raised her head only for a moment, but her gaze was stuck on the screen with the results of her training. There were a lot of deficiencies in it, but she knew that they were not due to her.

Although she still got the impression that the numbers were laughing at her.

"I don't know yet," she answered truthfully. "I have to think about it."

"Killjoy is counting on you."

Viper tensed at those words. Only they made Reyna look into those jade irises for the first time in a long while.

"Don't try to persuade me with this." She folded her arms over her chest. A strand of her hair slipped out from behind her ear. "Besides, she shouldn't be there at all. Kingdom took advantage of her, manipulating her like a rag doll, she shouldn't be visiting this place and remembering what her intelligence was used for."

Reyna didn't know exactly what she felt after that statement, but she knew that Viper had let herself crack for a moment. Killjoy was her weak point. And probably that's why Reyna couldn't help but say what she was thinking out loud.

"You care about her, don't you?"

"Those are too big words."

"Are they?" she asked. "You're in a similar situation to her. And you don't think of yourself in the same way."

"Right, similar. Not identical. End of topic."

Reyna did not discuss any further. However, they finished the training they had started, even if the results were to be heavily falsified.

***

"Last time I forgot to give you this." Fade reached into her sweatshirt pocket and pulled out a small object, which she then held out in the palm of her hand towards Neon. "I didn't think I'd buy anything during the mission, but I thought you'd like it."

The younger one took the gift in her hand. The small otter mascot was soft, and the key ring allowed her to attach it to some kind of zipper.

She wasn't used to gifts. In fact, she couldn't remember the last time she had received anything without an occasion from anyone.

Maybe that's why she felt strangely baffled.

"You didn't have to," she said, lifting her gaze to Fade, who only smiled slightly and shrugged her shoulders. "Thank you."

She played with the mascot for a few seconds, but her gaze wandered elsewhere, even as Fade stood in the doorway just across from her. She blinked several times, as if something had snapped her out of her trance, and invited Fade inside with a hand gesture, smiling to blur her previous uncertainty.

Fade, however, noticed. She went inside, but as soon as the door closed, she put her hands in the pockets of her sweatshirt and watched as Neon walked over to the desk and turned off the lamp on it.

"Are you okay?" She asked.

Neon didn't look at her. She closed the flap of the laptop on which she had the series on and cleaned up the tea cups, raking them into one corner. She shrugged her shoulders.

"Sure. As always."

There was that smile again. It wasn't real. The real one made her eyes light up, and now it looked like her lips were smiling separately from the rest of her face.

Hazal sat down on the edge of Neon's bed, then lay down on top of it and for the next few moments watched as the younger one whisked around the room, putting away scattered things, mending blinds and doing a thousand other things she didn't need to do at all, but this was an excuse so she wouldn't have to get close to Fade.

Not yet. Not until she got rid of what Fade had already managed to notice on her face.

After a while, she stood in the middle of the room, and, with her back turned to the elder, nodded her head, as if in approval of her own work. Only then did she head to the bed and lay down next to Fade, driving her gaze to the ceiling.

"I can tell when something is wrong with you, you know that?"

Fade turned her head, her gaze shifting to the younger woman's profile. Neon tucked her forearms under her head.

"I know, that's why I told you everything is fine," she said.

"It's unhealthy to bottle up your emotions."

Tala snorted a short laugh.

"Are you using my own spell against me?"

Fade turned on her side, but unusually Neon did not do the same, still staring at the ceiling.

"Just tell me."

Tala gave her only a passing glance. Quite as if... she was ashamed to look her in the eye. The ceiling was still the only thing that interested her as she sighed and gave up.

"Reyna and Viper are hypocrites. Maybe it even fits them, hell knows, but I thought the topic would end with them, and it turns out... it's just fucking begun."

Hazal furrowed her brow.

"And it did?"

Neon didn't answer, but Fade wasn't sure if it was because she was thinking of an answer, or if it was because she didn't hear the question.

"It's just... it's embarrassing to know that, and on the other hand... really? She's the one who was supposed to be the bastion, she's the one who tells us to stick by her side, we entrust our death and life to her, and now she's just like them and-..."

"Wait." Fade raised herself up on an elbow and looked down at Neon, catching her gaze. "Are you talking about Sage?"

Neon paused in her torrent of words.

"Yes, I am talking about Sage."

Perhaps the snort of laughter was a bit out of place, but Fade somehow couldn't help herself. She just looked at Neon, as if waiting for the latter to say it was just a joke, but the younger woman's face didn't show even the beginnings of a smile.

"Wait... you're serious?"

"Believe me, I'd like to joke too."

Fade let the air out slowly, and her eyebrows rose. She didn't manage to hold back that smile because... because it was so unbelievable, that probably all was left was to laugh.

To be honest, Fade would have been ready to assume that Sage had never touched another human being in even the slightest gesture of intimacy, and now....

She shook her head.

"I don't think I know how I'll look her in the eye now."

Neon shrugged her shoulders.

"Well... I didn't," she admitted. "I haven't talked to Deadlock yet, but I think history will repeat itself."

If Fade's eyebrows could have lifted even more, they probably would have.

"Sage... With Deadlock? That Deadlock?"

"Don't look at me like that," Neon said. She almost groaned, feeling a sudden wave of embarrassment. Just trying to imagine the scene Sunwoo had described to her earlier made Neon start to be surrounded by a bubble of discomfort. "I didn't see anything anyway, Jett did."

Fade... started laughing. She started laughing so hard that the mattress shook in the same rhythm as her shoulders.

Tala blinked in surprise.

"Come on, that's not funny!" she mumbled. "I'm fucking traumatized!"

Hazal tried to pull herself together, but whenever she thought she had gathered herself enough to calm down, she involuntarily continued to snort with laughter.

"Isn't it?" she asked, twitching slightly, and taking in a lungful of breath that she had been missing for a long while. "I think it is a little, though."

Neon first covered her face with the nearest pillow and groaned into it in frustration.

Immediately, however, she grabbed it and hurled it at Fade, who took a last-minute dodge, avoiding the item being thrown at her.

"Oh, fuck you."

Unintentionally, they both laughed.

Chapter 25: TWENTY FIVE

Notes:

I had to change some details about Reyna's abilities in the game, but you'll have to trust me that it's better for the plot :>

Viper probably didn't realize that when she entered the hangar, several pairs of eyes turned toward her.

Or she did realize, but ignored it, holding the handle of her suitcase, with her outfit half unzipped and her sleeves knotted around her waist. As usual.

As if this mission was an ordinary mission she was simply expected to attend from the start.

Yet she skipped Brimstone with her eyes. She missed Killjoy, Skye and even Reyna as well, or at least until she put her suitcase right next to hers, preparing to bring it on board.

"Don't look at me like that, I told you I will think about it," she muttered, shaking her hands off the dust that lingered on the handle.

Reyna merely shrugged her shoulders, putting down the tablet on which she had previously viewed the building plans sent by Sova's drone a few weeks earlier.

"I'm not saying anything," she replied, resting her head on her hand. "It's good that you're here."

Viper made no comment on the second part of her statement other than a barely perceptible nod. She still didn't look around in the slightest, as if some invisible bubble had formed where she stood that she didn't want to come out of.

"Who is piloting?"

"Brimstone. Skye as a co-pilot."

"I'm taking the seat in the back."

Reyna didn't react in any special way to this statement. Actually, she was able to understand the aloofness with which Viper came here and which she probably won't get rid of until the very end. Not surprisingly, Reyna herself was shocked when her mission call displayed the other agents who had been selected and Callas' name was among them.

On the one hand, it made some sense, since Viper and her connections to KIngdom were probably useful, but on the other... it was hard for her to believe that Brimstone was bold enough to actually send her that call after the way he had treated her recently.

So being completely honest, Reyna was shocked that Sabine had even set her foot inside the hangar. And for the next while, Zyanya didn't say anything else that might make Callas change her decision.

She just watched as Sabine copied her behavior and also sat down on her suitcase, listening to the hum of the vulture's slowly revving engines.

For a few seconds they sat in their usual comfortable silence, until Reyna reached for her tablet. She turned it on and swiped her finger across the building's plans, but Sabine felt out of the corner of her eye that she didn't care about it at all. Reyna had, after all, put it down a moment ago.

"Brimstone assigned us together," Zyanya said after a moment, involuntarily rotating the map as a 3D model on the screen. "I guess this is supposed to be some form of punishment."

For some reason, she didn't want to check Viper's reaction to those words, especially when she was close enough that Reyna would have been able to make out the slightest grimace on her face. But Viper wasn't moved by this, her gaze was fixed on her own hands, and she looked completely indifferent to this information.

"So in his opinion I need a babysitter now," she muttered, more to herself than to Reyna. "This isn’t even surprising anymore."

Reyna furrowed her brow.

"What exactly?"

Viper shrugged her shoulders.

"These games of his," she explained. "You talked to him so I could keep working. He agreed so he would make me miss going on missions. Now he shows that I can take part in them all the time, but he still expects me to surrender to Sage to show myself being grateful. And because you interfered in our conversation, you got a ricochet and now you're doing my babysitting."

"Well, at least it's me and not Sage."

Viper snorted a short laugh, as if the whole sentence was a joke.

"If you think I would go on a mission with her, you are sorely mistaken."

Reyna leaned over the tablet, but only for a moment. Later, she raised her head and looked around, quite as if she wanted to check if she could say what she intended.

"Which doesn't change the fact that it's strange that she didn't go."

"For me, no," she said. So confidently, in fact, that Reyna almost felt foolish for speaking up at all on the subject. "Brimstone wants to avoid further conflicts, and Sage doesn't want to see me. With reciprocity, to be honest."

Zyanya shrugged her shoulders. She couldn't explain why, but she suddenly felt the urge to light a cigarette. And at the same time, she had a feeling that if she offered it to Viper, the latter would also do the same.

To stop thinking for a moment. About the whole mess. To draw that damn smoke into her lungs, to forget that everything in the Protocol has become so complicated in such a short time.

"It's a bit irresponsible." Reyna leaned her elbows against her thighs and rested her head on her hand, losing interest in the tablet screen. Viper furrowed her brow and looked at her, but she didn't have to say anything at all to get an answer. "That she's not going. You know... after all, Skye doesn't resurrect people."

"It's good to know that you have faith in the success of this mission," Sabine stated. There was no anger in her voice, however, but instead the strange stiffness that had lingered since she entered the hangar. "That's really optimistic."

"Oh, come on, you know what I mean.”

"That we can't manage without her?" Guessed Viper, unconsciously copying Reyna's move and also rested her chin on her hand. "That's not true. Anyway... she's assigned to most missions. Brimstone will cover this up with some speech about the benefits of resting, and we will avoid Sage."

They sat in silence again. Not more than a minute, but it was so poignant that when Reyna broke it, Viper almost gasped in surprise.

Because Reyna laughed. She snorted a laugh to herself as she looked around the hangar, jumping from one engine to the next with her eyes, watching as Killjoy and Skye began to bring equipment inside the vulture.

"What's so funny?"

Viper looked at her, and Zyanya was aware of it. She shrugged her shoulders.

"Everything, I guess," she replied. "The way everything is fucked up. That every decision now is propped up by some strange ploy, how everyone plays for a separate team, even if we fight together. I feel like I'm, I don't know.... corrupt," she laughed again. "Sage, who can literally bring people back to life isn't going because Brimstone doesn't want to be in the middle of an argument. It's idiotic."

"He's already in the middle of it. It just doesn't get to him yet," Viper replied, laboriously pulling her hands inside the sleeves of her outfit. "And I don't want to talk about Sage."

"You don’t think it's fucked up?"

"And did I ever say it wasn't?" Viper stood up to let the material of her suit straighten. "It always has been. And probably always will be. We are people who do bad things. We kill, even if it's for the good of the rest of the world, but it's still... killing. Sooner or later, feelings start causing conflicts, because what we do affects everything."

Reyna still didn't get up from her suitcase.

"Are you saying we are bad people?"

"I'm not lumping everyone together."

Reyna straightened her back. She saw Viper's eyes flee somewhere to the side, focused on fastening all the buckles and checking the wires of her outfit. She saw her wince slightly, probably more to herself, but shrugged her shoulders to cover it up.

And that's when the pieces went into place. And Reyna understood the meaning of the statement more than Viper ever would have liked.

"So you're saying that you are a bad person?"

Saying it out loud was uncomfortable. Zyanya herself didn't know why, but the words probably hurt her more than Viper, who was mending her gloves and either thinking of an answer or not intending to give one at all.

Reyna felt like grabbing her by the arm and turning her around. To force her to answer her with at least one look, in which she could find the truth of what... what Viper thought of herself.

Viper allowed others to think of herself as a monster. Because it was safe to do so. Zyanya still remembered their conversation back then, in the lab, when there wasn’t a little more in Sabine's eyes at the sound of the word ‘monster’ than usual.

But she never said what she thought of herself.

Her silence made Reyna feel the need for Viper to deny it. In any way. She could shake her head, she could say a short and suave 'no'. Whatever. Instead, she ran her finger over the gas emitters on her forearm, as if their conversation had ceased to exist.

Or at least she did until her gaze slid to her elbow. Reyna's fingers entwined tightly around it, but when Sabine looked into her face, trying to understand when it had happened, Zyanya looked as if... as if she herself didn't know why she had done it. Nor what she wanted to say. Individual words flew loose in her head, not arranged into anything concrete.

"Viper, you are not-..."

"It worked."

Both pairs of eyes turned to Killjoy. The German woman, however, probably felt she had interrupted something and got a little bashful. She probably wanted to turn back.

"What worked?"

Viper's voice suddenly seemed to Reyna to sound completely different. Almost softer. Her whole demeanor lost its stiffness, even if the moment Zyanya let go of Viper, Klara looked in that direction somewhat uncertainly.

Reyna stepped back. Sabine corrected the sleeve of her costume, turning quite towards Killjoy, leaving Zyanya at an unsuspecting distance from herself.

"Turret. I've been sitting on it for days so that it would be ready for today. And it worked. It accepted the code, although I had to correct it a couple of times, because, you know, I struggled a bit with it and..."

"I knew you would succeed."

Killjoy interrupted her sudden stream of words, lowered her head and nervously corrected her glasses, quite as if Viper's words had knocked her over.

"You told me to give it a try, so the success isn’t only mine." She shrugged her shoulders. "It was a group effort, but I thought you'd want to know."

"It wasn't group work. It was your work," Viper said, fastening the buckle of her belt. "And you did it well, Little Mouse."

Reyna would have cut off her hand in a bet that Viper smiled. Maybe it was just a slight lifting of the corner of her mouth to show approval, but even if - it was sincere.

Killjoy put her hands in her jacket pockets. She looked on her feet for a moment, nodded, taking in Viper's words, and probably smiled too.

"It's good to have you back."

Zyanya felt like she was in the way, and at the same time, she was unable to leave. She knew that Viper in Killjoy’s presence was different, in fact probably everyone knew that.

But she had never seen it with her own eyes. And probably even more so, the question she asked earlier and didn't get an answer to, left a bitter aftertaste on her tongue.

Viper put her hand on Klara's shoulder and nodded in her direction. Probably in gratitude. Even if she tried to make it look like a simple acceptance of the information to herself.

She immediately reached for her suitcase.

"Let's get in."

***

Viper turned her head away from the glass as the echo of someone’s heeled boots bore down the back of the vulture, and a moment later the mechanism of the sliding door came to life.

She hadn't assumed anyone would come in. The rest of the agents were talking at their best in the main area, from which the door separated her. Her and the gun cases, of which this was actually the place of.

It may have been a bit humiliating. But she wasn't going to move from there anyway.

"Don't even try to persuade me," she said immediately. "I'm not going to come there and pretend that everything is fine."

"And who says it is?"

Viper lifted her gaze to Reyna. The latter leaned with her back against a rack of suitcases while Viper settled into her corner between the window and the wall.

And she was perhaps minimally surprised when Zyanya slid down the rack and sat on the floor opposite to Viper.

"Brimstone is practically silent. Killjoy somewhat tries to chat with Skye, because it's as droning as at the funeral." Reyna shrugged her shoulders. "Not that I'm particularly surprised about that," she said.

"Then why are you here?"

"Because I'd rather be here than there."

Viper furrowed her brow, but said nothing for a moment. Her gaze searched for something on Reyna's face, although even Viper herself didn't know exactly what.

"Don't you have any regrets?" she finally asked.

"I don't think I understand," Reyna said.

"That you stepped in all this shit." Their gazes met level, the machine shook slightly, and aside from the hum of her thoughts, all Viper could hear the engine running. "You wouldn't have had any conflicts because of me, Brimstone might have given you a break, and Sage didn't look like she wanted to stab you in the throat when you told her to give up my pills."

Reyna leaned her head against the rack behind her.

"Someday I would have done it anyway," she concluded. "Like you said, these things come out of people. Conflicts arise."

"You admit I'm right?"

There was surprise in this question, but it had nothing sarcastic in it.

"If you are, why shouldn't I?"

For the second time that day, Reyna witnessed Viper lift the corner of her mouth in that rare, even unprecedented smile. The restraint of the gesture suited her, and yet Zyanya saw in her that Sabine who wasn’t there often.

Because for Viper, Sabine Callas was a separate person.

Reyna could have also made it up, put it down to the fact that it was the vulture that shook her and she saw something that wasn’t there. Yet she still felt that her eyes did not deceive her.

Viper seemed to have decided that their conversation was over. Her gaze wandered to the windowsill by the window, and Reyna involuntarily looked there too, finding there the same tablet that she herself had held in her lap maybe an hour earlier.

She was sure that if she had unlocked the screen, she would have seen nothing but building plans and mission schedules. Viper always did this. She always checked everything a hundred times to always be sure, even if she couldn't be any more sure. But whenever she got on board, she didn't touch anything mission-related anymore.

Maybe that was how she arranged everything in her head, Reyna didn't know.

So when Sabine reached for the tablet in front of Reyna's eyes, the latter couldn't just keep quiet.

"You already know it by heart, Viper," she said half-jokingly, half-seriously. It's possible that she wanted to see that characteristic smile again, and it's possible that internally she felt something was wrong. "You can put it down now."

Viper raised her head only for a moment, as if to show that she had heard the words, but she wasn't going to do anything else. She returned to the screen without a word, and that was probably what made Reyna furrow her brow.

"Hey, are you okay?"

"Just a thought."

"A thought about?"

"About something being wrong." Seeing that Reyna was staring at her, apparently expecting an explanation, Viper took the tablet in her hand and turned it with the screen facing her. "There are two buildings. Five people. And the initiator, the sentinel and the controller are all in one."

"Is that wrong?"

"Sova's drone relayed that thermal activity was rare in the second one, and it indicated two people who appeared there periodically."

Reyna folded her arms over her chest. She looked at the screen, where indeed two silhouettes were highlighted in red.

"If there are only two people in the second building, we can easily deal with them. Two versus two."

"And in the first building there will be all the rest. The total number of people detected is eight."

"What do you suggest?"

Viper put the tablet down on the floor. She leaned the back of her head against the wall, and her mouth pulled down into a narrow line as usual.

"That we are not needed there at all," she finally said. Reyna tilted her head and laughed briefly, as if she expected Viper to tell her she was joking. But that didn't happen. There was seriousness on her face. "Brimstone will secure the area, Skye will check the area, and Killjoy will buy them time by distracting the enemy with her robots. That's the strategy when you know there's going to be a lot going on."

"But there are still two people in our building..."

"Who hardly ever show up on scans. They might as well not be there when we get there."

"Maybe Sova's drone broke down and there will be more of them out there," he said.

"Brimstone wouldn't have sent it for reconnaissance if he knew it was broken. Besides, it's a fucking expensive piece of equipment, it doesn't just break down like that." Reyna felt some indefinable weight fall on her shoulders as the meaning of these words reached her. "We're only going there as a decoration, Reyna. I thought it was me who misunderstood something or didn't read close enough, but Brimstone knew all this from the beginning. This is his plan, after all."

For a moment there was only silence between them. But not the one that was usually there and came when all the words were shouted or thrown around with sarcasm. This one was somehow... realizing. That past disagreements now became actual conflicts that showed up on a daily basis. And that... They are in this together.

And although she probably knew the answer, she asked only to have the silence dissipate.

"Why would he do that? After all, it's... fuck, we're not five to fight like kids over a bucket in a sandbox."

Reyna burst into laughter, although she probably didn't know why. Maybe it was because it was all so unbelievable that she was left with nothing to do but laugh. Maybe it was because she had become disillusioned with everything that the Protocol was supposed to be, and although she had seen with her own eyes what Brimstone had done before, the fact that nothing was going to get any better triggered that very disappointment.

Viper did not look disappointed. In fact, it was hard for Reyna to tell what Viper was expressing herself at that moment. Or what she was thinking about and how she was feeling.

"It's most convenient for him," Viper said after a long moment, nodding as if she was admitting herself she was right. And although she was looking straight at Reyna, Reyna herself had the impression that the chemist's gaze was unseeing. "I'm on a mission not to arouse suspicion in between the rest of the agents. What I do on it, only he and you know. And I won't be doing anything."

Reyna drummed her nails on her knee.

"From what I've seen, there are computers in that building, and we're supposed to download as much as we can onto a flash drive," she said.

"If there really was something there, do you think there would be only two people coming there with breaks lasting several days?"

The tone with which Viper said these words sounded resigned. And some really heavy fatigue, although Zyanya didn't know if it was more mental or physical. As Callas sighed, Mondragón herself felt something inside her begin to crumble.

Viper was right. Their presence was some damn theater. And it wouldn't have hurt Reyna herself much, maybe she wouldn't have even felt it, or explained it to herself that it was just meant to be.

The reason it hurt her was because she saw something in Sabine Callas break with each such situation. She was aware that her spark was fading with each mission, but she didn’t think it had ever... been this bad.

Her persona now didn't match the vulture. To the conversations in the middle, to how she had always meticulously explained the plan to everyone who was, and now she was sitting on the floor in the weapons locker watching everything she had dedicated her life to roll around her.

Reyna involuntarily clenched her hand into a fist.

"Son of a bitch."

***

No one spoke up as the team split into two groups and each went their separate ways with a rifle on their shoulder. Viper didn't look at Brimstone, and Brimstone didn't look at her, only urging Killjoy, who threw Viper one last tentative smile before moving behind the man, fitting in between him and Skye.

Reyna saw the interaction perfectly. And the way Viper nervously corrected her grip on her vandal, probably out of fear that Reyna would notice. The way she squirmed slightly, escorting Killjoy with her eyes until the last second, when their gazes diverged.

"Let's go," she threw only to Zyanya, passing her a second later.

Reyna nodded and followed her in silence. Probably she felt that no words would be appropriate now. And probably she also felt that somewhere inside her, admiration for Viper was starting to build up. That even though she knows what the situation looks like, she is still cautious. She still holds the rifle as if her role is as important as the rest. She continues to do everything as if nothing had happened.

She didn't know if this was helping Viper herself in a way that Reyna perhaps couldn't understand, or if Viper was keeping up these appearances because she didn't want anyone to guess how much of this behavior was false.

However, it wasn't until they stepped inside, and the echo of their footsteps carried through the emptiness around them, that Sabine's shoulders slumped. Broken cables dangled from the walls, the panes of glass in the windows separating them from the rooms were shattered, and shards of glass crunched under their feet as they walked deeper and deeper, searching for the designated room.

"So I was right," muttered Viper. The mask made her voice sharper. She shook off one of the cables lying on the floor with the tip of her shoe with a measure of unexplained disgust. "There's really nothing here."

Reyna wasn't sure whether she should speak up or rather not get into Viper's words. She turned one last time with her crosshair open toward the door they had entered, but a moment later she lowered the vandal's barrel and caught up with Sabine.

The door they were interested in was open, just enough to push it open. The glass shattered beneath them rustled against the tiles and gathered into a small pile, which Viper crossed without even looking at it. She looked around, and just as Reyna had already noticed that her shoulders had sagged, they now seemed to sink even lower.

It was as if she herself had shrunk, even if she only showed her disappointment with one long sigh and the transfer of her rifle to her other hand.

The room was as deserted as the hallway. The floor was littered with trash, glass, cables, and even paper cups from the coffee machine, nibbled on by rats or God knows what. The computers, yes, were there. But their age raised doubts about whether anything here would ever work again except for a few fluorescent lights, blinking with residual strength.

Viper unbuckled her poison orb from her belt and threw it, almost reluctantly, at the threshold of the door. Just in case.

Reyna leaned her rifle against the desk and searched for the computer's start button. She pressed it, staring at the black, dusty screen with some residual hope. Viper did the same with the other computer, but finally sat down in the questionably holding chair and pressed the bridge of her nose.

"You don't have to wait. This stuff hasn't worked for years," she said. Reyna looked in her direction and sighed herself. "When I worked there, it was already modern, and that was years ago. Everything here is scrap."

Reyna moved away from the screen and straightened up. Maybe she didn't want to admit it so openly, that yes, from the moment she walked in here, she knew there would be nothing to do, and Viper was right back in vulture. Maybe the reason she didn't want to admit it so openly was because she didn't want to make Viper feel even worse.

"So... what do we do now?" she asked, once again clicking a few random keys on the dusty keyboard just to be sure. "We still have the flash drive, we can try to get something out of this junk." With a movement of her chin, she pointed to the screen.

Viper followed her gaze in that direction. She shrugged her shoulders.

"Why not."

She took the flash drive out of her outfit's pocket and leaned over the equipment, trying to find the USB input on the case under a thick layer of dirt and broken glass, which she rubbed off with a flick of her hand.

Reyna pushed herself away from the desk.

"I'll go look to see if anything here is plugged in."

Viper nodded, not even looking in her direction. She could hear her footsteps as her shoes crushed the glass into even smaller pieces and her heels echoed around the room. And that's exactly what she focused on, until all the noise quieted down.

It quieted down too strangely.

Reyna said only one word.

"Viper."

That was enough for Sabine to pull out a handheld ghost and, turning abruptly toward the door, take aim at whoever was there. And there indeed was someone.

"Drop the gun."

The woman in the white apron looked at her through the eye of the crosshair, and her hands tightened on the rifle as she unambiguously pointed it at Reyna at first, who was kneeling by the abandoned extension cord, and then moved to look Viper in the eye. The light of those damned fluorescent lights was reflected in her glasses, and determination shone on her face.

She was not alone. An armed man stood right next to her, full military attire along with a bulletproof vest lending him superiority.

"Throw the gun, or I'll blow both of your heads, starting with her."

Viper measured them both with her eyes, but did not respond. The woman furrowed her eyebrows, with a movement of her head, pointing at Reyna. The man, who stood to her left, aimed his gun at Reyna’s head without hesitation.

"I could say the same thing."

The woman laughed briefly, as if she found the phrase so funny that she almost forgot where she was. Or she found it pathetic. Because that's what Sabine saw in her eyes - that she found it pathetic.

"So the rumors didn't lie," she said, and the corner of her mouth lifted in a kind of strange half-smile. "You did join them. And, who would have thought, you haven't changed at all."

Viper didn't lower her ghost even for a moment. Even though she knew that Reyna was probably wondering what the hell was going on. Even if she knew that if she made one wrong move, the team would return to headquarters with just the three of them. And even if she knew that the woman recognized her now and here, in this damn building where they weren't really supposed to be.

"Oh, fuck you, Octavia. Don't play the heroine while you're holding the gun."

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Reyna's brow crinkle. But she also saw that her orb was placed perfectly between the feet of the woman in the apron.

"And you're the one telling me this?" she asked mockingly, her glasses dropped slightly on her nose, but she didn't correct them at all. "You think if you cut your hair and put on a mask you'll be a different person? Don't be pathetic."

Viper tightened her fingers on the pistol's grip so tightly that she felt her fingers go numb in her gloves.

"That was a long time ago," she said.

"And you haven't forgotten."

"It doesn't matter, it's all gone anyway."

"Are you sure about that?"

Sabine clenched her jaw. She was aware that Reyna would not help her. Mondragón was still kneeling on the floor, suspended in a conversation that probably made no sense to her. She saw that Zyanya was taking a cursory look around.

The purple glow forming in her hand did not escape Viper’s eye. She intended to cast her leer.

It was a silent sign, and it was Viper's job to see it.

"What happened here?" she asked, pointing across the room with a motion of her head. "Kingdoms don't abandon headquarters just like that."

Octavia looked as if this amused her.

"Are you suddenly interested in this, Sabine? You come back like a fucking prodigal son after years and pretend you're someone else," she chuckled, snorting with a laugh so unpleasant that, although Viper herself often used one, it now sent shivers through her. "You're redeeming guilt because you can't swallow your own past."

The violet in Reyna's hand grew lighter, but Octavia didn't seem to notice.

"I'm at least trying to do something. You went from one shit to another." Viper lowered the ghost and smiled in a way that had a mixture of several feelings in it. Something bitter, something dark and something Octavia didn't notice. Cunningness. "It's just that it's the Kingdom that cleans your shoes of your own dirt, so you don't see it."

It was seconds before Reyna's leer appeared between them. Viper turned on her orb, the snake bite flew straight into the smoke and she heard the vial crashing to the floor perfectly. The man wailed in pain, a series of uncontrolled shots rang out, and bullets flew through the smoke and slammed into the walls, screens and floor until they fell silent, and the clatter of the falling rifle announced unequivocally that the man was dead, or had escaped with chemicals on his skin, for which the bulletproof vest was no obstacle.

Viper emerged from behind one of the sides of the desk and grabbed the vandal Reyna lying closest to her, moving at a run toward the door. She turned off her orb, and she was right - the man was lying dead on the acid-soaked floor where he had just been standing, and now died with his face frozen in a grimace of pain and horror. But she didn't look at him for too long when her gaze focused on the distant woman and the steady echo of her footsteps.

"Viper, wait-..."

Sabine glanced at Reyna for a split second.

"I have to end this."

And so she did. She ran out of the room and opened the crosshair, firing a single shot, aimed at Octavia, who was running away.

The figure that had just run fell to the ground with a thud, and a broken scream spread through the generally prevailing void. Later it fell completely silent.

Viper was panting, but she herself didn't know if it was actual fatigue or if her heart was beating so fast that her lungs also went into panic mode.

For a few seconds she simply stood, with the vandal held in her trembling hand, smoke still rising from its barrel. Her orb lay between her feet, finishing its life with single hisses before it fell silent, leaving Viper on the threshold of the room, where the past looked straight into her eyes.

She swallowed her saliva. She felt sick and for a moment thought it was the effect of shock, but a second later, she rubbed her bleeding nose with her glove as the mask dangled loosely from her neck. Of, fucking, course.

She looked at the top of her own hand with stiff indifference. The red stood out against the black of the costume in a way that grossed her out.

Viper spat blood and turned back, walking over the man's lifeless body as if she had put the fact that he was still alive a minute ago out of her mind.

"Both dead."

Reyna leaned sideways against the wall and nodded. Viper threw a vandal in her direction, immediately heading to the desk to retrieve hers.

And then she heard the clatter of a weapon falling to the floor.

She stopped in mid-step. The vandal was within reach, but Reyna didn't catch it. She furrowed her brow.

She turned around.

Zyanya stared at the rifle lying on the floor, as if she herself did not know why it was on the floor and not in her hands.

She didn't grab it. And she should have. Her reflexes allowed her to do so.

"Reyna?"

Viper felt her fingers begin to sweat inside the glove and was suddenly all too aware of the blood that ran down her chin.

Only when Zyanya smiled crookedly, almost apologetically, did Sabine's gaze slide lower. More specifically, to the duelist’s hand, which Reyna clasped at her side.

Blood was seeping through her fingers.

Viper's eyes widened. She looked at Reyna's face, then at the blood dripping laboriously onto the floor, as if the two elements were not coming together for her, no matter how hard she tried.

She didn't move from her place, because she probably couldn't. She felt as if she had stepped in freshly spilled cement. Or at least she did until Reyna slid down the wall and slowly sat down on the floor.

"Fucking hell."

She didn't even remember when she was approached, or when those very words came out of her mouth. She didn't remember when she started nervously rifling through her pockets, in search of anything. A bandage. A handkerchief, some damn pack of tissues.

Reyna looked at her. But Sabine knew that this gaze was too slow for it to be good.

"How the fuck did... how the fuck did it happen, I killed them for fuck’s sake," she said, swallowing saliva that had suddenly become thick. She continued rummaging through her pockets. She found nothing. "Fucking shit!"

"You're bleeding, Sabine."

Viper looked at Reyna in disbelief. Maybe even in shock that Reyna herself remained calm. Viper felt the leather upholstery of her shoes touch the stain of warm blood as she knelt on the floor. And although she heard the words clearly, on the other hand, she felt as if they had bounced off the wall and passed her somewhere nearby.

"Fuck it," she snarled and pressed her own hands against Reyna's palms, who jerked in pain, but said nothing except a little louder groan. Viper immediately felt the heat seep through her gloves, which were beginning to slip over her clothes and Reyna’s hands. "Skye won't get here in time. Can't you heal yourself?"

"I didn't hit him. They shot blindly." Reyna seems to have tried to pull herself up, but as soon as she tried, she immediately gave up. "Fucking dickheads."

Viper felt thousands of thoughts running through her head. Thousands of solutions. She had no bandages or anything with which to stop the bleeding. Skye and the others were in a building on the complete other side, and there was no way she could reach them in time.

Viper was left alone with Reyna, who was... dying.

For a moment, her gaze jumped everywhere. She searched for solutions. The door, the computer, the floor. Cables. The keyboard, broken glass and glass.

She even looked at Reyna, searching her face for some kind of rescue, maybe hoping she would get up right away and say she was just kidding.

But the warmth of the blood on her hands was too real for Viper to be able to believe that it was just some stupid nightmare.

She didn't think the two people recorded by the drone would pose any threat to them. She didn't think there were cameras here, because the plan didn't say anything about them, and yet, if only she had known, if only she had known beforehand, maybe she would have shot them and no one from Kingdom would have known they were here at all.

"What about the rest?"

A sudden question knocked Viper out of her stupor. In her ear she heard gunshots, but also the voice of Killjoy. The four had fallen.

With one bloody finger, Viper turned off the communicator, feeling it spread Reyna's blood on her ear.

"They'll be fine. And you will be as well," she said.

She didn't quite know whether to convince Reyna or herself. Maybe both of them.

And probably it was the pale purple light piercing through the fabric of Reyna's clothes that gave her that one spark.

She moved away from Zyanya and pulled her ghost from behind her belt. Her hands were stiff, cold and sweaty, even if the gloves were uncomfortably warm.

"What are you doing?"

Viper ignored the question and checked the magazine. All the bullets were in place.

She didn't even remember when she pressed the gun into Reyna's hand, who looked first at the gun and then at Viper, rubbing her gloves against her thighs. Reyna was really trying to make out anything from her tense, bloody face.

Viper rubbed her nose with her wrist.

"Shoot me."

Reyna blinked.

"Excuse me?"

Viper went back to applying pressure to the wound, but with a quick flick of her chin she pointed to the gun, which Reyna involuntarily embraced with her fingers, but with a measure of uncertainty. It was as if the weapon suddenly frightened her.

"You heal yourself by dealing damage, so take the fucking gun and shoot me," she said.

"I'm not going to shoot you, damn it, what kind of fucked up idea is that?"

Reyna sounded not so much surprised as furious. That such a thing had occurred to Viper at all, that she dared to press that gun into her hand and think that was the answer.

And that's why Sabine also felt that anger. That Reyna objected. That she thought she knew better, that she thought... that it was better when it bled before her eyes.

"You know how to use it." Viper's gaze slid to the ghost, effectively avoiding with her eyes the spot where her hands pressed against Reyna's side. "You know the way to shoot so you won’t kill. Shoulder, calf. Whichever one."

"You think this is a toy?" Reyna snorted. If Viper had not been in a panic, she might have heard the fear in that question herself. "It's a damn gun!"

"And you think you have any choice?" hissed Viper, trying not to squirm when she felt the aftertaste of her own blood running down her nose on her tongue. "We're all alone here for the hell of it. If you die, we won't make it to headquarters in time for Sage to revive you, so just fucking focus and do what I say."

"If something goes wrong, you'll die, doesn't that get to you?"

"And if you do nothing, we'll both die, because they'll come looking for Octavia right away," growled Viper. "That's the better option in your opinion?"

"Harvesting your soul is in no way a 'better option’," Reyna said through her teeth. "Neither now nor ever."

"So do you want to just wait until we're both killed, or bleed out because you can't do what's necessary?"

Reyna pressed her lips together. Drops of sweat glistened on her forehead and individual strands of hair stuck to her skin. Her breathing was shallow and her gaze involuntarily rested on Viper's hands soiled with her own blood.

Sabine noticed this. She caught eye contact at one point and spoke up only when she was sure that every word would reach Reyna.

"You're going to die, Reyna." She spoke the words slowly, but all too clearly. So clearly that Reyna felt them almost ringing in her ears. "So now you're going to take this gun and use it as you need to, understood?"

Viper had seen many times how Reyna's eyes changed according to her feelings. How they lit up when she was talking to Neon, for example, but at the same time different from when she was angry. And although she had seen them so many times in so many other situations, Viper didn’t think she had ever seen fear in them before.

Because maybe she wasn't looking closely, or maybe Reyna knew how to hide it. Viper never thought about it, but at the same time she knew that catching Reyna being... scared, was almost impossible.

Until that moment.

Because Viper stepped back. For a few meters, so that the shot wouldn't come from too close. But she waited, with her lips clenched, on which blood was still drying.

"It's fucked up," Reyna hoarse, shaking her head.

She shuddered, Viper saw that. And in a way... she didn't understand it.

After all, they had thrown themselves at each other's throats so often that Viper couldn't believe Reyna's reluctance to hurt her. That, after all, Reyna must have felt uncontrollable resentment toward her after how often Viper pushed her away with a slam of the door.

Reyna should want to hurt her. Because Viper was someone who deserved it.

And yet she hesitated. Looking this at Viper, this at the gun in her hand, which weighed her down with an imaginary weight.

"Just do it." Viper's voice echoed through the empty space, and she looked around nervously, as if to reassure herself that they were alone here. "You know you have to. So shoot."

Reyna leaned the back of her head against the wall behind her and sighed. She knew Viper was right. Worse, she felt he was right at the very moment her palms were beginning to sweat inhumanly and the world was starting to spin dangerously.

If she waited another moment, she wouldn't be able to do it deliberately and soberly.

"This is going to hurt like a motherfucker," she said.

"You think I've never been shot?"

"I'm stating a fact. In case you've forgotten what it's like."

"I haven't forgotten. Now get yourself together."

"Can you not rush me?"

"I can't, because we don't have time to-"

Bang.

"Fuck!"

Viper staggered backward and instinctively grabbed her arm as pain seared through her body like the blade of a heated knife.

She looked at her injured arm and then at Reyna with something like disbelief. However, she didn't hold back a groan of pain when she took her hand away from the wound and actually saw the blood there.

"You could have at least fucking warned me," she said.

"I distracted you."

"Do what you have to do and don't make excuses."

Reyna let the air out through her nose. But she gave in after a moment and made that one hand motion that Viper had seen so many times before that she probably should have gotten used to it, and yet... now it was different. Now she was the prey to which the vampire's hand was reaching out and thanks to which the tattoos on Reyna's arm began to shimmer purple.

Viper had never thought about what Reyna's victims feel when the last thing they see before they die is the purple streaks of their own souls. When death takes the form of a woman who feeds on it.

She gasped in surprise and crouched down. She felt a little as if someone had kicked her in the ribs, and the injured area pulsed with a dull tension. The nosebleed did not help, weakening her even more.

Reyna squirmed at the sight, but Viper didn't see it. She just propped herself up against the floor with her hand, taking a few deeper breaths and lowering her head, as if she hoped this would help control her dizziness. She tightened her eyelids.

She had no idea how long it took. It felt as if someone was taking the breath out of her lungs, as if she wanted to scream but couldn't. As if she were... suspended between where she is and where she ends up after death, when part of her soul has been absorbed.

It wouldn't kill her. She had read about Reyna at the time she and Brimstone were planning to recruit her, she knew her skills.

But she still didn't want to experience it ever again.

When Viper finally dared to raise her head, she felt a drop of cold sweat run down her temple. The fact that she hadn't fainted yet was probably due solely to the fact that she was too stubborn for that at the moment.

Reyna was collecting their rifles. Evidence of any injury was only seen in her blood-stained clothes when Viper looked in that direction. Later, her gaze stopped on a hand with a sun tattoo on the inside, extended toward her.

"Let's get out of here."

***

"What the hell happened?"

Viper moved her tissue away from her nose, but didn't lift her head, which she was resting against the vulture's cold wall, when the other three, with Brimstone in the lead, entered.

Reyna clenched her free hand tighter on her knee, feeling the nails digging into her skin even through the material of her clothes. With the other she continued to press the gauze against Viper's arm, trying to make meaningful eye contact with Skye.

The Australian understood and carelessly tossed her phantom onto a stand to later kneel beside Viper, where Reyna gave way to her.

Viper probably didn't even notice when Skye's power began to dull her pain. Her low, joyless laughter carried across the interior of the deck and pierced even trough the sound of weapons being put away.

"Surprised?" she asked. She could feel the skin over her upper lip being taut by the drying blood, and so she was aware that she probably looked pathetic. But that didn't stop her. "Because what, because it's not what you expected, right?"

Brimstone closed the vulture's flap with his fist and, with furrowed brows, took the communicator out of his ear, then put the device in his pocket.

"What are you talking about?" he asked, probably surprised himself that anger had crept into his voice.

Viper snorted.

"About what?" She threw the crumpled tissue on the floor, which bounced off Skye's shoe and stayed there. "Maybe about you treating me like an idiot again, for starters."

Brimstone sighed.

"I already told you that..."

"You knew very well where you were assigning us, so don't bullshit me, and have enough honor to at least tell the truth now."

If it weren't for the fact that Skye's treatment was still ongoing, she probably would have stood up and faced him with her eyes as she should have. And it didn't matter who saw it. Killjoy could see her bloody face, even how pale she was, but she would never ever show that it somehow limited her.

"I did what I had to do. End of topic."

Viper snorted. Out of the corner of her eye she saw that Reyna sat down at the helm and Killjoy followed her like a shadow. Maybe she didn't want to participate at all. Maybe she just wanted to get back.

And maybe Viper was even glad they weren't prolonging the launch.

"Ah, what you had to do. So first you pushed me as far away as possible from where I'd be useful, then you got me a babysitter, and then you triumphantly came back on board like the damn hero you are, and suddenly it turns out someone got hurt? Wow, well who would have expected that," she spat out, clenching her hands into fists so tightly that her fingers were starting to go numb again. "Too bad that in trying to get rid of me you didn't check the fucking cameras. That's what your fucking awesome plan was."

Brimstone looked a little like someone had slapped him in the face. But Sabine saw the puzzlement. She also saw something there that she couldn't identify at first, when the man fell silent and tried to win the silent battle of looks between them.

She nodded her head at this silent treatment, smiling crookedly. Almost with pity. And perhaps she would have left it at that, if not for the fact that a red light went on in her head.

At first faintly, and then it shone brighter and brighter, until Sabine couldn't stand it and parried a short laugh when an almost banal explanation slipped on her tongue.

"That wasn't your plan, was it?" she asked. "Sage made it with you, and she was the one who was supposed to check the cameras."

The pain stopped, and Skye removed herself to a corner. Sabine didn't even look to see where the Australian woman had gone, her gaze was still fixed on Brimstone, who didn't even flinch when the vulture moved and bounced off the ground.

"She certainly did her part. I'm in charge of the mission, so if you have to get mad at someone, get mad at me."

"Why, because you can't admit that your awesome new deputy screwed up? Don't be fucking pathetic." She pushed away from the wall and stood up, pointing a finger at Liam as if with this gesture she wanted to show even more emphatically that she didn’t care about no one else at that moment. "She almost died, do you fucking get that?"

She saw that Brimstone looked in the direction of the chair where Reyna was sitting. As he should do.

"But she is not dead."

Viper shook her head, fury glowing in her eyes, but if not the fury, Liam would have seen in them... disappointment. And one of those profound ones that go all the way to the bone.

"Unbelievable," she snorted. "And this is some kind of indicator for you? Did someone survive or die like a dog because you don't look at the hands of someone who doesn't have the faintest idea of what you entrusted them with?"

He probably meant to say something. But Viper no longer cared if he started arguing with her, calling her names, or maybe apologized, although she highly doubted it.

"You'd better not fucking say anything anymore. And think about whether you know who you're working with."

***

The flight passed in silence. A sepulchral silence, broken only by the hum of the engines and the occasional cough of the agents, the creak of a seat or the banging of a gun case against the frame of the rack.

And Viper nevertheless, once she had left it, felt the headache once again rise in her temples. And she didn't know if she looked as miserable as she felt, but she was probably afraid to find out.

Or maybe she didn't want to check it at all. When she set her suitcase on the ground to rearrange it in her other hand, she hoped she wouldn't have to look at anyone anymore - or rather, no one would have to look at her.

And that's probably why she furrowed her brow when, after turning around, she saw Killjoy in front of her.

The girl had her hands shoved into her jacket pockets, and her suitcase stood next to her, but somehow she didn't particularly look like she intended to go anywhere.

"Are you okay?" Asked Viper hoarsely, trying to read anything in the German woman that would explain her tense face. "Can I help you somehow?"

Killjoy rocked back on her heels, however, looking around first. Viper involuntarily did the same, but aside from Reyna, who was closer to the entrance of the headquarters, no one else was in the hangar besides them.

"I found something," Klara finally said, lifting her gaze from behind her glasses to Viper. "It was lying on the ground next to one of the dead scientists."

Sabine watched intently as the younger woman extended her hand toward her. She spread her fingers and a small flash drive appeared to the chemist's eyes.

"It's with the Kingdom logo. I thought it might be important." Killjoy, saying this, shrugged her shoulders.

Sabine reached for the object, but her fingers hovered over the German's hand at the last second.

"Did you tell Brimstone about this?"

Killjoy lowered her gaze and corrected her glasses with her free hand. Viper managed to notice that she repeated this pattern whenever she got shy.

"No," she finally admitted. "But you're closer to the Kingdom than he is. Whatever's on it, you'll probably get more out of it than me or him will, so... you're probably the one who should take it."

Viper furrowed her brow.

“It has to be secured somehow, it couldn't just lie there like that," she said.

"Because it was secured." Viper took the device in her hand, and her previously drawn together eyebrows raised at these words. "I hacked it. In vulture."

Taking a tactical position on the co-pilot's seat was no accident, then. The seat was large enough to separate the person sitting on it from the rest, and Viper was well aware that some Killjoy robots were no bigger in size than a coin.

She was able to do it. And she did.

"And Reyna? She was sitting next to you."

It wasn't until she said it out loud that Sabine realized she didn't actually know why exactly that question had come to mind as her next. Killjoy looked at her for a moment, and that moment was enough to make Viper feel... analyzed. Therefore, for the sake of inconspicuousness, she did not change her facial expression, remaining equally serious.

"She was piloting, so it's unlikely she was focused on that. But I'm not sure, I was more ivested in avoiding Brimstone."

Viper took the object and tucked it into one of the pockets in her glove.

"Alright," she said, reflexively looking around, as if to be sure no one had seen her hide the device. When she turned back to Killjoy, there was that slight beginnings of a clumsy smile on her lips. "You did a good job."

Klara nodded. She managed to hold back a smile.

"What do you think is on it?"

Viper grabbed the handle of her suitcase.

"I don't know. But I'll take care of it as soon as I can."

Chapter 26: TWENTY SIX

Sage had heard a knock on her door quite often and was generally used to it, so she machinically tried to hide her fatigue with a calm smile.

When she opened the door, she also armed herself with one. And she received a rather similar one in response.

Similar because Deadlock’s smile had something... so Deadlock coded about it. Some hint of ferocity that Sage saw there every time. Or maybe it was just about her confidence.

Iselin pushed the door more inward, as if to help Sage open it.

"Don't you have visitors at these hours?" the Norwegian asked wistfully, nonchalantly putting her hands in the pockets of her sweatpants as Sage invited her inside with a hand gesture.

She looked back at the Chinese woman as she closed the door, and Sage was sure that that smile of hers was lurking there. And it was. The one that Iselin had been in possession of too often and... used it too well.

Sage shrugged her shoulders and wiped her hands on the top of her thighs.

"Sometimes they happen," she admitted, for some reason looking around. She probably wanted to find something to occupy her hands with, but in the end she just scratched her temples. "Can I help you somehow?"

Iselin spun on her heel, still with her hands in her pockets as if Sage's question referred to someone who was not currently in this room.

Only when she faced her and shrugged her shoulders did Ling have a clear sign that the blonde had heard her question.

"Yeah, I would like... I don't know, something painkilling?"

Sage furrowed her brow. She intertwined her arms across her chest, looking at Deadlock investigatively. Deadlock, in turn, smiled with a hint of that flirtatiousness that she always did, and seemed to be enjoying herself quite a bit.

"You don’t know?"

Iselin shrugged her shoulders again. She took her bionic hand out of her pocket and scrunched up her nose, but even that failed to take away her smile.

"Oh, you know... Something definitely hurts me, right? Head, stomach, maybe throat or something. Actually, it could be anything."

"Iselin..." The Norwegian must have felt satisfaction at hearing her name, because something in her eyes flashed in that one way, but she only continued to stare at Sage. "If something hurts you..."

Deadlock rolled her eyes, probably amused. Ling's seriousness was at times all too contrasting with the characterful nature of herself, but at the same time there was something... charming about it.

She took two steps toward Sage, breaking off her expression the moment her hands found their way to the healer's hips. Her gaze slid in that direction, as if somehow absorbing how the shape of her hands matched Sage's body.

She muttered something in satisfaction and nodded her head in appreciation. God knows, if for Sage or for herself.

"Nothing hurts me," she finally said. She carelessly moved her hand up and down, occasionally looking in that direction. "But that doesn't mean I can't miss you, does it?"

Sage smiled slightly, a little indulgently, but when her gaze stopped at her hips embraced by Deadlock, she let the air out through her mouth, nodding.

She didn't respond with anything specific, however, as if remaining in the moment was somehow reassuring and safe for her, and she only realized that Deadlock had begun moving her touch here and there when she gasped in surprise, feeling the bionic fingers catch her waist without a second thought.

"Ise..."

"Relax," muttered the Norwegian, brushing her lips first over the corner of Sage's mouth and then over the edge of her jaw, smiling into her skin at the sound of that satisfying gasp from the older woman. "No one will see us here."

Sage pressed her lips together as she realized she had involuntarily closed her eyes. The back of her thighs collided with the dresser, but that didn't stop Iselin from marking her skin with slow kisses.

If only it was that easy.

She swallowed her saliva. She entwined her fingers in the younger woman's blond hair, trying to focus on the feeling her touch evoked. It was excitement, yes.

And yet Sage felt this strange tension that weighed like a stone on her chest.

She wanted to let Deadlock have what she was going for. She missed her too, that puppyish feeling of falling in love and losing herself in that one kind of touch that... she hadn't experienced in years. Even their… meeting in that damned medical wing was somehow liberating.

But when the coolness of the bionic hand found its way under her shirt, she felt every muscle in her body tighten.

"I don't think this is a good idea," she said when she finally managed to croak out a meaningful sentence, with her eyelids clenched so tightly that they were beginning to hurt.

Iselin pulled away from her neck, straightening up at once.

"Do you want me to stop?"

"Yes. No. I mean I don't know, I just..."

Sage felt her shoulders slump, and she herself suddenly gazed at some point over Deadlock's shoulder, who, with furrowed brows, tried to read something from Sage, whose thought had evidently escaped her.

"Did I push too much?" She asked. She scratched the back of her neck in a gesture of uncertainty that almost didn't fit her character. "God, I didn't mean to, I just thought that-..."

"That's not the point." Sage lowered her gaze to the floor, as if the point observed so far was too close to the Norwegian's eyes anyway, which she did not want to look into at all costs. "I screwed up the last mission."

Iselin raised her eyebrows, but Ling didn't see it. She began playing with her fingers, nervously rubbing her thumb against her index finger.

"What do you mean you 'screwed up'?"

Sage shrugged her shoulders, continuing not to look at her.

"I didn't check if there were cameras. Brimstone got angry," she explained. For a moment, she looked as if her head started to hurt at the same second. "I don't know why I didn't check it, because I always do, but it's possible that you know... I was distracted."

The hitherto puzzled look on Iselin's face turned to consternation with each passing second, and even if she didn't say a word through it, Sage overtook her.

"Don't get me wrong, I don't regret what... we did. But..."

"But you think you made a mistake due to me, because the day before we had sex?" When Iselin said this out loud, Ling concluded that it sounded stupid. Moreover, if Iselin had been calm before, now resentment resounded in her voice. "And that there is my fault in this?"

Now it sounded like a reproach. Iselin furrowed her brow and looked away. Perhaps she didn't want to show that Sage's words didn't so much annoy her as hurt her.

"Ise, it's not like that..."

"Now you're going to call me 'Ise'?" rasped out Deadlock. The corner of her mouth lifted in a crooked, hurt smile that Sage was afraid to look at. "You're blaming me." It was a statement of fact. "So maybe you'd rather go back to code names before I fuck up something else?"

"I'm not blaming you, for gods’ sake, I would never do that-..."

"But it sounds like it, damn it. It's hard to tell if you would never do that, when I'm standing here and you’re doing exactly that!"

"So why don't you stop finishing my sentences for me and let me explain it?"

Deadlock tightened her lips stubbornly, as if she was never going to speak again in her life. Or she was holding back from saying anything more. She took a step away from Sage and rested her hands on her hips, looking around the room involuntarily.

"Then enlighten me."

Sage sighed. Maybe it was a kind of relief, or maybe she just didn't realize out of nerves that she had been holding her breath. She nodded her head in silent thanks.

"It's just that all this is... new to me. I've never had a relationship like this, I haven't had anyone close to me since... gods, I don't know myself since when, okay?" She expelled in one exhale, feeling her cheeks turning red. Though she herself didn't know if it was from stress or from the shame that had suddenly swept over her. "I had no idea that you could have such a... influence on me."

"Influence?"

Sage shrugged her shoulders out of a sudden need to shake herself out of this embarrassing bubble.

Because yes, it was embarrassing in some ways. And perhaps embarrassing that Ling had never really... loved anyone. Life in the monastery robbed her of many things she learned to experience many years later... including a sudden and intense affair with a co-worker.

She wasn't quite sure how their relationship worked. But she was learning to let herself get those idiotic butterflies in her stomach when her and Deadlock's gazes accidentally met.

She sighed.

"I don't know why I made this mistake," she repeated. She went back to playing with her fingers. "But maybe I was thinking about you at the time. About us. About what happened. My thoughts ran away somewhere, I don't know, but I messed up."

She was afraid to look at Deadlock. She was afraid to see in her eyes that resentment from a few minutes ago that still hadn't disappeared.

"Maybe under other circumstances I would have taken it as a compliment, but... it still sounds like you're blaming me," Iselin said, still with a hint of bitterness, but the anger was no longer there. Maybe just the pain she hadn't managed to get rid of. "Even if I hope it's not like that at all, it's still there," she said.

"How many times do I have to repeat that I don't blame you for anything so that you'll believe me?"

Deadlock tightened her hands on the inside material of her pants. She avoided Sage's gaze as much as Sage avoided her gaze. Maybe that's why the fact that Iselin was moving more and more involuntarily toward the exit escaped the attention of both of them.

"I... I don't know. I just have to think about it. The whole situation and... and all of that," she finally threw out, chipping away hoarsely. "And I think it's better if I just go now."

Sage didn't have time to stop her, and the slam of the door closing seemed deafening to her for the first time.

***

"Is there any chance that Viper is here?"

Reyna took the protective earphones off her head just in time and turned toward the door of the shooting range.

Skye leaned out from behind the doorframe as if she was just looking in, but seeing the puzzled look on Reyna's face and her furrowed brow, she stepped inside, as if she assumed Zyanya hadn't heard the question.

"Are you looking for her?" asked Reyna, somewhat surprised.

Viper was unlikely to be the person anyone was looking for, and Skye asked the question as if she assumed in advance that the answer would be negative. That is, she had done it before. Probably.

"Since morning." That is, Reyna guessed right. The Australian looked around the shooting range involuntarily until she finally put her hands in the pockets of her pants. "She was supposed to come to me for a check-up after the last mission, and I can't find her anywhere."

It was late afternoon. Reyna put down the ghost on the stand.

"The lab?"

"It's locked and there is no light on inside."

"Armory? I don't know, maybe a hangar?"

"I have a feeling I've been in every room that exists at headquarters." Skye shrugged her shoulders. "And nothing. She just evaporated."

Reyna raised her eyebrows in surprise and rested her hands on her hips herself. Admittedly, Viper was one of those people who disappeared more often than she appeared, but there were some advantages to that - there were about three places in the entire headquarters where she could be if someone was looking for her, and they included the kitchen, where the coffee machine was, the lab, of course, and the shooting range.

Reyna had been at the shooting range since morning and Callas' silhouette didn't even flash in her memory. In fact, she hadn't flashed in it since the morning. Not even her shadow flitted down a random corridor.

"Maybe ask Cypher?" she suggested, even if that option wasn't her favorite. "Maybe he'll find her on one of the cameras or something, I have no idea."

"I wanted to, but he was just walking to Brimstone. We only passed each other in the hallway and that's all I saw of him."

Reyna let the air out slowly and shrugged her shoulders in a gesture of helplessness.

"I can't think of anything, if I'm honest," she admitted. It wasn't entirely true, because deep down she had a feeling that... something had happened. Even if she didn't know what exactly. "But I have something to give her anyway, so if I find her before you do, I'll let you know."

This, in turn, was a completed lie, and a fully conscious one at that. She had nothing to give to Viper, but Kirra didn't need to know that at all either.

"I would appreciate it. Just a text message or something."

"Sure, no problem."

Skye nodded and turned back toward the door. Reyna then grabbed the protective headphones that continued to hang around her neck, but didn't manage to put them on.

"Reyna?" Zyanya turned toward her. Confusion was painted on the Australian's face, as if she herself wasn't sure if she wanted to say anything. "Can I ask you something?"

Mondragón nodded, although at the exact same second she began to wonder if refusal would have been a better option at that moment.

Skye seemed to be gathering her words and only looked at her after a moment.

"What actually happened on that mission?"

Reyna furrowed her brow, smiling uncertainly.

"What exactly are you asking?"

"Well, you know, I guess just one thing was... surprising," she said.

"Viper getting shot?"

Foster didn't answer directly. She just nodded, avoiding Reyna's gaze as if her thought spoken aloud suddenly embarrassed her.

"Not that I'm somehow familiar with it, but it was Kingdom’s area. People there don't usually miss and..."

"Accidents happen." Reyna interrupted Skye probably too abruptly as well, but there was nothing she could do about it anymore. "This one was one of them."

She didn't want to talk about it. Nor did she want to explain herself. In fact, she didn't even want to think about it, because the mere memory of what happened in that damn building sent a wave of chills down her spine.

She had to feed on Viper's soul to survive. And although she tried to put the image out of her mind, Sabine's bloody and pale face, which was robbed of some of its strength by that fucking radianite, appeared in front of her eyes every now and then.

She hadn't talked to Viper about it. She hadn't yet. And she didn't know if they would ever talk about it.

Because that was their job. Because they had no other choice. Because it was a special situation. Because, after all, it wasn't Reyna's fault that she is who she is and functions the way she does.

Reyna may have wanted to talk about it.

Only after a while did she realize that her thoughts were somewhere else. She was only reawakened by a grunt from Skye, who, just as she had avoided her gaze before, did so even more effectively now.

"I understand. I’m sorry if I offended you," she added after a moment. She did not check Reyna's reaction. "If you hear from Viper, let me know."

Now it was Reyna who nodded. They parted in silence.

***

"How did you find me?"

Viper didn't even look at Reyna when she entered the room. She asked the question, but her gaze was fixed on the pile of cardboard boxes opposite as if she never intended to look in any other direction again.

Reyna, on the other hand, did the complete opposite - she fixed her gaze on Viper. And actually only at Viper.

Not at the boxes laying everywhere with their contents scattered on the floor in a disarray similar to that of the lab from some time ago. Not even at the dirty windows or the fact that the room was damn cold.

Only at Sabine.

"You're not the only one who's tried to get away from people in a place full of them."

Viper only raised an eyebrow slightly, as if she recognized Reyna's answer, but didn't want to admit at all that the latter had figured her out so easily.

Reyna didn't know if she wanted to ask. Although maybe not so much whether she wanted to ask, but whether Viper would want to answer her... to actually the pile of questions that was swirling in her head at the moment.

"Skye is looking for you. You were supposed to show up at her place for a check up," she said, more to interrupt her own stream of thoughts than to prevent that characteristic silence between them.

Viper took the nearest object in her hands. A black billiard ball lay right next to several others, and it was this one that Viper turned in her fingers, nodding.

The fact that the scene was deceptively reminiscent of the one in the lab, when Viper once got drunk, gave rise to a kind of anxiety in Reyna.

That the same thing that happened in the lab had happened again, but she wasn't witnessing it now. Viper had disintegrated for some reason alone, creating all this mess, and to her it showed a statuesque exterior.

Reyna had learned to see the cracks in it.

And it was here - in the would-be entertainment room, amidst cardboard boxes full of billiard balls, foosball parts and game controllers scattered on the floor like a mosaic, that she spotted another one on the figure of Viper, who, sitting on the ground amidst all the chaos, was afraid to look at Reyna.

"I know." She moved her finger across the print of the figure-eight on the lacquered surface of the ball. "But I'm fine. It will be just a small scar."

"Have you been sitting here since morning?"

Viper shrugged her shoulders. She didn't want to answer, even though it was already rather obvious.

Zyanya sighed. And then Viper looked at her. There Vi[er saw what she couldn't stomach more than a hit, more than pain and more than any negative feelings directed toward her - concern.

So she averted her gaze back, pressing her lips tightly together. Even as Zyanya knelt on the floor beside her, she pushed away some individual pieces of paper crumbling on the panels to make room for herself, and then sat down with her back against the wall as well.

Even then, Viper felt that if Reyna looked at her, she would see those scratches more and more, and the Viper wouldn't be able to mask them, and sooner or later she would just shatter like some damn glass vase.

"I checked it," she said suddenly. The voice, however, sounded as if it did not belong to her. It was hoarse, tired. She probably didn't have the strength to correct it. "Flash drive."

Sabine didn't deny whether Reyna knew which flash drive she was referring to. She knew that she knew. Killjoy might have been discreet in the cockpit, but she wouldn't hide from Zyanya.

"Do you want to tell me what was on it?"

The question was asked to her, although looking at Zyanya one could say she threw it more into space than in someone's direction. Maybe she did it because she felt that if she matched Viper in this conversation it would be easier for both of them, maybe looking at Sabine and those appearing features caused Reyna some kind of pain.

Viper was putting words together in her head, Reyna could see it. How each variant of the conversation ran through her mind in fractions of seconds, how she chose each word and accent, how she weighed each word on her tongue, all when someone standing on the sidelines would have assumed that Viper was simply somewhere in her own world.

"This woman..." she began, but immediately cringed. Maybe she realized she had started wrong. Or she wanted to clarify. Or start over. Or all at once. "The one on the mission. I knew her. We worked together when I was still there."

She had Kingdom in mind, and for some reason Reyna felt like looking at her, even if she knew it would scare her away. It always did.

Viper swallowed her saliva, and her gaze drifted away from the window and rested on the billiard ball. It was slippery from the sweat of her own hands.

"We were both young, we wanted to know more, do more... I don't know, maybe accomplish something great." She laughed that bitter laugh of hers, as if in a gesture of sympathy for her own naiveté. "That's why not everything we did was completely... legal."

Reyna heard that one word barely squeezed through Sabine's throat.

She wasn't sure what she should say, but she also didn't want to be completely passive.

"Everyone has made mistakes at some point," she said, feeling that those few seconds of silence were starting to get extremely uncomfortable.

Which was something new, since they usually resorted to that silence, but Reyna decided she would think about it later.

Viper smiled crookedly. Now that smile was for Reyna's naiveté. However, it was possible that Sabine included notes of admiration - that she defended her innocence more than... Sabine herself.

"Not these mistakes." She grunted as soon as she realized that her voice was getting dangerously hoarse. And the kind of hoarseness that is usually unstoppable. "Those researches should stay in folders and rot along with the Kingdom. And I should have realized earlier that Octavia didn't do what I told her to do."

"You can't blame yourself for something you had no control over."

Viper's eyebrows furrowed.

"She was supposed to burn them, Reyna. Tear them, bury them. Get rid of them so that no one would ever find them. I didn't get to see it, because I quitted." She stuck her gaze out the window again, letting the pale sun shine through the glass onto her face. "These were dangerous things. Maybe even crazy, or maybe even just fucked up. But they were smart, and I thought at the time that... that it was just fun. That nothing would come of it and no one would ever see it but the two of us."

"That's why you left Kingdom."

It wasn't a question, but a statement. And it explained everything in that one second it appeared in Reyna's head.

"I left Kingdom because Octavia wanted to put the research into practice. She was pushing. I didn't agree, because fucking around with DNA is never a good thing, and when you're a radiant, everything gets screwed up twice as often. She wanted to experiment on those who had already experienced radianite. To improve, to create armies of indestructible, immortal soldiers. But even if she claimed it would be a favor to the country... it would still be genocide before she could achieve such an effect," she explained. That bitter smile still lurked at the corner of her mouth as she shrugged her shoulders. "I didn't want to have anything to do with it. But it caught up with me anyway."

Reyna should get used to the feeling of being hit in the head with a brick. Because everything she was learning, every scrap of knowledge about Viper was just that.

Her past was a mystery. Actually... she herself had been a mystery ever since Reyna first met her on the threshold of the headquarters.

And now those mysteries were crumbling. The soulless monster, the executioner that Sabine may have created in her own head and whom she played every day in front of other agents were what Reyna should have noticed.

Now Sabine Callas wasn't even standing next to this artificial creation of her own wronged psyche.

And Reyna would have liked to know who Sabine Callas really wanted to be someday, if everything that had killed the version of her in her from a dozen years ago had never happened.

What her dreams would have been had she not hated herself for her own mistakes. How she would have used her knowledge. Would she have been happy, leading a life somewhere beyond the smell of war, blood and gunpowder, which she treated as her personal penance for the mistakes she had a right to make.

Zyanya herself swallowed her saliva. She felt as if she was holding a broken glass in her hand that could shatter any second. But she also felt... that she already knew how to hold it in such a way as to prevent that from happening.

"What... what's on that flash drive?" she asked, a moment later regretting that momentary hesitation.

Viper, however, either didn't notice it or ignored it.

"What she's managed to accomplish," she croaked out, leaning her head against the wall behind her. "Research. Recordings. Calculations. Descriptions of more mutants, death certificates, patient charts," she listed, shaking her head with a kind of resignation. If Reyna had been looking at her, she probably would have seen her lower lip tremble dangerously. "All she's learned from this fucking research."

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Zyanya's hand clench into a fist. However, she did not dare to look at her face, leaving them in this peculiar isolation.

"It's still not your fault," she said firmly, although Sabine could hear the tremor in her voice. "You couldn't have known that she didn't destroy them when she should have."

Viper didn't answer for a moment. Reyna thought she would never answer again when her lower lip almost turned blue from clenching her mouth with all her strength.

"They hurt children."

It was the only moment during the entire conversation when Viper looked at Reyna. When she looked at her so clearly that Reyna could see every flash of tears that gathered under her lower eyelid.

When Viper's trembling voice made even the air vibrate. And then her trembling breath. And the hands clenching in her lap so tightly that the pale knuckles grew even paler.

"I saw... footage. And pictures." The voice previously certain now shifted to a whisper. "They murder them the same way they murder adults. They watch them suffer and only write down fucking reports when one of them dies in agony because I gave them a launching pad for it years ago."

Viper quickly wiped away a tear that rolled down her cheek. It didn't have much of an effect, as more immediately followed.

"I have created a machine of a fucking slaughter, Reyna."

She laughed so brittlely, weakly and hollowly that Zyanya felt the emptiness all the way into the marrow of her own bones. In every cell of her body. In every inch of her skin.

She felt she couldn't move. Even if she wanted to, though she didn't know what she could do. Her limbs were numb as if her goal was to cling to that cold floor in that cold room and watch Sabine Callas disintegrate before her eyes.

Zyanya swallowed her saliva. She took a few deeper breaths. She tried to awaken her own hand to let her make any movement, but her finger twitched slightly only after a long moment.

Before she had time to do anything more, Viper leaned against the floor and then the wall and stood up. Crossing the items scattered on the floor, she shrugged off her clothes and headed for the door.

"I'll be in the lab. Tell Skye that if she were going to the medical section, she can come get me on the way."

 

***

"I thought it would be better," muttered the Australian, applying gauze to the previously disinfected wound with a quiet sigh.

Viper turned her head in the opposite direction when securing the bandage with a patch made her squirm minimally in pain. She didn't look toward her own arm, because perhaps she didn't want to admit that Skye was right.

Her treatment should have neutralized the injury to zero while still in vulture. And it probably even did. But until then, because Viper couldn't deny that she felt no effects of being shot.

"I'll be fine," she announced coolly. "Do what you have to do, I have to get back to work."

Skye looked at her for a second and grunted. There was uncertainty lurking in her gaze, as if she was afraid to say anything, but on the other hand she knew she had to.

She applied another patch and unrolled a piece of bandage. Focusing on the current activity had its advantages, because even though she could feel Viper's icy gaze on her, she had an excuse not to have to look at her .

"The skin is quite red and sensitive. It will take longer to heal than... I thought." She took the latex gloves off her hands and tossed them into a metal trash can next to the bed. "You should be careful for a while."

Sabine muttered something to herself, threw a fleeting glance over her bandaged arm and quickly threw on a t-shirt sweatshirt. She buttoned it up almost to the neck before she spoke.

"I'm a doctor, Skye. I know what I'm allowed to do."

If it weren't for the fact that Viper wasn't able to bandage her own arm by the location of the wound, she probably wouldn't be here. And although Skye was aware of this, Viper's words had shaken her self-confidence.

There was no denying that of the two of them, it was Viper who had the medical knowledge. Skye, for all intents and purposes, could only heal with her powers, and she had learned wound treating mostly on missions.

So with a slight wince she just nodded. She collected the packs of bandages and rolled up a roll of bandages, tucking everything into a cabinet without a word.

Viper apparently considered her stay in the medical wing to be over. She slid off the couch, adjusted the sleeve of her sweatshirt and left, leaving Skye in silence.

Reyna was standing in the hallway, but Viper probably didn’t even notice her, passing her like a shadow. Or she pretended not to see her, because looking at her was too risky.

From the glances, conversations were established. And Viper had exhausted her limit of conversations for the day and was not about to bend any limits.

Because from conversations, questions also arose.

As soon as Callas disappeared around the corner, the wing door opened and Skye leaned against its frame.

She immediately made eye contact with Reyna, and when the latter reciprocated it, Skye sighed and intertwined her arms on her chest. At first, she looked as if she didn't want to look at her at all, and in fact, that made her suddenly seem damn passive to Reyna.

"I'm not going to lie, it could be better."

Reyna didn't want to hear that. Even though somewhere deep down she knew it would be, Skye's words were in some indefinable way... terrifying.

But she let out a breath, furrowed her brow and rested her hands on her hips.

"How bad?"

Skye pressed her lips together for a moment. She was gathering her words. She knew Reyna had been out of sorts since returning from the mission, and their earlier conversation at the shooting range hadn't gone well, but to be honest, she hadn't expected Mondragón to want to talk to her about... about Viper.

"It's not healing the way it should. I don't know why, because I acted right away when we met in the vulture," she said. Reyna nodded her head. "I don't want to be nosy, but... but it would be a little easier for me if I knew how it happened," she said.

"It has nothing to do with healing."

Now it was Skye who furrowed her brow and crooked her head.

"What do you mean 'nothing'?"

Reyna shrugged her shoulders, although Skye couldn't shake the feeling that she did so somewhat artfully.

"She was shot, that's it. What else am I supposed to tell you?" she asked. "If something more had happened I would have had to write about it in the report anyway, so why would I lie about it?"

The funny thing was that Reyna actually lied. In the report and now. Partly, because the fact that Viper took a bullet was true, but no one needed to know who fired the shot.

The potential shooter named in the report was already dead anyway. And Reyna was under the impression that no one read these reports anyway.

Skye let the air out through her nose and shrugged her shoulders.

"I don't know. It just seems... strange to me."

Reyna raised an eyebrow.

"So you really assume I'm lying?"

Kirra heard the same notes of anger in this question as she had earlier at the shooting range. She realized she was treading on thin ice, realized she was risking an argument, but there was something she couldn't ignore.

Viper’s wound.

"I didn't say that," she replied, surprising herself with the very calmness she may have lacked at the shooting range. "The point is... that it would have been better for Viper," she added, carefully watching Reyna's reaction to those words. "I know what I saw, okay? If I had been shot like she did, there wouldn't even be a trace left at this stage. And hell knows if she won't get some kind of infection."

Reyna pressed her lips together. But she didn't answer. She couldn't answer, even if she wanted to. Viper would have killed her for that. But in all honesty, Reyna would have taken it better than that look of disappointment on Callas' face when she would find out that Reyna was the one who had told Skye the details of her condition.

"You're the only person besides Brimstone and Killjoy that Viper is talking to," she said. Skye didn't look Reyna in the eye, but she knew the latter was listening to her. "Of which I think you're the only one who can tell her that if she doesn't start taking care of herself, because one time mine or Sage's treatment might not work."

Reyna sighed. It was a strong argument. Actually stronger than she expected. Not that she thought Skye was stupid, it was more a matter that she thought her... contact with Viper was not so visible.

Or at least enough for Skye to easily pick her out.

"I'll talk to her, but I doubt she'll listen to me."

It was somehow a safe option. She wasn't conceding Foster's point, but she wasn't denying it either.

Skye nodded.

"Just try it."

Chapter 27: TWENTY SEVEN

"You wanted to meet."

Reyna lifted the phone as if to prove a point, but Viper wasn't looking at it. In fact, Zyanya faced mostly Callas' back at that moment, who was turned to face the window.

She was surprised when Viper's bedroom door turned out to be open, even though she had texted her explicitly. Viper never left the door open.

"That's true." The chemist's gaze moved somewhere on the grounds outside the window, and she clenched her fingers tighter on the arms entwined on her chest. "Lock the door."

Reyna tried to get something out of it, although she probably should have been used to it by now by this stage, that getting part of the answer from Viper simply required patience.

So she locked the door, as she had been instructed.

"Something wrong?" she asked, tucking the phone into her pocket when she realized she wouldn't need it. "Some kind of mission?"

She knew that wasn't what it was about, but she had learned in time that sometimes Callas needed a homing in on a conversation. Some sort of start, something to make her realize that the conversation was actually happening.

It worked. Sabine may not have shook her head or answered anything specific, but that focus that always appeared on her face after their famous silence was there again.

Now she stood sideways to the window and to Reyna, and the light of the slowly setting sun highlighted her profile.

"I'll get the treatment."

Reyna blinked. She didn't take her eyes off Viper's figure, as if she expected the latter to add something, or to deny it, or to tell Reyna to leave and announce that she was only joking.

"What?"

That was the only thing she managed to mouthed. She almost didn't recognize her own voice.

"I won't repeat myself."

There was a kind of threat in that statement. Reyna had seen the seemingly invisible thin ice she had stepped on, but she also knew that she had always liked taking risks.

An icy bath didn't seem so scary to her.

"That's... good. I'm glad." She swept past the dangerous section. Viper lavished her with a look and nodded, as if looking at her just to check her reaction. "So... tomorrow?"

It was a risky question to ask. Viper, however, did not seem particularly smitten by it.

"Next week. Sage needs to prepare," she replied, returning her gaze out the window. "Three days were for my decision."

"Which you changed."

There was no pinch in that sentence, because Reyna didn't mean it at all. It was a statement that she wanted Viper to confirm. And which made Viper uncomfortable, because a shadow of a grimace ran across her face. It lasted maybe half a second, and then disappeared.

"Are you going to reproach me for that?"

"No, I'm just... surprised."

"That I don't want to die?"

"That you let yourself be helped."

Sabine didn't seem to know how she should comment, so she evasively shrugged her shoulders. Her gaze rested on the pack of cigarettes that traditionally lay on the windowsill.

For a moment she simply stared at it, but finally gave up and grabbed the pack. She took out the cigarette maybe halfway through, when she stopped, feeling how intensely she was being watched.

And she was right, because when she raised her head, Reyna actually looked at her as if she was even demanding that contact.

And at the same time, as if she was embarrassed to hold it.

"I haven't thanked you yet."

Viper took out the cigarette completely and put it between her lips. Probably that was what made Reyna feel a bit like she was the one who wanted to talk, not Viper, even if her phone clearly said the opposite.

She should probably get used to that too.

"I don't like all of the thanks stuff," she concluded. She pulled a lighter from her pants pocket. "We can just consider it part of the mission."

Zyanya dared to come closer. She folded her arms across her chest as she stood at a distance of maybe two steps from Viper and let the smell of burning tobacco envelop her as well.

"Don't you like them, or don't you know how to accept them?"

Viper let the smoke out through her mouth with a sigh.

"It combines with each other."

"I don't want it to go away, that's all," she said, reaching with her hand for the window handle. She swung it open and some of the smoke escaped. "You saved my life, Viper."

Viper furrowed her brow only slightly. Although the sunset was going on outside the window and the light from the cigarette itself was not visible, Reyna remembered very well how it had illuminated her face then in the hotel after the mission to Icebox.

She remembered it, although she didn't even know why.

"It's my job," she stated, and the realization that Zyanya was still trying to get something out of her made her reach for the cigarette pack and extend her hand toward Mondragón. "You have nothing to thank me for."

Reyna hesitantly looked at the drug offered to her and - damn her addiction - took one between her slender fingers.

But she didn't ask for a lighter. Viper didn't offer one either, though Reyna wasn't sure if it was because she'd forgotten or if she was deliberately trying to get her to change the subject even with something so trivial.

"Even if... it's still a bullet," she muttered, turning the cigarette in her fingers for a moment as if she didn't quite know what to do with it. "A bullet, a pain, a scar. There's a bit of it. Sucking out a piece of your soul is unlikely to be anything pleasant either."

Viper rolled her eyes. The drug in her mouth was starting to catch up. So Reyna took hers between her lips and leaned over to Callas.

She lit her cigarette from the other. She was smiling. Not because bending Viper's personal space made her happy, no. It wasn't about mischief anymore.

She was curious about the calmness with which Viper let her do it. She watched her from that short distance for that not-so-long second. The green of her eyes was penetrating. She could count her eyelashes. She could name a few wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. She could describe what her lips looked like tightened around the filter.

She could see the mark of all those years on that face, and Viper... she let her.

Zyanya pulled away when a hiss announced that she could now smoke, too. Sabine dragged that one look away and then blinked and looked away.

"Thank you, Viper."

Callas first furrowed her brow. Later she pressed her lips together, as if on the one hand she wanted to say something, but on the other hand she was only holding back herself.

And then she pressed her cigarette into the ashtray, barely nodding, and walked away from the window.

Reyna followed her with her eyes, taking another drag. Perhaps she was hoping Viper would return there.

Viper didn't. She found her place at the desk, closed the lid of the laptop and began to gather the few loose sheets of paper scattered on the desk into an even pile.

She pretended not to have heard. But Reyna's advantage was that she knew it was just pretending.

"Hey, I'm serious," she added. She didn't include anger in that sentence. She didn't even mean to do it. "Thank you, really."

Viper began rearranging the pens in the organizer on her desk. However, her movements were stiff, too stiff to actually care one bit about Zyanya's words.

That is, she really didn't know how to accept thanks.

Reyna sighed. She didn't like to waste things, but she pressed the half-burnt cigarette into the ashtray and moved away from the window too, not even looking at it going out.

She rested her hands on the countertop, blocking Viper's access to one of the books the latter was stacking on the shelf. She did all this without saying a word. She remained silent, probably hoping that this silence would prove daunting.

Or that it would be eloquent enough.

"Viper, look at me." Reyna didn't even flinch as Callas tried to yank the book out from under her hand. "Viper."

Sabine let go of the book. She stared for a long time, first at the tabletop, then at her hands.

She was ashamed of her own inability to respond normally to something like this. She was ashamed of her inability to be normal. She was ashamed that Reyna saw every such defensive reflex of hers, that she knew when it was fake.

That Reyna had weakened her because she had learned to break through her barriers.

She raised her gaze hesitantly, allowing Reyna to actually look into her eyes.

"Thank you for saving my life, Sabine."

Viper couldn't stop it. Maybe she felt it coming one day anyway. Maybe she even felt it already when Zyanya walked into the room and stuck her gaze into her back.

Even then she felt that she would catch Reyna's face in both hands and kiss her. Again.

Because that's exactly what she did.

Reyna's cheeks were warm, and her hand froze in the air in a gesture that might suggest she wanted to reflexively attack. She lowered it, however, and found the nearest support on the desktop.

The cover of the book she had previously been guarding became irrelevant. What had happened before, what they had talked about, what they had learned about each other had just become... unimportant. That's what stung Reyna. It stabbed her, like the tip of a needle suddenly stuck into her skin.

She hated the fact that with each passing time, she was getting worse and worse at refusing. That it was getting harder and harder for her to step back, get some fresh air and sober up. She also hated herself for not having a clue why she doesn't push Viper away when she should, why she lets her lead her to such moments, even when she knows that's exactly how it will end.

She agreed to it, back then still in the hotel. And that's what she hated herself most of all for. For her powerlessness.

"Wait," she croaked out, catching one breath after another, though she could still taste the tobacco smoke on her own lips, and Viper tilted her head, making the memories of the hotel come alive even more. Goddamn Icebox. "Why?"

Viper's sight fled somewhere for a while. Again, she was creating a scenario in two or three seconds that could have had a thousand endings, and she would have predicted every one of them. Later, her fingers tightened more tightly on the collar of Reyna's shirt. Urgently.

She didn't want to talk. She just shook her head. As always, she just shook her head, damn it, and Zyanya felt herself being fooled again by those shining warning eyes, by the greedy embrace, and by the fact that if Reyna didn't know what their relationship actually looked like, she could tell that Viper wanted it.

She wanted to kiss her. Zyanya only gave in for a second. She pulled away again, feeling her radianite heart hammer against her ribs, and the air around her became hot and thick again.

"Why do you always do this?" She knew it sounded uncertain, but she couldn't change it. Her loins rested against the edge of the desk, Sabine stood between her legs and only tilted her head, as if suddenly unable to speak. Because she could hear everything. "Why are you letting it end like this?"

Reyna felt that her breathing was uneven. She sounded gasped and felt that way. It was as if the last breath had been forcibly ripped from her lungs.

Viper leaned over her. Her gaze moved across Reyna's face, stopped for a moment at her lips, and then returned to her eyes.

"And why do you let that happen?" she asked, shrugging her shoulders with slight hesitation, as if she herself was unsure of the gesture and whether it was definitely appropriate. But her somehow predatory aura was nowhere to be found when Reyna remained silent. On the contrary, it surged in strength with each passing second of just that silence. "You don't have an answer."

It was a statement.

And worse - it was true.

Reyna hated herself for many things related to Viper. The ones she did and the ones... that she didn't do. And she knew that another would be added to that set.

She kissed Viper. Even if it meant she lost the battle, she grabbed Sabine's forearm and pulled her close.

It had been a long time since she had felt so... strange. So seemingly free, herself not knowing if it was definitely a pretence. And if it was, who was creating it in front of whom?

She didn't want to give up. She didn't move away when she needed to take a breath, and she forbade Viper to do the same. Her hand found a place on the back of her head to more emphatically indicate her self-imposed prohibition.

Viper seemed to like it. However, Reyna didn't want to go into whether it was because she had once again managed to avoid questions, or because she actually found perhaps the same primitive pleasure in it as Reyna did.

The desk clattered against the floor as it moved closer to the wall under the weight with which Reyna leaned against it.

Maybe it was a little embarrassing. Actually... the whole thing was a bit of it. Probably because of the fact that it was simultaneously complicated.

And it was getting more and more complicated.

Reyna didn't realize that she had entwined her fingers in Viper's hair until Viper herself muttered something under her breath, sliding her lips to Zyanya's neck.

"God, I hate you."

Another of the things Reyna hated about herself was how weak it sounded. It was as if she didn't mean it at all, but she said it out of pure habit.

She herself no longer knew what she meant.

Viper's low laughter vibrated against the skin of her neck. She was enjoying it. Or she was enjoying herself, and probably, if Reyna had looked down, she would have seen that characteristic winning smile.

That's why she didn't look down. And she stared somewhere in front of her, with her breath ragged and her knuckles whitened from the grip she still had on Viper's neck.

Sabine's hands were cold.

She hissed under her breath, feeling the icy fingertips slide over her ribs under the material of her T-shirt. She rolled the material up higher and higher... and Reyna felt her knees bend lower and lower, even as she endured the kisses on her neck quite bravely.

"Take it off."

Sabine muttered the words more to herself, but Reyna looked at her immediately anyway.

At Viper, who, with her hands embracing her sides, the material of her shirt wrapping around the bends of her wrists, dared to look at her with that wild glare of hers that Reyna was still not immune to, although she tried to pretend otherwise.

And she knew full well that she was losing.

The back of her thigh settled against the edge of the desk, but Viper didn't even look in that direction. Her gaze carefully scanned Reyna's face. She was looking for something.

Or she had found it long ago, and now she was just admiring it.

Reyna swallowed her saliva. She had to sound firm, she had to sound that way, so as not to break her own prohibition.

"Sabine-..."

"Zyanya."

It was a demand. Viper always weighed her words, always chose her tone and accent so that everything would go her way, and so it was this time too.

She said her name in such a way that Reyna felt as if someone had hit her in the head with a brick and only gasped neither out of anger nor shock.

Viper, however, did not go any further; she kept her hands on the material of her clothes and just watched. In that one way that made others shiver, and Zyanya... Zyanya felt her throat dry up.

That's why she pulled her shirt over her head and threw it somewhere beside her.

Before she had time to change her mind. Or more... before she had time to think.

Sabine followed with her eyes the direction where the garment landed, and when she made sure it was lying on the floor, she turned back to Reyna.

Reyna couldn't stand the stare anymore, so as soon as Sabine was within her reach, she kissed her again.

She didn't want to hold back. Viper didn't do it either.

They kissed for a long time. They kissed passionately, although they themselves were not sure where the passion was coming from. They wanted harder, they wanted faster, they wanted more intense, as if time was slipping through their fingers.

Reyna growled under her breath, feeling Viper bite her lower lip. She pressed her fingers more clearly into her shoulder, drew her closer, even if there was barely room for one breath between their bodies.

Viper rested her hands on Reyna's ribs, now bare, hot and trembling from her uneven breathing. She wandered her hands, teasing the skin with her fingernails, every now and then encountering a scar or two and running her fingertip over them.

Reyna unconsciously sucked in a breath as she felt Sabine hook her thumb over the edge of her bra.

"Damn, you really like expensive things, huh?" muttered Viper, stepping back for a moment only to bestow Reyna's chest with a protracted stare.

Well... her lacy bra was indeed not cheap.

Reyna snorted, raising one eyebrow.

"You say that like it's the first time you've seen me in one," she stated somewhat breathlessly. She tried not to look at the way Viper's hand moved over her breasts seemingly casually, yet with deadly precision. "Besides, you're probably wearing a similar one."

Sabine pressed her lips together at first. Later, she nodded as if taking Reyna's words at face value. Later she looked at her hand placed on Reyna's chest, with her eyebrows furrowed as she always did when she was thinking.

And then she raised her gaze to Reyna herself.

"Do you want to check it?"

Her voice was not much different from her normal tone. But it was her eyes that sparked that note of ferocity. A fierceness. A note of the predator that Reyna usually was, and she never thought she would compete with anyone for that.

And it was driving her crazy.

Zyanya didn't stop the curse that came out of her mouth as she greedily grabbed the hem of Sabine's sweater.

She felt like tearing it.

Fucking snake.

"Just take it off already."

The sweater joined the t-shirt a second later. She took it off more carefully, being careful to avoid the still-healing wound.

Only now did Reyna notice that Viper was also struggling to breathe.

She was only pretending.

Her breathing was not calm, it was ragged. The clothing hid it. The tone of voice didn't match the body's reaction. And, not knowing why, the rumble of her heart that Reyna had heard suddenly became an outright thud in her ears.

For a while they said nothing. They looked at each other, heated and practically half naked as if they had forgotten for a moment what they were doing here. What was going on. And when the fuck did it even happen.

"So I was right." Reyna swallowed her saliva, raising her eyebrow in a meaningful gesture that pointed at Viper. Or rather, to her.... Actually, also lacy and also an expensive bra. She nodded her head. "Good to know."

Viper shook her head, rolling her eyes.

But now Reyna was already aware that these were just appearances. Sabine felt every glimpse of her on her skin, Sabine even when she grabbed Reyna’s chin and pressed her lips to hers, she failed to calm her own heart.

Zyanya purred when their chests touched. Only Sabine's hands were apparently cold. Her breasts were warm. She... all of her was warm.

She leaned on her elbows behind her, ignoring how the edge of the tabletop was beginning to dig unpleasantly into the skin on her loins.

Sabine began tugging at the zipper of her pants, but her kisses did not lose their fierceness at all. Even when Reyna got rid of her pants, kicking them into a corner as forgotten as the one where their previous clothes lay.

She kissed her lips, then her neck, almost as if she'd been doing it all along, biting, sucking, doing... hell knows what, but Reyna herself no longer knew whether she hated Viper or herself for it. For that she felt... good.

Zyanya tightened her hand on her side, feeling her lips wandering over her sternum. She tried not to look at how the glow of the radianite heart illuminated Callas' chin. How it accentuated the line of her jaw.

And so she did. Once or twice. Later, she raised her head and stuck her gaze to the ceiling, as if that was the only thing that would keep her alive.

She couldn't look at Viper very often. It was just sex. That was what they had established and that was what she had to stick to.

She couldn't look at her either when she kissed her sternum, or when she slid kisses down to her ribs, her abs, or - god damnit - above the elastic of her underwear.

Reyna felt the blood almost begin to boil in her veins.

"Sabine," she croaked out. She ran her hand through her won hair, trying to somehow revive herself with this gesture, and dared to look down. She quickly grabbed Viper's healthy arm and pulled her up almost from her knees. "Bed. Now."

Sabine gasped in surprise at the vehemence of the gesture. Probably she was knocked out of rhythm, maybe her plan was interrupted or she was forced to change it by Reyna's words.

But she did not protest. She disentangled herself from her own pants in a few, perhaps not very graceful movements, and took a few steps backward.

Reyna followed right behind her. She felt as if Sabine was holding some invisible rope that was pulling her toward herself, and she didn't have enough strength to resist.

No matter how strange it was. Never mind how out of place it was. Never mind that it should never have happened, and now it was happening again, over and over and over again.

No matter how many arguments there were against it, Reyna didn't refuse.

Because that was their fucking deal.

Sabine was the first to sit down on the bed, her predator's gaze unceasing, and just looked at Reyna.

That was all and that was all, and the bed bent under the weight of them both.

Zyanya didn't know where to put her hands.

At first they wandered around the cold bedding, seeking solace in the general heat. They moved up Viper's sides, grabbed her hips and bit the inside of her cheek, realizing how little would be left of Sabine’s damn expensive underwear if she didn't hold back.

Viper was driving her crazy. She had thought about this earlier. She was driving her crazy, letting Reyna know that in front of Viper she was... weak.

Reyna didn't want to be weak. And she was letting herself to be anyway.

Now and here, when Sabine Callas, with a mutter of displeasure, pulled at the edge of her panties, even though it was Viper who was down.

It didn't bother her. Their placement didn't matter. Nothing was ever sure with Viper, Reyna had managed to understand this before.

Therefore, even as Mondragón braced Viper’s hips with her thighs and leaned over her so that the purple ends of her hair stroked Viper's cheek, she trembled as she felt Sabine's cold fingertips on the inside of her thigh.

Viper looked for a moment in that direction. She hadn't done this before, she usually didn't gloat over her victory so openly, and now she did.

Reyna felt like murdering her for it.

"Sabine..." she gasped, involuntarily glancing between her own minimally trembling thighs for a split second. She felt like murdering Viper, too, for what would almost sound like a plea if she didn't hold back. "I swear..."

"Take it off."

Reyna looked at her in time to see her swallow her saliva. Aside from her eyebrows drawn together in frequent concentration, there was some uncertainty on her face, which she tried to mask with a sharp, demanding tone.

Her thumb eloquently pulled at the elastic of Reyna's panties.

She took it off. She didn't even look where they landed.

Viper muttered something to herself. Maybe she looked calm, maybe she looked downright... indifferent, but Reyna could hear her heart. She could hear its every twitch, could almost feel it tightening Sabine's veins with the blood flowing in them, warming her body, which Reyna usually considered so cold and chilly that in these situations she sometimes wondered if Sabine was actually... Sabine.

Reyna hung her head, swallowing a groan in her throat.

She herself widened her legs. Sam almost pressed her face between Viper's collarbone and her neck, as her head suddenly became too heavy to hold up.

The movements on her clit were slow. Murderously slow. So slow that Reyna wanted to help herself, maybe move her hips to get more friction, or maybe just urge Viper on.

But that would have been desperate. Even though her trembling leg muscles were already betraying her, she didn't say a word.

She tightened her fingers on the bedclothes and took it in hand, letting the air out as calmly as possible. She couldn't reveal too much. This was just sex.

And she was about to tear the quilt anyway when Viper finally sped up.

She tried not to think about the fact that Sabine was probably staring at the ceiling, her thoughts wandering somewhere Reyna couldn't reach right now - now that, with her face pressed into the sheets, she was trying not to go crazy and swallow every moan that tried to force its way through her mouth.

"Don't you know how to use your fingers?"

She wanted it to sound like a growl. Because somewhere in there, she was actually furious. Whether at Viper or herself was another matter, but she was.

Still, she was afraid that it sounded pathetic.

Viper, however, did not bite back with any sarcastic text, did not parry, nor did she drag out in doing the command.

She did what she was asked for.

Reyna lost count of whether it was actually Viper's heart, or whether her own was beating so hard that there was a steady screech in her ears.

Or maybe she only thought it was. Maybe it all was just a fever dream.

Maybe the fact that when Sabine flexed her fingers and Reyna saw dark spots dance before her eyes was just an illusion. Maybe her own hips that refused to obey and helplessly began to move in their own rhythm was also just a dream.

But she gave up that thought when her orgasm began to creep around the corner. It sped up, accelerated, and she no longer held back the movement of her hips.

She didn't care if she looked pathetic. Whether she looked like a loser, striving for orgasm. Viper wasn't looking, after all.

Viper only occasionally wrapped her neck with her warm breath, scattering a few individual strands of hair. She did nothing else.

Not even when Reyna's hips twitched that last time, and she clenched her fists so tightly that she drove her nails into the insides of her own palms.

All of this to stop herself from moaning.

She breathed deeply, drawing air into her lungs, as she felt them burning her. She analyzed the smell, the one that always accompanied them. Bedding, sex, skin, naked and warm.

"On your back," she croaked out. Although she couldn't see Viper's face yet, she could sense that the latter was wrinkling her eyebrows. She wondered. Reyna licked her dry lips. "Stay on your back."

She straightened up and slid off the bed. Her bra was suffocating her. It was in the way. It was too hot for her. She undid it, with her throat still dry, her mind still foggy, and it was in this state that she caught Viper's hips, who... obeyed.

Her furrowed brow, however, testified to her alertness. Her body may have betrayed her, the blush of exertion reached all the way to her cleavage, her hair was in disarray, but Viper never finished her guard.

Reyna saw that spark of surprise as she pulled Viper to the edge of the bed. Her calves hovered involuntarily over the floor for a moment, until Zyanya knelt by the bed and... arranged them on her shoulders.

Viper was no fool, she knew where this was going. She raised herself up on her elbows, her chest rising and falling as she looked at Reyna from this new... vulnerable position.

She pressed her lips together. Reyna waited, though she felt her fingers almost itching to touch and involuntarily slid one hand off Viper's thigh only to catch the swept sheet in her fist.

"Are you shy or what?"

Viper asked the question with a hint of that sarcasm of hers, but her voice was hoarse. She combed her short hair with her fingers and stuck her gaze into Reyna.

Reyna, who never in her life would have believed that she would ever have this version of Viper in front of her.

Viper almost naked, with a blush reaching her cleavage. With her hair, usually immaculately styled, now in disarray, single strands falling across her face. With uneven breathing and in all of this - completely exposed to her.

She didn't say what first came to mind.

Instead, she swallowed her saliva, armed herself with her wry smile and tossed her hair back.

"You'd like that."

She knew Viper didn't like extensions. And even so, she couldn't resist moving her hand over her thigh, maybe scratching a little, maybe forcing Viper to get impatient.

She slipped her panties off slowly, but no longer met her gaze. Viper didn't want to look at her at that moment, as she lay comfortably on her back, and the only sign that she knew what was happening was the minimal twitching of her calves on Reyna's shoulders.

Reyna, however, managed to hear a sucked breath as her tongue slid over Viper’s clit.

She purred to herself. To herself, to Viper, maybe to the silence around her.

She clamped her hands on her thighs, although she probably didn't know it herself. She repeated the same movement with her tongue, as if to reassure herself that deep down she realized with a strange feeling of tightness that she probably just wanted to hear that sucked breath again.

Viper always held back. Reyna was able to understand this, she did the same. They were not lovers, after all.

She heard every rustle of the bedsheets as Sabine's fingers tightened on them. She felt her heels digging into her shoulder blades as Reyna nevertheless pulled herself even closer, pressing her tongue harder.

So that she could feel it more clearly. So that the raspy breath came again.

She breathed through her nose, though she was sure she could have stopped just for that one ragged inhale. She felt her chin get wet, her lungs burn from the hot air, and her fingers begin to go numb from the force with which she drove them into the top of Viper's thigh.

She did it with a ferocity she didn't even expect from herself.

The setting sun warmed her back, the same sun that just moments ago illuminated Viper's face as she tried to avoid thanking her.

And now she felt nothing, but just Viper. The warmth of her thighs under her hands. The smell, the same as always, but now almost stupefying. Sex, heat, a little sweat. And that strange feeling, tight as a rope.

She gripped her thighs tighter, clearer. Just so she could slide one hand down, feel the wetness.

She herself had to swallow a low growl.

She didn't move away from Sabine for a moment when she slipped her finger inside.

She expected the air to be sucked in, or her fingers clenched tighter on the bed sheets. She expected Sabine to pull her hair or furrow her brow.

But that's not what made her move away. Or made the world stop, as she lifted her head faster than it was possible.

Viper moaned.

Their gazes met instantly.

Sabine covered her mouth with her hand, and probably mainly because of this, the only emotion Reyna was able to capture from her eyes was... terror.

Zyanya couldn't move. Sabine didn't do so either for the first few seconds.

She just stared at her with that look of a terrified animal, pressing her fingers to her face so hard that the skin around them began to turn white. She was panting, but there was no element of the usual in that breath.

Panic was ringing in it.

And it lasted for a while. Though maybe even an eternity.

Until Viper pulled back completely. She sat down on the bed, started picking clothes off the floor, and her hands were shaking so badly that her own sweater flew through her fingers several times before she managed to grab it.

It was only then that Reyna woke up. It was as if someone had pinched her and knocked her back to reality. That her knees were sore from kneeling on the floor, that she was hot, that her mouth was wet, and that a single strand of hair irritatingly tickled her.

"Viper, wait-..."

"I have to go."

Reyna furrowed her brow. Then she blinked. She found her own T-shirt and hastily pulled it on over her head, as if she was afraid that if she did it too slowly, she would be late and left alone in the room again. She dressed in underwear lying on the floor, although she herself didn't even know when.

She stood up, caught the wrist of Viper, who was just reaching for her pants.

She had no idea what she actually wanted to say.

Sabine moaned.

The same Sabine who was now trying to yank her wrist from between Reyna's fingers and avoided her gaze so much that she almost burned a hole in the floor.

"Wait, I... did I do something wrong?" she asked, although she could feel the lie weighing on her tongue. She was well aware of what had made Viper so terrified. Her head was still spinning, her throat was dry. "If I did then just tell me, maybe-"

"No."

It was supposed to be a command. Cool and frigid. And even so, her hands were still trembling as she pulled her pants over her thighs and pressed her lips so tightly that they were beginning to almost turn blue.

"And I'm supposed to leave it like this?" she asked. She still held her hand tightly. "Did I hurt you?"

"No."

"Then what happened?"

"Nothing." Viper jerked her wrist. "Let go."

"Not until you tell me what’s wrong."

"What the fuck don't you understand?" she growled, tugging at her pant leg, which she found difficult to put on with one hand. "I'm fine."

"That's not what it looks like."

"So maybe you have a problem with your eyesight. Let go."

Sabine clenched her jaw so tightly that Reyna could see the muscles in her cheeks twitch. Refusing to look at her, she drove her gaze into the wall as if Reyna had suddenly ceased to exist.

Once again, she pierced their bubble.

Reyna let go.

Sabine bolted out of bed, dressed her sweater, picked up her underwear from the floor and, clutching them in her hand, walked out of her own bedroom with a quick step, leaving both the sunset and Reyna behind.

***

Viper didn't remember the way to the lab. She didn't remember her footsteps echoing down the hallway. She didn't remember her own heart, rumbling in her chest from stress and exertion and heck knows what else.

She only remembered the hiss of the door opening.

And this is where she found herself. As soon as it slammed shut, she leaned against it with her back.

Someone seeing all this from the side might have assumed that Sabine was being chased by someone. But they certainly wouldn't have guessed that it was... herself. And a wave of her own thoughts.

She was still hot. Her hair was still in disarray, and - perhaps a little pathetically - she still had her own underwear in her jeans pocket.

All of this... it was still so close. What she had done... and how much her body defied her mind.

She clamped her eyelids shut. The chill coming from the door soothed insufficiently.

She slid down them until she sat on the floor and dragged her hands over her face.

"Fuck!"

Only the echo of her own voice answered her.

Chapter 28: TWENTY EIGHT

Reyna knew that going after Viper was not a good idea, no matter how much she wanted to do it.

She couldn't force her to talk now. Viper wouldn't have said anything to her anyway, if she even allowed her closer than ten steps away, and the only thing that would have come out of it would have been another argument that couldn't be avoided.

Reyna knew that Viper needed to be alone for a while.

Reyna herself, on the other hand, didn't know if she could survive being alone right now.

She put on her pants and, as she did her zipper, felt the cold fingertips on her palms. The room was out of fresh air, and when she went to the window to open it, she almost jerked the handle out of the frame.

The room smelled of them. The sun was slowly hiding. The book that Reyna had held before, was still on the desk.

Everything looked almost untouched in the desk area, that Zyanya almost couldn't believe that a minute ago they were still both here.

She knew she shouldn't do that, but she looked at the bed. At the crumpled sheets, the quilt partially fell off one side. At the pillows, tossed around.

She was used to this sight. She should be.

She remembered it from the hotel after the party, from Icebox, then again in her own bedroom.

Their sex was not peaceful. It was violent, impulsive, full of conflicting feelings, and it came where no one would ever expect it. It was intense to the point where it burrowed into your skull and drowned out everything else.

It was addictive in his own strange, unhealthy way.

But in that strange and unhealthy way, there was one rule.

Viper was quiet. She was restrained to the point of exaggeration, Reyna was sure she would have been able to not breathe if it meant that not even the slightest sigh would pass through her lips.

She didn't want to show anything of herself. Because it was nothing.

Just sex. That's how Viper showed it every time, and Reyna was able to accept it. In fact, she may have even unconsciously picked up this behavior herself, and didn't notice when.

Maybe her subconscious also put into her head the lack of meaning in what they were doing. Not showing emotion was some strange indicator that what was between them was just going to stay that way. Colorless. Impartial. Maybe even cold and blunt for as long as it was comfortable.

And now Viper moaned.

She had broken a barrier. Her own, Reyna's, or both of them. She moaned, and immediately, in the place of this new Sabine that Reyna had sometimes been given to know, the old one stepped in. Inaccessible and surrounded only by prohibitions.

Viper moaned.

Then, as her thighs were wrapped around Reyna's face, her hands clenched on the sheets, and the beating of her heart Reyna could hear more than ever.

She probably needed to breathe some fresh air.

***

She didn't quite know how from her walk around the headquarters she ended up in Gekko's room with a game controller in her hand, but she wasn't going to complain about it either.

She knew in turn that it might do her some good, so she sat on the couch, staring at the loading screen of some game she had never seen before.

She realised she got lost in thoughts, when Gekko put a bowl of chips on the coffee table.

"Someone died?"

Reyna blinked.

"What?"

Mateo shrugged his shoulders, then took one chip and sat down on the couch.

"That's what you look like. Like someone died."

Reyna smiled apologetically, although she herself didn't know if she actually felt embarrassment or just had no other idea how to respond.

"Forgive me, I was just... having a hard day."

Gekko furrowed his brow. Later he took another chip, but stopped his hand on the way to his mouth.

"Is that a question or an answer?" he asked with a light laugh.

He hoped it was a joke. He was right, Reyna herself would also have felt mixed signals in his place. Besides, she was doing it on her own, too.

She shrugged her shoulders. And it wasn't until she did so that she realized she probably shouldn't, because just as Gekko reached for his controller, he finally lowered it and placed it in his lap.

"Are you okay, Tía?"

Reyna looked at him with hesitation. She wasn't going to come here just to pour out her grievances, which she probably... didn't fully understand herself.

She wanted to answer something reasonably plausible. That she had a headache, that she had a hard workout, or that she hadn't had her coffee and now felt too sleepy to function. But no matter which option of these she would choose, it would be a lie.

"You know, I don't want to push, but... we are family." Gekko involuntarily moved his thumb over the controller's buttons, but lowered his gaze only for a moment. "What is my problem is also your problem, or something like that."

Zyanya smiled involuntarily.

It was no secret that since Gekko had been in the Protocol, Reyna was the one who introduced him to it all. Their distant bloodline connections sometimes blurred and Reyna was more under the impression that she was talking to her younger brother and not a cousin from the borders of the family tree.

"I just..."

"Is it about Neon?"

It sounded more like a statement than a question, and Reyna... was a bit saved by that. It wasn't what she meant, but on the other hand it wasn't a complete lie. And Gekko himself had suggested the idea, so her job was just to deny or confirm the supposition.

God, she was beginning to think like Viper.

"You talked to her, didn’t you?"

Gekko shrugged his shoulders. The corner of his mouth lifted when Trash crawled under the table and rubbed herself against his ankle, but it immediately dropped.

"I don't know if you could call it a conversation, to be honest." There was worry in Reyna's gaze, mixed with surprise, so he quickly finished, although he didn't want to at all. "We passed each other by the shooting range. I asked if she knew where you were, because I was supposed to let you know when I downloaded this new game," he sighed. He patted Trash probably just to avoid Reyna's gaze. "She told me to look for you at Viper’s. And she slammed the door."

"Oh."

That was the only thing Reyna managed to say. She wasn't sure whether she felt surprised by Neon's behavior or more ashamed in front of Gekko that he had to witness it, when he always got along well with Tala.

The fact that Neon didn't forgive her and announced it all around the quarters, perhaps in an act of being mad about it. And the fact that she made it clear where Reyna could be found.

And most of all that she was right, because Reyna was indeed at Viper's at the time. In the room. Naked.

"Did you two get under each other's skin?"

Gekko leaned against the back of the couch. He arranged his hands on the controller as if he was already ready to play, although on the other hand he was waiting for her answer. Zyanya herself involuntarily gripped hers tighter.

"We had a bit of a scuffle, that's all." She shrugged her shoulders. "I apologized. I think Neon just needs to get over this, I don't want to put pressure on her."

She felt some indefinable panic involuntarily begin to tighten around her throat. She knew Mateo would ask about this one thing. If she were him, she would probably ask too.

"It seriously was about Viper? Not that I'm judging, but..." He probably wasn't sure how he should put it into words, and in the end he just scratched the back of his neck. "Viper is the last person I would assume you would spend time with. No offense."

"Why?" she replied, trying to sound dispassionate, even though she knew full well that if she had asked that question to herself a few months ago, she would have been laughed at. "Skye often talks about integration, maybe there's something to it."

Mateo furrowed his brow and smiled uncertainly.

"Well, yes, but... she's still, you know, Viper."

"What is your point, cariño?"

"...You hate each other," he finally said. He hesitated for a moment. "At least I thought so."

Zyanya was not happy that she had to use Brimstone's words in this situation. But she had no choice, no matter how small the limit of her tolerance towards Liam was.

"Yes, and I've already been scolded for it once. Brimstone doesn't want conflicts among agents," she explained, although deep down she had no idea if she believed her own words. "Besides... she's not so bad once you somehow try to talk to her."

Gekko raised one eyebrow.

"There's no way."

"What?" Reyna laughed briefly, probably just to hide her nerves. "Viper likes everything clear, some peace and her safe space. If you respect that, you might live. And I have to, because Skye will rip my head off."

The lie stung the tongue a little. But only a little. Being honest, Zyanya was beginning to be appalled by how easily some of it passed down her throat. On the other hand, she should get used to it if she wanted everything that was her and Viper's business to remain just theirs.

For appearances' sake, she stroked the younger man's green hair, took the controller in her hand, much more confidently this time, and leaned back more comfortably.

"Let's stop the gossip and show me what you can do."

Gekko smiled. They played until evening.

***

Viper didn't have to look at Omen to know that when she entered the library, he stopped in his knitting.

And he probably wanted to ask a question. But he didn't ask it until Viper sat down in an armchair across from him, the sound of a bottle of wine being set down hard on the table and a single glass shattered the general silence.

It was evening. And she had already overestimated herself about alcohol once.

Somehow she cared little about it at this moment.

"You bought wine."

Viper stared impassively at the bottle, then shrugged her shoulders. The question made sense - Sabine was indeed never a fan of alcohol and if she did drink, it was occasionally.

Coffee and cigarettes were enough in the addiction category and she didn't want to change that.

But that didn't change the fact that even if she wasn't fond of drinking, at that moment she felt like getting so drunk that everything in her head became just white noise on a single frequency.

Back then in the lab she didn't plan it, now she did. Viper fully consciously intended to get drunk.

"And why not? Everything is for people," she replied.

She immediately reached into the back pocket of her pants and pulled out a corkscrew as if unaware that Omen had more questions for her at that moment than answers.

"I don't drink."

It was a simple sentence. Omen liked directness, and there was something Viper greatly appreciated about him.

He was still holding the knits in his hands, as if he wasn't quite sure whether it was appropriate to continue working, or whether he should wait for further developments.

"I'm not telling you to do so," she replied, applying the corkscrew to the cork.

Soon the bottle was open, Viper put a strand of hair behind her ear and nodded, as if in appreciation of her own accomplishment.

Omen let out one of his famous protracted hums. Viper still didn't quite know what they meant. She wasn't about to ask, either.

Omen listened more than he spoke, being usually a silent audience for what was going on at any given moment, sparing words and thus being the one in whose company Viper felt safe. They both respected their own boundaries and had no intention of crossing them.

"So why are you here?"

It wasn't a grudge. Omen started knitting again, so Viper understood that he had accepted her presence and her behavior simply interested him.

"Because drinking alone is a symptom of alcoholism."

Omen did not respond, the knitting stopped for a moment, but then he started working again.

Viper didn't know if he was looking at her. In fact, she never knew if he was looking anywhere. No one knew.

So his form had its negatives, because Sabine liked to know if she was being watched. She liked... to know in general. Just like that.

And now she didn't know Omen's thoughts. She wasn't sure if it bothered her or not. On the one hand, she could do as she pleased, but on the other hand, she felt this strange uncertainty that the conversation would sooner or later descend into any of the uncomfortable topics.

She decided to try to get rid of this thought by pouring red wine into a glass. The sound of the liquid sloshing against its walls was no louder than a whisper.

"Scarf?" She grunted, getting rid of her hoarse voice. She set the bottle down, meeting Omen's wink. "It’s pretty."

Omen didn't respond. Maybe he wasn't expecting it, or maybe he just didn't know what he should say. So Viper gave up trying to talk, because, after all, that's not why she came here.

She came here so that the guilt wouldn't be so glaring. So that she wouldn't feel that she had fallen somewhere beneath her dignity by getting drunk somewhere in a corner of the lab, like last time.

She wanted to do it in a civilized and reasonably decent way.

"You don't drink either."

Viper's eyebrows twitched at this statement. Omen may have said little, but he knew a lot. And he saw a lot. That was somewhat of a common trait between them - they valued observation.

"Without a reason I don’t.”

She should have bitten her tongue. But she added nothing more and lowered her head, covering her face with her hair. She grasped the glass in her hand and sank her mouth into the alcohol, trying to focus on making sure each sip went straight to her brain.

She didn't want to think. She didn't want to think about what had happened today. Not about herself, not about Reyna or both of them. She wanted nothing but an impenetrable void in her mind.

"Something happened?"

She rebuked herself for that sentence before, because if it hadn't been for it, Omen might have been tempted to keep quiet. She clicked her tongue, the corner of her mouth lifted slightly crookedly upward.

"Something is a good term," she concluded. She wasn't sure if her intention was to make a joke or if she laughed because that probably left her with nothing to do but laugh. "But I don't want to talk about it."

Omen respected that decision. She knew he would, and that's why she chose the library.

"Alright."

Viper nodded. She took another sip of wine and sank back in her chair, closing her eyes.

"I'm glad we're getting along."

***

Reyna didn't even bother to look at her clock as she once again turned on her side and stuck her gaze into the window.

The bedding was too slippery, the radiator was humming too loudly, and she felt that if she didn't fall asleep within the next few minutes, she would go crazy and either murder someone or herself.

She couldn't sleep. She should have expected it, but that didn't mean at all that the feeling was somehow becoming less frustrating.

In fact, it was getting worse by the minute, because although the fact of having trouble sleeping itself wasn't all that foreign to her, having trouble falling asleep when you knew the reason for it was something new.

She had laid down on her back and was now staring at the ceiling.

Her eyes moved across the solid color of the paint, as if she was looking for something there. And indeed - that's exactly what she was doing. The problem was, that she didn't actually know herself what she wanted to find there.

She probably hoped that by staring at one place, boredom would be replaced by sleep.

But as she folded her arms over her chest, she could only growl under her breath, feeling her radianite heart pulsing under her fingertips in a rhythm she didn't know.

She was agitated. Too stimulated. Too awake.

She could hear the hum of her own blood in her ears, could hear that damn heart pounding against her ribs. She even heard the patient groaning of the stitches of the pillow as she clenched her fingers on it so tightly that they were beginning to hurt, and if not for that, the object would have ended up in shreds on the floor of her quarters.

She placed her hands back on her chest. She pressed her lips together.

First she began drumming her fingers against her own ribs. She tried to find some pattern in the steady rhythm that would bring her solace. She pounded out the rhythm, counting each movement.

One... two... three...

She had to focus on the way the tendons of her fingers twitched evenly. On anything, as long as the jazzy thoughts shut up.

She stopped. She growled something under her breath.

The blood continued to rumble through her veins. She felt every single beat of her heart and was painfully aware of its workings.

She moved her thumb across her skin. It was hot, almost vibrating.

And so she remembered how much her temperature contrasted with the coldness of Viper's fingertips just a few hours ago.

She stopped immediately.

She lowered her hands along her sides and arranged them stiffly next to each other, scooping the quilt into her fists, as if she hoped it will hold her in place that way.

Viper moaned.

Reyna took pity on the quilt and returned to the pillow. She pressed it to her face.

Immediately she pushed it away. It was too hot for her. She could feel every bit of skin burning her and the air getting thick.

Viper's fingers were always cold. They were always like ice cubes suddenly appearing between their heated bodies, making everything more... grounded.

Reyna pressed her lips together even more. She also clenched her eyelids, praying for peace of mind, heart and rippling body.

Her fingers froze.

Viper's muscles also twitched in the same way. Single spasms under her fingertips as she felt the warmth of her thighs on either side of her head and-...

"Jesus fuck, shut up."

She growled this only to herself and the darkness of the night. She turned on her side again, this time toward the wall.

If someone had said they wanted to slap her in the face, she would have been ready to pay them to do it.

She squirmed in her place. The bedding was digging into her skin, the mattress was too soft.

Reyna could see her knuckles turning white from clenching on the bed sheets, each tendon tightening in sync with the movements of her tongue. She saw the all serious, unavailable Viper completely naked in front of her with cheeks red from exertion and pleasure.

She looked... wrecked. Wrecked in such a mesmerizing way, she could-...

Zyanya furiously pulled her shirt over her head. Because she hated herself for knowing why the damn heat wouldn't let go.

She laid back on her back. She was still too warm. She felt like pulling her hair out of her head.

She cursed in her native language as her body reacted without her will. She wanted to cover her bare breasts so that she wouldn't have to look at this... evidence of how she felt, but she knew that if she did, she would be too hot.

The crystal in her chest glowed brightly. Too bright than she would have liked.

Viper moaned. She broke through the barrier because it felt good, because it was Zyanya who made her feel so good. She could listen to it.

More often. She could listen to both that and more. If Sabine wouldn't hold back... if only she would finally let herself fucking let go-...

Her fingers began drumming her ribs again, but a moment later she carefully began drawing small circles with her thumb.

After all, it was only about relief. About a moment of peace. That's what she wanted, and that's what she was going to tell herself.

She needed to relax. That's all it was. This was no crime. Right?

Her hand moved down her stomach, her fingernail hooked the elastic of her shorts, and she let the air out of her lungs and the lip between her teeth that she had unconsciously bitten.

The warmth of heated bodies, quick breaths, the smell of skin. And that one moan that bounced off the walls and hit her right into her spine, plowed through every vertebra and for a few seconds her brain was just a shapeless mess....

With a curse on her lips, she slid her hand behind the barrier of her shorts. And underwear.

Maybe she hoped that if she did it quickly, she wouldn't have time to think about how idiotic the idea was.

Just relief. Nothing else.

She couldn't help feeling ashamed when it occurred to her that her body had begun to react much earlier than her mind. She was wet. Even more than she could have expected from herself.

More than she could accept that it was just that one damn sound that brought her to this state.

She moved her finger slowly, perhaps all too slowly, between her labia, and involuntarily her eyelids tightened, as if trying to hide from her own embarrassment.

"Fuck," she muttered. Her slick covered her fingers just like that for a moment. Maybe she didn't want to believe it was happening, maybe she was embarrassed to admit it was happening. "Fucking hell."

But the fingertip moved to where she needed it anyway.

She couldn't immediately impose a fast pace on herself, because it was too... obscene. Too desperate. Maybe even too embarrassing for herself.

She couldn't last that long, she wasn't able to. She accelerated her movements faster than would be consistent with her morals. And she immediately sank her teeth into her own forearm.

She didn't want to think about it. Is it okay, is it idiotic, or maybe she's gone completely insane and it's all just a dream to her. She just wanted relief, just this one thing, and even though her dying dignity was hiding in a corner with every move she made, Zyanya still felt it was there.

People didn't do that. She... didn't do that.

She wasn't the one who touched herself, feeling her wetness on her fingers to the point of exaggeration. She wasn't the one who clenched her eyelids so tightly that they began to hurt and only then did she put her forearm over her eyes.

It pulsed with dull pain from her own bite. It wasn't her bite, it couldn't have been.

It wasn't her silent gasps that came from between her lips.

Maybe it wasn't even her fingers. She couldn't tell because there was only warmth around her. It was a warmth she hadn't felt in a long time, a warmth... that she never expected to receive from someone so cold.

It was a warmth that now made Reyna feel her cheeks burning, her thighs twitching and her mouth dry from her increasingly frequent breaths.

That warmth that now was not just warmth. But what? A need? Excitement? Desire?

And then she realized. That it wasn't her warmth at all, not her fingers or her touch or even her body that made her like that right there, right now.

It was her warmth, her body, her touch.

She couldn't open her eyes. If she did, she knew she would be back in her room, half naked and desperately pursuing something she was ashamed to admit.

It was her fingers that touched her body. Her fingers were wet. And it was she who moaned, aware of how much Zyanya needed her now.

Her hand unconsciously clenched into a fist, her nails dug into her skin, and Reyna was sure that in an hour she would see crescent-shaped marks on her skin.

How would she react? What would she do? Maybe she would have tilted her head in that characteristic way of hers and smiled, her cold fingers teasing her until Reyna herself caught her hand and placed it where it was supposed to be all along?

She felt her hair sticking to her forehead. She was painfully aware of every gust of wind from the half-open window that teased her exposed breasts.

These were not her own fingers. Not anymore.

And that's why she didn't open her eyes. So that she wouldn't have to realize otherwise.

Viper's skin was mostly cold. It contrasted with her own, perpetually hot. She knew this, and so she would touch her entrance, and Reyna's hips would jerk at this sudden temperature difference.

And they jerked. The bed frame squeaked, but she didn't even hear it.

She groaned when a finger slid smoothly inside. She could do it, she was alone. She could let her own moan reverberate off the walls of her room.

One movement was enough to make her body tense up, and she already knew it still wasn't enough to achieve what she needed.

A second finger joined the first. She almost whined.

What if she was here? What would her reaction be? The same as Reyna's? A different one?

She brushed her hair away from her face, but her hand immediately fell inertly to the bed sheets. It was hot, too. Everything was hot.

The movements of her wrist were not restrained as at first. The individual tendons in her thighs twitched as she helped herself with hip movements, desperately chasing the pleasure that was beginning to build in the pit of her stomach.

She had to go fast. Faster. And even faster.

She let out a breathless moan from between her lips as her fingers finally - finally - reached that one point that never failed to pull bolder sounds from her throat.

She bit her lip, but immediately let it go.

She repeated the same movement. Faster. Harder. More clearly.

She felt a single tear form at the corner of her eye. Pleasure in its purest form as her hand worked relentlessly, hitting that one point again and again.

Oh, it had happened before. Once before, someone had brought her to this state. Not once, that one person knew how to do it in such a way as to drive her crazy, as if they already knew her by heart and knew what she liked, what made her mind go foggy and a moan form in the pit of her throat.

She knew how to flex her fingers. Reyna remembered them more than she would have liked. She remembered how they felt, how-...

Her back arched.

"S-Sabine!"

The orgasm hit her in such a way that all the thoughts she had hitherto had in her head disappeared. For that one moment, a steady hum surrounded her. The very one she had wanted all along, the one that would bring peace.

Her own breathing. Trembling muscles. A tired hand. A dry mouth, still half-open.

The echo of Viper's name spreading through the room.

Wait.

She slammed her fist on the mattress as the same echo reached her with redoubled force, even as her heart continued to rage and her breathing refused to calm down.

She moved her forearm away from her face, and stuck her gaze to the ceiling, looking for an excuse that wasn't there.

"Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!"

If it could have been worse, Zyanya just made it so. Much, fucking, worse.

Chapter 29: TWENTY NINE

“Are you looking at me?”

Viper peeled her gaze away from the bottle, and just when she did, she looked at Omen, as if she already knew the answer herself. She squinted her eyelids to increase the effect of that very look... and to sharpen her own eyesight.

She couldn't hide even from herself that everything she saw at that moment was pretty much hazy. And slowed down. It was also partly devoid of sense, but that was a good thing actually.

She herself felt as if she had slowed down a bit. Admittedly, there was also something to this feeling, comparable to stepping into freshly spilled cement, where a person can't move in either direction unless he or she puts quite a bit of effort into it, but all the same, Viper wasn't going to go anywhere for the time being.

The bottle, by the way, was half empty.

Well... maybe a little more than half. She didn't quite remember when it happened, but she knew that the glass in her hand was cooler than usual, as she felt the alcohol warm her veins... God only knew when exactly.

It was a little pathetic. But only a little. After all, it was with this hope to empty her mind that she had come here, and with it she intended to leave.

She rested her cheek against the wall of the glass, savoring the strange coolness.

“Excuse me?”

She licked her lips. Her vision was a bit blurry, the library having become a fever of colors beaming from the book covers, but she managed to focus it on Omen for those few seconds.

Not that she was surprised. This blissful, perhaps even naive stupor and indifference to what was going on around her... and in her mind it all was able to compensate her for the probably murderous headache she could expect tomorrow.

A steady buzz on one frequency came through her mind finally and she was more than happy to find it there. She almost felt like smiling.

She swayed her glass a moment, involuntarily tracing with her eyes the minimal waves that were forming on the surface of the not yet drank wine. She fiddled her look just between that and Omen’s figure.

“Are you looking at me,” she repeated. Her tongue was sluggish, the tart aftertaste of the wine still lingering on it. “Because I think you are.”

Omen clicked his knitting wires, his head tilted to the side, as if he was trying to get something more from Viper with this gesture. Perhaps the knowledge of how he should respond.

Viper found a certain calmness in the sight of the liquid overflowing from one side to the other. She thought more clearly while looking at it, or at least that was her impression after her efficiency in analyzing anything slowed down several times.

“So you're judging me. Understandable.”

That sounded more like the mutterings of a sleeping child than an overconfident sentence, and she may not have been proud of that fact, but she wasn't about to openly admit it either.

“Why would I do that?”

Viper laughed stupidly. She didn't know if it was Omen's answer that she found funny or the whole situation, but she shrugged her shoulders.

Or she was just drunk.

“It's a bit of my last meal or something, let it go. Then they'll probably forbid me to drink anyways.”

“I don't really understand.”

She scratched her temple. The corner of her mouth stopped in a crooked half-smile, but it immediately dropped. Omen had no idea what Brimstone had come up with. She shouldn't be surprised, he rather didn't want to brag about it. Maybe he wasn't proud of the idea. Maybe he wasn't even proud of the whole situation he got himself, Viper and Sage into.

“Maybe I deserved it,” she muttered. To herself or to Omen, she didn't know which option prevailed. She didn't even know if she should even start the subject, but it was too late. “I did a little wrong, didn't I?”

Her tongue tangled and she felt her cheeks heat up from the alcohol she had drunk. She sank into her chair and felt she didn't have the strength in her to get up from it.

“I think you should leave it now.”

With the tip of her finger she moved the wine cork, which turned a circle and hit her finger back. Omen must have sensed that she was about to grab the bottle.

“You know I'm right, you just won't admit it to me.” There was a minimal note of confidence in her voice of the Viper she was before she came here. It vanished immediately, however, and Viper winced. “It's all just fucked up. I... I just got fucked up.”

“You shouldn't tell me that.”

Viper concentrated enough to find something funny in that sentence. She raised one eyebrow, though she did so with difficulty as the alcohol took away some of her natural reflexes, and she snickered.

Her reactions were at odds with each other. They changed as if in a kaleidoscope, jumping between amusement and a sense of strange regret that she felt either toward herself or toward what she was talking about rather incoherently.

And perhaps if she had been sober she would have understood what Omen wanted to convey to her. The no fraternization rule. The less talk about feelings, the less attachment, after all, she damn well came up with it herself.

But she was not sober.

“And to whom, if not to you?” She asked the question as if it were obvious. She played with the cork, rolling it to one side and the other with a single finger. “Reyna? Don’t be ridiculous.”

Omen paused in making a scarf.

“What does Reyna have to do with this?”

Viper realized she should have bit her tongue. But on the other hand... she had no idea what she wanted to say. She didn't know which topic they were on anymore, and when her mind suddenly decided to go right to Zyanya.

“I don't know,” she muttered. “But she definitely has something. She always does. And she knows too much.”

She paused in her words and sank heavily into her chair. She closed her eyes.

She dropped the subject as soon as her mouth closed, because even under the cover of alcohol she still remembered.

She pinched the bridge of her nose. She glanced quickly at the bottle, but seeing that Omen didn't take his eyes off her she decided there was no point in reaching for it.

They were quiet for a while.

She felt dizzy and felt her palms sweating, which she clenched on the armrests of the chair from the heat caused by the alcohol.

And so she stood up. Maybe for a moment the thought crossed her mind to say anything, even a stupid 'good night' or 'see you tomorrow.'

Viper decided she had said too much already.

One shaky step was enough for Omen to rise from his chair, and her plan to leave as suddenly as she had come here was quickly derailed.

“I'll walk you to your room.”

***

Leaving the room cost Zyanya a lot... everything. She had the feeling that the walls were talking, that they were whispering something among themselves, that someone or something heard everything and somehow also saw everything.

That everything knew what happened behind closed doors.

It didn't matter that a moment ago she had washed her hands so roughly that her skin was starting to burn from the friction and hot water as if she was going to wash off that thick layer of shame along with... the evidence of her own problem. And so she felt the gaze of everything and everyone on her, even if it was beginning to approach paranoia.

She squeezed the edge of the kitchen sink, waiting for the water in the kettle to finish boiling. Maybe she hoped the coolness of the stainless steel would freshen her up, cool the still-hot heart that lit up the twilight in the room and made Reyna feel like covering it with shame.

She saw her knuckles turn white and bit the inside of her cheek, staring at the kettle like a kind of oracle. The tip of a tea bag hung over the edge of the mug swayed irritatingly and Reyna couldn't stand it.

She grabbed the thin paper and forced it to stand still. She almost crushed it.

She didn't know whether she was more furious or embarrassed. She probably could say it was a strange mixture of both feelings. She was furious at herself. At her inconsistency. And ashamed that she had given in to it.

Hell, after all, they had established who Viper was to be for her and who Reyna was to be for Viper.

And now... she had done this.

She put her arms around herself as if she suddenly got cold. Or as if she wanted to hide. Probably more the latter, although she told herself the opposite, burning an invisible hole in the kettle with her own gaze.

And then she heard footsteps. This was nothing new; after all, at headquarters the night often had many visitors. Insomnia was the bread-and-butter of Protocol agents, for some more, for some less, but there was no denying that HQ never really slept. Post-traumatic stress disorder probably accompanied everyone, even if not everyone wanted to admit it.

She listened. Her abilities made many things possible, and although she was able to determine that it was two people, she couldn't understand the rhythm. It was uneven. Shaky.

And that's why her brow furrowed as she leaned out from around the corner, ignoring the click of the kettle.

Seeing Omen there was no surprise. What came as a surprise was that his arm was being draped over... Sabine.

She saw Reyna. And Reyna saw her.

“Oh, fuck no, not her again,” muttered Viper, probably more to Omen. Immediately after, her gaze drifted to the hallway opposite, as if her earlier words were pure coincidence.

It was funny that Reyna could say the exact same thing. Especially after what she had done. How her fingers had grown stiff from holding the countertop, and how annoyed she had been by the tea bag string swinging earlier, because... because she couldn't keep her hands to herself.

She didn't want to look at Viper. She couldn't look at Viper.

Instead, she just swallowed her saliva. Omen looked at her a little longer than Sabine did. Maybe he wanted to tell her something, but he didn't quite know how, so he just held Viper as before, silently waiting for her to understand.

He didn't have to wait long. Zyanya came closer, and only then did her arms fold over her chest and her eyebrows raise in surprise.

“Is she drunk?”

Omen muttered something in his own words. His head turned toward Sabine, who was crouched over his shoulder and... stubbornly poking her gaze into the hallway, as if she didn't want to look at absolutely anyone, including Omen himself.

Reyna sighed heavily.

Sabine continued not to look at her. She pretended she wasn't there, her fingers only slightly tightened on Omen's cloak, as if to silently urge him on.

“She's not sober,” he finally spoke up, ignoring a huff of displeasure from Viper. “As you can see.”

Reyna cast a glance at Sabine, but quickly gave up the idea. Out of the corner of her eye, she only saw that she was involuntarily moving her foot across the floorboards, with her head still lowered. However, she did not dare to let go of Omen's arm.

Reyna wondered if it was a good idea for her to interfere. Or, more precisely, for her to interfere with Sabine and stay within her reach, in addition, when Sabine was drunk, and Reyna... Reyna was probably unable to look at her without feeling ashamed, no matter how hard she tried to ignore it.

“I'll take care of her.”

Omen nodded, without protesting in any way. Zyanya gave up her tea. She left the empty cup with the squashed end from the string alone.

“I can walk,” mumbled Viper, throwing Reyna's offered arm around her with a skeptical glance as Omen moved away around the corner. “I can take care of myself, too,” she added.

Even in the pale kitchen light, her cheeks were visibly flushed and her eyes glazed over. Her gaze didn't seem to be able to focus on one place, and Reyna got the impression that Viper was trying with her whole self to hide it all, no matter how ineptly she was doing it.

“I can clearly see you do,” Reyna stated dispassionately and, ignoring that look, took Viper under her arm. “Let's go.”

Viper clenched her jaw tighter, but allowed herself to be led. Not that she had any other choice.

They didn't say a word the whole way to her quarters, and although Reyna was aware that if someone were to meet them now in such and such a situation, she would be able to explain it normally - Viper's condition was visible to the naked eye, but still she couldn't shake that strange feeling of paranoia that it could be just the opposite.

That someone would assume something. That he wouldn't believe the explanations. That the whole damn maze she and Viper were stuck in would come to light.

That's why, along with the closing of the door and the click of the lock, she immediately felt this equally strange relief.

Viper walked into the room, and jerked her arm out of Reyna's grasp only to stand in the middle of the room, and draw her gaze into the wall somewhere next to Zyanya, even as she stood quite wobbly.

She looked as if she was just waiting for the other to leave and her job would be to just close the door behind her, while on the other hand Reyna didn't look like she wanted to go anywhere at all.

“Why did you do that?” she asked, ignoring the fact that she again felt like the question was just bouncing off the walls of the room instead of going to Viper. “Again?”

Reyna didn't want to look at her, but she knew she had to. She didn't trust her balance in this state, and she was unlikely to need any injuries other than the still-healing bullet wound.

Sabine rolled her eyes.

“Because I felt like it?” She answered with a question to a question. The words blended together in some places, but Viper fiercely pretended they didn't. “Anyway, why the hell would you like to know that, I already slept with you anyway,” she added, more like a murmur than a statement.

Reyna raised her eyebrows. She immediately lowered them, seeing that Viper was unimpressed by this reaction.

“That doesn't solve the problem. You got drunk.” She folded her arms across her chest, trying to ignore the fact that just as Sabine's gaze had wandered over the wall so far, it wasn't going to move from Zyanya's face now. It was quite... uncomfortable. “And that's the second time.”

“You're at least concerned about it as if I were twelve years old and not nearly forty, and as if I had no reason to want to be drunk,” Viper stated, running her fingertip over the bed frame she was leaning against.

She spoke carelessly, offhandedly, as if the conversation had begun to bore her or had bored her long ago. Zyanya herself was surprised to find herself weaned from this tone of hers, when not long ago it was the most common one Viper used in her presence and in fact... everyone.

She looked away.

“And you have a reason?”

“Every one of us has. Even more than one.”

Reyna wasn't quite sure whether the silence came because neither of them had anything to add, or precisely because they had so many that they decided to let go.

She felt something eating away at her from the inside, although she couldn't quite pinpoint what it was. She felt that she was being unfair to Viper. That she was now pretending to be this way and not that way, knowing what it was like a moment ago, when she thought of her... in a different way.

God, she was pathetic.

“I'm going to take a bath.”

Viper's statement snapped her out of her reverie. She blinked, but Viper didn't look at her anymore, hoping that Reyna herself would guess that the conversation was over on her part, or at least stop bothering her and voluntarily remove herself to a corner.

Reyna didn't budge.

Viper got to the closet next to which Reyna was standing and swept open her door.

She stared at its interior for a moment and finally decided on some clothes, but they quickly slipped from between her fingers and fell to the floor. Sabine lazily followed her eyes to her feet.

“Fuck,” she muttered.

Reyna picked up her clothes from the floor, feeling Viper's gaze burn a hole in her neck as she bent over.

“Sit down. I'll find it myself.”

Viper sat down on the bed with all her weight.

Although Zyanya didn't see it, she followed her every move as she rummaged through the shelves looking for something suitable for pajamas. Perhaps Viper listened to her just to watch her right now.

But she quickly got bored with it, and before Reyna had time to realize it, she heard the sound of water being tipped into the bathtub.

She didn't even hear her footsteps, damn it. That was an accomplishment, especially since Viper was drunk and Reyna had superhuman abilities.

She found Sabine in the middle of the bathroom as she tugged at the sleeves of her sweatshirt, trying to pull it off, and didn't notice Zyanya's presence until out of the corner of her eye she saw the clothes Reyna had slung over the shower stall handle.

She fidgeted, half amused, half annoyed. The latter probably predominated, looking at the way she furrowed her brow.

“Seriously?”

She raised her gaze to Zyanya, who ignored the question and simply walked over to Viper and gestured with her hand for her to sit on the closed toilet.

It was her own shirt. From this it appeared that Viper had not gotten rid of it after Reyna left it hanging over the handle of her room.

It was quite an interesting discovery, one that Viper herself... was probably not too happy about.

But Reyna didn't bother her about it. She didn't ask or push. She ignored her question as if it was just an echo of the water pouring into the bathtub.

“Raise your hands.”

Sabine growled something under her breath. But she couldn't deny that her own body was currently defying her, so she raised her hands, avoiding Reyna's gaze like a fire in the process.

Which, all in all, wasn't so bad. Reyna, if she could, would have averted her eyes, too, when she removed the sweatshirt from Viper's body.

She was almost certain that the crystal in her chest glowed brighter again. She didn't look down to check it.

Instead, she folded the garment and put it on the washing machine, treating this momentary task as a break.

When she turned to face her again, Viper changed tactics and instead of dodging, looked straight at her. She was waiting to see what Reyna would say or do. Maybe it was some other game that Reyna didn't know the rules of, maybe it was a test, or maybe it was Viper who was curious to see what move Zyanya would make on the chessboard.

She also looked into her eyes when she pulled down her pants, and left them on the floor as they lay.

Mondragón thought Viper was looking for some hesitation from her, until she spoke up.

“By grace, you could turn around,” she finally muttered as her fingers hooked around the edge of her underwear. “Just because you've seen me naked doesn't mean I'm going to give you a striptease.”

Reyna blinked.

“Sure. Sorry.”

She turned to face the door.

And she would probably stand like that. And she did. Maybe to the end of the world, staring at the door and counting every line on its surface, all to somehow calm that damn heart.

Surprisingly, it calmed down to the sound of moving water. Viper's sigh echoed and Reyna was relieved of her posture.

The sight of Viper stretched out in the tub, with her eyelids half-closed and her hands loosely hanging at her sides was somehow soothing. She rested her head against the edge of the tub and one might assume she was asleep, if they didn't know her well enough.

Reyna knew that Viper doesn't sleep. That she was always alert. Even when single strands of wet hair stuck to her forehead, the ends laboriously floated on the surface of the water. Even when her face was relaxed, because, after all, that rarely happened.

She licked her lips. And something nudged her to come closer. A hunch that it was too good to be true.

After dipping a single finger in the water, she already knew why.

“This water is cold.”

Viper didn't move an inch, only her lips moved.

“I don't see your problem, Zyanya,” she said.

“Drinking and taking an icy bath is-...”

“God, can you just sit your ass down for once without giving me these speeches?”

Viper raised her hand and pressed it to the bridge of her nose, still not opening her eyes. A trickle of water dripped from her elbow and spilled onto the floor.

Zyanya looked in that direction only to avoid looking at Viper.

Naked. In the bathtub. Who was apparently unaware of how intensely she was being watched, or deliberately ignored it.

Zyanya sat on the floor and leaned her neck against the tub. Her feet were almost touching the shower stall opposite, and she involuntarily waved her feet in that small open space.

That didn't mean at all that she was going to give up.

“You'll catch a cold.”

Viper plunged lower into the tub until her chin touched the surface of the water.

“And you'll keep going,” she sighed.

“You might get heat shock. Or a heart attack. You should know that anyway.”

“How can you know that's not exactly what I want?” replied Viper straightforwardly, knowing full well that Reyna was not fond of such answers. There was mischief in it, though not as savage as usual. “Maybe it's my greatest desire, hell knows,” she said.

“I doubt that your greatest desire is to end up in Sage's care once again, so just pour warm water in here.”

Sabine moved in the bathtub, which Reyna recognized by the sound of water slapping against its walls.

“No.”

Reyna raised her head, as if preparing for this verbal battle.

“Turn on the hot water,” she instructed more clearly, perhaps a tad louder. She herself couldn't tell if she was more annoyed or worried. “Sabine.”

“Uhuh.”

“I'm serious. Turn on the hot water, or I'll get in there.”

Viper mumbled something to herself. She didn't move anymore, just pounded out a rhythm on the edge of the tub with her fingers, showing that she wasn't going to care about anything Reyna said. Or that it amused her that she could come up with such an idea at all and assume it would work.

Or at least it did, until Reyna pulled her T-shirt over her head in one motion and laid it next to her.

Only then did she discover how cold it was in that bathroom.

Still, she started squirming to get rid of her shorts.

“What do you think you're doing at this point?” huffed Viper. She raised her head, her eyebrows raised to her forehead, and she pulled herself up, as if she couldn't believe what she was seeing.

Reyna got up from the floor. Her shorts got tangled around her ankles, so she quickly kicked them aside. Lucky for her that she was wearing pajamas was that she didn't have much to take off.

“I already told you.” She also unceremoniously got rid of her lower underwear. “Now move over.”

Viper blinked, and was probably too shocked to realize when Reyna had indeed stepped into the tub, forcing her more into her corner.

Reyna plunged into the water at once, knowing full well that breaking it down into stages would not help her at all, and only hissed under her breath when the water reached her collarbones.

She faced Viper with a look, putting her arms around her bare breasts. It was a confirmation of her words and silent proof that she wanted to crown her victory.

“Are you satisfied with yourself?” asked Sabine, raising an eyebrow, as if questioning whether the goosebumps on Reyna's forearms were exactly what Reyna wanted to achieve, as well as the trembling of her shoulders, which she was clearly trying to mask.

Zyanya shrugged her shoulders.

“Why wouldn't I be?” she replied. Damn, that water was really cold. “I'm doing what you're doing.”

Viper measured her with her eyes from top to bottom. Their calves rubbed against each other even as each was pressed to the limit at her end of the tub. The crystal in Reyna's chest gave the water a pink glow, and Viper realized with some discomfort that she was analyzing how Reyna's body was built once again.

The water flowed over her strong shoulders, made her tattoos glow, stopped at her collarbones and glued the purple ends of her hair together, and although her breasts were covered by her arms, Viper knew that the muscles of her abdomen left no doubt that Reyna was the perfect killer.

Everything about her was strong. Murderous, even. And she wasn't ashamed of an inch of her skin as she stared proudly at Sabine with her lips slowly quivering from the cold.

Viper curled her knees and rested her chin on them.

“But you're not used to it,” she stated.

Reyna shrugged her shoulders. She couldn't say that Viper wasn't right, because the moment her calf had dived into that water she began to question her choice.

But she was stubborn, and that probably saved her.

“So I'm going to die if you don't turn on the hot water.”

Viper squinted her eyelids. Reyna was relentless, and it was both impressive and sometimes annoying.

“But it will be your fault,” she said.

“What does it matter if I'm going to be dead anyway?”

Viper wasn't satisfied with that answer, although she didn't show anything more than a minimal twitch of her eyelid.

She was thinking again. By now Reyna should be used to Viper thinking as often as possible, and yet every time she realized that Sabine was once again immersed in analyzing everything around her, Reyna found some fascinating element in it.

And she also saw exactly when this process was over, as Callas' slender wrist hovered over the faucet, and after that moment of minimal hesitation, warm water actually began to pour into the tub.

Reyna was relieved. Maybe out of relief for herself, as she could already feel her toes and fingers stiffening and her jaw starting to shake uncontrollably, or maybe out of relief for Viper herself that she had finally succumbed.

Viper stared at the tap for a moment, as if she didn't want Reyna to comment on it in any way if they made eye contact. She didn't want to say anything, so she left it as it was.

Reyna straightened one leg more as the tub began to fill with heat and her muscles relaxed a bit. Her foot touched the outside of Viper's thigh, but she did not look in that direction. Viper didn't either. Even if she felt that minimal touch, she apparently wasn't going to speak up about it.

Sabine wanted to remain silent. She liked to remain silent. Zyanya, on the other hand, felt that this silence was slowly eating her alive, and the words themselves were pressing against her lips so much that she bit her lip as a last chance to save herself before she spoke.

She was unable to hold it in.

“People do that.”

The water stirred in the bathtub as Sabine turned off the tap and plunged her arm back into the now-warm water.

“Do what?”

Silence, silence, silence.

“They show that they feel good during sex.”

Viper glared at her for only a fraction of a second, only to then immediately poke it into the tiles somewhere behind Reyna's head, ignoring Reyna herself almost completely. She could feel her physically next to her, but the eye contact was somehow even more intimate at that moment than the nudity itself.

Reyna nevertheless knew Viper was listening. She always was.

“You didn't have to run away, Sabine,” she added. The echo of her voice made it emphatically clear to her that she was the only one speaking. “It didn't mean anything, after all, anyway.”

Because it meant nothing to them. Neither for Sabine, nor for Reyna. Right?

Liar.

She swallowed the bitter aftertaste and fought the urge to clench her eyelids to get rid of the desire to escape from looking at Sabine.

“I won't talk about it,” announced Viper coolly. Even though she was drunk, at that moment she seemed deadly sober. “And you won't talk about it either.”

Reyna, however, recognized this. The way Viper's shoulders hunched, the way she tucked her chin between her knees, the way she somehow tried to shrink back.

She was ashamed. And even if her words or tone didn't show it, her reflexes betrayed it. She was downright nervous, tightening her lips the way she always did when it seemed she would never speak even a word again.

“You think it's something bad,” Zyanya said. The Viper's eyebrow twitched at those words, and Reyna knew full well that she had stepped onto thin ice, but she still wouldn't back down. She couldn't. Regardless of whether it was selfish or not. “And it isn't.”

“What don't you understand about the sentence I don't want to talk about it?” Sabine's gaze continued to be driven to the wall as she muttered these words.

“And why is it so impossible for you to swallow?” Reyna was proud of the fact that this sentence took Viper's gaze off the wall, and she didn't yield even when she almost physically felt its weight on her. “After all, it's not a crime. You say yourself it's just sex and... what happens behind closed doors doesn't really concern anyone other than us.”

Viper rolled her eyes. A bit of water spilled onto the floor as she plunged deeper if possible so that her face faced the ceiling. Reyna could now see only the bottom of her larynx and her clavicles barely protruding above the surface. Viper's arms were placed on her breasts, copying this movement from Zyanya.

Zyanya, who couldn't see Sabine's gaze sweep across the ceiling, searching there for an answer she herself didn't have.

“I could ask you the same thing,” she said dispassionately, quite pleased with the way she had wriggled out of the situation. “Then why are you quiet, Zyanya?”

Reyna had a ready answer. Whether it was truthful was irrelevant.

“I thought you didn't like it any other way than this,” she said.

“And did you ever ask me about it?”

“No, because you were quiet yourself, so I figured out you preferred it like that.”

Viper snorted with laughter.

“That's a shitty answer.”

“Believe it or not,” Reyna replied. “You at least have an answer. Shitty or not, but you do.”

“I said I wouldn't talk about it. You're the one droning on about it, so I don't have to tell you anything.”

“Don't you want to or are you afraid?”

Viper furrowed her brow and sighed. She took her hand out from under the water only to press the bridge of her nose again.

“And why the hell does it even matter?” There was a note of amusement in the question, as if Viper was already so frustrated and tired of this conversation that she could only laugh now. “Sex is sex, one way or another. You don't need to break it down into some psychological factors, because they're not there, Zyanya.”

“If they weren't there, you wouldn't have run out of the room then.” Reyna was aware that perhaps she was bending some boundary of their arrangement. Because Viper was right - she shouldn't get into such things. They didn't matter, because their sex didn't matter. It just was. But didn't hold back. “And you did it,” she said.

“Yes, and it shouldn't matter to you at all, so start acting like that's exactly how it is.”

Viper was always able to show when her interest and patience for a particular conversation had run out, and this was that moment.

Reyna didn't push it. Maybe it was cowardice, because she didn't want to hear anything more, or maybe she was just afraid that if she herself said one word too many, it would end up even worse.

So she thought it would stay that way. That they would stay in that silence of the bathroom and the strangely ended conversation that left behind more questions than answers, and that the result would come down to what it always came down to - silence and a feeling that the air was thicker than usual.

But then Viper stepped out of the tub. She grabbed her towel hung on the rack, quickly wiped herself with it and, surprisingly, dressed in her pajamas much more efficiently than before. The one she had criticized. The one she remembered and pulled over her head as she would any other garment.

She did it in such a way that if Reyna didn't know Viper, she might have assumed two things. The first - that she had suddenly sobered up, and the second - that the fact that she was wearing a T-shirt that once belonged to Reyna and in her presence was something out of Viper’s style.

And then she left the bathroom without saying a word, ignoring Reyna's gaze, which had been poking into her back all this time.

Zyanya let the air out through her nose as she rested her neck against the edge of the tub. She felt like using this acquisitive habit herself to squeeze the bridge of her nose in the hope that it would organize her thoughts.

She closed her eyes. Just for a moment.

Wet hair stuck to her neck, to her collarbones and to her face, and for a moment she couldn't move, just lingering in that bathtub, with her superhuman hearing catching the single rustle of the bed sheets in the other room.

Maybe she shouldn't have spoken at all. Maybe she should have ended the discussion earlier, without bringing Viper to breaking point.

She licked her lips with her tongue, then, supporting herself on her elbows, she too stepped out of the tub.

She picked up her clothes from the floor, but took them only momentarily in her hand.

“You're dripping on the floor.”

She heard these words as she stood on the threshold of the bedroom naked, with her pajamas in hand, exposed to the gaze of Viper, who was watching her from the bed with furrowed brows. Perhaps there was some minimal disapproval in them, but the twilight in the room probably darkened it a bit.

“I can't help it.”

She shrugged her shoulders. Without asking for permission, she threw her clothes on the bed somewhere between Viper's legs and walked over to Callas' closet. She took a towel out of it for herself.

She felt that Viper was watching. That she was doing to her what Reyna had just done to her, and with her eyes burning a hole in her back.

But she said nothing more.

The wet floor thread ended as quickly as it had begun. Perhaps it was some irrelevant mention of anything to close the topic of a few minutes ago and start any new one.

Viper continued to watch. At her every move as she wiped her wet skin, hair, or face. Zyanya restrained herself to comment somehow.

This was not a good time.

“I'm going to stay here for the night,” she announced, taking her T-shirt, which she wore a second later, in two fingers. Water was still oozing from her wet hair. “I don't want you to do something stupid.”

Viper muttered something under her breath. It was not likely to be a sound of satisfaction and Reyna only saw from the corner of her eye Callas roll over onto her back from the side.

Reyna did not allow her to object in any other way. She wiped her hair one last time, put on her shorts and slipped under the sheets, aware of Viper's presence on the other side of the bed even as she felt as if she had moved as far away from her as possible.

She was afraid to get closer, ironically.

She was afraid to be closer after what she had done, it would almost be like stripping herself of the remnants of her dignity, if she still had any.

It would just be... not fair.

That's why the rustle of the bedclothes to her right almost froze the blood in her veins.

She was most likely lying like a log.

For the umpteenth time that day, she drove her gaze to the ceiling. She was afraid to turn her head to the side. She was afraid she would see Viper, who was watching her and who already knew. Or guessed. She looked over at Reyna and what she had done behind closed doors no more than three hours ago.

Zyanya was getting paranoid.

Instead of turning her head, she almost jumped when familiar warm thighs encircled her hips on both sides.

Suddenly.

Unexpectedly.

What the fuck.

She had no idea when Viper managed to move from her part of the bed to her part of the bed and yet brazenly straddle her hips, but she wasn't about to ask either.

“What... What are you doing?” she wheezed.

She pressed her hands stiffly against her sides, as if she didn't know where she should put them. Actually, she did.

Viper shrugged her shoulders. With a single finger she moved along Zyanya's sternum, the material of her shirt wrinkled slightly, and Sabine clicked her tongue.

“And what do you think I am?”

Reyna felt herself begin to panic. That in a moment a blush would appear on her face and Viper would notice it, that a single sigh or swallow of saliva would betray what she was thinking about earlier.

And Viper only tilted her head. Her drunken blush was gone, but there was still that strange haze lurking in her eyes.

She caught her wrist wandering down her stomach.

“We can't.”

She begged herself not to sound terrified.

A click of her tongue. Again. Reyna tried not to look where the usually cold fingertip touched her skin.

“Why?”

“You're drunk.”

“We were back then, too.”

“But back then we were both drunk.”

“What does it matter? After all, I'm not drunk to the point of unconsciousness, it won't be an assault.”

“God, no.”

“Then what do you mean?”

“Nothing. Just... let's go to sleep, okay?”

Viper furrowed her brow, but didn't speak. Perplexity was visible on her face even as she got off Reyna and moved to her side of the bed, as if nothing had happened.

She covered herself with the quilt and lay in a comfortable position for a while.

“Goodnight, Zyanya.”

Reyna let the air out slowly through her mouth, and when she was sure Sabine couldn't see it, she combed her fingers through her damp hair. And then all over her face.

Dear God.

She was probably trying to ground herself somehow with this gesture. And she probably did it poorly.

“Goodnight, Sabine.”

She didn’t fall asleep until the morning.

Chapter 30: THIRTY

"So you really are going to do it."

Sage turned around, startled by the sudden break in the silence that had hitherto accompanied her in the medical wing.

Deadlock swiped her hand over a few loose sheets of paper, seemingly reluctantly reading their titles, but Sage could see that her eyes were following the text quite closely. If Ling's scribbled notes and calculations in the middle of the night were legible at all.

Mechanical fingers drummed on the desk.

Not the one occupied by Sage. The one on which lay the papers the Norwegian woman was reviewing was much messier. It almost didn't match the sterile interior.

Sage nodded, pausing in putting her signature on one of the official printouts.

"Yes. We have to try."

Sage didn't know how she was supposed to take it. How she was supposed to act. No attitude toward Iselin was appropriate right now, but after all, she couldn't pretend not to see her. Neither her nor the fact that Deadlock was probably struggling with the same thing she did.

They hadn't talked much since that conversation some time ago. Nothing more than the occasional passing of a report to each other or wishing each other good luck on a mission fell between them, and for the sake of the team, swallowing the bitter aftertaste of insinuation had been their daily thing for too long.

That's why Deadlock came here. And Sage knew it.

"Viper agreed to this?"

Sage finished her signature and, releasing her bitten lip from between her teeth, finally turned to face the blonde. Letting the air out from between her lips, she first folded her arms over her chest and then shrugged.

"She didn't really have much other choice."

Deadlock didn't know much about Viper's illness. All she knew was that her condition was worsening, the case was serious, and Callas' attempts to cure herself were unsuccessful.

Or at least that's what she learned from Sage that first evening. She didn't know if the Chinese woman was unwilling or unable to tell her more, but if it was a matter of being unable to do it, even though Deadlock had only been in the Protocol for a short time, she knew, among other things, that Viper was a role model for Killjoy, and that sowing panic between agents was never a good thing.

It was a rather risky question, but she asked it anyway.

"So... she doesn't want it?"

Sage looked at the floor.

"It doesn't matter. We have to do what is necessary."

Deadlock nodded, responding with a sort of single murmur that was probably simply meant to indicate that the words had reached her.

They both saw that they didn't care to talk about Viper, and this small talk had little to do with what was really on their minds.

And Sage was aware that she should be the one to start. She felt that Deadlock didn't quite know what she should do with herself either, and the fact that she came to Sage didn't at all mean that she had swept the matter under the rug. More than that, Sage didn't want that to happen.

"I shouldn't have said it then," she finally said. She wrapped her arms tighter around herself. "You had nothing to do with it."

Iselin waited a moment for eye contact and finally got it. Sage looked as if she was relieved that Iselin was the first to decide that she wanted to look at her.

"You shouldn't have said that. But whether you said it and whether you think it are two different things, Sage," Iselin replied a little more bitterly than she intended. She was glad that the conversation had finally taken place, because the pretense was starting to drive her crazy, but that didn't mean the resentment had disappeared completely. "You said you don't blame me," she said.

"Because I don't." Sage felt she had to maintain eye contact in that second, no matter how difficult it was, when she could still see some tension in Iselin's eyes. She had to show that she was sincere. "It was my mistake. Mine alone."

Deadlock took a breath. For a second, her gaze wandered somewhere, as if she wondered if she was sure she wanted to say what was on her mind.

"What if... what if it will happen again?"

Sage furrowed her brow. There was no anger on her face, however, but more... fear. And maybe a little embarrassment.

"It won't."

Iselin felt her mechanical fingers digging into the skin of the human forearm, so she put her hands in her pants pockets.

"Ling I just... don't want to be the one on whom the blame falls if you get distracted."

She probably struggled to get it off her chest, but she knew she had to.

Sage lowered her gaze. She couldn't stand the tension that began to squeeze her temples.

"You don’t trust me?"

"And do you trust yourself?" Deadlock's voice was unusually calm, even with a hint of that resentment that still hasn't faded. "With me, with what we're doing, and with how it might turn out and what consequences might follow?"

Sage pressed her lips together. She wasn't angry. She was embarrassed and ashamed that Iselin was able to infer such a thing without any hesitation. And worse - that she was right about it.

They were silent for a while. Deadlock wasn't gathering her thoughts to leave, and probably wasn't going to do so until she had an answer. Sage was gathering her thoughts, her words, perhaps herself too, so as not to sound like a child explaining herself to a parent.

"I want to start," she finally confessed quietly. "I have to start," she corrected immediately afterward, and as she took a deeper breath, she gathered herself enough to raise her head a little higher. "And I'd like you to give me the opportunity to prove to you that I can do it."

Iselin's face seemed to soften a bit. The tension that Sage had previously seen there eased and then disappeared completely.

She said nothing for another moment, however. Maybe she was putting this confession together in her head, maybe she was thinking about what she should tell or how to react herself.

"And can you promise me that no one else will get hurt?"

She wanted to hear ‘yes’. She wanted to hear that it was just a one-time mistake, that it was an accident. That Iselin wouldn't have to wash someone's blood off her hands because she let herself feel something and let someone else feel the same.

"Yes. Yes, I can."

Deadlock breathed a sigh of relief. Sage seems to have done it too, although neither of them openly admitted it.

"Okay. That's... that's fine."

"Fine?"

"Between us. You know."

"Oh, okay. Yes, it's fine."

Iselin looked at her briefly. A face on which relief and something like gratitude were now painted. That she understood. That she had allowed her to explain herself, and that, although Sage still felt embarrassed by the whole situation, that embarrassment was starting to go away.

"I'll get you some tea."

Sage's gentle smile was the last thing Iselin saw before leaving the med bay.

***

"Have you ever wondered if this rule even makes sense?"

Fade raised her eyebrows and peeled her gaze away from the laptop screen on which she and Neon had just been watching a movie in her room.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

Fade saw that Neon had been wrinkling her eyebrows from time to time for a good few minutes, as if she was thinking about something, although she had not said a word so far, staring at the movie.

Whether she was actually watching it was another matter.

Fade didn't press the issue, she could always be wrong about her assumptions.

"The no fraternization rule," Tala replied. She turned on her back, and Fade moved back a bit to allow her to do so. "Don't you think it's a little... overdone?"

Hazal lay on her side, so Neon did too. She probably just needed to look at her.

Fade smiled uncertainly, putting her arms under her head.

"You know my opinion wouldn't be objective right now."

Neon pressed her cheek more against her own forearm, as if she didn't quite know how she should respond to that answer.

The movie was humming somewhere in the background behind Valdez's back, but to be honest, she had long since lost herself in its plot and was not particularly interested in the ending.

"But if... if you think about it that way, it's a bit inhumane, isn’t it?" she pouted. "Besides, if Viper and Sage don't stick to it, does it even still exist? There might as well be some sort of deliberation or something to get rid of it. Actually, we would already have six votes." She shrugged her shoulders, seemingly out of breath.

Fade smiled slightly.

"Have you really been thinking about it all this time?"

"And you don't think about it?"

Hazal was finding something charming in this sometimes excessive analysis of everything in Neon. Perhaps it was a matter of Hazal herself having to rely on spontaneous decisions for most of her life, because excessive thinking could finish her off or make her lose her head back in Turkey, or perhaps she hadn't found that much... concern for things that concerned her in another person for a long time.

"I'm limiting myself."

"Just like that?"

Now it was Fade who shrugged her shoulders.

"Somehow it comes out on its own," she admitted. She saw Neon's eyes jump all over her face, as if she was looking for something more there than such a banal answer. "The less you know, the better you sleep," she said.

"And don't you think for a moment about that... that, you know, they might fire us over something so natural?"

Hazal furrowed her brow, the corner of her mouth still slightly raised.

"And can they? Viper is in the same situation, more than that, Sage is in the same situation. The only person who would be profitable is Brimstone, but then he would have to get rid of half the Protocol," she explained. "This rule only exists on paper now, so what difference does it make whether it is officially there or not?"

Neon let out a breath. Fade's words made sense, even a lot of sense, but to be honest, Tala wasn't sure it relieved her in any way. Maybe it was her sense of justice, maybe she just didn't like restrictions. Or maybe it was something else she couldn't adequately name.

"Because I don't want to feel like a criminal when I want to hug you or something," she muttered, a little more tentatively, although she also didn't know where this sudden embarrassment came from. "And that's what I do. And more, I still have the feeling that someone is constantly following us because of the fact that someone once came up with some idiotic rule," she burbled.

She avoided Fade's gaze, even though she could feel it on her very carefully. Besides, it was not surprising if they were separated by a distance of little more than one breath. For a moment, her face continued to pile up the tension, but when she felt a gentle hand on her cheek, she let the air out through her mouth as if she had grown tired of her own frustration.

"Do you feel that way now, too?" Fade asked calmly.

Her thumb stroked the younger woman's cheek unerringly since Hazal had learned that this movement often soothed her.

"No, but... I just..." She sighed, aware of how disjointed that sentence was. "There are no cameras in the rooms, but outside of them I feel like I'm playing a role in some kind of theater."

Had it not been for the semi-darkness of the room illuminated only by the bluish light of the laptop screen, Fade might have noticed the blush that appeared on Tala's cheeks. It was hard even for Tala herself to determine whether it was embarrassment or more the intensity of Hazal's gaze on herself that was somewhat embarrassing.

"You know, this has its good points." Neon raised her eyes at these words. Fade's thumb didn't stop stroking her cheek, and the initiator had a calm expression with a slight smile, as if she wanted to give the younger woman encouragement with it. "Something you wait for always brings more satisfaction than something you get right away," she said.

"Is that flirting?"

Neon involuntarily smiled uncertainly, too. She happened to close her eyelids when Fade's hand felt so pleasant on her face, and the tension accumulated in her body began to slowly disappear.

“It can be," Hazal admitted with a laugh. "But I guess any way is good, right?"

Neon parried. She nodded her head as much as her reclining position allowed.

"Whatever," she said. The corner of her mouth lifted slightly, and her eyes stopped flashing with frustration, replaced by something else. "Although I think you know a better one to convince me."

Fade raised her eyebrows.

"Wow."

"What?"

"Just say you want me to kiss you."

"Your directness is invaluable, Hazal, really."

"Mhm. And when are you going to start being direct?"

Tala snorted a short laugh, even though she knew Hazal's question wasn't funny at all. And it probably wasn't meant to be, because when Neon dared to look at her, there was mostly seriousness in her eyes, even if the corner of her mouth was still slightly raised.

This smile, however, had something different about it than the one from a few minutes ago.

"You mean?" she finally asked, out of the corner of her eye tracking how Fade's fingers put a strand of her hair behind her ear.

"Tell me to kiss you."

Tala could tease. In fact, she quite often did. She could say that she wouldn't listen to anyone's orders, she could tell Fade that she herself could do it too.

She could say many things.

But this one time she didn't want to prolong anything. A thought formed in her head as quickly as it was spewed from her mouth a moment later.

"Kiss me, Hazal."

So Eyletmez did. She leaned over Tala, lightly brushing her lips at first, teasing her with short, small kisses, even though she knew it wouldn't last very long.

And she was right, because Neon first snuggled more into the touch of her hand on her face, and then reached out with her hand to weave her fingers into Fade's hair, as if to hold her there.

She enjoyed being kissed by Fade. In fact, she felt that since she could do it, she was somehow addicted to it. She liked the way her lips matched hers, she even liked that sometimes the coolness of her piercing gave that kiss a sudden spark when it made contact with the skin on Neon's chin.

Maybe she just liked all of Fade. She loved her. And kissing her was something Neon loved to show it. How much she wanted to be closer, how the whole Protocol was worth it, how Neon could leave her native Philippines once again, if it meant she could find herself in this place as she was now again.

In Fade's bedroom, with Fade herself at arm's length.

For a few moments, it was the younger one who set the pace, pushing against the older one's mouth as much as her position would allow. She squirmed, however, feeling that lying down was restricting her from being able to be even closer, so when Hazal's hand touched her side, Neon caught her face in both hands, mutely showing her what she wanted.

She lay down on her back, letting the initiator hover over her. But it was Fade's tongue that slid first over her lower lip and then she bit on it gently with her teeth, coaxing a quiet gasp out of Neon's mouth that was impossible to stop.

By now she had completely forgotten what the movie was about. She didn't remember the title, the plot, she didn't remember anything.

Fade moved her hand along her side, the material of the younger woman's shirt wrinkled under her fingers, and when she slipped under it, Neon gasped in surprise and automatically looked in that direction, but immediately returned to her previous activity.

Before Hazal had time to realize, Neon deepened the kiss.

So Fade pushed the material higher. There was nothing else under it.

Neon began to breathe more deeply, and her blush darkened as Fade's gaze penetrated her chest so much that she felt her cheeks burn.

"You've seen them before," she muttered, somewhat wistfully, as if, despite everything, the feeling of being exposed had taken away some of her original courage.

Fade returned her gaze to her face.

"But only once," she said. It wasn't a lie. "And they are even more beautiful than I remembered."

Neon couldn't say the same about Fade. Because... she had never seen her naked before. Because they had never before gone further than they had then in that damn living room.

So, accepting Fade's kiss, she pulled at the fabric of her clothes.

She didn't know what she wanted. All she felt was that her breathing was getting faster and faster, and her heart was beating so hard that it almost physically caused pain by hitting against her ribs.

Hazal obediently moved away from Neon, but it was then that she hesitated. Her fingers caught the edge of her clothes as she sat back on her heels, but she didn't move further.

"Are you-..."

"Just take it off," huffed Neon.

Her breathing was uneven, the material of her pulled-up T-shirt was carelessly spread under her neck, and her blush reached all the way to her sternum.

But Fade furrowed her brow. She sensed something. Her skills made it impossible to fool her in some ways.

She let go of her clothes.

"Tala, are you...?"

Are you scared?

And just then, Fade's phone rang.

They both looked in that direction. The ringtone cut through the noise of the movie still playing in the background, the screen added a little more light than the laptop, and Fade managed to read that it was Skye.

"I have to answer that." She almost groaned those words and only looked apologetically at Neon, who nodded. "I'm sorry."

Never in her life had Fade cursed the timing of anyone who wanted to steal radianite in the middle of the night this much.

***

Viper growled when her hips were pressed against the cabinet so hard that the piece of furniture hit the wall under the impact.

She didn't have time to comment, however.

Reyna drank that noise from her lips, pushing against her with almost the entire weight of her body as she tried to establish dominance with another kiss, only to be reached by Viper's fist clenched on her clothes and her gasp when Reyna's claws dug into her hips a little more clearly.

The pressure of the nails on the chemist's skin had an element of pain in it. An element of that ferocity that always accompanied them and always manifested itself.

In single glances. In a slight tilt of the head. In a single, fierce kiss that choked all the air out of their lungs as if it had never existed in their bodies. In the way they started panting, slightly choking on the heat all around them in that damned cramped and damned cluttered room, where space didn't matter in the slightest, because all that mattered were gasps, humms and that fucking edge of the countertop, still digging into Viper's loins.

Neither of them had any idea how it happened. After all, they were just talking a moment ago.

It was only later that something snapped, something shattered, and something finally let go, and before Viper had time to realize it, Reyna had dragged them both into the lab's supply room and slammed the door so hard it nearly broke it off its hinges.

After that, things only got worse. Because after that, Viper was almost out of breath, biting, sucking and kissing those greedy lips of the vampire, whose eyes glistened in that almost non-existent light of the room. She breathed in her breath, her scent, and endured the sickly heat that perpetually emanated from her body.

Only the fluorescent lights of the lab poked through the small window in the door. Only their own breaths mingled together, as if the smell of cleaning products and weathered coffee from the coffee machine no longer existed. Only they existed, drowning out the radiator hum, or even the ticking of the clock.

Viper's hand indicatively moved across the countertop behind her. The coolness of the coffee machine almost hurt in contrast to the temperature of her skin. For the first time, her hands were not cold, but actually burning.

She painfully felt every blood vessel pulsing with hot blood, every shattered breath burning her lungs, which shrunk in her imagination as she felt like she couldn't get enough air into them.

She hooked her fingers on Reyna's shoulder. Reyna only purred, without asking, shoving herself between Sabine's legs, as if she had to, as if... she was dying to be closer.

Her fang slid against the Viper's lip and Zyanya felt herself tremble. How her body vibrated, how her heart pounded against her ribs so that she heard a steady hum all around her, over and over again on one frequency.

She could taste her.

She had already done it once. That one drop of blood, back then, at the bathroom banquet.

That one drop of blood that made her head spin and she could swear the world stopped just for a moment for that one drop of blood to appear.

"Keep those to yourself," Viper croaked out.

Her eyes flashed warningly, her fingers clenched tighter on her shoulder, unconsciously sliding over the radianite tattooed pattern.

Reyna snarled to herself. She leaned in as if her head had suddenly become too heavy, as if she was struggling to stay upright at all and the only thing she was supporting herself on was Callas' hips in her own hands.

The want was eating her alive. Wildness was her attribute, the weapon the battlefield required. She was in control of it. She had to control it.

And now she was panting into Sabine's neck, fighting something that usually came easily to her. Self-control.

If she didn't restrain herself, she could tear her apart. She could have ruined her, absolutely, completely ruined her. The white lab coat Viper was wearing, which Reyna was also involuntarily holding, tightened, dangerously close to tearing.

"Don't break it." She heard.

Her eyes lifted to Sabine, glowing in that twilight probably more than her dignity allowed.

She could feel her muscles toning as Viper moved her hand from her shoulder to her neck.

"I'll buy you a new one," she hissed. She wasn't angry, not at Viper. She was horrified to hear her own heartbeat in her ears, horrified at how tightly she clung to that damn apron. "Or ten more."

She pulled. She pulled her closer so that Sabine couldn't speak again, because with the moment she pushed against both her and the cabinet, Reyna felt her every single tendon tighten.

Viper could kiss. She could kiss fiercely, wildly and just the way Reyna liked it. She was not afraid to bite, not afraid of a note of aggression. Even when she had to move away to take a breath, her cheeks flushed and she was panting as if she had just run a marathon, the ferocity never disappeared from her eyes.

It was always there.

Reyna felt herself weakening. In a way she didn't know, because although her knees almost buckled when they returned to the kiss, her every sense sharpened.

She saw a lot. She saw the crack on the kettle, saw the single hair that crossed Viper's forehead. She heard too much. The radiator, the fluorescent lights. The murmur of blood rumbling through her veins.

And every touch burned, like a living fire.

Sabine flicked her tongue over her lower lip. Dangerously close to the fang that could hurt her after all, but she was not afraid. The smell of her skin alone almost made Reyna growl, cursing her senses.

Sabine teased. But it wasn't until her hands embraced Reyna’s face and, without asking for any permission, deepened their kiss that Reyna broke in a way she had ever broken before.

Her hands tightened on Callas' thighs, lifted her off the ground and seated her on the top of that damn cabinet.

Something in the background dropped to the floor. The piece of furniture hit the wall deafeningly again. Sabine muttered in surprise. That didn't make the kiss stop at all, quite the opposite.

Viper's fingers wove through that dark hair, combing through it again and again, savoring the way it flowed through her hands, and Zyanya could only gasp helplessly.

She felt like had a fever. Her eyelids were half-closed, all her senses ringing with alarm. She knew this condition all too well.

But she never thought that balancing on the edge of the Empress state would appear anywhere other than on the battlefield.

"Fuck," she growled.

She couldn't see if she was reproaching herself, warning Viper, or saying the word to some silent audience, which at the time could only be the damn coffee machine.

All she knew was that shoving that curse word into Viper's mouth didn't help her at all, because Callas' fingers wouldn't stop playing with her hair. Ruining her usually impeccable hairstyle as much as Reyna wanted to ruin Viper's at that moment.

She wanted that gasp. To hear that same moan. To see her knuckles whitened from her grip on the bed sheets. Damn, to feel that touch again, that soft skin under her own fingers, the thighs around her face.

Zyanya thought she was about to go crazy. Instincts would take over, she would just take, grab what was hers with her claws and never let go again. Her whole body ached from how much she had to hold back.

And before she could stop it her tongue swiped from the column of Sabine's throat all the way to her jaw, leaving a wet trail, the epitome of that very greed.

Reyna swallowed a whine.

Viper’s skin was warm. Hot. She could hear the blood flowing underneath, felt every pulsing vein of Sabine. The fang hooked into her neck ever so gently, barely pushing against it, creating an invisible scratch mark that Reyna felt with her whole self.

God, if only…

And then a solid tug on her hair forced her to move away.

She hissed. Fury shone in her eyes, but only for a split second.

"I said. No marks."

Viper was finding something remarkably interesting in how untamed Reyna seemed at that moment. With her teeth bared, the predation in her eyes, her claws clenching tightly on the material of her lab coat while her tattoos began to cover themselves with a pink glow... and one gesture, one pull on her hair and a firm tone was enough to make her obey.

And although a growl lurked at the bottom of her throat, Zyanya swallowed it. Later, she sighed as Viper's grip loosened and she was able to press her lips back against hers as if her life depended on it.

Maybe it even did. That's how she felt as every joint and muscle tightened as she tried to hold back. She hoped Viper wouldn't notice the pink light on her hands or how blinding the glow from the crystal in her chest was.

But Viper had noticed, before. Then, when she looked into those wild eyes, holding Reyna's. And she wanted to inquire. For satisfaction or out of curiosity.

"Do you really..."

"I need you,"

Reyna muttered before she had time to think.

Before Viper had time to ask the question, the answer to which would somehow be embarrassing for Reyna. Because she couldn't control herself enough to leave her radiant powers solely to fight.

As if the fact that her knees were almost yielding wasn't embarrassing enough. That her fingers were numb from holding the chemist's thighs. That she said the two words to her that perhaps she should have left to herself.

"Now?" asked Viper, responding to the kisses as much as her compressed lungs would allow.

Reyna felt every breath, and with them, she was getting closer and closer to madness.

Zyanya got the impression that her brain existed somewhere completely outside her body. She had no control over it, her throat was dry, her hands were tingling. To touch, to... mark in the most primitive way that existed.

"Yes."

"Here?"

She felt like murdering Viper for these questions. She frantically nodded her head.

"Yes."

Sabine wove her fingers into the Mexican woman's hair harder, clearer, more secure. She massaged her scalp, oblivious to the fact that Reyna had to muster all her divine strength not to fall to pieces at that moment.

"It's not very responsible," she said.

"I don't fucking give a shit," she croaked out.

She almost didn't recognize her own voice. But even if Viper seemed more in control of herself, if she was the one who dictated Reyna's melody to which the latter danced and didn't even try to deny it, under that cover she was just as hot, just as wild and just as greedy as Reyna.

Reyna could hear her heart, oh she could hear her heart so accurately that she could get drunk on that sound alone. Her voice, usually sure, now trembled, sometimes faltered, and sometimes she had to take a deeper breath because she was breathless.

Her lips glistened even in the pink radiant glow of the radianite heart in that damned cantaloupe. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes clouded, though she tried to mask it with her gaze.

Sabine simply looked at her for a moment. And Reyna was afraid of that gaze. Because, after all, Viper always saw too much. Zyanya tried to keep her guard up, tried to somehow gather herself back into the role of predator, even if she had literally just betrayed herself.

But she was still panting. Flames crackled from under her half-closed eyelids, she licked her lips when she saw that Viper was looking at them. She trembled all over, sensing the movement of every single cell in her body.

"I need..." she began, but the thought fled somewhere to the side as the green irises looked back at her with that fog that Reyna could stare at for hours.

Viper furrowed her brow at this hesitation. Zyanya, on the other hand, had to shake off the fact that Callas' every breath was settling on her cheek. Trembling, quickened, hot.

Reyna could still only breathe. The words refused to form a sentence, and Sabine must have noticed, because she pulled her hand out of her long hair and laid it on Reyna's stomach in a silent proposal.

Reyna, however, shook her head.

"No," she gasped. Only when she felt pain did she realize she had bitten her lip. "Not that."

She was breathless. The world was spinning, and moments before it had shrunk to the size of this one and only room.

"No?" Viper tried to look at her. So hard that Reyna physically felt the weight of that look on her face, where Sabine looked for an explanation. "You said you needed-..."

"You," she finished. "Yes. Exactly."

Viper didn't understand. Or at least until Reyna's claws hooked into the fabric of her shirt. They embraced her sides, and her hand slid over her waist, as if Zyanya was drawing some kind of life energy from it. Still, she didn't look at her, because she probably felt it would be too... intimate.

Or that looking Viper in the eyes at that moment would probably kill her.

"Please."

Viper couldn't shake the feeling that this one word qualified as begging.

Reyna had stopped caring whether Viper would stamp out her request. Because, after all, she could easily do so and then smile and walk away somewhere in the shadows, no matter how unexpected it might be. All she cared about was how her fingers itched to touch, to grab and not let go, to go back again to that one night that... perhaps was the reason why they were right now, right here, and on her initiative.

But Viper tilted her head again.

"Alright," she said. She swallowed her saliva, because hell knows, maybe her throat was as dry as Reyna's. "So what are you waiting for?"

If Zyanya hadn't lost the remnants of her dignity earlier, this would have been the moment. Her heart dropped to her feet and for a moment she felt as if all the blood had drained from her body only to suddenly return and make her dizzy.

She didn't look at how her fingers were shining with that pink glow. Nor did she look at how she almost ripped the fabric of that damn shirt, pulling it out from behind Sabine's pants, who not much later kissed Reyna, as if to avoid any questions.

Zyanya muttered something to herself, feeling those long, usually cold fingers weave into her hair again. For a moment she couldn't focus, tugging at her zipper, then at the button, then at the fabric that wouldn't slide off Viper's thighs enough, all while Sabine pulled at her hair and forced more pent-up breaths into her mouth.

Maybe it was all the fault of the too-small room. Because Viper had Reyna too close, because she could see her too close. Because Reyna could feel Sabine's breath on her own face, could hear the rush of blood in her veins, and all that frigidity of hers was gone, mixing with the ghostliness of the room, and all Reyna could smell was the scent of her skin.

And that's why Viper's head sagged a moment later, helplessly resting on Reyna's collarbone, with her face pressed between her neck and shoulder.

Zyanya took perfect note of the moment when she received one more pronounced tug on her hair, as she herself almost moaned when she finally touched Viper where and how she wanted.

She was wet. Enough to get a curse out of Reyna's mouth as she moved her fingertip up and down, trying to stop the dizziness. Her fingers moved smoothly, without the slightest resistance, even obscenely easy.

"Fuck."

Zyanya felt the word on her skin. She felt how it vibrated, warmed her neck, even if spoken inexpressibly by Sabine. She also felt that if she actually didn't hold back, Viper's favorite shirt would get new holes.

Viper entwined Reyna’s hips with her calves. Maybe she didn't even know it, or maybe she knew that if she did, Zyanya would absolutely go fucking insane.

Because of the pants, her wrist movements were restricted. She could see it from Viper, the way her hips tried to make up for it, moving in a rhythm that would give her more.

She clenched her fist in Zyanya's hair. She probably wanted to hold her down. Or to let her know that Viper still wanted to be the one in control of everything that was happening. She gasped something under her breath and pressed her nose against Zyanya’s shoulder, trying to ignore the fact that her hips were already moving on their own was somewhat humiliating.

Not so for Reyna. All Reyna could do was count every breath Viper took, every twitch of those hips of hers, she could feel how perfectly her fingertip glided over Viper's clit. She could also thank herself from a few days ago that she had decided to cut her nails to a safe length, because before she had time to think, the question itself left her lips.

"Can I put them in?"

The tone of her voice might suggest that she was in Viper's shoes. She was aware of it, every hoarse or inflected voice of hers. Her hand would normally have started to tire by now, but that pink glow refused to disappear, pumping that hot blood into her heart with redoubled force.

She couldn't get tired. She didn't want to get tired. Not now.

Viper did not move away from her body. She did not respond. She just nodded, still blowing that warm air into Mondragón's clavicles, with her calves digging into her loins.

Two fingers slid in without resistance. Reyna ignored the minimal pain as Sabine's hands slid from her head to her shoulders, as if she'd lost the strength to hold them up, and dug into her shoulder blades.

Her overhearing allowed her to catch that sound of air being sucked in. At the rustling of her lab coat, which had slipped off the countertop and now dangled over the edge. At the yielding of the zipper as Reyna pushed harder against it.

Viper’s nails slid across her shoulder blades through the fabric of her clothes after only one movement. Reyna herself clutched her hand tighter on Viper's thigh for more balance.

She thought about whether Viper was restraining herself from moaning.

"I'm not made of fucking glass, Reyna."

That was it. If Zyanya thought it wasn't possible for her to break even more, crumble even more, and start questioning her decisions about their damn deal even more, at that moment Viper would prove her otherwise.

She swallowed a growl. She tensed her muscles so as not to bend her knees and show how much those words affected her.

And then she sped up.

She didn't even blink when Viper's nails plowed through her shoulders. She didn't squirm when Sabine pulled her closer hard enough that the edge of the tabletop poked unpleasantly into her hip bones.

She focused only on Viper's breath on her own neck. The warmth of her body. The fabric of her jeans that separated her from direct skin-to-skin contact. The dull ache on her shoulder blades.

Her hand worked as it was asked to. Firmly, clearly and quickly, flexing her fingers when she felt she should.

How much she would do to hear that moan again. Maybe she even subconsciously wanted to do it, in her imagination adding that one sound to the scene with each harder thrust. She hoped Sabine would mumble the curse into her skin one more time, but this time differently.

More trembling, out of control, as if any boundaries she had imagined would cease to exist and Viper wouldn't hold back, no matter if they were in bed or in a supply closet in the lab.

Viper's hands embraced her tighter, her calves pressed closer.

And then Reyna's phone rang.

The melody echoed softly from her pants pocket, but it still seemed like the loudest sound on the planet.

"Don't pick up," gasped Viper, before Reyna had time to even think about commenting somehow. It almost sounded like a threat. "Don't you fucking dare to pick that up."

Reyna struggled to break through the fog that shrouded her mind. She swallowed her saliva, along with a curse in her native language that she would have happily shouted in the face of whoever decided to call her at that exact moment.

But she couldn't ignore everything, no matter how much she wanted to. She wanted to see Viper come on her fingers, she could kill for that sight.

The phone's ringtone annoyingly cut into her temples.

"You know I have to," she said, though the words barely squeezed through her throat.

"No, you don’t" hissed Viper.

She knew, however, that Reyna was right. And Reyna could see that her hearing was not failing her, and underneath that lid of Sabine's anger and maybe even rage... lurked such disappointment that she could almost feel these emotions touching her as well.

She stepped back, however. She removed her hand from Viper's pants, which the latter accepted with a curse on her lips, and a moment later tilted her head back. She was probably watching the ceiling just to keep from tearing Reyna to shreds when the latter took her phone out of her pants pocket.

She carelessly wiped her other hand in Viper's pants, but Viper somehow didn't bother to comment on it beyond one look that could be described as indignation.

"It better be something fucking important."

Reyna somehow didn't stop herself from growling those words into the phone once she answered.

Viper continued to stare at the ceiling and normalize her breathing. She wasn't too bothered by the unzipped zipper or the fact that she could feel her calves starting to go numb since she had hung them over the edge of the countertop.

She watched Zyanya talk. As she nervously paced around the small space, she was grunting and trying to sound neutral, although her fists were clenching and unclenching alternately.

Viper couldn't hear much; she recognized only Skye's voice.

"I have to go," Reyna finally said as she hung up and it was just the two of them again. "Urgent mission."

Viper raised her eyebrows. She involuntarily glanced at the phone in Reyna's hands. They both stared at it with a kind of disbelief.

Reyna let out a single breath. Viper got the impression that it echoed.

"Will you come back?"

Reyna blinked in surprise, returning her gaze to Sabine. Her face was still flushed, her gaze was still not as sharp, but there was a certainty in the question.

She demanded an answer.

"I’m not easy to kill," she replied with a slight smile. Maybe even a little playful.

Callas nodded her head. She seemed satisfied with that. She followed Zyanya with her eyes until the vampire's hand settled on the doorknob.

"See you later, Zyanya."

Reyna felt some comfort in hearing her name.

"See you later, Sabine."

Chapter 31: THIRTY ONE

Viper didn't know how long she had been staring at the opposite wall. It was probably quite a long time, but somehow she didn't feel like thinking too much about it or reproaching herself for it.

She assumed that she just needed to stare at that pale gray wall for a while for no great reason. Maybe the concrete was somehow meant to help her process what had just happened in the room, maybe just its color was somehow calming.

She still hadn't gotten off the top of the cabinet, her lab coat was still draped sadly over the edge, and somehow she didn't want to correct it. The only thing that had changed since Reyna left the lab was that, for her own ego she couldn’t just give up, she zipped her pants back up.

She couldn't remember the moment when the conversation turned... into this. Maybe it happened too quickly. Maybe it was just that some small signal that Reyna sent her had escaped her attention and thus startled Viper because she didn't read it in time.

She remembered the tea Reyna had placed right next to Sabine's notebook, as if she wanted to show right away that she wasn't taking ‘no’ for an answer. But she also remembered that Reyna wanted to say something, even though she had thought about it for a long time.

Sabine knew it was about the previous evening. Their conversation still resonated in her head, like an echo.

She realized that she probably knew how it happened after all. A strange thought, but she tried to pretend it wasn’t, because usually anything that might complicate their relationship Viper pushed somewhere to the back of her mind.

Now she heard every word clearly and distinctly. It wasn't to her liking, but I guess she couldn't help it.

"I didn't mean to push you away."

This sentence surprised her, and at the same time annoyed her in some indefinable way. Because Reyna again wanted to explain something, she again pressed the scab that she should have left alone at the time.

"You didn't do that before."

This was true. Zyanya had never refused before, Viper could tell that she even couldn't do it. Or she pretended she couldn't, which would make sense now.

"You were drunk, that would’ve been wrong," she said.

"We both know that it wasn’t about being drunk, so don't lie to me."

The shock on Zyanya's face then quickly turned into what Sabine might call fear. But Reyna wanted to mask it, and she succeeded. Well... almost.

"I'm not lying. You're the one trying to find something that isn't there. It wasn't the right time for sex, that's all."

Her body language said otherwise. Sabine almost breathed her tension, out of the corner of her eye she caught how Zyanya’s arms were intertwined on her chest, as she found it difficult to hold them stiffly against her sides. She also escaped Viper’s stare with her eyes.

"I'm searching because you're a damn bad liar."

She remembered then clicking her pen, sighing almost carelessly, as if stating something trivial, and Reyna's gaze involuntarily landed on the small object.

"Since you see more in it than I do, why don't you enlighten me?"

Reyna played with fire. A risky move, and thus even quite impressive, looking back on her inferior position comparing Viper in this conversation.

"Apparently why did you suddenly care whether I was drunk or not?" she said.

"Because I'm not a monster to take advantage of this? What kind of stupid question is that?"

"There is only sex between us. If I pursued it myself, why did you stop?"

"I already told you that it just wasn't the right time. You surprised me, I wasn't ready for it, what's so strange about that?"

"Spontaneity in an arrangement like ours is rather valued," she said.

"Are you trying to dig in my brain because this one time I wasn't spontaneous?"

"Perhaps."

"Is this some new indicator?"

Then Viper shrugged her shoulders. It was a test of sorts that Zyanya was not informed of. Sabine just... wanted... no, needed to know what the Mexican woman would do.

"Understand it in any way you want."

Reyna furrowed her brow. She licked her lips mechanically, her gaze shifted briefly over the tea cup, and she knew that Viper was following her every move with the fascination of a... well, a scientist.

"Alright."

When Viper now actually thought about it, and her hand found its way to the handle of the supply closet door... there was that spark in Reyna's eyes then. She should have read it earlier, then she wouldn't have been surprised by the kiss that took place right after those words.

So that's how it happened. It made some sense. Reyna was provoked to prove something and she gave in to that provocation. And Viper... Viper just closed the door behind her and returned to the papers scattered on the counter.

She sipped her already cold tea, wincing only minimally.

***

"Good to see you," Skye said as Reyna walked briskly into the hangar, wielding her suitcase in her hand. "We're still waiting for Killjoy."

Reyna nodded. She set the suitcase on the floor and took a breath, involuntarily looking around as if to discern the situation.

Nothing new, the vulture, the hum of the pacing engine and the darkness outside the window, which made her even more acutely aware that the hour was inhuman, to say the least.

"Do we know any details?"

"Brimstone will give them when everyone will get here," the initiator replied, catching a hair tie between her lips and efficiently braiding thick orange strands of hair. "He doesn't like to repeat himself."

Zyanya acknowledged this with a quiet sigh. On the one hand it made some sense, wasting time saying the same thing three times was not Brimstone's style, and on the other hand, although she couldn't explain it, it aroused some resentment in her. She preferred to know what she was signing up for, she had no data other than the fact that she had been thrown back into reality like into an icy river, and little else - Brimstone himself was not in her sight.

She found this a bit irritating. Or maybe she was just angry.

Actually, that's also how she could explain it to herself.

"And where is he now?"

She hadn't planned to include as much reproach in this question as she ultimately did, but she probably didn't manage to hold back. Besides... why should she hide it? Hell, she gets called to a mission by Skye in the middle of the night like something's on fire, she gets no official information from the commander, and as if that wasn't enough, the commander himself doesn't show up at the assembly point on time.

In fact, she could have been furious and additionally resented Liam just like that.

"He went to get extra ammunition because the supply in the vulture ran out." Zyanya turned her head toward Fade, who interjected in the conversation by reloading her shorty. "So don't act like an offended child whose nap has been interrupted."

Reyna raised an eyebrow in surprise. Skye closed her mouth, which she had previously been preparing to answer, and put her hands in her pockets and lowered her head. It was as if she didn't want to participate.

Zyanya might not have taken Fade's words as anything more than a simple teasing if she hadn't heard a note of... mockery in her voice. She also caught the way the corner of her mouth lifted in a mischievous grin, which was probably only meant to be to Fade herself, but Mondragón noticed it anyway.

She parried indignantly, resting her hands on her hips. Fade didn't particularly realize any of this, unwillingly correcting the leather gloves on her hands.

"Forgive me for demanding an explanation from a commander who isn't here right after he dragged me out of bed at one in the morning."

She lied. Quite solidly, yet she personally found it quite believable.

Hazal, however, snorted a short laugh.

"Oh, sure," she snorted. That smile didn't disappear from her lips as she dragged out the last word. She looked proud of herself. "Sure it was."

She raised her gaze to Zyanya. She didn't wait for her answer, but slipped past her and headed toward the vulture's entrance, snorting a laugh under her breath once more before she was out of Zyanya's sight.

Reyna dragged her gaze down the younger woman's back. Later, her gaze fell on Skye, who folded her arms over her chest and seemed to avoid her gaze. In fact, she seemed to be avoiding the whole situation.

The Mexican woman decided to spare her the discomfort and simply grabbed her suitcase, following in Fade's footsteps. She boarded and didn't have to wait long to find Eyletmez at the equipment racks, who seemed to be pretending that Reyna's presence was almost non-existent to her.

Almost, because that smile still didn't come off her lips and Zyanya felt the initiator watching her, if only from the corner of her eye.

"What’s your point?" she finally asked as Fade stacked her suitcase in its proper place, still with her back to her.

"And what’s yours?" replied Hazal, shrugging her shoulders when she finally turned back to her.

Reyna got the impression that she did so with too much attitude, and the mockery refused to leave her voice. Zyanya didn't know whether she was more irritated by just that, or by the fact that Hazal was clearly trying to show her that she had no idea what she was talking about.

"Don't play dumb," she growled. "You're the one grinning and throwing around some damn bite-backs, so tell me to my face what's going on instead of putting on this shit of a show."

Fade raised an eyebrow. She looked as if the anger that crept into Reyna's voice was particularly amusing to her,

"Where is this aggression coming from?" she asked, raising one eyebrow. "After all, we're in agreement, and you're getting angry almost as if you've been interrupted in something."

Reyna lowered the suitcase to the ground with a little more momentum than she intended.

"It's one fucking o'clock in the morning and I really don't feel like playing any of your games, Fade."

Hazal, however, only smiled again. She muttered something to herself, some perfunctory 'mhm', as if she was processing the older woman’s words. Or rather, she pretended to care about them. So after a moment, as she stared at Reyna looking for that satisfying anger in her, she lifted her chin higher.

"I like your hairstyle."

Zyanya furrowed her brow.

"Excuse me?"

Fade shrugged her shoulders. She stepped back minimally, only enough to give Reyna room to arrange her suitcase, while still being able to invade that personal space of hers with the same idiotic grin that hadn't disappeared from her face for several minutes.

"Hairsty;e. And from what I see you're wearing a new color of lipstick."

Fade left her with this news until Zyanya dealt with her suitcase and, with a wave of frustration at this annoying ignorance, took her phone out of her pocket and turned on the front camera.

She regretted not looking at herself in the mirror before she left her bedroom, hurriedly fastening the last buckles on her armor.

She regretted not doing so even for half a second, because half a second would have been enough to see... this.

Her impeccable hairstyle... was far from its impeccability. Individual strands of hair stood off in various directions, some of them tickling her face, which by some miracle she hadn't noticed until now.

They looked messy in a way that was not hard to understand.

Evidence of Viper's presence beyond the single strands scattered on her back and collarbones was the lipstick smeared at the corner of her mouth.

And it wasn't the lipstick that Reyna used every day, so often that no one associated her with any other color. It belonged to Viper with a sharp red color, cutting away from that maroon shade she was now wearing.

Viper didn't speak before Reyna left. Maybe that's because it seemed logical to her that Zyanya... would get herself together and prepare before flying out, and she couldn't blame the chemist for that.

For that, in the same second, she understood why Skye was avoiding her gaze so much.

Was she guessing? Maybe she had assumed something? Or had she already figured it out?

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

She began to smooth her hair with the palm of her hand, doing so with a nervousness not usually familiar to her. She rubbed off the excessive lipstick with her thumb, and it was with this movement that she once again heard Fade chuckle.

She glanced at her out of the corner of her eye. Or rather, at her figure, which she could see in the corner of the phone's camera lens.

"Seriously, you could at least try to be more discreet," Hazal muttered, while ostentatiously examining her fingernails.

Reyna locked her phone screen and shoved it into her pocket, turning on her heel.

"And you could dress more appropriately," she hissed. An involuntary smile similar to Fade's blossomed on her lips as the initiator's eyebrows rose in apparent incomprehension. "You have the vest on the other side."

She wished she had said that earlier, because maybe this idiotic discussion would have ended a few less nerve-wracking moments ago, but on the other hand the satisfaction was probably greater now.

Hazel discreetly glanced at her sleeves. It didn't escape Zyanya's notice.

"I took a shower just now. Besides, I was changing my clothes before the mission." She replied almost unmoved. "That's different from someone else's lipstick on your face."

"We both know there was no shower," Reyna snorted.

"Just like your sleeping, because I guess you had other plans for that night, right?"

"You're doing exactly what I'm doing and you dare point that out to me?"

"I don't arrive on a damn mission with a proof painted right on my face of what and with whom I was doing just a minute ago," hissed Fade, shoving her hands into her pockets. "If you want us all to get kicked out of here for good, then keep this shit up."

"Brimstone isn't here for now, so stop lashing out. Besides, if it's so important to you, you could have told me right away instead of acting like a shithead."

Zyanya bit back instinctively, thinking little of it. This seemed the most natural thing to do, because she didn't want to just let Fade attack her like that, but on the other hand, deep inside she felt a bitter taste of guilt, no matter how much she wanted to swallow it.

"Don't blame me for your lack of dignity," she countered. "First of all, you deserved it, and secondly, if Brimstone were here he's not a damn idiot not to notice something like this."

"But he’s an asshole."

Fade snorted.

"That's your answer?"

"You carry out some kind of revenge against me and play kindergarten guessing games, then conclude that I'm the one who would screw something up. In that case, my answer may be meaningless, too."

"Don't compare me to yourself, I didn't come here in the same state as you. And I'm not dumb, I would have told you in time, but I'm not going to protect your ass because of your stupidity."

"God, have you ever had an orgasm once in your life, or are you going to preach to me because you're jealous?" hissed Reyna, not making much of the expression of indignation and shock on Fade's face until it was replaced by rage.

"What should I be jealous of?” snorted Hazal, with the beginnings of a mocking laugh on the tip of her tongue. "Fucking around like rabbits? With Viper?"

Reyna's eyes flashed dangerously.

"Shall I remind you which one of us was caught making out in the living room or you will manage to figure this out?”

"I’m ready!"

Both women turned in the same second toward the vulture entrance, through which a drowsy Killjoy had just entered. She looked like she had been running for the last... at least a hundred meters.

Her nervous movements betrayed that she was in a hurry to get here. She nervously rubbed her hands together as she set her suitcase down for a moment to improve her grip on it, then wiped the sweaty insides of her palms on her pants.

"Forgive me for being late, I've been... busy," she explained, nervously correcting her glasses on her nose and still not raising her head at the two women who had suddenly lost interest in each other.

When Killjoy finally looked at Reyna, however, she encountered her furrowed brow and her arms crossed over her chest. Fade was - funnily enough - her complete opposite, and she raised her eyebrows upward and rested her hands on her hips with something like disbelief.

Killjoy slowed her movements. Now she was the one who felt uncertain.

"What?"

With a movement of her chin, Reyna pointed somewhere higher than Klara's gaze reached. She took advantage of the fact that Brimstone was out of sight for now.

"You got a new hat?"

Killjoy first furrowed her brow. Later, she reflexively reached for the headgear and took it off with a jerk. Her eyes widened when the material was not the one she usually wore.

Hat belonged to Raze.

"Sheiße," she wheezed, pressing it into the open pocket of her jacket, as if in that same second she wished that no daylight could reach it.

The visor protruded clumsily from behind the zipper anyway, at least as if it specifically wanted to become the main character of the conversation, no matter how red Killjoy's cheeks were and how she nervously wiped her hands on the material of her pants.

Fade in the background snorted with laughter and, shaking her head, moved away somewhere in the depths of the deck. Killjoy only surreptitiously escorted her away with her eyes, just to make sure she had definitely lost interest in her, and then lowered her head, aware of Reyna still present there.

"You've been busy, hm?" Reyna asked. She realized that she had included a bit of a hitch in that question, but if she were to be completely honest, she also felt partly relieved. "With Raze?"

With a movement of her chin, she pointed to the cap still protruding from Killjoy's pocket, which the younger woman reflexively covered with her hand.

"It's not what you think," she muttered. For a split second, Reyna managed to hear a bit of dismay there. "We were just tinkering together, seriously."

Zyanya's face softened. Perhaps she was even influenced by a bit of worry, as Klara lowered her head in shame, refusing in every way to lift it, and fidgeted nervously with her fingers, while Reyna really couldn't shake the impression that the younger woman was so ashamed and frightened at the same time that she narrowly missed having tears appear under her eyelids.

She walked up to the German woman and put her hands on her shoulders.

"Hey, I was just kidding," she said calmly. Klara grasped her shoulder with her other hand and tightened her grip on the material of her yellow jacket. "It's okay."

She wondered if she should speak on the subject at all, and if it wasn't better to just leave it just as it was now. She knew the rules existed, and she also knew she was breaking them herself, but she probably didn't have enough conscience to just leave Killjoy here and now.

"I won't tell anyone."

Klara raised her head in a split second, and her brow furrowed as she tried to find something on Reyna's face to explain the words.

"What?"

Reyna looked around for certainty. Fade seemed to have sat down at the helm, and Skye was still standing in front of the vulture, waiting for Brimstone. She let out a breath of air and leaned more towards the younger woman, as if she was afraid the walls had ears in spite of everything.

"You don't have to worry," she repeated. "You and Raze."

"But Fade-..."

"She won't say anything either," she interrupted before Killjoy could jump to too many conclusions. "Trust me."

For a few seconds, Killjoy still seemed tense. She was probably still terrified, but she let the air out slowly, and with that gesture, relief crept in to replace that tense feeling. Her shoulders relaxed, and she nodded and corrected her glasses.

"Okay," she said finally. She perhaps wanted to add something, and although Reyna assumed she only thought she did, Klara spoke up. "Thank you."

Reyna probably never saw on anyone's face the amount of gratitude that appeared in Killjoy at that moment. She didn't regret her decision. In fact... she was probably even grateful to herself that she had made one.

She took her hand off her shoulder and nodded, smiling softly.

"Just hide that hat somewhere."

Killjoy did so immediately. Immediately Brimstone came on board and began to explain the mission's premise.

***

Viper found it pathetic. And frankly speaking, if it weren't for the fact that she didn't want to splash blood on her own mirror, she might even have burst into laughter. So hollow and downright unpleasant that it would have bounced off the walls of her bathroom only to hit her spine with redoubled force.

She could still feel the chill on her thighs. One water stain was a stark reminder of how a few minutes ago she had viciously scrubbed at the material of her pants with a towel just to get rid of that one... maybe even a little humiliating evidence of what she was doing with Reyna before.

And now she was spitting blood into the sink, and for some reason it was the stain on her pants that bothered her more.

But looking at those red stains, feeling that metallic aftertaste she knew all too well, Viper thought for a split second about where she had just been. After all, looking at it from the side, someone would consider her a victim, right? A meager, weak figure filling the role of some sufferer.

And Sabine Callas, leaning over the sink for the first time looking at the blood, thought that she probably deserved it. And no one should correct a strand of her hair, no one should rub the sweat from her forehead or help her get up from the floor, on which she slumped a moment later just because she no longer wanted to look at her reflection in the mirror.

Sabine Callas had created a doomsday machine that she had no idea existed. Sabine Callas... just now she thought about those recordings. About how sex was supposed to whiten her strange, maybe even sick brain from the accusations that fell on her the moment she plugged that damn flash drive into her laptop.

Sex was supposed to be oblivion for what she saw, and she felt sickened by that fact.

That's why the stain irritated her so much. That's why she wished it would dry up already and stop plaguing her skin with that coldness.

Sabine Callas had no right to accept help even from a hand with a sun tattooed on its inside. The person who had such a tattoo knew who Viper was. And while Viper wasn't sure about telling Reyna what she had learned, what the chemist's bloodstained figure of innocents actually was, so sitting on the cold floor of her bathroom, she decided that maybe it was for the best.

Reyna didn't see the footage. Reyna didn't see the tears, she didn't hear the screams. She hadn't dug through thousands of death certificates, photos, scans. X-rays, MRIs showing radiant blood streaks, torn veins and collapsed lungs.

Maybe it was stupid of her to think about it just now. Maybe she really shouldn't think about it at all anymore, cut herself off from her old self and convince herself that Sabine she had been before died some time ago and will never come back.

But whenever she closed her eyelids, all those images came flooding back.

Sabine thought about how if Reyna had been here, she would have told her to get up. She would have washed the blood off her face, helped her into bed.

That's why Viper didn't do it. She sat, wondering if anyone else would have come here if she had bled out now and here. She didn't show up in the kitchen tomorrow. She didn't make coffee or open the fridge.

Probably no one. And that's what her end would look like. Interesting.

She should have dumped it all on Reyna. She was the one who had to go. She left Viper in the middle of the night with that damn stain on her pants, and that's what got her in that bathroom thinking about how terrified the kid's eyes were looking into the camera right before the video ended.

She was a fucking murderer.

And at the same time, it was Reyna who seemed to be the only bright spot in all that darkness. Reyna tried to justify Viper when Viper couldn't justify herself. Everything bad about Sabine, Reyna just took in. She didn't scream. She didn't yell. She didn't look at her with reproach or disgust.

Reyna accepted it in a way that Viper couldn’t understand.

Viper took her phone out of her pocket and put it on the floor. She didn't do anything else, because she didn't even know what she could do. She stared at the black screen, stubbornly not correcting a strand of hair or rubbing the sweat from her forehead.

And perhaps she wished someone would do that. That she wouldn't be here alone, in all this cold, with a bloody nose and a strange crooked smile on her lips that she didn't even want to imagine, because she would probably wince in disgust.

She admitted to herself that she wished Reyna was here. Even then, tears involuntarily flowed down her cheeks.

***

Reyna sat down heavily on the bed as soon as she put her luggage in a corner and sent the suitcase a look full of resentment and fatigue, the source of which she could not identify.

The flight passed well, in relative peace except for the occasional glances of Fade at her from the co-pilot's seat and Killjoy, who seemed unable to find a seat and roamed around the deck most of the time. So why the hell didn't she feel that peace at all?

Plans changed and the attack on the Omega agents was scheduled for tomorrow morning, because... actually she didn't quite remember why. She listened moderately to Brimstone, feeling Fade's gaze on her all this time, but she knew she had all night to get some sleep.

Yet somehow she didn't feel the urge to do so at all.

The bed mattress bent under her weight too much, she felt that the hotel room was too stuffy, but at the same time she somehow didn't have the strength to get up and open the window to get some fresh air.

Instead, she wiped her face with her hands and took her phone out of her pants pocket in the darkness of the evening, although she didn't know much of her own purpose.

She unlocked the screen and for a moment simply stared at the startup screen, as if looking for some kind of answer in it. But it just stared at her the same way she stared at it, illuminating the darkness around her with an annoying white light.

Or at least until she realized that her finger was hovering over a contact called Pandemic.

She had never been a fan of that code name.

She didn't press anything. She didn't dial a number or a message, she didn't do anything, and yet she didn't lock the screen.

On the other hand, what did she actually want to say to her? That she’s sorry? That she would make it up to her? After all, Viper knew what their job was, Reyna didn't need to explain herself to her.

And so Reyna still had the feeling that she owed Viper something.

She let the air out in frustration.

Should she tell her about Killjoy? Or did Viper already know? Viper knew everything, after all. Ever since the Protocol began feeding on the lie that the no-fraternization rule continued to exist, Reyna herself no longer knew what to believe.

She felt a bit like she was in the middle of a tornado, and although things were stable for now, she had a feeling that sooner or later something would make all the arrangements and secrets no longer matter. That everything would crumble like a house of cards and there would be nothing left to pick up.

Reyna went to bed without calling to Viper.

And first thing in the morning she wondered why she even wanted to do it.

Chapter 32: THIRTY TWO

Viper didn’t know the mission guidelines. It wasn't some big surprise if the call was sudden, but she felt a kind of discomfort as she stared at the laptop screen, as if she was waiting for files that were never there to suddenly appear before her eyes, and that wasn't happening.

For a week, to be certain.

She was able to suppress this strange feeling of uncertainty until someone made her realize that she actually still felt it. And to her surprise, that person turned out to be Deadlock, who entered the kitchen just when Viper was in it.

Iselin did not speak up right away. In fact, she bypassed with her eyes the table where Sabine was seated with her laptop (for some reason she was sick of her own room for the first time) and headed straight for the fridge.

"Any news?"

Viper didn't immediately realize the question was directed at her. In fact, hardly any question had been directed at her lately, and she certainly didn't expect it from Deadlock, with whom she had exchanged barely a few sentences since her recruitment, and all of them were about the mission.

Sabine only came to her senses when she realized that Iselin's gaze was no longer scanning the inside of the fridge, but insistently peering over the edge of the lid of her laptop.

"I'm not the commander of this mission," she stated, shrugging her shoulders. "Ask Sage, she should be at her place."

"Fair," Iselin admitted bluntly and closed the fridge door. Viper quickly noticed that she was holding one of the protein shakes in her hand. "But Sage is not in the office. And the door to her room is locked."

Viper lowered her gaze back to the screen.

"So knock on it."

"Don't make an idiot out of me," Deadlock snarled, shaking the plastic bottle. "If I didn't try, I wouldn't have asked you."

Viper remembered why she wasn't fond of talking to Iselin. Deadlock had a sharp tongue and her character sometimes drove Viper crazy with the fact that even if she insulted someone, she didn't sound that way at all.

That was the case this time, too.

"I don't know where Sage is or anything about the mission," she finally said, clicking her mouse involuntarily. Not that she actually had anything to click on, she just wanted to make Iselin aware that she was bothering her. "Why do you even need to know anyway?"

She shouldn't have asked that question if she wanted to end the discussion, but on the other hand, she probably just wanted to know as well. She had a sort of strange feeling that Iselin was going over her head about something she wasn't saying.

"The prosthesis is glitching. Killjoy was doing something in it, but it could use a correction," she stated simply. She opened the shake with her human hand and took a sip. "If I'm suddenly called to a mission it's not gonna be fun," she said.

At first Viper wanted to ignore these words and just go back to what she was doing without even blinking an eye, completely ignoring the presence of the Norwegian. But that one flash made her furrow her brow.

Sage couldn't just vanish into thin air. And especially not when she was overseeing the mission from headquarters and, in fact, should be available for twenty-four hours a day on the phone, with her nose stuck to the laptop screen. That would have been extremely irresponsible, not to use the word stupid.

"Have you tried contacting someone who is on the mission?"

Deadlock looked down, and involuntarily that's where her gaze was drawn, as if subconsciously this question had shaken her confidence in maintaining eye contact, even if she braved it every now and then.

"I was going to."

"Going to?" Repeated Viper with a raised eyebrow. "Going to won't do anything here." She didn't even notice when exasperation crept into her tone, and she tilted the laptop lid slightly, as if to see Iselin's face more clearly. "Have you made contact or not?"

"Not yet."

Viper let out a controlled breath, in contrast to the momentum with which she slammed the laptop lid shut. She stood up from the table, shoved the computer under her arm, and took the coffee mug in her other hand only to put it in the sink and pass Deadlock on the way.

"I'll do it myself."

Iselin didn't answer her. She didn't want to either because she didn't care for Viper's additional provocation or because she knew that Viper liked to do things her way and whether Deadlock would try to contact someone would be a waste of time, because Viper would do it herself anyway.

And Viper actually did it. With a sweeping step, she walked through the corridors of the headquarters, ascending only to put down her laptop, and then stood in front of Sage's door and knocked on it.

She did expect that she was right.

“I know you're there. We need to talk.”

She didn't care if she looked idiotic, standing in the hallway and literally talking to the wall. Hell knows, maybe Deadlock was watching her somewhere from afar and in her eyes Sabine was acting at least as if she was out of her mind. After all, Iselin tried to talk to her and was met with silence, right?

But just as the same Iselin had just assumed, Viper liked to do things her own way.

And her hunch was almost never wrong.

The knocking sounded again, this time more clearly.

"Open the damn door. You're not going to fool me, your mug was in the sink."

Sage, like the other agents, was unaware of how she was being watched. That Viper had taken note of certain behaviors, that she had already made note of the bright blue color of the tea mug that Sage always came to meetings with a few weeks ago.

She found the same one when she put hers down. The brown rim on the inside of it was evidence of use, and in the morning the mug was clearly not in the sink.

"Sage, open it."

A growl echoed down the hallway, and it was probably the one that made the hinges finally budge.

"Stop yelling," hissed Ling as she finally leaned out from behind the doorframe, effectively facing Callas' gaze. "If you have to say something then get inside."

Viper felt that she wanted to say it quietly, but at the same time knew that by doing so she would betray that she actually intended to hide her presence.

Sabine raised an eyebrow. A spark of satisfaction awoke somewhere inside her, seeing that Sage was looking around, even if she tried to hide it.

"And why can't we talk here?" she asked bitingly, shrugging her shoulders. "I thought you didn't have any secrets."

Ling didn't answer. She pressed her lips tightly together and only opened the door wider, as if to give Viper the choice of standing in silence or getting inside.

Viper let herself go this one time. It was enough for her that Sage visibly felt some discomfort when Sabine violated her space, disrupting the prevailing calm with her rigid body posture and violent gaze. She also didn't feel like the conversation went on any longer than necessary. She needed simple information.

"What is it about?"

Viper's gaze returned to Sage's figure after she involuntarily moved across her desk. It looked like she was organizing the first aid kit from the medical wing, as various packages and syringes sorted in groups littered the entire tabletop.

"For some reason no one knows how to find you today." Viper folded her arms over her chest just to avoid clenching them into fists. "Deadlock is even convinced that you're not at headquarters."

"I've been busy."

Viper felt like parrying with laughter, if it weren't for the fact that she was too furious to do so.

"Enough to not be able to open her door?"

"It's none of your business."

"Don't bullshit me," she hissed. "You know how the mission is going?"

"That's none of your business either."

"And yet I'm more interested in it than you," she replied. Sage didn't answer, but she also avoided Viper's gaze, though she didn't know if she did so consciously. "Tell me what you know."

Sage lifted her head higher. She thought for a moment before speaking again, and her voice was irritatingly calm.

"You're not in charge, I don't need to tell you anything, especially when you speak to me like that."

"You're fucking around," growled Viper, furrowing her brow. "You're avoiding the subject. You don't know what's going on on a mission, do you?"

"Get out of my room."

"There you go, another mission you failed to plan," Viper stated, ignoring Sage's previous statement as if it had never been made. "Not that I didn't expect it."

"Don't insult me," Sage instructed.

Her tone trembled slightly with anger, as if that annoying calmness of hers was beginning to wear off, even though she had an abundance of it just moments ago.

"I'll stop if you tell me where Brimstone, Skye, Fade, Killjoy and Reyna are. And you'd better fucking know it," Sabine hissed. She took a step forward, deliberately violating Sage's space. "Or at least have enough balls to admit what you screwed up again."

Sage endured Viper's stare even as she hurled lightnings from it. Even though she unconsciously wanted to take a step back herself, she stumbled over the edge of the desk and stopped mid-motion. She tightened her fingers on the edge of the furniture.

"Brimstone, Skye, Fade, Killjoy and Skye Reyna are on a mission," she said, trying to ignore the way her knuckles turned white as Sabine leaned toward her, getting closer with each step. "You don't need anything else."

Viper wanted to snort with laughter. That would have been her style. But for that moment she felt only rage.

"Are you fucking serious?" she asked, straining each word as if it left an unpleasant aftertaste on her tongue. "You don't know what's going on, you're not controlling the mission, you have no idea where your own people are, you're stacking fucking first aid kits in the meantime, and you have the nerve to treat me like an idiot?"

Sage was cornered by Sabine in a way she didn't like. They both never wanted to get in each other's way unless it was necessary, and the same applied to personal space, which was now severely shaken.

"I told you to get out of here," Sage said, trying to make her voice sound confident.

Viper, however, either didn't notice or ignored it. She took another step forward, feeling the venom flood her tongue and the blood in her veins begin to boil with rage.

"Because what?" she growled. She carefully traced Sage's face, from her eyes to her chin, as if looking for fear or something to quell the impression that Sage was really that naive. "Are you going to try to kill me again by not checking the cameras?"

Sage squeezed the edge of the tabletop tighter. She heard several syringes and ampoules roll across the table, then fall to the floor. One of them even brushed her fingertip when Sage pushed against the desk hard enough to tip the tabletop. Viper still didn't move away.

"The cameras were an accident. I made a mistake, that's all," she said, with a kind of broken anxiety as she watched Viper smile.

She didn't believe her. And just when Ling had had time to get used to that smile, she felt a tug forward.

Viper's fist clamped down on the collar of her blouse so tightly that Sage could almost feel it begin to dig into her neck. She tried to pull away, but managed to barely jerk back.

"Somehow you only have accidents." Viper's voice was furious, but that rage was so dark that her voice dropped a ton in pitch instead of rising. "Tell me where they are or I swear I won't vouch for myself."

Sage glanced down quickly. Unlike Viper, who didn't look at her own fist for a second.

"It hurts, let go."

Although she didn't want to, panic crept into her voice. She had seen Viper angry several times. But never up close like this. And never, either, had she violated the boundary of that safe space with which they had always avoided each other.

"I don't give a shit," she said.

"The localizers have lost their signal." Sage said this quickly, as if she felt that if she frowned, she would fall silent forever. She felt a suffocating sense of danger starting to creep up her neck. "Satisfied?"

She tried to free herself. Viper, however, held tight, and her eyebrows drew together even more, bringing even more tension to her face.

"What the fuck do you mean they've lost the signal?" growled Viper, a tone lower than a shout. Her knuckles had long since turned white in her clenched fist. "They discharged all at once? They broke?" she snorted, tugging at Sage's clothes with every word, though she probably didn't control it. "What the fuck were you thinking, that you didn't check them?"

"Let me go!" screamed the Chinese woman, thrashing her hands somewhere behind her, as if looking for any support in anything.

More syringes and quick applicators fell off the countertop and rolled somewhere on the floor.

"In your fucking dreams."

Those were the last words Viper spoke. Or at least the last ones she uttered in a reasonably conscious way.

She felt only a sting in her shoulder. She looked there for a second. And then in disbelief at Sage's hand, in which the latter held a pen for emergencies. She knew the label. She remembered its color.

An anesthetic.

She squinted her eyes. A mixture of fear and simultaneous desperation was painted on Sage's face, her lips clenched so tightly that they turned blue.

She let the pen out of her hand. Viper watched it fall at their feet and only then did she pull her gaze upward, as if for some reason this pen and Sage were not making sense together.

Her limbs were beginning to numb familiarly. At first she clenched her fingers tighter on the material of Ling's blouse, as if that would hold her up, but then she let her go.

Her hand sagged and Sabine lowered it loosely by her side. She knew what it meant and she knew what had happened. She had used it in emergency situations, on missions where sudden, painful treatment was needed and wounded to wasn’t able to bear it while conscious.

She knew all the whys and hows. That it wouldn't last long. That if she fell asleep, she would wake up in an hour at most.

And at the same time, there was something so frightening about it that Sabine felt a wave of chills even before she could form a sentence. Pen rolled somewhere on the floor, she could still hear the echo of the fall.

"Did you just-..."

Sage's face quickly blurred before her eyes before she settled into darkness.

***

One ragged breath made her realize she was no longer asleep.

Sweaty face. Sweaty palms. A blanket wrapped too tightly around her body.

Her own room, she recognized the pack of cigarettes on the windowsill. For some reason it was the first thing she noticed. Or maybe it just seemed to her and she just noticed too much.

How did she get here? No, wait a minute. She knew. She remembered Phoenix's voice, remembered him saying something. Or maybe he was asking? If he asked, did he get an answer? After all, Sage...

Sage.

It was all Sage's fault.

A new layer of cold sweat ascended on Viper's forehead with the moment she realized what had happened. Her arm suddenly ached, began to go numb. She clutched at it, trying to suppress the pain that wasn't there at all, but her brain told her otherwise.

She clenched her icy fingers, the chill breaking through the material of her sweater.

Sage attacked her.

A strand of hair stuck to her forehead. When she tried to push it away, she realized that her hands were shaking like an old man's and pressed them under her armpits, as if it was somehow embarrassing. Maybe it was the anesthetic remaining in her body, or maybe it was just the terror she was trying to swallow in her throat.

She was afraid, she didn't know what of. And yet she always knew why. It had always been so very simple, and now....

The darkness of the room was judging her. She was watched. And the walls listened, every single breath weighing down her throat like tar, and she felt she couldn't get enough air into her lungs.

She wiped her face with her hands. They were icy cold.

Sage attacked her.

Her breathing became shallow. She kicked off the quilt, sleepily watched it fall to the floor, and its rustling suddenly became strangely deafening.

That one word was terrifying. More than the shot. More than pain. Maybe even more than death.

She shuddered.

Sage touched her, though she shouldn't have. Sabine felt her skin rot where Sage's touch had been, as it began to burn with that fire from before. She invaded the space and broke the bubble that was a personal wall between her and Sabine.

A wall that Sabine never intended to cross. She didn't want to and couldn't. She meticulously added one brick after another, intent on making Sage see her unapproachable.

Her palms began to sweat. She rubbed them into her own sides, then into the sheet.

She drugged her.

She was alone in the room. The thought caused some anxiety.

Could she have done it again? Could she have hurt her?

No, she couldn't. Viper would not let her do it again.

Yet now she let Sage lull her vigilance.

It made her feel sick and for a moment she even thought she was really going to throw up.

Take it easy.

She felt as if her lungs were filling with water. Her eyes began to burn, and the air around her became thick and opaque. She couldn't see anything. Sabine was blind in her own panic.

Just breathe. It will pass.

Her skin was covered with goosebumps. She suddenly regretted throwing off the quilt, but after all, she was so terribly hot. So terribly, like a furnace, like... like a fire.

No. It was a long time ago.

She became painfully aware that the skin on her back was scarred. Tight and constricting, unhealthily taut, with an ugly color. She felt foreign. Sabine didn't want to feel it, because she had the feeling that this ugliness reached all the way to her bones.

She did it to her.

She wanted to curl up and hide. The mattress was too soft, the walls were starting to come down towards each other and Viper saw with those glassy, broken eyes a vision of her being crushed between them. She could hear her own heart. She heard the crackle of a fire that wasn't there and her own cry that she couldn't identify. Did it belong to her, or was it the echo of memories bouncing off those walls?

Sage had hurt her then, too. She could do it again. She could... kill her.

"Shut up," she croaked out. She pressed her hands to her temples, scowling as she inhaled her own hot breath, which settled in layers on her skin. "Shut up, please."

She didn't know who she was asking. The walls? The echo? Her own mind?

It all came back when the panic attack caught her in its clutches and wouldn't let go, like an animal that has waited so long for its prey that it hungrily savors its final feast.

There she was again. Where dust, dust and gunpowder began to mingle with the smell of burning.

Where, lying in bed, she begged for death in exchange for an end to her suffering, even if she knew that death would not come. That Sage would not give it to her. That she would only watch.

Now she watched her fall, too. How weak she was. That Sage had defeated her so simply and trivially that she should be ashamed of herself.

She lay down on her side. She tightened her eyelids.

It was a long time ago. A long, long time ago, a long, long, long time ago…

Darkness settled on her shoulders, wrapped around her like a blanket.

That sudden, overwhelming loneliness that lurked in the corner and only watched when the right moment would come to put a hand on Sabine's shoulder and make her realize that yes, it was there, took the form of a silent audience.

***

Raze didn't hear the sound of her workshop door opening. The music in her headphones was playing loudly, anyway, as it always did, and she was so engrossed in rummaging through her boombox that she hadn't even looked around since... heck knows when.

That's why when Neon appeared in the corner of her field of vision she jumped up on her stool, and the screwdriver fell out of her hand and onto the floor with a clatter.

She slid the headphones off her ears with one hand.

"God, you scared me," she said, laughing lightly once she had taken her hand off her chest, where her heart sped up for a moment. "You can't sneak around like that."

"Sorry, I thought you heard me," Neon replied, smiling apologetically.

"It’s fine." Raze waved her hand, as if to confirm her words. She bent down to pick up a screwdriver that had rolled under the desk, then put it back on the countertop. "What brings you here?"

Tayane was clearly in a good mood. She was spinning circles on the tabletop with the screwdriver, probably unconsciously playing with it. Neon hoped for Raze give her some of that positive energy, which would perhaps... drown out those black thoughts.

"Do you have any information?" she asked. Feeling that it was too vague a question, she quickly added. "About the mission. I don't know, maybe Killjoy wrote you something or so?"

The Brazilian stopped playing with the tool, and her brow furrowed for a moment.

"No, actually," she admitted, shrugging her shoulders. Neon didn't quite share this indifference. Nor the enthusiasm. "Why do you ask?"

Now it was Neon who shrugged her shoulders. She leaned with her hip against the edge of some cabinets that were strewn with coils of cables, and somewhere next to her shoe lay an empty packet of Doritos. She smiled uncertainly, as she probably didn't want Raze to see the difference in their moods.

"Just because," she admitted. She intertwined her arms across her chest and drove her gaze to the floor, unconsciously avoiding Raze's gaze, though she didn't know why. "They've been silent for a week now. I thought maybe you knew something."

"Have you tried calling anyone?"

"They're not answering."

Neon deliberately used the plural.

"Even Fade?"

That is, she didn't have to use the plural at all. She bit the inside of her cheek and shrugged her shoulders again, as if to assure Raze that the rather direct question did not impress her.

"It turns on the voicemail right away," she said. "There's not even a signal."

Raze furrowed her brow. She reached into the back pocket of her pants and took out her phone. She clicked something on it a few times, then put the device on the desk. Neon spotted a picture of Killjoy and the name, but frankly she was more interested in the word ‘dialing…’ just below. Probably she saw it as some kind of oracle.

Agents usually didn't call each other for no reason if they happened to be part of a mission. It was a foregone conclusion that any distractions were not advisable, except in an absolute emergency. It was never quite clear whether a person was under fire or in the comfort of a hotel room.

"Weird," muttered Raze. The smile came off her face slightly, and she scratched her cheek when the call ended before it began. "Have you told anyone about this?"

Neon shook her head.

"There's no one I could tell, actually. I haven't seen Sage lately, and I don't look likely to get along with Fade."

Only when she said it out loud did she realize how stupid it sounded.

She didn't even know why she spoke up. Did she want to explain herself? Did she have some inner need to justify herself for what Raze had suggested earlier and did it in probably the most idiotic and ill-considered way she could?

She probably shouldn't have spoken up. Or thought better of it. Actually do anything, which was already too late at this point anyway, because Raze raised an eyebrow.

"No?" she asked, wrinkling her eyebrows slightly as she put the phone back in her pants pocket. "Funny, and I would have just assumed that..."

"Not at all," burbled Neon, tightening her fingers more tightly on her forearms. She could feel them starting to go numb because of how much strength she had put into the gesture. She only had a holy hope that she didn't start blushing. "I don't think you know Fade."

The eyebrows that Raze had previously pulled down now lifted upward, and she probably couldn't help but smile.

"Maybe not like you, but I'm not blind," she laughed briefly. "Come on, after all, I know there's something going on between you two," she added, and seeing Neon's lips tighten, who was avoiding her gaze like fire, she relaxed and leaned her elbow against the desk. "I won't tell anyone, a word."

Tala looked at her hesitantly, and yes she opened her mouth, but not at all what Raze expected to hear.

"I guess I can call this 'tinkering' of yours with Killjoy something too, can't I?" She reflected. She knew Raze had a point, and maybe that's why she dared to make a joke. A little for herself, to get rid of the tension, and a little for the general public. Maybe so she wouldn't feel she was alone in this. "Sitting together at night and all-..."

Raze snorted with laughter.

"You're not going to admit it, are you?"

"And you?"

"I'm not the one drooling over Fade, you are."

"I'm not drooling over her!" Neon poked the Brazilian woman on the shoulder, but the latter only laughed. "Besides, you still haven't answered me."

Tayane shrugged her shoulders.

"You know me, I like to break the rules," she finally admitted, still slightly amused. "And this one in the Protocol is acutely pointless, so... why not? I'm not going to make a big deal about it because I don't want to expose myself, we're just being cautious."

Neon nodded her head. She didn't say anything for a while, because probably she wasn't sure what she should say so that it wouldn't sound stupid. But Raze cut her off.

"So you and Fade..."

Valdez sighed.

"Yes, we are dating," she finally admitted, with a certain amount of shyness that she didn't know where it actually came from. Raze, on the other hand, smiled contentedly, as if she had only been waiting for that, and nodded appreciatively. "And that's why it worries me that she doesn't answer, and at the same time I don't really have an idea what we can do," she added.

"Killjoy always answers, too. I can try to trace her phone, but I'm not an IT specialist, so I don't know if I can work anything out," Raze concluded. "To be honest, the best thing to do would be to ask Sage, but if you say she's not there, then.... I don't know, maybe Viper? After all, she's always been around missions, maybe she knows something."

"I think I'd rather shoot myself in the knee."

She didn't want to include as much reluctance as she did in that sentence, because she didn't want to arouse any suspicion, but somehow it came out like that itself. Raze, on the other hand, probably didn't take it that seriously, because she only snorted with laughter, as if she was amused by the sentence itself, not by... what Neon really meant.

"Why?" she asked. Tala refrained from saying that she must be joking, before Tayane could finish the thought. "Killjoy is not complaining," she said.

"Killjoy is something else," muttered Neon, and when she met Raze's gaze, who was clearly waiting for her to elaborate on the thought, her eyebrows went up. "Really? Don’t be kidding," she said. “Viper is mean, I can't believe you've never experienced this firsthand."

Raze shrugged her shoulders.

"She's harsh, that's a fact," she admitted. "Sometimes she will say something unpleasant, but-..."

"Unpleasant?" interrupted Neon, as if in disbelief. "She said she'd shoot our heads. Besides, you were there yourself. It's not just unpleasant."

She regretted that she couldn't tell Raze everything. That she couldn't tell how Viper had spoken about her, about Fade, what she had done, how she had threatened, and the whole strange but somehow functioning system of silence.

Maybe then everyone would be convinced. Maybe even Killjoy would find out that the person she is trying so hard to be is a monster.

"If I'm honest, it's a little hard for me to judge," Raze said, taking the screwdriver she had put down earlier. "We don't really know much about her."

"And that excuses her?"

"No, but you don't know why she's like that. Maybe Killjoy has a bit of a distorted perception of her, but from what she says, Viper may have her reasons."

Neon didn't know whether she should now parry with laughter or be offended. She probably couldn't decide on one option.

"You mean?"

"You know, she was here from the beginning. We don't know how much she survived. Killjoy says Viper might just be tired of it all after so many years, even if she doesn't want to show it," she said. "And KJ is the one Viper spends the most time with, so she probably knows more than us. I think so."

Neon didn't know if she wanted to hear it. She wasn't going to witness Viper being justified in any way. In fact, she could feel her blood boiling in her veins at the mere sound of her alias.

But she couldn't show it. And she had to somehow swallow this bitter aftertaste of anger while trying to put on a relatively neutral expression.

She shrugged her shoulders.

"I don't know, maybe," she said. She pushed herself away from the tabletop and machinely shook her hands. "But I'll still try to look for Sage."

Raze did not negate her choice, and Neon was very grateful for it.

Chapter 33: THIRTY THREE

Silence was everywhere. Under their feet, in the metal walls of the vulture, in the air she breathed. It was annoying, monotonous, and for some reason Reyna couldn't stand it, even if she had always managed it so far.

Even the engines seemed not to hum as loudly, as if they were also trying to join this strange conspiracy of silence. Or maybe it was just Reyna's paranoia that the silence that was currently reigning over the deck was quite different from the one she liked to be surrounded by, and was getting under her skin in an annoying way.

Maybe that's why she couldn't find a place for herself. The agents were silent or asleep, Brimstone hadn't spoken since he took the helm. And she paced around, step after step, stopping here, there, to at least look in the damn window, anything to occupy her mind.

It felt like an eternity had passed. Or maybe it was just short minutes. Maybe even seconds she couldn't handle and arrange in her mind.

The lack of a signal with HQ was killing her. Especially if it lasted a whole damn week, and Reyna suspected that maybe that was why everyone was silent. They were afraid to speak up, what had failed, what or who was to blame. Reyna didn't ask either. In fact, probably nobody asked, or if they did ask they weren't going to share the answer.

The plan worked and no one was hurt, but that didn't change the fact that such a situation made everyone tired. There was no way to get any outside information from headquarters, so they had to work based only on what was relayed to them on a regular basis from Brimstone.

At the same time, reducing their flexibility.

She crossed to the other side of the deck again to find herself at the window.

"Can you stop?" She didn't turn around hearing Fade's growl. "This is fucking annoying."

The initiator leaned the back of her head back against the wall where Reyna happened to be standing. She was sitting on a bench, squeezed into a recess between two converging walls, but she could still see Zyanya enough to see her glancing at her out of the corner of her eye, although she was trying to hide it.

"You didn't sleep anyway," Reyna replied dispassionately.

She realized that only their voices echoed. The rest only periodically followed their gaze when they happened to be staring at the floor trying to stay awake.

Killjoy sighed something to herself and curled up more in her co-pilot's seat, drifting back to sleep.

"How do you know I didn't try?" Fade said quietly, but still included notes of resentment in the question. "You running in circles over and over doesn't help me with that."

Reyna raised an eyebrow right after she rolled her eyes. She tore her gaze away from the window and turned fully to Fade, who was looking down at her with a strange mixture of boredom. And fatigue.

Reyna was probably tired, too. And at the same time, she couldn't calm down. Sleep was not even mentioned.

She sighed.

"Do you want to argue again? Really?"

"Just sit on your ass and don't move for five damn minutes," Fade said, batting her eyelids as if she had actually just drifted off to sleep, even though it was a lie. She was good at pretending. "Everyone wants to be in bed already, so you don't have to show your displeasure so much," she said.

"I'm not."

"You don't know how to lie," Hazal stated without batting an eyelid. Reyna fled with her eyes. "And sit down before I go insane."

"Doesn't it touch you?"

"What do you mean?"

"They don't even know if we're alive. We'll be flying for the next six hours, and they'll think we’ve died for the next six hours," Zyanya hissed. "That's exactly my displeasure," she added.

"And you think running around in circles will help anything here?"

Reyna opened her mouth, but immediately closed it. Either she didn't know what she should answer, or she didn't have an answer, or she decided that for the sake of the others it would be better if she just said nothing.

She sat down. Fade raised the corner of her mouth crookedly, returning to closing her eyelids, with her head still leaning against the wall.

"You're not fooling me," she said after a moment. Quietly, so as not to wake Killjoy or arouse Brimstone's suspicions. "You don't care about the rest at all, do you?"

Reyna pressed her lips together tightly. She herself didn't know what she meant, but the ambiguous question stirred up an irritation she thought she had already gotten rid of.

Fade smiled to herself, probably aware that Reyna was looking at her. Maybe that's what she cared about.

"Well, of course. Of course you don’t." She nodded to herself, admitting to herself that she was right after Zyanya's silence. "You haven't cared about others for a long time," she said.

"I'm not the one who avoided everyone for the first few months after joining the Protocol," Reyna hissed, feeling her hands involuntarily tighten on the edge of the bench. "You only left the room because of Neon, so don't tell me I was the one who wasn't interested in anyone, because unlike you, I spent most of my life trying to protect everyone in my care, whether I wanted to act like an offended kid or not," she screeched.

Her voice was balancing on the edge of a whisper. She didn't suspect Brimstone would hear it from the cockpit, but she wasn't about to wake Killjoy unnecessarily.

Fade snorted.

"Did you also protect those you murdered, or did I miss something?"

"And you will be the one to preach morals to me?" she growled. "You were a bounty hunter, your life consisted of killing for money anyone who got in your way, so get away from me and stop acting like you're the only one who's fucking innocent."

"Can you calm down? Both of you?"

Reyna and Fade turned toward Skye, who was just wiping her face with her hands on the opposite side of the vulture and looked as if she had just woken up.

And just as Skye usually exuded energy of the positive kind, now a note of irritation crept into her voice. Or it was simply fatigue.

Fade did not respond, and neither did Reyna.

The rest of the flight passed in silence.

***

Zyanya tried to lie to herself that she didn't want to go to Viper now at all from the moment she turned on the water and the shower began to wash the dirt and dust of the battlefield from her skin.

Because, after all, it was late. Because, after all, Viper was surely asleep already, and if she was not asleep, she was at her lab and surely didn't want anyone to disturb her. Because Reyna also already wanted to go to bed, and she could talk to Viper in the morning, too, and it wouldn't make any difference.

Because Viper surely knew that they were fine, because she wouldn't let them be killed so easily. She certainly thought so. Zyanya wanted to believe that Viper thought so.

Yet she caught herself staring dully at the tiled wall in front of her as if these thoughts were not convincing enough for her to believe them as soon as they appeared in her head.

She leaned her forehead against the same wall, not even flinching at the sudden chill that pierced her body.

She didn't want to do it, but she thought of Fade's words. And she could blame it on her nerves, on fatigue or simply on the fact that Fade wanted to tease her, because she had her reason, but Zyanya couldn't forget it anyway.

Did she really treat Viper differently from the rest?

She felt her head starting to hurt from the flurry of thoughts. And she should have dismissed the question, turned off the tap, gone to bed and fallen asleep, after all, she was damn tired and it was damn late.

But instead of going to bed, she threw on her pajamas over the first better sweatshirt that came into her hands and left her room slamming the door.

Subconsciously, she knew that Fade would have laughed at her if she had seen her traversing the dark corridors in search of that one door. How she frantically looked around, as if she didn't want to be caught, even though, after all, she had nothing to fall back on.

Subconsciously, Reyna may have even felt a little stupid herself with the fact that standing at Viper's door actually admitted what Fade had accused her of.

But she knocked on the door anyway. She had a feeling that the sound echoed treacherously like never before. That the water from her hair fell too loudly to the floor, and she clenched her hands in her sweatshirt pockets like a stressed-out student standing next to the blackboard.

The lock clicked, the door opened. For some reason, the first thing Reyna noticed was that Viper's eyes in the dark resembled those of a cat. Wild and squinted, in places... skittish.

Zyanya had never seen that in them before.

But before she had time to think about it, she was pulled inside. Into the darkness, cut only by that one shade of green and the hazy glow of her own radianite heart.

She didn't even manage to say a word when her face became hurt from the slap that was aimed at her.

Her first instinct, and probably even her first thought, was to respond with an attack as well. Unconsciously, her hand clenched into a fist.

She wanted to speak up, a sulfurous "what the fuck?!" was forced to her lips, as her skin burned mercilessly and she could even feel the numbness where the slap had fallen. And yet she didn't say a word, as she was probably unable to say anything.

"That's for scaring me."

These words echoed through the walls of Viper's bedroom, and Reyna probably felt them more clearly than a slap. She unconsciously massaged her skin without taking her eyes off Sabine's figure, and when she took her hand away from her face, as if to check if it was bleeding, she saw that Callas was also looking there. Just for a moment, as if trying to understand what she had done and whether she had gone too far.

The woman turned back. Only then did Reyna see that Viper was holding in her hand... her knife. A butterfly, handy one, which, by the way, she threw into the nightstand drawer a few seconds later with a sigh of the kind she indulged in when she had a headache.

Reyna noted that she had no idea which fear Viper had in mind.

And Viper hoped Reyna wouldn't comment on it.

She wished she had, even if it was Viper who gave her the baseto do so as she sat heavily on the bed and rested her elbows on her knees, driving her gaze to the window.

She was playing the character herself, which she didn't want to be after all. But now it was too late anyway. Reyna saw the knife. Reyna saw everything. And Reyna certainly wondered what had actually happened just now, and Viper wanted to give her the answer just so she wouldn't go too far.

Although she sensed that she would still break faster than she would have liked. She felt her nerves twitching like the strings of an old guitar, threatening to shatter into a fine poppy at any moment.

"I'm sorry about that," she said finally. She heard Zyanya walking toward her, but didn't turn around. "It's good that you're okay. What about the rest?"

Maybe that's how she should play it. Like she always does, change the subject, sweep it under the rug. Whatever.

The mattress bent slightly as Reyna sat down next to her. Viper still didn't look at her. Reyna did, and noticed with some sympathy that Viper wasn't even in her pajamas. It was as if she was still awake.

She didn't comment on that, however. Just like that one strange slap, which she would have liked to understand, because for some reason she couldn't be angry about it. Not now, when Viper looked so strange. Weak. As if Viper herself didn’t understand what had happened, or felt so lost in her own thoughts that she couldn't even make it to the surface.

"It's okay, everyone's fine," she replied truthfully. Viper nodded her head. "Brimstone said he would check what screwed up, so it's unlikely to happen again."

Sabine nodded again, but this time somehow differently. More stiffly, as if she was simultaneously thinking about something so intensely that she unconsciously tense her muscles. Reyna noticed that she began rubbing her thumb over the top of her hand, and her gaze slid from the window to the floor as she furrowed her brow.

"It's her," she said. "It's because of Sage."

Reyna got the impression that saying those few words was an inhuman effort for Sabine.

"What?"

Viper licked her dry lips, and when she finally turned to face Zyanya, her face was paler than she remembered it. It was not a matter of moonlight, it was not a matter of fatigue. Sabine had not slept, and her palms were beginning to sweat.

Sabine was afraid.

"I was at her place." She rubbed the top of her hand with her thumb again, then rubbed it against the material of her pants in frustration when she sensed how sweaty it was. "I asked because Deadlock started to worry too. It's because of her. I don't know what exactly she screwed up, but-..."

"Brimstone will definitely explain it."

Viper shook her head. She bit her lip, hard, maybe even to draw blood, but she didn’t even feel pain. She only felt panic. And anger. Anger at giving in to this panic, at not knowing how to control it.

"No. You don't understand." She clenched the same hand into a fist, still shaking her head. She wanted Reyna to understand without words, so that she wouldn't have to go back to it, and at the same time she felt that she couldn't remain silent. "He won't explain it. Sage will wriggle out, she always... always does that, don’t you know?"

Reyna wanted to put a hand on her shoulder. The strange panic on Sabine's face made Zyanya as sure as ever in her life that something had happened. That something very bad had happened while she was away. There was a plea in Viper’s voice, as if she was asking Reyna to believe her, not to deny, just believe.

"Sabine..."

She involuntarily glanced at the nightstand, where she knew the knife with which Viper had greeted her was hidden. A silent referee, some sort of indicator and perhaps an explanation of what happened while she was away.

She knew she wanted to ask. What happened? How did it happen? How could she help? Was it even still a question of mission and anxiety about her, or about Sage, about something deeper and more difficult? What was she afraid of? Where was the skittishness in her eyes coming from?

She wanted to ask all this, and at the same time she knew that when she did, Viper would panic.

She preferred that Sabine would tell her herself. She wanted to give her time to arrange her words, to take a few deeper breaths, even if a sense of anxiety was growing in Reyna's heart and she could almost feel the blood starting to flow through her veins much faster because of it.
Viper looked at her fleetingly, and although it was Reyna waiting for an answer, the question was clearly written on her face.

What did she do to you?

Sabine couldn't unsee it. And at the same time, her tongue dragged in her mouth like a stone, and her lips began to tremble dangerously.

"She drugged me."

She said the words quickly, for fear that if she didn't say them now, she would never say them again. Because it was embarrassing.

It put her in a light that Sabine hated to see herself in.

Reyna opened her eyes wider. Out of shock, out of horror. In place of one question, ten others jumped in.

Viper didn't want her to ask them, so she took a deeper breath.

"When I came to ask about the mission," she added, her hands rubbing the fabric of her jeans with a gesture so nervous that Zyanya felt like catching those hands in her own and somehow calming them down. "I was pissed because she didn't know anything. She said the localisators were broken, I wanted to know more." She furrowed her eyebrows and nodded her head, as if admitting her guilt. "I snapped, pushed her. She was sorting through the first aid kit and just happened to have a pen at hand, so..."

She didn't finish. She shrugged her shoulders, for the sake of inconspicuousness or lying to herself that she had already gotten over it, but Reyna saw so much tension and nerves in the gesture that she couldn't believe it.

Instead, she felt her fatigue leave the room and shut the door behind her with a slam. She didn't even remember when she got off the bed and looked at Viper as if she didn't believe Sabine was actually in the room with her.

"We have to tell him."

"No!" Reyna rebuked herself for how the sorrow in that voice hurt her. Viper rested her head on her hands and began to shake it frantically, right after she swallowed her saliva. I think she realized that she was too out of line. "No, we... we can't," she added already more quietly.

With shame. That she was too weak. She didn't fight back, although she had always done so, and this weak, less brave side of Reyna was watching right now. She had her at arm's length.

"Can't we?" Reyna repeated in disbelief. She intertwined her fingers in her long hair, combing through it nervously. "Viper, she attacked you, you can't leave it like that!"

"And what good will it do if I tell him? He won't believe me anyway, Sage will fool him, as usual," Viper brought up. She looked like... like a helpless child who no longer had the strength to protect herself and at the same time desperately needed that protection. "Sage is supposed to heal me, and if she gets mad then... no, I can't do it. Not now," she croacked out, raising her gaze to Reyna in that one second. "Please, not now."

Zyanya pressed her lips together. And then her eyelids. And then she let the air out, trying to stifle every ounce of rage that raged in her body. And perhaps it would have taken her much longer, but... but then she looked at Viper once again.

At the creased back, the hair with which she wanted to cover her face, the sweaty palms with which she rubbed the material of her pants, as if she was waiting for her skin to start burning. In all this there was... a tenderness that Reyna had probably never seen before. Not in this way. Not surrounded by this fear.

"Alright," she said finally. Viper let out a shuddering breath with her lips, and Zyanya almost felt something hurt when she sensed inhuman relief in that gesture. "So what are you going to do?"

Viper gently furrowed her brow. And then she put her arms around herself, as if she suddenly felt cold or as if she wanted to pull herself together that way.

"Nothing for now. I have to wait it out, at least until the treatment," she said, breathing out a hoarse whisper that she may have been ashamed of.

Reyna nodded her head. She rested her hands on her hips for a moment, but immediately lowered them loosely by her sides. She took one step to the right, then to the left, all in order to crouch down in front of the Viper after a moment's hesitation.

She wanted to face her gaze. Or she wanted Viper to be the one to face Reyna's gaze.

Which she did, but reluctantly.

Out of the corner of her eye, Reyna noticed Sabine tightening her fingers on the fabric of her sweater.

"I'll stay the night," she announced calmly. Not with reproach or insistence. She was aware that a single dissenting tone in her voice would crush Viper like glass. "May I?"

It was this question that made Sabine look at her more than she had for the past few minutes. As if she was in disbelief.

Perhaps she was.

She didn't answer directly. She probably couldn't. Probably if Reyna hadn't been looking for that answer on her face, she wouldn't have even known that any had been given.

A minimal nod of the head. That was what she was going to settle for, that was going to be enough for her in its entirety. And it was enough, because she probably didn't have the heart to question Viper when she was... just like that.

She responded with the same gesture.

They understood each other in silence. In silence, too, she escorted her with her eyes to the bathroom as Sabine gathered her things and wordlessly disappeared behind the door for several minutes.

Also in silence, Viper went to bed and only then did Reyna, for some unknown reason, get the impression that it was damn small. Steam was coming from the half-open bathroom door, and Zyanya could feel the moisture emanating from Callas' hair. She could feel it seeping into the pillows, into the air.

Even the sigh that Viper let out with her lips seemed to hang in the air.

Zyanya wasn't sure if they wanted to talk. Does Viper want to talk, with her hands folded on her stomach almost stiffly, as if sleeping was just a distant future thought.

She pulled the corner of the quilt, wanting to cover their legs. She stayed at her half of the bed, not wanting to bend any boundary even by a millimeter.

"You can be there."

Viper's words made no sense at first. They seemed out of context, spoken quickly in the silence of the night and that strangely soothing darkness.

"When... it will happen," she added a moment later. Perhaps she sensed Reyna’s consternation, perhaps she just wanted to say it for herself. "Actually... I think I want you to be there."

Reyna could have thought many things. That it was fear. That it's no wonder Viper doesn't want to be left alone or that she doesn't trust Sage, whose... whole image in Reyna's eyes was once again ripped apart. In fact, it no longer existed, crossed out like in a damn game of tic-tac-toe.

And all Reyna could think was... she felt relieved. She needed that approval, she needed to hear it without any prior argument, just like that, just like that. A simple request for help.

"Okay," she replied. She swallowed in her throat something she couldn't name. "So I will."

Viper seemed to nod. Zyanya wasn't sure, she had only seen her out of the corner of her eye.

Quite often they were in this position. Not looking at each other, just listening. Understanding from the tone of voice, the minimal movements, the hoarse sighs. It was probably their way of learning.

"But if something goes wrong..." Viper hesitated. Not because she didn't want to say it, but because she probably waited for Reyna to interrupt her. She didn't. "I want you to know that I have never forgiven myself for Lucia's death."

Reyna pressed her lips together. Now it was she who was gathering her thoughts, trying to suppress the burning stab of pain that spilled over her ribs.

She took in a lungful of air. For a moment she felt as if someone had kicked her right in the stomach, but she managed to chase the discomfort away.

"It wasn't your fault," she said.

"It was." The answer was so straightforward and direct that it was almost unreal. "Actually, it was only mine."

"You know the options ran out."

"It doesn't matter." Again that directness, with a hint, however, of such gnawing guilt that it almost didn't sit well with Sabine. "I just want you to know that."

Reyna didn't know what she should answer. Lucia was a topic avoided at headquarters. So was Omen's past, Viper's, or the story of Agent 08, which probably only Viper and Brimstone knew about.

Lucia was a painful topic.

Watching her body slowly die of an endless hunger for souls was something burned into Reyna's mind so deeply that she knew that even at the moment of her death, it was the image of her younger sister that would appear before her eyes.

Lucia was dying in a coma for months. Reyna went on a killing rampage, murdering until her breath fell without restraint and it was all... for nothing.

Viper tried everything, Reyna did the best she could.

Reyna failed as a sister, and Viper failed as a doctor. And it left them with a scar incapable of healing.

So Reyna told the truth.

"But I never blamed you."

She looked at Sabine at that moment. She needed to do so to make sure that the meaning of that sentence reached Viper unhindered. She hoped it had pierced her spine like a needle and stuck there permanently now.

Viper endured the look. It was hard to determine whether it was the bitter taste on her tongue or disbelief, but her gaze was full of questions.

She only managed to answer one.

"How?" she whispered. Her gaze had long lost interest in the ceiling. "How do you do it?"

"How I’m not blaming you for something I shouldn't?"

Reyna intended to make it a rhetorical question. That Viper would think about this answer and nod her head, because after all, this was the end of the discussion that made sense.

"I hated you for it."

Her voice was not much louder than a whisper. The dirtiest secret, the most disgusting and shameful, had been consuming Viper for far longer than she wanted to admit.

Reyna's eyes widened, but she said nothing more. Viper needed to speak, there was that characteristic concentration on her face again.

"I hated you because you reminded me of that," she added hoarsely. She squeezed out the words as if it physically pained her to say them. "That I was not perfect. That I failed. I hated you for my own mistakes, and you... and you don't even blame me. Why?"

It almost sounded like resentment. It was as if Viper wished it were the other way around, that all the puzzles would fall into place and Reyna's behavior would make sense, instead of... just losing it.

She should hate her as it was in the beginning. It should stay that way. It would be easier that way, and that way Viper would be able to explain it somehow.

And Reyna stayed every time. Each day she took a bold step forward, ready to meet the rebuff. She had changed. Even a lot, and Viper couldn't even tell when exactly.

"I'm not a monster," she replied calmly. Sabine got the impression that even Zyanya herself needed to hear those words spoken aloud. She was able to understand it. "And neither are you. No matter how deeply you've told yourself that, it's not true."

Viper wanted to pretend she hadn't heard that at all. It would have been easier for her that way. Silence, after all, was always easier, and she was willing to force her own mind to create just such a vision of the current situation.

Where both of them simply dove into silence.

But she didn't.

Instead, before Zyanya had time to realize it, Sabine's body was pressed against her own side.

Her fingers tightened on the material of Reyna's T-shirt, her knuckles whitening from the grip. However, she didn't want to take it off or tug at it.

She needed a hold. For her own realization that as long as she holds this piece of cloth, nothing will change. And so they will remain without a word of explanation on her part.

She was afraid of the repulsion she had so often given Reyna. Now it came to her how much she didn't want to be pushed away, and she could only show her fear by holding the damn shirt.

That's why Viper laid her head on her shoulder so she wouldn't have to look at her. She didn't want to see the questions on her face, the shock or all that would only create more corridors in the maze of their relationship.

She clenched her fist tighter.

And Reyna's hand moved over her shoulder blades, stroking the nearby skin that Sabine hated so much.

Chapter 34: THIRTY FOUR

Sage didn't quite know how she should act when Brimstone's silence dragged on for another minute.

She had no idea how long she had already been sitting like this. The meeting room was usually full of people; now it seemed to blind her with emptiness to the point of exaggeration, and she had the feeling that even her own breathing echoed off the walls.

The man stared at the report. Still. Concentration was painted on his face, although when he rubbed his temples he seemed inhumanly tired. He sighed before speaking for the first time since they entered the room and Sage only heard 'sit down' before they plunged into that very silence.

“I hope you have a good explanation.”

Sage shook off the impression that Brimstone was simply focused. There was a reprimand in his voice so profound that Sage felt like lowering her head to avoid his gaze.

She didn't, however. She bravely held it up, though her fingers beat out a steady rhythm on her own thigh.

“I mistook these localisators for the ones for longer distance,” she said.

Liam wasn't looking at her. His gaze was fixed on the wall, as if his thoughts were completely elsewhere. This probably made Ling feel even less confident than before.

“They lost the signal at a certain distance. They looked the same, so...”

“So you didn't check them?”

Sage fell silent, as if her voice had been cut with a knife. Brimstone now looked at her, probably wanting to find something on her face that Sage couldn't name. Maybe he was looking for sincerity there. Or anything else that would cover that sense of disappointment Sage had seen in his eyes from the beginning.

“I know this sounds stupid, but...” she began. Brimstone's gaze was intense. She was surprised that he hadn't burned a hole in the wall at this point. Because she was almost certain he was burning it right through her. “I've never been... here. I wasn't in charge of reinforcement. I made a mistake, because I'm still learning what you and Viper have been doing for the past years.”

Liam didn't speak for a while. Sage thought he would bestow silence on her again, but that was not the case.

“We have all the armaments written down in the system. The localisators have serial numbers by which you can know what their range purpose is,” he said.

For those few seconds, he became the very commando he had been most of his life, and he still hasn't broken free. The war had left scars on him, gray hairs interspersed through his beard. His authority and experience were intimidating, especially when the explanation for the problem was... so trivial.

“I told you about this. I told you everything a commander should know when I suspended Viper,” he added. “So what failed?”

Sage didn't know what answer Brimstone expected. None seemed good enough, and although she had several options, each seemed infantile and stupid.

However, a stupid and infantile answer was better than none at all.

“I forgot about it.” Saying the word cost her more effort than she expected. “I forgot to look them up, I forgot that there are two kinds of them. Everything happened so fast, I made a mistake and I apologize for it.”

It was difficult to read anything from Brimstone's face. He let the air out through his mouth. Sage herself didn't know whether this conversation was more difficult for him or for her.

“You know I asked if you felt ready for this position. I wanted it to be a simple answer, and that's what you gave me,” he said. “Now I feel like you lied to me, Sage. To me and to the rest of the team, who should be relying on you, while you're failing.”

Sage remained silent. She intertwined the fingers of her hands together so tightly until they began to hurt. She didn't want to explain herself any longer, because that would probably put her in an even worse light than before.

“So, what are you going to do?”

She swallowed, enduring Brimstone’s stare, who sighed once again.

“I want you to know that I'm doing this for the sake of the rest of the team, but I'm wondering if I should swap you with Reyna.”

“Reyna?” Sage couldn't get the surprise out of her voice. And although she felt like almost parrying, she didn't. “She's a duelist.”

Brimstone seemed prepared for such a reaction.

“She spends most of her time on the battlefield and between the enemy. She has experience.”

“Shooting anything that moves is not an experience.”

Liam raised an eyebrow, surprised by this outrage. Sage seems to have felt a little ashamed as well, and tightened her lips immediately after those words were spoken.

“I don't want to be rude, but I don't think you should question my choices at this point, when you yourself know why we're even sitting here,” he said. “Agents are not blind, they see that mistakes lately occur on missions more often. How long do you think it will take before they get outraged because they will feel unsafe? Or refuse to participate in any missions at all, already leaving aside the fact that I'm not going to write a death report because I hesitated with an important decision for too long.”

Sage did not respond. In fact, when Liam said the words, he himself sank heavily on the back of the chair, as if they had previously weighed down on his shoulders.

For a moment he looked deadly reminiscent of Viper as he pressed the bridge of his nose in the same way she did. As if he had a headache. As if he was tired. Or as if both variations were going on at the same time.

“I'll give Reyna new guidelines at the earliest opportunity,” he announced, although he wasn't looking at Sage at the moment, as if it was the existing or non-existing headache that overwhelmed him. “And you focus on Viper's treatment. When are you going to do the procedure?”

Brimstone's ability to relay information while missing irrelevant facts was useful for the job, yet Sage felt a bit like an avalanche of these two simple facts had slapped her right in the face.

However, she couldn't argue. Her own mistakes were watching her from around the corner and laughing quietly among themselves.

What a terrible day.

“On Thursday.”

Liam nodded.

“Good. I'll cross Viper out of all training until then.”

Sage also nodded. Probably for lack of an idea of any other response. Everything happened too fast, the questions and the whole conversation suddenly shrunk to a few seconds by how quickly one topic was ended and another introduced.

She got up from her chair with a simultaneous sense of shame and strange discomfort at the fact that she didn't know how she should actually say goodbye.

They parted a moment later, with Ling's footsteps unpleasantly echoing.

***

Neon just watched Fade's reflection in the mirror as Hazal brushed her teeth with the bathroom door open. Neon was sitting cross-legged on the bed and had been silent for a long while, absentmindedly playing with the string from her pajama shorts, as if she couldn't find a better occupation for her hands.

She remembered that Fade had returned during the night and had come to her room with her entire suitcase probably reflexively, and soon she just snuggled against her back and fell asleep. This morning she apologized to Neon for cramming herself into her bed without a shower and in random clothes, which just weren't her battle clothes, but the younger woman just waved her hand and said she could use her shower now, and that she planned to change the bedding anyway.

Fade spat out the toothpaste and turned on the tap. Individual still-wet strands of hair stuck to the nape of her neck as she bent over. She washed her face and reached for the towel next to her, and the impression that she had heard Neon's footsteps proved true when the latter hugged her back just as the elder finished wiping her wet skin.

“Can't you call it off?” muttered Neon, embracing Fade around the waist and pressing her cheek against her shoulder. “Skye probably won't get upset.”

Hazal smiled slightly.

“Skye might not, but I don't want to have to explain myself to Brimstone,” she said, reaching for a hair tie that lay on the bathroom counter. She efficiently tied her hair into a ponytail, even with Neon pressed against her body. “It'll be over quickly and I'll be right back. You can pick a movie for later if you want.”

Neon only muttered something. Maybe to herself, maybe to Fade, or maybe just for effect or some subconscious need. And that made a little red light go on in Hazal's head.

Neon was very fond of watching movies. To be honest, she could watch more of them in a week than Hazal had watched in her entire life.

A mutter to this proposition was not her style.

“Hey, are you okay?”

Fade wanted to look over her shoulder herself, but only managed to see the top of the younger woman's head when her gaze automatically went elsewhere. Namely to her waist, which Neon embraced, but now no shirt was standing in her way.

“Are you sure you have to go?”

Fade furrowed her brow and slowly let out her breath. Tala's hands were gentle and rather hesitantly stroked the skin of her belly in contrast to how ambiguous the question sounded.

Something, however, was wrong.

“I'd rather stay with you, too.” Hazal smiled at the corner of her mouth and stroked the outside of Neon's hand under her shirt, which the younger one accepted after a slight twitch of surprise. “But you know I have to.”

They stood like that for a while in front of the sink in silence. Fade seemed to be waiting for the younger one to digest this information and let her go, but whenever she tried to look at her face in the mirror's reflection, Neon didn't look at her..

Nor did she do so when her hand slid a little lower and her thumb snagged on the edge of Fade's sweatpants.

“Tala?”

No answer.

And something strange, suspended in the air, that refused to let Fade rest even if she couldn't identify it. Or at least not right away.

The feeling of realization only hit her when that same thumb slid behind the hem of her pants, and there was so much uncertainty in that one gesture that she could almost feel the younger's finger trembling against her skin.

Fade pressed her lips together and caught Neon’s wrist before it moved further.

Hazal knew how she knew this feeling. She had sensed the same thing before flying out on the mission, and just as she didn't have time to react then, now she had the opportunity to do so.

She took in air in her mouth to ask, but no words came out of her mouth.

“You don’t want me?”

There was no resentment, sadness or disappointment in that sentence. It was inflicted even stiffly, as if it barely squeezed through Tala's throat.

Fade blinked.

“Where did that thought even come from?”

She wanted to look at her in the mirror, but Neon averted her gaze and shrugged her shoulders, as if suddenly ashamed of the question she had asked moments earlier, and then retracted her hands and rested her forehead against the elder's shoulder.

Not for long.

Hazal turned to face her, not wanting to try to make eye contact solely with her reflection.

“You've already seen me naked, I thought... well, you know.”

Tala shrugged her shoulders again, but fled somewhere with her eyes, unlike Fade, who stared at her intently, as if afraid to miss even the slightest reaction.

Neon did not complete the thought. And that made Fade sigh. Not because of the younger woman, but because she knew what she had to say now.

She put both hands on Neon’s shoulders, somehow trying to stop her in case she tried to leave the bathroom suddenly.

Not that she was expecting it. But subconsciously she did anyway.

“Tala, you know that I... can feel that something is wrong, right?”

Neon pressed her lips together as if to chase this truth away from herself. Fade seemed to have done so as well. Both of them didn't like bringing up the topic of Fade's abilities mainly because Fade herself didn't like it in general.

She didn't like the fact that something that perhaps wasn't supposed to be revealed was being revealed against someone's will, and Hazal knew it, although she didn't necessarily want it. At the same time, she couldn't be fooled about certain things, and as much as it was very useful on missions, Neon at this point felt discomfort about just that.

“But everything is fine.”

She tried to deny it anyway. She even shrugged her shoulders for effect, although she probably was aware herself that it didn't come out very credibly.

“I can see that it's not.” It wasn't a reproach. Hazal really sounded worried, that's why Neon's eyes fled again. “I can see that you are afraid of something.” She didn't like the word fear, but she had to use it. “And I think we should talk about... this.”

With a hand gesture, she meant to point them both out. Overall. The situation that had just occurred.

“But I don't want to talk about it. Everything is okay, Hazal.”

“Are you lying more to me or to yourself?”

Silence. Fade bent down slightly as the younger woman's gaze was stubbornly fixed on the floor, and she wanted her to look into her eyes.

“I'm not fooling anyone, I'm saying it's okay,” she said.

“You're starting to get upset, so no, it's not okay. If it were, I wouldn't feel your fear every time you touch me like that.”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“If something is wrong, then we have to talk about it, whether you want to or not.”

Neon raised her eyes.

“And do we have to talk about it just now?” Hazal made no mistake, guessing that the younger woman said this with a hint of anger. “Apparently you have training with Skye,” she said.

“And if we don't talk about it now, will you promise to come back to it?” She asked, wrinkling her eyebrows slightly, with one hand still on Neon's shoulder, who, although she raised her eyes, looked as if she was doing her best to avoid that contact anyway.

“Maybe.”

“Tala...”

“Okay, fine.”

Fade nodded, as if in gratitude, and straightened up. She kissed the younger woman's forehead some more before gathering her things and heading for the door.

“I'll be back soon.”

***

Fade wasn't in the habit of showing her mood to everyone around, so she silently entered the shooting range, greeted Skye with a hand gesture and walked over to her locker to enter the code there.

She realized that Skye had received her presence rather positively, and probably felt a little bad about the fact that she personally didn't feel like doing this training at all. Nor to be here. Frankly, she would have preferred to sit with Neon and try to clarify this strange understatement with her, even if it was going to end in the absence of any result.

She was tired and frustrated, and that's what she blamed the curse that ripped from her mouth for when the ammo magazine fell out of her hand and onto the floor. She put it back in its place in the phantom and slammed her locker shut.

Skye didn't seem to notice or ignore her (rather) apparent annoyance and didn't speak up until Fade took her safety glasses off the rack under the stand.

“Bad day?”

Hazal turned to Kirra. She found traces of fatigue on the Australian's face to her own relief, too, and it made her feel a little more cheerful. She smiled crookedly, as if apologetically, and sighed.

“I certainly can't call it good.” Skye nodded in understanding and laughed lightly, as if she appreciated Hazal's efforts to make a joke. “I barely slept.”

She didn't know why she added this explanation. Maybe she had a need to justify herself in some way, as if she was subconsciously afraid that Skye would guess it was about something other than her almost non-existent biological clock.

Foster, however, merely nodded.

“Yeah, the mission was really... shitty.”

They both snorted a light laugh at this very... appropriate term.

“Out of politeness, I won't deny it,” Fade replied, putting her headphones over one ear, as if to show Skye that she could keep talking if she wanted to.

Skye did the same, but neither of them grabbed a gun. They were both not too keen on this training, but by the fact that they probably had very similar attitudes, they were a little more comfortable,

“Do you know something?”

Fade furrowed her brow.

“About what?”

“About what failed,” the Australian explained. “Something had to, after all.”

Hazal shrugged her shoulders.

“Brimstone didn't say anything, except he was going to explain it,” she said.

“The atmosphere was deadly.”

Fade sighed, and rested her hand on her stand. She stared at her phantom for a moment as Skye reloaded her weapon.

“No wonder. Everyone was confused. I think if we had the energy to do it, someone might even have been decently pissed off,” she said. “Brimstone played it relatively safe.”

Skye agreed with a nod. After a moment, however, the conversation cut off for a moment, but neither of them either started training or spoke up.

“Can I ask you something?”

Hazal raised an eyebrow, blinking for a moment as if she had been snapped out of her reverie when she happened to be staring at a wall with bullet marks already left in it permanently.

“Sure.”

“What were you arguing with Reyna about?”

If Fade wasn't surprised before, she certainly was now. And just as there was mostly surprise on her face at first, when she sighed heavier than usual, she hoped she had sufficiently shown her reluctance on the subject.

“Why do you ask?” she asked, not hiding her reluctance for a moment. Skye didn't answer, she looked a bit embarrassed by her question, but she didn't back down from it at all either, which is probably why Fade didn't cut off the topic so immediately. “Is this some very important thing?”

Skye let the air out slowly and first opened her mouth and then closed it. Eventually she just sighed, as she probably decided that there was no point in thinking about the right choice of words.

“On the previous mission, she seemed off.”

Fade raised an eyebrow.

“Off?”

“Viper's wound didn't look too good and I wanted to know how it actually happened. I had the impression that Reyna was really avoiding the subject. I think she even got a little annoyed,” the Australian finally said. “And now you guys are arguing and... I don't know, I just wonder if I'm missing something.”

“It doesn’t,” Fade replied immediately. “I don't know what happened on the earlier mission either. By the way, I don't think anyone but Brimstone knows. Everyone sat quiet the whole flight. And yesterday she was just being picky because she was annoyed that the flight was taking so long.”

“And don't you get the feeling that you don't know something? Not even a little bit?”

Fade knew that the ground she was stepping on was thin. She knew that if Skye started connecting Reyna to Viper, sooner or later she would also connect her to Neon. And that would set off an avalanche of disasters.

“About what, for example?”

Skye furrowed her brow. She poked her gaze into her vandal, as if gathering her thoughts.

“Viper stopped being in charge, we don’t even know why. She doesn't get along with Brimstone. On missions more and more often, something gets screwed up. Reyna is messing something with her reports, on top of that she's probably easier to annoy than ever, and Sage suddenly isn't going on missions at all lately. Don't you get the feeling they're not telling us something?”

It wasn't a subject Fade expected, but she wasn't sorry about it. However, instead of being happy... a sense of strange, even disturbing realization hit her right in the ribs.

“You know, maybe it's just not our thing.” She didn't want to use the statement that she had never thought about it. Rather, she felt that she needed to think about it soberly, and although she was aware that her own words didn't come out very confidently, she didn't change them. “I don't know if I want to get involved in whatever is going on in the Protocol now,” she said.

A safe option. However, she couldn't shake the feeling that Skye seemed disappointed with her answer.

“Maybe you're right.”

They went through the entire training without once returning to the subject.

***

Reyna once again rejected the call and also once again cursed under her breath, pressing it into her shorts pocket.

“I told you to pick up.”

Viper's voice carried through the bathroom. It sounded more muffled, through the blood running down her chin, which she constantly rinsed over the sink. She grunted hoarsely, then spat the blood once more on the snow-white porcelain.

“It's not important now,” Reyna replied, perhaps unconsciously pushing back a strand of hair from Viper’s sweaty forehead, who unusually did not comment on this behavior. “I'll make you a compress.”

Reyna left the bathroom and almost reflexively began rummaging through the closet for towels. Viper's morning hemorrhage didn't want to let go so easily, and Reyna would be lying if she said it wasn't starting to freak her out a little.

“How do you know it's not?” muttered Viper from the bathroom, raising her head as much as she could. “Is it Brimstone?”

“Are you really worried about it right now?” the Mexican woman replied, throwing a found towel over her shoulder. “If I don't pick it up it means I can't do that now.”

“You know, this job isn't exactly about that.”

Reyna passed Viper in the bathroom and turned on the water in the shower to dampen the towel with cold water.

“Just don't say anything, will you?”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Viper roll her eyes, but she didn't protest. She let Reyna apply the cold compress to the back of her neck and entwined her fingers around the edges of the sink with a sigh of something that could be taken as relief.

“He doesn't usually call for no reason.”

Reyna sighed. She didn't answer. On purpose. If she did so, Viper would probably have dragged the discussion further, which is exactly what she wanted to avoid, so she just kept that cold towel on the back of Viper's neck, trying to more or less monitor whether the bleeding stopped even a little.

Sabine spat the blood and rinsed her face once again, letting the red streaks disappear down the drain. In frustration, she turned off the tap.

She couldn't listen to the noise anymore. With her hands numb from gripping the edge of the sink, she simply stared at its interior, taking deeper and deeper breaths into her lungs. She felt the blood flow under her nose and that it stopped at her upper lip, but she probably didn't want to look in the mirror to see that.

She didn't want to see it. Just like that.

Even though she should be used to it by now.

She straightened up. Admittedly squinting her eyelids a bit when the light from the lightbulb at the mirror stung her eyes unpleasantly, but she did it. Reyna pulled the towel away from her neck, as if she didn't quite understand her behavior, but at the same time she didn't want to block her from doing it.

“Let me see.”

Viper raised a brow. Not because she didn't know what Zyanya meant, but rather because those words had been said at all. She ignored the drop of blood that was beginning to dry over her upper lip, and her eyes scanned Reyna's face. There was no reproach in that gaze, however.

There was a strange uncertainty lurking there that Reyna didn't seem to have seen there before.

“What for?” She asked hoarsely.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Reyna tighten her fingers on the damp towel. For some reason, the first thing that came to Viper's mind was that she wasn't expecting this question. Or she didn't have an answer to it.

“Just let me.”

The eyebrows that Sabine had previously raised now furrowed. She took a step closer, however, and while she maintained that eye contact stubbornly, Reyna's gaze slid down to her blood-stained nose.

The chill of the towel pierced her to the marrow of her bones, but she involuntarily let out a sigh of relief. All the cells of her skin that had been on fire so far, and her nose pulsed with a strange, dull pain, were just drowned out by this cold, spreading across her face like a wave. Her lip began to go numb, but she was able to endure this numbness as soon as she felt Reyna gently wash the clotted blood from her mouth along with that metallic aftertaste, and her stomach stopped revolting, even if she hadn't eaten breakfast yet,

She grabbed the edge of the cabinet with one hand and took a breath. She swallowed her saliva, trying to negate the dizziness that probably came from the sudden change in temperature.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

Viper looked at her from under her lashes.

“I'll be fine in a minute.”

Her voice was muffled by the towel, but Reyna understood anyway. Which didn't mean she believed it at all. Sabine was pale, and her gaze was focused on nothing in particular, as if she couldn't keep it steady.

“I will help you lie down.”

Viper didn't comment when Zyanya threw her arm over her shoulders and embraced her at the waist. The Mexican woman apparently wasn't going to take any opposition and Viper just held tightly the towel.

The chemist did not have the strength to argue with her own stubbornness. Nor with her own dizziness, which, contrary to her assumption, was not diminishing at all.

They reached the bed, Sabine lay down on her side and watched from the corner of her eye as Reyna sat down on the opposite side. She hesitated for a moment, and Sabine noticed it. It was a slow sigh, her hands placed on her lap and her fingers tapping out some unknown rhythm on them.

She pulled the material away from her face.

“Are you going to at least call back?”

Zyanya turned toward her, and a moment later reflexively looked toward the bathroom, where she had left the phone, but did not move from her seat.

“No,” she concluded. “Texting exists for a reason.”

“Brimstone is the last person who could use texting.”

Zyanya shrugged her shoulders.

“That's his problem, not mine.”

And just then the phone rang again. They both looked in that direction, Viper additionally squirming minimally at the sound of the ringtone, which was unpleasantly hammered into her skull by the echo spreading through it, while Zyanya cursed under her breath.

“Just answer it.”

Reyna hurled some more curses. It was in Spanish, so Viper had no idea what it meant. She knew barely a few words in that language, including 'serpiente'.

But she escorted Zyanya with her eyes to the threshold of the bathroom. The ringtone soon went silent as the Mexican woman came back to her with the device in her hand.

She did not answer. She rejected the call.

“You were wrong,” Reyna involuntarily smiled, still staring at the phone's screen, as if she saw something extremely funny there. “He did send a text.”

Chapter 35: THIRTY FIVE

"You didn't pick up."

Reyna paused upon hearing these words and her footsteps fell silent in the hallway. With her back turned to the man, she could afford to roll her eyes, because frankly, she had hoped that they would pass each other without a word after all.

"Yes, I know that." She bit her tongue, aware that the pissy tone of that sentence might have been too apparent. "I was busy."

"So much you couldn't take a call from your boss?"

Reyna tried to swallow the annoyance in her throat, although she felt she was dangerously close to breaking that intention, hearing that pretentious tone.

"And are you sure you want to hear about what exactly I was doing in the bathroom at that moment?" she asked, shrugging her shoulders as she turned to face him.

The momentary confusion on Brimstone's face was worth the question. Perhaps such directness even irritated him slightly, which would have been an even better option. For some reason, Reyna wanted to irritate him.

She figured he deserved it. She actually hoped he would comment on it somehow, but he just sighed and folded his arms over his chest.

"We need to talk," he said.

"We are talking."

She said it as if it was the most obvious answer in the world. For her, it was. Even though she knew perfectly well that she was stepping onto perhaps thin ice.

"Not here."

Reyna raised an eyebrow.

"Why not?"

"Because that requires talking in private."

Her eyebrow rose even higher. Brimstone didn't comment in any way, more waiting for Zyanya to simply agree without denying anything. And he seemed impatient with the fact that it wasn't going so easily.

Was he hiding something again? There were more some strange agreements in the Protocol, spirals of intrigue and secrets, and now she was going to be part of them?

She felt like saying that she wouldn't go anywhere. And that she was not at all interested in what Liam had to tell her. And if she had absolutely no brakes she would have asked him, if he liked secrets so much, whether he was aware of what was going on under his supervision or not.

Instead, she just squinted. She had to bite her tongue. This time. But she felt she wasn't much short of berating him for what she thought of his behavior over the last while.

And it didn't matter here if Viper had managed to do so already.

"I'll be waiting at the office."

He passed her in the hallway without saying anything else. She didn't turn around immediately, but heard the sound of the door closing, which was a telling summary of this exchange of words.

Sometimes she thought about whether Brimstone was puzzled by her change of attitude toward him. Or whether he saw it at all. Maybe it was a bit crass and risqué, but Zyanya probably wished he would notice. That he would notice how he had lost his authority and finally start doing something about it, instead of sinking deeper with each of his decisions. She also wondered what others were thinking, whether they noticed how some things had begun to look in the Protocol, whether they saw the intrigues, scams and all that... that was up for repair.

And it was not at all to her advantage to have to look him in the eye now and act as if she still considered him the highest authority in the building. To be honest, she was beginning to doubt that she still had any authority in anyone.

But she had to swallow her pride and resentment as she sat down in the chair at the man's desk, because she felt that if she didn't, this conversation would go on even longer.

She leaned back more comfortably to show that she wasn't going to sit stiffly like a log and raised her eyebrow as if to say 'so?'.

Brimstone seemed to understand. He leaned his elbows against the desk top and leaned more toward her. Maybe he wanted to reduce the distance Reyna had created.

She wasn't going to make it easy for him.

"I thought about it for a long time. And to be honest I still have some doubts, but I think it's for the best," he began. Reyna furrowed her brow and crossed her arms across her chest. "I wanted to offer you to take on the role of co-commander and-..."

"What?"

That was the first thing she choked out. A snort of disbelief escaped her lips on its own before she could stop herself.

Brimstone must have been taken out of context, because for a moment he looked as if Zyanya's reaction was a bucket of cold water poured right in his face.

But before he returned his gaze to her, Reyna nodded. And she smiled to herself without looking at him. As if she already knew something. She had looked through him and was damn proud of it.

"That's because Sage isn’t keeping up, right?" she asked. Her laid-back yet confident attitude contrasted with how serious the ex-soldier's face looked. "She finally went too far?"

Reyna's face looked reproachful. But it also gave her the satisfaction of putting Liam under a critical evaluation that she could finally afford.

"This is a temporary proposal. Sage needs to focus on curing Viper now." She felt like laughing at this evasion of the subject. She also felt like he was lying. "You have battlefield experience and spend the most time between the enemy of us all," he said.

"And you've only now come to the conclusion that Sage doesn't have it?"

She wasn't going to hold back the mocking tone of the question. She had shown from the very beginning of this conversation that she didn't want to be here, so she wasn't going to avoid saying what she felt like saying all the more.

Liam didn't even bat an eyelid. And that's a shame.

"I don’t want this conversation to look like this."

Again, she felt like laughing, but only squinted her eyelids.

"And I didn't want to almost die, because someone doesn't find herself in the job she was assigned," she chuckled. Straight up, because she felt that the longer she sat in that chair, the less self-control she had in her. Brimstone seemed to notice this, although he didn't hold her back yet. "Sage wasn't doing well before, but when people started talking, now you're offering this to me. How do you think it looks?"

"Sage being the co-commander was my initiative, so if you have to get mad at someone, get mad at me."

Zyanya snorted.

"And what does it matter whose initiative it was? We could have been killed or seriously hurt. And everyone knows who was listed in the report as the commander anyway, so regardless of who you want us to blame, I think you already know who we're actually blaming," she said. "Now you're trying to justify yourself and her, that's the truth."

"I don't want to make excuses for anyone. Neither myself nor Sage, whom, by the way, I have already talked to," he replied firmly. Reyna, however, did not look him in the eye, her gaze fled to the window. "I want the agents to feel that after what had happened there have been changes to ensure their safety," she said.

"So give that function to someone who actually knows how to do it." She turned her head toward him just to see his reaction. "And I think we both know who I'm talking about."

"That was my intention." Reyna corrected herself in her chair, immediately after she blinked. She jumped with her eyes all over Brimstone's face, searching it for a sense of the words she had just heard. The man seemed to notice. "Viper will help you. Until she will fully recover."

Reyna processed the words for a moment. And for some reason, no matter how many times or how she tried to put them together, the whole thing didn't make a shred of sense.

And it was too suspicious.

“Okay, what's this bullshit about?”

"She'll help you get into it. She'll supervise what you're doing."

"And that's what I'm asking," she said. "Sage didn't need supervision. You yourself say that Viper is not capable of working now, and then you assign her to me as a wingman, so what the hell is going on?"

"You know very well that Sage doesn't get along with Viper. Making them work together would be a recipe for disaster, and we're both aware of that."

"So you left Sage unattended, she turned out to be a threat to the team as a commander, and now you're trying to cover it up and unofficially involve Viper in it because you don't have enough remorse to give her the job, but you know also know you need her?" she expelled almost in one breath. Previous amusement turned to bitterness and disbelief. "Are we in fucking kindergarten or what?"

She felt like hitting her fist on the table. She herself no longer knew whether she was more bitter, annoyed or amused by how idiotic the situation was.

Brimstone looked at her for a few seconds when they both fell silent. He probably was waiting to see if she would say anything else, or if she had already thrown out everything she had in her.

Reyna herself couldn't tell. She would have been happiest to just get up and leave, to prevent all her thoughts and opinions from being spoken aloud. She would then have betrayed Viper and perhaps been kicked out of the job.

On the other hand, whatever Brimstone would accuse her of, she knew full well that she was too useful to just get rid of. Her skills could not be taught or faked, finding a replacement would be a tough nut to crack. Too tough.

But she remained silent anyway.

"Viper was removed from her job for several reasons. I never said it would stay that way permanently," he finally spoke up. Reyna hoped she looked like everything he said was bullshit to her. She wanted him to feel that way. "I realize that I screwed up with the choice of a replacement just as much as Sage screwed up on the missions, but in the current situation we have neither the time nor the conditions to dwell on everything that happened."

The question on the tip of Zyanya's tongue was 'that's because you can't apologize?’ but she only clenched her fingers tighter on her forearm.

"Then say it straight out," she instructed, driving a stare into the man. "Right now, what the intention is. Without the bullshit."

Brimstone seemed surprised by such directness, but at the same time he didn't seem to mind. He leaned back and leaned against the back of the chair.

"Sage was making too many mistakes. I told her to focus on treating Viper. I need a second in command, you will be suitable, and to avoid mistakes Viper will supervise you, but you will be written in the papers."

"Why don't you just give her that position?"

"Because emotions after the recent events still haven't cooled down. Agents still remember what she said and how she acted. You know yourself what she's like..."

"A leader," she paused for a moment. Somehow she couldn't help herself. "She is firm. It's hard for some people to understand it, but they have to get used to it.”

"An agent who feels resentment toward the commander is not effective."

Reyna pressed her lips together and looked to the side. She didn't like that he was right on this one point. The feeling was like a familiar splinter stuck in her skin that lies too deep to be removed.

And it irritated the hell out of her.

Brimstone seemed to think he could go on.

"I want you to think it over. Although I make no secret of the fact that I'm hoping for a quick answer."

Silence. Reyna got up from her desk without a word, leaving Brimstone with only a nod. He just had to accept it and not press for anything more, so he didn't even speak up when she walked to the door and pressed the handle.

"How will you explain the change in the papers to the team?" she asked.

She didn't turn to face him, intending to emphasize that this was the end of the conversation.

"I'll figure something out."

Reyna walked out of the room into the empty hallway.

***

"You're avoiding me."

The previous silence in the gym was broken by the sound of barbell weights clanging on the floor.

Deadlock didn't turn around immediately. For a moment she simply stared at the metal near her feet, as if she wasn't sure if she wanted to stop training now. She wiped her human hand on the material of her sweatpants to get rid of the sweat and shrugged her shoulders.

"Are you surprised?"

Sage did not come closer. She stood at a safe distance from where the Norwegian woman was working out and just watched her from the side. Maybe she was waiting for Iselin to reciprocate the eye contact, even if her gaze was still fixed on the barbell.

"What are you talking about?"

Deadlock let the air out through her nose. She wiped the sweat from her forehead with the palm of her hand, seemingly preparing for the next series of deadlifts, but on the other hand she didn't move from her place, equalizing her breathing.

"More like, what you don't tell me," she replied coolly. "Did you think I wouldn't find out, or what?"

She couldn't stand staring at the floor anymore. She felt her human fingers tighten, though she didn't even know when, and that dull ache of disappointment came up again between her ribs.

She turned on her heel to Sage, wanting to see her reaction to these words. Ling probably wanted very much to look into her eyes, but involuntarily she lowered her head a little, and her shoulders trembled slightly. Perhaps from the cold.

"I wanted to tell you."

Iselin's lips were a narrow line. Sage spoke quietly, looking even overly sensitive, but at that moment Iselin somehow didn't look at it. The bitter sense of disappointment was all too evident.

"Is that so?" she asked. Almost bitingly. With a reproach she couldn't contain. "Is that why I'm finding out about this after a week and, more than than, not from you? Because you wanted to tell me?"

"You think I'm proud of it?" replied Sage. Almost in a whisper. She put her arms around herself, though it's not entirely clear whether out of cold or the need to support herself. "I had to prepare for it somehow... prepare, think about it, whatever. I know what we discussed, what I told you, and I was just... afraid, okay?"

It was hard to tell whether the tears under Sage's eyelids came from sadness, from nerves, or from stress caused by how indifferently Deadlock looked at her at that moment. Indifferently, with a hint of that disappointment Sage had experienced before and felt she would not be able to do more.

"So now you've come to lie to my face that you don't know what I'm talking about?"

Sage didn't know what to answer, because... because she didn't have that answer. She couldn't gather the words, the thoughts, everything in her head was just single words, and her throat was choked by panic, which, not knowing when, came so close.

"I didn't want to lose you," she said.

Her voice cracked dangerously, maybe from panic, maybe from crying, which she tried to control with all her might. She looked at Deadlock with glazed eyes and held back with sniffling, but she found a coldness in the Norwegian's eyes that seemed colder than ever before.

"And you could have lost others?" she replied, tightening her lips immediately afterwards, as if she herself had to digest what she had just said. "The ones you endangered, the ones you could have brought in fucking black bags?"

Sage almost shuddered.

"Iselin, don't say that..."

Deadlock's eyebrows, however, furrowed even more as she pressed a human hand into her sweatpants pocket. She left the bionic one in plain sight, and Sage didn't understand why for the first moment, until the blonde pulled the prosthetic toward her.

Ling, though she didn't want to, looked over to where the artificial material was clearly cutting away from the skin.

"I've had enough souvenirs of someone else's mistakes," she said bitterly. "I've already bagged my friends' dead bodies once, I won't do it a second time because we treat each other differently from the rest of the team."

Although Iselin didn't say it out loud, she forced Sage to look there when the prosthetic forearm was right in her line of sight. She wanted Sage to understand what she meant. What a mental and physical scar the recent events in Svalbard had left on her as a Ståljeger.

And how much she didn't want to go back to them.

Sage was unable to speak up. She couldn't. She faced Iselin's cold gaze, against which she grew weaker with each passing second, which she simultaneously could not bear and at the same time could not lose.

"I'm not going to contribute to this, Ling. Not again."

She looked away. Probably to avoid looking at the tears that began to run down Sage's cheeks.

"Brimstone put me on hold," she threw out suddenly.

As if that was the only and last razor Sage was ready to grasp. The last words before disintegrating, after which the Chinese woman stared into Deadlock's face with an amount of hope that surpassed human ability.

Deadlock, however... did not move an inch. Only her eyelid twitched minimally when the elder caught her arm as if with that one jerk she was trying to stop her from leaving.

"And maybe bring back again," she announced. "I'm sorry, but I won't risk it this time. And I think... that we should just let it go. It will be safer for everyone."

Sage blinked. She fought back tears, which immediately reappeared. She also opened her mouth, but not a single sound came out of it, because when Deadlock turned her back on her with that terrifying coldness in her eyes, their conversation ended.

Sage left the room, slamming the door. Iselin spent the rest of the day at the gym.

***

She only realized that her gaze was dully poking into the kettle when the device began its work and the steady bubbling of boiling water began to spread through the kitchen.

She winced minimally.

She felt stupefied. A bit as if she had a really murderous hangover that was impossible to fight off. She squinted her eyelids against the light. Every sound was louder than usual. Even the tea bag fell out from between her fingers several times before she successfully dropped it into the cup.

She let the air out slowly, resting her whole palms on the marble countertop. The chill was soothing, so she allowed herself to close her eyes and listen to the silence broken only by the working kettle.

Or at least for a while.

She didn't turn around when she heard footsteps, she wasn't going to pay attention. Her gaze shifted from the kettle to the mug, and for some reason she thought how sad the string from the tea bag looked hanging over the edge of the mug.

Some cabinet was opened. Something in Viper twitched to at least take a peek, to be aware of who was in that space with her.

She didn't.

The sound of a dish being put down on the countertop almost hurt her oversensitive head.

"It's your fault."

It was a whisper. But it didn't have a shred of calm in it, and each voice seemed to be squeezed out through Sage's teeth.

Viper tightened her fingers on the edge of the marble annex. She let the air out through her nose, feeling her muscles involuntarily tense up at the sound of that voice.

She didn't want to answer her. She didn't want to start any conversation, didn't want to look at her or be where she was staying.

So she remained silent, trying to focus on the noise of the kettle. She counted down the seconds in her mind, because she knew that if she just left like that, she would be a coward in her eyes. And in her own as well.

Yet for a moment she even thought about it. Her throat tightened and she didn't understand the feeling simply because she didn't want to let it sink in.

She didn't want to let on that she felt fear as soon as she heard that very voice. Her mind sped up, and although she probably didn't have time to register it, she immediately thought of an escape route.

Her palms began to sweat, so she pressed them into her sweatshirt pocket.

"I know you can hear me, so be brave enough to look me in the eye."

Viper clenched her jaw. With her fingers, she began to mint the pocket material from the inside. This was a provocation. She didn't yet know what exactly or what the hell Sage was even talking about, but she knew she couldn't give in to it.

Not now, when an indefinable panic choked her throat and she felt another wave of cold sweat pour down her body.

"Whatever you've come up with again, I don't care," she said, still with her back turned, still with her eyes fixed on the tea bag string. "So take advantage of the fact that I have a good reason not to snitch on you and get the fuck out of here."

She felt like slapping herself in the face for the way she said those words in a trembling voice. She felt that she was suffocating. That Sage's presence here when she was alone with her is one big red exclamation point.

Viper should turn around. Check for a syringe, a knife or a gun in Sage’s hand. And at the same time she couldn't do it, because if any of these suppositions were true, Sabine wouldn't even be able to move.

"Some truth hurts you?"

Viper noted that it sounded almost like the hiss of an angry cat. She swallowed her saliva. She didn't want to see any tool in Sage's hand.

Not now, when she had no way to defend herself, the outlines of objects blurred before her eyes, and she felt all over as if her body was made of cotton wool.

"I have no idea what you're talking about." She turned around. Stiffly. Her limbs were numb and sore from the constant tension. "And I already told you to get out of here."

Sage took a step forward. Sabine wanted to take a step back, but her loins slammed into the edge of the tabletop. She had nowhere to run. She had nowhere to run, no-...

"Don't fucking move," she growled out.

And so she heard her own fear in that sentence. With one hand she reached behind her for balance, but her fingers slipped on the marble and lost their grip.

Sage stood about two meters away from her, and Viper felt like she was breathing her air.

"Because what? Are you going to feel pity for yourself again?" said Sage with a note of venom that Sabine had never heard in her voice before. A venom that now seemed frightening to her. What if she actually had a syringe in her pocket and put her down like a dog again? "Will you come to the conclusion this time that your love for self-destruction is screwing up everything we've built?”

"We?" Viper replied. She didn't have the strength for a mocking tone, and could only snort slightly and try to get even closer to the cabinet. "You don't even have the right to say that."

"I don't? And whose care do you think Protocol was under besides Brimstone, when all you did was sit in that lab of yours and try in every way to show how fed up you were with us?" expelled Ling on one exhale. Her hands clenched into fists. "Or that time when you treated the agents in such a way that they were afraid of you, because you had to take it out on them for not being able to become a great lady scientist worthy of the Nobel Prize? Who was it then?"

The echo of Sage's words carried through the kitchen and bounced off the walls. Her raised tone, which had been balancing on the edge of shouting, quieted completely and the two were left in that penetrating silence.

Sabine pressed her lips together so tightly that they began to hurt. But that wasn't the worst of it. She could endure the fury, she could endure the anger, she could endure the fact that she wanted to throw herself at Sage and scratch her eyes out, even if she could barely stand on her feet.

She could bear it all.

But not the tears that burned under her eyelids. Out of rage. Out of grief. Maybe even from fear. The mixture of these feelings made Viper unable to speak when one tear, overly salty, ran down her cheek, and she left the kitchen.

She forgot about the tea even when she almost bumped into Reyna, passing in the hallway.

"Viper?"

She didn't answer. She slammed her bedroom door so hard that Zyanya almost flinched.

Reyna moved to the kitchen, clenching her fingers on the plate she was carrying so tightly that she thought for a moment about how it would crack in her hands and crumble into a fine ash.

"What the hell happened here?"

Sage's eyebrows were drawn together, but she didn't raise her head when Reyna stood in the doorway. She poured boiling water in an almost nonchalant motion and dipped the bag several times in the water.

"We were talking," she replied.

"You were talking?" hissed Reyna. "It didn't look like the result of a conversation. Tell me what you told her."

"Nothing that wasn't true." Sage sounded stiff. It was as if she had already learned the formula and knew exactly what she wanted to say at that very moment. At this, when Reyna's gaze was burning a hole in her profile, and she was still brewing herself a lemon tea. "Since when do you even care anyway?"

Reyna felt her nails digging into the insides of her hands, so she folded them over her chest.

She should have restrained herself. Maybe it would have been better and safer that way, but somehow she couldn't.

"Since when you've been acting like a bitch."

Sage lowered the cup she had directed to her lips so far and put it down on the countertop. Reyna wasn't afraid of her gaze, even if she found it difficult to determine what was actually in it.

"You don't know anything," she replied dryly.

It was as if she had completely ignored the challenge there, and the fact that it had reached her was only accentuated by the set aside cup.

Zyanya felt like laughing in her face.

"No, you're the one who doesn't know anything."

Because she actually did not. Sage had no idea what Reyna knew. And what's more - Sage had no idea how much Reyna was holding back from spitting it right in her face.

Sage may not have even known what Reyna had in mind right now. And that was even more satisfying in all this.

"Like what? That you're playing her lawyer?" she asked. Fury slid through this apparent indifference. "You can enlighten me. As well as about why she has suddenly become so important to you."

Sage passed Reyna, but deliberately collided with her shoulder as she exited the kitchen.

Reyna regretted having to control herself.

***

She reckoned the Viper wouldn't let her in. In fact, she could say that she expected it to be so from the moment her knuckles met the surface of the door.

That's why the sound of the lock being turned and the rasp of the hinges startled her.

Viper looked at her not even for a full second. She met her eyes, pulled the door so that it opened wider and left Reyna alone with this fact, as she herself immediately turned back to the window, as if to avoid that this second would be prolonged.

Zyanya thought Sabine would reach for the cigarettes. And that's exactly what happened, because as soon as she closed the door behind her, the insistent clicks of the lighter cut through the silence.

The hiss of the cigarette didn't ring out, however, because the tip wouldn't light and pulled a sulphurous curse from Sabine's lips. Immediately afterwards, she hurled the untouched cigarette into the ashtray, and the lighter landed right next to it on the windowsill. Or rather, it had.

It bounced off the ledge and fell to the floor. Viper didn't even look in that direction.

"Can I..." began Reyna. Immediately she broke off as she realized that no definite statement was forming in her head. She had to think about it. "Do you want... do you want to tell me what it was about?"

The tension appeared on Sabine's face again. The corner of her mouth twitched and her eyebrow drew down minimally once she pulled her gaze away from the lighter lying on the floor and, refraining from running away, finally looked at Reyna.

Even if it was done absolutely in spite of herself.

"About that I screwed up Protocol." Another attribute of Sabine was her pained, crooked smile and shrug of her shoulders with that characteristic stiffness. "Actually... that I screwed up everything I… I worked half my fucking life for."

Reyna's knees buckled when she saw the tears that began to swirl under Sabine's eyelids. She couldn't move, staring at her as if she had stepped on fresh concrete.

Viper didn't wipe them away. Perhaps she knew that if she did, more and more of them would appear. Her face, however, did not express this crying. It seemed to exist separately from the tears, the appearance of which she probably did not want to admit.

Maybe there were no more emotions in those tears. Maybe they had managed to evaporate. Or maybe Viper was already too tired of them to empathize with the crying the way everyone else did.

"About that I'm selfish, I hate people, and people hate me. About that agents are afraid of me, and about that I screwed up my life because I couldn't be good enough. About that I'm not in charge, I'm just intimidating, that I'm too demanding, too strict, too cold and too inhumane," she croaked out, ignoring how her shoulders suddenly began to shake along with her hands so much that she pressed them into her sweatshirt pockets in shame. "And about hating myself so much that I make it a problem for everyone around me."

The last words rang out and cut right into that dead silence as Viper pressed her lips together, as if she never intended to speak again in her life, or as if she regretted that she hadn't managed to keep this information to herself.

That Reyna had heard it all just now and that she was looking at her again with that compassion of hers that Viper couldn't stand.

That's why she reached for the lighter. She bent down, trying to ignore how intensely dizzy it made her feel, and caught the object in her hand.

Reyna, in turn, caught her wrist just at the moment when Sabine wanted to return to the abandoned idea of lighting a cigarette and her hand hovered over a packet lying on the windowsill.

She looked in that direction for just a second.

"You know that's not true."

It wasn't even a question. And that's why Viper twitched her eyebrows, as if she didn't know whether she should wrinkle them more or lift them up. Because Reyna shouldn't be sure. Reyna shouldn't disbelieve what she heard about Viper, when Viper herself had been so used to these thoughts that she could recite the same formula in the middle of the night.

Even if it hurt like a motherfucker.

Viper cast a quick glance once again at Reyna's fingers entwining her wrist. She felt like laughing, but only managed to crookedly lift the corner of her mouth.

"Is that so?" she asked. Reyna let her hand drop, which the woman placed on the cigarette pack. She did not move further, however. "You know it too, after all, Reyna. I know that you know."

"I don't know anything, because it's bullshit."

Viper had difficulty deciding whether to make eye contact. Once she wanted it, once she avoided it like a fire, and there seemed to be no pattern to this conversation. But when she turned to Reyna, the latter realized that there was a pattern after all.

Viper talked about herself while looking at her. About this self-hatred. About the pain. About everything she thought about herself, because she wanted to give it truthfulness. She wanted Reyna to believe that the Viper in front of her was the same Viper in her head.

"You know they hate me. Or they feel dislike for me," she said. She shrugged her shoulders, again ignoring the tears that gathered under her eyelids, and when she smiled crookedly and shrugged her shoulders, one of them ran down her cheek. "Except maybe Brimstone or Kiljjoy," she corrected. "I'm not someone you can tell your problems to, who will listen to you or with whom you play games at some social evening. I've always... stuck to what I'm here for. I thought it was fine, that's how it was supposed to be."

Reyna let go of her wrist. Probably she wasn’t able to hold it back any longer. Sabine, however, did not reach for her cigarettes, but embraced herself with her arms.

Reyna took a step forward, as if she wanted to be in Sabine's line of sight. As if she needed her to look at her.

"Because it is fine."

Viper took in a lungful of air. Something in her face contorted. Cracks appeared on that hard shell beyond the tears. She broke down, maybe minimally, and maybe it almost hurt her.

She felt as if knives had been driven into her lungs.

"And by being fine you mean them being afraid of me?"

Reyna fell silent. All the pieces of the puzzle fell into place, and the crack she had previously only thought she saw made sense. And reality.

Viper never wanted to be seen as a monster. Never. Viper wanted to do what was necessary. What seemed... good. And that's what it was supposed to be.

"Viper..."

That was all she managed to get out. She had no idea what she even wanted to say, what would be appropriate to say to Sabine at this moment.

"Don't even try to deny it, please," Callas interrupted. There was a kind of plea in that sentence. For Reyna not to deny it, to simply accept it without any consolation or attempt to distort the truth just for the sake of making Viper feel better. "You know I'm right."

Sabine wrapped her arms tighter around herself. It was as if she longed to shrink, or preferably disappear altogether these few moments, so that the feeling of that damn shame would finally disappear.

"I have never been afraid of you. And I never will, do you understand?" replied Reyna firmly. "I already told you that you are not a monster. And you never have been one, nor will you ever be one, no matter if anyone thinks otherwise."

Viper took this information with difficulty. It didn't matter that this was the second time she had heard the same thing, it didn't matter that Reyna sounded completely sincere and serious each time. Viper, however, habitually first furrowed her brows and then relaxed them, as if she had lost the strength to hold this tension of hers, and letting Reyna's words sink in was a gesture more of surrender than acceptance.

Zyanya frantically searched for eye contact, which she once again lost when Sabine stuck her gaze into the window. She wanted to receive it, maybe see some kind of confirmation in her eyes, or maybe even a response, even if only in two or three words.

She wanted to get any kind of reaction, but Sabine stubbornly kept her gaze where she intended. And she didn't give Reyna what she wanted because... she cried.

It wasn't sobbing, even her breaths were reasonably calm, though perhaps a little shallower. But the tears flowed on their own when Sabine didn't say a word. Nor did she do anything to stop them.

Maybe she realized she wouldn't be able to.

And then Reyna didn't wait any longer. She knew there was no point, that after all she had already seen enough and enough words had been spoken for her to manage to come to her own conclusions and take action.

Maybe she didn't know herself when she moved even closer to Viper, put her arms around her and hugged her.

At first, Sabine's muscles were hard, almost steel. For the first few seconds it might have seemed to stay that way, but that's when Viper let herself breathe. Maybe... Maybe she realized that she was safe.

That there is no one here but them, the door is locked. That Reyna, of all the things she could do, just wanted to hug her. And nothing more. To comfort without words, which didn't contribute anything anyway, and just show that... she was there.

That's why the stiffness began to fade, and Viper hesitantly placed her hand on Reyna’s shoulder blades, as if on the one hand she wanted to do it, and on the other she was damn hesitant. But she did it, reciprocating the embrace as much as her mind could afford at that moment.

And then all she was left with was to cry.

Cry a lot.

Chapter 36: THIRTY SIX

Notes:

The bonus anniversary chapter today, because it has been a year since I posted this fic on ao3. Thank you for the kudos, comments and feedback I've recieved over this year, I love you all! <3

Zyanya wasn't sure at exactly what point Sabine's slowed heartbeat seemed too suspicious. At what point it slowed down so much that Reyna furrowed her brow, but she didn't even have time to ask because the Viper's head fell onto her shoulder at the same moment her entire body went limp.

She wasn't actually sure of anything, except that she felt a monotonous screeching in her head, and the generally prevailing chaos in the medbay made the world spin, leaving her disoriented in the middle of it.

Sage's footsteps cut into her skull, the clatter of the metal cart carrying medical supplies was unbearable, but she still remained still, watching the Chinese woman unwrap a IV from its sterile packaging.

"When did it happen?"

At first Reyna didn't understand that the question was directed at her. She slipped her fingers into her hair unconsciously, trying to calm the beating of her own heart, which was pounding painfully against her ribs.

She didn't know where she should look. Viper lay on the bed unconscious, with blood stagnating under her nose, and Reyna could still feel the material of her T-shirt damp where the same blood had touched it.

She felt her breakfast rise to her throat as the needle of the venflon silently went into the vein in the bend of Callas' elbow.

And yet she had seen so much blood in her life that she shouldn't even blink.

"A moment ago," she replied. She tried to ignore how much she didn't want Sage's presence right now. How tired she was of knowing that she had to rely on her and only she knew what to do. "She felt a little worse today, but-..."

"What's going on?"

Only Reyna turned to Brimstone, who had entered the room. She had no idea where he had come from, whether Sage had informed him or whether he had somehow noticed the commotion himself.

Reyna had a feeling that she was suffocating. There was too little air in the room. There was too much noise. And she continued to remember how Sabine slumped against her, only to be hit by the smell of blood a second later.

She watched Sage and had no idea what she was doing, but she seemed to want to be everywhere. She rummaged through the cabinets, put on her gloves, left the room first and then returned, leaving Reyna in those long seconds alone together with Brimstone in the too-cramped, too stuffy and too chaotic room.

"She fainted. I'll draw blood for testing," said Sage, just when Reyna was about to speak up. Maybe it's a good thing she didn't have to, because she felt she wouldn't have been able to croak out any meaningful sentence. "Take care of Killjoy."

"Killjoy?" For some reason, Reyna had the feeling that the agent's nickname was a stone on her tongue. Actually every word now was one. "Killjoy is here?"

"We had a training session together. She ran after me when she heard it was about Viper."

Reyna felt as if she were standing in the middle of a tornado. More information attacked her like punches in her guts, from which she couldn't defend herself or understand them.

"Where is she now?"

Sage indicated the exit with a movement of her head.

"In the hallway. I told her to wait there," stated Sage. She seemed impatient and annoyed that both Brimstone and Reyna were looking at her hands, just when the situation was particularly tense. "Can you take care of her and let me work?"

Brimstone, however, did not move from his place. His suggestive look sent to Reyna was clearly meant to make her realize that although this request was directed to both of them, she was the main target.

And that's why she raised her eyebrows. And then she frowned.

"I'm not going anywhere."

Brimstone took a bigger breath.

"I need to have a word with Sage, so respect our privacy."

She felt like snorting laughter in his face. Not to mention Sage, whom she didn't let out of her sight for a second, even if the Chinese woman wasn't looking at her, putting the tubes with the collected blood in the rack.

"You can have it now as well, if it’s that urgent," she replied, folding her arms over her chest. She knew Liam would not protest or rebuke her. He needed her too much. "Is it about the procedure?"

Brimstone did not direct himself to Reyna. He didn't even look at her, and that annoyed her more than the fact that he was about to make her leave like a shithead a moment ago.

"How much time do we have?"

Sage took a few steps away from the bed as she made sure the IV was flowing properly and she collected the appropriate blood samples. She pulled the latex gloves off her hands and hurled them into the trash.

"Less than I thought."

"Is she dying?"

Zyanya wanted to slap Brimstone in the face for that one question, even though she knew it was accurate and that she probably wanted to ask the same one.

"Not yet. But we have to hurry," Sage replied. Her voice was cold, compared to what was going on. It was as if everything she did didn't move her, as if her every action was mechanical. "She needs some more electrolytes, she's probably dehydrated. She should be ready this afternoon."

Reyna felt that she was unable to listen to her, and at the same time she couldn't avoid listening to her. She was getting too much information that she probably couldn't quite process, and worse, they weren't stopping.

"Reyna, take care of Killjoy. Don't let her hang around."

She turned to Brimstone as if he had at least slapped her in the face, and blinked.

"Why me?" She failed to hide the indignation in her voice, but she didn't seem to intend to either. "I said I'm not moving from here."

Perhaps she shouldn't have used that tone toward him. But only perhaps, because whenever she spoke to him, her dislike for him did not let go for a moment. She remembered everything he had done. And perhaps there was something satisfying about the fact that he was unaware of it and could not even deny it.

Something twitched in Brimstone's face. She saw it coming, but she was very happy about it.

"Because it's an order."

Reyna furrowed her brow, and a dangerous spark passed across her face. She didn't have time to bite her tongue.

"I don't give a shit about your orders."

Brimstone only blinked several times, and out of the corner of her eye Zyanya saw that he clenched his fingers tighter on his forearms. However, he didn't seem particularly moved by this confession.

Hardly, he took a step toward her, invading her personal space, as if to make her realize that she would not slip away so easily. But Reyna didn't move either. She faced his gaze, pressing her lips tightly together.

She wanted him to know that she didn’t regret her words.

"And I don't give a shit that you don’t give a shit, so just fucking go there."

Not even Sage spoke up. No one spoke up. Maybe even they themselves unconsciously held their breath, and the silence was broken only by the steady beeping of the cardiac monitor in the medbay.

Reyna took one last glance at Viper's bed. And then she left the room without looking at anyone.

***

"Will someone finally tell me what's going on here?" Reyna didn't have to look long for Killjoy, because the younger woman immediately sprang from her chair and almost bumped into her right after the door closed. "Sage runs out of the shooting range in the middle of training, mentions something about Viper, and then goes here and leaves me in the damn hallway!"

Zyanya took a step forward, perhaps unconsciously pushing the younger woman back, who, although she took that step back, did not take her eyes off her for a moment.

"Nerves won't help, sit down."

She felt a bit like a hypocrite saying these words. She herself was aware of the fury that had gripped her just a few moments ago, and she herself was aware that her own nerves were tarnished to the point that she had to intertwine her fingers together to hide how they were trembling.

It was hard for her to tell whether it was from anger or stress.

"Is that blood?" The question knocked her out of her rhythm as she sat down in the chair next to Klara’s. She felt like most of the sounds were passing somewhere past her head. "Is that Viper’s blood?" Another question. The fear in Killjoy's voice overshadowed the previous anger. "Reyna!"

Reyna felt like she couldn't speak up. Even if she wanted to. Even if somewhere in there, her lungs squeezed tight at how terrified Killjoy seemed.

She didn't know what she should say to her. Killjoy didn't know anything other than that there was something wrong with Viper, as long as Viper didn't tell her anything. Of which Reyna was sure.

Killjoy didn’t know how serious Viper's illness was. Nor what they had to do to save her. All she could do was sit and think and demand explanations from people who clearly didn’t want to give her those.

Zyanya realized that she felt sorry for her.

Even after all this time, even if she still hadn't fully shed her experience of what Killjoy of the Kingdom had contributed to, and even if that resentment probably remained somewhere, hidden perhaps from Reyna herself, she sympathized with Killjoy for the very fear she herself couldn't quite swallow.

Klara was just... a kid. Zyanya didn't know why she thought about it just now, but somehow she wasn't going to go into it.

She rested her elbows on her knees and stuck her gaze into the wall across from her probably because she couldn't look at the younger woman for the first few seconds, even if she knew the latter needed it.

"Yes, it's her blood," she said finally. She felt like the words barely squeezed through her throat, even if she said them calmly. Killjoy let out a gasp from between her lips, and her shoulders slumped. "She had a hemorrhage, she passed out."

Only now did she look at her. Reyna wanted to see how KJ would react. Klara swallowed her saliva, she was poking her eyes at Reyna as if she was the only source of truth in this world, and her fingers tightened on her knees so hard that her knuckles turned white.

"What?" she mouthed after a moment. "You said Viper would come up with something, I thought..."

Zyanya wasn't sure if it was actually just shock or if it was the tears that choked Killjoy’s throat. She was suddenly painfully aware of the dried blood on her shirt, which made the material unnaturally stiff.

"She didn't want it to tell you," Zyanya admitted, herself not knowing why she almost came close to whispering. She felt as if she was confessing to a crime. She felt as if she was guilty of sitting here and now with a German woman whose palms were sweating from nerves. "She didn't want to tell anyone. But especially you."

"Tell me what!?"

She croaked at the raised voice. At the despair that sounded in it and which, as much as Reyna didn't want to hear, she heard all too much. And she wasn't sure how she should react to it at all.

"That she failed," she said. Quieter than she intended. Immediately afterward, she grunted to get rid of her hoarse voice. "That she didn't find a cure for herself and that... it was getting worse."

She hung her head, though she didn't even know when. She should feel better that she got it off her chest, that Killjoy already knows or at least get that selfish feeling that she's not left alone with this information except for Brimstone and Sage. But that didn't happen at all.

Killjoy rested her elbows on her knees. She first opened her mouth as if she wanted to say something, but then closed it with a weak gasp. She did so several times, as Reyna saw the whole process from the corner of her eye, even the way Killjoy's eyes welled up with tears.

"So what now?" she asked.

Killjoy was trying to hide how thin the rope was that was somehow holding her together. But Reyna could hear her heart. And that wheezing breath. She no longer had the strength to scream, it even seemed to Zyanya that in those few moments all strength and all aggression had left Klara as if they had never been there.

Now there was only fatigue. And fear.

"They're going to help her."

"How?"

Reyna felt like tearing her hair from her head. She wanted Killjoy to stop asking. That... everyone would stop. She felt she didn't feel like having this conversation, because she herself hadn't yet processed what had happened. Nor what will happen. In fact, in a few hours.

Funny that not long ago she thought she had settled into this thought. And now? Now the blood boiled in her veins at the mere sight of Sage, and she had to relax her hands every time they clenched into fists. Every second all those mistakes Ling had inadvertently made ran through her head, and now... now Viper's life depended on her.

"They will carry out the procedure," she said truthfully. She couldn't put it into blunt words. "They will cure her."

She begged in her mind that Killjoy wouldn't inquire. Some words wouldn't pass her lips.

"What if it doesn't work?"

She didn't want to hear that question, even if she felt like asking it herself. To herself, to the space around her, or to the echoes in the hallway that wouldn't give her any answer, but would still make her feel a little better.

"It has to work."

It was hard to determine who she was convincing more. Herself, Killjoy, or the invisible, silent audience around her.

"What if... what if it doesn't?" Klara paused for a moment. She was swallowing saliva. Or tears. "If she... God... If she-..."

Her words jumbled, breaking off. Several times she tried to finish the thought, but failed. She clenched her fingers, and her sweaty skin slipped against itself, no matter how many times she wiped her hands on her pants.

That's why she froze motionless when Reyna locked her in a hug. A sudden and unexpected one, where she wrapped her arms tightly around the younger one, stopping her from this constant shaking.

Only later did she relax. Zyanya felt her fists clench on the material of her shirt, and then she began to cry quietly, as if on the one hand she was holding back from doing so, but on the other she knew she wouldn't be able to anyway.

She had never hugged Killjoy. She never... never actually even felt the need to talk to her or get to know her better when they both found themselves in the Protocol. She tried to treat her no differently from the rest of the agents, despite the history between them.

But now... now it somehow came out on its own. Killjoy looked at no one the way she looked at Viper. Viper, who was everything to her, Viper in whom she perhaps saw a substitute for the family she had lost touch with at an age when no one should.

And Reyna... Reyna felt that she was not alone with this.

"I'll stay here," Reyna said quietly when Klara's crying subsided after a few minutes and now they just embraced each other in silence. "I'll watch over her, and you go get some rest."

"No. I'll stay too."

The statement was thrown so tough and firm that Zyanya didn't want to argue with it at first. But Klara was almost limp in her arms, her head was probably cloudy, and the medbay was not the best place to think about such things.

"It's not a good idea," Reyna replied calmly. "If something happens, I'll text you, I promise."

Killjoy agreed faster than she would have thought. Maybe she was already tired. Maybe subconsciously she didn't want to be here anymore. Maybe she even felt the same way Reyna did.

Reyna watched her leave the medbay, trying to get past the feeling of a dull ache in her chest.

***

"I want to see that paper."

Brimstone interrupted his conversation with Sage at the same moment Reyna stepped into the medbay supply room. They both broke away from the conversation as if electrocuted, although it was hard to tell whether they were surprised more by the visit itself or by the demand that came from Reyna's mouth without the slightest stammer.

"What paper?"

Zyanya was a little surprised that it was Sage who had picked up the conversation, but she actually didn’t care. She shifted her gaze from Brimstone to the Chinese woman without moving from her place.

"The one about the procedure. After all, you have to write it down."

She said it as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. According to her, it was. According to her, she was right and Brimstone's furrowed brow was not impressive for her.

"It's true, but why do you want to see it?"

Sage probably felt safer when Brimstone spoke up. And that's a shame. Reyna found some kind of primitive amusement in making Sage feel uncomfortable in her presence. She deserved it.

Zyanya wondered whether she should be bitter because she just happened to feel like it, or play it safe.

"Because I'll be there, so I'd rather know what's going to happen," she said.

Once again she gave them an answer so trivial to her, and so complicated to them. And it gave her the same satisfaction. Those expressions of surprise on their faces as she pulled cards from her sleeve that they had no idea about, that communicative look they exchanged between them, though they may have thought she hadn't noticed.

"Viper asked me to do it," she added succinctly when no questions came from their side, and she didn't want to waste any more time here than necessary. "So that's what I'm going to do," she added.

"How can I be sure that’s what she did?"

Just as the faint amount of anger in Sage's voice was satisfying, and somewhere Reyna had even counted on it, the pretentious tone drove an irritating splinter into Zyanya's skin. She stuck a hard stare at her to show that she was not at all afraid to answer her.

"Are you implying that I'm lying?" she asked. Sage did not answer, only pressed her lips tighter together. "Do you think I have any joy in this, or what?"

"I think there's no need for you to play a guard dog," Ling threw out, probably before she could stop herself. "I know what I'm doing."

"Do you?" Reyna reflected, folding her arms over her chest. She ignored Brimstone's presence completely; she didn't want him to interfere, nor did she want Sage to think that Reyna intended to bring him into it in any way. She just looked at her. "It seems to me that if that were the case, I wouldn't be here now, don't you think? Since Viper asked me to do it, she had a reason. And I don't care what you think about it."

Sage didn't respond. And Reyna wanted to take a step forward, maybe add something else just to invade her space, but Brimstone's hand on her shoulder stopped her in those actions.

"I don't know if your presence there will affect Sage well. I think making a crowd doesn't make much sense."

Reyna felt like snorting in his face. She smacked his hand off her shoulder. She wondered if her earlier words had given him anything to think about. She realized they hadn't.

He pretended that nothing had happened.

"If you had any idea what was going on under your supervision, maybe you would understand me," she hissed. "You're lucky I don't have the right to make you understand, so for once just give me this paper and don't try to acquit anyone you don't know everything about."

He was surprised by the last sentence, she saw that. Pretty much, that's exactly what she was aiming for. At this growing tension and the net of misunderstandings they had woven for themselves, and now their legs were getting tangled.

"If you know something more, tell me."

She saw perfectly that spark of fear in Sage's eyes. And that annoyance growing in Brimstone through the accumulating ignorance.

And as much as she wanted to finally break it, to end this silence and make the man painfully aware of what he had contributed to and was unaware of, she couldn't say a word.

"I'm not the one you should be talking to about this. And you know very well who I mean."

Brimstone's gaze slid from Reyna's face to her hand, which she held out in front of her in silent demand. She didn't expect an objection. In fact, she was sure she would win from the moment she walked in here.

The file of papers was in her hand a second later. She didn't even say goodbye.

***

She made sure no one was around as she put a stool next to Viper's bed, placed the stapled sheets of paper on the windowsill and opened them on the first page.

She didn't want to leave her alone. Not with Sage. Not when she couldn't defend herself. And not when the beeping of the heart monitor was so annoying and depressing that she could hardly stand her overhearing.

Outside the window gray clouds had gathered, probably announcing rain. The room was dingy as she went through page after page, reading words, sentences and whole paragraphs that... probably scared her, although she tried to tell herself otherwise. She knew that proper documentation was necessary and that it made the procedure safer, but... but at the same time she felt that the officialness of it all was strangely killing her.

She tried to tell herself that this was the way it was supposed to be. That it would be fine, because it had to be. That all these paper sheets had some meaning in them that she may not have grasped, but which was enough to make her believe in them.

Unwittingly, she looked at the drips of fluid from the IV bag dripping down the tubing. Unbeknownst to her, she began tapping her fingernail on the windowsill in their rhythm, began to feel the rhythm of Viper's heartbeat as her own, and with her hearing unconsciously tried to catch her breathing, although her gaze was fixed on the papers.

Sage's words ran through her mind, but she quickly chased them away.

"What happened?"

If she had been holding a pen, it probably would have fallen out of her hand and rolled somewhere on the floor. But she could only stop tapping her nail on the windowsill.

Viper looked at her with furrowed brows, her voice so quiet that Reyna almost didn't hear it. She struggled to admit that she missed that hint of feistiness, that once-annoying self-confidence seen when, while talking to Viper, you could feel what the woman thought of herself.

And now all that was gone. And all that was left was a hoarse dry throat.

"You fainted," Reyna said. She was unaware that she had been holding her breath until she let it out of her mouth. "You probably don't remember that?"

Viper herself now sighed. She stared at Reyna, clinging to her figure like a drowning man to a razor, though she didn't know why. Reyna was the only thing unchanged. After all, everything had changed around her. She was not in her room. She did not feel comfortable.

She felt weak. She felt disappointed in herself. And in this weak, unbearing body.

"No," she whispered. "I don't remember."

She winced at how irritated she was by the plastic tubes in her nose through which her oxygen was delivered. How her sweat-stained hair stuck to her forehead, some of it mangled on her pillow.

She was even disturbed by the idiotic hospital pajamas she had probably been changed into by Reyna. She wasn't going to ask about it, she was sure.

Her lips tightened for a moment. As if she was angry. Like she was disappointed. And probably because of that, Reyna left the papers as if they had never been there and unconsciously leaned closer to the bed. Maybe she wanted to show something.

That Viper is not alone? That it's okay to be frustrated? She had no idea herself.

However, before she had time to ask anything, she was interrupted.

"How bad?"

The question was simple. Maybe even too simple, which is probably why it was so uncomfortable. Zyanya thought about how Viper's presence had once been the splinter in her skin. Maybe she even tried to tell herself that it still was.

Now the splinter had become this question. And the realization that she knew the answer to it.

Zyanya knew she couldn't lie to her. Besides, she probably wouldn't even be able to. But she still couldn't put the words together into a sentence, so she opened her mouth a few times and then closed it.

She drummed her finger against her knee, unconsciously running her eyes from Viper. She quickly corrected herself.

"Sage will do the treatment this afternoon."

The words hung in the air. They echoed somewhere, bounced off the walls, and partially flew out the ajar window. They were like a kind of heavy tar suspended in the air. Smoke that settled in the lungs and made Zyanya feel like coughing, although she couldn't.

Viper didn't react at first. She didn't even blink, continuing to stare at Reyna as if... as if she was waiting for her to add something. As if she didn't reckon that this was the end of the statement, and the information itself flashed past her head in a fraction of a sec, without even leaving a trace.

And then she collapsed on the bed as if something heavy had fallen on her chest.

It was hard to tell whether Viper felt like crying, screaming, or just endured it in silence, because she didn't have the strength for any extreme reaction. Her gaze lingered on the ceiling for a while, as if the whiteness of the paint would help her arrange her thoughts, which, although clouded by weakness, seemed to create one big noise in her head.

After all, she knew it would happen sooner or later. After all, it was inevitable. After all, there was no other way out.

So what was she hoping for?

Reyna didn't know if she should do it or if it was the right thing to do. To be honest, she didn't think about it, intoxicating herself with the thought that they were accompanied only by silence and the occasional hum of the radiators combined with the beeping of the heart monitor.

But she grabbed Viper's hand.

She glanced in that direction only for a moment, because maybe she herself didn't know how she could explain it, so she preferred to pretend that nothing had happened. That she just felt the need to show support in this way without any explanation.

Viper only looked at her when Reyna squeezed her gently. She made sure of what she had done. And she also reassured Viper.

"But you won't be alone," Zyanya said. Quietly, in a whisper. As if she was afraid to frighten her, although, after all, Sabine would not even have a way to escape. "I talked with Brimstone and Sage. They can't forbid me to go there and they won't do it, okay?"

When she said this out loud, she somehow felt better. But her optimism died down when the initial relief on Sabine's face turned into something completely different. She got serious again, even if she didn't have the strength to do so, and the tension was back on her, her brow furrowed and the thoughts that flooded her mind like a river, but ended with one question.

"What if this doesn't work?"

Reyna should be ready for that. After all, she had already heard this question once, answered it once and eased the same fire.

Yet there was something different about the words spoken into the hospital silence directly to her by a woman who, tired of her own life, was now fighting for what was left of it.

The question, surrounded by an arsenal of medical equipment, that damned beeping, the smell of disinfectant and a strange depressing aura ran straight up Zyanya's spine.

And that's exactly how she felt it. Like paralysis.

She felt that Viper needed to hear an answer. But not one like Killjoy's. Bluntly, without dimwittedness, without wrapping things up.

Reyna wanted to give her one. She really wanted to. But the words didn't squeeze through her throat, no matter how hard she tried.

So she could only repeat the same words that had already been said that day.

"It has to work."

Viper asked nothing more. She only squeezed Reyna's hand tighter, but when Zyanya looked at Viper, her gaze rested on the window.

Chapter 37: THIRTY SEVEN

Reyna knew she would hate this room the moment she entered it. She couldn't say why, she couldn't put the feeling into words or explain it in any way, but the anxiety and strange uncertainty growing in her every second seemed to squeeze her ribs and take away her ability to breathe fully.

It was cold inside. A chill came from the metal tubes, equipment, disinfected cabinets and instruments. From everything.

The room for more serious procedures was not one Reyna would visit often. Well, or at least not while conscious. Every agent had come across it at least once during their career, and there was nothing strange about that, but now, looking at it from the sidelines... it seemed downright scary to her.

And yet Reyna wasn't afraid of just anything. Right?

Out of the corner of her eye, she watched that damn heart monitor and Viper's chest, which was rising steadily. After thinking about it for a while, Zyanya concluded that the use of anesthesia before transferring her here made more sense than she initially thought.

In the same way, the choice of room itself provided more privacy and reduced the possibility that one of the agents would sow unnecessary panic because they would see something he shouldn't.

Reyna was here for Viper. And for no one else.

That's why she swallowed the heavy gulp she had in her throat and straightened up more in her chair. She squeezed tighter the stapled documents she had been looking at just a few hours ago, feeling the marks of her sweaty palms on the paper, but she pretended that she didn’t feel it.

Her instinct made her immediately jerk her head to the side as the door opened and Sage walked in.

The Chinese woman didn't even look at her, heading straight for the cabinets. It was as if Reyna didn't exist, as if her presence was somehow automatically overlooked by the healer and that's what she wanted to show her.

That she didn't care about Reyna.

Reyna, on the other hand, did just the opposite. She watched, her eyes boring into every inch of Sage's body, every slightest expression or movement, clutching the stapled pages just to get the sense that something was holding her back.

Sage put on latex gloves, the crackle of them being applied to the skin carried an unpleasant echo, but Reyna didn't flinch. She suspected that Sage was doing it on purpose. She wanted to frighten her somehow, to discourage her. Maybe she hoped Reyna would leave the room on her own before anything else started.

She could only dream of that.

Reyna remained silent, yes. She sat in her seat, blending into the background for as long as possible, but contrary to Sage's expectations, she finally spoke up.

"What is it?"

Her voice cut through the silence like the blade of a knife. Sage turned her head away from the syringe she had just held, lowered the ampoule with the drug and set it down on the metal table, frowning her eyebrows.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

Reyna could perfectly see the irritation on her face and in her voice. She didn't like the fact that Reyna was here and showed it as much as she could. If the situation had not been serious, perhaps Reyna would have found it satisfying in some way. She pointed to the table with her chin, outlining her thought.

"What's in the syringe?"

Sage's eyebrows drew together even more.

"What are you suggesting?"

She almost spat out the question. Reyna didn't even blink. She wouldn't yield as easily as Ling thought.

Zyanya regretted that she couldn't tell her at that moment what she actually knew. That she couldn't spit in her face the real reason why Viper wanted protection. Why she felt threatened and why she couldn't stand that Sage was the one and only person who could help her.

She swallowed this feeling.

"What. Is. In the syringe."

She was aware that she had strained those words out, but she also knew that this was the only way to show Sage that she wasn't kidding. And that no side questions would pass her by without even the slightest echo.

Reyna knew why she was here, and nothing else mattered to her.

Sage faced her momentarily with her eyes, but grabbed the ampoule and stretched it out on her hand toward Reyna without a word. And although she held it so tightly that even under her gloves you could see how tight her tendons were, Zyanya ignored it.

She read the name. She glanced at the papers in her hands. And then she stood up and, passing Sage, put the ampoule back in its place.

Ling did not speak again. She injected the substance into the Viper's venflon and moved away from the bed, standing in front of the cardiac monitor.

The monotonous screech that followed a moment later seems to have permanently embedded itself in Reyna's skull. She felt like her breakfast was coming up her throat, and although she tried to hold it back she looked at the damn graph anyway.

The horizontal line was unmistakable.

She had to lower her gaze. She slammed it into the tiles between her feet, sliding it over them to focus on anything that wasn't that particular sound.

She set the papers down next to her on the floor, the pages rustling as they fell.

"How long..." She didn't want to hesitate. "How long should it be like this?"

She didn't know if she expected Sage to answer her, or if the answer would come to her on its own, or if she would be left to this echo.

Instead, she knew that the answer was probably in those abandoned pieces of paper that stared at her from the floor and screamed in letters arranged in serious and formal sentences.

Somehow she couldn't touch them. And Sage didn't answer her, taking one of her healing orbs in her hand.

Reyna tried to fight the way her stomach churned as she involuntarily returned her gaze to that damn monitor. How in a moment her head hurt, and she wasn't sure if she felt dizzy, sick, or if it was just paralyzing fear that encompassed her body in that cold room.

And yet she had seen death so many times. So many times it had looked into her own eyes and so many times someone had died in front of her, only to be brought back to life later. So many times she saw blood, guts dyeing the snow red, dead, motionless eyes frozen in one point.

It's just that somehow... somehow she never saw Viper in this situation. Because it... it was this Viper. The same one who said that the opponent was afraid of the drawn-out death that the torturer was playing with. The same one who, with a bloody nose, continued to keep the team in formation. And the same one who had herself shot so that Reyna could live, even if she herself was barely on her feet.

Viper was the person who seemed to be the unchanging, constant in the Protocol, and Reyna... probably got used to that thought. That Viper had always been there and was in it now. That Viper loved her coffee at any time of the day or night, that Reyna would always find her in the lab and that... and that Zyanya finally didn't feel so alone. Different. Less human because of her radianite.

And all their quarrels, the harsh words that were said between them when they couldn't stand each other's company or even a single glance blurred somewhere in Reyna's memory, although she didn't even know when. When all the misunderstandings, shouting and insults turned simply... into understanding. The silence between them as they smoked cigarettes in the evening chill, and the quilt surrounding their naked bodies. Conversations seemingly fleeting, yet serious, even the faint smiles from Sabine that Reyna sometimes caught.

Everything was... normal. More than ever.

Reyna felt finally seen by someone. Not as a killing machine, not as a radiant or immortal entity, the perfect assassin.

In the company of Viper, Reyna was... herself. In the most human way she could afford to be since she didn't know when. She was not judged. She didn't have to explain anything. In a way, they were both different from each other and... damn similar.

Zyanya, though she didn't want to, thought about Sage's words. Had indeed Viper suddenly become so important to her?

She could have denied it. Of course she could, she could even do it for eternity if she so desired.

But seeing that lifeless horizontal line on the monitor, she couldn't lie.

Reyna cared about Viper, even if she couldn't quite understand it.

And that's probably why she felt her palms sweating, her heart pounding against her ribs, and herself feeling like the air in the room was running out.

Viper couldn't die. Not when Reyna wanted to tell her so many things, when she needed to tell her so many things and was stupid enough to not do it sooner.

That she wanted to apologize. That she didn't notice what happened those years ago, that she never asked, that she didn't try to understand her from the beginning, or that she thought Viper just was like that. That she apologizes for being an idiot for so long. That she looks up to her. That she should learn from her.

And that she never in her life wanted Viper to die for her on that one mission, because she wouldn't have been able to bear it.

She probably thought something else too, but the thought fled, as if a gust of wind blew it out of an open window. Maybe she preferred to leave the thought for later because she was a damn coward, maybe she was just ashamed of it.

That's why she felt like pulling her hair out of her head when Sage moved away from the bed again.

Reyna had no idea how long it lasted. A few minutes, a few hours or a few days. That damned silence as they both stared at the monitor, and Zyanya's nails dug into the inside of her hand so hard that she was sure she would have to bandage them later.

It couldn't fail, it just couldn't, not now, not when she-...

A steady beeping filled the room again. They both breathed a sigh of relief.

But Reyna was the one leaving the room, wiping away tears whose origin she did not know.

***

The first thing she saw was the warm light of a lamp that was smoldering alone somewhere beside her.

The room was dark, the rain drummed against the windows in a quiet evening song and soothed her scared heart at first.

All around except it was silence. Viper wrapped herself in it a lot, so finding it around her was something that gave her a sense of comfort.

The bedding was cold. The stainless steel of the IV stand reflected that faint light in a familiar way.

Silence, rain, twilight.

And the absence of that one element that had accompanied her so often so far. Pain.

It didn't flare her bones, didn't tear her muscles. It didn't lurk in her temples with a migraine attack or that hideous metallic aftertaste that ended in hemorrhages, her lungs didn't burn when she breathed, her joints didn't resemble those of an old man.

The pain was gone. Just like that.

She felt like crying, even though she knew she shouldn't. After all, nothing was a foregone conclusion. Nothing was sure, and it could only seem so to her. Maybe she was still asleep, and it was all just an illusion of a tired mind.

The illusion dissolved, however, when she turned her head toward the murmur she heard from her left. She had not been aware before that she was not alone.

And she wasn't.

Reyna was now already sitting on the couch, the blanket tangled in her legs. A few wrinkles of fabric were imprinted on her face and the sleeve of her t-shirt had curled up, leaving a mark on her tanned skin.

But she sat up, snapped out of her slumber, awake and aware, probably as never before. And she was looking straight at her, with a feeling written on her face that Viper probably couldn't name. Or which she couldn't believe.

"Hi," whispered Viper. Almost shyly.

Maybe she didn't see how she should start the conversation any other way, and that one seemed most appropriate. Maybe she didn't want to ruin the quiet moment between them and just leave it just as it was.

She couldn't raise her voice to anything louder, but the corner of her mouth lifted gently. Reyna still didn't move from her seat. Or at least not for the first few seconds, as if she was digesting that one word, arranging it in a drawer and carefully closing it afterwards.

And then she sprang from her seat, her arms embracing Viper's neck faster than she had time to register it. Viper felt Reyna tighten her fingers on the pillow behind her, her chest taking in air and then letting it out with her mouth right next to her ear.

"You're alright," she croaked out. Her voice was muffled as she pressed her face into Viper’s neck. "Oh my god, you're alright."

Viper's hands froze behind Reyna's neck as her body, too surprised by the gesture, didn't have time to react. Only a moment later she lowered them slowly, placing them on Zyanya's shoulder blades, where she unconsciously scooped some of the material of her shirt between her fingers and squeezed.

It was quite a nice feeling.

Even though Reyna's hair tickled her face, the venflon was unpleasantly lodged in the bend of her elbow, and those damn plastic tubes in her nose were still as annoying as before.

It was a nice feeling.

"You won't get rid of me so easily," she acknowledged, getting off on that one joke only to have Reyna laugh into her neck as well. Quietly.

Maybe she didn't want to ruin the moment either, and unconsciously they were thinking the exact same thing.

Viper didn't think about whether it was the right thing to do. Whether it included their strange contract, the way she clenched the material of Reyna's shirt in her fingers, or the fact that she felt something else along the relief that she didn't wake up in the medical wing all alone.

And that's what surprised Viper in herself.

Or maybe she was just tired.

"It worked," Reyna said as she moved away from her. Viper squinted her eyelids, smiling uncertainly, a little crookedly. Zyanya didn't hesitate to repeat herself. "Sage did the blood tests. You're getting better, Viper."

Sabine never wanted to die.

She thought about it many, many times, maybe even more than she could remember, but the vision of death itself never materialized to the point where she wanted her life to end early. She put herself in a position where she was somewhere between life and death, because actually she may not have wanted to die, but she didn't consider life valuable. Or at least not her own.

After all, she had screwed up so many things, hurt so many people and things. After all, she herself was so damn fucked up that... that for so many years she was probably all the same.

She was able to accept her condition. At least that's what she thought. Because, after all, she was all the same, life versus death, which she may have feared, but she could accept it.

And now hearing these words gave her a relief she had never felt toward herself before.

She just nodded her head, suddenly all too aware of the tears that appeared under her eyelids and the lip she was biting unconsciously to hold back a smile. She even lowered her head a little to avoid Reyna's gaze, though she didn't know why.

Sabine may never have thought she would enjoy being alive.

"That's good," she said finally. Cautiously, as if she was afraid to strain for something more, as if something more might show too much.

Reyna nodded her head.

"Yes, that is good."

For a while they simply remained silent. Silence was their language, they knew how to use it. They found in it their universal method of communication and resorted to it.

Now, however, it was not about silence after an argument. It was not about the echo of a scream bouncing off the walls, tightly clenched lips or furrowed brows, when everything had been said, resentments thrown out, and anger boiled in veins uninterrupted.

Now the silence was soothing. Different, perhaps alien. But it did not disturb them at all.

"Have you been sitting here for long?"

Reyna blinked, surprised to break this bubble of silence, but she didn't mind it. She spotted a stool in the corner of the room and soon pulled it closer to the bed.

"Since we moved you here, actually," she admitted, shrugging her shoulders. As if it was so obvious. As if anyone in her position would have done the same, and yet... Viper knew that wasn't true. And there was something so foreign to her about the feeling that she struggled to restrain herself to look away. "Around two days."

"Two days?"

Reyna sat back in her chair, not very moved by the question.

"Well, you know, everything had to get back to normal. Stabilize itself," she said. "Sage said it could be like that."

Viper nodded her head in understanding, saying only a quiet 'okay' under her breath. But really... Was it okay? Was it okay that Reyna waited here for two damn days?

She probably didn't want to ask that, but at the same time she couldn't help herself.

"Did you..." The thought escaped her for a moment. The words somehow didn't want to harmonize, but now it was too late to take them back. "Did you sleep anything?"

Reyna rested her elbows on her knees and intertwined her fingers. Viper, on the other hand, couldn't shake the feeling that the question made her somewhat uncomfortable. Or shy.

"As much as needed," she stated evasively. She shrugged her shoulders, again, feeling Viper's gaze linger on her and stay there. "I'll be fine."

Viper agreed to these words, even if she didn't feel that this answer satisfied her at all. She didn't even know why. Or maybe she did know, but she was foolish to admit that she knew perfectly well what she wanted to ask.

"I'll get you some water."

Viper didn't even have time to respond before Reyna got up and disappeared into the back room. Strangely, she got the impression that they were both holding back some words at this point. Reyna seemed to avoid her gaze and had already opened her mouth several times only to close it without result.

That's why, when Zyanya set the paper cup on the table, Sabine spoke up.

"Okay, go ahead."

Reyna furrowed her brow and stared for a moment as the water calmed down inside the cup.

"With what?"

"Whatever is on your mind."

Zyanya looked at her for that one second. Actually... what could she expect, Viper was always alert after all. The keenness of her eyes was contrasting with this waspish, sleepy environment filled with medical equipment to the brim.

"There is nothing."

She lied extremely poorly. In fact, she did it just for the sake of principle and conformity to her own stubbornness.

"Isn’t it?"

Reyna realized that even with tubes in her nose, mangled hair and a venflon in the bend of her elbow, Viper still had enough confidence in herself to outplay her so easily with that one question.

Or it was Reyna herself who was unable to resist. She let the air out through her nose and sat back down next to the bed.

"I just... thought a lot," she began. She smiled at the corner of her mouth uncertainly, as if she suddenly felt stupid for speaking up at all and let herself be persuaded to say something. "About all that happened, what Sage did and... I want to apologize to you."

There was seriousness on Sabine's face. But at the same time, the same uncertainty that Reyna expressed when she chose her words slowly and all too carefully.

Perhaps she also didn't want to destroy their silence.

"You couldn't have known," she interrupted her for a moment and Zyanya's gaze momentarily fell on her face. "No one knew."

"I could’ve noticed something. And thinking that's the way it is is all I did, that your conflict is there and doesn't go anywhere, I never even asked, damn it, I-..."

"And you think I would have told you the truth then?" she interrupted, and when the waterfall of Reyna's words broke like a knife cut, Viper just stared at her. "I would have lied for as long as I could stand, Reyna, you know it well. And I don't blame anyone for all this other than someone who deserved it."

Zyanya pressed her lips together, but a moment later opened them and simply let the air out. She nodded her head in acceptance, as she probably didn't have a better idea of how to respond.

Which didn't mean she was okay with it. That she was able to just swallow all these things that had escaped them for so long, but were happening right under their noses.

But she didn't pursue the subject. It was probably better that way, because she could already feel her fists clenching again and her nails starting to dig into her skin. Viper was also unlikely to add anything more.

"Kiljjoy was asking about you," she chuckled suddenly, wanting to break the tension. Viper somehow softened at the mention of the German woman, and was probably relieved that the subject had been changed after all. "She asked me to text her when she could come to you. She was really worried."

"How much does she know?"

Reyna expected that Viper would not be happy about Killjoy being dragged into what was happening to her. But Sabine herself probably knew that some things could not be avoided.

“That you got worse. And that Sage helped you when your options ran out. She doesn't know what the treatment consisted of," she replied. She intertwined the fingers of her hands together, lowering her gaze for a moment, as if she couldn't bear to see Viper nod, though she couldn't say why. "I don't want to interfere, but... but I think you should talk to her."

Sabine pressed her lips together. She didn't seem angry. In fact, more like she was taking the information in, only that with a hint of bitterness.

"I know," she sighed. "I'll do it."

"What you tell her won't change how she looks at you." Viper furrowed her brow at those words. "You are important to her. Nothing will change that, because I know what I saw."

"I should tell her right away," Viper said.

"She'll understand. Believe me."

Viper didn't argue with that statement, but Reyna heard the relieved breath released perfectly. It was a pleasant sound. Much better than any wheezing breaths she had witnessed.

"Honestly, I'd rather sleep at my place," Viper said suddenly. "This environment is somehow... depressing."

"I can go get Sage. She'll undo the IV and everything else. She's probably awake anyway."

Viper skimmed the Chinese woman's name with her thoughts.

"Alright."

***

Reyna was somewhat relieved when Viper was disconnected from all machines and medical support by Sage. Ling was skeptical, it was evident, but she didn't discuss it further after being assured that Viper would still be in someone's care.

Zyanya had the strange feeling that Sage didn't really care at all. She had to ask because it was the right thing to do, and she had to ask in case someone else asked.

Therefore, with Viper's arm slung over her shoulders, Reyna opened her bedroom door shortly thereafter.

Viper surprisingly did not protest. In fact, she didn't speak the whole way from the medbay to here, but when Zyanya looked at her, she couldn't distinguish whether Sabine had so many thoughts or just one, which she was thinking so intensely that her gaze was driving into the wall as she sat down on the bed while Reyna turned to close the door.

"Do you want to go to sleep?"

Viper blinked in surprise at the question. Her fingers tightened on the edge of the mattress minimally.

"I think so," she answered after a moment.

Her eyebrows drew together. Zyanya wanted to ask. She didn't.

"I'll find you something to wear."

Viper suddenly felt all too aware that she was still in her hospital shirt, and her shoulders slumped a little more under the pressure of that thought. She could only unconsciously pick at this material, out of the corner of her eye watching Reyna browse through her closet.

When Reyna turned to her with the clothes in her hand, Sabine didn't quite know where she should be looking. To be honest, for a moment she looked more confused than ever before and at the same time as if this fact irritated her.

"Do you need help with this?" With a movement of her chin, Zyanya indicated the clothes she had stacked next to Sabine. There was no grace in this question, it was neutral enough... that Viper didn't know what she should answer. The silence made Reyna crouch by the bed. "Hey, are you okay?"

Viper let go of the edge of her shirt. She was silent again for a moment before the words formed into something intelligible.

"You don't have to stay here," she finally said, shrugging her shoulders as if she wanted to outline a semblance of her calm with this. "I know you had to say that because of Sage, but you should get some decent sleep."

"I did sleep."

"The medbay couch has rather questionable effects, especially after two days. And you won’t have much space here."

"I don’t care. I'm not going anywhere."

And Zyanya kept her word.

Chapter 38: THIRTY EIGHT

Reyna had no idea how long her morning had already lasted. She hadn't looked at her watch properly since the moment she woke up, which was... probably a while ago now.

But she couldn't say she was sleep-deprived. Despite it all, the night wasn't hard. Nor was it frightening, because there was no element of that anxiety that usually accompanied her when she left Viper in the bedroom alone and didn't really have a clue what state she would find her in.

Now... it had all somehow disappeared. It was as if a stone had fallen from her heart, the existence of which she had not even been aware of before.

She awoke once, when Sabine was struggling with fever chills and was shaking so much that Reyna could sense it from the movements of the mattress. Sage said it could happen, but Zyanya didn't hesitate to embrace Viper from behind and give her some warmth as she struggled against her regenerating body.

Now she could hear her breathing, she counted every single inhale and exhale, immersed in the need to control and make sure her senses didn't fail her. Her heart was beating evenly, calmly, her breathing had gotten rid of that morbid wheezing and her fever was gone.

Viper had no signs of her illness.

The problem was that despite this, Reyna still didn't move away. Somehow she couldn't. Maybe she didn't even want to either, because in her current position, at least she felt that she was helping her in some way, and there was a little less remorse.

She did a lot of thinking. Ever since she woke up. She thought about everything that had happened, what she hadn't done, what she had, and what she could still do. She thought about how she felt about it all, tried to understand the sense of being tired of Protocol and combine that with the simultaneous sense of relief that now filled her.

She even tried to understand why she was now unable to move away from Viper, and probably this problem was the only one... left unresolved.

She unconsciously nibbled on her lower lip as her fingertip slid over the skin on Viper's arm. Perhaps it was to help her understand her own mind. She didn't squirm when she encountered one of the scars, only her eyebrow twitched slightly, trying to get used to the sensation.

Had she really not noticed anything before? Any scar, any pain in her eyes? Had she never wondered why Viper loved her turtlenecks so much, wore them even in scorching sun and why her gym workouts were usually done in solitude, if that was possible?

She counted one breath after another, focused on catching Viper’s chest movements.

She didn't tell anyone, because it was good for the team. She swallowed the fact that no one knew, the fact that she was the 'bad one' and worse, the fact that Sage was the 'good one’. Fuck, how did she manage to do it?

“You should talk to Neon.”

Reyna's hand hovered in the air, as if Viper's skin suddenly burned her. She immediately took it back.

“I thought you were sleeping.”

She had no idea why she said exactly that first. Probably she wanted to justify herself if Viper asked.

Viper didn't ask. Reyna, on the other hand, felt like doing so just to know how long Sabine had been holding back from speaking to her.

She did not do so either.

“Why did you stop?”

Sabine turned on her back along with that question, poking her gaze at Zyanya, who seemed to be doing her best to escape from that gaze. She blinked in surprise, wanting to show that she didn't know what Viper was talking about.

Because she did not.

Until Sabine looked at Reyna's hand. Zyanya didn't even realize that she had clenched it into a fist from the moment she realized she had been caught.

Aware that Viper was waiting for a response, Reyna felt strangely abashed.

Probably.

“I... I don't know if it was okay.”

For her, or Viper?

Sabine lay on her side and shrugged her shoulders. It was hard to determine whether she took the information at face value or already had her theory anyway, but she asked out of curiosity.

“That was nice.”

The words echoed off the walls and for a split second Reyna felt as if someone had put a stun gun to her spine.

Nice?

Viper didn't sound like she intended to joke. In fact, it wasn’t clear what was behind that one sentence, because her face expressed nothing more than calmness.

Reyna relaxed her fist. She herself had no idea what she felt at that moment. Viper's eyes, however, continued to leap over her face, waiting for some kind of reaction.

Zyanya felt like asking if this was some kind of provocation. Or a test. Even if, deep down, she had the feeling for the first time that they weren't playing a game this time.

“I can...” She didn't know why she hesitated. “I can do it again if you want me to.”

Lying face to face with Viper, she had no way to escape her gaze, so the only way to cope was to minimally tighten her fingers on the pillow.

Viper seemed to be analyzing the words. The two seconds went on indefinitely, but she finally gave her answer.

“I do,” she said.

However, she did not look at her shoulder when Reyna returned to her previous activity. She probably cared that Zyanya would refrain from commenting on the decision, so the Mexican woman didn’t speak a word about it.

“Killjoy wants to meet you. She texted me a few times.”

Reyna probably couldn't stand the silence more than Viper. She ran a finger down the length of the chemist's arm and surprisingly found relief in the fact that probably neither of them particularly wanted to maintain eye contact at that moment.

Viper nodded her head. Her gaze was still stuck somewhere on the wall behind Reyna for a while, only then was she the first to dare to look at her.

“I'll do it if you will meet Neon.”

Zyanya knew that Viper was stubborn. She should probably have expected it, but she sighed at that sentence anyway.

“Viper...”

Viper raised one eyebrow. Of course she had been waiting for more, something like that was not going to put her off, no matter how much Reyna hoped that one word would speak for itself.

“You can't avoid her forever.”

Sabine was a master at presenting facts. Reyna was aware that Callas was right, but her finger hesitated for a split second in its tour of the skin of her arm before moving on.

“I'm not avoiding her.”

That was the first thing that came to mind as a way of defending herself.

“Really?”

“I'm just giving her time to... sort some things out in her head.”

“By avoiding her.”

Reyna pressed her lips together, but immediately opened them.

“It's not that simple,” she muttered. “When I wanted to talk to her, I felt like she couldn't look at me. She's probably not ready for it yet.”

“She isn’t ready, or you?”

Reyna gave Viper a point for that one. But only in her mind. She remembered her conversation with Neon well. Actually, maybe even all too well, because the vision of a repeat was almost paralyzing to her for a longer moment, especially since Gekko mentioned Dimaapi angry as a wasp.

Reyna was afraid to start the same topic again. She was afraid it would turn out the way it did before, and she wouldn't be able to explain herself, because... because she herself had no idea how the hell she was supposed to do it if she didn't understand herself.

“And what would I tell her?” she asked, letting out a breath from between her lips, noting how that one gust had picked up a strand of Viper's hair to dance. “She thinks I've changed sides. Actually... that spending time with you is the reason why things are the way they are.”

She expected some spark of pain on Viper's face. Discomfort, perhaps. And then she remembered that Sabine had been used to playing the bad character for so long that it no longer impressed her.

“Then admit her right.”

Reyna's eyebrows furrowed.

“What?”

Sabine shrugged her shoulders.

“She's right. Your relationship with her changed because of me. So admit her right,” she explained without much emotion. “If you will be honest, she will listen to you.”

Reyna didn't know what she should answer. She had no idea how she could explain this sense of fear of... being honest.

So she said nothing.

“Text her. I'll text Killjoy.”

With a sigh, Reyna interrupted her stroking of Sabine's arm only to reach for her phone.

***

Viper usually entered Killjoy's workshop without asking. Besides, Killjoy herself told her that she didn't need to do so some time ago.

Yet she stopped for a moment in front of the door, staring at the frosted glass in front of her, as if waiting for it to move in front of her on its own, because she didn't seem to have the courage to press the button, which, after all, was practically under her finger.

She took a deeper breath and the door opened.

“Can I come in?” she asked immediately, even before she even lifted her gaze from the floor to locate Killjoy. “Listen, I'm sorry that...”

The screwdriver fell to the floor with a clatter, and the metallic sound reverberated off the walls of the workshop.

Killjoy didn't even look in that direction. Her gaze fell on Viper so intensely that Sabine interrupted her speech and the echo of her words was cut off.

For a second, only the music playing from the portable speaker flowed somewhere in waves between them. Everything else fell so morbidly silent that Viper felt like turning around and walking out, apologizing beforehand for coming here at all.

Killjoy had a right to be angry with her. She had the right not to want to see her now, after all she had kept so many things from her, after all Klara had the right to know, and Viper was a coward and couldn't say a word all this time because she was so afraid of pity that she preferred to pretend everything was fine.

She took in a lungful of air to apologize once again.

But then Killjoy sprang from her chair, which was pushed all the way to the other end of the room and hit the wall.

Before Viper had time to say anything, Killjoy clung to her so tightly that her breath was almost taken away.

Viper held her hands up for a second, too shocked to do anything when the younger woman's arms embraced her as if her life depended on it. Only a moment later she lowered them and carefully placed one on the younger's head, unconsciously tightening her fingers on her favorite green beanie.

Viper allowed herself to be hugged. But she also allowed herself to reciprocate the hug, and before she had time to realize it, she herself was stroking Clara's shoulder blades in a calm, perhaps a little stiff motion.

She didn't say a word until it occurred to her that Killjoy was crying. Her broken breaths passed somewhere near Viper's ear for a few moments, and then Sabine could no longer remain silent.

“Hey, it's okay now, it's fine,” she said quietly. So quiet that for a moment she thought the portable speaker would drown her out. “It's okay, little mouse, I promise.”

Killjoysniffled. For a moment more she held Viper's shirt in her clenched fists, only then did she begin to slowly loosen her fingers, as if she had grown tired of that one movement.

She stepped back after a few more moments, but did not immediately look at Viper. Probably she was ashamed to do so when her eyes managed to redden, and she clumsily rubbed her nose herself with the back of her hand.

Sabine smiled as if in encouragement, and a moment later pulled a swivel chair towards her and then sat on it. Killjoy must have picked up on this activity, because she also found her own, pushed back into the corner of the workshop, and sat down opposite.

Killjoy probably didn’t know what to do with herself. She intertwined her fingers with each other and rested her elbows on her knees, probably still too intimidated to lift her gaze. Perhaps she felt stupidfor hugging Viper so violently, and even more stupid for crying.

Sabine didn't know this, nor was she going to ask. She didn't hold it against Klara. In fact, it was quite... a nice feeling. But she felt that she had to be the one to start the conversation, because if she didn't, the silence would devour them both.

“I didn't want to tell you,” she began. She realized that she was stressed out, and for a moment she paused, as if she was fumbling with what she had intended to say so far. She felt Killjoy looking at her, although she raised her gaze shyly from time to time. “I guess I thought... that I would be able to handle it myself before anyone realized.”

Clara pressed her lips together, her gaze shifting across the tiles of the workshop, and in keeping with Viper's observation, she raised it for barely a fraction of a second. Perhaps she wanted to make sure Viper hadn't disappeared at that time.

“I could... I could’ve helped you somehow,” she whispered after a moment. She let out a breath from between her lips, wrinkling her eyebrows slightly. “What if... what if it didn't work? I wouldn't even know what happened.”

Klara was still a little shaken, she didn't bite back a hoarse breath and hugged her arms as if she wanted to somehow hide.

Sabine squirmed slightly at that note of regret in her voice, even though she knew she deserved it.

“I know, I'm sorry,” Viper admitted. She rested her forearms on her thighs and hung her head slightly, her shoulders slumped. “I guess I ... wanted to protect you from it,” she said. “Maybe I thought it would be better for you if I handled it quietly.”

Killjoy nodded her head. And Viper didn't quite know what she should think of such a reaction for probably the first time in her life. Was she angry with her? Disappointed? Did she feel left out? She had no idea, she had no scenario she could take for granted, and that made Sabine feel more and more uncomfortable with each passing second of silence.

“I didn't want you to think differently about me.”

She only realized that these words had been spoken aloud when Klara raised her eyes to her. Maybe she didn't manage to keep them exclusively in her head. Or maybe subconsciously she just had to say them so they wouldn't eat her up from the inside.

She stopped right after them and first opened her mouth and then closed it, entwining the fingers of her hands more tightly together. Perhaps she should have added something to them, tried to explain, but nothing else came to mind.

Killjoy's eyebrows were raised. Sabine couldn't stand it. So she lowered her gaze again and started playing with her fingers, and before she had time to realize it, she began to pop her knuckles in a nervous gesture.

“I would never do that.”

These words were spoken so calmly that Sabine almost felt how much her own attitude contrasted with Klara's. Her grief had disappeared somewhere, although, after all, it was still lurking somewhere a moment ago, and Viper could not understand where she had hidden it.

She didn't know what to answer. Nor did she know why her throat tightened so suddenly and unexpectedly that it surprised her how much effort she had to put into swallowing her saliva.

“That's... nice.” She found this answer woefully poor in words herself, but nothing else came to mind. She even tried to smile, although she had no idea if the expression on her face actually expressed that smile. “It means a lot to me.”

She popped one of her fingers again, and the sound broke through the music playing. She let out a breath, trying to ignore how trembling it was.

“I'll go now,” she said after a moment, casting a communicative glance in the direction of the desk, where a disheveled turret was. She immediately stood up and wiped her hands on her pants. “Sorry once again.”

As she turned back toward the door, she immediately stopped.

“Viper?”

She turned her head.

“Yes?”

“I'm glad you're okay,” Killjoy said. She held in her hand the screwdriver she had dropped earlier. “And if you want, then... you know, you won't bother me.”

With a hand gesture, the German woman pointed to the same turret as Viper.

This time Sabine's smile was completely genuine. She walked away from the door and stayed in the workshop until evening.

***

“You didn't write back.”

Reyna entered the gym with those words on her lips, just after she saw Neon's figure on the treadmill across from her through the glass door.

There was no reproach in her voice. It sounded more like she was explaining why she had come here. Because that, for some reason, went down her throat easier and faster than 'hello', which she wouldn't even know what tone she should use for it.

Neon took one earbud out of her ear, without stopping her run. Her ponytails bounced with each step, but her gaze was focused solely on Reyna, who was looking around as if she wasn't quite sure if she could approach her.

She stretched out the moment by gliding her finger along the ring's ropes, or the barbell hanging from the hooks, before facing the younger woman and raising her head at her.

“I know,” Valdez replied, wiping her forehead with the willow of her hand.

Immediately, she yanked the other earbud from her ear, as if the music was preventing her from gathering her thoughts. Cables dangled over the treadmill connected to the phone.

Reyna wasn't sure how she should understand such a reaction. It was hard to figure out anything from the younger woman, whose gaze was probably fixed on the wall opposite, and any twitching of her face might as well have been the result of exertion. She didn't know whether her presence pleased Neon or disturbed her, which is probably why she spoke up not much later.

“Can we talk?”

Neon ran for another second, maybe two, but then hit the stop button, just as she turned off the music that was playing from a phone placed on a stand near the treadmill display.

The noise of the sliding tape faded away and a silence fell in the gym that Reyna probably never witnessed between her and Neon.

On the one hand, she wanted to speak up first, maybe get rid of what she was thinking all at once and hopefully as quickly as possible, and on the other hand, she felt a certain uneasiness when Neon's answers were so sparing that it was hard for Reyna to guess what kind of mood she was in.

“I saw that text,” Tala said suddenly, once her breathing had returned to normal. She jumped off the treadmill and grabbed a towel slung over the edge of the ring. “I just didn't know what I should text back.”

Neon did not look at her. She was wiping her neck with a towel, her gaze was somewhere on the floor for a while, and probably stopped on Reyna's face only by accident. There was still that inaccessibility in her voice that Zyanya remembered all too well from their last conversation, that tension that the Mexican woman regretted happening.

She tried to ignore it, because she knew she had to if she didn't want to leave the gym with nothing.

“And that's why I'm here.” Tala raised an eyebrow, her eyes finally staying on Reyna's face for a longer moment, even when Zyanya sighed. “Neon, I don't want it to be like that.”

The younger one took the towel off her neck and held it in her hand. Her lips tightened into a line.

Reyna understood this, Neon could still be angry with her. Besides, she would probably have reacted the same way in her place. The topic was... quite complicated for both of them.

“You mean?”

Zyanya partly expected it. The evasion of the topic, that shrug of the shoulders, as if Neon was trying to fool her into thinking she didn't actually know what she was talking about, and that pretentious tone that was meant to shake Reyna's confidence.

Zyanya furrowed her brow. She didn't know much of a way not to be so direct, so only one thing came to mind.

“I talked to Gekko.” Neon paused for a moment in raising the water bottle to her lips, but only for a moment. She took a few sips, although Reyna still had the impression that she was only doing it to continue to feign her indifference. “He said you were furious when he mentioned me.”

She didn't allude to the fact that Mateo also passed Neon’s words about where he could then look for Reyna. But it was probably safer that way.

“He didn't lie.”

Zyanya felt like sitting down if only on the floor. She felt that anxiety was growing in her with each passing minute and almost drew her to the ground. That it was already too late. That Neon had already crossed her out earlier and now she had nothing left to look for in her.

But she had to try anyway.

“You don’t want to change it?” This question barely squeezed through her throat and she didn't even know where such nerves came from. “To... to make it like it used to be despite all this. I wanted to give you time, but I feel that if I just leave it like this, it will be too late and I won't forgive myself for it, do you understand?”

Neon looked at her carefully. She clenched her fingers tighter on the water bottle, the plastic bending slightly as she searched her head for any appropriate words.

“And have you forgiven Viper for what she did?” she asked. This time there was no anger in her voice, there was calmness and anticipation there, albeit with a kind of tension. “All those threats? You said we were family, and when she throws her fists at me, I find out you slept with her.”

Zyanya felt her palms begin to sweat.

“People change,” she said cautiously. She tried to sound confident, because only certainty could help her in this conversation. She couldn't lie or evade the subject, only honesty remained. “Even people like her. She's not the same anymore, believe me.”

Neon nodded, though more to herself than to Reyna, as her gaze fled somewhere. It was hard to tell if she believed the words or not, or if she did even partially.

“And she really changed so much that you sleep with her now?”

Reyna pressed her hands into the pockets of her pants so she would have somewhere to put them, instead of involuntarily entwining them together.

She let out one breath, then another. Neon's intense gaze rose from the floor again and fell directly on her, and she was all too aware of it.

“I know it sounds stupid, but it's not what you think it is.”

Dimaapi's eyebrow lifted. It was not a mocking gesture, so Reyna felt a little safer.

“Then how is it?” Neon folded her arms over her chest. “After all, you are sleeping with each other, you admitted it yourself.”

For some reason, Zyanya was ashamed to look into her eyes. She was afraid to see the same disdain there as before.

“Because we do,” she admitted. “But that’s the only thing we do.”

If Neon's eyebrow could have lifted even higher, it probably would have. For a few seconds she digested this information. A few... probably very long seconds. Only then did she remove her hand from the bend of her elbows and unconsciously point to Reyna with a hand gesture.

“Wait... so you two...?”

She was counting on Zyanya to finish the sentence faster than it actually happened. Zyanya, on the other hand, wasn't so eager to do so at all, as her gaze moved along the walls before resting on Tala again.

“Yes.” Reyna nodded. She shrugged her shoulders, feeling them stiff as stone. “It's just sex.”

Neon sighed heavily, shaking her head. She rested her hands on her hips and took a step first one way, then the other, as if she needed to move to somehow process the information she received.

She opened her mouth only to close it later. She didn't even have a clue what she could say. She didn't even know... how she felt about all this. Nor how she felt about Reyna, and Reyna saw the hesitation herself.

“I... I need to think about it,” she said.

“It's okay. I just wanted you to know that,” Zyanya finally said, shrugging her shoulders again, a little more loosely this time. She was a little relieved. “I know that my relationship with Viper has changed a lot. And I know you might be angry, because I probably would be too if I were you. I'm not counting on you to forgive me for everything just like that, I just... don't want our contact to look like it does now for the rest of my life.”

Neon listened. She listened carefully. Reyna might have overlooked or exaggerated something, but she got the impression that the tension also escaped from the younger one after those words. Not completely, but enough so that Zyanya no longer felt like a guilty person coming under the guillotine.

“I don't want that either,” Valdez said after a moment of silence. A little quieter, less clear, maybe she didn't want to say it so loud.

Reyna took a breath. She dared to put a hand on the younger woman's shoulder, and the latter immediately looked in that direction. First at the vampire's hand, then at Zyanya, who smiled a bit crookedly as she probably tried to mask her own relief.

“Can I hope for you to come to our training tomorrow?”

Neon was silent for a moment. But the rage on her face was no longer the rage it once was. There was no joy there, or some kind of unspeakable relief, but for Reyna, just that calmness was enough.

Perhaps that was what was hardest for Neon to swallow? That she and Viper would be connected by something more, and Tala would be sidelined?

Whatever it was, the hurricane of these thoughts calmed down as Neon sighed again.

“I'll think about it.”

***

Reyna caught herself that wherever she was and whatever she wore, she always had a lighter in some pocket. And it was always the same one, actually the only one she had owned for a long time.

Well, maybe she really was smoking more than she thought. Maybe she already had the symptoms of an addict and the lighter always teleported to one of her pockets regardless of her will, and somehow Reyna never thought about it until now.

She sighed in the silence of the evening, but put the cigarette between her lips anyway, as if she wasn't even trying to hold back anymore. With the lighter she found in her pocket again, she flicked the tip and the hiss of the cigarette being fired up mingled with the concert of cicadas around her.

From time to time she liked to go outside to smoke. Just as she treasured her ashtray put on the balustrade, sometimes reaching her gaze somewhere farther out, leaning against one of the front walls of the quarters had something liberating about it. The wind played with her hair, sometimes a bird flew by here and there, and sometimes she simply gazed at the trees around them and watched the swaying branches.

She let out a puff of smoke through her nose and shook the ash into an ashtray. She appreciated that Protocol had taken care of this small detail even here, although the metal post with a reservoir of old ash at the top was perhaps not very in keeping with the modern atmosphere of the headquarters.

For some reason, she thought about whether there was a chance it was Viper's idea. She could picture her here those few years back, when after a few hours in the lab she would give in to her addiction, unnoticed by anyone, and curse the ash rolling on the ground in the gusts of wind. And she continued to come here, sometimes even smoking together as she did after that one night in the lab, when inviting Zyanya to have a cigarette was a gesture of peculiar, momentary reconciliation for Viper.

She drew warm smoke into her lungs, somehow relishing that familiar scratch in her throat.

Or at least she relished it, until out of the corner of her eye she caught some movement. After a second or two, she recognized the figure of Sage, who was returning along the path she had trodden and was inevitably walking toward her, probably returning from the gardens. Apparently she liked to meditate there, from what she had heard.

Zyanya was indeed standing near the door to the headquarters. But that didn't mean she fancied the encounter, even if it would pass in silence.

She reflexively inhaled her cigarette a little deeper. I think she hoped to stifle the drug's momentarily awakened irritation.

“You weren't at the periodic examination.”

Zyanya stubbornly looked somewhere beside Sage, pretending that the tree opposite was the most interesting part of the moment. She let the smoke out through her nose along with an exhale.

She saw that Sage squirmed minimally at the gesture. And Reyna knew she was minimally happy about it.

“I forgot,” she stated briefly.

Perhaps a bit dryly, but she actually didn't care to try to be nice right now. She didn't like excuses. And she didn't even know how different her way of reacting was from that of Neon when, at one time, the same question was asked in her direction.

She whisked the ash away again, and the Chinese woman's gaze went to the ashtray, as if with her very look she wanted to make Reyna aware of her displeasure with this addiction.

Reyna didn't care actually. In fact, she was a little amused by it.

“Mhm.” Sage folded her arms over her chest, but seemed not to pursue the subject. She winced again as cigarette smoke flew right past her face. “How is Viper doing?”

Purple eyes momentarily focused on Ling. Tension appeared on Reyna's face as quickly as it disappeared. Instead, she laughed hollowly, the corner of her mouth lifting in that one dangerous smile.

The one that was Reyna's attribute when an opponent walked right into her target area.

“Now you care about it?”

Sage blinked, but anger was only visible on her face for a moment. The tension and seriousness were a contrast to Zyanya's almost amused and mocking expression.

“I guess it's logical that I want to know if the treatment has worked?”

Reyna restrained herself from blowing smoke again in her direction. She turned her head away probably only because she wanted the conversation to end as soon as possible.

“You don't have to pretend,” Reyna muttered. Her eyes shone a bit in the light of a nearby lamp. “I know you're asking because you have to ask, so give it up.”

“Excuse me?”

Ling's indignation was not so obvious, as anger also crept into the tones of that resentment. Reyna knew that she had brought it on herself, or perhaps she had aimed for it actually, but involuntarily her eyebrow twitched slightly in a gesture of irritation abandoned earlier.

She shook off the ash again. Sage looked there again. The cigarette was burning out, and Zyanya felt like lighting another one just to show that she didn't care much for the stares.

“Viper is fine,” she finally said, again wandering her eyes somewhere around. “Is that all?”

Her tone was pretentious. She wanted Sage to see how out of place her presence was and how much she was bothering her at the moment. Ling saw this, however, she still didn't budge. Reyna's answer, on the other hand, instead of satisfying her, made Sage furrow her eyebrows.

“What's wrong with you?”

Reyna almost laughed. She blew the smoke out her nose one last time and stubbed out her cigarette, pressing it to the bottom of the ashtray.

“You better tell me what's wrong with you,” she answered, raising her gaze to the Chinese woman, whose mouth was one narrow line.

However, something flashed in her eyes that did not escape Reyna's attention. And she had the irresistible impression that it was anxiety.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” hissed Ling.

Sage’s irritation was like poison - Reyna wanted to see it and gloat over it, and at the same time she could feel it making her skin tingle with every second as it passed on her as well.

She regretted that the cigarette had burned out and she had nothing to occupy her hands with as she involuntarily clenched them into fists. She pushed herself away from the wall and approached Sage, well aware that she was taller and... stronger than her.

She wasn’t afraid to violate her space, she had the leverage. Besides, it was Sage who slowly fueled this fire that Reyna could already feel in almost every vein.

“You want to heal, but you don't do it when needed. You want to be the best, but you screw everything up and can't admit it. You're contradicting yourself, Sage.”

The fact that she leaned over her minimally gave Reyna a sense of power over the situation.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Ling repeated, carefully enunciating each word, almost straining it through her teeth as if she hoped it would scare Reyna away.

Reyna did not move away for a moment. She tilted her head, the corner of her mouth lifted in the same kind of smile as before.

She was drawing handfuls from this moment. Because now she could stop being silent. Now she could say what she wanted, and nothing stood in her way on this October evening.

“I know everything.”

She savored every word in that sentence. Every voice or sound that made Sage's countenance twitch slightly. Slightly, but enough.

“You won’t frame me for anything,” she spat out. “Whatever she told you, it’s nonsense.”

Sage didn't believe her own words, Reyna saw her gaze jump across her face, as if she was trying to look everywhere but into the purple eyes of the vampire. Because she was afraid of her. And that was good, Reyna wanted her to do just that.

“It's nonsense that you're still here,” she said, almost in a whisper, but so frighteningly low that the echo of her voice still stumbled against the walls of the building for a while.

The wind blew and picked up tree branches to dance. Some bird cried out in the distance.

Sage raised her head. She was playing with fire, but somehow it didn't stop her. Her countenance was colder than ever, even the yellow light of the lamp did not warm it.

Sage knew she wasn't going to win. And she had enough of that. She pulled a card from her sleeve that had been hidden for so long that it was beginning to bother her, and before she could stop herself, it fell out on its own.

“And her?” she asked. “She might be here after what she contributed, or is that something she hasn't shown off to you yet?”

Zyanya felt like her blood had begun to boil. Her fingers were itching mercilessly, her own heart pounded against her ribs, and she felt herself losing any remnants of self-control with each passing moment. She clenched her jaw, feeling her teeth grind against each other.

Sage knew. Reyna had no idea how, but Sage knew about what had happened at Kingdom.

“Because of her sick ambition, she murdered thousands of people. And then she comes here, thinking she's someone completely different, sets up the Protocol and hopes to wash the blood off her hands by bullshitting about being successful.” This time she looked Reyna's fury straight in the face. She paused for a moment before saying her next words. “She deserved it.”

Reyna couldn't stand it.

Unbeknownst to her, her hand clamped down on Sage's throat, immediately followed by the Chinese woman's back thumping against the wall.

Ling reflexively grabbed Zyanya's wrist as her breath was ripped from her throat, but quickly moved it to her fingers, trying to untie them with any method.

She scratched her palms, drawing rapid breaths, but Reyna didn't even feel it. In fact, she no longer felt anything but one thing.

Her eyes shone with fury, purple sparkled like fire. The glow of the radianite heart illuminated Sage’s chin, who was still trying to jerk out of her grasp. She even tried to say something, but could only open her mouth and stay at this point.

She had no chance with her. The vampire was stronger, her muscles concentrated like steel, and each breath was marked by a pulsation of purple light from an enraged heart.

If this was what death at the hands of Zyanya Mondragón looked like, it was terrifying.

She fed on Sage’s fear, the rumble of her heart beating in panic, tears welling up in her eyes in stifling terror.

Reyna's fangs flashed deadly as she leaned over her. As if she wanted to drink every single one of her severed breaths, stolen in fragments, and satiate herself with it.

Sage tried to kick her. Zyanya didn't even flinch when Ling's boot brushed against her calf. Nor when blood began to flow laboriously down her injured hand. Nor when the younger one wriggled under her death grip struggling for even the smallest breath.

Zyanya tilted her head, purple flashing again in her irises like the last light you see before you die.

“I could break your neck right now and you wouldn't even feel it,” she whispered. “So watch your mouth, Sage.”

The words bounced off Sage's face, she inhaled her fear being millimeters from her face. She didn't shout, didn't raise her tones, for it was in that low voice that lurked that irrepressible fury as she uttered each word, the light of her own heart reflecting off her fangs.

“You won't tell anyone,” she concluded. One of her claws slid across Sage's neck, though she wasn't even aware of it. Instead, she felt with satisfaction the Chinese woman swallowing her saliva with difficulty under her claw, trying to tug at her already bleeding fingers with her nails. “If you won't keep quiet, I won't either, and I swear I'll do everything I can to make you fucking remember this, understand?”

“Reyna, leave her.”

Zyanya turned her head to the side in a second. Sage jerked once more, trying to take advantage of this moment of inattention, but the grip was iron-like.

Viper stood next to her, turning the lighter in her fingers. Zyanya had no idea when Sabine had come here, she hadn't heard the sound of the door opening or any footsteps, and now stared at the situation before her with an almost supernatural calm.

The lighter case clicked lightly in contact with her fingernails.

Reyna, however, looked only at her.

She let go of Sage's neck, not even for a second looking at how Ling slid down the wall coughing and choking on her suddenly recovered breath. Instead, she stretched and flexed her fingers stagnated by the grip a few times with a kind of disgust, then mechanically massaged her wrist.

She whisked her hand away, drops of blood splattered in a kind of decoration on the gray marble slabs beneath their feet. She didn't pay much attention to it.

“The camera's broken, you won't get any footage,” she threw in Sage's direction before she tried to relax her muscles with a circular motion of her arms. “And you better not forget my words.”

She didn't help her get up. She had no intention of doing so. She simply passed next to her, massaging her fingers one last time.

“Let's go.”

Viper put her lighter in her pocket and Reyna's cigarette was catching up in the silence of the evening when she obeyed that command.

Chapter 39: THIRTY NINE

Sabine came back to the balcony after maybe a minute. She was holding a cotton swab in her hand, probably soaked in alcohol or some other disinfectant that Reyna insisted she didn't need.

That's mainly why she stepped out onto the balcony before Viper had time to chase her into the bathroom. Well... apparently Viper was too stubborn.

“Give me your hand,” she instructed.

Reyna couldn't guess or assume what Viper might have had in her mind at that moment. What she was thinking about her, about the whole situation she had witnessed. They were deadly silent from the moment the front door of the headquarters closed behind them, leaving both Sage and the echo of their own footsteps behind, and Zyanya somehow didn't have the courage to start any topic.

Therefore, she did not take her eyes off the view in front of her and only corrected the position of her elbows on the metal railing, as if to show that she was not going to move. There was indeed dried blood on her hand, the skin was unpleasantly tightened by clots.

She glanced at it discreetly, but enough for Viper to notice.

“Give me your hand,” Sabine repeated. Her tone was no different from her previous command, and Reyna still did not look at her. Or rather, she tried so hard to do so that she pressed her lips together, because, after all, Viper was standing right next to her. “Zyanya.”

Zyanya let her lip fall from between her teeth and turned away with a sigh. She probably sighed to herself that she didn't know how to ignore Viper as well as she used to. Or it was Viper who had become better at preventing being ignored, which was also a possibility.

She had no idea what to think. She wasn't mad at herself, she had no remorse, and even her sore hand didn't bother her, yet she felt this strange sense of tension in her chest, an awareness that something was hanging in the air that either she or Viper couldn't tell. She knew neither what Viper was thinking, nor what she herself was thinking.

Frustrating.

She held out her hand to Viper. She caught herself running somewhere with her eyes when Sabine clicked her tongue. Reyna also now didn't know whether it was a reaction to her behavior or to the sight of her injured hands, but she didn't dare try to find out either.

“So... what was it?”

Reyna should have expected her to ask that. In fact, she even expected it, and still didn't feel any better with that knowledge.

She also found out that she was getting worse and worse when Viper demanded answers so intensely and directly, and Zyanya avoided her gaze so often that she didn't even know anymore whether it was out of shame or because when Sabine looked at her, Reyna was convinced that she had x-rayed her to the marrow of her bones.

Viper's words were carried away somewhere by the wind. She took Reyna's hand and began to gently rub off the dried blood with the cotton swab. It was stinging, but only a little, and Zyanya was able to bear it without comment as long as the chemist's green eyes were preoccupied more with her hand than her face.

She knew that she could not remain silent indefinitely. Although, on the other hand, she didn't want to speak at all, because she felt she would have to admit something she didn't understand herself.

“She started it.”

Spoken out loud, it sounded even worse than in her head. Perhaps she should be ashamed of herself for that, if it weren't for the fact that those were the only words that came to mind and were relatively... harmless. She felt her hands clench into fists, but Sabine continued to wash her skin.

“That's a very adult explanation,” muttered Viper. Reyna felt minimally relieved that instead of reproach, Callas' voice echoed with amusement at her words, even if perhaps it was only momentary. “But I can honestly say that it doesn't explain much,” she said.

She was right, and that was the worst part of it all. Not that Reyna expected the topic to go unnoticed, she just wasn't ready for an answer. Not now, when it was so peaceful around them, the wind was playing with their hair, the sound of the ocean was singing somewhere over the horizon, and Viper was holding her hand as gently as probably no one had before.

Because Viper wasn't afraid of her.

Reyna let the air out through her nose. Suddenly she craved a cigarette like she'd never had before, even though she'd barely had it a few minutes ago.

“Sage knows,” she finally said, probably on one exhale, which she unconsciously held back. The cotton swab hovered motionless over her hand, but Sabine didn't raise her eyes. “About you and what... you discovered.”

The amusement disappeared from Sabine's face as quickly as it had appeared there. It was not replaced by anger, however, but by seriousness. Maybe even acceptance, which Reyna endured probably worse than if Viper were to get mad. She didn't even ask. She didn't ask why, from where, she didn't say anything.

She simply accepted the information.

And getting angry was more natural.

Sabine, however, remained silent, responding with nothing more than a nod. But Reyna saw her clench her fingers tighter on the cotton swab, and unconsciously hug her wrist tighter with her other hand.

“That would make sense.”

Reyna didn't even let her finish her thoughts. She probably wouldn't be able to listen to it, the way Viper just accepts more facts and doesn't even argue. She still remembered the fury that coursed through her veins like boiling lava as soon as Sage spit out that one disgusting sentence.

“She said you deserved it,” she threw out.

Viper tucked the swab into her pocket, not bothering to go back inside the quarters. Her gaze, however, did not leave Reyna's face, even when the latter sighed heavily, as if she regretted having spoken at all.

Viper straightened up. Her eyebrows furrowed, but only for a moment before she lifted them up. There was no longer tension on her face, but rather... gentleness. But also curiosity.

“Is that why you attacked her?”

The echo of her voice cut through the chirping of crickets.

Reyna felt that her own fang was hurting her lip by biting it so hard, and only when she felt a sharper pain did she let go.

She involuntarily looked at her hand. It didn't look bad once it was cleaned, the scratches were only superficial.

She turned her front to the balcony door and leaned her loins against the railing.

“And what was I supposed to do?” she asked. Viper's gaze was fixed on her figure, so she fled her own somewhere to the wall. “It was revenge,” she admitted. “She took revenge for something she didn't know shit about, and now she's wriggling out of her own mistakes and hoping that everyone will fall to their knees before her just because she can resurrect people,” she expelled on one exhale, swallowing the bitter taste of anger. “She had no right to say that about you, that’s all.”

Reyna shrugged her shoulders. As if it was trivial. As if it was the simplest and most logical explanation there was.

For Viper, it apparently was not. Viper stared at her with wide-open eyes, putting all these sentences together in her head like a puzzle, and when she reached the last one, she almost squirmed under the force of the words.

She pressed her lips together.

Then she bit her lip.

She even wanted to put her arms around herself, but decided that would betray her uncertainty. She felt she had to change the subject or her own thoughts would kill her.

Reyna defended her.

“Does it hurt?”

Zyanya blinked, as if snapped out of a trance. She looked at her hand, but immediately lowered it. Unlike Sabine, she wasn't prepared for such a change of subject, but she didn't drag it out any further.

“It's fine, don't worry,” she replied softly. Her lips, however, were still tightened, anger seemed to lurk inside her, although she tried to tame it. She intertwined her arms across her chest. “Would you like a cig?”

Viper nodded. She was glad she didn't have to say a word when Reyna pulled a pack of cigarettes from her pocket and extended it toward her. With a lighter she hadn't had time to use before, she lit the end of hers and then Reyna's, who inhaled the smoke as if nicotine hunger had been eating her up from the inside for a few hours, not a dozen minutes.

Viper tried not to look at her. But she was doing it anyway. Maybe it was to try to find in her posture, maybe her gestures, the answer to the question she hadn't asked.

Maybe she was afraid that the answer would affect her too much, but at the same time, whenever it flowed onto her tongue, the harder it was to swallow.

Viper walked over to the railing and rested her elbows on it as Reyna had done earlier. In this way she avoided her gaze, which quite suited her, and blew the smoke straight into the darkness of the evening.

She didn't know that Reyna was holding back from looking at her, if only for the way the lit cigarette gently illuminated her face.

Viper liked the silence. She valued it in her life and elsewhere, but now it seemed to get under her skin. She liked silence, yet with each puff of smoke she blew out, she had less and less control.

Finally, she couldn't stand it.

“Why did you stand up for me?”

The question was carried away by the wind. For a long moment, Sabine thought it would stay that way. Out of the corner of her eye, however, she saw Zyanya shake the ash into an ashtray attached to the railing, and her eyebrows were drawn together.

“Because someone has to react to such things,” she replied. “I think that's obvious.”

“And that's why you started choking her?”

Reyna inhaled a puff of smoke. Viper had the impression that she did it a little more nervously. Their auras contrasted with each other, and it was the first time in such an arrangement.

Usually it was Reyna who endured Viper's reluctance to answer.

“I got a little carried away, that's all.”

She shrugged her shoulders. Viper turned her head, accepting the statement with a single hum.

“And this is obvious to you?”

Reyna sighed. The tension that had been on her face now only grew stronger. Sabine knew, however, that it was not directed at her. And that was probably what she was most curious about. And at the same time, it was what she most wanted to understand.

“I didn't plan this,” she said.

“You've never done something like that before.”

Reyna blew out the smoke one last time before extinguishing the cigarette in the ashtray. Viper furrowed her brow as it was only half-burnt, but she still nonchalantly held hers between two fingers, pretending she didn't see it at all.

Nor how Reyna stood next to her, apparently demanding eye contact. She seemed so frustrated by her questions that Sabine decided to turn around and rest her forearms on the railing just because Reyna had never wasted cigarettes before.

“I'm just saying.” This time it was Viper who shrugged her shoulders. She faced Reyna's figure, drawing another inhale of nicotine. “Sage got under your skin, but-...”

Reyna had had enough.

She stepped closer, snatched the smoldering cigarette from Viper's hand and, with a flick of her wrist, pressed it into the ashtray, finishing it off.

But before Viper had time to react and the indignation on her face had time to turn into a verbal reprimand, Reyna caught her face in both hands and pressed her lips to hers.

This was not expected.

Reyna held her face tightly, Viper felt her fingertips pushing against her cheeks and the warmth of her body emanating straight to her by how suddenly she was so close.

She responded to the kiss. But she had to deploy quickly, she had to pick up the pace when Reyna wanted fast, hard, when she probably wanted to take every breath from her, and hell knows when she was almost panting into her mouth when just seconds before they were just talking.

Maybe Reyna just wanted to silence her. Maybe she wanted to silence herself. Maybe she just felt like doing it now and just stop thinking, the way Viper once put it into words.

Viper didn't know that, but she knew it didn't bother her. The lack of an answer to her question was now pushed somewhere to the back of her mind, and she wanted it to stay that way.

Finding support in Zyanya's shoulder, she hooked her fingers there. In return, she let Reyna grab her waist and pull her close with a hum of satisfaction from her.

They kissed for a long time, and Viper... Viper never ceased to be fascinated by the fierceness with which Reyna did it. With which her hands held her sides, as if she never wanted to let them go again. With which she bit her lip, as if she knew perfectly well that Viper liked it, with which her breath tickled her nose and cheeks, pulling a few individual hairs up.

Even the railing poking lightly into her back stopped bothering her. Her hands moved higher and higher up Zyanya's neck.

She knew it would work.

And it worked.

Reyna pulled away from her lips only to gasp.

So Viper combed her hand through her hair once more, and then once more just for the heat that momentarily appeared in the vampire's eyes as soon as she dared to grab the dark hair a little tighter.

“Can we...”

Reyna swallowed her saliva. The thought escaped her, the words refused to form a sentence. All she could do was pull at Sabine's clothes in a silent plea.

Sabine looked in that direction. Zyanya's knuckles whitened in the grip in which she held the material of her shirt. There was something fascinating about that, too. Something that made her own throat dry.

“Yes,” Viper replied. Reyna's gaze jumped all over her face, as if waiting to see if she would change her mind. She wasn't going to. “Come on.”

The balcony door slammed a short time later.

Viper brought their lips together in a kiss, the force of the gesture forcing Reyna to go back a few steps. She swallowed a groan in her throat as Callas bit her lip and teased her fang with her tongue without a hint of hesitation.

Zyanya framed the chemist's hips in her hands. So that she wouldn't fall and fall to pieces so easily because of Viper's learning all her weaknesses and exploiting it so fucking well.

Reyna didn't even realize how tightly she was holding her.

Nor of the fact that she unknowingly crossed the room backwards, trying to respond to every kiss Sabine gave her.

She had no idea where to put her hands, she felt them itching to be everywhere at once, to hold those hips, but at the same time to mark Viper with her nails on her waist, to grab Sabine's wrists and thus tell her not to stop playing with her hair, because it was driving her insane.

Sabine's hand pressed against her sternum. She didn't understand what it meant until the back of her knees collided with the edge of the bed.

She obeyed without protest. Actually she couldn’t even protest. Not when she had her body under her fingers, her mind even boiling with emotion, and Viper kissing so well that all the stubbornness of someone like Reyna fell down like a house of cards.

She had no idea why they were doing it. And when the idea of this kiss was even born in her head instead of even the most trivial answer.

Maybe she wanted it to be that very answer?

Viper immediately straddled her thighs. She didn't want to wait until they moved deeper into the bed, it didn't matter. Reyna obeyed again, because again she couldn't say no, so her back collided with the mattress, the bedclothes almost pulled her in.

The mattress was soft, but the Viper under her fingers even more so. Her skin was melting underneath them, so Reyna wanted harder, more, wanted to hook her nails into it and pull her close before Viper disappeared or before she started asking and Reyna would never get rid of the fire that was eating her from the inside again.

“Off.”

Sabine barely hooked a finger around the edge of Zyanya's sweatshirt, but it was enough. She propped herself up on her elbows and slipped out of the garment, as if she could no longer tolerate the feel of the material on her skin, with every single fiber irritating her and prying at her like a stubborn splinter.

Thrown into a corner, the sweatshirt banged lightly against the floor. The lighter rolled out of its pocket, and although Reyna had completely forgotten about it and didn't intend to think about it at all, Sabine looked in that direction with fascination for a moment. She muttered something to herself in satisfaction, her hands spontaneously settled on Reyna's abs, and only then did she tear her gaze away from the discarded garment.

Purple glowed in her eyes, her chest rising and falling rapidly under her hands. Perhaps if Sabine had looked more closely, if she had squinted her eyelids or tilted her head she would have seen the desperation that Reyna still hadn't learned to contain.

Sabine smiled to herself. Reyna. That Reyna. That deadly, effective, inevitable on the battlefield, invincible. And now her ribs drew in rapid breaths as soon as Viper's hand slid over her hot skin, Reyna’s nails teased her thighs in silent supplication, and her fangs, instead of bring chaos, gnawed on her lower lip in anticipation as her lungs filled with heat.

Viper clicked her tongue.

She leaned over Reyna, faced her with feverish eyes, rested her hand right next to her head.

She could kiss her. She felt that Reyna, though trying to control it, was almost dying to do it.

And Viper just... extended her other hand. She rested her thumb on Zyanya's lower lip and her gaze, for that one moment, focused right there as she pushed against it. She released her lip from behind her fang with a quiet gasp from Zyanya.

Reyna caught herself closing her eyelids. Her heart pounded in her chest, a steady screech slowly began to form in her ears, so intoxicating and addictive that for a few seconds she thought maybe she had just gotten drunk and it was all some damn dream.

“You're going to hurt yourself,” Viper's whisper reached her in waves of chills. Every muscle was burning her. Every tendon the fire swallowed whole, yet Sabine did not take her thumb away from her mouth with her gaze stubbornly focused right there. “They're sharp.”

Reyna swallowed her saliva. Probably she had any idea until now how dry her throat was. She could only dig her nails into the underside of Callas' thighs, forbidding her to move away. She couldn't move away. Not now. Not now, when her hair was tickling Reyna's heated cheek and she was staring at her with the same spark as usual in her green cat eyes.

“Just fucking kiss me already,” she croaked out. “Please.”

Sabine glanced fleetingly at Reyna's fingers clenched on her thighs. The material around them was taut, and Zyanya's knuckles whitened from the grip. The tendons of her wrist twitched under the tattoo in a silent dance.

But Viper didn't know that she was the one pulling the strings. Probably.

Zyanya almost sank into the mattress when Sabine complied with her request.

Viper was never a calm lover. She never held back with her kisses, was never afraid to bite, her every touch was wild and almost unnaturally contrasted with how composed she was. Sabine Callas was as addictive as a drug whenever she was within reach of Reyna's hand, and their breaths mingled together in the bedroom of Valorant headquarters.

And that's why Zyanya grew increasingly impatient. She responded to another kiss, her heart flashing warningly in her chest, but Viper seemed to either not notice or ignore it. Her cold hands moved over Mondragón's ribs, forcing her to suck in air, to jerk away once or twice more, urgently pulling at Viper's shirt, which, unbeknownst to her, she had captured in her fist.

It was as if it was Viper who was feeding off that ferocity that had been sitting inside Reyna for so long.

And Viper... she wanted to tease a little. To say that she wouldn't take off her shirt, that she wanted to stay that way, even though that wasn't the case at all. But maybe... maybe she wanted to see what would happen next, if those tight strings that guided Reyna would finally let go. Her claws would be able to touch her skin without limits, she would be able to grab the way she wanted and touch the way she wanted. She longed... to know if those hungry stares were just appearances.

Viper pulled back. Her hair was tousled, her chest heaved irregularly, and her lips glistened in that twilight illuminated only by the light of her radianite heart so that Reyna had to swallow a growl in her throat.

Goddamn.

With a jerk she got out of her clothes. Zyanya didn't even look at where it landed. Her hands immediately embraced Viper's sides, her thumbs exploring the skin on her belly, tensing and sucking in every breath. Not a twitch of muscle escaped the vampire's eyes. Absolutely none.

She swallowed the words that pressed against her lips. She knew she had to. Her gaze couldn't focus on anything in particular; it jumped from one scar to another, glided across her abdomen, then her sternum.

She could even see the marked edges of her bra above her ribs as her underwear slid higher under the movement.

She was so focused that she barely registered when Viper started tugging at the zipper of her pants. She wanted to help her, lift her hips, even let her move away just to do that.

But that's when she came across Viper's thigh between her legs, which she hadn't expected one bit.

And it was probably there by accident.

But her hips jerked as she hissed.

She cursed herself for doing it so loudly.

And for the fact that her damp underwear didn't leave much of an illusion.

Fuck.

Did she say that out loud?

Viper paused with her hand on the zipper of her pants. And Reyna felt her gaze on her for that one moment, so much so that on the one hand she felt like hiding from it, and on the other hand she realized that if Viper didn't do something... then Reyna would probably go crazy.

“Sabine...” she croaked out. She herself didn't know what she wanted to say. Call her out? Ask her to fucking move back that thigh, to get rid of the friction just where she needed it and avoid the humiliation that had just begun to creep under her skin? “I-...”

“Take it off. Now.”

Zyanya felt like the blood from her entire body had gone to her head like too much and too sudden a dose of alcohol. A fire ignited in Viper's eyes, but she knew she couldn't look at it for too long if she didn't want to lose her mind, so she swallowed her saliva and took off her pants in a few not-so-slick movements, digging them out later somewhere in a corner.

She didn't even catch that Viper had done the same. But she had to swallow the growl in her throat when, finally - finally - there was no boundary between her hand and Sabine's skin.

She realized that everything was bothering her. Her bra was bothering her, she felt she was too hot, even though she was almost naked after all, and when Sabine leaned over her, Zyanya had a feeling that nothing irritated her more than the chemist's underwear at that moment.

She wanted to see her naked. She wanted to feel her naked.

God, she must have been drunk.

“Move over.”

She blinked in surprise. With a movement of her chin, Sabine pointed to the far side of the bed.

She wasn't going to deny it. She supported herself on her elbows and slid closer to the pillow. At one point she took off her bra, and perhaps she wouldn't have remembered it if not for the fact that Sabine's gaze scanned her body for a long moment before she did anything else.

Reyna was strong. Her body had to be reliable to survive, she had to trust herself, that physicality that made her the perfect duelist. The radianite heart pumped blood through all her veins, filling her steel muscles with energy, which now seemed to tremble under Sabine's fingertips so satisfyingly that Callas wanted to imprint the moment in her memory, like an engraving on a ring.

She savored the way Reyna sucked in air as the touch didn't so much tickle as burn. She stared at her face, as if she longed to intoxicate herself with those reddened cheeks that matched the misty purple eyes and completed the picture of desire that Reyna no longer even tried to hide.

She was impatient. Her heels were wriggling into the bedclothes, as if she wanted to kick them off or throw them off the bed because they disturbed her. Her hand tightened on Sabine's waist, slipped a finger under the edge of her bra and pulled her close, not even twitching when the chemist's hand was again suddenly next to her head for balance.

She stretched out her neck to kiss her, to feel something that would ground her and make sure she wasn't floating in the air at all, damn hot and suffocating. She tugged at Sabine's bra.

The material did not let go. But after all, she didn't want to destroy it. She had to restrain herself.

“Try again.”

God. Shit.

The crack of the breaking clasps echoed. She didn't even know they would break so easily and bounce off somewhere to the side only to tumble to the floor and end up under a bed somewhere.

Viper muttered something to herself. The bra strap fell off her shoulder and dangled loosely against her skin, but it must have started to bother her, because she threw the ruined garment off her shoulders, well aware that Reyna wasn't taking her eyes off her.

She didn't kiss her. Well, not on the lips. Sabine's lips were immediately pressed gently against Zyanya's neck, so gently and irritatingly inadequate that she felt like pressing her hand against the back of Sabine's head in a silent gesture of urging.

She let the air out through her nose, enduring the faint kiss with the dying remnants of patience. Her legs glided across the bedclothes, looking for something to grab onto so she could stop feeling so unstable, trembling and absolutely, damn hot.

Viper felt that frantic pulse under her lips, a working artery, restless under her touch. Almost as irrepressible as Reyna herself. Wild, deadly Reyna, squirming in place under the touch of her hand, as if it was steaming her, and at the same time that burning pain gave her that primitive pleasure.

Another gentle kiss. Too gentle.

Zyanya gasped in frustration. Her mind was clouded with fog, she felt like she was either drowning or had already drowned, all sobriety had escaped through the open window and so before she had time to think, she opened her mouth.

“Bite me.”

Viper hovered over her neck at the same second. Her breath blew over the damp spot from the kiss, spreading chills along her spine.

“What?”

Her voice was low. Viper muttered the question, perhaps not even realizing that she didn't sound any less ruined than Reyna. Reyna, who took a few deeper breaths and dropped her forearm over her eyes, as if that would help her focus.

Viper's breasts were touching her own, her belly was perfectly above hers and Zyanya could feel every single unit of heat emanating from her body and hitting Reyna right in the head.

“Fucking bite me,” she repeated.

The curse came out of her mouth on its own, because somehow she couldn't help herself.

“What if-”

“I don't give a shit,” interrupted Zyanya, swallowing her saliva. “I'll cover it up.”

And just like that, a sharp pain appeared just below her collarbone. She arched her neck, perhaps unconsciously trying to give Viper more room, perhaps trying to show her that she liked it more than she should, unconsciously weaving her fingers into her short hair.

For a moment, she thought she was going to faint. That Viper, along with her skin, had also sucked out her soul and Reyna would never again return to where she was before.

She mumbled something weakly when Sabine kissed the fresh hickey, as if to soothe her burning skin. Or Zyanya herself. Or both. Her fingers laboriously combed through the black strands, almost semi-consciously, and she was sure that when she stopped feeling them under her fingers, it was a matter of chance.

But then she felt Viper's lips on her sternum. And then on her ribs, where her nails were drawing unfamiliar patterns. And then Reyna dared to lift her head minimally, because she probably needed some explanation.

Something on Viper's face that would explain why she was so intent on pushing her body to the brink. Why she savored every electric pulse it sent straight to her brain.

Why she hummed quietly when Reyna didn't stop her legs from twitching as the realization hit her head like a several-ton truck, feeling Viper kiss her navel.

“Up.”

Sabine patted her thigh. And Reyna gasped in disbelief, suppressing the curse in her throat, and obediently lifted her hips before she had time to think anything through.

For example, the fact that she was now the one avoiding the conversation this time, that she resolved it in that most primitive way of theirs, and that Viper didn't say a word of protest, so she told herself it was okay.

And the fact that she wasn't able to tell her honestly why she stood up for her, because she was a damn coward.

Nor was she able to look her in the eye when Sabine slipped her underwear off one leg with a single finger.

And she didn't care at all that by doing so, Reyna's panties dangled awkwardly from her other ankle, tangling somewhere in the bedclothes.

Viper embraced her thighs, partially taking their weight on her shoulders. Her fingers delved into the soft skin significantly, enough to make Reyna even more acutely aware of what was happening.

She was. Oh, she was.

She reached one hand behind her head only to grab the edge of the pillow and clamp her hand on it.

And with the other, she immediately wove it into Viper's black hair as she moved the entire length of her tongue laboriously between her labia.

Exploring. Teasingly. Almost languidly.

Reyna sank into the mattress, the muscles of her thighs tightened so much that they even hurt, and she reflexively grabbed the strands of hair a little tighter.

Viper murmured something in response. Zyanya felt the purr with every inch of her body, it spread over her skin in waves so that she hissed under her breath, as if trying to prepare herself for the fact that in a moment it would reach her head and leave nothing but emptiness, a monotonous screech that came so often that Reyna should be used to it by now, and yet she was still addicted to it.

Sabine hooked her tongue over her clit. Once, then a second time. Then she picked up the pace, still muttering something from time to time in her own way, interrupting this evening orchestra of rapid breaths, noises from the sheets and... obscenely downright wet noises, which, if Reyna hadn't been so stupefied, she might even have been ashamed of.

She didn't have a head for it now. She involuntarily massaged Viper's scalp, unconsciously brushing away the strands of hair that fell onto her forehead. Unconsciously, because she felt that if she raised her head even for a second, the sight would probably kill her.

She felt a familiar tension begin to build in her lower abdomen. Her hips moved in their own rhythm from time to time, when she just couldn't stop it.

She felt her cheeks flush red, her blush spilling down to her cleavage. Even her own radianite heart almost sparkled purple as she chased that relief, tugging at the pillow material with her fingernails.

“Fuck, Sabine-...”

She had no idea she was even capable of such whining.

Neither she, nor Viper.

Viper's fingers clenched tighter on her thighs, probably leaving nail marks there, which Reyna didn't even feel.

Instead, she felt Sabine's hair slip from between her fingers, and she couldn't catch it, because her hands suddenly didn't belong to her, she couldn't coordinate them properly to do it with her eyes closed as before.

And that's why she raised her head. She thought it would only be for a moment, that she would prop herself up on her elbow barely for a second or two and then immediately fall back onto that hot bedding.

But then Sabine looked at her in that one way.

From between her legs, with a few strands of hair tickling her face, her chin glistening from Reyna's wetness in that pink radianite light, her cat eyes blushed wildly.

God. Fuck.

Reyna pushed the hair away from her face once more, with a hand almost trembling, as if she wanted to urge it to make it faster, so she could feel her more.

She felt her panties tickle her ankle. She felt the heat of the bedding, of this room. She felt her heart in her chest, every vein in her body, the muscles in her abdomen that tightened warningly.

And Sabine's warm, wet tongue on her clit, which she sucked on a moment later.

“I think... I... Fuck-...”

She didn't even know why she wanted to say it. Why she thought Sabine should know or why she failed to keep the thought to herself.

She had always been quiet. Because that was the deal. This was how she was supposed to present herself, and now somehow... she needed to say anything, maybe it was to relieve her, or maybe she just wanted to show Sabine that it didn't always have to be this way. That their arrangement can be broken. That there are only the two of them, and what happens behind the door, behind the door forever stays.

She felt like her brain was just a shapeless blur of loosely scattered thoughts unable to produce anything concrete as she jerked her hips to match Viper's rhythm.

She wandered her fingers through her hair, as if to hold her there, to make sure she wouldn't melt into the air that second and Reyna would be left with nothing but silence. She didn't care if she sounded desperate, or if Viper would get indignant about the fact that she wasn't able to be quiet the way she usually was, and the bedroom was no longer completely immersed in silence.

“Yes, yes, just like that... just-... fuck, come on, come on-...”

Her orgasm came suddenly. All of her feverish, agitated mumbling was cut off in that very second, when her body tensed up, her spine arched off the mattress, and all she could do was let out a breathless, drawn-out whine from her throat and collapse inertly onto the mattress.

Viper, however, did not stop immediately. For a few more moments she laboriously moved her tongue over her overstimulated clit, as if the thighs twitching around her head were unimpressive because she still held them tightly enough.

She pulled away only when Reyna's hand pressed against her head in a silent gesture of submission.

Viper propped herself up on her elbow and wiped her mouth with the top of her hand, silently watching Zyanya take another raspy breath, her body still shaken from time to time by minimal tremors, and her fingers clenched on the pillow slowly loosening their grip.

She rested her cheek against the inside of her thigh. She felt one of the muscles continue to tremble at its own pace, tickling her skin.

“Okay,” gasped Reyna, swallowing her saliva immediately afterwards. Viper only muttered something into the warmth of her thigh. “My fucking turn.”

“Bold,” commented Viper, almost amused by the words.

She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, her heated cheek teasing Mondragón's sensitive thigh, as if she wanted to play with it a while longer. With the fact that she was just so sated, flushed and ruined, she felt every touch twice as much now and was hypersensitive to it, even if Reyna Mondragón seemed indestructible.

Reyna raised her eyes at her.

Viper had never been afraid of her ferocity. She liked her in a mesmerizing sort of way.

“Come here.”

She furrowed her brow, as if unsure how she should respond. She moved her cheek up along Reyna's thigh to her knee, before moving away completely and placing her hand on the same knee.

“Where?”

“Up here.”

Viper laughed briefly. Reyna pointing at her own face wasn’t something she expected.

“You don't look like you have the strength for it.”

Reyna wasn't going to make much of a plea for herself. She felt like telling Viper that she underestimated her.

Not her, nor how much she wanted to sink her hands into those soft thighs once again.

“First of all, fuck you,” she huffed. Viper mumbled something in response, apparently not too concerned about it, more amused. “And second, I said something.”

Sabine looked in the direction where Reyna's hand had embraced her side.

“Don't boss me around,” she instructed, nevertheless leading her gaze to where Reyna's nails slid across her ribs.

Without a shadow of shame, she embraced her breast.

“I won't when you will fucking come here.”

Viper raised an eyebrow. She wanted to ask if Reyna was desperate. Maybe tease a little or drag out the subject and see what she would do. After all, she could and there was nothing stopping her.

But she had a better idea.

She didn't respond with anything specific, at least not in words. Instead, she stepped back a bit, laboriously removing her lower underwear. Not that she actually couldn't do it quickly. In fact, that was the best thing about it, that she could do it quickly and efficiently... but she didn't want to.

“Are you having fun?” growled Zyanya. Viper felt her gaze on her perfectly, the same one that reminded her of the gaze of a hungry animal. So... she was desperate. “Hurry up, damn it.”

“Impatient,” she commented wistfully, with a shadow of a smile that she somehow couldn't contain.

But she finally shed her panties under Zyanya's watchful eye and climbed onto her stomach.

Zyanya, in turn, didn't wait too long to grab her thighs. Her hands glided over the soft skin as if drawing some life energy from it, hooked her nails as she sucked in a breath and suggestively pushed against their underside, trying to ignore the fact that the wetness that Viper left almost immediately on her abs seemed to have completely taken away her ability to think soberly.

“Wider.”

Reyna almost didn't recognize her own voice. Viper didn't comment on her hoarseness or how she pulled her up to arrange it the way she wanted, even when she complied with the command.

Viper rested her hand on the headrest of the bed, tightened her fingers on it and, with furrowed brows, endured the purr of satisfaction with which Reyna graced her, once she had attached her lips to the inside of her thigh.

She seemed all too delighted with her position, muttering something in her own way and gliding her tongue over the warm skin, as if she wanted to lick off something that would finally satiate her, as if the taste of that skin was what she had been starving for until now.

Viper hung her head. Maybe she wanted to look at her. To control what was happening, how her eyes glinted in that twilight, how the sharp edge of the fang scratched her thigh with an invisible mark, and how she precisely avoided what, after all, Reyna had wanted to do so badly just a moment ago.

Viper hissed as a sharp pain pierced her thigh and reflexively wove her fingers into the vampire’s hair scattered on the pillow. She knew it would work. It always worked. Reyna growled under her breath, but let Sabine push her head away, even if she was pleased with the effect.

She didn't even have time to soothe the pain from the hickey with her tongue when she faced the jade green.

“Behave.”

Sabine's blush spilled over her collarbones, her hair was like a dark curtain as she leaned over her and managed to rebuke her in this... curious position. Those minimal twitches of her hips betrayed her, and although she tried to pretend it wasn't like that at all, Reyna noticed it all.

So did the fact that the last time Viper seemed to fight with the urge to murder at the thought that Reyna might leave any marks.

“Oh, I will,” she muttered. Unwittingly, the corner of her mouth lifted victoriously.

She wasn't lying. Reyna intended to behave well. So well, in fact, that she swore to herself that Sabine would forget any questions she had about her earlier.

Viper let go of her hair, taking in this information. She leaned her palms against the headrest, not even realizing how tightly she was holding it.

The mattress creaked as Sabine's knees involuntarily bent, and she sucked in air, realizing she had to catch her balance.

Reyna thought otherwise. Her hands held Sabine's hips where she wanted them to be just when she finally - finally - reached her clit with her tongue.

She caught Viper's gaze from above. And she had a feeling she got even hungrier from the mere sight.

Viper could play so tough. She could order Reyna around, she could pretend it didn't bother her. However... yet now her wetness was almost running down Reyna's chin, and she rested her heated forehead against the wall, trying to stifle violent gasps. Her eyes were closed, tightly, stubbornly, but that fog was in them.

Because Sabine, being honest... she had no idea what Reyna was doing between her legs, but whatever it was... she was damn good at it. Along with those eager fangs of hers that she could still feel on her hickey-marked thigh, those nails digging into her hips, and that fucking tongue that she unconsciously started chasing, not long after it was on her at all.

“You don't have to hold back, you know that.”

Viper reflexively jerked her hips, feeling the edge of the fang on her thigh again for a second. This time on the other one.

“F-fuck you-...”

Her breath bounced off the wall and hit her right in the face. She didn't even know she was feeling this hot so far.

Instead, she knew that Reyna had seen through her. That she saw her lips tighten, her hips move with the help of her hands. That she may have seen her swallow her saliva helplessly along with all the sounds that were dying in the pit of her throat.

Yet she was only able to say just that.

Until Reyna's tongue returned to its place.

She gasped. She involuntarily wanted to fall back, but Zyanya held tight.

Sabine felt her hands go numb on the headrest, a screech began to appear in her head, and until Reyna purred, she didn't even realize that she had accelerated the movements of her hips, blindly pursuing relief.

She grabbed her by the hair, perhaps hoping this would keep her whole. Anything to occupy her hands, to start feeling it between her fingers, mindlessly combing through it, anything to distract her own attention from how thin the rope that held her was.

Reyna did everything to break it.

Oh, really everything.

She put her feet up on the mattress for stability, embraced Viper's clit with her lips and sucked.

Hard.

“Fuck.”

For a split second, Zyanya thought it was over.

That Viper would disappear behind the door again within a minute, and that the memory of that sound would once again be left only between the walls, as if it had faded ages ago.

But Viper did not move from her seat. She only clenched her fist in her hair.

“Do it again.”

The request gasped out in the pause between the movements of her hips was too eloquent for Reyna not to listen.

Her nails slid across her scalp.

“Harder.”

She did it harder.

Viper's pulse quickened in her ears to the pace of a familiar chase. She hugged her thighs tighter, but giving full freedom to her hips, which were already slowly beginning to lose their rhythm.

It was intermittent, unstable, and the jerks became more and more chaotic until Viper’s hips twitched one last time and her thigh muscles tightened under Reyna's hands.

Viper's moan hit her right in the spine.

And although she muffled it a second later by gnashing her teeth on her own knuckles, Reyna knew she wouldn't let it die in her memory for a very long time.

Not that, nor her still twitching hips, her hair falling across her forehead in unkempt strands that she clumsily tried to chase away.

“Not a word,” she mouthed straight into the wall, as if she wasn't ready to face Reyna's gaze.

Her thumb wandered somewhere on Viper's buttock, involuntarily stroking the skin there. Maybe she wanted to soothe her. Maybe she wanted to show her that they were still both here and neither of them had disappeared.

Or maybe she just felt it was the right thing to do.

And she actually didn’t say a word.

***

“So... what was it?”

Viper left the bathroom door ajar to let the warm steam seep into the bedroom. She raised her gaze to Reyna, who had been lying on her bed on her stomach and browsing something on her phone for the past ten minutes.

Reluctantly, she peeled her gaze away from the screen, but Viper immediately linked their gazes, taking to wiping her hair with a towel.

Not that Reyna was disappointed... but if she was going to be honest, she hoped that the subject of their previous conversation had long since flown out the window and wouldn't return for at least some time.

But Sabine was vindictive.

She shrugged her shoulders. Maybe she hoped that with this gesture she would convince herself that she actually had an idea how to conduct the conversation in such a way that Viper would stop asking.

She put the phone down next to her and put her hands under her chin

“I already told you,” she stated seemingly out of breath. “She said one word too many.”

Sabine didn't seem satisfied with that answer. Instead of acceptance, on her face Reyna still saw that unchanging curiosity, even though it was almost the middle of the night.

“So... you think she deserved it?”

Zyanya raised an eyebrow.

“And you don't?”

Sabine wiped her hands in the fabric of her T-shirt, worn as pajamas, moments before hanging the towel over the back of a chair.

“I'm asking you.”

Zyanya got the impression that Viper looked at her phone on the desk just to avoid looking at her. She swiped her finger across the screen, and even though she was standing facing the bed, Reyna felt it was just a game of appearances anyway.

“A lesson will come in handy for her,” she finally admitted. Viper's fleeting glance did not escape her attention. But she wasn't going to hide from it at all. “Maybe next time she'll think twice before saying something just when she should shut up.”

Sabine nodded. That was supposed to be enough for Reyna, and in theory it was... in practice, however, she felt a certain malaise, although she couldn't pinpoint where it came from.

She moved her finger across the screen once more.

Reyna dimly saw the hickey that adorned her thigh, standing out on her pale skin even in this darkness.

Sabine's face was illuminated by the blue light. Only for a moment, because then she locked the screen and put the phone back on the desk, reading a text message.

“There's a meeting tomorrow morning. Do you know anything about it?”

Reyna put down her phone as well, out of the corner of her eye just watching Viper walk between more pieces of their closet, still lying on the floor.

“No.”

“Do you think it's because of Sage?”

“I don't think so. She'd be taking too much of a risk if she even tried to speak up. She's not stupid.”

Viper muttered something to herself. She seemed satisfied with this explanation. She moved the quilt away from one side of the bed and patted Reyna's shoulder.

“Move over.”

Reyna again simply obeyed. This time they both slept through the night.

Notes:

I will be on vacation for the next three weeks so here is some longer chap to feed you guys for this time :> I will try to translate something in advance to publish later, so I won't leave you starving, but can't promise anything, so just dropping the info. Anyways love you all, take care <3

Chapter 40: FORTY

Reyna caught herself getting impatient.

She tapped the cap of her pen on her notebook, staring at the blank page as if she was looking for something to occupy her. She even began unconsciously scribbling meaningless designs in the margins a moment later, casting only a quick glance at Raze, who had entered the room and sat across from her, removing her headphones from her ears.

She shouldn't look out for Sage so much. That would be too suspicious for everyone, especially when the chairs were slowly filling up. She counted down in her head how many empty ones were left.

She began to run out of space in the margins, so she moved her pen to the bottom of the page. She didn't suspect she was going to write anything on it anyway.

“You're wasting paper.”

She turned her head to the left. Viper placed her notebook next to her serving of morning coffee, then sat down. Almost immediately she entwined her fingers around the mug.

“Nice to see you, too, Viper.”

Sabine had her own personal ways of saying 'good morning' and that was one Reyna didn't know. But for all she knew there was something distinctive about it, and she had long since learned to take it less seriously.

Viper mumbled something, dipping her lips into her coffee. But when she put the cup down and it clinked slightly on contact with the table, that urge to ask a question appeared on her face.

Her gaze, however, briefly lingered on Reyna's turtleneck before stopping at her face.

Reyna had never worn turtlenecks. This time, however, they both knew the reason, so neither of them spoke up on the subject, and Viper simply sank her back against the backrest after that one second.

“There's nothing in the schedule about new mission. Nor about the sudden inventory stuff.”

Reyna put down her pen. She looked at Killjoy, who was taking a seat next to Raze, and then at Omen. Later, she turned her head.

“Nothing has been showing up for me since yesterday either,” she admitted. “Have you seen Brimstone anywhere?”

“He was making coffee. He'll probably come over soon.”

She nodded. She felt like starting to scribble again, but didn't.

Finally, heavy footsteps were heard from the corridor, and soon after, Brimstone entered the room, actually carrying steaming coffee in a mug.

And behind him… was Sage.

Her head may have been raised. And she could even walk quite confidently to her seat, convincing everyone who sat there.

But Reyna wasn't like everyone. As soon as she met her gaze, she specifically scanned her face. Sage only managed to hold that gaze for a second, before seemingly casually returning it to her notebook.

She flipped through the pages, playing her pretense.

She was afraid. 

Also, she was wearing a turtleneck. Reyna was able to imagine the marks her fingers had left on Ling's neck even from the mere memory of how clearly she felt Sage’s terrified pulse under her fingertips at the time.

Sage tried to pretend that she was able to bear it, that her escaping with her eyes was just a matter of coincidence, and yet... yet Zyanya was content to drive her gaze right into Sage whenever she had the chance just to show her that she was still there and wasn't going anywhere.

She won't fool her.

A clap of hands snapped her out of her observation. 

All pairs of eyes turned to Brimstone, who, in his usual move, rested his forearms on the table and leaned in slightly.

“Let me say at the outset that this is nothing sudden or urgent.”

Reyna leaned back more comfortably in her chair, and the rest of the agents also seemed to feel some relief over this information, so the former tension escaped the room a bit.

Not surprisingly, no one was likely to feel like going on another mission after the last one was over. Some of the agents closed their notebooks, Killjoy even tucked away the pen she had been fidgeting with until now.

“There's been a lot going on lately. There have been a few mistakes and the missions have been tough at times,” the man continued, probably unaware that Reyna and certainly Viper were struggling to restrain themselves from smiling mockingly. Losing the agents was unlikely to be just a mistake. “But from what Cypher and Sova have informed me about, it looks like Omega Earth is not going to let us know about them for some time, so you should get some rest,” he said.

“Lack of activity doesn't mean they're not planning anything.”

Sage's gaze immediately went to Deadlock, who crossed her arms over her chest. And she seemed to be specifically not looking in her direction, but hard and directly at Brimstone, who nodded in her direction.

“That's true. But that doesn't limit the possibility of a pass to leave the country, if you keep in communication with each other and take your locators with you. And a little vacation will allow you to recover from recent events.”

Reyna raised her eyebrows.

Leaving the country?

“So we can just... go? Wherever we want?”

Raze laughed briefly, as if saying that sentence amused her just because of how... almost absurd it sounded.

“For a period of a week nothing should happen,” Brimstone stated, before turning to the side for a moment. “Cypher, me and Omen will stay at headquarters and monitor Omega activity. If there's anything on, we'll get in touch, and if necessary, we'll send Vulture to where we will track the locators.”

Cypher nodded, turning his trapwire in his hand, as he was accustomed to doing in meetings.

Raze joined Reyna and also raised an eyebrow. She didn't say a word, however Fade did.

“What's the catch?”

Liam didn't seem as offended by the question, as he was probably prepared for it. Fade's distrust didn't make much of an impression on him, after all, it shouldn't be surprising that the vision of a day off was downright surreal for the Protocol.

“By the end of the week I want to see the submitted pass papers on my desk. That's all.”

No one spoke up. There was a grave silence in the room, broken only by the clicking of Cypher's trapwire and occasional murmurs.

Reyna cast a glance at Viper. Her gaze was fixed on the window, but her lips were clamped shut. She wasn't going to speak up.

Raze, Killjoy, and Neon were simply bewildered and somewhat confused. However, no one stepped out of line, so Brimstone straightened up in his chair.

“If you have no questions, feel free to go,” he said.

Agents waited another moment. They looked at each other a little uncertainly, as if they were waiting to see which of them would be the first to get up from the chair after this unusual gathering, which... lasted a maximum of five minutes.

In the end, Jett was the one who pushed her chair away from the table and headed for the door first, yawning discreetly at the threshold.

Not surprisingly, time was barely reaching nine o'clock. 

The rest didn't linger too long, and soon after, the noise of chairs being pushed back and notebooks being closed filled the room for a moment before the agents slowly left the meeting room, no less bewildered than they were a moment ago.

Reyna did not do the same.

With a slight furrowed brow, Viper left her in the room after taking her things along with her coffee, but she didn't ask, simply leaving with the rest.

“What's the idea?” she asked when there was no one else in the room besides her and Brimstone, and she turned back to the main desk.

The man raised his eyes from over his coffee and raised an eyebrow.

“What do you expect me to say?” he replied with question after question. “As I said, we all need to rest.”

Reyna was not satisfied with this answer. She folded her arms over her chest, thereby announcing that she was not going to leave so easily.

She couldn't understand why Brimstone's calmness with which he answered her irritated her. For some reason, anger being one-sided was frustrating.

She remembered telling him that she didn't care about his orders. And a few other things that openly showed her dislike, and he... he was now acting as if nothing had happened. He could have taken it as a momentary emotion at the time, he could even forgive her without much problem.

And Reyna didn't know if she wanted him to.

“Somehow it was never even a thought before,” she said.

“Before I have never had to write out the death certificate of a person who just walked out the door.”

Reyna pressed her lips together only slightly. She caught herself using her skills to listen to his heartbeat in case he was about to lie. And she was disappointed when it beat calmly.

“What happened to Viper is known to us, Sage and Killjoy. It didn't affect more people, so why have days off for all?”

Brimstone took a sip of coffee and set it down on the desk.

“You don't trust me?”

“You wanted to know yourself if we had any questions.”

Brimstone looked at her for a moment. Maybe he was waiting to see if she would yield and go on with the subject further herself, but Zyanya had no intention of doing so.

“Sage made mistakes that put the team at risk. It certainly affected them, so if I want them to act soberly, they have to let themselves forget about it for a while.”

“So are you waiting for the issue to be swept under the rug?”

“And in this case, is that a bad thing?” He asked. Reyna felt like parrying. “I'm giving you, by the way, time for your answer, which I believe, coincidentally, you still haven't given.”

Reyna shrugged her shoulders. She was not particularly interested in the minimal reproach in Liam's voice. Frankly speaking, she preferred to hear it than to endure his annoying calmness.

“Because I don't have to anymore. Viper, after all, is fine now.”

“She is, but that doesn't mean I'll put her right in the middle of the battlefield anytime soon,” he replied. As if that was the simplest explanation in this world. And maybe it even made some sense, only Reyna felt an inner chuckle anyway. “She will have regular checkups for a while,” he said.

At least she already knew where the gnawing anger was coming from.

“You're still pushing her away,” she said, struggling to restrain herself not to sound like she was mocking at him. “Are you going to keep blowing off steam like this indefinitely, or are you finally going to let her get back to the job where she's needed?”

Brimstone was probably not very happy with the way she was responding to him. She could see from him that he sensed every reproachful tone and endured it worse and worse, but it wasn't yet bad enough for him to say anything about it.

“I'll let her go back to work when I'm sure it won't endanger her,” he replied. Harder than before, perhaps because of the frustration she had caused. And perhaps it even suited her. “She'll be helping you anyway,” he said.

“It's not the same.” Reyna didn't want to growl those words so much, but somehow she couldn't help herself. “You're once again showing her that she's not that important, even though you know perfectly well that everything is going to shit without her,” she added dryly. Brimstone didn't speak up, and she intended to take advantage of that before all those strained nerves finally let go. “I'll file the papers for a pass by the end of the week.”

And she left. Just like that.

Brimstone probably looked behind her until she slammed the door, but didn't stop her. And good thing too, because Reyna wasn't going to stop anyway, even if he had asked.

***

Fade did a lot of thinking as she walked hand in hand with Neon down the corridor. To be honest, she didn't quite know why exactly now her thoughts ran to this one point, but on the other hand, watching Neon push her hands into her sweatshirt pockets and avoid her gaze, she wasn't surprised at all.

Although she might have only thought so.

“Do you have a moment?” 

She cleared her throat, realizing that it managed to dry out since she had spoken up at the meeting. That one question rang out in the hallway when they finally stood at the door of Tala's room.

“Is something wrong?” replied question to question Neon, opening the door and holding it in silent invitation to Fade.

“No, no. I think not.”

Neon furrowed her brow, but made no special comment. She simply walked into the room, took her phone out of her pants pocket and carelessly tossed it on the bed before sitting down in the chair at the desk.

Fade occupied her bed once she had closed the door. The creaking of the mattress was strangely uncomfortable in the silence, but she decided to pretend it didn't bother her at all.

“Can we talk about it?” she finally asked.

Maybe she knew that getting to the topic by a circuitous route didn't make much sense, and prolonging it wouldn't do any good.

“What do you mean?”

Apparently only Fade was of that opinion.

She sighed, placing her hands in her lap as if to prop herself up with this, and looked at Neon out of the corner of her eye. Neon, who either didn't seem to really know what Hazal was talking about, or pretended really well that she did.

“You know very well what I mean.”

It was a test. And she thought that Neon would recognize that there was no way to avoid the subject and would simply yield, but she only minimally bit the inside of her cheek and shrugged her shoulders.

Hazal felt those notes of fear all the same. As much as she hated her powers at times, at that moment she knew that her gut was not wrong, and at least that was what she was sure of.

“What was before the mission, before I left the room,” she finally said. “You promised we would talk about it.”

Neon pulled her legs up under her on the chair and sat down cross-legged. Her face lost that facade of unconsciousness and she seemed overwhelmed by Hazal's words... and not very happy about them.

“Does it have to be just now?”

“You said the same thing earlier. And, by the way, the previous several times too.”

Fade was not angry. She didn't intend to be, because that wasn't what she wanted, and she didn't want Neon to reproach her with whatever she had in her head in an act of anger. She just wanted to... talk.

She had been trying to broach the subject for the past few days whenever the moment seemed right. It gnawed at her that they still hadn't explained where Dimaapi's fear came from at the time, and worse, Neon seemed to be doing her best to make this thread go away.

She ran off somewhere with her eyes. Hazal felt that the younger one at that moment regretted agreeing to let her into the room. She had to swallow it.

“But the previous times I told you I didn't want to talk about it. It still hasn't changed,” she muttered, plucking a protruding thread from the fabric of her sweatshirt with her fingers. Irritation crept into her voice, but she brushed it off and, still not looking at Fade, spoke again. “Are you going to use the pass?”

Fade took in a lungful of air. She wanted to change the subject, wanted to tip it again to the previous one, because after all, that's what she cared about, but when Neon didn't even raise her head, still playing with that damn thread from her sweatshirt and doing her best not to look at her, Fade could only sigh. 

Her shoulders hunched, she all bent over, shifting more of her body weight to her elbows.

Maybe she didn’t have the strength to push, though. Not when, looking at Neon, she felt she was colliding with a wall that the younger woman had not yet been able to break through.

“Rather not,” she said. She heard the surrender in her voice, and frankly, she hoped Tala heard it too. “I'll sit with Cypher, we'll play chess or something.”

Neon muttered something to herself. It was hard to tell whether Fade was supposed to take this as acceptance of this news or just the opposite.

Fade didn't really have much of a place to go. And to be honest, she knew from the beginning of the start of this topic at the meeting that she wasn't going to participate. Not that she had anything against it, because the idea itself was even a good one.

But she was used to the thought that, like Omen or Cypher, she had no place of her own outside of the Protocol. In Turkey she had nothing to look for except death, and somehow she never got the courage to go to the other countries.

Or maybe she just felt she didn't deserve to travel, so playing chess with Cypher was a safe option.

“I wanted to visit home,” Neon said, shrugging her shoulders. She bit her lip for a moment, and Fade didn't understand it at first, until the younger woman finished her thought. “I was thinking if you'd like to come with me, instead of... you know, sitting here.”

Hazal raised her eyebrows. She straightened unconsciously, unlike Tala, who slouched even more, as if her own proposal embarrassed her. However, when she finally dared to raise her gaze to the older one, an uncertain smile wandered on her lips.

“Do you want me to go to the Philippines with you?”

Fade herself didn't think this question from Neon could surprise her that much, and yet when she wanted to make sure, disbelief sounded in her voice.

“Is that bad?”

Fade blinked.

“No, no, I just... you surprised me, that's all,” she said quickly, seeing that Tala seemed even more uncertain after her answer than before. “I think... I think I would like to.”

Neon seemed to be trying to hold back a smile. Fade wasn't doing that. She looked at the younger woman, trying to push her previous attempt to talk about a sensitive topic out of her mind.

Maybe she really wasn't ready for it. Maybe Fade was pushing too hard. Maybe there was something deeper behind it than she thought, and Neon's reluctance didn't come out of nowhere.

“I'll let you know when I fill out the paperwork.”

Hazal nodded.

***

“What did he want?”

Reyna almost jumped when that very question startled her just around the corner leading to the shooting range. 

Sometimes she forgot that the Viper was able to outplay her overhearing, and she still wasn't used to it.

She turned around. Sabine was leaning with her hip against the wall, and it seemed that she must have been standing there for quite a while. Which was surprising on the one hand, but not at all on the other. After all, she knew every schedule by heart and was able to recite it probably awake in the middle of the night, so she knew well where to be in order to run into Reyna at a convenient moment.

“Nothing,” she replied, truthfully. For effect, she shrugged her shoulders. “I'm the one who wanted something.”

Viper's brow lifted. She entwined her arms more tightly across her chest.

“You mean?”

“That he should stop assigning me to every possible mission when we have several other good duelists.”

That accusation was a half lie, but it came out of Reyna's mouth smoothly enough that she almost didn't reproach herself for it.

She didn't know if Viper believed it. But she wasn't at all going to make sure she did either, so she simply opened the door of the shooting range and held it.

“Do you want to join?”

Viper looked at the open door for a moment, for a moment at Reyna. Perhaps she was looking there for those traces of a lie that Zyanya had not managed to hide so well.

“I'm banned from training until the end of the week.”

Zyanya did not feel particularly affected by this statement. She shrugged her shoulders again, this time sincerely.

“I didn't say you have to train.”

Sabine squinted her eyelids, but her previous inquisitiveness had disappeared somewhere. Reyna had either lulled her vigilance or Viper had done her best to make it seem that way.

She followed Zyanya into the shooting range and took the first bench she could find against the wall, pretending not to observe Reyna, who walked over to her locker and began taking her gun from it.

“How did the talk with Neon go?”

The question echoed lightly, and Reyna hesitated only for a moment in taking a magazine out of her vandal. She loaded the second one efficiently, under the watchful eye of Viper, who seemed to find amusement in watching Reyna's hands.

“She's still mad at me,” Zyanya admitted, looking at Viper out of the corner of her eye just so Sabine would know she was aware of her observation. “But I guess it's better when she knows that we... well, you know, it's not like she thought.”

“And what did she think?”

Reyna's efficient hand movements stopped. For a moment, but Viper noticed it anyway. She searched for the right words for probably too long, but she wasn't going to show that the fact that she couldn't find them intimidated her, so she habitually laid the vandal on her shoulder to check the crosshair.

And to avoid looking at the Viper.

“She thought what was between us was the same as what was between her and Fade.”

She played it smoothly enough. She tried to tell herself that one word didn't stay in her throat for a moment.

“We have training together today,” she added. Probably because she didn't want to give Sabine time to react. Callas, however, wasn't going to interrupt her, and Reyna was grateful for that, although she couldn't say why. “I guess it's not tragic, but she still needs some time,” she said.

She glanced at Viper. Just for a second. Sabine nodded, but the expression on her face... was somehow different than Reyna had imagined. She didn't want to use that one word, but it was the only one that came to mind.

Disappointed.

She chased it away somewhere in the back of her mind.

She walked over to the stand, put the vandal there, and went back to the cabinet to get her safety glasses and headphones.

“You were right.” Reyna turned her head, as if snapped out of her thoughts. Viper rested her elbows on her knees. “I should have told Killjoy earlier.”

Sabine shrugged her shoulders in a sort of acknowledgment, though she didn't know if Reyna saw it, by how busy she was putting on her glasses. She didn't put her headphones on.

Nice thing to know that she was listening to her.

“You wanted to protect her,” Reyna said, before settling the vandal on her shoulder. “Maybe a little too much, but that's understandable. I doubt she won't be able to forgive you for that, right?”

Viper ran her gaze over her hands and began playing with her fingers. She smiled to herself.

“Thank God.”

Zyanya nodded her head. She reciprocated the smile, although Sabine had no way of seeing it, as the vampire turned toward the bot arena.

She started the training, set to the most difficult level. Higher than before.

Sabine could only watch, but she didn't mind at all. She liked to watch, she liked to observe a lot, to draw conclusions, to analyze. And yes, now one of them came to fruition, because Reyna at the usual training sessions... was simply bored.

Her senses were too sensitive to miss. Her eyesight was too sharp, and her reflexes made suddenly appearing and disappearing bots not too much of a challenge.

Those like her were not spared in training. The bots almost flashed before her eyes, and she fired shots without a moment's hesitation. The number of points gradually increased on the scoreboard one by one as she decapitated the holograms again and again.

It was strange, but it was the first time Viper saw the killer in her from so close up. That precision, the death that the vampire carried in her hands along with her rifle whenever she appeared on the battlefield.

Viper read Reyna's card while recruiting. She knew who she was dealing with on every mission, and after all, her deadliness was so much in evidence that even a blind man would have noticed.

Yet now... now she could see the focus on her face from less than two meters away. Eyes that jumped from target to target, arms carrying the rifle as if it weighed nothing, finger pulling the trigger again and again and firing barely one shot each time, but each time hit.

“Are you going somewhere?”

Sabine blinked. She couldn't remember the exact moment when the shots stopped, but she wasn't going to show it. Even then, Reyna leaned with her back against the vandal stand and unusually slowly unhooked the magazine from her belt to replace it.

To her own relief, she figured out pretty quickly what Reyna was talking about.

“Why are you asking?”

“I want to know if you have any plans.”

Viper raised her eyebrows.

“And why do you want to know?”

“So that I can tell you whether to get ready or not.”

“Excuse me?”

Reyna looked around the shooting range for a moment. Not that there was anything interesting to look at, she just probably felt that looking at Viper at that moment was strangely... intimidating.

“In five days it's Día de Muertos,” she finally said. “That's what we call the day of the dead in Mexico,” she added, feeling that if she didn't clarify everything right away, she wouldn't hear from her again on the matter and would just go back to training. “If you have to spend a week alone in the lab, it's probably a better idea if you come with me. Some peace but with dancing, fun and some good food. The brain gets a little cut off from... you know, everything else.”

Reyna probably felt uncomfortable with the way Viper was looking at her, as if she was waiting for her to explain something more, or explain herself, and she didn't have that explanation. She started tapping the underside of the vandal stand with her fingertips.

It was idiotic for her to stress over something like this.

“I'm not a very... fun person.”

She lifted her gaze. Sabine looked a little as if saying this out loud was an admission of guilt. Her shoulders creased minimally.

“You don't know until you try,” Reyna replied without much effort. “Besides, it's just a suggestion, you don't have to agree to it.”

Viper nodded again. And Zyanya, on the one hand, felt like going back to training, and on the other hand, felt that if she let go now, the topic would go far into the ether.

Because actually, her proposal was... unpredictable. And perhaps even a little out of character if their relationship was to remain at the stage they had established so far.

Regardless, Reyna had a feeling that things were starting to go complicated on this subject.

“When? And where exactly?”

Reyna didn't want to let it be known that Viper's directness was such a surprise to her.

She let the air out of her mouth.

“If you agree, I'll bring you the pass papers after training. You'll just have to sign it.”

Viper straightened up a little. The back of her head leaned against the wall behind her, and her gaze wandered somewhere beside Reyna, as if that was where she was looking for answers.

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

Reyna asked before she could stop herself. She knew Viper didn't like to repeat herself, but now... she probably needed it.

“I'll go with you.”

Although Reyna was an excellent assassin, this time she missed several shots during another round of training.

***

Viper turned her head as the lab door opened. She moved away from the laptop for a moment seeing that Killjoy was obviously looking for something.

“Can I help you with something?”

Klara tore her gaze away from the shelf and returned it to Viper, then scratched her temple.

“Didn't I leave my calculator here?” she asked. “I can't find it anywhere.”

Sabine unconsciously looked around for a moment, copying her movement, but after a moment she simply opened the drawer of her desk and rummaged around there for a while.

She took out a Killjoy calculator and held it out toward her.

“Sorry, I must have hidden it by accident,” she admitted, but Killjoy just waved her hand and tucked the calculator into her sweatshirt pocket.

“It's okay,” she replied. With a movement of her chin, however, she clearly pointed to Viper's laptop, which displayed a schematic of her poison orb. “What are you working on?”

Viper herself glanced at the screen.

“I'm increasing the running time,” she said, then shrugged her shoulders. “If we're going to take time off, I'd rather take care of it now.”

Viper looked at a percentage chart of the progress of uploading the new system. The green bar was loading slowly, but enough to occupy her attention enough that she didn't notice the younger one's brow crinkle.

“Are you leaving?”

Viper's calm disappeared in the same second. She blinked in surprise, although there was nothing surprising about the question.

What was surprising was that she didn't realize in time that she shouldn't say anything about it.

Because, after all, Viper never left. Actually, she spent most of her time either in the office, at her bedroom or in the lab, and that's how everyone associated her.

There was no convenient way to explain to KJ why she intended to go to damn Mexico. Even more so if even Viper herself didn't know it.

She had no idea why she agreed.

“And you don’t?”

It was only a temporary solution, but it bought her some time. She could count on Klara forgetting what she wanted to ask at first.

“I don't know yet,” she said, but her gaze fled somewhere to the side as she took in a mouthful of air. “Raze wanted to go somewhere together, but it's not a sure thing.”

Viper wasn't sure how she should respond. She just nodded, glancing fleetingly at the laptop screen, probably so she wouldn't have to look at Killjoy. She had recently learned to see more.

“That's nice of her.”

She didn't want Klara to think she was against the idea, because... she wasn't. And if she was, it would put her in the light of hypocrisy. Besides... it wasn't hard to see that Killjoy valued Raze's presence, and Viper cared that Killjoy avoided loneliness.

And Killjoy must have noticed this, because she breathed a sigh of relief. She took her hands out of the pockets she had hitherto clenched on her calculator and put her arms around herself.

And then Sabine, for some reason, couldn't stand her own silence.

“I'm going with Reyna.” Killjoy's eyebrows went up, and frankly Viper wasn't surprised at all. “To Mexico,” she added, turning to face Killjoy already fully when the loading of the new system into the smoke grenade was over.

The German woman leaned against one of the cabinets. Viper felt like lowering her gaze to the floor or, for the sake of appearances, starting to click something on her laptop, but she knew it wouldn't do any good.

In Killjoy's place, she would have been shocked, too. If someone had told her some time ago that such a sentence would ever come out of her mouth, she probably would have laughed it off, so her consternation was not surprising, but... but it did cause Viper some embarrassment.

“So... do you like each other?”

“No,” she answered right away. Too bad it was only when she said it out loud that she noticed it sounded all too desperate. “I mean... not so much. We're not too fond of each other.”

“Well, okay.”

Killjoy scratched the back of her neck, her brow furrowed this time.

Viper perhaps should have just left it at that. At this simple acceptance without further questions, even if Klara clearly had some. Yet after a moment of drumming her fingers on her knee, Viper couldn't stand it.

She increasingly regretted not holding her tongue earlier. Only that now it was too late.

“Is this weird?”

She didn't know if knowing the answer to that question would help her in any way. She didn't even know why she wanted to know that answer at all.

Killjoy, on the other hand, clearly wanted to say something, but was about to give it up. Viper decided that she would give her time to arrange the words in her head, even if each successive second of silence on her part made her feel strangely uneasy.

“No, I just...,” she paused for a moment and corrected her bangs, which had fallen over her eyes. She shrugged her shoulders. “When they brought you to the medbay, Reyna spent quite a lot of time there.”

“A lot of time?” She stopped drumming her fingers on her knee. “Two days.”

“Is that what she told you?”

Viper blinked. She even opened her mouth to say something, but immediately closed it when she realized she didn't even know what. All she could do was stare at Killjoy like an oracle and hope she didn't look as confused as she felt.

“And what... what was she supposed to say?” She unconsciously cleared her throat. “Killjoy?”

Klara continued to stare at the floor, biting her lower lip, probably considering the available options. Finally, she sighed and hugged the edge of the countertop behind her with her hands.

“It's been a week,” she finally threw out. She ignored the shock on Viper's face as she herself seemed a little puzzled at this point. “You didn't notice?”

Sabine herself didn't know whether her heart had dropped to her ankles or was coming up to her throat. She felt it pulsing between her ribs steadily, for a moment taking away her ability to focus on anything else.

“I didn't... I didn't look at the dates. I don't even remember what day the procedure was done.”

She almost didn't recognize her voice.

“It could be the fault of the anesthesia,” stated Killjoy quickly. “Or the drugs. You know, you're still recovering.”

That explanation made sense. But Sabine didn't even think about it, thinking about the same word over and over in her head and jumping her eyes over Killjoy's face as if she was waiting for her to cancel everything she had said.

A week?

She put two fingers to her temples and rested her elbow on the desk, as she probably felt her head getting heavy from all this information.

And yet it was nothing that big. It shouldn't have been anything like that.

“Sorry, I have to go.”

In a few seconds she unplugged the poison orb from her laptop and slammed its lid shut. The stool she was sitting on rolled to the oppos

ite wall when she hopped off it.

She passed Killjoy, knowing full well that she was looking at her and Viper might even be able to explain this sudden reaction to her if... she herself knew where it was coming from.

Chapter 41: FORTY ONE

“I'm almost done with printing, I was about to go to you.”

Reyna only turned around when she heard the sound of the office door closing. The printer hummed behind her, continuing work, but she looked at Viper, who hissed a curse under her breath as she struggled with the lock.

“Something’s wrong?”

The lock clicked finally, leaving them both in a securely private space. Viper was still wearing her lab coat, rippling as she turned on her heel toward her.

“Two days,” she said on one exhale. Reyna furrowed her brow, seeing as much frustration on Sabine's face as she had probably never seen before. She wanted to ask what that was about, but didn't even have time. “You said you’ve been there for two days.”

She only glanced at the finger that was pressed against her sternum in resentment. That it was all about her. That she had again done something she shouldn't have. That perhaps she was the reason why Viper was so angry that she was close to crying at the same time.

Reyna pressed her lips together. She knew what it was all about. She knew it and probably hoped that it would somehow die down sooner, die in Viper's unconscious. But after all, Viper was always finding out, no one knew where, no one knew when. Viper liked knowing more than she liked anything else.

“Viper...”

“It's been a week,” she interrupted immediately. Her index finger still pressed against Reyna’s chest, the printer still running in the background. “A week!”

Zyanya let out a mouthful of air. Her shoulders relaxed, knowing that maintaining a defensive posture would not help her. Viper knew and there was no point in denying it.

She knew it so well that she was trembling all over from this knowledge that... it was overwhelming her.

“I couldn't tell you.”

If Viper's eyebrows could have furrowed even more, they probably would have.

“You couldn't?” she croaked out. “Why, the hell, you couldn’t!?”

Reyna looked again at the finger pointed at her, like a knife pointing at the guilty one. She carefully raised her hand and entwined her fingers around Viper's wrist.

She had a feeling that Sabine's muscles were tight as a rock, but that didn't discourage her. Nor how Callas also drove her gaze there, as if in disbelief, tightening her lips just enough to make them go pale.

“That's why.” A momentary consternation ran across Viper's face. Momentary, perhaps, but enough for Reyna to notice it. “I knew you would react this way,” she said.

“So you decided to lie to me?”

Viper withdrew her hand, so Zyanya withdrew hers as well. Only then did she feel how strong the pressure of Viper’s touch was on her sternum, but she didn't comment. The printer behind her spit out the documents for the pass, then fell silent, leaving the two of them only in the silence.

“I decided to spare you from thinking about something you shouldn't be thinking about,” she said. Her gaze fled somewhere to the side, even as she felt Sabine's eyes on her so hard it almost hurt her. “Because it's not in our deal. Because it's not supposed to be there, and neither is me in the medbay for that damn week, right?”

Sabine seemed strangely horrified by these words. Zyanya couldn't tell if there was more anger in her eyes now, or that very indefinable fear.

She was angry because Reyna spoke calmly. Because she knew what she wanted to say, she was sure of it, and Viper was angry... because in that second she didn't even know what she wanted to say. And horrified that Reyna saw this and didn't respond to aggression with aggression.

“You can't do that,” she finally threw out, shaking her head. Her throat, however, was uncharacteristically stifled. “This is not in our deal for a reason,” she added.

She felt as if she was straining each word through her teeth with inhuman effort. And worse, that she knew very well why.

She lowered her head for the same reason, as her eyes stung in an all too familiar way.

“Did I make a mistake then?”

The question was simple. Too simple for Viper's complicated mind, in fact, because it didn't fit into any drawer. It didn't fit into the several possible versions of this conversation she had imagined on the way here and existed somewhere separate.

“What do you think?”

Viper lowered her hand and put it into her lab coat pocket with a frustration that even belied her earlier, momentary weakness.

She fought back the tears, ignoring the fact that she didn't even know their origin. She blinked several times, disposing of them still out of Reyna's sight as she turned her head.

“Why do you even want to go with me?” she added when she felt confident enough to look Zyanya in the eye. “You have the whole Protocol to choose from, and you chose me. Why?”

Reyna was not afraid of her demanding gaze. She had grown accustomed to it and learned to deal with it over the months. So much so that she sometimes felt that this ability irritated Viper.

“Because I know very well what you'll do if I don't take you with me,” she countered immediately. She wasn't going to let herself be broken so easily, she wasn't going to let Viper push her away at a time when Viper wanted to do it so badly that Reyna felt desperation in the air. “I've already told you that spending seven days in the closed four walls of the lab is not a solution,” she said.

“What about Omen? Cypher? Breach or Jett? Are you so worried about them too?” She immediately tightened her lips. As only she could, the way Reyna had learned to perceive it. “They don't go out either. They're locked in the headquarters, they can't go anywhere, and somehow about them-...”

She stopped. She stepped back and pressed her fist to her mouth, as if she wanted to interrupt herself before her throat would betray her completely. She wasn't going to finish the thought, because she felt that if she spoke up, the previously withheld tears wouldn't escape Reyna this time.

She still had no idea where they came from.

She walked a few steps, but the room wasn't very big, so finally she simply stopped in front of the opposite wall.

Zyanya waited a moment. Not too long, because she probably wasn't able to just stand there and remain silent. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Viper twitch at the rustling of paper being taken out of the printer tray, but she took it out anyway and approached the chemist with a calm step.

She held the papers toward her.

“I'll write it out. And then I'll leave it for you to sign. Whether you do it is your decision.”

She knew Viper was listening to her, even if she wasn't looking her in the eye. She could imagine how many thoughts were swirling around in Callas' head at that moment, she could even see it as she chewed the inside of her cheek and her gaze was troubled.

And that's exactly why Reyna had to be her opposite.

Viper escorted her back to her desk with her eyes, staring at the sheets of paper that rippled under her step, as if following that little movement was supposed to calm her down. It was supposed to make her believe that she was in control of the situation, even if she didn't know for a damn thing what she actually felt.

She clenched her fists in her lab coat pockets, painfully aware that she probably looked pathetic. Because she didn't even know what she meant. She had no idea why she was angry, or why tears appeared under her eyelids so quickly. She didn't understand herself, and still silently watched as Reyna took a single pen from the stand on her desk and began filling in the blanks with her handwriting.

Moments later, a few sheets of paper clipped together with a stapler were slid toward her across the desk top against which she had rested her hands moments earlier, finding some peace in watching Reyna's hands.

Or at least a substitute for it. Somewhere between the need to rip Zyanya to shreds for what she was doing to her. And for doing it so easily. Too precisely.

She picked up the documents. She habitually moved her eyes over them, trying to understand at least a little of what was written in them, but after all, she didn't know any cities in Mexico.

She left Reyna alone.

***

“Can I come in?”

Deadlock looked somewhere past Sage's face. Her human hand clenched on the door frame twitched slightly, and she let out a mouthful of air.

Sage expected that Iselin would not be happy with this visit. If she was to be honest, she had even prepared for it. For the coldness in her face, for the furrowed brow and even for the fatigue that was breaking through there, and yet... yet again she felt tiny compared to the Norwegian.

“I don't know if this is a good idea,” she replied. The door, which was half-open, did not budge even a millimeter. “Do you need anything from me?”

Iselin avoided her gaze, while Sage seemed to be doing her best to maintain that contact. Maybe she was looking for something there that she couldn't name, or maybe she was so hungry for hope that she was ready to look for it in Iselin's eyes, even after their last conversation.

She took a breath. She felt like intertwining the fingers of her hands, but didn't want to do it so much in plain sight. Maybe she didn’t want Deadlock to see how much she cared about this conversation.

“No, it's nothing urgent,” she said truthfully. She shrugged her shoulders involuntarily. “I just saw your pass on Brimstone's desk. I guess I wanted... to see you one more time before you go.”

Iselin bit her lower lip. There was still no peace on her face. Probably Sage was not supposed to experience it during this conversation. She did so for another reason. Sage probably didn't even want to think about it.

But Iselin opened the door, silently allowing Ling to enter her bedroom.

She didn't watch her go inside, however, but crossed the suitcase lying on the floor to get to the open closet.

It was as if Sage wasn't there at all. The sound of the door closing was enough for her to confirm that she had gone inside, so she wasn't going to turn around.

She took some folded clothes out of the closet and threw them on the bottom of the open suitcase, without looking at Ling, who stood over the same suitcase and stared dully at it.

“Are you going to Norway?”

Deadlock shrugged her shoulders.

“That's how I filled out the paperwork.”

Sage nevertheless intertwined the fingers of her hands. She tried to somehow shake off how this answer had hurt her in a way. Iselin straightened up and almost immediately headed for the bathroom, only to emerge later with a makeup bag in her hand.

“Can we talk or...”

“I'm a little busy.”

“Probably not so much that you can't talk to me.”

Deadlock stopped at that second. The bag with cosmetics was thrown over the folded clothes so hard that it rolled off them and fell into the empty space of the bottom of the suitcase. Her lips tightened as she raised her gaze to Sage.

“What do you want from me?” she asked sharply. Sharper than she had ever dared to say anything. “I told you it won’t work out, okay? I said it's over and that it's better for everyone, so what else do you want from me, Sage?”

Sage opened her mouth. Immediately she closed them, unconsciously slouching in response to the echoing words that carried across Iselin's bedroom and hit her right in the face.

She knew that this was no time for tears. That tears would ruin everything and she really did her best to swallow the scratching in her throat.

But she still had to blink a few times to chase them away. She felt the hard gaze of the Norwegian woman on her, on every inch of her skin that cold stare devoid of anything but frustration.

“I just... I can't...” she took a deeper breath, clenching her entwined fingers even tighter. “I don't want to end it like this, Iselin.”

“It's not about what you want.” The Norwegian still didn't move from her place. She stood stiffly, as if on duty. Like a soldier. A soldier who in no way resembled that someone who had charmed Sage for the first time in years. “It's only about what will be safer. And don't try to tell me that what we were doing was like that.”

“But-...”

“If it were otherwise, you wouldn't be here now, Sage,” she interrupted immediately. For a moment she fled somewhere with her eyes, as Ling's tears were noticed by her and she didn't want them to change the trajectory of this conversation. “You wouldn't be here, you wouldn't have lied to me about the mission, you wouldn't have chose the wrong locators, and Viper wouldn't have been shot at Kingdom headquarters because she would have known about the fucking cameras, okay?”

Ling had no idea what she could answer. She wanted to say something, anything. Anything that could explain her.

She didn't croak a word. She fiddled with her eyes over Deadlock's face, looking for something more, maybe at least a hint of apology, anything that wasn't that uniform, frightening coldness.

“You should leave.” Sage took a sharp intake of breath. Those words ripped it from her lungs like a blow to the ribs from which she failed to protect herself. “Now.”

Sage walked out of Iselin's bedroom, slamming the door.

***

Viper tried to focus on her notes. She tried to finish the equation written neatly in her favorite notebook, but her gaze fled to the side anyway.

Her signature on the document was staring her straight in the eye. And it was distracting. Damn distracting, even if she had so many things to do, even if she could finally do them without fear that her body would betray her. She had to test the new smoke orb, perhaps make adjustments, and she had to make coffee and see if her samples with the new toxin passed the tests.

And she did nothing but stare at a piece of paper and her own equation, which now seemed meaningless to her.

She began tapping her pen cap on the notebook.

“You signed them.”

She almost jumped up. Almost. The pen hovered over the page in stillness, and she bit the inside of her cheek for a moment.

She should get used to those all too quiet vampire footsteps. It was only strange that she didn't hear the door open, but she wasn't going to dwell on that either. Maybe she was too busy with her own thoughts.

Or maybe she just didn't expect to see Reyna here, even if by now she should have gotten used to the fact that by some miracle she always managed to find Viper, too.

“Don't sneak around like that,” she commented.

She didn't raise her eyes even when Reyna stood right next to her and rested her hand on the documents. One of her claws slid over Callas' name in the corner of the sheet.

“Sorry. I'll warn you next time.”

Viper bit her lower lip. It was probably the first time that she was the one who was uncomfortable with the silence, and it even seemed to overwhelm her, but the worst of it all was that she knew what was weighing on her tongue.

The second worst thing was that Reyna knew that Viper wanted to say something. Even if she was seemingly indifferent, leaning against the edge of the desk with her hip, she always knew.

Sabine put down her pen. She furrowed her eyebrows, leaning back more on the chair, as if that would help her collect herself.

“I'm sorry,” she said finally. Maybe even on one exhale. “For that thing earlier.”

She turned to face the vampire, as she didn't seem to quite fit in below her, especially when Reyna was obviously staring at her.

And she wasn't wrong, because when she lifted her gaze, purple eyes actually followed her every move.

“Well... you signed them,” Zyanya repeated wistfully. Sabine might have assumed Mondragón was angry at her, if it weren't for the corner of her mouth that lifted, showing one of her fangs. She clawed at a bundle of papers. “So I won't hold a grudge.”

Sabine nodded. She felt foolish, although she probably hadn't felt this strange feeling of embarrassment in a long time.

The fact that she should explain herself, and she didn't even know how. The fact that she felt confused about how she was being perceived at that moment and that she didn't know absolutely everything about the subject.

She had no idea how to act. What to say, or what to do.

And Reyna was acting so... ordinary.

“How’s your hand?”

She knew she didn't have to ask that at all, because she knew Reyna's abilities. And after all, her hands were clearly visible and the answer to this question was right in front of her.

Aside from the fact that she had asked it before.

She simply wanted to change the subject.

“There is not even a trace,” replied Reyna, shrugging her shoulders, as if to emphasize that it was really no big deal. Apparently she wasn't going to mention that she had already given a similar answer in the past. “Sage has a rather bigger problem.”

Sabine raised her eyebrows and nodded. Ling had never been a fan of turtlenecks, and the one she had worn to the meeting was probably the first time she had ever seen one.

Apparently, she would have to get used to it.

“Can I ask you something?”

Callas cleared her throat, perhaps wondering if she was sure those words had come out of her mouth. And whether she was sure she wanted to say it, even if it was already too late.

Or perhaps it was too late much sooner.

Reyna tilted her head, in a message that she was listening. And Viper had already pretty much convinced herself that she didn't like being lower, so she stood up.

She folded her arms over her chest and slowly raised her gaze. Only to see that Reyna didn't break that eye contact for a second.

“Did that satisfy you?”

Reyna first looked at her hand. It was flawless, without any blemishes, as if she had already forgotten what had happened. She had forgotten Sage's pulse under her fingers, her terrified gaze, how defenseless she was against Reyna and didn't even stand the slightest chance against her strength.

The question was not whether Sage had learned her lesson. Sabine didn't care what Reyna's intentions were and whether she achieved her goal with Sage. What Sabine wanted to know was whether what Reyna had done had an effect on just... Reyna.

The same one who smiled to herself, unaware that she had made Viper even more uncertain. Not that Sabine was going to show it from herself.

“Do you really want to know?”

Viper shrugged her shoulders. It pressed against her lips to say something like ‘if I didn't want to, I wouldn't have asked’. Anything that would take away at least some of the power Zyanya had at that moment, and she probably didn't know it.

Viper, on the other hand, knew it all too well.

The vampire took a step toward her. Callas got the impression that this one step was louder than anything else at that moment.

She invaded her personal space so smoothly that if Viper hadn't been Viper, she might not have even noticed. The way Reyna crossed the boundary, the way she breathed her air and what's more - she was all too comfortable with it.

And Sabine didn't stop her.

Only out of the corner of her eye did she trace the movement of her hand as the tattooed image of the sun flashed into her field of vision. Immediately afterward, the same fingers that had tapped her signature on the piece of paper pushed a strand of hair away from her face and, without a shadow of hesitation, placed it behind her ear.

“It did.”

Viper looked for something more on her face. She tried to understand why the gesture didn't make her flinch. Nor did it make her nervous. She didn't even flinch and hoped Reyna would be the one to explain it to her.

Reyna didn't say a word. Viper only nodded her head.

Zyanya took the papers from the desk with her other hand, pulling her gaze away from Viper. Sabine thought she was probably looking at her signature again, wondering why it was there.

Funnily enough, Viper wondered about that, too.

“I'll take them to Brimstone,” she said.

This was the moment for Viper to change her mind. If she wanted to. If, however, she felt that her earlier behavior had a basis in fact, and she shouldn't allow....

“Okay.”

***

“Since when has Vulture been used as a tour bus?”

Brimstone paused in putting the cup down the sink, hearing Viper's voice behind him. The chemist had turned on the coffee machine with her back to him, and so she didn't care to look at him.

Liam was somehow not particularly surprised after she didn't seem to look in his direction once during the meeting.

“Since never,” he admitted openly, as it was impossible to deny Viper's words after he sent her approval of the documents with his own signature on the email.

“You wrote it down as a means of transporting me and Reyna for the pass.”

Viper selected the option from the express screen by habit, because she didn't even have to look at it. Her gaze was fixed on the cabinet at her eye level, or more precisely on its handle. Perhaps she was counting on the reflections of light to occupy it enough that she wouldn't turn away throughout this conversation.

“For your safety.” She heard. She felt like rolling her eyes. “If something were to happen, Vulture will be there. We have masking systems for something.”

Sabine nodded, awarding Liam a point in her mind for anticipating her question in the third sentence. Investing in covering the plane with space-reflecting tiles was a good decision.

As for the first one, she wasn't so thrilled anymore. In fact, she was irritated by it. And to her own surprise, not about herself at all.

“So that Reyna could be there faster,” she said.

She was glad she didn't have to maintain eye contact, because she heard Brimstone turn away. His gaze began to burn a hole in her back shortly thereafter.

“What?”

Sabine shrugged her shoulders. She lowered her gaze only to see how long she had to stand here waiting for her coffee.

“You're overworking her,” she concluded. “I've seen the mission reports. She's been on almost all of them, and the number of her assignments is definitely higher than the other duelists.”

She wasn't about to admit that she had checked those reports maybe a few minutes ago. Only because the conversation with Reyna had somehow sunk into her memory.

“She didn't complain. And you will get Vulture because of you.”

Viper tightened her lips. She fought with herself not to turn away. She ignored the second part of the sentence.

“And does she have another choice?” she replied. She began tapping her fingers on the kitchen counter, staring at her mug with increasing impatience. “You're the one who assigns her, she has to do what you tell her,” she said.

“Because she's one of the most effective duelists we have.”

She felt that Liam was annoyed. She didn't particularly care.

“Jett can fly, Phoenix can be reborn, Neon is practically intangible, Yoru teleports, and Raze is brilliant with her inventions. What don't you like about them?”

“Statistics don't lie, Viper. Besides, you helped with recruiting her yourself, and you know very well why.” Brimstone tried to contain his irritation, Viper could feel it. The fact that it wasn't working out too well for him as well. “She's effective,” he said.

“All too much.” The mug finally began to fill with coffee. “She hasn't been to her last periodic checkup. Do you know why?”

She held Liam in silence, waiting for the mug to fill completely. She took it in her hand, wanting something to occupy her fingers just to keep her fists from clenching.

“Why?”

She was tempted to say that a certain person got in her way and that's why she missed the appointment. But that wasn't the reason. Reyna didn't want to go there.

Balancing on the edge of Empress's condition in the lab, the lack of any missed shots on the range except the last one, attacking Sage. It all added up to something Zyanya didn't want or was ashamed to admit.

She turned away, embracing her mug with both hands.

“Because her results would be shitty,” she said. “If you had taken even a moment's interest in this, you would know that she is too saturated with energy, because she collected a lot of souls in a short time. Too short for her to process them. And if you don't want to cause bloodshed when she finally lets her nerves go on one of her missions, you'd better get Yoru or anyone else to move their ass.”

Brimstone furrowed his brow. Viper didn't. She was happy to see some information forming in Liam's head. She waited for that realization, a flash of awareness.

Brimstone may have been a good military man. He had done well in war, knew how to command and was effective in his actions. But sometimes Viper had the feeling that he didn't realize who he had under him. Radianite was studied, it gave them an advantage, but... but it was still radianite.

They couldn't anticipate everything.

“Vulture is yours.”

Brimstone left his mug in the sink and passed Viper on the way out of the kitchen.

Viper took a sip of coffee.

***

“You should say no to him sometimes.”

Reyna stopped at the threshold of her bedroom with a towel in one hand and a bidon in the other. She blinked in surprise at Sabine's presence at her desk, but only raised her eyebrows slightly and closed the door behind her.

“I'm going to start thinking you're following me,” she said half-jokingly, half-seriously, wiping the sweat from her forehead with the top of her hand.

“I know where to find you, that's different.” Viper shrugged her shoulders, leaning back in her chair at the desk. Reyna cast a quick glance in her direction, and Callas immediately caught the silent question in it. “You had the door open.”

Zyanya set the bidon down on the nearest cabinet and tossed her ponytail over her back. She took time to notice that Sabine had her laptop and notebook with her, and was turning a pen in her fingers.

“I probably forgot to lock it when I went back to get water,” she stated, still a bit breathless. With a movement of her chin, she pointed to the chemist's laptop. “What are you doing here?”

“I couldn't focus, so I came here.”

The explanation was so simple, and yet Reyna somehow still couldn't stop herself from laughing briefly. Viper had all the places in the headquarters to choose from... and she chose her room, and just at the moment she returned from training, her clothes were sticky to her body, and she felt like every muscle in her body was on fire.

“Fair enough,” she nodded. She moved her hand over her face to get rid of the individual hairs that stuck to her sweaty skin. “What were you talking about?”

She wasn't going to be bothered by Viper's presence so much as to forget a shower. She also knew that Viper wasn't going to bother with her shower, so the situation was even.

She walked over to the closet to take out some clean clothes.

“You should say no to him sometimes.”

Reyna furrowed her brow, and although Viper didn't see it, she was sure Reyna did.

“To who?”

Viper continued to play with her pen, unconsciously suddenly losing interest in her work. She turned to face Reyna in the swivel chair, as she probably wanted to see if the latter was listening to her.

Not that she had any other choice.

“To Brimstone.” Reyna stopped with a t-shirt in her hand and glanced over her shoulder in dismay. “I checked the latest reports. You were right, a little too much of you in them.”

Zyanya laughed uncertainly.

“That's true,” she replied, shrugging her shoulders as if to dispose of her with this gesture. Or at least she hoped she would. “But it's also my job. If the situation calls for it, I don't really have much choice. I only threw in a request, and what he does with it is not up to me.”

She lied a little. However, she didn't think she should cause more harm than good with this small lie. It was quite safe.

Reyna put her clothes back on the bed and reached into her ponytail to untangle her hair. Black and purple strands spilled down her back, and she sighed, as if relieved.

“You were at the shooting range today. And now you've had training with Neon, right?” It was a rhetorical question, Sabine knew she was right. “What else do you have scheduled for today?”

“What does it matter?” replied Reyna, grabbing the hem of her top to take it off over her head a moment later. “Anyway, I don't know, I didn't look at the rest of the day.”

“I did.”

Reyna turned to face her. Viper propped her head on her hand. Reyna couldn't avoid her gaze, even if she tried, so she decided to do so with a redundant smile.

Viper found it unconvincing, especially when she saw that her dark skin was glistening with sweat and she could almost be sure that Reyna's abdominal muscles were twitching with exertion.

She had seen a duelist training more than once. And exercise schedules. And each time she got the impression that they weren't fair.

“In two hours you go running with Skye, and you end the day with hand-to-hand combat training with Deadlock.” Viper ignored Reyna's sigh as she combed her hair with her fingers, neither out of frustration nor exhaustion. “Do you realize that's twice as much training as the others have? And agreeing to every mission you are selected for is not a very good idea.”

Reyna rested her hands on her hips.

“Okay, fine, I'll push him about it,” she said, letting the air out of her mouth, ”But first I need a shower.”

“You don't have to.”

Reyna stopped at the threshold of the bathroom, with her clothes slung over her shoulder. Viper could even physically feel the heat emanating from the vampire's body, but she dismissed the feeling as much as she could.

“What?”

“I already discussed it with him,” Viper announced. “He'll give you a break. And we'll get Vulture for the pass.”

Reyna first raised her eyebrows. Then she furrowed them. Then she blinked, and then opened her mouth only to close it immediately, because nothing clever came to mind.

Maybe it was a matter of fatigue. Maybe Viper's straightforwardness and her lack of hesitation were all too evident, so she just stood in the threshold of the bathroom, clothes slung over her shoulder and sweaty from her workout, wondering when Sabine had even managed to notice all these things.

“He crossed you out of today's training with Deadlock and Jett will replace you with Skye.” Viper didn't wait for a response and turned the laptop toward Zyanya. Her name was indeed no longer on the schedule for today. “Take a shower and get some rest. You can also take care of packing.”

Only the closing of the laptop snapped Reyna out of her numbness.

Sabine pushed back her chair and stood up, starting to gather her things. Zyanya looked at it all. As she closed the notebook, turned off the lamp, hooked the pen on the belt loop of her pants, and somehow couldn't move from her seat.

She caught Sabine's wrist only at the door, when the latter put her laptop bag over her shoulder. She turned around no more emotionally than she stood up, and Reyna only let go of her hand when she herself felt how tightly she was gripping it.

She herself didn't know why she stopped her. She felt that it wouldn't pass her lips, although she didn't even know why, because it wouldn't be the first time she had said 'thank you' to Viper.

So she didn't say it directly.

Sabine slammed her shoulder blades against the closed door as Reyna pressed her lips against hers. Any words disappeared from her head as if they had never been there, and that was exactly the intention.

That Sabine would gasp into her mouth. That the laptop bag would swing by her side and her hand would unconsciously rest on Reyna's shoulder. Even for that damn pen to poke slightly into her hipbone, a little above the hem of her pants.

And for Sabine to respond to that kiss. And she did.

Zyanya would never have assumed before that the lips of someone like Viper could have been so soft. And warm. And not at all as... inaccessible as it might seem.

And that after so many nights, passionate and endless nights, where the bedroom of either of them was filled with the rustling of the sheets and a little faster breathing, Reyna still wouldn't get used to them, because instead of getting used to her kisses.... She wanted more and more of them.

Even if they were imbued with spontaneity and that typical Viper fire, Reyna purred into her mouth once or twice, trying to restrain herself from tugging at her waist too hard. So as not to hurt just because she loved to hold tight.

“Reyna, I...” She sighed something to herself when Zyanya interrupted her with another kiss, which she answered anyway. She answered each one, so it took her a while to put the rest of her sentence together. “I have some work to do.”

Viper's words blended together between one breath and the next. Reyna nodded her head in the sense that she understood, swallowing her saliva.

Somehow she didn't have the courage to raise her eyes. Even if they breathed the same air. Even if, if Reyna wanted she could have counted her every eyelash from this distance.

“Right,” she whispered, and she cleared her throat, lowering her head slightly. “Sorry.”

She laughed soundlessly, perhaps more to herself than to Viper. Was the situation actually funny? No. Did Reyna feel strangely ashamed of herself for reacting this way? Perhaps.

She pushed away from the wall to gain some distance between their bodies and nodded her head as if apologetically. If she hadn't done that, Sabine's panting as she tried to normalize her breathing would probably have etched itself into her skull so much that she wouldn't have forgotten it for the rest of the day.

She swallowed her saliva and straightened up.

“I have the evening off.” Viper said the words much more confidently than Reyna ever would have been able to. “If you text me, I'll leave the door open.”

God, have fucking mercy.

Chapter 42: FORTY TWO

Reyna looked at herself in the mirror for a long moment after entering the bathroom. She didn't know if she was angry with herself. She didn't really know what she saw in her own eyes, and if it weren't for the fact that she was going to take a shower anyway, she probably would have splashed her face with ice-cold water.

She didn't. Instead, she took a step away from the mirror, maybe two. Her gaze immediately found what it was looking for, and soon after, a single finger slid over the skin below her collarbone, grazing over a fading hickey.

She wiped her face with the palm of her hand. She thought it would wake her up. She thought that would be enough of a signal to just take that damn shower and stop thinking too much. She also thought that she had already forgotten about that event, and that the hickey was slowly dying just like her memories.

Yet the realization of that night hit her right in the face. And it reminded her of itself at every turn, when she had to wear a more covering T-shirt for training, hiding that obvious mark from Neon's eyes.

And now. Why couldn't she croak out that damn ‘thank you’?

She moved her finger away from her skin. She took in a breath and turned off the lamp by the mirror. She shed her clothes, taking a moment to step into the shower for fear that if she stood in front of the mirror a minute longer she would go actually insane.

She quickly washed her hair and body. But still, she couldn't move. She felt that if she left the bathroom, something would happen. She would go back to the kiss with Viper, which she didn't understand. Actually... that she would go back to the moment she didn't understand herself.

She didn't feel that she was biting her own lip. Perhaps she wasn't even aware of where her thoughts had wandered until she felt a solid stab of pain and wiped her mouth with the top of her hand.

A drop of blood was quickly washed away with water running down her body. She only hissed a curse in Spanish and rested her hands on the tiles in front of her.

She closed her eyes. She just had to stop thinking.

She had to focus on the sound of the water.

And instead, only the rustle of the bedclothes came to her mind. The rustle of the bedclothes, of breaths, of quiet gasps. But also the whisper of the wind, which carried away the gray cigarette smoke as words were spoken in the silence of the evening. Sincere, confessed with the hope that they would be forgotten, and yet Reyna never pushed them out from her memory.

She had to focus on something other than the sound of the water.

She wanted to reprimand herself for what she was thinking about. For thinking too much about the fact that she wanted to kiss Viper. That she wanted Viper to stay in her room, and she didn't know how to ask for it. That she wanted Viper to be closer, because then Reyna felt... normal.

She had no idea how to accuse herself.

Viper did everything so... effortlessly. She pulled Reyna to herself without blinking an eye. She was able to shut her mouth with her intelligence, the way she cared about many things she didn't really need to care about, and yet she did.

She ran her fingers through her hair and tilted her head back. Perhaps she was hoping that the water dripping on her face would sober her up.

Reyna had thought so many times that Viper was heartless. And Sabine... Sabine stood somewhere beside her, silently, watching Reyna fool herself with that outer layer again and again.

And then she let herself be shot to save Reyna’s life.

“Fuck.”

Zyanya said this word only surrounded by silence.

***

Viper didn't have any extra work to do. In fact, she didn't know why she said that if everything she had to do was done in Reyna's room.

And yet Viper always knew what to say and why.

Especially on the subject of Reyna. After all, she knew every agent. She knew how to deal with them, how to lead them into her traps and how to get out of her own discussions with a defensive hand.

And now she was walking down the corridor and wasn't even sure where she even wanted to go.

“Come to the medbay.”

Viper squeezed the strap of her bag tighter on her shoulder as Sage, coming out of the kitchen, visibly walked toward her with a cup in her hand. The Chinese woman's eyebrows were drawn together, and the words she spoke seemed downright forced.

Sage didn't want to talk to her. Sabine was even less willing to talk to Sage. The arrangement would have been pretty even if it weren't for the fact that Viper twitched slightly when their gazes met anyway.

“What for?” she replied. As coolly as she could.

She could feel her muscles toning. And Sage only measured her with her eyes. Viper, in turn, unconsciously glanced around Ling's neck area, now covered by her turtleneck.

Maybe she wanted to know how much was visible. Maybe it would give her some sense of power. Maybe even security.

“I'll draw your blood,” Sage replied. Viper noted that there was tea in her cup. Hot tea. “I need to see if the treatment is still working. And by your grace, don't keep me waiting.”

Viper responded with barely a shrug of her shoulders and wasn't about to check if that was enough of an answer before she slipped past the healer.

The sound of the text message echoed, and the corner of her mouth involuntarily lifted.

She had no specific plan, so she went wherever she could. She put down her laptop in the lab, circled around there for a while, went back to her room for a while, took a circuitous route to the gym to look at the equipment very carefully. She even walked over to the laundry room, which no one used since the washing machine was installed separately in each quarters. Later she went for a smoke and took a walk around the gardens, back and forth, and when she returned from her wander around the headquarters area including the helipad for Vulture and the hangar, the sun was beginning to hide behind the horizon.

Therefore, what she heard upon entering the medical wing after... around three hours did not particularly surprise her. It was around eight o'clock.

“You were not in a hurry.”

She was prepared for that, so she closed the door, shrugging her shoulders. She squirmed minimally at the pungent smell of disinfectants.

“I didn't intend to be.”

Sage apparently assumed that Viper wanted to provoke her, so she didn't respond to the taunt. She closed the book she was reading and went to the back room to get the necessary items. Sabine wasn't going to lead her astray, because it was quite to her credit that with that one sentence she showed enough displeasure that she had to be here.

If it weren't for the fact that she was unable to draw blood from the bend of her elbow, she would have done it herself. She wanted Sage to know that.

And so she doubted that the Chinese woman had been sitting here all this time. She was not that foolish to assume that Viper would actually come to her right away after the exchange of words.

She sat on the couch facing the window. Staring out was a safe solution in avoiding Sage's gaze.

“Since you had so much time, you could bring Reyna too. She missed her last check-up.”

Sabine heard the distinctive snap of latex gloves being put on, but that didn't mean she was going to turn around.

Viper wanted to ask if Sage was just pretending that mentioning Reyna came so easily to her, or if her attack had already been forgotten by her. But first, she was probably too stubborn for that, and second, she didn't want to stick a stick in an anthill. Especially when they were alone.

She also didn’t want to give Sage absolutely any satisfaction. Not a single thought about the fact that Sabine did not feel at all as confident as she looked.

“I'm not her mother,” she replied, stubbornly not turning around until Sage herself was in front of her face. “I'm not responsible for whether she wants to go for the checkup or not,” she said.

“But you probably know where she is.”

Viper wasn't about to fall into that trap.

“As I said, I'm not her mother.”

She said these words calmly, but confidently enough to convince both herself and Sage that she knew what she was saying. Ling just measured her with her eyes a little longer, but a moment later she sat down on a stool beside the bed and pulled the metal utensil cart closer.

“Are you two that much of strangers to each other even when she throws herself at me like an animal?”

Viper clenched her jaw. Sage was angry. But she didn't show it with anything more than straining some words through her teeth. She was angry in her calmness, which crawled under Viper's skin every time and left an itch there that she wanted to scratch.

She pulled up the sleeve of her sweater. She didn't want Sage to do that.

“I'm not responsible for her actions.” She poked her gaze out the window. Which apparently didn't please Ling, because Sabine could even feel how much the Chinese woman wanted to look at her and thus cause a silent battle. “If she did it, it means she had a reason.”

Sage did not respond. Neither did Viper. They sat in silence for that one long minute, which Viper was prepared to delay for another couple of hours.

She wasn't going to explain herself or let Sage provoke her into doing so. So she just watched the red glow of the sky piercing through the blinds until the test tube hit the rack.

Ling, however, did not get up from her chair right away.

“I know what you did.” Her gaze stabbed into Viper's body like a dagger. “I said what I thought. And I don't regret anything.”

Viper did not yield. Only the corner of her mouth twitched anxiously, and a nail tapped on her thigh. She was all too aware of the band aid in place of the needle insertion.

“In that case, Reyna also did what she thought. And she doesn't regret anything either,” Viper stated dispassionately. She may have even felt some amusement by the way she reflected this exchange of words. “You're the one who played the self-appointed judge, not her. And I'm not going to pretend to be sorry about it.”

“I wonder if your scary dog knows what kind of monster she's working for.”

Viper just squinted her eyelids. She could have gotten up and left. Leave the conversation at the stage it was at, because she knew very well that this was another provocation. Sage wanted to make Viper feel threatened, to make her irritated, get up and leave slamming the door.

And Sabine really felt like doing it. But not right away.

“And does she know which monster she's being treated by?”

Sage paused in removing her gloves from her hands. She turned around and to her own surprise, Sabine was no longer staring out the window, but straight at her. Even if she could leave. Even if everything she was here for had already been done, she drove her gaze into Sage to show that she wasn't throwing those words around for no reason.

She wanted Sage to know that those words were targeted. They were meant to be direct and hit straight to the point.

And Ling looked just like that. As if those words hit straight to the heart.

“You're no better than me at anything, Sage,” she added, taking advantage of the fact that the Chinese woman was looking at her with that expression on her face that was a mixture of inhibited anger and disbelief. And which almost made the corner of her mouth lift. “You're just better at hiding it, and others believe you.”

A moment of silence.

“I didn't hurt the children.”

Viper clenched her jaw, but if she had to be honest, this sentence brought her some satisfaction. At least now it was clear between them what they knew about each other. Sage finally broke through.

“Neither did I,” she replied. She ignored the fact that she felt strange saying it out loud. “If you had enough morals, maybe you would know the details. Because unlike you, I had no control over what happened.”

She didn't know why she said it so easily. Why it went down her throat so easily, even though she herself didn't quite know if she believed it. And why she couldn't stop herself from going on.

“You took revenge on me because you wanted it. It was your decision, not anyone else's or by accident. You didn't know shit and you still do, but you did it fully consciously, so don't try to tell me I'm worse than you because a few years ago I was a different person than I am now,” she chuckled quickly. She felt that if she didn't say everything at once, she would miss something. And she needed Sage to hear her every thought. “Just because you hurt me didn't make you the savior of those people whose lives I can't give back . And I think it still doesn't get to you.”

And then Viper did exactly what she wanted to do. She got up and walked out. The difference was that she didn't slam the door.

***

Reyna shouldn't have felt like a criminal entering Viper's room, which was actually open. After all, she should have expected it, that's what she wrote the damn text message for.

And yet, when she closed the door behind her, she couldn't shake the feeling that something didn't feel right. That she felt strange, just left like that in Viper's bedroom, where she was supposed to be waiting for... actually for what? For a sex meeting? It sounded idiotic already in her mind, so she didn't dare say it out loud, even if... that's what it actually was.

And she should be used to it. To make an appointment just for that, without any unnecessary information, without any unnecessary events. It had already happened once. But only once.

All the rest... somehow came out on its own.

So Reyna hoped she wouldn't stay in the empty room for too long, and wherever Viper was, she'd be back from there soon, but she walked a little deeper anyway, so as not to stand directly at the door.

She never looked too closely at what Sabine had in the room. What she did manage to notice was that it was more orderly than the lab. In fact, almost pedantic, in contrast to the empty coffee cups, opened notebooks and loose sheets of paper littering the desks in the lab.

Her footsteps echoed.

Reyna's finger moved over the spines of the books stacked on the shelf above her desk spontaneously, perhaps out of boredom. Maybe to make that stupid feeling of being reminded of her school days finally go away.

She picked up one of them. She moved her hand across the cover and almost smiled.

Of course she had to find at least one scientific item in Sabine Callas' room. Or twenty.

She put it back in its place. She picked up another. A detective story.

Who would have expected that.

But it was the next title that made her nostalgic until she opened the book somewhere in the middle, and the corner of her mouth went up.

And then the door opened. Internally she felt relieved, but she knew she couldn't show it from herself, so she only raised her head when the lock slammed.

“Are you reading 'Sherlock Holmes'?” She lifted the book higher, smiling slightly. She didn't manage to catch too specific eye contact with Sabine. “I wouldn't assume that-...”

Sabine walked across the room with several large and unusually fast steps.

That's why Reyna didn't finish. That's why she didn't even have time to think about how the rest of the sentence should have sounded.

That's because Viper caught her face in both hands and kissed her. Hard.

Maybe even too hard, judging by how surprised Reyna was when the book she was holding fell out of her hand and fell to the floor with a thud. She took a step backward for balance, the heel of her shoe grazing against the cover of that damn book, but it wasn't enough, and a moment later the chill of the balcony window pierced her back.

Viper's thumb dug into the skin on her cheek, she felt the other hand on her collarbone, where its chill almost merged with that coming from the window, and Reyna herself didn't even know when she started responding to those kisses as fiercely as Viper.

Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe this was just what Reyna needed - a reminder of who they should be to each other, why she had come here, and why everything she felt didn't matter now. All she could do was put on a mask, step back for a moment and try to say anything when her breathing wouldn't cooperate with her, and she was again all too aware of how fast her heart was beating.

“Nice to see-...”

“Shut up.”

Viper muttered those words almost as if they were an order, although that distinctive note of reprimand wasn't there this time. It hadn't been there for a long time.

This time, however, something else was there. Not just lust and that blind pursuit of the relief that their sex was supposed to be, not even any anger. Something Reyna couldn't overlook, no matter how much she wanted to just ignore it.

The same thing made her step back for a moment, just when they both needed to take a breath and just before Zyanya felt Viper unbutton her jeans.

“Wait,” she gasped. She swallowed her saliva, as Sabine's gaze flickered sharply across her face, losing interest in her zipper. “Are you sure you're okay?”

“Yes,” she growled, although Reyna had the feeling that she didn't want to do that at all. Or did she want to?

She tugged at the zipper of Zyanya's pants, which stubbornly refused to budge, making Viper's frustration visible on her forehead through furrowed brows.

“Viper,” Reyna said, grabbing her wrists to push Viper away and distract her from her damn pants. “What's going on?”

“Nothing,” huffed Callas, only glancing fleetingly at her wrists in a grasp she clearly didn't like. She didn't try to jerk back, however. She knew that then she would come off as even less credible. “Let go. We both know why we're here.”

Perhaps Viper had betrayed herself with that growl earlier. She used the wrong tone, and she shouldn't have. She should have responded more neutrally and acted as befitting the situation... but now it was too late.

“I won't let go until you tell me what happened.” Reyna stated. Viper's gaze fled somewhere to the side. “We won't do this like that.”

Sabine pressed her lips together. The green eyes soon after gave up running and met those purple ones again.

“Since when does it bother you?” she replied, shrugging her shoulders. “Angry sex is rather nothing new for us, is it?”

“You're not sure of what you're saying.”

Viper struggled not to roll her eyes at this statement. She wanted to react indifferently in any way she could, as long as she didn't have to admit that Reyna was right. Because she couldn't not be right. Because of her damn senses.

And Viper knew it, but that didn't mean at all that she was going to admit it.

“It doesn't matter,” she mumbled, clenching and straightening her fingers, as if by doing so she was trying to let Reyna know that the grip on her wrists was bothering her. “I'm just saying how it is.”

Reyna hated herself for being willing for a while to give in to this game that Sabine was always driving her into. That they would talk later. That they could now get on with something else, something she had actually agreed to herself, and consider everything that stays behind Viper's bedroom door irrelevant.

She could go back to kissing Sabine now and here, when her heart was still pounding against her ribs and she sounded far more breathless than she would have liked.

And that would be safe. According to their rules.

And yet she didn't let go of Sabine. Even though she was still tugging at her zipper a moment ago, and the chill of the balcony glass still pierced through her clothes down to her skin.

“Where have you been?” Viper squinted. Maybe she hadn't expected that. She had hoped Reyna would let go. After all, she often let go. “Sabine.”

Saying Callas' name had long been like an emergency safety button that reset all systems. And even if Reyna caught herself saying it more and more often and Viper reacted to it less and less, in arguments it never stopped working.

Only now Viper wasn't spitting out 'don't call me that' with the second the last voices rang out.

Now she just looked at her. And then Zyanya decided that she could already let go of her wrists, so she did, and Viper immediately put her hands in her pockets.

“At Sage's for a checkup,” she finally said. “Satisfied?”

Now it made sense. Reyna shouldn't have been surprised that the Chinese woman was the reason for this indefinite mood in Sabine, she shouldn't have been surprised and actually... she was indeed not surprised. Because instead of being surprised, Reyna realized that she was pissed as well.

And she hadn't even seen Sage today.

“What did she want?”

“To draw blood for testing.”

“That's not what I'm asking.”

Sabine, at that second, couldn't shake the feeling that Reyna looked extremely threatening. It was as if she was furious, but only internally, and the single, twitching muscles in her jaw were gathering that fury, even if just moments ago she seemed so easy to maintain and almost soft under her fingers that Callas herself was surprised.

Sabine was sure that Reyna could have killed someone at that moment. And it wouldn't be her this time.

“Nothing specific,” she replied. Zyanya's brow furrowed and her purple iris flashed warningly. “The usual, don't touch it,” she said.

“And this is how you react to 'nothing specific'?”

With a hand gesture, Mondragón indicated the general public. And Sabine particularly disliked the fact that the gesture pointed mainly at... her.

She played it wrong.

“She's looking for a way to budge me. That’s all. I think you'll agree with me that this gets annoying after a while.”

And her way to do it is to use mentions of you. And it annoys the hell out of me that it she is fucking good at that.

Sabine didn't say it out loud.

Reyna didn't say out loud what she was thinking about. The fact that she wanted Viper to share with her what was gnawing at her, and the fact that her hand, on which there were no longer any scratch marks, was again unpleasantly itching, and she needed to calm her down.

“If I kiss you now, will you hold back from any unnecessary words?” Reyna quickly realized that Viper had taken her hands out of her pockets and was now pressing her palm against her sternum. She also realized that although their conversation had lasted a while, their breathing had not calmed down at all. Maybe it was never supposed to. “Because I really have a better idea how to spend this evening,” she said.

And Zyanya still hasn't learned to say no.

Chapter 43: FORTY THREE

Reyna brushed her wet hair away from her face as soon as she emerged from the water and leaned her forearms against the edge of the pool with a gasp. The empty room made that one sound that echoed lightly across the tiles and perhaps made her realize that she was indeed alone.

She couldn't remember the last time she had actually been alone in such a… calm place. Not on the battlefield, not when she was wiping blood from a bullet-scratched shoulder, someone was protecting her back, and someone else was relaying the enemy's position to her via communicator.

Probably that's why she's been swimming through pool after pool to kill this feeling she wasn't used to. Or she was trying to clear her head of the idiotic guilt of letting Viper leave the bedroom the way she used to. As if nothing had changed.

Because it shouldn't have changed, right?

It shouldn't, and what's more, it shouldn't have gnawed at her to the point where she was ready to spit out her lungs at the headquarters swimming pool two days later rather than spend even a minute thinking about it.

Maybe she should have come here during the day, hoping to meet someone who would take her mind off her own head? Or maybe in this unconscious self-destruction she liked to torture herself with she purposely chose late evening. Because of fear that someone would actually ask and she wouldn't know what she could answer.

She ran a wet hand over her face, trying to somehow get herself together. She was still panting from the exertion, her gaze dully fixed on the bars of the drain in front of her, and with her overhearing she tried to focus on the steady purr of the active jacuzzi at the other end of the room.

She rarely visited here. That's because she didn't actually have time for it. Now, on the other hand, she couldn't get used to the fact that she was actually here. That was kinda paranoic.

“That's not exactly what I meant when I told you that you should rest.”

Reyna raised her head, although she didn't need to at all. Viper entered the swimming pool, and the sound of her flip-flops joined the general noise. However, she wasn't dressed in a bathing suit, but in a normal t-shirt and shorts, so Zyanya understood that their meeting was not by chance and was never meant to be.

She didn't know if there was any point in asking her how she knew she would be here. Because, after all, Viper always knew everything. And even if she didn't, she was always damn lucky to run into her, although Reyna was almost convinced that the former option prevailed.

She couldn't show that she was being gnawed by something that shouldn't even be within the scope of their relationship, so she just shrugged her shoulders.

“I am resting,” she replied, resting her cheek on her forearm so she could look up at Viper, especially when the latter raised her eyebrows.

“I think we know a different definition of this word.”

Sabine folded her arms over her chest. The light reflecting off the water was marked by patterns on her face, and if it weren't for the fact that the swimming pool was technically in the basement, the lantern light from the back gardens would probably have crept in somewhere, too.

Reyna laughed briefly.

“You can't blame me,” she acknowledged, still a little breathless. Her arms were rising above the water in those very breaths, forming miniature waves around her figure. “It’s been a while since I did that,” she added, as if to justify herself.

Somewhere in there she wanted to ask why Viper had come here. What topic she wanted to talk about, or not at all, and that's where her casualness about wandering around the pool came from. Because she didn't come for anything specific.

That was Reyna’s hope. Even if she knew it was illusory.

“Then you'd better get used to it again,” muttered Viper, resting her elbow on the railing by the ladder. Reyna couldn't shake the feeling that the chemist's gaze was more piercing than usual. “And change your definition.”

Reyna neither agreed nor denied it. She only bit the inside of her cheek as she suddenly felt strangely embarrassed by this silence. It was as if, at the very least, she was afraid that every second of it would bring Sabine closer to questions Zyanya had no answers to.

Sabine also didn't say anything new for a while. Zyanya watched somewhat puzzled as the chemist dropped her flip-flops from her feet. She soaked her feet in the water, sitting down on the dry surface of the tiles, right next to Reyna's forearms.

“How did you find me?” she finally asked.

It didn't matter that she didn't need to know, she just wanted to do anything so she wouldn't have to sit in silence.

Viper waved her feet in the water for a moment. Small waves swam into the depths of the pool, then quieted.

“You weren't where you usually are,” she replied without much ado. Her gaze went to Reyna more emphatically when she felt the latter glare at her. “And you've been avoiding me since yesterday.”

Fuck.

She tried to tell herself that it wasn't like that at all. That it was a matter of coincidence, that just after that one night when Sabine simply left her bedroom, Reyna wasn't around her very often. Because, after all, that could be the case, she could have been packing, especially if their pass started in twenty-four hours, she could have just missed Viper or....

“I'm not.”

Aside from the fact that she was wearing a two-piece bathing suit, she felt extremely naked after saying that sentence. Apparently, it was only then that she realized that it would probably have been better if she had somehow chosen any better answer.

Especially when the Viper's gaze penetrated her face so intensely. Zyanya was uncomfortable with the fact that the glow of her radianite heart was also minimally illuminating Sabine.

“You have a lot of skills, but lying is not one of them.”

She was tempted to tell Viper that she was wrong. She was perfect at lying to herself.

She didn't say it out loud.

She rolled her eyes.

“I'm not lying,” she said. She lied. “I had a lot on my mind, it’s probably a coincidence.”

She was practically certain that with this she had dug her own grave, but she preferred this to letting herself be read as if an open book, when only green eyes studied every twitch on her face.

“Let's assume I believe that,” Sabine muttered, although Zyanya had the impression that she looked amused by how hard Reyna was trying to save herself from something Viper had long known. “But if you were busy resting, you should rather be there, don't you think?”

Reyna turned her head in the direction of the jacuzzi, but immediately turned back to Sabine.

She didn't believe her lie for a second, but she didn't pursue the subject either. It was a convenient solution.

“You came to watch over me?”

Reyna raised an eyebrow, and the corner of her mouth lifted slightly. Sabine wasn't going to dig in her head this time, so she decided to make this half-joke.

Maybe it was to help her herself get used to the idea that the reason why she came here came to her instead.

She couldn't be so dramatic. She had to embrace herself, get her thoughts together, even if her thoughts didn't make sense, and she was getting the impression that something was wrong with her, because damn, since when did she ever dwell on such things?

“You could call it like this.” She rested her hands on her knees, and just when Reyna thought Sabine just wanted to recline, the latter stood up and slipped her flip-flops on her feet. “That's where you belong. And I don't want to repeat myself.”

With a movement of her chin, she indicated the other end of the room. Reyna shook her head.

Sabine was stubborn, she was damn stubborn. She'd seen too much, known too much, and Reyna was almost certain that for the rest of her life she wouldn't be able to prevent Viper from seeing through her even before she thought anything herself.

She rested her cheek against her entwined arms. She could just agree and let her go, because after all, that's what she came here for, right? To be alone, solely in the quiet hum of bubbles and overflowing water. In the semi-darkness, barely with the light of the single sconces and lamps built into the bottom of the pool.

In the solitude into which she herself escaped from Viper, because Viper forced her to think too much.

Yet she couldn't hold her tongue.

“You should relax, too.”

Sabine stopped in mid-step. Her hand had not yet managed to let go of the railing she had just held on to, her fingers still grazing over the stainless steel, showing Reyna that she had probably spoken up at the last moment.

When she turned her head with a question painted on her face, Zyanya only shrugged her shoulders. Viper traced the black lines of the tattoo on her hand, refracting partially in the water under the light.

She didn't quite know why she did it.

“You mean?” she reflected, although Zyanya was probably aware that it was a ploy anyway.

The Mexican woman didn't point this out to her, however. In fact, for a moment Sabine even thought that Reyna would back off from the idea, wave her hand and want to let it go.

But that wasn't Reyna's style.

Because Reyna swam up to the ladder and get out of the pool as if nothing ever happened, standing in front of Viper just to look her in the eye. Or to block her escape route. Or both.

And that was completely her style.

“Join in.” Zyanya pointed behind her with her thumb. She knew very well that she was leaving no doubt now, and that was exactly what she meant. “Of the two of us, I'm not the only one who should rest.”

Viper had to admit that if Reyna wanted to actually block her escape route with her person, she succeeded.

She didn't want to do it, but she still swept her body with her eyes at an express pace. She analyzed a possible opponent in case of an emergency, she always did.

The difference was... that even if Reyna Mondragón looking at her in a clinging black bikini, drops of water dripping from her nose and a slightly glowing heart of radianite was that opponent... then Viper somehow still couldn't focus.

She didn't like it. She didn't like that she found in this body something that made her leave Reyna in her own bedroom two days ago. She didn't like the way her skin glowed, her muscles standing out in the light of those damn sconces. She didn't like how pronounced her features were, her fangs flashing from time to time from between her lips.

And most of all, she didn't like the fact that there was no denying that Reyna was attractive.

She took in a breath. She broke their eye contact, even if she didn't have much of a place to focus her gaze. She smelled chlorine, focused on its pungent odor.

She pressed her hands into the pockets of her shorts to gain at least a false sense of freedom.

“I don't have a swimsuit with me. I just came to talk.”

She didn't lie. And it was a pretty strong argument.

Apparently not for Zyanya. Who, by the way, continued to drill those purple irises into her face at least as if her life depended on it.

Viper longed to point this out to her in some quick addendum, only to have her stop.

“I'll wait,” she concluded. “No one will come here at this hour anyway.”

“I'm not in the mood for swimming.”

She tried again. She had to try. She wanted to somehow outline that she was turning around and heading for the exit, yet she couldn't move. Just like that, she was able to pass by Reyna, the way she usually did.

And that made her nervous, too.

“After all, we won't be swimming,” Zyanya replied. She took one step forward, on purpose. Of course she did it on purpose. Or maybe she didn't and Viper was just paranoid? “Someone told me not to, after all.”

Viper snorted. The usual 'fuck you' was pressed to her lips, but it only ended with a snort.

“Take your time.”

Sabine didn't flinch when the vampire's wet hand lightly stuck to the shirt on her shoulder. She didn't even flinch when Zyanya turned her back and went exactly where Viper told her to go.

Viper, in turn, listened to the sound of bare feet on the tiles until they quieted down. The chemist meticulously watched as Reyna stepped inside the smaller pool, her arms spread out over the edge behind her. Her silhouette disappeared in a gamut of bubbles, the purple tips of her hair floating on their own.

Reyna tilted her head back. And she sighed, closing her eyes, which reflected the lamplight so much that Sabine couldn't stand it.

She could have left and not come back. What Reyna wanted didn't mean that Viper had to do it. She could just leave her here and not explain absolutely anything, especially since Sabine didn't like to admit Reyna was right.

Especially when she saw through her enough to know that Sabine actually needed to relax, too, and regardless of whether Viper denied it, Reyna stayed her course.

But she went to change. And she returned, albeit with her head proudly raised, to convince herself that she didn't feel weird about it. Nor with the fact that, even from a distance, she saw the same purple eyes that had stopped on her figure just before the corner of Reyna's mouth lifted enough to show her fang.

Suddenly her dark green bikini became too revealing. Which was idiotic, because just twenty-four hours ago those same eyes saw her naked.

It's not that Viper hadn't settled on the idea that actually her skin was quite uncovered in front of Reyna and every single scar was visible to the naked eye. After all, she knew them all.

It was more a matter of the intensity of that look.

“Welcome back, serpiente.”

Viper didn't answer until she was immersed in the hot water up to her shoulders, and inevitably she could no longer avoid Reyna's gaze, since the latter was sitting across from her and apparently expected that answer.

She slid lower than Reyna so she could rest her neck against the edge of the pool.

“The fact that I'm here doesn't cancel out the fact that you're not supposed to talk to me like that,” she muttered.

Reyna knew that this time Viper had said those words out of habit. She didn't sound angry for a second, she just didn't know what else to say.

“Sounds like something you would say, indeed,” Zyanya replied. Her fingers drummed on the tiles she was reaching for. She harbored no resentment toward Callas' tone. “Do you really dislike it that much?”

Viper folded her arms across her chest.

“I have a name,” she chuckled, seemingly out of breath, seemingly seriously. “And it's there to be used.”

Zyanya furrowed her brow. She took her arms off the edge of the pool and tucked them in the water, anyway, under Callas' watchful eye. Even under the bubbles, the glow of her heart was highly visible, and Sabine seemed to be finding some new habit in watching it.

“As far as I know, you don't like it when I do it.”

Viper's gaze shifted from the purple glow to Reyna's face in a second.

“I prefer it over serpiente,” she stated. “Then start using it.”

Zyanya tilted her head. For a moment she gave Viper a break from eye contact, as she had to think for herself.

She was again giving her riddles that made her think too much. Which made Reyna feel like closing the distance between them just to look at Sabine's face up close and find the answer there.

To look into those green eyes and ask how she does it that Reyna, who came here to avoid Sabine, is now so close to her and all resistance melts away. That, damn it, she now calls her that one word, although she prayed that they didn't have to exchange a single word.

She didn't recognize herself. When her tone changed, when it was so easy for Viper to turn her escape here into that... that Reyna was resorting to something that even qualified as flirting.

She could tell herself that it was all fake, and that she had invited Viper to join only to deceive her into thinking that everything was business as usual. That she didn't want to get away from her at all, and that Reyna doesn't find anything downright... intimidating in her presence.

She flirted for appearances' sake. She smiled for appearances' sake. Because, after all, her behavior wouldn't make sense otherwise, would it?

This was getting more and more confusing. And Reyna still couldn't stop the fact that she was unwittingly herding herself into these twisted corridors of relationships with Viper, because... because she felt she had lost control of it.

“Isn't it against your rules, Sabine?”

Viper's gaze slid from Zyanya's eyes to her lips. Maybe she wanted to trace how the vampire pronounced the words, to be sure of them. To remember how her lips line up when she says her name.

“Don't catch my words, Zyanya.”

Reyna smiled to herself. Probably. A little to herself, a little to Sabine. A little because she couldn't ward off the impression that Viper, despite the fact that she made eye contact, didn't feel confident with it at all.

“Okay,” she agreed. “Whatever you want.”

Reyna rarely used this nonchalant tone in any conversation. Neither towards the agents, nor even at that damn ball Sabine recalled her speaking to her that way.

Stretching certain sounds. Pronouncing words in a peculiar way with an infusion of that Spanish accent, a hard 'r', in a melodious yet confident voice.

Instead of doing it then, she was doing it now. When her eyes glittered in the twilight, and Sabine, not knowing why, noticed a single hair stuck to her forehead. When her eyelashes were darker, sticking together with water, she dared to use that accent on her.

She wasn't going to pretend she hadn't noticed it.

“Don't use that voice on me,” she announced. It wasn't even a command, but an implicit statement. Viper didn't countenance a refusal. “It doesn't work.”

Reyna raised an eyebrow.

“Doesn’t it?”

Viper bore her gaze. And she did what she did best. She changed the subject.

“Sage suspects something.”

Reyna should be grateful that they switched to something more serious in the conversation. That at least sobered her up. Relatively. It distracted her from the fact that she felt like constantly rebuking herself in her mind.

She decided to go that route, abandoning her own game in favor of this Viper. Even if Sabine didn't take her eyes off her face. She also had the impression that once or twice she glanced at the place where the hickey had already disappeared.

Fuck.

“Where did that thought come from?” she replied.

She took her hand out of the water and ran it through her damp hair to embrace that one strand of hair. Green eyes followed her movement. She wasn't quite sure if it was her own heart or not, but one of them certainly sped up.

And yet that calm. A conversation that was important, but imbued with an almost indifference. Only an air as thick as the steam that wrapped around their bodies.

A contrast significant to them. Only for them.

“She dropped a few not very nice words.” The answer came. “She treats you the same way she treats me.”

Zyanya focused on the tone of her voice. But the answer came to her rather quickly, as it was the only one she had.

“It doesn't mean anything.” The tone she used was meant to convince Viper, and as she wasn't sure it did, she finished the thought before Sabine could interrupt her. “She's seen us together a couple of times because we were assigned to each other on a mission, and I bit back to her a few times, but...”

“You attacked her because of me.”

Reyna bit her tongue. A solid argument, but she wasn't going to show that it knocked her out of rhythm a bit, so she just clicked her tongue, as if Sabine's words hurt her slightly.

“We've already talked about this. Sage won't tell anyone, I've got her cornered as much as she has me.” She shrugged her shoulders. “She can think what she wants, I don't care.”

Sabine muttered something to herself. One could consider the matter over, Reyna could change the subject or keep quiet and wait for Viper to be the one to break the silence, only... that when she looked at her more closely, she noticed that Viper's eyes had lost none of their perspicacity.

She inquired in silence. She waited for Reyna to break, even if Reyna herself didn't know from what. She felt an invisible knife at her throat, that one word could go too far, and then... well, then there would be trouble.

Zyanya knew that Sage had grounds for her suspicions. Her role was to pretend that wasn't the case at all.

“That's your style,” Viper admitted, nodding. Spreading out more comfortably, the water came up to her collarbones, and Reyna inadvertently looked there. “Actually, that's really your style, Reyna.”

Zyanya felt a bit like an ant under a magnifying glass. In addition, she was driven into a corner. It wasn't new for her to be screened by Sabine, she was theoretically used to it, but... but now there was something in those green cat eyes that made her want to get out of this topic as soon as possible. And by any means necessary.

She took in a breath.

“So let's talk about you,” she threw, like a final card on their table.

Perhaps with this move she knocked all the cards out of Viper's hand. That was her intention. No matter what topic she had to discuss now, in addition, she knew full well that she would dig her own grave with it.

But Viper didn’t have the overhearing ability. Her heart was safe.

“About me?” She raised one eyebrow. For a moment, her eyes fled somewhere, unlike Reyna's. She wanted to see her reaction, to be sure that the thin ice she had stepped on would not collapse under her feet. “There's not much to talk about me,” she said.

“You enjoyed yesterday, didn't you?”

The question was very sudden. So sudden, in fact, that Reyna could almost sense the moment when Viper's consternation turned to understanding, and a gasp escaped her lips. Disbelief. Maybe indignation, but whatever it was, Sabine quickly pulled herself together and her eyebrow rose and she wrapped her arms tighter around herself, laughing uncertainly neither to herself nor to Reyna.

Reyna didn't laugh. Her gaze swept over the Viper, not fading anywhere near her for a moment. Her face was serious, even too serious for Callas to dismiss with a wave of her hand. Purple eyes shone in the twilight, waiting for an answer, which Sabine probably preferred to leave to herself.

She looked like a predator. And Viper didn't even know when it happened.

“Your directness is invaluable,” she replied quickly. That was supposed to discourage Reyna, probably. And apparently Sabine wasn't entirely satisfied with the result, because Zyanya lifted her chin higher. “Why do you want to know that?”

Mondragón shrugged her shoulders. Only her brow furrowed gently when the familiar heartbeat reached her ears.

She effectively changed the subject. And effectively now she could observe Viper under a magnifying glass.

“And why not?”

Sabine didn't like that answer. She had no idea what distance separated them, but it seemed downright claustrophobic to her. Just water between their bodies, hot bubbles that burst and settled as droplets of water on Reyna's nose. Or over her lip. Or under an eye.

They measured each other with their eyes, fighting a battle in the background, wordless. Who would give up first, who would get frustrated or withdraw and walk out of the small pool with her tail tucked.

Sabine was a stubborn woman.

And Zyanya hated to lose.

“Do you want to feed your ego with this?”

Reyna laughed low, more to herself than to her.

“Ah, Sabine. Do you judge me so poorly?” she muttered. One of the wet strands of hair covered part of her face as she tilted her head. “I'm just curious.”

Would you understand that Sage had grounds for her suspicions, even if she didn't know they were stronger than she thought?

“And that's what will get you lost someday.”

The answer was quick and simple. And it was trite in its message - Sabine ended the conversation, as always owning the last sentence and leaving Reyna just with it. No explanation.

She waited for Zyanya to simply mutter something again, nod her head and agree to such an arrangement, in which they both remain silent and the possible options for this conversation are just scenarios in her head.

And to her own uncertainty, there was none of this relaxation in Zyanya's face. Resignation. There was something in Zyanya's face that Sabine didn't like in the way it made her uncertain.

The vampire didn't finish the conversation. Sabine, on the other hand, had no idea how she could defend herself for the first time in her life.

“Do you think so?” she asked. A Spanish accent lay heavy on her tongue, making the voices too characteristically pronounced for Viper to overlook. “It's not my heart that's racing.”

Silence. Silence. Silence.

Viper felt the blood rush to her head. She could have blamed it on the temperature of the water, started to explain that she was simply breathless now. But Reyna couldn't lie to her.

Because that vampire had heard fucking everything.

“You wish.” She wanted to sound feisty, as was her habit. The problem was that Reyna liked the sharp note in her voice all too much. “You think I can't handle you?”

Fang flashed in the semi-darkness. Zyanya didn't want to admit that Viper's words pleased her. She liked how she tried to fight what her senses were hearing.

She denied the undeniable. With a blush that reached her cleavage and Reyna was almost certain it was not the result of hot water.

The memories of their last night together were still very vivid. They both knew it.

“Oh, no,” she replied. Sabine did not take her eyes off her, even when she swam up to her. She consciously violated her space. And Viper stubbornly didn't budge, enduring Reyna's presence closer than she had for the past few minutes. “But that doesn't mean I can't be intimidating to you, does it, serpiente?”

What the hell was going on with her?

Viper tilted her head. She pressed her lips together, letting Zyanya's finger slide under her chin, forcing her to lift her head. That she should look at her, even if all Reyna wanted a moment ago was solitude.

Viper looked because she had to. Many times she had Reyna close, many times she had analyzed her features, and yet... yet each time she was surprised that Zyanya Mondragón's aura was more dangerous up close.

Seductive, but not to everyone. She was seducing right into death, and now... ironically resembled a snake intrigued by its prey.

She felt her finger on her chin, not held tight. Enough for Sabine to be aware that Zyanya was controlling her in this symbolic way.

The snake caught the prey. The prey let it do so.

“You are not.”

The breath settled on Reyna's face. Viper was painfully aware that their chests were almost in contact. They did it often, after all. Very often.

And now she felt more exposed than if she were naked. Her gaze involuntarily fell for a moment on the glowing radianite crystal sparkling in the vampire's chest. She immediately picked it up as soon as a low laugh tickled her cheek.

Reyna didn't stop. She moved a step further. Sabine's shoulder blades touched the edge of the pool, cutting off her escape. She was herded by the snake.

And she wasn't shaking in terror at all.

Purple eyes followed her. A smile lurked somewhere in the corner of Zyanya's mouth. Her thumb hooked around the edge of Sabine's mouth.

If she wanted, she would have started purring, gloating at the unsteadiness of Viper's heart in her ears. The uneven pulse, now healthy, beating for her in this mad tango of theirs.

To think it was all for a silly change of subject.

“Your heart says otherwise,” she whispered. Viper's skin under her finger was soft, warm.

Sabine cursed her distinct accent. She cursed the penetrating gaze, how close she was. She cursed all of Reyna.

But only in her mind.

“So it is mistaken.”

Zyanya squinted her eyelids. Sabine was serious, Reyna - content. Too content. Too sure in her situation, which Sabine had no way to change.

Or maybe she didn't want to at all?

She was warm. Zyanya's breath settled on her lips so clearly that she could almost feel her lips on hers. The distance was no more than the thickness of a sheet of paper.
Neither of them moved forward. They persisted in this suspension.

Tick tock.
Tick tock.
Tick-tock.

“Is it, Sabine?”

She didn't even notice when she started breathing faster. Because it was Reyna who was taking that breath away from her. It was all Reyna's fault. She was taking her breath away, making her hot and her cheeks puffed up with a warmth too satisfying for a vampire.

It was always Reyna's fault. Hands clenched on the bed sheets or on the assassin's shoulders, leaving invisible traces of touch. Muscles trembling from exertion, shallow breaths. Those hands, confidently stroking her thighs as she swallowed the last sigh in her throat.

And beyond that... that normalcy. The fact that Viper felt more and more... different with her.

That, too, was Reyna's fault. Viper didn't sign up for this after all. She shouldn't be caught in her trap so easily, and now she was sitting here, breathing in that hot air and clasping her hands up to her whitened knuckles just to... restrain herself.

“After all, the truth can be deceiving, can't it?”

They were playing a game. Viper could drop all the pawns or let Reyna do it. The vampiress laughed briefly.

Impressed.

She liked it.

“You are an interesting woman, Sabine Callas.”

The corner of Viper's mouth lifted slightly. Zyanya let her win, but she wasn't going to float in honor. It suited her at what stage she had left their pawns on the chessboard.

“I'll see you in Vulture.”

Zyanya moved away under the single touch of Sabine's hand on her sternum. Trivially easy. Maybe she had lost that strength of hers a long time ago.

Maybe she hasn't.

Maybe Sabine Callas coming out of the swimming pool area was the test of her strength.

Mainly of Reyna’s own willpower.

Chapter 44: FORTY FOUR

“So you really are going out.”

Viper stopped just around the corner. She turned around to see Killjoy, who was probably coming out of the kitchen because she was holding a mug of steaming coffee in her hands, and nodded at the suitcase in Viper's hand, in case her question wasn't clear enough.

Sabine first looked at Killjoy, then at the suitcase, but spoke up after a momentary hesitation. It was a bit like she was caught off guard. Although she herself had no idea why she just felt that way.

After all, she wasn't doing anything wrong, was she?

Vulture in the hangar was nothing wrong. The fact that Reyna was probably inside it and waiting for her probably wasn't either.

So was the fact that she couldn't sleep tonight.

Probably.

“It just sorted itself out.” She shrugged her shoulders, wanting to introduce some lightness to the conversation. And to get rid of the tension in her own body, because she felt strangely uncomfortable when Killjoy's gaze jumped from her to her suitcase. “And you?”

She smiled slightly. She hoped that with this gesture she had deceived not only Killjoy, but herself as well.

She would definitely feel better if she managed to get into the hangar without stumbling upon anyone. Without unnecessary questions, inquisitiveness. Questioning about where, with whom and why.

Sabine didn't know why.

Because if someone had told her some time ago that she would go with Reyna voluntarily to Mexico for a week, she probably would have laughed in their face. Perhaps deep down she was laughing in her own face, if only because it was actually somehow ridiculous.

It didn't suit her. Sabine, after all, did not like large spaces. She didn't like crowds, fun. She always felt like she was in the way or didn't fit in with what was going on around her, and now... now she was flying to damn Mexico to celebrate something she didn't even fully understand.

“I'm staying.” Killjoy entwined her fingers around her coffee mug and shrugged her shoulders. Only that gesture made Viper realize they were having a conversation. “Raze thought it would be better, but that's okay. We'll sit in the studio, watch some movie, you know.”

Sabine noticed the younger one fleeing with her eyes somewhere to the side. She could have asked, but first of all, she already knew her own, and secondly... she had a feeling that then the conversation could dangerously roll over her.

Well, and she probably didn't have the heart to pull Klara's tongue.

“Sounds good,” she acknowledged neutrally. “If you need anything, you can use the lab.”

Maybe she needed to change the subject, even if she partially developed it herself. Which was also not her style. After all, she always ended discussions.

“Are you going by Vulture?”

This was the moment when something clicked in Sabine's head. She furrowed her eyebrows slightly and put her suitcase down on the floor, feeling that Klara was following her every move with her eyes, but when she straightened up, Killjoy was staring at her coffee mug.

“What do you really want to ask?”

Klara first tried to pretend to be surprised. She tried, because it didn't work very well for her, and she probably knew it, because she bit the inside of her cheek.

She knew that with Viper she would not win. She knew her well enough to be aware that sooner or later Sabine would read everything out of her like an open book. She didn't try to deny it.

She simply held back her answer. At least for a while, until she let the air out of her mouth and lowered her hands lightly with her mug with resignation.

“You're not mad at her, are you?” Sabine raised her eyebrows. For a moment she didn't know who Killjoy was talking about, but she didn't manage to say anything. “I thought you knew. Or that Reyna told you even before you left the medbay.”

She shrugged her shoulders, this time trying to convince Sabine that she wasn't stressed at all. She bit the inside of her cheek, it gave her away.

“At first I was,” Viper admitted openly, because she actually had no reason to deny it. She was angry with Reyna, actually, she was downright furious with Reyna as soon as she found out. “But then it calmed down. She surprised me, that's all.”

Killjoy muttered something to herself. Her face, however, showed the relief Sabine had been looking for.

“So... you still don't like each other?”

Sabine stopped in mid-motion as she was about to bend down to pick up her suitcase. She gave up on it. She felt there was a catch in that question.

Killjoy wasn't stupid. Hell, she was all too smart for not noticing how certain facts conflicted with each other. Klara might not have argued with Viper about the fact that the latter didn't like Reyna, but somehow it only now occurred to Viper that she didn't say she thought it was true.

“It's... complicated,” she finally said, aware that too long a silence would not give her much credibility. “We know how to tolerate each other.”

“I wouldn't spend a week in the hospital next to someone I can only tolerate,” Killjoy muttered coyly. With her smile she was probably trying to convince Viper that she wasn't going to point it out to her or consider it a bad thing. “It's none of my business, but... but I think I know what I saw.”

Viper wasn't sure how to react. And she had no idea if she was staring at Killjoy as if she had seen a ghost, or if she was still managing to maintain any composure toward this conversation, which had suddenly become strangely... stressful.

She really liked Killjoy. And she really valued her company, but now she felt like hiding from her. And yet confidence was rarely in her short supply.

She had no idea what she could answer. To be honest, the only thing she was sure of at that moment was that her muscles even stiffened in a strange paralysis. At the same time she wanted to escape and at the same time she couldn't move.

“Sorry, but... I think I have to go now.”

That was the first and probably the only option she could think of. Perhaps even too cheesy and raising even more suspicion, but Viper had no choice.

She felt her hand gently slide down the handle of the suitcase as she picked it up.

Killjoy understood enough, because she recoiled in a second. Even for that moment of silence, Sabine felt that the younger woman was thinking about something. Or maybe she wanted to add something.

The fact that Sabine didn't know what Killjoy could add was almost paralyzing.

“Right, sure.” She corrected her glasses, gestured with her hand to the suitcase in Viper's hand, and smiled. “In that case, have fun and fly safely.”

The end of the conversation was like a stone falling from her shoulders for Callas.

“Thank you. Take care.”

***

Reyna's back was turned to Viper as she boarded the Vulture. Perhaps it was even to Viper's advantage that she didn't have to immediately face Zyanya, whom she had actually just discussed. And at the same time, she was thinking. All too much.

So much so that she herself wasn't sure whether she was angry at her or at herself. Unless it was at both of them, and then absolutely nothing would save the situation anymore, but she knew full well that Reyna had heard her footsteps, so pretending not to see her didn't make much sense.

And it's not at all like she had a need to avoid her since the situation at the pool, even if at the time it was Viper who had Reyna in her hand, not the other way around.

Viper, at that moment, felt just the opposite.

“Sorry, I met Killjoy on the way,” she mumbled in greeting, passing Zyanya by the suitcase rack.

She placed hers on the floor next to her, waiting for the Mexican woman to finish securing hers with a belt.

“That's okay,” Reyna replied, shaking off her hand after struggling with the jammed buckle. “She wanted something?”

Zyanya moved away from the rack and rested one hand on her hip, as if to assess her work. She was still mostly focused on her luggage instead of Viper, and that was quite to Sabine's liking. She leaned sideways against the wall that divided the baggage area from the main area and looked down at the floor, folding her arms over her chest.

She tried to look as stiff as possible, even if Reyna wasn't looking in her direction. She bent down to pick up her suitcase and slid it onto the shelf without a word, reaching for the securing belt later. Viper didn't ask her to, but she didn't comment.

“She wished us a nice trip,” she said, raising her eyes only when she was sure she would not hesitate in her... evasion of certain facts. The realization that she was finding it increasingly difficult to do so left a bitter aftertaste on her tongue. “And safe flight.”

“That's nice of her.” Zyanya continued to focus on the clasp strap, but the corner of her mouth lifted up in case Viper thought the tension between them wasn't coming from her alone. “Wait, she's not going anywhere?”

“She was going to. With Raze. But something changed, I didn't ask,” Viper admitted, shrugging her shoulders.

Reyna muttered something to herself, on the one hand taking in this information, while on the other hand Viper couldn't help but notice the hidden puzzlement on her face anyway, which she probably didn't want to say out loud.

She didn't speak up until she was face to face with Viper.

“Don't you think that she and Killjoy...” she began. Maybe she wasn't sure she wanted to ask that, whether it would violate any boundaries and screw something up even more. But on the other hand, she felt she couldn't keep quiet, because she had promised Klara that Viper wouldn't be angry. “You know.”

“I know.”

Reyna blinked. Viper wasn't too moved by this.

“Fade and Neon couldn't hide. But Killjoy and Raze are even worse at it, so yes, I know.”

“You don't mind?” asked Reyna cautiously. It wasn't malice, she didn't intend to be mean at this point, she was just... consumed by curiosity. “Feelings get in the way of work and such.”

If Viper wasn't happy about the question, she didn't show it to her in any way. Only the corner of her mouth twitched slightly, but gently enough that Reyna might as well consider it a coincidence. Although she was almost certain that when it came to Viper, coincidences were relatively few.

“You know what I think about that,” she concluded, shrugging her shoulders. “It's never a good idea. Or at least not in a job like this.”

“So you're not going to try to get it out of her head?”

Viper sighed. Her gaze fled somewhere to the side and she looked as if she was beating her thoughts for a while, even if she always knew what she wanted to say. She always had a thousand different plans and solutions, in fact she could see through Reyna after the first question, and yet... yet she hesitated.

“What good will that do?” she replied with question after question.

On the one hand she looked resigned, and on the other hand there was not an ounce of uncertainty in that answer. Reyna raised an eyebrow, not quite understanding the contrast between Viper's previous statement and this question.

“If I scold her, it won't make her stop talking to Raze. They can pretend they have nothing in common, but they will find a way. They're both too smart for that, even if Raze likes to break the rules. I can only hope they are also too smart to do something stupid.”

Zyanya felt a certain question press against her lips, but at the same time she felt she had to think about it. Viper may have seen it coming. Actually, very likely she saw it, because she saw everything, but Reyna was somehow used to this thought.

So they just sat in the main and co-pilot's seats. They didn't speak until the vulture was in the air and the autopilot started. Reyna leaned back more comfortably, staring at the glass in front of her, before casting an indicative glance at the Viper.

Callas leaned her head against the headrest and pulled her knees up, also staring at the horizon. The hum of the engines surrounded them both in that silence they so loved, yet it was Viper who interrupted it first.

More and more often she did. Or it was Reyna who increasingly caught herself giving her a reason to do so.

“I feel you staring,” she muttered. As usual, without being too concerned, she simply stated a fact. “So go ahead.”

Zyanya could have taken a book, a phone or anything else out of her bag a moment earlier to buy time to think about her question again. But subconsciously she probably didn't want to drag it out, which is why her book still lay quietly in her bag. She still had a good few hours to read it, after all.

She folded her arms over her chest.

“Don't you think that the rule of non-fraternization is increasingly...”

She searched for the right word. Anything so as not to sound unkind, with the knowledge that the rule was created by none other than Viper herself. Viper, who in turn found the word immediately.

“Ignored?”

She was not ashamed of the word. She said it perhaps more confidently than Reyna would have been able to. And the silence on Reyna's part was eloquent enough for the corner of her mouth to lift slightly, as if she wanted to say 'I got you there' without words.

She turned her head toward Reyna to also show her that she was not uncomfortable with the word.

Or maybe she just wanted to check her reaction.

“This isn't the first thing that's started to get fucked up in the Protocol.” Viper didn't sound particularly agitated; in fact, she seemed all too reconciled to her own assertion. “And it certainly won't be the last, so honestly... I don't know if I want to dig into it. Not after all of this.”

“All of what?”

It wasn't that Reyna didn't know what Viper had in mind. In fact, she may have even guessed it to some degree, but even if she did... she probably wanted to make sure. She wanted Viper to tell her what she was thinking, regardless of whether her guesses were going to be confirmed.

“Fade dates Neon, Killjoy dates Raze, and they're probably not the only ones. The rule of no fraternization probably exists only on paper. Sage is not able to master her own job, she constantly screws something up and Brimstone sweeps problems under the rug. Everyone knows something is wrong, but no one speaks up, because speaking up is uncomfortable, so we sit up to our knees in the swamp and don't even try to get out,” she said, almost in one breath. It was as if these exact thoughts had been swirling around in her head for a long time. “The Protocol is no longer what it should be. It's still surprising that it's still functioning in any way.”

“A pessimistic vision.”

Viper squinted her eyelids.

“Realistic,” she corrected, sighing slightly. Her head rested against the headrest again. “If it weren't for the fact that I'm too deep in it, I might have quit it all to hell.”

She laughed at her own suggestion. Reyna watched as she pulled her knees up more under her so that she could then rest her chin on them.

“Have you ever thought about it?” Sabine tilted her head, making it clear she was waiting for an explanation. “To quit it.”

“Yes,” she said immediately. A smile continued to wander somewhere on her lips, slightly bitter. “I often wonder if I'm just too old for it at this point. And on the other hand, watching a person half my age pick up a gun and walk out onto the battlefield probably keeps me in it.”

Reyna didn't speak for a while. For a moment she tried to process the information she got and fit it in where... where the other agents' opinions of Viper had been so far. How contradictory they were.

Egotistical? Insensitive, cold and unscrupulous?

The same one who fought on the front lines of this fucked-up war just to keep the younger and younger recruits out of it?

“You do it for them.”

It was a statement. At first, the corner of Viper's mouth twitched slightly, as if she intended to deny it. She felt Reyna's gaze linger on her figure, waiting for any reaction from her, even if she tried to hide it.

“I'm doing this to end a war that no one signed up for,” she corrected. Her gaze was stuck somewhere outside the window, tracking the shifting clouds. “I've been at this too long to lie that I don't know anything about it. I'm good at it, Reyna. And I'm going to take advantage of it.”

“What if you could stop?” Viper turned toward her at this question. Reyna shrugged her shoulders. “The war is over and you can do whatever you want. What are you doing?”

Sabine laughed lightly. Tentatively. Maybe even shyly, because she felt that the trajectory of this conversation was no longer predictable for her, and instead of gaining confidence, she felt more and more naked.

“What kind of question is that?”

Reyna apparently didn't feel too put off by this uncertainty in Viper's voice, which the latter tried to mask with a snort.

“We have at least four hours of travel ahead of us anyway. Just say it.”

Read a book. Browse something on the phone. Sleep. Count the chemical equations for the new toxin. Actually, Viper could be doing a lot of other things right now, yet she didn't move to do at least one.

She pulled her knees more under her.

“Why are you interested in this?”

“We can just sit in silence if you want.”

Viper's brow twitched. She was considering this option. In fact, it was all too tempting, after all, Viper loves her safe space uninterrupted by any words.

“I don't know what I would do,” she said, shrugging her shoulders slightly. She felt Reyna's gaze on her, waiting for her to finish. “I'd like to quit, but I've never... never thought about what would be afterwards. For now, it's the present that matters.”

“Would you leave?”

“Where?”

“You tell me.”

“I'm used to the headquarters. I'm fine there.”

“I don't believe it.”

Viper again countered with a short laugh.

“If you don't believe it, why do you ask?”

“I don't believe that you would want to spend the rest of your life at headquarters after you save the world,” she said. Reyna intertwined her arms across her chest, herself unsure if it was appropriate to smile or if Viper was just playing pretenses. “You can go wherever you want and stay there?”

“I built this place, Reyna,” Sabine mentioned. “This is my home now.”

“Home can be changed.” Zyanya's argument was strong, and it looked like she wasn't going to give up so easily. “So?”

Sabine sighed.

“Finland.”

“Finland?”

“Now you're questioning it?”

“No, I just... I wouldn't have assumed that you were dreaming of Finland exactly.”

“Why? It's nice. Little crime, peaceful. They say it's the happiest country in the world,” Viper replied, gliding her gaze somewhere outside the window again. “If I had to choose, it would be Finland.”

Reyna smiled to herself.

“Are you looking for happiness?”

“Maybe. Although it would be nice if this one time it would find me.”

***

Viper was able to adapt to the situation. She could dynamically change the mission plan during the course of the mission, she could dynamically switch from position, to position, she could manipulate the interlocutor without his knowledge and make him join her side even before he had time to realize it. She was able to adapt on the battlefield, in conversation and any psychological situation.

And yet, when Reyna, on the staircase leading to her apartment, was stopped by a neighbor, Sabine wasn't sure what she should do with herself. She had no plan when the women spoke in a language she didn't understand a word of. She didn't even know where she should look so that neither she would feel like an intruder, nor would this strange woman treat her that way.

Even the fact that this neighbor was an elderly lady with a strong Spanish accent and pronounced words firmly, confidently, and Reyna answered her in exactly the same way, as if she had subconsciously returned to her roots, did not make her feel better. And yet there was no danger.

The wind blew from under the threshold of the staircase entrance, the warmth settled on her skin despite the evening, and echoes of Spanish words carried along the walls. She held her suitcase in her hand, breathed fully and listened to the conversation with the knowledge that she was healthy and was here and now. And it was all... normal.

So normal that she almost couldn't swallow it.

“Who was it?”

She only dared to ask the question when the door from the apartment across the street closed and Reyna turned the keys in her hand, looking for the right one.

“Mrs. Carrera?” Viper didn't answer, assuming it was a rhetorical question. “She's lived here for years. And for years she's had the keys to water my flowers while I'm away.” Reyna laughed briefly, lightly. Viper thought that perhaps the visit to her hometown had awakened something in her that she had never seen in her before. “I warned her I was coming, so she did a little shopping for me. I'll drop her money in the mailbox later.”

“Does she know?”

The door finally opened and Zyanya invited Sabine inside with a hand gesture. She didn't respond, however, until it was just the two of them left, and she threw her keys on a dusty cabinet in the hallway.

“She does.” Reyna turned to Viper, though she didn't immediately look at her. She was gathering either words or thoughts. Or both at once, as she remained silent a bit longer than usual. “Maybe not all about the Protocol, but... her daughter was one of the first people at the Sanctuary. As far as I know, she now lives somewhere in California and is doing well.”

Viper paused for a second in stillness, her mouth ready to utter a quiet 'oh', but finally she didn't say a word. Because maybe it was out of place. Because she probably didn't want to stir up Reyna's memories of the Kingdom. She also perhaps didn't want to know what kind of experiments the girl had been subjected to and what condition Zyanya had found her in.

And perhaps it was selfish, but she knew that the guilt eating her up from the inside was already strong enough.

That's why Reyna hesitated to answer. Now she was grunting to somehow get rid of the silence on Viper's part.

“Make yourself comfortable. I'll show you where you'll sleep.”

She followed Reyna so she wouldn't stand still. She couldn't get rid of the tension, couldn't get rid of the feeling that she shouldn't be here, because this violated boundaries more than ever, and she didn't belong here. Maybe she had already grown attached to the lab desk. Maybe she didn't know any other life than the one she had in the Protocol, and she felt fear that she wouldn't be able to hide it.

Still, without a word, she let Zyanya carry her suitcase to one of the rooms.

“What about you?”

Reyna straightened up after setting the suitcase down on the floor, and for a moment looked as if she had no idea what Viper was asking. Maybe she was lost in thought too, but she quickly reconsidered.

“There's a fold-out couch in the living room.”

For the first time, Viper wasn't sure she liked this vision. Something wasn't right. Something was in the air, and she couldn't tell exactly what. To understand herself, which usually came easily to her.

She wanted to ask if Zyanya would prefer to sleep in the same bed with her. Because after all, they were already doing it, right? It wouldn't be strange or uncomfortable, because that was already the way it was between them.

She didn't ask. She just nodded her head.

“I'll go make us something to drink,” Reyna stated briefly, and although she smiled, Viper had the impression that she did so for lack of an idea of another response.

Sabine renewed her head movement, wordlessly taking in this news. She felt... uncomfortable, left alone in Zyanya's room. Again, that bitter aftertaste of crossing a boundary that she may have only had in her head appeared on her tongue and she could not swallow it in any way.

Here were her things. She didn't know what percentage of them Zyanya had at headquarters, she didn't even know what she could have here, and she still felt afraid to touch even the windowsill. Everything was personal, even the flower in the pot standing on the shelf seemed to judge her.

Even if she wanted to get rid of this feeling, she had no idea how to do it; so instead of looking around the room, instead of unpacking her suitcase, she followed Reyna.

She must have heard her footsteps, even though Sabine put each of them quietly. Perhaps she wanted to give her the feeling that she was not being supervised, which is why Mondragón did not turn to face her when she entered the kitchen.

She remained silent. And so did Reyna. Sabine watched the vampire prepare two mugs and wait for the water to boil, in the meantime inspecting the contents of several plastic bags on the kitchen counter.

Sabine guessed that these were the groceries she had mentioned earlier.

“So this is where you ran away to?”

Reyna took some vegetables out of the bag and threw them into the sink to wash them. She heard Viper push back a chair at the table and sit down on it, but didn't turn to face her. Probably she wanted to prolong the moment of that minimal privacy, she knew Sabine cherished such moments.

“You mean?”

She was sure Viper shrugged her shoulders. Zyanya could imagine it, even if she was standing with her back to her.

“When you were leaving,” Viper replied. “For passes when you had the chance. Did you come here?”

“Yes.” Reyna smiled slightly, although she was aware that Viper was unable to see it from her position. “I'm not proud of the layer of dust we found, but it's good to come back here.”

The kettle finished its work. The noise of boiling water quieted, leaving the two of them in a silent apartment. Viper drummed her fingers on the table top, as if she wasn't sure how to deal with the silence coming from everywhere.

Because there was always someone in the headquarters. Behind a wall or two. Maybe on the floor below or somewhere deeper in the corridor, but always... she always had the sense that someone was next door. Someone more. And her every move is being watched.

Now it was just her and Zyanya.

Green eyes traced it as boiling water filled the cup. The string from the tea bag rocked slightly, first one, then the other, as Reyna substituted a second mug.

“The Protocol doesn't make it any easier to clean up,” she chuckled. She didn’t quite knew what to say. She had felt for a long time that the conversation wasn't about anything specific, and it was hard to tell whether she liked it or not. “But at least you have nice neighbors. Flowers don't die and all that.”

“The people here are some of the best I've met.” Reyna placed the tea cup in front of Viper, and the latter immediately embraced it with her fingers. As if she needed something to hold on to. “They're like one big family.”

Sabine muttered in response. She let it be known that she understood. And at the same time, she didn't have much of an idea of what to say next.

Reyna seemed to sense this. She also took a cup for herself and placed it in front of Viper before taking a chair as well. It took a while before she looked at her, and Sabine could already feel that something was hanging in the air this time on Reyna's part. On the one hand, it looked disturbing, but on the other hand, Viper probably preferred to make the most of the conversation already than to ponder the unsaid later.

Reyna drummed her nails on the walls of her mug. She felt that Viper already knew she was going to say something anyway, and there was no turning back from that, but she wasn't in a hurry at all anyway.

“I know it's a shitty time for such things, but...” Viper raised an eyebrow. It was hard to tell if she was more surprised or concerned. “Brimstone wanted me to take Sage's job,” she threw out after a long moment. “He suggested it to me some time ago.”

Sabine looked as if she wasn't sure how she should take those words. As if she didn't fully believe them and didn't know what kind of reaction Zyanya expected.

Maybe she was hoping that Zyanya would be the one to speak up again, if only directing her on how she should respond, but she remained silent, still pounding out a rhythm on the walls of her tea mug that she only knew.

“He suggested you to replace her?”

The question sounded strange on her lips. She herself felt strange about saying something so out loud and so literally.

Zyanya squirmed minimally, wetting her lips with her tongue.

Sabine had the impression that Reyna wasn't going to drink her tea and only had it to occupy her hands with something.

“Not really.” Zyanya saw Viper's shoulders slump at those words. She wasn't surprised at all; after a while all the scams start to get pretty damn tiresome. “This will be a little less official,” she said.

“Most things in the Protocol have been like that for a while now,” Viper muttered bitterly. Her gaze escaped somewhere to the window, and Reyna felt minimally relieved about that, as looking Sabine in the eye had become uncomfortable. “And frankly I don't think anything will surprise me anymore,” she said.

“Wanna bet?”

Zyanya herself couldn't believe she got off on that joke, and her short laugh was hardly hers.

Viper looked at her briefly, but the corner of her mouth lifted a little more reservedly.

Reyna took in a mouthful of air soon after as she took a sip of tea.

“Officially, the co-commander will be me. Unofficially you will oversee everything.”

Sabine now unabashedly burst into laughter. However, it was not a joyful laugh. Actually Reyna didn't like this laughter, even if she knew it was part of their job.

He sounded tired more than anything else.

“Well, well, it gets better and better,” Viper stated, following Reyna's lead, also sipping her tea. “How did he justify it this time?”

She smiled. Slightly crookedly, because Reyna was able to believe that mentioning the job made Viper feel a little less... foreign about the place, but on the other hand, at the same time, it put another crush between their peace of mind that they had come here for.

“I don't know if it matters,” Reyna admitted frankly, and Viper nodded in agreement.

“It probably doesn't. But I'm curious about his creativity.”

There was a grain of truth in that. Reyna, in Viper's place, would probably want to know that too, so all in all she wasn't particularly surprised.

“In short, the agents are supposed to forget Sage's mistakes. To make them feel safe there is a change of commander, because it means that he has taken some steps in this direction, but as you know more than me, we work together in the same position, except that I am the one who signs the reports and I am the one the rest officially know about.”

Zyanya should have been relieved to hear the rumble of a stone falling from her back, but instead... she listened to the murmur of Viper, who again took a sip of tea and nodded her head with appreciation and no less indifference than if Reyna had told her about the weather.

“Clever,” she commented. “But not very effective.”

For some unexplained reason, Zyanya felt relieved that Viper no longer looked as defeated as she had then on the balcony. That she resembled that old Viper, who knows every move, anticipates it and thus doesn't get surprised.

She didn't look defeated because she knew weaknesses in Brimstone's plan that he himself had no idea about.

“It stinks to me, too,” Reyna said frankly, then sighed. “Like cowardice.”

She enjoyed making Sabine laugh with that one word. For a moment, she could even swear that her eyes flashed a spark she hadn't seen there in a very long time, even if the conversation was on a not very pleasant topic.

“True. But also desperation. Brimstone is slowly losing his way, and the agents are not stupid. They'll start to figure out about the scams faster than he can come up with new lies. He considers the Protocol a bunch of sensitives who can't hear a stronger word, because they'll walk away from the deal. He's afraid to fight this war alone, and at the same time he does everything he can to prevent others from finding out what the same war is about.”

“Do you think that's why he suspended you? That others really were so scared of your words?”

Maybe this question was one of the sensitive ones and somewhere she had some resistance to ask it, but on the other hand she had the feeling that both she and Viper had a need to hear the answer.

“I don't know.” Oh. This was not what Reyna had expected. “Liam has been to war. He knows what the hierarchy of values looks like when you're trying to win what you care about. And I've been in this shit as much up to my knees as he has, and now he's trying to disavow the fact that he used to be like that too.”

“Harsh?”

Viper nodded.

“Harsh, more firm. Strict maybe. Radianite did not choose, after recruiting Jett we did not look at age, because the situation was a crisis, and the shortage of people could not be overlooked. Now Neon has joined, or Gekko, and Brimstone seems to be barely accepting it. Frankly, I get the feeling that he can't handle the fact that we have a bunch of kids in the lineup who shouldn't be here at all.”

“So you do have something in common after all,” Reyna added.

“He shows it too much. He doesn't treat them as equals and it shows. You remember what I told you, and I won't change my mind, but I can't fool myself that we don't need new recruits.”

Viper only looked at Reyna for a second. Then she stuck her gaze into the tea, as if there was something so personal and embarrassing in this confession that she felt the need to hide.

They refilled their tea in silence, listening to the hum of the streets of Mexico quietly singing under the window.

***

Sabine found the bathroom herself.

Reyna probably felt it would be better if she stayed that way, so she quietly unpacked the rest of the groceries without saying anything else. Except maybe that the clean towels were lying on the washing machine or in the cabinet under the sink.

She felt that Viper needed to spend some time in her own company, even if she had to open the wrong door once or twice.

And Viper was damn grateful to her for that, even if she didn't say it out loud. Hardly, she might not have even admitted it in her mind, because she would have bent her morbidly protected boundary again.

She locked the door and only then took a breath.

Maybe she should feel bad that she abruptly ended the discussion and somewhat selfishly was the first to announce that she would take a shower. Because this was not her home. She didn't belong here and had no right to rule.

And yet, for the same reason, she felt that she needed to feel at least a little bit of control over what she was doing. Because she had no control over the fact that she would agree to come here. Nor the fact that she would have tea with Reyna in her apartment, talking about things that Viper didn't talk about... to anyone, actually.

Maybe at least this stupid shower was supposed to give her a substitute for power over herself.

She ran a hand through her hair, staring at her own reflection in the mirror. Only to find, without looking, that a small shelf was cluttered with a toothbrush cup, some single perfume. Reyna's belongings.

She turned away, taking a towel from the washing machine. She took one of the quickest showers of her life and left the room, refraining from slamming the door out of frustration, the origin of which she did not know.

***

Viper wasn't sure if she should walk closer.

Already standing in the threshold of the living room, she saw who was in the photograph placed on the table, surrounded by flowers, and one lit candle, standing somewhat alone next to a small porcelain skull.

The other Reyna held in her hand, along with a lighter.

She seemed not to smell the food left on the stove. She didn't hear the footsteps of Viper, who leaned her shoulder against the doorframe, looking at the silent, very silent scene that she felt she wouldn't banish from her memory for a long time.

Reyna stared at her sister's photograph as if everything around her had ceased to exist, and the bitter half-smile was about to stay on her lips for eternity.

Maybe she wasn't even aware that she was holding that damn candle, or that whatever she was cooking in the kitchen was about to burn if she didn't keep an eye on it.

It wasn't an everyday sight for Viper to watch Reyna in such... tranquility. Suspense. Reyna, who was usually in constant motion, who was everywhere and Sabine could even be tempted to say that she never stopped, now... seemed like a stranger.

And when it seemed to Viper that she had finally snapped out of her trance, Zyanya put two fingers to her lips and, taking one step forward, pressed them to the photograph, closing her eyes.

Closing herself in that moment. When her elbow bent to put the porcelain skull on the table and something in Zyanya Modragón's strong form broke as she let out a shuddering breath from between her lips.

Viper didn't know if it was Reyna's breath or her own, because before she knew it, she felt her eyes fill with tears.

She bit her lip, then covered her mouth with her hand, praying in her spirit that no sound would escape from between her lips, trembling in that silent cry. She swallowed her saliva, trying not to start breathing raggedly, and stuck her gaze to the floor, aware that it was already too late.

Zyanya approached her, but Viper did not immediately raise her head. First she wiped her tears with the back of her hand and smiled crookedly, apologetically, as if she hoped that by doing so Reyna would forgive her, and Viper would forgive herself.

“I'm sorry,” she whispered, swallowing her saliva. That apologetic smile still didn't come off her lips, as she couldn't seem to get rid of it. “I don't know what got into me,” she said.

“It's okay.”

For the first time in her life, Viper found comfort in those three words, spoken by Zyanya. In the small living room, in the small apartment, in that almost intimate silence at that moment.

She opened her mouth. Despite everything, she wanted to finish the thought, but Zyanya's hand on her shoulder meant that she could only wipe away her tears again with something that bordered on embarrassment.

“You don't have to explain yourself to me.”

Sabine shook her head. She put her arms around herself, taking a clearer breath. Maybe she wanted to feel that her lungs were not as compressed as they had been a moment ago.

“I didn't mean to disturb you.”

Reyna looked over her shoulder involuntarily, probably.

“You didn't.”

The hand placed on Sabine's shoulder almost made her eyes fill with tears again, but she chased them away. She blinked rapidly just as she turned her head away for a moment.

Away from Reyna's gaze.

Because she knew that she would find there again what she was so terrified of. And what, in Viper's opinion, shouldn't be there. Not after their history, not after what their past was like. Not after what Viper had contributed to, and continued to scratch that wound just to feel the pain she thought was her penance.

Nor did she look at her then when she opened her mouth.

“I'm sorry,” she whispered again. She didn't let Reyna interrupt her this time. “I'm sorry I couldn't save her.”

Reyna did not respond. And Sabine felt bad that she was the one crying as they hugged in that small living room, in that small apartment, in that almost intimate silence at that moment.

***

Viper wasn't surprised that she couldn't fall asleep.

For a long time she simply stared out the window, looking there for anything she could count to finally get her to sleep, but she just turned from side to side, unable to find a comfortable position.

The room was quiet, empty. And the bed seemed too big and too comfortable for her, so maybe she was actually the workaholic that the entire headquarters thought she was. After all, a bed that was too comfortable wasn't a desk where she too often dozed off over work, and even the one in her room didn't live up to that.

She has been at headquarters for a really long time. And to be honest, she realized with a grimace of shame that... she couldn't remember the last time she had been away.

She left that thought only to the brightening sky. She had no idea what time it was when she resignedly walked out of her room into the hallway.

Nor did she know what she wanted. She stayed with the thought of brewing herself another cup of tea, but when she passed the living room, she immediately gave up.

“You can’t sleep?”

She paused. She should have expected this, and yet she still felt caught off guard.

She gave up her tea.

“Actually… actually not really.”

“Well, that makes two of us.”

Reyna patted the spot next to her on the couch. It was spread out, with bedding and a pillow, but at the same time just as spread out as the one temporarily belonging to Viper. Viper wondered if Reyna was also looking for anything outside the window that she could count.

But then she realized that Reyna had never started looking for that something. Because her gaze had fled to the altar anyway, lit by candles and now surrounded by still steaming food, all the names of which Viper couldn't even remember since Zyanya had mentioned them in Vulture.

She hadn't heard Zyanya roosting in the kitchen at night.

Sabine sat down next to Reyna. Their thighs weren't touching, but she had already learned in time that the vampire always exuded warmth in some way.

She intertwined the fingers of her hands with each other, involuntarily also locating her gaze where Reyna was.

“Sorry about what happened earlier,” she began. She pulled her legs together and sat down cross-legged when she realized that this time she didn't want to run away. “This shouldn't be about me.”

Reyna turned her head toward her. Maybe she was hoping Viper would return the look, but Viper didn't. She always avoided her gaze as she allowed herself more emotion than her inner blockade allowed.

“This could be about anyone,” Reyna countered. “You have as much right to grieve as anyone here.”

“Even so, I'm sorry.”

Zyanya laughed briefly. Maybe more to herself than to Viper, maybe just to make the thick atmosphere at least partially go away.

“You said that word far too many times today. You have nothing to apologize for.”

Sabine didn't reply that she agreed with that. She responded to Reyna only with silence, and Zyanya accepted that.

“If you want, we can change the subject,” Reyna suggested a moment later, inferring that Viper would not speak up first.

“All right.” She looked at her hands for a moment, perhaps unconsciously popping her fingers in a gesture of nervousness. The candlelight in the dark room, however, perfectly caught the moment when she turned her head slightly and her eyes shone slightly. “Can I ask you something personal?”

Zyanya could have pointed this out to her. Use the mention of their agreement rules. She did neither of those things.

“Ask.”

Reyna didn't catch how discreetly Viper looked at her hands.

“What's it like when you're the Empress?”

The question went unanswered for a moment. Zyanya furrowed her brow, as if she wasn't sure if this was definitely what Viper wanted to find out in the first place.

“What I'm going to tell you won't be too different from what I have written in my file,” she said.

Which, presumably, Viper knew by heart. She knew everyone's files by heart, without exception. And Reyna was sure she was no different than the rest of the agents in this case.

“I know what's in the file,” Viper replied. “I want to hear it from you.”

Reyna blinked, somewhat puzzled. No one had ever asked her that. Because actually... it didn't matter to anyone, as long as it all was effective. As long as the final stats were at a high level, and the enemy didn't dare to enter their territory knowing Reyna was there, it didn't matter.

“Is it that important to you?”

She subconsciously couldn't believe it. Maybe that's also why she herself involuntarily looked at her own wrist, adorned by a tattoo.

“I would just call it curiosity,” Viper replied, shrugging her shoulders. “You don't have to say anything if you don't want to.”

“No, that's fine.” Reyna even felt surprised that she didn't quite know how to choose her words for the situation, and ultimately decided not to hide it. “It's just... I guess it's hard to describe,” she said.

“So the file lied.”

They both laughed. Maybe briefly and maybe a little bitterly, but they did. It wasn't entirely clear whose words were a collection of information that had been obtained about Reyna before her recruitment. Mostly it was the testimony of witnesses to her actions, observers, which Viper counted herself among, and she actually wrote a few sentences herself, even if... she didn't have much idea what she was writing about.

“A little,” Reyna admitted. “It won't be very professional, and I probably shouldn't say it, but the body works separately from the mind then. Everything happens faster, and to be honest, I don't even know how much I can control it. Sometimes I don't remember a few parts of it, sometimes I remember everything. I rely on it to... to just kill everything that gets in my way, because when sudden hunger eats you from the inside, there are no half measures. Nor brakes.”

Viper didn't want to, but she thought of that one word anyway, which she remembered all too well in her description of Zyanya Modragón.

Terrifying.

There were several other adjectives as well. Adjectives that now seemed to exist somewhere beside that same Zyanya Modragón, in a cozy apartment in Mexico, where she gazed longingly at a photograph of her younger sister.

“It's cruel, but... but sometimes I think about how good it is... that Lucia...” For a moment, Viper thought that Reyna waited for her to finish the sentence. Sabine didn't want to bail her out on this, for fear she would risk having the wrong word “... could avoid that. When I first felt the effects of radianite and realized what I was capable of.... The fear of myself was stronger than the will to survive. I wouldn't want that for her.”

Viper fought with herself. She really struggled, and felt that her red light would go on again when she gave up, but... but she spread her hand and gently moved a single finger over Zyanya's tattoo.

She tried not to show that something inside her was breaking when the black pattern on her wrist shifted under her touch. That was supposed to be the answer, too.

That she wasn't going to get into it and wasn't going to judge. And that he agrees with her choice. And that's why Reyna let out a breath from between her lips, as if in relief.

“Are you still scared?” asked Viper.

She didn't stop stroking Reyna's skin, although she did so carefully, as if she was afraid that a touch too firm would lead to a rupture for which both of them were not ready.

Are you scared of yourself? Scared of what you can do?

“I'm scared, because I don't know where the limit is.”

Maybe Reyna did it unconsciously, maybe she did it consciously and it was some kind of test that Viper didn't know about, but she turned her hand so that the image of the sun was visible in that twilight just for Sabine.

Sabine reached out with her touch there as well.

Chapter 45: FORTY FIVE

Usually when Sabine woke up in her room, the surroundings were cold. Not because she sometimes left the window open, nor because she was dressed too thinly, but because Sabine felt that her ability to keep warm was barely there.

Excessive coffee and chronically staying awake at night didn't help her with this, but Viper had probably... gotten used to the fact that she was often cold at night. It was something as constant and unchanging as the rest of the things on the list of those in her life that shouldn't change.

She felt like burying herself deeper under the covers, because that was the only way she could get any source of the warmth she had lost with no idea when, and fall asleep again.

But then she realized that this was not her room. Nor her bed. Nor even her warmth, which shouldn't have been there.

And it was there.

She muttered something to herself, still a little dazed, dimmed by the warmth that was off the list. She couldn't even remember the moment she fell asleep.

And she even less remembered the moment when she leaned against Reyna in the middle of the night and fell asleep just like that.

On that couch, where the amount of space was quite... limited.

Except that now she was no longer just leaning on her, but lying on top of her, somewhat awkwardly embracing her body with one arm and leg, getting an answer to where the warmth actually came from.

For a split second she thought that Reyna’s heart, for a radiant woman, was beating very calmly.

In the next split second, she wanted to break free.

And in the same one, she realized that Reyna always had a firm grip, because she didn't even manage to twitch with Zyanya's arm placed on the small of her back, tightly pressing against her body.

Shit.

She only got out later, taking the opportunity when Reyna loosened her grip a bit, muttering something under her breath, apparently displeased with the Viper's wriggling.

Her other forearm was cast over her eyes, her hair was disheveled and partially hanging off the couch, and the material of her T-shirt curled up to her waist when Sabine looked at her from the side. The reason they didn't fall off the couch was because Zyanya had one leg resting on the floor.

Sabine combed her hand through her hair, straightening her own t-shirt.

It's nothing big. It’s fine.

She could only try to tell herself that. However, the power of persuasion was too weak to keep her from letting out a shuddering breath from between her lips.

Reyna was not very awake, she might not remember how they had spent the night, and Viper, after all, might as well have just left the bedroom, right?

She didn't know if telling herself that Zyanya would believe her would help, but it was better than nothing.

It's not at all like the feeling that she had screwed up was starting to appear in the pit of her throat like a stone. And it was choking her even when she was getting dressed, pulling her pants over her legs in frustration or combing her hair in front of the bathroom mirror, which she found it increasingly difficult to look into.

Because she didn't recognize herself.

She shouldn't be here. The version of herself she knew wouldn't have allowed her to even enter that damn shooting range with Reyna back then. Because that version of herself would have just gone back to her room, read a book, whatever, and wouldn't have even thought to wonder what Reyna was talking about with Brimstone.

That version of her wouldn't have settle down with Reyna in the middle of the night, at her sister's altar just to talk about things both important and completely meaningless.

That version of Sabine would not have slept through the night cuddled up to a person with whom she should have nothing more in common than sex and professional relations.

For current version of Sabine, she felt guilty that the sudden pattern of nights devoid of warmth seemed surreal to her, because yes, as she had once managed to point out, vampires were not so cold after all.

“Get a grip,” she muttered to herself as she left the bathroom, habitually tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.

She cast a quick glance at the couch.

“Coffee?”

That would explain why the couch was empty.

She tried to avoid looking surprised and completely pulled out of her thoughts when Reyna dropped the question, leaning on the fridge with her elbow.

She yawned as she waited for an answer, although she managed to smile gently beforehand.

“Gladly.”

She needed to get rid of the stiffness as soon as possible, so she walked deeper into the kitchen and leaned her loins against one of the countertops. Perhaps unconsciously, she chose the one farther away from Reyna.

Not at all to watch her and look for signs in her behavior of whether she remembered that Viper had tried to break free from her firm grasp a moment ago.

Reyna nodded her head. She combed her fingers through her long hair and reached into the cabinet.

“Sorry, I don't have a coffee maker,” she muttered, taking out a can of coffee from inside. “If you want, I can go to the store to get some better-...”

“No need. This one will be just fine.”

Zyanya was sleepy. Her movements were slowed, her clothes were crumpled after that particular night, and she seemed to still not quite know where she was and work almost on autopilot.

Yet Sabine's sudden and even too quick response made Reyna pause for a moment with a spoon in her hand, once she managed to take out two mugs.

“Are you okay?” Viper noted that Reyna's Spanish accent was more pronounced in the morning. And she noted it earlier than she realized she should have answered first. “You're tense. Did you sleep badly?”

Thin ice. Even very thin. She had to play it out somehow, although at the same time she felt she wouldn't be able to lie.

“No, no. I was comfortable.”

Safe. Reyna poured coffee into mugs, accepting that answer.

“I know, you drooled over my shirt.”

Reyna seemed amused by this fact, and perhaps because she was standing sideways to Sabine, she didn't notice that the latter almost choked on air. She even opened her mouth to... apologize? Or to deny it. Or heck knows what really, but to react in any way.

“But it's okay. It means the sleep was deep. We just didn’t have much space.”

Zyanya yawned once again. For her, it was like saying that the sun was shining outside, while Viper couldn't understand that very thing.

After all, she could have asked Reyna what she was thinking. How does she manage to treat all this as normal, as if nothing is happening and no walls of their fucked up contract are coming down tumbling. Or ask if this is some kind of test that Viper has no idea about.

She didn't say a word.

“Thank you.”

That's all she managed to say, accepting the steaming mug of coffee in her hands. She stuck her eyes into the black drink, as it was easier at this point than any eye contact with Reyna.

“If you're up for it, I made an excess of tamales yesterday.”

Viper nodded. At the same time, she breathed a sigh of relief as she again found a point of conversation that wasn't about the previous night.

“I didn't think you were the cooking type,” she said.

“Because I'm not.”

“Really?”

Viper took a sip of coffee right after pointing with a motion of her head to the dishes piling up in the sink from last night. Reyna looked there, too, though a bit more sluggishly.

And to think, she probably had never seen Reyna sleepy. The schedule was tight, it's true, yet earlier Viper had assumed that Reyna just liked to get up earlier.

Not that she had to.

“I couldn't sleep,” she admitted quickly, also sampling her coffee, as if trying to somehow escape Viper's gaze with this gesture. “I gave most of it to Lucia anyway.”

The image of steaming food piled on an altar in the middle of the night shifted before Sabine's eyes. Between lit candles, fruit and flowers.

There was something beautiful about it.

“And the other majority is in the fridge?”

The dishes in the sink accompanied them like a silent audience and proof at the same time.

“Okay, maybe it didn't stop only on tamales. But if it saves me, pan de muerto is a duty.”

Zyanya admitted this already with some chuckle. A bit like she was admitting something she was ashamed of. Or the fact that Viper had noticed something in her that she had forgotten about herself.

“I've never seen you cook any of these things at headquarters.”

Reyna shrugged her shoulders. A slightly crooked smile graced her lips this time, and Sabine found so much of her energy in it that she felt the need to look away, even if only for a second. She wasn't sure how to feel about seeing such a personal gesture from someone other than herself.

“You know our schedule, you know how it is.”

Viper knew. And even if she had already confronted Brimstone, even if she herself had contributed to letting Reyna rest, that one sentence made her feel a rather pronounced sting in her chest.

Because the Protocol was taking a lot of things away. And until now, Viper was convinced that it didn't bother her, because after all, she was already used to it and in her workaholism she found comfortable, steady patterns. She had never tried to live differently since Protocol began crawling, nor did she think she needed it in any way.

Looking at Reyna at that moment, she understood how much they sacrificed. Because Reyna had never made tamales at headquarters, just as she had never slept in. She never made coffee drowsy, in an old t-shirt that served as her pajamas, never even had time to think about what it would actually be like if she stayed in Mexico forever and could water her flowers without the help of her neighbor.

Yet she was in the Protocol with her, washing the enemy's blood off her hands and replacing rifle magazines time and again.

Zyanya took a plate covered with foil from the fridge and placed it on the table. Sabine followed the movement, drumming her fingers on the walls of the cup. At one point she stopped.

“I want to finish the Kingdom thing.”

Suddenly, the sentence made Zyanya pause for a moment, in a half motion of reaching for the coffee mug. Her eyebrows furrowed in that way Viper already knew. She gave her time to explain without saying a word, and Viper did just that, struggling to keep herself from running away from the vampire's purple eyes.

“I thought about it. A lot.” Reyna's face did not change and Viper felt a slight discomfort, not knowing what she might have been thinking at that moment. “What Octavia.... did. It can't go unnoticed. That’s all.”

“But Octavia is dead.”

Hearing those words from Reyna's mouth was a bit strange. She actually said them more confidently than Viper probably would have been able to, even if she remembered perfectly the one accurate and fatal shot that had knocked out her old acquaintance, ripping the last breath from her lungs.

She nodded, conceding her point.

“She certainly has her people. People like her always do,” she countered. She felt the coffee begin to burn her fingertips, but she didn't let go of the cup. “I have to find out if all that stuff on that damn flash drive is over. If it is, they have to pay for it. If not, they have to pay for it and stop whatever they are doing.”

“That sounds like revenge.”

Zyanya expected Sabine to twitch at that word. She would replace it with some better, more sophisticated and maybe not so literal. But Sabine didn't.

“Because I think it is,” the answer was simple and blunt. “I'm going to track down the flash drive. Wherever it was created, I'm going to get anyone who had their fingers in it.”

“Do you want to go there alone?” And only then did Viper twitch. She minimally chewed the inside of her cheek, her brow furrowed slightly, as if she wasn't too pleased with what her answer would be. And she probably didn't want to say it out loud, so she let her behavior serve as Reyna's answer. “So no,” she said.

“It didn't go so well last time, when it was just the two of us,” Viper said. There was that bitter aftertaste of defeat in that confession, which she probably couldn't quite digest. “It's Kingdom, we need support.”

“And Brimstone?”

As much as Reyna didn't want to allude to their boss, she knew she couldn't leave him out at this point. Viper had her answer ready, but before she gave it, she took a sip of coffee, as if to calm her nerves.

“He would have found out at some point anyway. Hell knows, maybe everyone will find out sooner or later. But without his help, I can't hide the real purpose of the sudden mission from the rest, even if I wanted to go there alone.” She shrugged her shoulders somewhat stiffly, remarkably comfortable with the way Reyna's gaze lingered on her figure. She was probably prepared for this. “He may not approve of it, because revenge is not his thing, but...”

This slight suspension and a moment of silence that seemed to last an eternity, lit a small red light in Zyanya's head.

“But?”

Sabine let out a breath.

“But if you accept his proposal to be a second in command, you too can sign the papers.”

Silence fell.

Viper lifted her gaze to Reyna this time, because she had to. She felt she had to see her reaction, to anticipate the outcome of this conversation before it actually happened. Because she could expect anything and the number of possible scenarios suddenly forced a sudden panic into her body.

“No, sorry, that's dumb.”

“I didn't say that.” Reyna sounded much calmer than Viper had a moment ago. “Actually, it is manageable,” she said.

“Thanks to the fact that I will take advantage of your position, which you may not even want to accept. Forget it, I shouldn't even propose it.”

Viper waved her hand. And Zyanya ignored the last sentence completely.

“You are taking advantage of what Brimstone himself suggested. He couldn't blame anyone else but himself.” She shrugged her shoulders. “To be honest, he dug himself into it a bit.”

Sabine had to process this information. She was still ready to leave. In fact, she was ready to leave any time she found at least a minimal signal that she should do so.

“Do you want to piss him off?”

She failed to hide the note of disbelief in that question. Not that showing Liam her point wouldn't bring her satisfaction, it's just that this case had more to do with Sabine... than with Reyna, who would have to take on a responsibility she may not have wanted.

“Do you think he didn't deserve it?”

“No, I just don't want to drag you into something so serious just because of that.”

“And you think that's all I care about?” answered Reyna. Viper, on the other hand, tried not to look as if she had been beaten off her feet. “I'd love to watch those assholes from Kingdom get a rumble,” she said.

“And you're willing to accept this position solely because of that?”

For a moment, Viper thought about the fact that Reyna would comment on her inquisitiveness. Maybe she would even bite back with some text about being ungrateful, even if for some unknown reason she had a feeling she wouldn't do that at all.

But Viper wasn't going to be nosy or ungrateful. Viper simply felt that if she didn't ask, she wouldn't be able to put it all together in her head in a logical way.

She needed an explanation for why Reyna was doing all this. Any other than the one she was thinking of.

“I don't want to be pessimistic, but if I'm honest, it seems to me that Brimstone won't let me say no anyway,” she muttered. “He'll keep pushing until I say no regardless of whether he gives me a theoretically free choice. And if he does, giving a choice to him would be unfair, wouldn't it?”

Viper wanted to tell her that she was grateful. She wanted to tell her that she didn't know how she was supposed to feel about Reyna doing so much for her and wanting to send herself as a commander on a dangerous mission just so Sabine could close this chapter of her life and get a substitute for peace at last.

To say that she felt understood and the burden she was carrying on her back finally became lighter.

But she only nodded her head. Because she wasn't ready, she shouldn't feel it, and she shouldn't even think about it.

No matter how much she had to fight with herself to hold her tongue.

***

Viper felt the laptop laughing in her face. She stared at her own wallpaper, her desktop filled with shortcuts to various files, folders with reports, scans of her notes... and chose nothing to work on, even if there was only Sabine in Reyna's bedroom and the silence she loved so much, after all.

She didn't know how much time had passed. How much time she had been pounding out a rhythm on her own thigh with her fingers, looking for at least a spark of inspiration to do something. Anything. She had so many unfinished equations, so many diagrams to analyze, so many things she could make up... and yet she just sat, with the knowledge that Zyanya was behind the wall.

She had returned not long ago, after giving the money back to her neighbor, Viper remembered perfectly the moment the door closed. She could even imagine that the elderly woman had persuaded her to have a chat, maybe even offered her some cake, since Sabine had been in the apartment alone for more than two hours. She could ask Reyna about it, just because she liked to know... but she was here.

Thinking. Thinking too much.

She slammed the laptop shut. She left the bedroom, intent on making herself a cup of coffee, even if she had to stay silent all this time. She vowed to herself to be silent, because she had to be silent now. She had already said too much.

“Are you going out somewhere?”

Fuck.

She should bite her tongue, but it was too late, so she pretended she only cared about reaching for the kettle. She hoped she had looked discreetly enough toward the living room, where dress was laying on the couch and the coffee table was cluttered with makeup stuff.

Reyna turned her head away from the window, stopping to comb her long hair. Viper felt that she had knocked her out of her own thoughts, and regretted it more than that she couldn't stop herself from asking. Maybe that way the conversation wouldn't have happened at all.

Maybe then she wouldn't have dug herself into an even more convoluted corridor of this maze of theirs, which was slowly beginning to lose all exits.

Reyna threw the brush on the couch, Sabine's gaze involuntarily followed there. Zyanya licked her lips as she approached Sabine and let out a breath with her mouth. Probably she didn't quite want to answer, but that didn't mean she wouldn't.

“To the Sanctuary.” With a movement of her head, she indicated the mess behind her back, but while doing so she seemed to avoid Sabine's gaze. Almost as if she was stressed. “Kids... kids really like this tradition. You know, face painting, dressing up, stuff like that.”

Oh.

“That's... nice.” She didn't even realize that her throat had gone hoarse. “When are you leaving?”

“Actually, I wanted you to come with me.”

Oh.

Reyna leaned against the fridge. Her gaze drifted to the floor, and Viper realized she had dug her nails into the inside of her palm, though she didn't even know when.

Neither of them spoke. Zyanya was biting her lower lip, waiting for anything that wasn't just the hum of a working kettle.

Viper was just waiting for her to calm her own nerves.

“I don't know if I'm good at that.”

Her smile was apologetic, almost awkward. She was uncomfortable with the fact that Reyna might not have been looking at her face at that moment, but with her eyes she was almost burning a hole in her back when Sabine went to get her cup.

“You can always try.”

Viper stopped midway through her move. She couldn't shake the feeling that Reyna seemed stressed by her own proposal. She set the mug down on the countertop and rested her hands on it.

She stood like that for only a moment. Long enough to think through all the options for and against, to come up with a ton of excuses, to laugh, or to pretend she hadn't heard anything and ignore Reyna's every word. But also long enough for Zyanya to feel uncomfortable with the silence and wanted to break it.

“Or you could help me get ready.”

Sabine turned away.

“Help?”

Reyna continued to bite her lip. And from what Sabine knew of Reyna, she didn't do that often. Not in such ordinary situations.

“You know, with makeup and all,” she replied, shrugging her shoulders. Viper wasn't sure if she wanted to convince more of her or herself. “It's been a while since I last did... something like this. I haven't had time to practice.”

Sabine developed an urge to hold something in her hands. Something to keep them busy and not have to resort to popping her knuckles in a nervous gesture that would be too obvious.

Instead, she put a bold, though probably a little too shy, smile on her lips.

“I can try.”

Because, after all, shyness was no match for Viper, right?

***

If Viper lost any confidence in her decision when she saw the photo on Reyna's phone from two years ago of her in the makeup she was about to replicate, she didn't show it.

Her eyebrows lifted slightly, and she only gained air through her mouth, hoping Reyna wouldn't hear it from the bathroom, where she had just applied the white base.

Viper had never seen Reyna like this. In fact, maybe once or twice she had seen her in more formal attire, if to count the dress from a rather memorable ballroom mission, but other than that... other than that she was actually used to her battle attire.

If not battle-ready, then comfortable, so that at least at headquarters she could take a break from the heavy shoulder pads, belts and armor on her calves.

In this photo, she almost didn't recognize her. So beamed, relaxed and smiling in a way that was hard to attribute to Reyna. To this Reyna, who fed on human souls and was forced to wash off thick layers of clotted blood from her hands.

In the photo, the artistically painted makeup of a typically Mexican skull seemed far more distant from death than the distance Zyanya was usually from the same death.

A garland of distinctive orange flowers added delicacy. Sensitivity and femininity. Beauty.

And Viper had no idea when she began nervously turning the makeup brush in her fingers.

“I didn't think you had an artist's spark,” she said evasively as Reyna reappeared at the living’s room threshold.

Maybe she felt she had to start this conversation first to regain at least some control over the situation.

Zyanya smiled uncertainly as she accepted the phone from Viper's hand and placed it on the couch with the screen unlocked.

“That was a long time ago. I wouldn't be able to do that now.”

“You can always try.”

She inadvertently used the quote, but she wasn't about to take it back. Reyna raised an eyebrow.

“Are you chickening out?”

She felt like answering that she was. Maybe for a moment, a very brief and fleeting moment, but she was sure she had those words on the tip of her tongue, even if in her life cowardice from anything hardly ever happened.

She never ran away. And looking at that photo there, she wanted to do so, although she didn't know why.

And it wasn't at all that this kind of makeup was drastically different from her everyday makeup, she had no idea what to do or how to do it, and she would actually be doing something like this for the first time in her life.

She was running away from Reyna, although she remembered very well how many times she was ready to jump on her just to get at her throat some time ago.

“Of course not,” she replied. She didn't want to think about whether Reyna believed it. Instead, she patted the spot next to her on the couch, still turning the brush in her fingers. “Sit down.”

Reyna had her arms folded across her chest. For a second, she looked as if she wanted to comment on the downright commanding tone, but refrained with finality.

“Where do I start?”

Asked Viper, vaguely looking around at the cosmetics spread out on the table. She even touched a few of them, as if trying to decide on one, although she knew full well that she was only doing so because Reyna's gaze was burning a hole in her profile.

“What are you more comfortable with.”

Sabine didn't like such answers. She glanced at the photo once more, even as she struggled to start ignoring a single thought in her head, and stood up, stopping in front of Reyna, who reflexively tilted her head up to look at her.

Viper pulled her eyebrows together in concentration, glancing once more at the photo and then at Reyna. Zyanya felt her hesitate, though she had no idea on what point, until Sabine rested a hand on her shoulder for balance. This, too, they endured in silence.

She wasn't much taller than Reyna, but she had to bend over much more than she would have liked. It would have been a hit that, looking down, she had the best chance of symmetry, because frankly she would have been able to agree to any position other than that.

She took one of the face paints in her hand. She had no idea which of the cosmetics would work for her, but decided to rely on her intuition. They could always start over. Probably.

“Not very helpful this advice of yours,” she muttered, but Reyna only laughed quietly. The facial wrinkles were more visible on the white base. Sabine had never noticed that Reyna was smiling so clearly. “Close your eyes.”

She bit the inside of her cheek as she led the first line.

It bothered her that she could feel Reyna's breath on her face.

It bothered her that although she tried her best, she was aware that her hand was shaking. And worse, she was afraid that Reyna was also aware of it.

But even if she was, she didn't comment on it.

Viper breathed a little in spirit. Actually, only in spirit, because until the purple circle was finished as the outline of the skull's eye, she didn't realize that she had been holding her breath. And for some reason, she knew it wasn't at all for fear of making a particular line crooked.

“Do I make you nervous?”

She tried not to look as if the question had suddenly knocked her out of her rhythm. Fortunately, Reyna was forced to keep her eyes closed, otherwise Viper wasn't sure she would have been able to take it.

Reyna looked at her the way that left Viper feeling strangely exposed to her for a long time.

“No.”

She wasn't going to give Reyna the opportunity to negate that answer, however small. She focused on making the second circle of the Spanish skull symmetrical with the first, and cursed herself in her mind for letting the air out with her mouth a little more uncertainly and unnaturally than she would have liked.

She saw that the vampire was smiling, and she really tried not to look at that distinctive smile, but there was little she could do when Reyna was practically breathing her air.

She had to look at the photo on her phone again. Stepping back for a second was for her like taking a deep breath for a long time

“You're different from when we’re at the headquarters.”

She didn't look at her. She pretended to look at the photo.

“You mean?”

“Less strict.” She perfectly heard the hesitation in Reyna's voice before she finished the thought. “Less... closed.”

Viper didn't know how she should read that. In fact, she didn't know whether the fact that she agreed with it weighed more on her tongue, or whether she felt like agreeing with the sentence because the answer was so pressing on her lips.

So she tightened them. Or at least she tried, because she could only sigh. For herself. Or for Reyna. Maybe even for both of them, that they are now, here, Reyna getting under her skin again with her all too right conclusions, which she hands to Viper, and they sift through her fingers like sand.

Yet they scratch her skin with how adequate they are. And how unique they are, because no one else has ever made them.

“I told you to close your eyes,” she muttered, leaning in again. Zyanya may have expected a non-answer, maybe she added it up out of context. She didn't drone on. “Otherwise it will be crooked.”

Reyna closed her eyes. Sabine breathed a sigh of relief.

“It's a good change.”

Zyanya kept her eyes closed, yet Viper didn't feel better at all. All she felt was a stinging sensation under her ribs, and the fact that she knew perfectly well what it was almost made her feel like putting down the brush and locking herself in Reyna's bedroom before she could answer anything.

Sabine looked death in the eye. She was risking her life. Her whole life had been about fighting, and yet... the fear came right now.

Sabine had changed.

She had changed.

Sabine had changed.

Reyna noticed that Sabine had changed.

“Don't be delusional.” She hoped her hand didn't tremble perceptibly when painting the ornaments. “You might get burned on this, Zyanya.”

The brush froze in place. She should have expected it already when the corner of Reyna's mouth lifted slightly. As it always did when she accepted challenges from her. Like when she showed that she could break down the walls that Sabine was building. And that she would not give up.

Zyanya's fingers slowly moved down the side of her thigh. Gently. Without subtext, without any purpose except one: Reyna once again showed that she was not backing down. Viper cursed herself for looking in that direction, but only for a moment.

Reyna's eyes were still closed.

“A little heat can't kill me, Sabine.” The sentence stabbed into that momentary silence like a dagger. It rang, like a church bell in a deafening forest. “I thought you already knew that.”

She sensed it. Of course she sensed it. Every twitch of her heart, restless whenever she tried to get out of the trap she had put herself in. She always had a lot to say. Thousands of sayings for thousands of occasions during thousands of possible scenarios.

Reyna was difficult to intimidate. Viper could make her melt under her fingers, could make her beg for more by entwining her fingers in her hair, could make her look at her as if she were the last and best meal in her entire immortal life, could make her bare her fangs wanting more and more of her, and yet... she was unable to push her away.

“What are you doing?”

A gasp escaped from between her lips, and she didn't want it to sound like that, but it was too late anyway. Anything to bring the conversation back on track, she had to grasp at everything at her disposal.

Reyna slowed down her hand movements. She did not stop them at all, however.

“What are you talking about?”

Viper furrowed her brow.

“You're interrupting.”

“Am I distracting you?”

“Are you boosting your ego with these questions, Zyanya?” Reyna purred in a draughty, contented way, like a cat. Sabine knew that saying her name would not go without consequences. She could bear it. “You're interrupting, those are two different things,” she said.

“You hurt my heart.” Viper rolled her eyes, which Reyna didn't see. But she laughed anyway. Soundlessly, showing one fang, which made Viper feel like grabbing her chin just to stop the gesture. She did nothing. “I thought you were able to multitask,” she said.

“Don't go that way.”

The command was simple. It qualified as a command from Sabine's lips, who returned to her interrupted work, even as she felt Reyyna’s fingertips perfectly on her thigh. Through the material of her pants, and yet she would have been able to map the identical trail they made on her skin. Delicate. Sensitive. So easy to stop it that a single gesture would be enough to shake Reyna's hand off her leg.

“I don't like boundaries.”

Sabine's fingers tightened this time on the eyeshadow brush. She spun it around in her hand a moment, just a moment.

Breath was torn from Reyna's throat the moment she lost her balance, pushed firmly and suddenly. She propped her elbows against the couch behind her, her gaze reflexively searching Viper's face for any response, but she didn't manage to find anything, because the next moment Sabine straddled her hips.

“So you have to learn them. Now hold still.”

Reyna seemed impressed. Maybe a little in shock, looking at how her hands froze in the air when she wasn't sure where she could put them. Or where she should. She laughed briefly, almost, nervously, before carefully placing them on Viper's hips.

“Not so bold anymore?” muttered Viper, fidgeting in her seat for a moment as she applied the eyeshadow.

Reyna obediently kept her eyes closed, but she could still bet that this time it was Sabine who was smiling. For as much as she didn't like it when someone negated her effectiveness, she liked bringing Reyna down to earth on this subject even more.

“I'm good at listening.”

Viper snorted. With amusement.

“Not at all.”

“No?”

“Shall I recall for you how many times you ran into the middle of a battle when you shouldn't have?”

Reyna clicked her tongue, laughed to herself, and her brow furrowed slightly.

“You know I have a weakness for showing these assholes where they belong. If only you knew how their hearts are shaking when they see us.”

Viper bit the inside of her cheek as Reyna had already put her hand completely on her hip. She seemed to have relaxed. She recognized that she could already, and her shock was gone, as if it was the most natural activity in the world.

“Doesn’t it bother you?” she asked. She grasped Reyna's chin in two fingers to force her to turn her head without saying a word. She obeyed. Curious. “That you can hear everything.”

She couldn't tell why she wanted to know that. Why she needed confirmation that Reyna could indeed hear everything, every heartbeat within her reach. Every rippling breath. A note of fear.

Everything Viper needed to hide from her, and she was terrified that it might not be possible. That was the reason.

“It's selective,” she said.

“So you hear what you want to hear?”

“I'm beginning to think you have some interest in this.” Reyna smiled again in that way of hers and Viper in that one second wanted to wipe that smile off her face. She won again, sweeping all the pawns off the board with one sentence. “Are you afraid I know something I shouldn't?”

Sabine should not hesitate. She should continue uninterrupted, sitting on Reyna's hips, breathing her air and holding her chin in a gesture that was supposed to give her the feeling that she was in control of what was happening.

But she hesitated. Even though her hair was stroking Reyna's cheek, and if Reyna had opened her eyes, she could have perfectly seen the moment when fear was planted on Viper's face.

And yet she was not afraid of Reyna with blood on her hands. She wasn't afraid of Reyna laughing in her enemy's face, attacking him suddenly, slitting his throat with a knife or packing a bullet right between his eyes. She was not afraid of Reyna during the Empress state, when her mind focused only on the smell of blood.

She was afraid of Reyna, who was able to see right through her right now.

“Like what?”

Zyanya shrugged her shoulders as much as her position allowed.

“You tell me, Sabine.”

Viper furrowed her brow. The makeup was almost ready, a few final strokes to bring it to a finish.

She pressed her thumb against Reyna's lower lip. She reached for her lipstick.

“And right now is the moment for you to shut up.”

To think that a vampire who heard the heartbeats of others and yes, ran into the middle of the battlefield led by the smell of death, listened once again. She obediently kept her mouth half open, let her lipstick drag across it, and just when Viper thought she'd come out of it unscathed, Reyna opened her eyes even wider.

And Viper didn't want to let her say even one word.

“My turn.” She liked to see that spark of surprise in those purple eyes whenever she managed to knock Zyanya off track. “I'm coming with you. And you better do your best.”

The weight disappeared from her hips in a second.

And Reyna listened again.

Chapter 46: FORTY SIX

Viper had never seen Reyna in the company of children.

This shouldn't actually surprise her, because, after all, there were no children at the headquarters. Their lives were devoid of them too, as they lived on a remote island somewhere away from human eyes and the possibility of being overheard at any time.

Viper was sure that none of their instincts survived except the one based on survival and the one given by radianite.

Reflexes, agility, speed and superhuman abilities giving them an edge. That's what they had, and it was the only thing in the Protocol agents that hadn't died yet.

At least that's what it seemed to Viper.

Until this girl's eyes lit up like the candles next to her, and she bolted down the stone stairs and threw herself into a chase across the courtyard.

“Zya!”

Reyna didn't even have time to bend down when the child ran almost straight into her calves, embracing her as far as she could reach so tightly that Zyanya laughed briefly before placing a hand on her head and crouching down.

The girl stubbornly pressed her face into Reyna's neck, as if for all the world's sakes she wasn't going to let her go, and her small hands scooped up the fabric of the ornate dress in a handful.

And then Viper realized that she was wrong.

They were just people. Experienced with radianite or not, they were human. And at that moment Reyna... for God's sake, she never thought she'd admit it... she seemed the most human of them all. Everyone around her, everyone in the Protocol.

The tattoos on her arm hid under her clothes, as if they had never been there, and Reyna disappeared for a moment, switching with Zyanya to take her place.

“Who is it?”

A child's voice snapped Viper out of her numbness. She blinked rapidly, trying to somehow smoothly throw herself back into reality.

The girl's eyes were fixed on her, like a mirror. She continued to tighten her hand on Reyna's skirt, twisting her head in anticipation of an answer.

Reyna bent down and picked up the kid, taking her in her arms. Sabine seemed to have forgotten how to speak. She looked awkwardly at the girl, not being used to anyone paying attention to her.

Because here she was only supposed to be the background. Accompany Reyna so she would not not lose herself in the laboratory instead of... catching attention of the public, which was closely associated with Reyna.

She involuntarily looked at Reyna. She looked for rescue in her purple eyes.

“This is aunt Sabine,” she replied, and the girl stared at Viper for a long moment more, as if trying to match those words with what she was seeing. “She came with me.”

A smile wandered on the girl's lips, a little shy and so childlike that Viper felt a tightness in her chest at the sight of this innocence.

She didn't even protest Reyna's words. Her gaze only softened, and the corner of her mouth lifted in gratitude to Zyanya.

“Will she play with us?”

Sabine should have felt cornered by this question. Reyna didn't seem so sure anymore, as perhaps she didn't want to say something that would make her uncomfortable. She tried to send her an apologetic look, and perhaps Viper would even accept it, but...

“Yes, I will."

Reyna was as surprised as Viper, who had no idea why she had spoken at all. She blinked a few times, her eyebrows pulled together so tightly that even her makeup showed her furrowed brow.

Sabine just shrugged her shoulders. They seemed to have forgotten the presence of the child for a moment. Just for a moment.

“Her eyes are pretty.” She heard. She was about to laugh quietly and thank her, but before she could do so, the girl made them both realize that this sentence was not directed at Viper at all. “Right?”

Reyna corrected the grip she had on the child's arms, smiling uncertainly. Her eyes jumped from her expectant companion to Viper, who looked no less surprised than herself, and intertwined her arms on her chest. She quickly regained her confidence as she urged Reyna with a silent 'come on’.

Zyanya remembered to use this later. Somehow. She wasn't easily knocked out of her rhythm or embarrassed in any way and now she felt downright naked under the gaze of Sabine, who was perhaps more waiting for an answer than little Zoya.

She always analyzed every word and was always able to grab for it at just the right moment.

And Zyanya probably didn't want her to do it this time.

Viper's eyes were pretty. Their strong feline color stood out against the pink and white skull painted on her face, which Reyna meticulously created while she was still in the apartment. The color palette of her makeup was a bit brighter than Reyna's, but if ever Sabine Callas' eyes were to stand out more than ever, it would be this moment.

“Of course,” she said. Somehow she couldn't look at Sabine. She focused on Zoya and hoped she had done so discreetly enough. “Where's the rest of the family?”

Zyanya put the kid down on the floor just so the girl could proudly show an unspecified direction with her hand. The important thing was that she was pointing ahead and Zyanya seemed to know what he meant. That must have been enough for Sabine.

“Will you play us a song?”

Another question was asked just when Reyna was probably about to address Viper and... actually what, apologize?

Viper, on the other hand, probably never saw Reyna more embarrassed. But she wasn't going to speak up, because although she wouldn't be able to admit it, the struggle between this elusive and precise Reyna and a really talkative... six-year-old child was quite an interesting sight.

That certainly wasn't in her file.

“I don't have a guitar with me, honey. Besides I haven't played in a long time and I don't remember-...”

“I'll get you one!”

Reyna stared dully at the girl, who ran ahead, as if everything that had just taken place had completely ceased to matter to her. Her braids rocked to the rhythm of her steps, and Zyanya must have been too focused on them, because she only woke up when she heard a snort.

“Not a word,” she muttered to Viper, who shook her head once she had turned toward her.

“I'm not saying anything,” she replied, shrugging her shoulders. On her lips, however, continued to wander that restrained and very rare smile, which she must have tried to hide, because she turned sideways for a moment. “I just didn't think you'd be outplayed by a six-year-old.”

Reyna rolled her eyes and ostentatiously shrugged off the skirt of her dress.

“First of all, Zoya is six and a half, and secondly, she didn't outplay me at all.”

“Really? Somehow, though, I get the feeling that she did.”

“She talks too much. You know how kids are,” muttered Reyna, waving her hand. The issue was that she didn't know whether she was divesting more herself or Viper. To whom, being on the subject, she still didn't look into her eyes, seemingly escorting with her gaze the silhouette of a child disappearing into the distance. “And I’m sorry... for that one.”

If she had looked at Viper perhaps she would have noticed how she squinted her eyelids minimally, trying to see through her. And it was probably a good thing Reyna didn't in fact look at her, because Viper actually did want to do that.

Reyna was aware of Sabine's fondness for analyzing everything and everyone, and in theory she was used to it, and yet... yet now it was making her feel a certain sense of shame.

“Did you lie?”

Reyna started to walk ahead and Viper followed her, and yet she couldn't miss the moment when Zyanya’s step became seemingly less calm for one second. She might have been delusional, it was dark, and the streets were lit mostly by lanterns and candles with warm, typical November light, so Sabine might have been mistaken.

And so she was almost certain she haven't.

“I can play the guitar, I just...”

“That's not what I'm asking.”

Of course it is not. And Reyna knew that very well, all too well. So well, in fact, that even if she were to betray herself more than anything else, she couldn't answer right away.

She copied Viper's movement, folding her arms over her chest, and her step became more dance-like, as if she were trying to diffuse the tension that Viper felt even those half a meter away from her.

Viper wanted to know the answer. Maybe it wasn't even so much a desire as a need to see if she could still tell herself that she was in control of all this or not.

“Green is a nice color.”

Viper didn't quicken her stride, even if Reyna did. Maybe she wanted to increase the distance between them just like that, to play with the wavy dress a bit, or maybe... maybe it was the tension Sabine noticed that was the problem.

“The more you wrap it up, the more suspicious it gets, do you realize that?” She asked. Her voice reverberated through the tenements around her, footsteps echoing across the cobblestones, mixing with the muffled sound of music coming from the houses around, the gardens, the porches. “It's a simple question,” she added.

“You never ask simple questions, Sabine.”

An almost victorious smile dawned on Reyna's lips. They had always played the game, and although neither of them ever knew when the round began or ended, at the same time they both knew that all the pawns always stayed on the board.

“You were able to answer them before,” Sabine remarked. Seemingly unfazed, almost as if it was a meaningless comment about the weather. “Do I make you nervous?”

Reyna caught the reference perfectly to her own question asked in the small living room, as her hands spontaneously began their trek up Viper's thighs. In her mind, she awarded Callas a solid point. Even her smile widened, showing one fang, as if she was almost impressed.

“Bold,” she muttered, nodding, more to herself than to Sabine. They walked unsteadily ahead, the street carrying the echo of their footsteps. “What good does it do if you know?”

She turned behind her only to see and record in her mind the chemist's reaction. She wanted to notice the unspoken on her face, in a microexpression, any expression. She wanted to grasp at the last resort, even if it had to drive thousands of splinters into her fingertips.

“I like to know.”

Simple answer. In the style of Sabine, who shrugged her shoulders, and although she didn't show it, she was always pleased with how smoothly she carried on a conversation, avoiding any pitfalls altogether as if she knew their unfolding much earlier.

Zyanya laughed to herself. Sure. So much time, and she still hadn't learned from her mistakes. She let herself make them again and again, because somehow... when she made them in Sabine's presence, they didn't seem so bad to her.

“So last time you said I'm terrible at lying, right?”

***

Viper was used to her coldness. It was her invariable companion during the night, during the day, when she warmed her cold hands on a mug of hot coffee, when she spent her afternoons in front of the laptop screen and her somewhat numb fingers clicked the keyboard incessantly.

And the room was warm. Not just physically, as the glow of the fireplace danced on the walls and the couch was swaddled in layers of blankets and pillows. Not even because a pot of warm tea stood on a table in the corner of this theoretically large room and Sabine could see it steaming.

The room was warm. That's because several children ran up to Reyna as soon as they crossed the threshold, jumping off the couch, abandoning their coloring books, making garlands of orange flowers, or braiding braids of their hair.

A woman smiled as she picked up one of the discarded books and put it down on the table before standing up and joining in the greeting.

Sabine had no idea when the small arms embraced her calves as well, but she knew that at that very moment she clung to the floor as if she were about to stay there forever. Her cold hands became warm the same second she bent down only minimally, but enough to stroke the dark hair of the little boy cuddled in her legs. Stiffly. Almost mechanically, as if she didn't know how she was supposed to do it.

He didn't know her. He didn't know who she was. And he smiled as if he didn't see a hint of Viper in her character. Just Sabine.

“It's good to finally see you.”

The woman didn't bestow her gaze solely on Reyna, even though she was the first to embrace her, and Reyna seemed to find herself very comfortable with the gesture.

The garland of flowers fell slightly on her forehead, obscuring the purple ornaments that Sabine was painting with her own overly trembling hand.

“You too, Nicole. I see the kids are in shape.” She stepped away from the woman, a few strands of hair settled on her shoulder, stopped at her collarbone. Sabine refrained from putting her hand in her pants pocket. Her purple turtleneck suddenly seemed too thick for her, and she was all too aware of her makeup, which may not have matched the rest of her outfit, but somehow no one seemed to mind. "God, it's been ages since we've seen each other.”

Reyna also looked at Sabine as Nicole embraced her as well in a friendly gesture. A gentle smile crept onto her lips when she saw that the little boy still hadn't unhooked himself from Callas' calves, only moving to the side to give space to the sitter.

Viper wasn't used to cuddling. But she reciprocated the gesture, even if a little stiffly.

“And yet you didn't change one bit,” she said. And that was the last thing that was directed at Zyanya, because suddenly Viper became very aware that the attention was focused on her. “You must be Sabine.”

She wasn't used to gentle stares either. The ones where there was no knowledge of who Viper was, what she was doing and who she had become after all those years in the middle of hell.

It always felt like she was lying then. She was forcing a personality into everyone's head that they could only see from the outside, and only the one that Sabine had just decided to show them at any given moment. Because they should know who they are talking to, what her damaged interior looks like, and understand that Sabine could never ignore that element of evil that always clung to her. The chaos and destruction. That sense that something was forever broken inside her and nothing could fix it, no matter how hard she tried.

She felt that anxiety creeping under her skin, whispering only one thing in her ear. Liar.

Now she pushed it to the back of her mind, clenching her eyelids for a split second, as if that one gesture would cut her off from the abyss of dark thoughts.

She wasn't a liar. Not now. Not anymore.

She swallowed the bitter aftertaste in her throat. She lifted her head.

“That's right,” she replied, nodding slowly.

She hoped that the stiffness of her neck was not noticed by anyone. The boy snuggled into her calves suddenly tugged at the material of Callas' pants, violently pulling away from the woman. In doing so, he drew everyone's attention to himself, as he let out a high-pitched squeal along with the pushing away.

“I want a song!” he announced loudly, driving his gaze into Zyanya. “Will you play it for us? Please!”

Sabine shifted her gaze to Reyna. Reyna, who seemed to have been pulled out of the flow of all kinds of thoughts and laughed briefly, uncertainly.

Maybe she thought she would get away with it.

“Yes!”

All three women looked at Zoya this time, who clenched her hands into fists and seemed (unlike Reyna) delighted with the little boy's proposal. The other two children remained silent, although a girl with blond hair clutched a teddy bear mascot and smiled at her friend for a moment before clapping her hands. The last little boy, on the other hand, crawled onto the couch, ready for this event that... that wasn't even confirmed.

This time it was Reyna who looked to Sabine for support, but Sabine... somehow couldn't save her.

Or maybe she didn't want to. That's another matter. She just shrugged her shoulders, as if to say 'I guess you have no choice’ and Zyanya sighed.

However, she was betrayed by that one smile.

Sabine never thought that the same Reyna who was ready to fight for her own like a lion couldn't say no to a few pairs of eyes. But Viper also caught herself thinking that she didn't think it was a bad thing at all. It just... added a certain depth to Zyanya. The soft part of her character fit like a perfect jigsaw puzzle into everything she already knew, saw or experienced. And it's not that Sabine had hitherto thought Reyna couldn't be soft... there was just something different about the version of Reyna she now accompanied.

Warmth. Home. Family.

And the rifle she held every day blurred into memory as if it had never been there.

Reyna sat down on the couch, adjusted the skirt of her dress that draped over the edge of the furniture and lay lightly on the floor.

Nicole smiled as she gathered the few coloring books that still littered the couch and picked up a few individual crayons scattered here and there.

Out of the corner of her eye, Viper noticed the face paints in a still-closed box on the corner of the coffee table and momentarily remembered their conversation in the kitchen.

She sat down in the armchair next to her, biting the inside of her cheek. She put her foot on her leg, trying to... get rid of the stupid tension that she constantly felt under her ribs and that she had wanted to rip out of her own chest ever since it appeared.

She watched as Zyanya accepted the guitar from Zoya, her hands embracing the neck and resting the whole thing on her knee. For some reason, the familiar image of the tattooed sun on the inside of her hand appeared through Sabine's eyes.

She remembered its edges, where they began, where they ended, where she glided over it with a single finger trying to etch the image into her memory, though she had no idea why she needed it so badly.

Zyanya's tattoos were as permanent as many things in Sabine's life that she cherished. She wanted to return to them with her memory, because returning with her memory to the tattoos was easier than returning with her memory... to Zyanya herself.

And she didn't very much want to admit to that anymore. Nor to think about it.

She looked away from Reyna only for a second. She felt she had to focus on something, even if it was Nicole in the corner of the room, putting away abandoned crayons in a container.

The kids arranged themselves next to Reyna, some sat up straight, others leaned against her shoulder, apparently fascinated by the way the woman crinkled her eyebrows as she tried to remember the tabs and arrange her fingers properly on the strings.

¡Ay! De mi llorona Llorona

de azul celeste

Sabine took in a lungful of air and realized that her gaze had long since stopped on Reyna. However, if it had done so before, now it remained there for good.

She had never heard her voice like this.

Probably no one has heard it. Because no one associated Reyna with singing, a soft, melodious voice in a language she didn't use on a daily basis, yet she accented her words in such a way that the music seemed to flow around her.

The guitar sounded light, delicate. Sabine almost didn't hear the instrument itself.

Aunque la vida me cueste, llorona

No dejaré de quererte

The girl who was clutching the teddy bear squeezed it tighter.

A smile blossomed on her lips, which Reyna apparently noticed, because she turned her head and reciprocated it. Without much reason, Sabine thought, if Reyna’s hands hadn't been occupied, she probably would have stroked the girl’s head.

No sé que tienen las flores, llorona,

las flores del campo santo;

que cuando las mueve el viento, llorona,

parece que están llorando.

Viper didn't understand a word. And she didn't need to understand either.

The soft armchair seemed to absorb her, and she felt drunk in a way she didn't understand. It was as if everything ceased to exist, including her physical form.

The world had shrunk to the size of that one room somewhere in the middle of Mexico, with guitar strings, a Spanish song in the vampire's mouth, warm candlelight and the smell of tea.

Sabine didn't seem to want to leave it.

A un santo Cristo de fierro, Llorona,

Mis penas le conté yo,

¿Cuáles no serían mis penas, Llorona?

Que el santo Cristo lloró.

Only to plunge deeper, deeper and deeper into those peaceful notes.

There was a desperation in Reyna's voice that she may not have understood because she didn't understand the language itself or the lyrics of the song, but she was able to sense it on every inch of her body. It settled on her hands and forearms under the material of her sweater in waves of shivers, forcing Viper to weave the fingers of her hands together, trying to pull herself back together.

She had never heard Reyna sing or play any instrument. She had never even tried to think about it, because it seemed so removed from their everyday lives that Viper couldn't put the two together as a whole.

Now Zyanya fused with the two activities as if she had never done anything else in her life. And Sabine, as much as she wanted to reprove herself for it, to reproach herself that this is not how it's supposed to be, that she shouldn't be doing this, she couldn't look away.

No creas que porque canto, ay Llorona,

Tengo el corazón alegre,

Her hair decorated with flowers fell in waves on her shoulders, the purple in her irises shimmered from time to time, reflecting the flames of the slowly melting candles.

Her makeup fit her into the scenery of this holiday, which was full of color and life... which had something so magical about it that Sabine was unable to put it into words.

She had never seen anything like it. And yet she revolved around death so often, training herself time and time again every day to be better, to kill better and to be more effective. Both of them revolved. In fact, their entire lives revolved solely around survival.

And yet Viper knew that they had never been further from death than at this very moment.

También de dolor se canta, ay Llorona,

Cuando llorar no se puede.

She perhaps stopped breathing. It wasn't until the last notes echoed down those walls and the last twitches of the guitar stopped, that Viper noticed she had been holding her breath.

She didn't know since when, she didn't know how long. Her lungs had been compressed under her ribs all this time, and the world wanted her to relax just when their gazes met.

Zyanya Mondragón's eyes had never been so gentle.

They simply looked at each other, in that complete silence, with the guitar fading somewhere in the background. Their faces under the distinctive makeup were still as they remembered them, looking to each other for answers, questions and anything else possible, having a silent conversation in the middle of Mexico.

Viper stared at Reyna, tracing her facial features, accentuated by the warm light, her eyebrows which had furrowed slightly since their gaze met and never wavered for a moment. Her fingers tingled as she recalled how focused she had been, painting the various ornaments on her skin with many shades of purple, or the feel of her chin in her fingers when she told her not to move. After all, she didn't want to smear lipstick on her lips.

She remembered how she silently just wanted to make herself a cup of coffee, because she didn't want to impose on absolutely anything and just go back to her regular patterns even if she was in a different place. But she stopped because she couldn't keep silent. Because she wanted to watch Zyanya comb her long hair and then come up to her and almost shyly make her a proposal that Viper would never have agreed to a while ago.

Reyna looked at Viper, trying to remember when she last saw her so relaxed. Maybe never. Maybe her shoulders were always tense under the weight of thoughts, responsibilities and Reyna had never seen Viper otherwise. Well, maybe not Viper... but there was always Sabine. Sabine, somewhere beside her, separate from the wounded and ice-coated figure of Viper, who now asked Zyanya to paint her face to the delight of the kids. Who was looking at her with those cat eyes of hers, with her mouth slightly open and her shoulders relaxed on the backrest of the soft chair.

A strand of her hair was tucked behind her ear as usual, she saw as she did so, intertwining the fingers of her hands with each other and moving her thumb over the top of her hand in a gesture that Reyna might have recognized as nervous.

That's why Reyna smiled. Just to her. To show that the two of them are there, that Sabine is not alone in an unfamiliar space that may be beyond her.

And that Reyna is there with her.

“Once again!”

Reyna tore her gaze away from Viper and blinked rapidly. Her expression changed as she turned her head to Zoya, who was stubbornly placing Reyna's fingers back on the strings, as if she didn't like the way they were loosened.

Zyanya laughed quietly and so withdrew her hand from the guitar's neck.

“Why don't we let aunt Nicole prove herself too, huh?” she asked, raising one eyebrow. Viper couldn't connect her voice to what she had just heard. Nor that expression from which Reyna broke out quickly, and Viper... Viper somehow still remained in it. Suspended. “I'm sure she knows more songs than I do.”

Nicole pushed herself away from the wall she had been leaning against with her hip until now, as soon as Zoya nodded after a moment's consideration.

She took over the guitar from Reyna, who stood up and was probably about to sit down in the chair next to Viper to make room for her old acquaintance, but the girl, who hadn't said a word since the beginning, jumped off the couch and pulled her by the hand, leading her to a larger area of the room.

Sabine involuntarily followed her eyes there, wanting to catch some contact with Zyanya, but the latter only shrugged her shoulders with a smile as much as her stooped position allowed. Another song echoed in the background and Nicole's soft voice, although her accent came through more clearly through the guitar strings.

“Do you want to dance?” Sabine heard behind her back.

She turned her head, spotting Zyanya, who now embraced the child's hands gently. She started to sway, but the girl didn't budge, looking up at Reyna as if she wanted to absorb her view, but wasn't quite sure what to do.

For a moment, she actually matched Reyna's movements, even grinning as she took in how the woman gently guided her to turn. But then she lost interest. Which wouldn't have been surprising, after all, there were so many interesting things around, coloring books, paints, crayons, blankets and pillows, but... But before Sabine could look away, the girl was already standing in front of her and poking her with a look of giant round eyes, still speechless.

She grabbed her hand without hesitation. She pulled, making a sound that could be described as urging. Viper lost any confidence for a moment.

“Oh, no, darling, I don't...”

I don't dance, she wanted to say. But she could only wish.

Again that sound of displeasure, this time a gasp and a more pronounced tug on her slender fingers.

Nicole was still playing her guitar, singing a song that Sabine didn't know either, and could only shrug her shoulders with a smile in response to her gaze.

She already knew how Reyna felt when she begged her to help her get out of performing the song.

And as she did, she knew she had no choice. So yes, she stood up. And she allowed herself to be led to the same place. To lighten the atmosphere, she wanted to throw in a text that she had found a replacement for Reyna, but she should consider that not a very good one.

She wanted to say anything that was light, nice and fitting to the situation, maybe to amuse both herself and Reyna and the rest of the kids, but... but then her hand was unceremoniously pressed into Zyanya's hand.

The same sound of urging. The girl folded her arms over her chest.

Viper's heart dropped to her feet. Green eyes panickedly jumped between the child, Zyanya's equally puzzled face, and their joined hands.

Finally, they stopped only at Zyanya's face. She opened her mouth. She probably wanted to say something, then closed it when she realized she didn't have the faintest idea what she was supposed to say.

“Listen, I...”

“I don't think you have a choice. You've been chosen.”

Reyna shrugged her shoulders. She seemed amused by the directness of the girl's action, the corner of her mouth lifted in the smile that Viper knew so well and that once again fit perfectly into this picture of Reyna.

The same one that brazenly took Sabine's breath from her lungs and made her feel smaller than a speck of dust under the onslaught of her intense gaze.

Sabine restrained herself from squeezing her hand in a nervous gesture. She wanted to play confident, somehow sweep this under the rug and retreat in a discreet way that wouldn't elicit unnecessary attention, yet she could only bite the inside of her cheek as she tried to gather her thoughts into some sort of unified whole.

She felt that everyone's gazes were just stuck on the two of them. Even as the song continued to sound, and Nicole's focus was probably right there, even her gaze was burning a hole in her back. She didn't even want to think about all those children's faces that were waiting for the result of their friend's actions.

“But I can't dance,” she finally said, on one exhale. She felt Reyna's thumb slide across the top of her hand and paused at the last moment to keep from stiffening. “I'm serious.”

Reyna tilted her head. The garland slipped slightly to her left side, her eyelids squinted gently. Goddamn, Viper even noticed a strand of hair that rested against her contoured cheek. She shouldn't be looking at all this, and yet she did. She paid attention. To everything. To all of Reyna. And she didn't know where she should focus her gaze so as to at least try to look confident.

“You handled it somehow at the ball.”

There was that smile again. Sabine didn't even manage to get as indignant as she would have liked about the fact that Reyna was able to reproach her now.

“It's not the same,” she almost whispered.

“Is it?”

Reyna raised their joined hands higher. Sabine looked at them. At the way their fingers were intertwined, and though she didn't want to, she thought again of the tattoo with the image of the sun. The fact that her skin was now touching that radianite pattern on Zyanya Mondragón's warm, strong hand was... something that made her almost lower her gaze.

After all, she could have moved away. At any time. And what's more – she knew Reyna wouldn't have protested. She could have even walked away if she had wanted to.

Instead, her gaze fell on Reyna's other hand, placed on her waist so gently that Viper probably wouldn't have felt it if she hadn't seen it. She stayed there for a moment in stillness, perhaps waiting for Viper to stop her, or flinch in a sign of discomfort.

She did neither of those things. She let the air out of her lungs.

Her first step was tentative. She followed the movement of Reyna's hips, letting herself be led for the first few seconds. She minimally squeezed her hand as she carefully placed her own on Reyna's shoulder, though she hoped she wouldn't reproach her for it.

She didn't. She just nodded her head in silent agreement. Reyna's hand was warm on her waist.

The material of the turtleneck seemed unnaturally thin as the heat seeped through it as if no barrier had ever existed. And the material of Reyna's dress was soft, smooth, Sabine found comfort in leaning against her shoulder.

Later, she dared to lift her head higher. To look at Zyanya, to try again to catch any emotion on her face, maybe to look into those purple irises and try to go back to the moment when the guitar fell silent.

And Reyna reciprocated the same look. A gentle smile on her lips, encouraging. As if she wanted to say 'see? it's not that bad' without saying a word as they gently swayed to the beat of the song, taking a step once in one direction and once in the other.

In time, they sped up, picking up a tempo that adjusted to the chorus. The skirt of the colorful dress resembled ocean waves surrendering to gusts of wind, sometimes a strand of hair was thrown over Reyna's collarbone, sometimes she laughed silently as she almost stumbled. And sometimes or not sometimes Zyanya's thumb moved higher over Sabine's ribs when she happened to step closer.

She spun them efficiently, as if she had been doing it forever, and music flowed through her veins more than blood. Sabine succumbed to this turn as their steps carried small echoes among the small crowd. The strand of her hair that usually clung behind her ear was unraveled and tickled her cheek, her hand slipped more into Reyna's palm, getting rid of the initial tension, relaxing into the embrace.

She didn't even notice when she heard rhythmic clapping to the beat. She didn't hear someone enter the room and several other children took their places against the wall, staring at the peculiar display with smiles on their faces. Nor did she notice several adults, probably the other caregivers, discreetly peeking through the open door.

She didn't notice anything. Except for Reyna.

The steps began to quicken, the melody picked up considerable pace, and before Sabine had time to realize it, time and again she was taken in efficient, sure spins, and Reyna's smile flashed in the corner of her eye, sometimes obscured by a cascade of dark hair, sometimes focused on the purple lines painted up to her cheeks in the pattern of a skull.

Faster and faster.

The crowd clapped, the world whirled.

Sabine had never felt more alive.

The smell of tea, candles and a warm evening.

Another turn. And one more.

She probably laughed. Or Reyna did. Maybe both at once.

Someone whistled in the background, a guitar sounded fiercely.

Reyna's hair danced together with her dress.

Another turn.

And then the world stopped.

Viper was panting, catching shallow breaths of hot air. The guitar fell silent and for one, but it seemed a very long moment, only their breaths stood out in the deafening silence. They sped up and jittered.

She was unable to escape her gaze, staring into the purple irises reflecting the candlelight. She breathed her air, the same thick, hot air, for when the world stopped, it stopped Sabine at the moment when Reyna's face and her own were separated by nothing more than that very one, shallow breath.

Only the pressure on her waist made her realize that there was a short distance between her and the floor. Reyna, however, was not about to let her go. She held tight, tickling her face with a strand of purple hair as Sabine's hand clung to her shoulder, the other still entwined in that initially awkward gesture.

Silence, silence, silence.

Her heart pounded against her own ribs. Out of effort, out of emotion. From how much work it was taking up the moment she could count every single eyelash of Zyanya's, or point out an imperfection in one of her makeup lines, when her hand just happened to tremble and she didn't notice it.

She ran her eyes over where she saw movement. Reyna swallowed her saliva.

Was her throat dry?

There was also... something in her eyes that wasn't there before. A substitute for uncertainty, which, after all, should not have been there, because Zyanya was at home, because Zyanya felt comfortable here. Because Zyanya licked her lips, wanting to say something.

But then an uproar of applause rang out. The earth began to spin again, the clocks started working again, moving the hands of them forward and measuring the minutes. Sabine started breathing again, her heart started beating again.

Reyna cleared her throat.

That seemed to revive them both. She helped Viper rise back to her own feet and bowed slightly. Viper copied her movements. Her head was humming.

She thought about what Reyna had told her about her overhearing. She hears what she wants to hear. And she can hear every single heart if she wants to.

And that suddenly became for Sabine Callas the most frightening thought she had had since the beginning of the day.

Overhearing. She could hear every rhythm. Every movement of the blood in her veins. If Reyna had only decided to focus acutely on that one heart entombed by a dozen others, she would have heard everything.

This time she swallowed her saliva.

“I'll go get some tea.”

She felt those purple eyes on her back as she retreated toward the table. So much so that she probably felt absolutely nothing else besides the physical weight of Zyanya's gaze.

But she didn't turn around, recognizing only Nicole's voice in the general noise.

“Who's hungry?”

Sabine poured tea with trembling hands. A few drops spilled onto the colorful tablecloth and stayed there until it was finished.

Chapter 47: FORTY SEVEN

“They liked you.”

Viper tapped her finger on the armrest of the couch. She followed with her eyes the somewhat faint but warm light of the bathroom, which marked a smudge on the floor and almost reached the tip of Viper's shoe.

She could hear her clearly, in the darkness of the night, in this suddenly too-small apartment, and wondered if she could answer. Should she do so, even if her own voice might have betrayed her, instead of simply waiting where she was until Reyna finished washing off her makeup, still laughing and full of the emotions rippling through her chest.

The clock was ticking in the background. Sabine was unable to tell what time it was. The moon was already sitting heavy in the sky, poking through the curtains. She bit her lip.

Her face was still damp from the warm water as she washed off her makeup with it just as Reyna was now. The smell of candles and food, of fresh flowers, orange and bright, still lingered on the material of her pants.

Now there was only silence, the ticking clock and Reyna. 

Sabine furrowed her brow and rose from the couch.

She followed the streak of light, aware that Zyanya could hear her footsteps. Maybe her breathing.

As she leaned with her hip against the door frame, Reyna happened to be taking makeup remover wipes out of the cabinet. She looked at her anyway. The wall lamp hanging under the mirror made her eyes shine again, and although Sabine was about to hate herself for it, she maintained that eye contact.

She intertwined her arms across her chest.

“How do you know?”

Her voice seemed not to belong to her. She breathed out, trying to make it as natural as she could. She even raised the corner of her mouth.

Because that's how it was supposed to be. It was just supposed to be a light, casual conversation about what had happened. To reminisce, to ask about this or that. That's how she was supposed to play, and at all costs swallow the bitter aftertaste in her throat of something she didn't want to admit to herself. Something that was taking the breath from her lungs and making her painfully aware of where that pressure between her ribs was coming from.

Something she was so afraid of that she lied to herself more plausibly than she had done anything else in her life. And yet it was only a few months. An insignificant amount of time that Sabine never counted, because every day and every minute of her life until so recently had been morbidly equal. It was supposed to be an insignificant time only punctuated by something human and that was only supposed to somehow settle her down at least for a while. To take her thoughts away from the spinning world around her.

The door frame was poking her shoulder. She tried to focus on it, on anything. So she walked deeper into the room, embracing the edge of the sink with one hand, as if its coolness would help her ground herself.

Reyna straightened up, placing the tissues on the edge. The rustling of the package echoed as she took one out and captured it in her fingers.

Her skin was wet from taking off her makeup, glistening slightly under that pale light, and only a few smudges marked her cheeks with a fuzzy purple. Viper didn't want to look at it.

She couldn't shake the thought that she wasn't supposed to be here, and now not only was she there, but... she was still looking. All this time she had been watching, deep down knowing that it was not due to her need to observe in terms of her job.

She could analyze Reyna's behaviors. To look for useful motives, patterns in them, to bring them up later on the battlefield, in training. But none of them had anything to do with training for some time.

Sabine couldn't swallow it.

Zyanya shrugged her shoulders, leaned back against the washing machine.

“They're usually shy,” she said frankly, applying a wet wipe to her eyelid with a shadow residue. “They're quiet kids, they've been through a lot. They are not fond of new people.”

Viper reflexively followed Reyna's hand movements. The couch's upholstery had been replaced by a sink and she was now drumming her fingertips against its interior in a rhythm she only knew.

“So I should feel special of some kind?” she answered. 

Zyanya laughed soundlessly. Her fang flashed in that light and Viper looked away again, searching the small room for anything she could hang her eyes on for at least a second. Anything that wasn't Reyna.

It fell on the tiles on the wall opposite.

She felt like she was standing somewhere next to it all. The other part of her just continued to sit on that damn couch and listen to the conversation semi-consciously, while the ticking of the clock hummed in the background. That's where she should be. And not moving.

“To be honest, yes.”

Sabine muttered something to herself. She realized that her rhythm on the walls of the sink had accelerated and clenched her hand into a fist, wanting to somehow stop this nervous gesture before Reyna opened her eyes and noticed it.

She would rather have avoided it.

“I didn't expect them to speak English,” she said, once again breaking the barrier of silence she should maintain. She really should.

So that she wouldn't go completely crazy with her own thoughts.

“They have home schooling. We have a few volunteer teachers, most of them are radiant themselves, who are not convinced to live in normal society.”

“Lack of acceptance?”

Why did she even continue this conversation?

Reyna took the wipe away from her face for a second. Only to fold it in half, and Sabine looked every damn time at the slightest movement of her fingers anyway, even though just a moment ago she was watching the tiles so closely that she could have drilled a hole in them with her own gaze.

“Rather not, it's just... they're fine where they are,” she added. Zyanya shrugged her shoulders. The tattoo on her arm rippled against her skin. Viper thought again about the pattern of the beaming sun. “As they say, old trees shouldn’t be replanted. Nobody kicks them out of there, it's a safe place, they have family there, foster or not. What more could they want?”

Viper nodded.

“You're probably right.”

She wanted the conversation to end that way. Because it would be <em>easier</em> that way. More comfortable. She was ready to turn on her heel and walk out, straight into the darkness of the living room, or maybe straight to Reyna's bedroom, bury herself under the covers and pretend for the next few hours that she was asleep and nothing had changed in her life.

That she hadn't changed.

Because Sabine was always supposed to be constant, like a statue that sticks firmly in the ground regardless of weather, temperature or time. Everything about her was supposed to be so morbidly the same until she would die. That was how it was supposed to be good. It was supposed to stay that way forever.

And now one element didn't fit her character so well that she felt like scratching it out of her own chest, even if she were to bleed, while at the same time not being able to touch her own skin.

She had to live with the fact that the element came into existence, and no matter how much it scared her, it had to stay there.

“Are you okay?”

She acquired the urge to slap Reyna for that question. Because she began to scratch the wound, to push that element Sabine hated even deeper and even more clearly and Sabine couldn't stop her from doing so.

No. Nothing was okay. It was worse than ever, because Viper had lost something she loved most.

Control.

“Yes,” her voice was no louder than a whisper. And just a moment ago she was faking it so well. “It's just been a long day.”

She didn't care if Reyna noticed that the smile was crooked and Sabine was trying to lie, clenching her fist in the sink so much that the scars on her hand stretched unpleasantly.

That's why she turned her head away.

She wanted to turn her head. She didn't even flinch.

A worn makeup wipe dangled sadly in Reyna's hand. Viper tried to count the number of colors she saw on it, to connect them with the image of Reyna those few hours ago. To focus her thoughts on anything logical or schematic that would distract her from Reyna and her intense gaze.

“I know that look,” Zyanya said. With a motion of her hand, she pointed to Sabine, who felt like turning her head away. She could only wish. “What is it?”

Nothing, was her first thought. It would be best if she spit out that one word, with that characteristic venom that always left her potential interlocutors at a safe distance. At the same time, she felt she couldn't hiss that one word in the way that used to come easily to her.

Not to Reyna. Not to this Reyna, in this small bathroom, in a small apartment and a pale but warm and all too homely light.

“Today was... Fun. I have to put it together.”

Zyanya looked at her with furrowed brows for a moment, as if trying to figure out if this was the real answer or another riddle. But then her lips stretched into a smile, and she... laughed so lightly that the single sound reverberated off the walls and hit Viper right in the spine.

“God, don't scare me,” she replied, resting her hands on her knees. She was still smiling slightly. “I thought something was wrong.”

Sabine seemed to reciprocate the gesture. She shrugged her shoulders, a strand of her hair escaped from behind her ear, but she didn't bother to correct it. Everything she did was stiff. It was filled with that peppy tension that refused to let her rest, burrowing into her skull and making her thoughts nothing more than a collection of jazzy voices.

“You have to be prepared for anything.”

Reyna snorted with laughter. She crumpled up her wipe, tossing it into the trash can next to her. Viper looked there as well. She shouldn't. She shouldn't look absolutely nowhere.

“Full of surprises, huh?”

Viper crooked her head. She bit the inside of her cheek and again felt her fist clench even tighter.

She tried to blend in with the floor. Force herself to stay exactly where she was or turn around.

There should be no other option. Never. Viper, after all, had always stuck to the patterns, the ones she had meticulously laid out in her own head before they even happened, followed point by point, ticking them off in her head and smilingly moving on, paying no attention to all the twists and turns. She walked through the maze of her own thoughts and always knew the way.

Until now.

She let go of the edge of the sink and approached Reyna. Even if it was just those two steps. Even if the weight of her gaze immediately fell on her and Viper saw it as a question.

If Reyna had spoken up and asked the question out loud, maybe Sabine would have found it easier. To step back. To answer the question with a question, as she always did in these uncomfortable moments. To do anything schematic, which was her safe zone.

But Zyanya didn't say a word. Her lips remained closed until Sabine stood between her legs, tilting her head slightly. The difference in height small, yet so significant at that moment.

Interesting.

Sabine tilted her head, her brow furrowed slightly on her forehead, and Reyna, not knowing why, focused on the way that faint light shone through her hair, illuminating individual strands. At how the green eyes flashed in that one way that only Sabine Callas' eyes did. At how, for a moment, Reyna was sure that Viper held her breath, simply staring at her.

Sabine Callas' gaze had never been so gentle.

“What are you...?”

Zyanya stopped the thought the second Viper's thumb found its way to her lower lip. The whisper was drowned in silence, as if it would never exist. Maybe it was a good thing she didn't finish her sentence. Because she would have betrayed herself in a way that would never explain her again and stay with her until the grave.

A way that Sabine would have caught out. After all, she had seen everything, always and everywhere. Even now, interrupting this trivial conversation, she followed her with penetrating eyes, looking for the slightest grimace on her face.

She let out a breath. Slowly. Very, very slowly, and it mixed with the air in the small room, dispersed between them.

Viper felt it on her skin. Maybe she swallowed her saliva, but did not withdraw her hand. One tendon in her finger twitched uncertainly as she hummed to herself with approval of her own act, which, although so risky... was almost tempting.

Tempting like a fruit that was out of reach, and she was dying to grab it in her hand and pluck it from the tree after all this time of aimlessly staring at it and watching it ripen.

This could have meant the end. She had crossed the line.

It didn't.

Viper swiped across Reyna's lip to the corner of her mouth, picking up the remnant of lipstick that she had missed. The dark purple smudged on her tanned skin for a moment, almost reaching her cheekbone, then the touch became clearer, stronger.

Zyanya tightened her fingers on the edge of the washing machine. She did her best not to close her eyes, not to miss a second.

Something was different. Something in that look, in that gesture. She had to know what was it.

Such an insignificant thing. Such an unimportant thing, and yet Viper's gaze had never been more focused. Her lips tightened stubbornly at first, as if she was afraid that she would say one word too many, that she would break that barrier the wrong way and nothing would ever go back to the way it was again.

Or maybe that's what was it all about.

About that one touch.

Later, the same mouth already half-open, focused on Zyanya's lips, her cheek and chin. She admired her work. She avoided Reyna's eyes, as if they were burning her and digging into her skin. They suddenly became too overpowering for her, but Zyanya could only helplessly clench her hands even tighter, begging for Sabine to break through.

That she would look at her, even though she knew it would probably break them both in a way they had never experienced.

Viper did just that.

She stopped the moment. She stopped them both in that second.

She was able to breathe her air. And Zyanya was able to do the same while she continued to search, stubbornly looking for something in Sabine's gaze. A prohibition. A sign that it wasn't happening, and that Zyanya was simply thinking too much and should stop.

There was a familiar screech in her ears. The blood began to hit her head again, and she breathed discreetly. At least she hoped it was discreet.

She heard the rumble of her own heart. She furrowed her brow.

She wanted to ask what Sabine would do. The same Sabine being no more than one breath away from her, the same one whose strand of hair had slid down her face and tickled her cheek. The same one who continued to stare, uninterrupted.

Her gaze dropped to her lips.

Reyna's knuckles turned white.

She couldn't twitch. Not now, God, just not now.

Sabine's breath warmed her face. It was faster, unsteady, devoid of rhythm.

Zyanya couldn't shake the feeling that her heart wasn't the only one pounding out an anxious rhythm. Maybe there were two of them, together, in this wild, wordless tango.

Sabine leaned in.

Reyna held her breath in that one second. She couldn't close her eyes, couldn't urge her on. She couldn’t even say anything, just clench her hands until her fingertips began to slide on the washing machine.

Viper looked at her lips again.

Reyna moistened them with the tip of her tongue. Sabine's gaze immediately focused on the gesture. All too much so, as Reyna noticed the twitching corner of her mouth, she felt the pressure of Viper’s thumb on her cheek more clearly.

There was nothing she could do.

She didn't want to do anything as well.

Viper reduced the distance between them even further. Her knees touched the housing of the washing machine. She leaned over, wanting to bridge the height difference, and tilted her head, as if in silent question.

May I?

Only.

One.

Breath.

Reyna was right. Something had changed. Maybe even everything.

But she herself invariably could not refuse.

This time... she just didn't want to.

In the next second, Viper placed her other hand on her cheek, both embracing her face.

In yet another, she brushed her lips with Reyna's own.

Gently. Carefully. Even timidly.

Reyna was afraid to breathe. That if she did, something would change. The Viper would simply step back, wash the residue of that lipstick off her own thumb and leave her in that moment as if nothing had ever happened.

And she wasn't sure she'd be able to take it this time like all those times she'd been left alone in her or Viper's bedroom, barely with Sabine's scent at her side, the mangled bedclothes tangling against her ankles and the moment itself seeming so fleeting and insignificant that Reyna often doubted whether it had happened at all.

Now she had no doubts at all. She was certain that Viper had kissed her now, attaching her lips to hers.

And there was something in that gesture that Viper did not resemble. Something that was missing from their quick encounters, the abrupt removal of each other's clothes and the greed for direct contact so eating away at her insides that Zyanya was even embarrassed more than once. What wasn't there was the fierce look in Sabine's eyes as she attacked her lips in exactly the right way so that Reyna wouldn't even think of protesting.

The kiss was slow.

From Sabine's usually fierce lips, Reyna now sipped calmly, clenching her fingers and surrendering to the careful movements of her mouth. She surrendered trivially easy, even if her heart could be heard in her throat, even if she almost didn't breathe, terrified that if she twitched and even one atom of that moment changed its trajectory, Reyna would lose the moment and could only watch it leak through her fingers.

She only dared to hum quietly, feeling her eyelids heavy. Viper held her face in both hands, her thumb wandering over her cheek, a sure point of reference that still held Reyna whole.

And Sabine... Sabine felt the air that Zyanya let out through her nose. How each breath settled on her skin, how her lips rubbed against hers with a reserve that didn't even match Reyna's.

Sabine finally felt that this damned tension, which had previously refused to let her rest, finally disappear somewhere behind the door and dissolve into the darkness of the living room.

Maybe this is exactly what she wanted. Maybe all the events were just leading up to this.

To have her touch slide off Reyna's cheek just so she could grasp her wrist and pull Reyna's hand away from the washing machine.

She placed her hand on her hip. She wanted that touch in a way she couldn't explain and at the same time almost made her gasp when Reyna's thumb stroked the edges of her stomach, following the command without protest.

And yet it was only a small gesture. A gentle one. She shouldn't even feel it.

And she needed to do so. She didn't want Reyna's knuckles to turn white on the edge of the washing machine, she didn't want her touch to be distant just when calm had crept into that little bathroom in Mexico.

She felt Reyna relax, ghosting over the material of her shirt with her thumb. Her shoulders slumped slightly, as if by now some invisible force had held her by the throat and wouldn't even let her twitch, and then she realized that Zyanya needed this touch as much as she did.

She was just waiting for permission.

So she grasped Mondragón's other hand, Reyna sucking in air slightly as she made sure of that grip Viper wanted her to do.

She moved away from Sabine. Her eyes glistened in that faint light, her breath settling between the two of them in those slightly faster exhalations, and for a moment Viper didn't understand why Reyna stopped.

But then her gaze dropped lower. Reyna furrowed her brow as she focused her attention on how her hands were aligned with Viper's hips. In the faint light, her throat rippled.

She swallowed her saliva.

And Viper saw it all. She felt it.

The gentle movement of a thumb that circled her hip, leaving a pattern of invisible touch. The purple of Reyna's eyes, which were fixed there as if nothing else mattered at the moment, her lips slightly parted in concentration for that second or two.

She moved her hands up, down. Barely a few centimeters, just to feel how the fabric of Viper's clothes shifted under the impact of that movement. How her hips fit into the insides of her palms as the tendons of her fingers twitch slightly, almost out of fear that she will crumble it.

That this tenderness would immediately disappear as soon as she lifted her head.

That's why she did it slowly, unconsciously avoiding the green eyes for as long as possible, because she knew that whenever she met them on her path, she probably wouldn't be able to hide everything that made her hear her own pulse in her ears and every breath squeezed through her lungs almost making her choke.

Only, when she did, she couldn't stop herself from taking that step forward, moving even closer to Sabine, as if that distance worthy of a piece of paper moments before had suddenly become unbearable.

She drew her hips toward her, let out another breath with her mouth, watching Callas' face so intensely that she could even tell it was verging on paranoia. That she would find something there that she shouldn't. That Viper's gently tilted head and quiet gasp on her part was just a pretense when she licked her lips this time, connecting their gazes after that long, tense moment.

Sabine saw a mist in Reyna's eyes. Quite as if she was drunk, unaware of what was happening and operating solely on the autopilot of her stupefied mind as she continued to unconsciously stroke her hips, as if unsure of what she might do next.

And there was something beautiful about it.

Sabine first looked at Reyna's hand on her hip. Just for a second, maybe two, trying to remember the sight, though she was afraid to admit why it was so important to her.

Later, she returned to those misty eyes.

She hesitated. First she opened her mouth to say something. Trying not to focus on the fact that Reyna's breath stopped on them, warmed them and took away any ability to think soberly. Probably that's why she closed them. Later, she opened them again, suddenly unable to bear the silence, taut as a string, ready to burst at any moment.

She wanted it to break, actually. Every string. Every moment. And probably every boundary, of which Sabine had set thousands throughout her life.

She raised one eyebrow. Her gaze this time deliberately fell on Zyanya's lips, one time, then another. Two were enough for her to understand the message.

What are you waiting for?

She only had time to see the relief that came over Zyanya for a second. Another string let go, the tension on her face disappeared the moment she complied with this wordless request and brought their lips together in a kiss again.

Explicitly. So that Viper felt her lips on hers, so that she felt their hips pressed against each other like two perfectly fitting pieces of a puzzle. But at the same time so very... different.

Zyanya's hands were sure on her hips, though they weren't rushing anywhere. Finally they had time, finally she could stop for those few moments because Viper let her. Viper, whose fingers wove through her hair, massaging her scalp with her fingertips, wandering that touch between individual strands in a way she had mastered to perfection.

She knew all her weak points, and yet... it didn't make Reyna feel powerless at all. Not now.

Viper liked the feel of Reyna's hair between her fingers. They flowed through them, like branches of a river, grounding her in a way. They made her realize that she had Reyna close, maybe even closer than anyone had ever dared to have Reyna. When she kissed her lips, Reyna was not Reyna, but Zyanya.

And Viper was kissing Zyanya, playing with her hair as she calmly responded to her kisses. No protest, no rush. It was as if the world was about to end, and they only had these few moments of peace that could immediately escape through their fingers and never return.

And she didn't want to admit it, didn't even want to think about it, that she knew the reason.

It terrified her. Maybe it even paralyzed her in some pathetic way that Viper would have been able to describe if she hadn't been ashamed of it in front of herself.

She could only sigh when Reyna's lips didn't meet hers the next second, but marked her neck with barely a touch. First with one, then with another, she pressed her lips against her warm skin, as if she sensed that Viper needed grounding and playing with her hair was not enough.

Reyna reached with her kisses under her ear, slid down to her jaw, though she didn't even know when, and closed her eyelids tighter, stopping at the pulse point for a long moment.

Sabine's heartbeat rang in Reyna's head, she knew every twitch by heart, every hesitation and change in rhythm. She had them engraved in her mind like tattoos on her arms. Permanent and unchanging.

Sabine tilted her head to the side, finding support in Zyanya's arms. Her hands slid down them somewhat involuntarily, snagging the material of her shirt before tightening her fingers on her shoulders. Reyna's eyelashes tickled her jaw, her breath was warm, <em>soothing</em> even, although if she had used that word a while ago, she probably would have laughed at herself.

She bit her lip...

God, she bit her lip?

...as she moved her hands from her shoulders under Reyna's shirt, resting them first flat against her stomach, then stopping at her waist. She gripped her tighter, wishing she had any support as the Mexican woman peppered her neck with kisses, attaching her lips to her skin so clearly that I probably Viper had never been as sure of anything before as that Reyna was there.

With her.

She knew that Reyna would notice it faster than probably anyone else would, but she still didn't stop. Her hand had barely slipped past the elastic border of Zyanya's sweatpants, and she was already gasping into her neck, as if she'd been knocked out of rhythm back into existing reality.

But there was no desperation in that one gasp. There was none of that hunger that Viper so loved to watch and see devour Reyna utterly.

Zyanya pulled away from her mouth just to look at Viper's hand right there, to somehow register what was happening and realize... that she didn't want to hold back. She simply glanced at Viper, wanting to find a possible protest there, a hesitation.

But Viper just shrugged her shoulders, with her lip trapped between her teeth, as if she suddenly found in her behavior a reason to be ashamed.

That she was different now. That now she didn't want to rip Reyna's clothes off right this second and greedily drink from her mouth all of the moans, gasps and shameless whimpers when her hand would come between her legs in not reasonable time.

Now she wanted to play with her hair, to remember the touch of her hand on her hips as the awareness of the origin of that burning sensation under her ribs occupied her entire mind, finally putting her never-ending analysis to rest. She wanted to feel the warmth of her skin under her finger and sense every twitch when she hooked her fingernail on Reyna's abs.

Viper slowed down. Reyna slowed down with her.

And there was something so uncertain and new about it, that's why she bit that lip, gliding her touch over Reyna's lower abdomen. It ghosted over the muscles, memorizing every curve, dimple, or thickening on the skin in the form of a scar, one or two. She focused on the way they trembled slightly under her finger under the breath that caught in Reyna's throat for a second.

Viper swallowed her saliva, teasing with her fingernail the distinct v-line disappearing under the fabric of her clothes. She liked the sound. And she wanted to hear it again, so she wandered up and down with the same fingernail, drawing invisible patterns. She was sure that purple eyes followed the same movements with her, half-closed eyelids leaving only a fragment of color in this bathroom plunged into semi-darkness.

Until two fingers were placed under Viper’s chin.

Zyanya looked at her intensely. Even though her shoulders were hovering in slightly faster breaths, her lips were glistening from said kisses, and her hair was disheveled and it was Viper who seemed to be the more outwardly collected one, Zyanya was looking at Viper more than anyone had ever looked at anything.

Her breath seemed to get caught in her throat. Her finger brushed the string of Reyna's pants involuntarily, as she no longer looked in that direction, but at... the corner of Zyanya's mouth lifted almost playfully.

She had never felt anything so clearly as Reyna's fingertips just on her chin. But she didn't run away, didn't move away. She waited for an explanation, though she knew it would be wordless.

And Zyanya nodded toward the shower. In a question that Viper didn't have to answer or agree to at all. She could have shaken her head, walked out, and would have known that Reyna would have left it at that.

Instead, she crossed her arms and pulled her shirt over her head.

She could see Reyna's gaze on her. She felt it physically, the weight of it settling on her skin in the form of a wave of shivers. She didn't have anything underneath, because it was the middle of the night and they were getting ready for bed anyway, but now somehow... it was to her advantage.

Zyanya didn't move, even as she breathed her air right after Sabine's clothes were put away on the washing machine. Her gaze shifted slightly wistfully over Viper's collarbones, then lower and lower, and before she could stop herself, she brushed the inside of her hand against her ribs.

The touch later moved down her side, and Reyna furrowed her brow, as if she couldn't believe what was happening. Yet she had been in this moment so many times before. So many times she had had Viper's skin under her fingers, so many times she had touched her here, there and everywhere she wanted and how she wanted.

She didn't realize she'd held her breath until she let it out with her mouth, and a strand of Sabine's hair picked up to dance tickled her cheek.

“I'm about to assume you like what you see.”

Viper's voice was no louder than a whisper. Reyna laughed briefly, a little pulled out of her own thoughts. A little surprised.

“I didn't think that sentence would ever come out of your mouth.”

Her own quote from a few months ago bounced off the bathroom tiles and hit her right in the head. At the time, it didn't have much meaning. It was only meant to be a splinter for Sabine, a reason for Reyna to see the irritation in her eyes and for a moment scrape the mask of indifference off her face.

Now it was thrown carelessly. Even too lightly compared to the fact that those few months ago Reyna would have been ready to stab Viper in the throat for it.... With reciprocation, anyway.

“So I guess I am indeed full of surprises,” she muttered, shrugging her shoulders. “Now be so nice and get rid of this.”

If Reyna had wanted to tease, she could have pointed out to Sabine how breathless she sounded. That her voice was devoid of venom and in that second there was nothing in it but a pure, gentle request as her nail wandered uninterruptedly under the material of Zyanya's shirt, yet her voice trembled, somewhat overwhelmed.... The intimacy of the moment.

She couldn't point out to Viper what was eating away at herself either.

And while all that was unspoken hung in the air, Zyanya threw off her clothes, closing Viper's mouth with a kiss.

***

The wall was cold. The water was warm. She felt steam settling on her eyelashes, then condensing on her cheek and running down her chin. Wet hair stuck to her forehead, but she paid no attention to it.

Reyna's hands were everywhere. They were hot, hotter than water, hotter than Reyna herself, who Sabine associated with lava so often that if she ever had to compare her to anything, she would use that very word. Reyna stroked her sides, her hands a bit rough from the rifle after all these years, yet they were so soft that they matched her skin.

Viper hooked her hands around her shoulder blades, knowing perfectly well the arrangement of her muscles, and purred into her mouth as the cold of the tiles on the wall began to penetrate her spine.

She moved her hands to Zyanya's cheeks, then to her arm with a radianite tattoo traced on her skin.

Then she gasped as the touch slid from her waist to the side of her thigh, carving with her fingernail patterns only familiar to her quite the same as Sabine had done on Zyanya's abs a moment ago. Still just as delicate.

Still as contradictory to the image of the Empress in all those cards, folders, files or recordings. That figure was so alien and distant that only her shadow could look at Zyanya now, lurking somewhere in the darkness far, far away from the capital of Mexico.

Zyanya was so close to death every day, and now... so far from it. When she marked her neck with kisses, letting Sabine weave her fingers into her wet hair, unconsciously pulling it away. When she was so gentle that her nail on Viper's thigh or ribs didn't even leave a mark. When she kissed her lips as if there would be no tomorrow and as if this Empress, this one made of darkness and emptiness, would never belong to her.

The shower hummed. The water ran down their bodies, washed away all those emotions. It leveled the tension. It relaxed muscles tense so often that they no longer remembered what rest was.

Reyna's breath was warm on her jaw, her ear, her neck. Her body was warm, so pleasantly warm, so... calming. A short gasp escaped Sabine's throat before she could stop it as Zyanya silently fitted her thigh between her legs. She covered her mouth with her hand, disentangling it frantically from Reyna's hair, pressed her knuckles to her lips, not wanting anyone to hear, even if they were alone after all. Even if she had already done it out loud, more than once and more than twice, forcing a curse into Zyanya's skin or into her mouth, letting her lather it up and swallow, looking her straight in the eye.

“Don't do it.”

Slender fingers and a sun tattoo flashed into her field of vision before Sabine's wrist was pulled away from her mouth.

She wanted to protest, or at least she thought she did. Maybe she never wanted to. Maybe now she wanted to let Reyna make her stop thinking in that damn tiresome, analytical way.

That's why she didn't jerk away when it was both her wrists that were trapped above her head and pressed gently against the tiles. Not for dominance. Not for a show of force, so that it would hurt, or so that it would leave marks, to which Viper sometimes returned with her thoughts. Just for the mere sign that they were there and would stay there for a while when Reyna lowered herself to her ear.

“I want to hear you, let me,” she said. Zyanya hesitated for a second. So long and drawn out that it almost didn't match Zyanya and her vehemence with which she usually kissed, touched and tore through layers of clothing to reach her bare skin. That second made Viper close her eyelids, inhaling the hot steam, enduring the kiss on her jaw as Mondragón collected her scattered thoughts. “Sabine, I… please.”

She didn't think the word would come out of her throat so broken. It was as if she no longer had the strength for that demanding tone, that whole facade she had clung to for as long as it was convenient.

Now it began to imprison her, and to dig into her body mercilessly. And she couldn't put together a single, meaningful sentence.

Viper tensed her wrist muscles. Individual tendons twitched under Reyna's grip as she spread her fingers, then clenched them, then spread them again, suddenly aware of how exposed she was.

Vulnerable.

Stretched out on the wall of the shower stall, pressed flat against the wall. Her chest lifted with each gasp of frustration as she realized she was unconsciously trying to give Reyna more access to her skin, and yet that's not at all how it should be.

Her thigh was fitted perfectly between her legs, giving relief by applying pressure where she needed it, and yet... she was afraid to let go. She was afraid to bend her knees just to plunge completely into the feeling, because the vision of it devouring her utterly was in some way humiliating.

Until that moment.

Until that one word.

Please.

Viper was suddenly aware of everything. Wet hair stuck to her forehead and back. Her own ragged breaths. The fact that she was naked. The fact that Reyna was also naked, and that her body emanated a heat that pierced even the temperature of the room. The fact that Zyanya's one hand so easily encompassed both of her wrists and did not move a step further, waiting for an answer with her nose almost snuggled into the hollow of her neck.

She tightened her eyelids. She looked at the ceiling, albeit dimmed by steam. She bit her lip, trying to ignore the tornado of thoughts in the whole situation.

And she nodded, for the first time in her life not letting the thought that it was a terrible idea creep into the moment.

She replied in one exhale.

“Alright.”

If Reyna had been holding her breath until that moment, she let it out along with the moment the last sounds of that sentence rang out in the bathroom. 

Later, Viper wasn't sure when she responded to her kiss, nor when the vampire embraced her cheek with her free hand, as if she was afraid that despite everything, Viper would somehow get out of her arms and disappear. She needed to hold her there at least for a moment, to make sure she wasn't lying.

If she had to dismantle the walls Viper was building around herself brick by brick in the sweltering heat of the glowing sun deprived of water, she was ready to do it with her bare hands. Now she was.

Viper wasn't lying. Viper gasped with a wheeze that balanced on the edge of a groan, but she let her hips twitch, rubbing against Zyanya's thigh with hesitation at first. She gained minimal friction, jerked perhaps unconsciously in the radiant woman's grip, but stopped immediately. The tension still lurked inside her, still holding some strings.

But it grew weaker and weaker as Reyna began to go down with kisses, slowly. She brushed her thumb against the protruding bones of Viper's wrist as her lips returned again to the one spot that made them both dizzy.

Blood rumbled through Viper's veins in a song similar to orchestra concert at the philharmonic. Zyanya felt every contraction and diastole of her heart under her own lips, her fangs rubbing against her delicate skin, picking up the water droplets that had settled on it, as if she longed to drink them in.

She sensed that Viper had sucked in air.

She wanted to move away. Do something else before she goes crazy. So her hand captured Viper's breast, tensing her thigh more clearly, only in her mind noting the twitching of Callas' hips, which eluded her less and less, but which made her throat dry up more and more.

But then Viper grabbed her nape, stopping her right there. At her neck where the fang had just moved, where her pulse echoed. Reyna could hear her rapid breaths perfectly, passing into uncertain gasps, her skin tightening and relaxing so close to her lips. Her fingers were clenched tightly on the back of Zyanya's neck, almost as if she was afraid the woman would move away and ask too many questions.

She would look at her one second too long and it would be too late.

Zyanya herself had to take a deeper breath. For a moment, her head swirled as she realized what Sabine wanted her to do. Something that had been so unattainable all these weeks, something that was beyond the bounds of their arrangement, and something that Reyna had only recently proposed on herself and had never forgotten.

Viper agreed then. Because it was Reyna, not herself. Even if she didn't know what had changed, if anything at all should change, she did it back then. She left the hickey on her neck, unconsciously looking at that spot many times when they were in the same room, thinking about how Zyanya's tanned skin had turned scarlet for those few days.

Now that Zyanya's teeth were so close to her neck, her chest was filling with hot air, water was running down her face, and she had agreed never to be silent again at moments like this, she wished for the same thing no matter how devoid of rationality it was.

Or perhaps she had long since lost any rationality. In everything that involved Reyna.

“Are… are you sure?”

She was sure as she heard Reyna swallow her saliva. Every broken tone as the hoarse voice carried across the shower stall, bounced off the tiles and danced between the steaming hot air.

She stared at the ceiling. She prayed that Zyanya would not raise her head. Because then she wouldn't have the courage to confirm her own request without thinking that in fact her rationality had ceased to exist.

Viper ceased to exist at that moment and only Sabine remained. And she didn't even know when they switched places during all those moments. Too fast. 

So fast, in fact, that Viper was beginning to have doubts about which one surpassed the other.

“Do it.”

The vampire's cloud of breath tickled her skin. She caught the gasp.

As if without force, she kicked Zyanya in the ribs and snatched that very breath from her lungs.

And then it was Sabine's breath that was taken away. Reyna let go of her wrists, letting them fall loosely to her sides, and the next second she sucked the skin on her neck, embracing her cheek with one hand, the other holding her arm as if at the cost of her life.

Reyna sucked souls on a daily basis. And that's exactly how Viper felt - as if she had given Reyna a piece of herself that Reyna had irrevocably taken with her.

Unwittingly, her knees bent, stars danced in her head.

But Zyanya was there. She held her. She was always there when Viper needed her, always holding her so tight, so damn tight, making sure she didn't fall, even then... then when she kept hitting her in the demolished lab, begging her to let go and walk away as if she had never been there.

Zyanya always clung to Sabine. All this time, like the fucking scab that Viper first tried so hard to rip off because it itched and bothered her.

And now she knew that every time she ripped it off, it started to bleed.

She pushed Zyanya's face away from her, violently pushing her away by her shoulders. She startled her, that's for sure, but she didn't have time for that, because the next second their lips collided with each other. Suddenly. Quickly and violently.

Not because she wanted to close her mouth, give her a riddle or push her away for some distance, building a wall between them.

It was because she understood why she was bleeding.

Her neck pulsed slightly. She felt nothing else, kissing Reyna's lips, as if she had done nothing else in her life and nothing else mattered as much as this moment. She embraced her face, Reyna did the same, kissing, sucking, picking up the pace faster and faster, but she felt that Reyna, although surprised, was responding to each of these kisses.

She wanted her close. Instead of forcefully wiping away the dried blood and watching it run down her skin, now she wanted to gently clean it, watch the wound heal and leave not even a trace.

“Zyanya...”

She had no idea if anything would pass through her throat. Perhaps only her name was safe. And even it defied all the boundaries she had been building for so long.

Reyna's thumb stroked her cheek, touched her forehead with hers, raising her purple eyes to the height of her own. She didn't dare finish the sentence. She had to leave it at that. Convince Reyna that she just wanted to say her name for no great reason, maybe to call out, maybe to urge her on, even if they weren't going anywhere in a hurry after all.

But Reyna smiled at her.

She didn't drone on.

Good.

Stunned, she watched Reyna's kisses go lower and lower, first to her collarbones, then to her breasts. Oh, she knew this sight. She knew it all too well. She knew her sides were trembling in the embrace of Reyna's hands as she tried to calm her breathing, but somehow she couldn't.

Or she didn't even try.

She tried not to close her eyes as the kisses slid down to her sternum, lower and lower, her breath gasping in her throat with every inch Zyanya covered.

She rested her palms flat on the wall behind her, her fingertips trying to find any support on the slippery tiles as she swallowed her saliva, hypersensitive to every touch, every breath and every kiss.

And it wasn't until Reyna herself placed Viper's fingers in her own hair while kneeling on the shower floor that Viper tilted her head back, because she probably couldn't take it without losing consciousness.

Because of how good it felt. With her thighs embraced by those strong hands, her fingers entwined in wet black strands, her skin marked with kisses, her neck endowed with a hickey, like the most important prize.

Proof. That Viper had completely lost the remnants of control.

But when she finally felt Reyna's tongue on her, her back arched away from the cold wall. And at first she didn't want to look between her own legs for fear that she would become more convinced than ever that Reyna was with her at that moment and wasn't going anywhere.

But then her leg was lifted and she was forced to watch Zyanya place it on her own shoulder, placing her other hand on Callas' hip.

“God…”

She mouthed the single word as if it was not her. Semi-consciously, she gathered the single strands of Reyna's hair that had fallen across her face, almost thoughtfully taking them into her own hand. A groan gathered in the pit of her throat with every movement of Zyanya's jaw, and she no longer knew where to look so that her knees would not collapse completely.

On Reyna's shoulder, entwined with her own thigh, decorated with tattoos? On her hands, where one held her hip, teasing slightly with her nails, but not enough to hurt or leave a mark, and the other embraced her raised thigh? Maybe at Zyanya's face, framed by her thighs, with drops of water running down her forehead, stopping at her eyebrows, gliding across the bridge of her nose or cheekbones?

Or at the purple eyes, flashing with something Sabine was afraid to name?

She bit her lip, not breaking that eye contact. Reyna didn't intend to either, not for a moment. She enjoyed every twitch of her thighs under her fingertips, the single jerks of her hips as she gave Viper all the pleasure she had to offer.

Maybe even more. Maybe she wanted to give her something more than just pleasure. To put an end to waking up in a cold bed that was suddenly too big. With pretending that Sabine is not at all the first person to touch her tattoos without even a hint of fear. With the idiotic tightness in her chest where her radianite heart was beating, which appeared when Sabine's gaze became too intense and dangerously balanced on the edge of risk.

Viper didn't know about time at the moment. It didn't exist. She was focused on how pleasure was building in the pit of her stomach, tying a tight knot. On how her moans became bolder, though she didn't even know when they left her mouth.

She clung to Reyna's hair for a dear life, wanting to form any meaningful sentence, but everything was lost in the pit of her throat irretrievably.

She knew Reyna, she knew she could use her mouth, she knew she could do it well, she knew she could make it so that there was not a single thought in Viper's head except for overpowering pleasure and intoxication. 

But still, it was different. And so she felt more now, a moment later helplessly chasing her hips with her tongue, trying with all her might not to bite her lip, after all she had promised. She allowed herself to let go.

She let Reyna hear all of her. Every sucked breath, gasp, moan or whine. Brushing through her hair again and again, thoughtfully caressing her face with a fingertip as compensation for her leg weighing down on her shoulder.

Until finally, the lack of words began to get to her as well.

“Zya... Zyanya, please...”

Maybe she shouldn't say it, because every single word pulled more and more of the jagged pieces of her blockage out of her hands, and that was something forbidden. Or maybe that's exactly what she wanted to do, because she was tired of having her own hands go numb trying to hold it together.

She didn't know what she wanted to say, what to ask. All she could do was comb through Reyna's wet hair, massaging her scalp with her fingertips, and hope she would guess.

Zyanya had guessed. Somehow she always guessed. After all, she always knew everything, and violet eyes never missed anything. 

So after a second or two, a familiar feeling in her lower abdomen filled her entire body, spilling through her like a sip of cold alcohol, flowed through her every vein, reached every nerve. That must have been it, because her head almost spun from the orgasm as, with Reyna's name on her lips, Viper bent forward, handfuls catching her hair.

Hot breath left her mouth again and again, the muscles of her thighs trembling under Reyna's fingers as she held her to the very end, wanting to prolong the moment as long as possible. As long as it was just the two of them, until her knuckles began to turn white clenching at the long, glossy strands of hair, until, after a while, Sabine rested her head on the tiles behind her allowing her hips to settle for long seconds under Zyanya's touch.

Until the echo of Reyna's name stopped between their breaths.

But this time Sabine wasn't going anywhere. She wasn't going to slam the door, she wasn't going to leave the bathroom or push Zyanya away and disappear before Zyanya had time to notice.

This time Sabine involuntarily combed through Reyna's hair, with a cloudy look as she watched Reyna rise from her knees. Her leg back in place, Reyna's hand embraced her hip as she tilted her head, as if this image of Sabine was one she would never tire of. Of those she could see every day and would be just as stunned every time.

And she just stared. Again. But the weight of that gaze from both sides was different. It pulled to the ground, made one aware, so aware that was probably why silence came along with that gaze.

Reyna looked at Viper. Her reddened cheeks, the blush reaching her cleavage, spilling down her collarbones. At the neck marked by a slowly distinguishing maroon mark, when Reyna could so perfectly recall how delicate her skin was in that area. At the eyes half-closed, so wonderfully stupefied, though still full of that characeristic fierceness.

At the lips that had just said her name in a way that Reyna didn't even know she had dreamed of until she heard it.

At how delicate she was just now.

And Viper looked at Reyna. A single hair stuck to her forehead, a spark in the gaze so often murderous, but now more human than ever. Sensitive. Soft. Warm. A tattoo stretching from her shoulder to her heart, shimmering under the skin. Reddened cheeks, shoulders rising in deeper breaths.

She reached out a hand and embraced Zyanya's cheek, stroking the skin there with her thumb. Her gaze fell on the vampire's lips again, half-open and as tempting as the first time.

But this time it returned to her eyes.

Maybe that's where she wanted to stay. With her breath shuddering, her hand on her cheek, her throat parched from violent gasps just a moment ago. With Reyna across from her, who swallowed her saliva as if she sensed it.

The fact that although they had now shed their tension as they usually did, unspoken as usual hung in the air, Sabine wanted to speak up. In that all too intimate, all too disconnected moment from their everyday lives, looking her straight in the eye and stroking her cheek with a single flick of her finger, as if she wanted to make another pattern of something that had not changed in her life.

The smell of sex was still around. Of rapid breaths. Blood rushing through their veins, adrenaline, lust and... something else. Heated glances and soft hands.

After all, Sabine liked silence, didn't she?

“Pretty,” she finally whispered as she moved her gaze across Reyna's face, wetting her lips with the tip of her tongue the moment she realized something. Another thing, leaving her eyebrows drawn together and her lungs slightly compressed. Another thing that made Zyanya seem to hold her breath. “No,” she interrupted suddenly. She took in a breath. “Beautiful.”

They both breathed a sigh of relief.

***

Viper stood on the threshold of Reyna's bedroom in an oversized t-shirt and shorts, though she couldn't even remember when she had dressed them. Her clothes slung over the bend of her elbow were unnaturally heavy, as if they wanted her to just stay there. She clung to the floor and didn't dare move, protest, just obediently leave it all as it was supposed to be. As if nothing had changed and was not going to change anytime soon.

Yet she broke away from that moment by hearing the bathroom door closing and the sound of bare feet on the panels. Reyna didn't try to sneak in, not now, although perhaps if by some miracle she knew Viper's current thoughts, she probably would.

“Reyna...” she began.

Her voice carried down the hallway, but the footsteps stopped. Reyna stopped at the level of her bedroom door, probably a bit surprised that Viper was still standing on her doorstep, even if she had left the bathroom earlier.

“If you want...” Sabine lowered her gaze. For a moment she looked as if she was struggling with her own thoughts, but after all, Reyna knew the look on her face. She knew all this because she knew Viper, so... she waited. As she always did. Viper shrugged her shoulders. “You have a pretty big bed.”

Zyanya's eyebrows lifted gently. Sabine waited for anything that would give her at least a piece of a clue to what Reyna might be thinking at the moment, even if it was to be a minimal twitch of an eyelid, the beginnings of a grimace at the corner of her mouth. Anything.

But Zyanya only smiled.

“Out of politeness, I won't deny it.”

She understood, right away. She didn't even need to get a full sentence out of Viper.

And the moment Reyna entered the bedroom passing Viper on the doorstep, the room suddenly stopped feeling so foreign. Everything returned to its place, every object made sense. Even the flower from the windowsill turned away embarrassed, no longer trying to judge Sabine Callas.

Soon after, the bedclothes stopped pressing into Sabine's skin, when Reyna covered them both, the mattress was no longer too soft, but perfectly aligned on both sides.

Outside, the night continued, the cicadas chirping, the warm wind skimming between the gutters. Viper with her hair scattered on her pillow, with her gaze fixed on the ceiling for the first few moments as Zyanya laid back in her place. She knew that in the dark her eyes tended to reflect the slightest source of light.

“I didn't know vampires were so warm.”

She also didn't know why she said that. Maybe the night reminded her of the chill she usually felt at this time, and now... it was so distant.

Reyna laughed quietly and Sabine turned her head in her direction. Her shirt had rolled up to her waist again, and Viper thought that was a rather interesting thing to add to her list of tidbits about Reyna.

“I wouldn't have suspected you of such stereotypical thinking,” she replied, raising one eyebrow, as if this assumption on Viper's part had indeed pricked her somewhere. Her smile betrayed her. “Is that a compliment, or not too much?”

“It's a statement of fact.”

Zyanya nodded, not even trying to argue. She only bit her lip for a second; Viper might not have even noticed it.

On the other hand, she noticed how Reyna's forearm hovered over Viper’s waist. And it seemed that she would back off, that the gesture was too bold compared to the exchange of words, but that was not the case.

“Can I?”

Viper looked first at Reyna, then at her hand, suspended in stillness over her stomach.

“You can do more than that.”

She wanted to bite her tongue, but didn't have time. She didn't want it to sound like that, at a time like this. She just wanted to... at least for a moment, pretend that she was in control. That everything was as it was, at least for a second without feeling that with each passing moment Viper was plunging into something from which there would be no turning back.

“I don't want anything, I just want...” Reyna wasn't offended, perhaps she expected it. Maybe she already knew Viper more than Viper knew herself. But she did not withdraw her hand. “Can I hug you?”

Viper felt like tightening her lips. A matter of habit. She didn't.

But she turned sideways, her back to Reyna. Without a word of explanation, hoping that this one gesture would be eloquent enough.

And it was.

Zyanya threw her arm across her side gently, pressing herself against her back. She could smell the scent of hair shampoo, fresh bedding, she could smell... Sabine. Even the contrast between the temperature of their bodies was somehow reassuring, although she couldn't explain it.

She seemed relieved to feel that Callas' muscles were not tight as a rock. She surrendered to her touch, letting Reyna cling flat against her back.

“So stereotypes really do lie.”

The whisper was so quiet that if it weren't for her overhearing, Reyna might not have even heard it. She hugged Viper's waist a little tighter, but laughed to herself at the words.

“Sleep, Sabine.”

And the cold really became distant.

Chapter 48: FORTY EIGHT

The ringing of the phone tore through the silence.

Reyna thought at first that it all only seemed to her, that she was still asleep somewhere and the melody was only contained in the world of semi-consciousness.

But the sound did not disappear or recede at all. On the contrary, it reached her more and more and more and more as it was penetrating her skull.

Viper also moved under her hand, so Reyna turned onto her back and rubbed her face. The ringing of the phone was too real to be a dream, so she raised herself up on her elbows and reached over to the bedside table, reaching the device.

She squinted at the bright blue light, then stifled a curse in her throat when she managed to read the name of the contact. And the time.

She picked up.

“Hello?” she croaked out.

She felt that her body still didn't understand what was happening, her eyelids sticking together, reality further blurred, and she collapsed into the mattress of the soft bed irretrievably.

“You have to go back.”

Brimstone sounded nervous. Maybe even desperate, because he preferred to throw out that one sentence faster than he would have wasted time saying hello.

The problem was that the moment he was upset, Reyna got even more upset. She managed to register that it was still dark outside the window, although the sunrise was probably lurking around the corner, brightening the garnet sky,

“What are you talking about?” she mumbled, throwing her legs over the edge of the bed and resting her elbows on her knees. She tried to whisper, not wanting to wake Viper, although she was afraid she wouldn't be able to stop herself anyway. “It's fucking four in the morning,” she said.

“I'm not happy about it either, but I have no choice. Cypher's cameras have detected something, and we have to be ready anytime.”

“Are you kidding me?” This time she didn't hold back her irritation. The mattress moved on the other side of the bed and Reyna heard the noise of the sheets. She didn't dare turn around, however, because for some reason she felt guilty. “We're in Mexico, Brimstone. Besides, it will be hours before we get there, damn it.”

She involuntarily ran one hand through her disheveled hair. Probably to keep herself from exploding as much as she would have been prepared to do.

And yet she should have expected it. The pass was still just a pass. They had to be both ready at a moment's notice, and a week off was only the best of all possible scenarios that could happen.

Reyna was still at work.

Viper was also still at work.

So why did this realization hurt her so much?

On the other side of the phone, she heard a sigh. For a split second, she thought that maybe Brimstone was actually sorry too, and didn't feel good about having to make that phone call either.

But it was just that one split second.

“And that's why I'm calling,” he said. Reyna gasped with indignation, not even realizing how tightly she was clenching her fingers on the phone. “Hurry up. I'll meet you there, I've sent the coordinates to your vulture's autopilot.”

Before she had time to protest, say anything or do anything, the call was cut.

Reyna clutched the phone in her hand for the next few seconds, staring in disbelief at its dark screen, where she could see the faint outline of her own reflection.

“Fuck,” she growled. At the last moment she refrained from throwing the device to the floor and watching it shatter into smaller pieces. Because then she would probably have to admit to herself that she was overreacting, and she didn't very much want to do that. “Unbelievable.”

A hand on her shoulder made her realize she was not alone. She sighed, finally able to toss the phone back on the cabinet, with the knowledge that Viper was awake. Although she probably hadn't slept since the very beginning of this conversation.

The clatter of the device's casing on contact with the wooden cabinet echoed, and Reyna first clenched her hands into fists and then wove them into her hair, wanting to get rid of the tension somehow.

“Was it Brimstone?”

The very sound of that nickname from Viper's mouth made Zyanya tighten her lips. And she didn't even know why Liam had suddenly started getting on her nerves to this extent, and probably even felt a little silly about it.

“Yes. There’s a mission.”

Her gaze was fixed on the wall. She didn't even turn her head when Viper sat down next to her. The echo of her hoarse voice was so out of tune with Reyna's mood that she even felt physical pain. Or physical rage. At herself, at Brimstone, or at all of it combined.

“Now?”

Out of the corner of her eye, Zyanya noticed Sabine wiping her face with her hand. She clenched her jaw.

“He sent the coordinates and told us to hurry up.” She wanted to stop herself, she really did. Because this was not the place or time to set a scene, because Brimstone actually sounded concerned, and because maybe this situation really was serious. But she still couldn't hold herself back. “Fuck, it's seven days. Seven fucking days, and it still turns out that we can't even have that much.”

Viper furrowed her brow. Zyanya saw these thoughts starting to slowly form in her head, and for some reason she was sure she would draw exactly the same conclusion as Reyna did a second ago.

“Besides there are a lot of people left at headquarters.”

Reyna snorted.

“Tell that to him,” she concluded, with a substitute laugh so bitter that it reminded Viper of her own to the point of madness. Viper noticed that her knuckles were beginning to turn white from the grip on her hair. “He slammed the phone down before I could make him aware of it,” she said.

Sabine squeezed Reyna's shoulder. The tattoo lines stretched slightly under the gesture, but she heard Zyanya's exhaled breath perfectly. It could have been like this. It could have stayed that way. Though she herself felt irritation seep under her skin in those characteristic waves.

“I'll talk to him,” she replied. Her tone hadn't sounded so cold in a long time. But this time they both found a kind of comfort in it. “Because he's starting to really overestimate my patience.”

Everything that happened next was so repetitive that both of them went through the steps in silence.

They packed their suitcases, got rid of any leftover sleep from their eyelids, returned to the place where they had left Vulture and boarded, moments later checking that every weapon and every magazine was in place.

The only thing isolated from the pattern was when Zyanya tossed a note to her neighbor that she could take the food from her fridge so it wouldn't go to waste.

And they returned to where they were. In the pilot's seat, with a heavy sigh on their lips and tension hanging in the air. The silence before the storm was something normal, maybe even something healthy, to at least calm one's head before opening the crosshair.

But Viper noticed that Zyanya's hands had been trying to manage the fastening of her knee pad for several moments, and each time the buckle slipped from her fingers.

Finally, she cursed in her native language and plopped down on the back of the pilot's seat, with one knee pad still hanging sluggishly from her calf and her hands pressed into the bends of her elbows.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Zyanya turned her head to Sabine when the question was asked maybe a minute after takeoff, and Vulture was already gliding quietly between the clouds.

Viper continued to stare into the glass for a moment, but for a second her gaze fell on that unfortunate knee pad and Reyna cursed her perceptiveness. But she didn't even feel like arguing that her hands, shaking with anger, weren't enough of an indicator that something was indeed up.

“I don't know if there's anything to talk about.”

Viper shrugged her shoulders.

“You can always make something up,” she concluded. She pulled her knees up under her again, as she did every time she sat there. “Let's start with what that poor fastening did to you.”

Zyanya knew it wasn't about the fastening at all. And it never had been.

She bit her lip as she looked at the piece of her armor, then took a deep breath and slowly let it out.

She had no idea if it did anything for her, but she could always tell herself that it did.

“I'm just pissed.” If it weren't for the fact that she was a little more than pissed, she might have found it funny by how trite it sounded from her mouth. “You were right when you said that the Protocol hasn't been what it should have been for a long time and everything is going to hell,” she said.

“All the more reason why you shouldn't feel bad about having enough of it.” Reyna raised her eyebrows upward, but then lowered them. Viper didn't seem particularly concerned about her statement; she might as well have been talking about the weather. “I think anyone in your position would feel the same way,” she said.

“And you?”

“We were dragged out of bed at four in the morning after two whole days of peace and quiet, and now we're flying to a place with guns in the trunk to put a bullet between someone's eyes.” She snorted a light laugh, because indeed, it sounded quite... sad. And at the same time it was true. “There's nothing in this to be happy about,” she said.

“But?”

Viper squinted her eyelids slightly, as if Reyna's question had knocked her out of her rhythm. Maybe she didn't expect to be able to make out her entire thought.

Or maybe she should have learned by now that Reyna could read more things out of her than Viper thought, and had been for a long time.

“But let's just say... it's like going back to the roots,” she said.

“Did you expect that?”

Viper smiled to herself, but it wasn't the smile Zyanya had seen in the apartment. Neither shy, uncertain, nor sincere. It was one of those bitter smiles that Reyna should be used to, and yet something prickled in her chest every time she saw it on Viper's lips.

“This was too good to last forever.”

Reyna was left with those words for the rest of the flight.

***

Viper looked at her all that time. How she reloaded the vandal in frustration, putting the magazine in place, clipping the others to her belt, how she checked the cartridges in the handgun with her lips tightly clenched, or tightened the shoulder strap. What was missing in all of this... was that composure that Reyna always carried with her. After all, she was good at what she did. For years she had been doing the same thing over and over again, the same moves, the same patterns.

And somewhere there was that smiling Reyna with a guitar in her hand and a Spanish song on her lips.

The engines continued to hum as the vulture descended in flight, and Reyna finished checking the weapon, propping it against her leg. Viper checked the gas emitters, the snake bites, the handy knife. Everything in its place.

Before she put the mask on her face, however, her hand was on Zyanya's shoulder. This one without the shoulder pad, as if she wanted to make sure she could definitely feel it.

“You know we will handle it, right?” she asked cautiously. The uncertain smile on Zyanya's lips did not look very convincing, but Sabine could even understand her.

Reyna hung her head, not commenting on Sabine's hand on her shoulder. Maybe she didn’t want to scare her. Or she just needed it.

“I know, thanks,” she said. Vulture sat down heavily on the ground and Reyna's fist collided with the button that opened the front hatch. “Let's make this quick.”

Viper nodded. She put her mask over her face and they both walked down the ramp, correcting the weapon on her shoulder. They immediately encountered several silhouettes opposite, including Brimstone in the lead, who was heading toward them with his typically heavy step.

The propellers of both vultures hummed for another minute until they fell completely silent, and suddenly both of them became all too aware of the silence before the storm. But not the comfortable one, the one that was supposed to bring some solace, but the one that tightened like a string as soon as Liam's gaze fell on their figures.

Sabine was glad that the mask covered the grimace on her lips, which she didn't have to hold back.

“It's good to have you here,” he announced.

Sage stood at his side, a fact that did not escape either Sabine or Reyna. Sabine, in turn, was sure that Reyna had minimally clenched her jaw.

“What exactly is going on?” cut in Zyanya, apparently not feeling like responding to her boss’ previous statement. She also bypassed Sage with her eyes.

Brimstone looked at Viper for a moment, as if hoping that at least she would answer him. She didn't. Mechanistically she tightened her fingers on the vandal, mirroring with her eyes the rest of the team that was in place. Good thing there was no time for pleasantries.

“Cypher has picked up activity from an unidentified device. I think they are drilling underground to obtain a large amount of radianite in a short period of time. The process doesn't take long, but enough for someone to figure it out, so they probably are holding all the corners around the drilling site, and we need to check it out and secure the device.”

“How many of them are there?”

Zyanya's question was straightforward. Somewhere in there Viper even understood her, she didn't want to be here as much as she did. They were just going to do their job and go home, and Reyna... well, Reyna was used to doing that job.

And for some reason Sabine felt very bad about it.

“A minimum of five. Sage will cut off one entrance to the site and take care of the one left. Skye will check A site with her, I'll check B, you will go from the middle to help on both if necessary, and Viper will take the balcony, as it has the best view of the drilling site. If the shooting starts, everyone is more likely to converge on one place anyway.”

“Where is Fade and Neon?”

Maybe Viper shouldn't cut in like that, because there was no time for that. Except that somehow she couldn't help herself. She saw Sage's quick glance, which fell first on her, then on Brimstone, and then stuck around, as if she suddenly felt bad about standing so close.

Good.

“Excuse me?”

Brimstone blinked, previously focused to answer Reyna's question, but now he was knocked out of his leadership state.

Viper did not back down from her question. On the contrary, she caught her vandal more confidently and straightened her back.

“Time and speed is important here, so where the hell is Neon?”

Sage continued to stare at the ground. Skye was adjusting her glove in the background, and unless Viper was mistaken, she sighed heavily.

“On the pass.”

“What?”

Viper's snort was somewhere on the border between indignation and amusement at this very absurdity.

“We'll manage without them. Skye will survey the area.”

“And how do you explain the absence of the other duelist?”

Silence. If Sabine hadn't been holding a gun, she probably would have clenched her hands into fists so tight that they would have started to hurt.

And she had already opened her mouth to say something, because the silence was eating into her skull, and the rage that she really didn't need now was starting to bubble through her veins, but then it was Reyna's hand that rested on her shoulder.

“I'll handle it, really.”

Viper turned toward her. She couldn't shake the feeling that Reyna looked tired. With the trip, this situation, or everything at once and she probably wanted to end the argument for the sake of the sanctity of them all.

Sabine's gaze softened, but only for that one second, because when she returned it to Brimstone, her eyebrows were again drawn tightly together, and she could have killed with her eyes alone if she had so willed it.

She arranged the vandal on her shoulder, Skye must have picked up on her move, because she did the same, thus showing her readiness.

“This conversation is not over. And you'd better know it.”

***

She knew that parting their ways in silence and tension that could be sliced with a knife was not very professional on her part, but if she were to be quite honest, she cared less and less about that very professionalism.

Her crosshair was open, by habit checking all corners as she was directed by Brimstone to head for the mentioned balcony.

One down. The device in sight.

She heard the usual two words from Sage's mouth and did not particularly react. A cold calculation drew only one conclusion - there were still four left at least. About the rest, she quickened her stride a bit, and with that reflexively tightened her fingers tighter on the rifle. Faster steps meant more noise, and more noise could attract the enemy.

God, she really was working too much.

Her steps were sure. From behind a corner emerged a staircase leading to a mezzanine, Viper remembered from the map that this was where the balcony she was to occupy was located.

Somewhere in the background, gunshots echoed, a few of them bouncing off the concrete, as she would have recognized that deafening sound anywhere. For some reason, Viper was sure it carried from mid, and she knew whose voice she would hear a second later in her earpiece.

Two dead.

The Spanish accent was clear without an ounce of breathlessness. Viper should have expected that the person who missed the shots was definitely not Reyna. Which was... disconcerting in a way.

The stairs squeaked as she rested one leg on them. Too much sound.

Too much echo.

She strapped the rifle behind her back, and from a strap at her thigh she took out a ghost with a recently repaired silencer. If someone was on the balcony, she preferred not to create more noise than necessary, quietly take her position and from a comfortable angle eliminate anyone who would try to make it difficult for Brimstone and Sage to take the device.

Simple. She knew how to do it.

She had to know if she wanted to get it done quickly, get back to headquarters, forget about that damned Mexico and all those thoughts that hadn't wanted to give her peace since she heard the first notes of a Spanish song.

Maybe it was even a good thing that Brimstone had called? She had a reason to break out of this strange, too-warm bubble and wash her head again with icy water, forgetting everything that seemed too... normal for Sabine and just take the rifle in her hand the way it always was.

Maybe it would be better if she just shut up and didn't make an affair out of something she really should have expected?

Yet the option of silence did not appeal to her at all.

She entered the room, dodging the broken glass on the floor. Hands clenched on the ghost, her eyes instinctively sought cover. She saw the entrance to the damned balcony, of course she did.

But she also saw the shadow of the figure that had just been on that balcony. And it circled, to the right, to the left, to the inside of the room too, probably. Sabine was lucky enough to enter it just at the moment when it was empty.

And Viper knew the kind of footsteps. Quiet, too quiet. Murderous to those who didn't know them.

She let out her breath slowly, calmly. She knew her mask was useful, but she also knew how much it spread unnecessary sounds.

She bypassed a pile of broken glass from another window and slipped behind the cover. She didn't have time to take a closer look, but it was probably an unusually old, rusty fridge.

Viper didn't quite know what the whole area was, but the room she was currently in resembled a social room, one of the larger ones. Who knows, maybe the balcony she was to use as a watchtower was once a place where one smoked a pack of cigarettes with friends on a lunch break and they converged here from neighboring buildings like bees to honey.

She squatted in her place. She listened to the footsteps, trying to catch a moment that might give her an advantage. The corridor on the opposite side was empty, the partially torn carpeting showing bare concrete.

There was a chance that if Omega Reyna headed that way to continue scouting, Viper would have a chance to shoot her perfectly in the back of the head without alerting anyone or anything.

A quick, sudden death. In addition, painless.

She had to wait.

She clasped her hands on the ghost, her finger hovered over the trigger, and she stared at the wall opposite, trying to focus on the arrangement of broken or fallen tiles that piled up in a pile at arm's length.

She would like to know if this Reyna can activate the Empress now. If so, Viper would prefer to get some support, if not, it was enough to just play it right.

She just had to calm down and listen.

Seconds became minutes, and minutes became hours. And Sabine knew it only seemed that way to her, that after all, Reyna couldn't be circling that damn balcony indefinitely, but that's what it felt like. It was as if Reyna was just waiting for her to stumble, to shoot her and suck a fragment of her soul out of her body greedily, reaching out a hand armed with claws, laced with tattoos.

She was a far cry from Reyna, with whom she had enjoyed a celebration of the dead in the Mexican capital a dozen hours ago, and yet she felt this strange weight on her shoulder, holding her ghost. One that she had never felt before as she prepared to kill someone.

Until finally, she heard the sound of crushed glass under the sole of her shoe. The glass poppy became even finer, and the golden upholstery of the shoe tip flashed in the morning light.

Sabine aimed, leaning out from behind the fridge.

The shot was quiet, almost like a whisper of wind. It was the sound of a falling body that was to be the loudest of the day.

It would have been, if not for the fact that the bullet slammed into the wall.

Viper missed.

And in the same second, purple eyes looked straight at her. The next, a gun was in Reyna's hands and a salvo of shots flew in her direction, perforating the casing of the old refrigerator like a sieve.

If she hadn't slipped into a corner more at the right moment, she would have received the fatal carotid artery hemorrhage long ago.

Fuck. Fuck, Fuck, Fuck.

She leaned out, trying to aim at the enemy's head, but the bullet flicked right next to her ear so close that for a moment her head was filled with a steady screech. She sent a few random shots to buy herself at least a few seconds to think.

They exchanged deliberately missed shots, Reyna retreated behind old kitchen cabinets, but Viper could hear her replacing the magazine from time to time, dropping the old one on the floor.

Anyway she did exactly the same thing, replacing an empty one full far too many times than her time allowed.

She had to think fast. Faster than Reyna, who could still be fractions of a second away from transitioning into the Empress state, and Sabine had no idea.

She knew that a few steps behind her was the second door to the balcony. Their frame was cracked and the wind rumbled, carrying down the hallway. She unbuckled the poison orb from her belt and threw it in front of her.

Reyna retaliated with a few blind shots, but when a hiss announced the activation of the smoke, and Viper heard a muffled cough, she retreated straight into it, thus allowing herself to enter the balcony.

She could have tackled her from behind. Her plan could still succeed, as long as she aimed perfectly at her head. She couldn't miss this time if she wanted to come out of this clash alive.

And yet she never missed, damn it. All the workouts, all the compilations of those fucking scoreboards, where the list of errors glowed white and announced to all and sundry the number zero. The workouts where she spent every possible leisure time so that she wouldn't think for even a moment that she might not be enough.

All those workouts in which Reyna had an identical score. Because they'd been in all that shit for too long to remember what it was like to miss, and their hands arranged themselves on the gun in a way that ensured survival.

And Omega Reyna was a mirror image. They were frighteningly similar, frighteningly dangerous in a one-on-one duel, and even if Viper could beat Reyna with her mind and strategy, if she got too close, she wouldn't stand a chance.

She was aware of this all this time. Keeping Reyna Mondragón at bay was the main way to survive.

Maybe even the only one.

And that's probably why her heart stuck in her throat for the first time in her career, when, emerging from a cloud of toxic smoke, ready to take a shot, she found no one in sight.

Only a second later, the shrill sound of Reyna's dismiss.

And then a forearm clamped around her neck and a low chuckle next to her ear.

“Predictable, huh?”

Flashes danced in front of Viper's eyes as the sudden lack of oxygen hit her head, and panic tightened her throat so much that for a second she thought she would suffocate just because of it.

The gun fell out of her hand as she struggled for breathe.

She reflexively grabbed Reyna's wrist in an attempt to jerk away, even though she knew she had no chance with her. Reyna tightened her elbow around her neck, putting the barrel of the gun to her head.

Sabine felt the coolness of the metal, laced with the minimal heat of the recently fired shots. She was convinced that it still smoked, still smelled of gunpowder and all those missed shots only for Viper to now feel the breath of the end on her neck and the echo of a woman's voice as she gloated every moment before her victim's death.

Viper bent her leg. She aimed her kick straight at the tibia, with the heel of her boot striking her opponent's leg with all the strength she had left.

Reyna growled, losing some of her balance.

The grip loosened, enough for her to break free. She heard the swish of the butterfly knife being pulled from its sheath, then the distinctive clicking of its joints, as Reyna must have sensed that she didn't have time to reload.

Well, sure enough. A knife was a more sophisticated way to kill. Prolonged death was always more frightening, and Sabine cursed her own words at this point.

Reyna was going to have fun.

Even if it wasn't the same Reyna. Even if this Reyna would most willingly watch her bleed out and happily suck out her soul, Viper couldn't reciprocate the same desire for murder.

And she didn't know why. Or she knew, but the thought was so debilitating that she pushed it to the back of her mind before it could block her own survival instinct.

All the blows she aimed, she aimed automatically. A few times she collided with Reyna's forearm, when the blade of the knife almost pushed against her cheek, she froze for a second, taking a punch under her ribs, but managed to hit her opponent's kneecap straight on, hard enough that Reyna felt it even through her armor, as she bent her leg and hissed something under her breath.

So many times she'd had training with Reyna. So many times the two of them spit blood on the mat with no relief, only to later silently apply ice packs to sore muscles and slowly growing bruises for several hours. So many times she had learned her moves by heart, trying to forge her patterns in her mind, so that in a situation like this, that knowledge could save her life.

Yet when her back collided with ground with a thud, and the shattered glass slammed into her back, Viper lost.

Reyna blocked her legs with her own thighs, and a smile lurked on her slit lower lip that meant only one thing. Satisfaction.

Satisfaction as she measured from the drawn out and now reloaded ghost straight into her face. And Sabine measured at Reyna with her own ghost, panting heavily and not even trying to remember when she had even picked it up.

Reyna's knife lay abandoned on the floor and alone reflected the light of day as death stared Viper in the eye. Vandal had become unfastened somewhere during the fight and now its back was touching the casing of the perforated fridge. She had no way to reach for it. She had nothing but the gun in her hand and her throat tightened in sudden breaths. The mask hung loosely from her neck, knocked off at some point during the fight.

The pistol barrels were almost in contact, captured in a grip dripping with desperation.

But it was Viper who lay on the floor, with specks of glass poking through her suit, her hands clenched on the gun so tightly they were beginning to go numb, and a look of green eyes fixed on Reyna, who knelt over her with eyes flashing with hatred and a smile at the corner of her vampire lips.

The flickering glow characteristic of Omega agents surrounded her figure, like the aura of death itself, and laughed Viper right in the face.

She felt the metallic smell of blood in her mouth, the throbbing, dull pain of a possibly broken nose, but most of all her own heart beating in panic in her own chest, which Reyna could certainly hear.

Even with a bruise slowly blooming on her cheek, a cut lip and clotted blood on her chin oozing from that lip, Reyna laughed lightly.

Too lightly.

“Are you going to hold back now?” she asked, raising one eyebrow. Viper did not answer, trying to calm her own breathing enough to at least minimally hide her fury. Or perhaps the terror she felt as she looked into the depths of the ghost's barrel. “Ay, Viper, come on. Don't disappoint me.”

Zyanya tilted her head. Her voice was mocking, because yes, she felt this moment as her triumph, felt Viper's pulse in her own ears, heard her breathing.

Sabine did not respond. Her hands did not move, her finger rested on the trigger, and her gaze was fixed on Reyna, who… fucking laughed again.

She withdrew her hands. Ghost fell out of Reyna's hand with a deafening crash, slamming to the floor. Viper didn't look in that direction, she couldn't. Instead, she looked at Zyanya raising both hands up in a gesture of surrender, the smile never leaving her lips as the image of the sun appeared to Sabine's eyes, who was still holding the gun in the same place.

“You have a clear shot,” muttered Reyna.

A statement of fact. She was right. And Viper’s finger continued to rest on the trigger, aiming at the weaponless (and perfectly aware of it) Omega agent.

Sabine gasped as the vampire grabbed her wrist and put the barrel of Viper’s to her forehead herself. The fang appeared to her eyes in that characteristic smile.

“So why don't you shoot, Doctor Callas?”

The question was no louder than a whisper. Viper pulled her eyebrows together, slowly feeling that she was losing the ability to breathe, that the air was becoming thicker than tar. Glass began to pierce through her suit, she squirmed slightly and was sure that Reyna would be satisfied with this grimace.

“Because all you're doing now is provoking,” she hissed. She sounded more tired than she wanted to. “You like to play with it too much, Reyna.”

Reyna squinted her eyelids. She still held Sabine's wrist in an iron grip, but this time she moved it aside so she could lean over Sabine's face.

Sabine couldn't kick her, her legs were blocked. The pain of crushed glass penetrating her skin gradually but effectively second by second took away her ability to think soberly. In the earpiece, someone said something, but she was unable to focus on it, she had no idea what stage the mission was at.

All she knew was that Reyna's lips were close to her ear when she said the next words with satisfaction.

“Or it is you who weakened.” Viper smelled blood from Reyna's cut lip. Or her own broken nose. She wanted to move away somehow, to do anything, but she was trapped beneath the assassin with no escape route. “Besides... you're out of bullets, aren't you?”

The truth from Zyanya's mouth echoed and was suspended in the thick air.

She was right. Her magazine was empty, she had used up all the others in an effort to buy time. Ghost was useless, at this point assuming the role of a scary toy that was only meant to stir up anxiety.

It was supposed to buy her time just like those damn magazines. But now she knew there was no escaping what awaited her.

Reyna could feel her fear. Overhearing gave her an advantage, and what could she listen to in this trashed room now riddled with bullets, if not the terrified heartbeat of her victim?

She didn't answer. She continued to hold her gun, even at her side, still pulled back by Reyna's grip. This, too, could have been a bluff.

Reyna might not have known that. She could have just thrown in that sentence, hoping to knock Sabine out of her rhythm with it and just then slit her throat.

Not this time.

Sabine knew that Reyna knew what she was saying. She was a duelist, she knew about cartridges, magazines. She knew how many were in a particular weapon, how long one magazine lasted, or maybe she was counting every single fucking bullet Sabine left in the wall, buying herself time.

Reyna was amused by her silence. She let go of Viper's hands, the useless ghost still lingering in her grasp, but Reyna wasn't going to bother with it.

She grabbed hers, abandoned on the floor in a false gesture of surrender. With her finger, she almost caringly embraced the handle as the cold barrel was applied to Sabine's throat. The latter embraced the handle with her free hand, covering Reyna's hands to somehow pull the weapon away from her own body.

But the tattoos on her arm began to shimmer purple, and that meant only one thing - Viper didn't stand the slightest chance against the Empress. Her physical strength was enhanced, her endurance, her senses sharpened. She could try to fight back, but even pushing against her hands with all her strength, she couldn't move the barrel back an inch.

“You and your mind games,” muttered Reyna. With her other hand, she grabbed her chin, forcing her to look into the glowing purple irises. Sabine tried to jerk away, but her opponent held firm. “Do you always have to play with your food?”

The next moment a shot rang out.

Viper closed her eyes. And she held her breath.

And the next, she felt something warm splash onto her face and the whole world stopped in that exact second.

Only when the weight fell from her body did she dare to open her eyes.

Omega Reyna was lying dead. A blood stain was beginning to grow next to her, staining the carpet a scarlet color, the same color that Viper now had on her own face.

A steady screech thundered in her ears. She was probably feeling sick. She was also probably utterly terrified. And she also had just smeared someone else's blood on her cheek, trying to get rid of it before it would dry up.

“It is a little disgusting, I admit.”

Viper turned her head. Reyna had just lowered the rifle from her shoulder, standing in the threshold of the room.

Sabine was panting heavily, staring at her at least as if she had seen a ghost. As if she couldn't believe that she was alive, that she wasn't here alone with death looking her right in the face. As if she still couldn't put it in her head that the shot wasn't meant for her.

Reyna strapped the vandal on her back and stepped inside, dodging broken windows and door frames. She extended her hand toward Sabine, who didn't take her eyes off her for a second.

Her own pulse was still in her throat. She could still feel the chill of the barrel against her own throat, even through the material of the suit. The opponent lay dead on the floor with a bullet in her head, perfectly aimed to kill in a split second, the room filled with the smell of fresh blood.

Reyna's hand, this Reyna’s hand, was warm to the touch. Soft. Sabine grabbed onto it and lifted herself to sit down, hissing under her breath as the pressure of the glass on her body disappeared and speckles sprinkled on the floor, falling off the black material.

Zyanya pulled her higher, helping her up.

“Are you alright?”

Viper didn't even realize how tightly she was holding her hand. She felt her own was icy cold even under the glove, the clotted blood from her broken nose drying on her lips. Only after a few moments did she raise her gaze to Reyna.

Her eyes were gentle.

“Viper?”

Before she knew it, she put her arms around Reyna. Her fingers tightened on Zyanya's shoulders looking for any kind of attachment, a grounding that she was okay now, that she would not die now, at the hands of a person who was identical to the one who had just saved her life.

Reyna carefully reciprocated the embrace. She placed her hand carefully on her loins, not wanting to touch the area wounded by the glass.

“I'll be fine,” Sabine finally said on an exhale, deeper and longer than she had in a while. Now it came to her how compressed her lungs were. Even the pain in her back and nose had been drowned out somewhere. “I’ll be fine now.”

She stepped back only when she was sure she had normalized her breathing and the shock was no longer so visible on her face. She felt sick with nerves and may have even wanted to say that she had never been so afraid before, but her throat was clenched for a few longer moments and she finally didn't say a word.

Reyna still kept her hand on her shoulder and for a moment she looked as if she wanted to say something, but immediately closed her mouth. She simply nodded her head at this one word of gratitude, giving Sabine one of those gentle, slightly bitter smiles.

“How did you know where I was?” she asked, once she got rid of the hoarseness from her voice. She almost didn't recognize him. “Ghost had a silencer, by the way, not just mine. Not that I'm complaining, just...”

“I hear more than you think, remember?”

It slipped her mind. She nodded her head.

“Yeah, right,” she admitted. She bent down to pick up her gun next to the dead Reyna, once she made sure she could do so without losing her balance. She carefully avoided the blood stain on the floor, as if staining her shoe with it was proof of what had just happened here. “What about the rest?”

She wanted to mention that she didn't make it to the balcony and had no way to supervise the rest of the team. But somehow she hoped Reyna had figured it out. And she probably did.

Or maybe she just didn't want to force her to explain at a time when Viper’s shaken and terrified heart could be heard so accurately in her ears that she almost shared that fear.

“We can go back. Everyone's dead. I was looking for the last one.”

And put a bullet straight into her head at the last second.

Reyna fled somewhere with her eyes. For a second, but long enough for that one question to appear on Viper's tongue and escape her lips before she could swallow it.

“How many did you kill?”

“Why does it matter?”

“Just tell me.”

“Four.”

“Of how many?”

“Viper, it really isn't...”

“It is. How many were there, Zyanya?”

Viper's hand found its way to her shoulder and squeezed gently. Reyna sighed. Instinctively, she looked at her own wrist, as if to make sure that purple had not appeared in her tattoos at that moment and that she was far from that very moment.

“Six,” she replied after a moment's thought. “But now let's just get out of here, okay?”

Reyna swung Sabine's shoulder on her own shoulders, aware of her injured back and broken nose. She didn't wait for Viper's answer, in fact she had no intention of letting her protest or stop her.

Sabine sighed. She remained silent, letting Reyna help her down the stairs with a grimace of pain and slowly headed toward Vulture.

The only thing she was sure of was that she needed to talk to Brimstone as soon as possible. And that it would not be a pleasant conversation.

Chapter 49: FORTY NINE

Viper lowered her shirt just after Skye finished tying the bandage covering her back. She thanked the initiator, who nodded and moved away toward the racks of suitcases, joining the rest getting ready to land in the hangar.

Her nose pulsed with a dull ache that stretched all the way to her sinuses, but went away with each passing minute thanks to Skye. She sighed, tying the sleeves of the suit around her own hips as she stood up, probably hoping to feel a little less shitty if she did so. At least a little bit as if she could wrap her head around all of this.

She couldn't believe she was saying it, but she probably needed a really good nap.

Vulture sat down heavily in the hangar, the engines still humming steadily for a while, the sound insistent in Viper's skull. There was minimal movement on deck, people were gathering their belongings, somewhere in the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of Reyna, who seemed to be carrying the luggage of both of them.

Viper brushed her hair away from her face and walked down the ramp as soon as the machine settled on the ground. She knew what she was looking for, or rather who she was looking for, but some part of her remaining decency told her to wait until the area had cleared up a bit.

She knew Brimstone would be the last to leave the hangar.

“You’re not coming?”

Reyna stood next to her and set the suitcases down on the ground, then looked around as if to find what Viper was looking for in her surroundings. Perhaps a reason why she still hadn't moved from her spot, leaning sideways against Vulture, with her suit tied around her hips.

“I need to get something done. I'll be right there in a minute.”

Zyanya seemed to notice the moment Callas' green eyes hung on Brimstone's silhouette, circling the Vulture.

“You know you can do it later,” said Zyanya cautiously. “Seriously, it's fine.”

“It's not,” Viper connected their gazes. She always did this when she wanted to show that she wasn't joking and had never been so serious in her life. “And you know it well. If I leave it again, it will drag on as long as he's comfortable.”

“He'll get bored someday. Probably.”

Sabine snorted. She folded her arms over her chest, wincing minimally as the healing wounds stretched her skin unpleasantly.

“This conversation should have happened a long time ago,” she replied. “Besides, you were not really amused by this call either. And rightly so.”

“Because I wasn't. But I know what our job consists of, and you don't have to stick your neck out for me once again.”

“I do.” The answer was thrown straight. In that tone that left no room for objection. Viper used it whenever she had a pattern of conversation already established and intended to see it through to the end. “We have more than twenty agents in the Protocol for a reason and you shouldn’t do eighty percent of all the dirty work, Reyna,” she said.

“You already tried once,” Reyna sighed. It wasn't a reproach, Zyanya sounded more like... resigned. “Maybe it just has to be that way.”

Viper furrowed her brow. She pressed her lips into a narrow line, not looking Reyna in the eye this time, but focusing her attention on the agents leaving the hangar.

“I'll keep trying until I get there. We both know what the training schedule is like, whose training repeats more often than others and a week off after making him aware of it is not a long-term solution. I thought he had seriously thought about it, but it looks like... well, you can see for yourself.”

“But you know you don't have to, right?”

The question came again, but this time it sounded somehow different. This time Reyna wanted Viper to be more aware than before that Zyanya knew she was doing all this in her interest. And that she is grateful to her, although she didn't want to say it so directly.

She remembered that Viper didn't exactly like receiving thanks. Probably because she didn't know how to do it, but Zyanya wasn't going to push. This one question had to be enough for both of them, and... it was.

“I know,” Sabine replied. Maybe she realized that Reyna was poking her gaze, because she stuck hers in her own shoes. One question was enough gratitude, she didn't want to accept the one hidden in her eyes as well. “Go now, I'll meet you in the armory.”

Reyna nodded. She caught sight of Brimstone, who was closing the Vulture's trapdoor and approaching them, still unaware that Viper was just waiting.

“I will be waiting.”

She took the suitcases and passed Brimstone, not even looking in his direction. Nor did she look back, wanting to avoid a possible exchange of words.

Liam probably didn't particularly remember Viper's words during the mission, because when she spoke up, he seemed extremely convincingly surprised that she wasn't just standing here for decoration.

“Okay, what was that?” she asked immediately, as soon as the man's gaze moved away from the side door that had just been slammed shut. “Just don't start this conversation with that 'I don't know what you're talking about' of yours, because I swear to god I'm going to get fucking pissed, and don't even try to ask me how I'm feeling, because I'll get pissed twice as much.”

Liam rested his large hands on his hips, letting out a breath. He may have forgotten Viper's words, but he certainly hadn't forgotten that he hadn't been able to outsmart her. That was rather impossible to forget.

“I admit, I panicked,” he said after a moment, raising his head to face the sharp and unyielding green. “This incident was an emergency, and I needed someone to handle it quickly and efficiently. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

“I want to hear where the hell the rest of our duelists are,” she hissed. “Or the rest of the Protocol in general, because I have the impression that lately in your eyes it has narrowed down to five people,” she added, at first trying to hold back her rage, but after one word she realized she couldn't. “I wanted to be nice, Liam, I really did. But either you give me one solid reason why Fade with Neon continues to warm their asses somewhere in the Philippines with some inexplicable easy pass, or I swear this is the last mission by your command I'll go on.”

Brimstone took a step first in one direction, then in the other, as if he simultaneously wanted to move some distance away from Viper, while on the other hand he was unable to move.

“You saw her.” Viper's eyebrows went up. “Within ten minutes she had cleared almost the entire area. You can't pretend she wasn't necessary in an emergency, because I remind you that if we had waited a few minutes longer, those people would have come back with a year's supply of radianite, which hell knows what they can do with.”

“Are you serious now, or are you trying to fucking piss me off after all?”

“Am I wrong?”

Sabine snorted. In disbelief, as if looking at Brimstone's face, she couldn't relate him to those words. As if she didn't want to believe they belonged to him.

“She's not a fucking dog you let off the leash when you need to scare someone.” It was pushing on her tongue to add that he probably spends too much time with Sage if that's what he thinks, but she restrained herself. “You can always take a bigger squad instead of her alone, and if you're short of duelists, recruit new ones for fuck’s sake.”

“A larger squad means more potential for death reports, we have only one Sage and she can't resurrect everyone on one mission.” he countered. Viper had to look away this time, because she didn't seem to be able to look at him. “New ones can be recruited, but you know yourself how long it takes to track down new radiants, then how much training it requires. They won't reach Reyna's level of efficiency for another few months, even if they were about to squeeze the last sweat out of themselves while training.”

“So you actually don't care what I say to you, because if you had at least tried to listen to me last time, you would have known why this is the shittiest solution you could come up with,” she spat out, not for a moment considering the curses that echoed around the hangar. “Go ahead and tell Skye to do Reyna’s blood tests once she manages to drag Reyna to the medbay after she comes up with a million excuses why she doesn't need them like she did last time. And then I want to be there when she reads you her results.”

Brimstone did not respond. He was simply silent for a long moment, and Viper was ready to assume that the conversation was over. She would even enjoy it. She had always liked having the last word, and since Brimstone had started to behave… well, like this, it brought her even more satisfaction than it probably should have.

But then he sighed and pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose in a gesture that Sabine preferred to attribute solely to herself.

“Reyna should now take part in as many missions as possible...” Viper was at this point ready to start screaming. And she heartily didn't give a damn whether it would be professional or not, but she didn't manage to say a word about how Liam wasn't listening to everything she had just told him. “...as part of the training for second in command.”

He surprised her. And not by the mere information that Reyna had given her before, but by the fact that he had mentioned it to her at all. Fact is, he had to tell her at some point if she was going to oversee the whole thing anyway, but looking at how long he's been able to ignore serious situations lately, she didn't think it would come so soon.

“But you do have a second in command,” she countered, batting her eyelids to play up her lack of knowledge in a relatively believable way. But also to stick a pin where it was supposed to hurt. “Right?”

“Sage has been suspended.”

Viper snorted with laughter before she could stop herself. Which was interesting, looking at the fact that she also knew about it.

“It's really amazing how many things you're capable of doing just to keep me from being reinstated to where I've always been and by some miracle nothing was getting screwed up as much as it is now. Are you going to tell the rest about it, or are you going to do everything behind their backs, as usual, and they'll find out about it themselves by accident?”

Brimstone ignored the last question.

“I already told you why you can't go back to your job yet,” he said.

“Unlike Reyna, I feel good and I’m not exhausted after doing the amount of work that should be shared throughout the Protocol. But you'd rather find ten side roads to the exit instead of taking the easiest one if it means you won’t have to face the consequences of your own actions.” Viper pushed herself off the Vulture. This time she was confident of ending the conversation. “I want to get a list of all the duelists' statistics from the last six months on my desk by tomorrow evening. And either you change their training schedule or I'll do it myself.”

Brimstone did not respond. Maybe he nodded, maybe he didn't, but Viper couldn't see his face anymore, leaving the echo of her footsteps behind.

In fact, she didn't even want him to answer her.

***

Reyna slammed her weapons locker shut the moment the sound of Viper's heels came from the armory door. She turned around, involuntarily scanning Callas' figure with her eyes, because unless her overhearing had misled her, she was limping.

Viper merely nodded in her direction, then headed toward her locker. Her suitcase was waiting for her just as she thought, and it was where she focused her gaze.

She didn't want to look at Reyna, even though she knew it was inevitable. That the conversation would begin anyway and Viper would have to say what she was thinking, because she was probably getting worse at keeping her indifferent mask on.

She opened her suitcase on the floor, but when she pulled the ghost out of it and straightened up to refill the magazine and then put it back inside the locker, Reyna was holding open the door of it and clearly following her every move.

It shouldn't have surprised Viper that she didn't hear her footsteps. Maybe she had the same way with it as with overhearing - she only walked quietly when she wanted to do so.

“We need to talk,” Viper said, taking a full magazine from the shelf. 

After so long she could replace it with her eyes closed, but she still stubbornly looked at her own hands. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see purple irises gently flickering in the twilight, and she could see Reyna trying to guess her thoughts even before she said anything.

“Then let's talk.” Zyanya shrugged her shoulders without a word of protest.

And she should protest. Because Viper didn't know if she was ready to face the events of today right now, even if she knew that filling out the report wouldn't pass her by. She will have to write down what happened. Explain how she was left without bullets, because the shot that was supposed to be the first and last one passed the target and left only a hole in the wall.

She knew that Reyna was patient. That she would not move until Viper actually started this conversation. So she waited until the suitcase was empty and was set down on a stand in the corner of the room.

Viper held it by the handle, her back turned to Reyna, her thumb stroking the worn anti-slip pad for a few more seconds.

She knew the weight of Zyanya's gaze very well. That's why she recognized when the woman stared at her back. Maybe she was thinking about how the sleeves of the suit looked funny, swinging at her sides. Maybe she was thinking about how the bandages stood out under her shirt, covering the healing scratches on her old scars.

Or maybe she was just thinking about why Viper had remained silent for so long, trying to force her own voice through her throat.

“I missed the shot.” That one sentence rang out louder than any sentence that had ever come out of her mouth in this room and she immediately had to swallow her saliva. “On today's mission.”

Although her back was to her, she was sure that Reyna was furrowing her eyebrows. And she probably even expected what she would hear.

“Is it bad?” 

It wasn't about almost losing her life that day by actually missing the shot. Because maybe it would have been something bad for Viper if she had acted and felt the way Viper should.

But her concern was not at all about the result of that missed shot and the consequences in terms of endangering lives.

Her main concern was the reason why she missed in the first place.

And that was Sabine's problem this time, who let her lower lip fall from between her teeth only when she dared to turn to Reyna. She sufficiently measured the gesture so that Reyna would not see the nervousness hidden in it.

And so she couldn't carry on this conversation with her back to her indefinitely. It had to end at some point, and Viper had to face the consternation on Reyna's face sooner or later.

She had to explain to her what she had just said.

And that was the most stressful part of it all. Maybe even a little embarrassing, because it was so unlike what Viper usually felt and what she had to explain that she probably couldn't handle it.

“I had a clear shot, she didn't see me,” she added.

It was as if she hoped this would explain enough and Zyanya would guess the rest on her own. After all, she had been on the range with her many times, they had even trained together many times, and Zyanya should also remember that Viper's stats were as flawless as her own.

That's how it was supposed to be. That's how it had to be.

Until this day.

“Anyone can have a worse day...” began Reyna, but Sabine only shook her head, and that was enough to make the thought abort. She fought the urge to put her arms around herself. “Sabine?”

The way Reyna said her name irritated her in a way that was unspeakable some time ago. She uttered it in a way that she knew got under Viper's skin, pretentious and pinched, as Reyna arranged the word on her tongue the way Viper hated it most.

“I missed it because she looked like you.” The silence never got louder. Sabine fought with herself not to escape with her eyes this time, because she probably wanted to make sure that every word reached Reyna. “I don't miss, Reyna, you know that. And now that bullet... it wasn't even close to her head, because she looked like you.”

She didn't want her voice to tremble at the last word, because, after all, she was just repeating the same sentence. But just because it happened, Sabine covered her mouth partially with the top of her hand, as if she was afraid that if she dared to speak further right away, her throat would tighten all the way and tears would appear under her eyelids.

Zyanya took a step forward. Her armor made the distinctive sound of metal joints bumping against each other, which filled the room in every corner. Her eyebrows continued to be pulled together, but the tenderness... and shock smoldered in her eyes.

Maybe she didn't know what to do. Maybe she was so surprised by this confession that she thought that if she came closer, some words would come out of her mouth. Any words.

She was unable to say even one.

“What if I didn't really want to kill her?”

Because she wears your face, and I couldn't watch her brains being splattered on the wall like an extraordinarily gruesome painting?

What if you weaken me in a way I'm afraid to admit, and even though I know the name of it, I can't get it past my throat?

“And is that such a bad thing?”

The question was like a soft blanket on a cold morning. Even though they were still tired from the mission, Viper still hadn't washed off the remnants of enemy’s blood from her face, and there were traces of soot and soil on Reyna's knee pads, Zyanya's voice gave the moment a sense of calm.

They killed their omega counterparts on a daily basis. In theory, they should rid themselves of the guilt of looking at faces identical to their own friends then, as life left their bodies. And they did. For so many years, the place of guilt was replaced by minimal discomfort.

Only discomfort.

Viper knew this.

Reyna knew it too. 

But they both also knew that this wasn't about the case of the omega agents. It never had been.

Viper took a breath. She wanted to at least play the pretense that she had everything under control, that she knew what she was feeling and nothing was slipping through her fingers. Something she couldn't put back together.

Or do as she used to do and take it out on Zyanya, clenching her hands into fists and yell at her until she would get tired. She had so many solutions she could use. So many words she could have said, but instead... she did what she did most of the time.

“I have to write out a report.”

She slipped past Reyna and slammed the door of the armory, trying to banish the shock and something that might have resembled disappointment on Reyna’s face.

She was sure Zyanya would stare at the wall for a while longer before heading to her headquarters herself. She'll be thinking over her words, what it all actually meant, and why Viper was even starting this conversation if she was going to end it that way anyway.

On the unspoken.

Even if to see some things, they no longer needed words.

***

“Who is it?”

Neon looked at Fade, lifting her gaze from the phone screen for a moment. The evening was warm, the wind humming quietly between the streets as they went for a walk, and although sitting on a bench the temperature had dropped a bit, it was still pleasant compared to the sizzling heat of the day.

“Skye,” she replied. She immediately furrowed her eyebrows and laughed as she read the message from Foster to the end. “She asks if I have any idea where her running shoes might be, because I saw them last, and since she came back from the mission she can't find them anywhere.”

Fade leaned more comfortably against the bench. At first she wanted to just accept this information, because it wouldn't be anything important if she didn't think about it. But she did. And her eyebrows also furrowed after a short while, even if at first she wanted to ignore this strange premonition.

“There was a mission?” she asked. She knew what the answer would be, so she asked another question. Even if she could feel her own displeasure approaching on the horizon. “When?”

Neon wrote back to Skye and immediately locked the screen, tucking it into her pocket.

“They came back this morning,” she replied and even wanted to stretch out more comfortably on the bench, but before she could do so, her gaze stopped on Fade. Her earlier indifferent expression was replaced by a question, at the sight of the initiator's sigh. “Something wrong?”

Hazal wasn't sure if she wanted to start the subject. They had been at Neon's house for several days, the weather was warm, she had Tala close by, and for the first time in a truly unremembered time she felt normal. It was as if everything related to the Protocol had disappeared for all those hours.

But no matter where they were now, or how much Hazal appreciated being here, she knew they would have to return to headquarters. Maybe not right now, maybe not tomorrow. A matter of a few precious days, but all those visions were ending up in the Protocol anyway.

And something was wrong in the Protocol. And that something was bigger than anything Fade knew. She felt it, felt that she didn't know everything and little - maybe no one did. Something was slipping away from them and Hazal was becoming more aware of it with each passing day.

“Do you know who was on the mission?”

Neon shrugged her shoulders.

“She mentioned Reyna and Sage. And probably Brimstone, apparently something sudden,” she replied. The corner of her mouth lifted slightly crookedly as the next thought popped into her head. “Not that I feel bad here or anything, but I'm starting to get bored with my own work. Just in general.”

Hazal remained silent. Then she nodded her head.

“So I'm not crazy yet.”

Maybe that was to come. Maybe they were both about to come to the same conclusion, only that since everyone at headquarters was silent, they too wanted to be part of the conspiracy, because it was more convenient that way. Something was established with Reyna, something with Viper, and they were supposed to feel safe in the face of everything else, which was probably... falling apart like a house of cards.

Neon sighed. There was nothing to hide anymore so she could speak out loud.

“I know that Reyna is older than us, has more experience and in general functions a little differently than other duelists,” she began, and if Fade wasn't mistaken, something probably stung Neon's chest when she said this. The subject of Reyna herself was still... touchy, although she was no longer slamming the door on passing her anyway, so it could be considered progress. “But we're also here for something and I feel like all I've been doing lately is sitting on my ass and watching TV series, because Reyna is assigned everywhere she can and no one else has to do anything. It's a bit like we're not here at all,” she laughed briefly, with little sound. “I thought I was exaggerating, but the rest of us noticed it too. Yoru only sighed when he didn't see himself on the agent assignment list before the last mission.”

“And it doesn't do her any good,” Fade interjected. She felt the younger woman's gaze on her. “I read her file. With skills like that there's no joke, simply put.”

Neon nodded. She knew very well what Fade was talking about. They both knew, in fact, because since radianite entered their lives, nothing has been the same. Priorities had changed, their sense of self-security had changed. Hell, even the awareness of one's own body, since it stopped being one hundred percent human and this bizarre element entered it.

“If you know it, why Brimstone doesn’t?”

Fade seemed to pause for an answer. And when she spoke up again, Tala understood why.

“I say this with reluctance, but when Viper was in charge together with him, everything was somehow more organised,” she said after a long moment, lifting the corner of her mouth slightly, as if she herself didn't believe what she was saying and she found this fact amusing. “Sage is a good person, but...”

“Not fit to be a commander?”

“I didn't mean to be so literal,” she muttered, still slightly amused. “But yes. Viper is a cold bitch who I don't understand and probably never will, but she knows what she's doing. Brimstone, on the other hand, goes around in circles trying to hide the fact that too many things are slipping through his fingers. Alone, it's hard to get the training schedule right, assign the right agents to the right missions so that it's safe and at the same time run the whole Protocol so that it does its job. Plus, if Sage doesn't know anything about those chores and there's a problem with Viper... it all goes to shit.”

“You know what it could be about? You know, all of this.” 

Now both of them were looking somewhere in front of them, as if they didn't want to allow the thought that they were actually talking about work at the moment. About problems they should have left behind the moment they crossed the threshold of the headquarters with the pass papers lying on Brimstone's desk.

“Other than the fact that Viper's biggest fear involved some kind of hospital, I know as much as anyone. Viper can't stand Sage, and Sage can't stand her because of something that happened before we were both even here and no one ever found out what they were actually about. Brimstone assigned Sage Viper’s job, so now the three of them take turns lashing out on each other. And when commanders do that, sooner or later something is going to screw up. Actually, it already did.”

Tala nodded her head. And thought for a long moment about what to do next. After all, the light-hearted atmosphere of the walk had probably already gone to hell anyway, hadn't it? She tried to tell herself that, to somehow motivate herself, to get her to do this one thread that she had kept quiet for so long.

There probably wasn't a good time for that anyway.

“Since we're already on heavy topics then... I want you to know that what... what you felt from me when... you know yourself what was going on, was not your fault.”

Her heart momentarily began to pound against her ribs in stress. She intertwined her arms across her chest as if she needed to embrace herself, and although Fade was sitting right next to her, Neon somehow couldn't look her in the eye.

She shouldn't be nervous. After all, she knew Fade. She wouldn't judge her, she wasn't like that. And yet in all of this... there was an element of that shame that she couldn't get rid of.

“If you're not ready...”

Neon shook her head. No matter how much she felt like admitting Hazal was right and shutting her mouth, then forgetting that this topic had even come up for another few days or weeks, she couldn't do it.

Fade deserved to know.

“It's nothing serious,” she said immediately, fiddling with the string from her sweatpants. She twirled it between her fingers looking for peace of mind. “No one hurt me, if you think about it, just...”

She had to spit it out. But she didn't know how. Every way she tried to dress up that sentence seemed inappropriate or strangely funny or stupid to her.

“I like kissing you. I like it when you touch me and everything. I just... god, this is so embarrassing...” She hung up again. And that was the moment she realized that if she didn't say it now, she never would. “I felt fear because I never had sex with anyone before, Hazal.”

And it was also at this very moment that Tala raised her eyes to Fade. Looking there for some kind of evaluation, maybe an opinion. A reason for Neon's strange urge to cry out of shame, although that would probably be even more awkward than what had just crossed her throat.

But Fade didn't look at all like she was going to judge her. Her gaze was gentle. And at one point she found Neon's hand, intertwining their fingers together.

The younger woman's hands tensed for a few more seconds before she was able to breathe. Once she was sure that Fade would not leave. When she was sure that there was indeed no trace of criticism on her face.

“Do you want to talk about it at home?”

Neon wanted to maintain eye contact, if only for the sheer proof that she wasn't stressing as much as Fade would have thought. Even if she probably felt her fear as clearly as she did every time.

Her gaze lingered on the cobblestones. But only for a moment.

It was a good idea. It was hard for her to swallow, the very vision of having to explain that a lot of things were still new to her, even if maybe at this age they shouldn't be. It was hard for her to swallow that Fade had to wait so many weeks for Tala to finally be ready to talk, because she was too ashamed.

But now Fade simply held her hand and assured her that it was all right, and she was going to let those weeks of waiting go, if only Neon was ready.

So she nodded.

“I think I do.”

Chapter 50: FIFTY

Viper didn't realize she had fallen asleep until she heard the sound of the lab door opening. She lifted her head from her desk, trying to realize where she was and what she was doing, but she didn't have time to credibly pretend that she wasn't asleep at all, because Killjoy immediately spoke up.

“Sorry, I didn't mean to wake you up,” she said.

She was probably ready to leave through the same door she had just come through, but stopped in mid-step when Viper waved her hand, straightening up in her chair.

“It's okay. I just dozed off for a minute,” she muttered, wiping her face with her hand, as if trying to sober up and prove to Killjoy that she hadn't actually disturbed her in any way. “Do you need anything?”

She rested her elbow on the desk, wanting to get rid of the confusion that was probably all too evident on her face. She had no idea what time it was or how much sleep she'd had, but she also didn't at all want Killjoy to assume her nap had lasted more than fifteen minutes.

Not that this was the first symptom of her frequent overtiredness, which Klara knew about by the way, but somehow this time... it was extremely humiliating. Because she knew very well what she had fallen asleep over and didn't quite want to admit it.

And besides she had an irresistible feeling that she would have to, because Killjoy already looked as if a question was forming in her head.

“I borrowed it,” she explained, extending a hand in Sabine's direction with the pliers Sabine usually used to fix her backpack. She accepted them and set them down on the desk. Next to the reason for her own fatigue she hoped Killjoy wouldn't ask about. “Skye asked me if I could call you in for a check-up in medbay and I had no idea what she was talking about. I didn't assume they would drag you back from the pass so early.”

She replied a little too quickly.

“An emergency call,” Viper answered, biting her tongue at the last moment she could say one word too many. “And I'll check in with Skye right away, thank you.”

Klara nodded in understanding. Sabine might have assumed that this was the end of the conversation and she was relatively safe and far from explaining things that she... didn't want to admit to herself.

But then Killjoy's gaze fell just where Viper feared it would fall.

“Mission report?”

Viper only glanced fleetingly at the few sheets of paper bound together with a stapler. The empty boxes laughed in her face when the only data written out was the date and the weapon she was carrying.

Because she somehow couldn't bring her memory back to that moment.

“Yes, I'll be finished soon,” she said.

“You didn't write anything.”

Viper tightened her lips. Killjoy's straightforwardness surprised her a bit, although she put it down to drowsiness. At least she tried. She knew that Killjoy was aware of the pedantry with which Sabine Callas approached her work. She always knew what to write, where to write it, her mission reports were detailed and polished more than anyone else's, because she treated them like a collection of knowledge about the enemy from someone else's perspective.

And now she was staring at a nearly blank sheet of paper without even one complete sentence, during the writing of which she might actually hesitate for a moment and then fall asleep.

“This mission... was quite complicated,” she concluded, seemingly out of breath. She tried to ignore the fact that she sounded exactly as she didn't want to sound - as if she had made up this explanation on the fly. “I don't quite know where to start, there was a lot going on,” she said.

She sent Killjoy an encouraging smile, in case the latter was worried. Except that she had no idea who she actually wanted to comfort. She felt that this conversation was going down a dangerous path, and although she tried not to think about it, she also felt that she couldn't stop it.

Killjoy will find out what happened sooner or later. From Skye, from Sage, from anyone else in any way. She'll find out that Viper couldn't look at the enemy Reyna and kill her on the spot.

Or she already knew, she was just being polite and waiting for the right moment to ask why what happened actually happened.

And Viper will then remain silent, because she won't croak a word. Even if that silence was killing her and she felt she had less and less control over it.

“Were you hurt?” Viper blinked, as if the question had knocked her out of her own thoughts. For a moment she must have looked genuinely surprised by the break in silence, because Killjoy shrugged her shoulders. “Since Skye wants to see you, you know...”

“It's nothing serious,” she assured. She wanted to wave her hand again, but feared that Killjoy would then see that the gesture was stiff. “Just a few scratches.”

From the glass that had been stuck in my back when the woman, who I couldn't kill in cold blood, aimed her gun at me ready to splatter my brains on that fucking carpet.

“Do you need help with that?”

Viper only realized Killjoy had a report in mind when she pointed to a bundle of papers with a movement of her chin.

She had the urge to take a pen in her hand and tap the cap on a piece of paper. Anything to occupy her hands, because she had a feeling she didn't know what to do with them to look neutral.

She bit her lip. She wanted to deny it. To tell the younger one that she could handle it, because after all, she always did. To watch her leave and listen to the echo of her distant footsteps.

But she asked the question faster than she had time to think through the scheme of action.

“Did you ever kill Omega Raze?”

She didn't want to look her in the eye. She didn't want Killjoy to find the answer on her face about why Viper didn't want the question echoed around the room like an avalanche in the first place. She didn't want Killjoy to see that Viper was ashamed of the question or afraid of the answer.

That's why she didn't look at her. But she knew that Klara furrowed her brow, taken out of the context of the conversation, and perhaps even opened her mouth and closed it, surprised by the sudden change of topic.

Viper already regretted speaking up. And it was once again in front of Killjoy. And also once again it was too late for her to take back her words.

“I don't know, probably yes,” she replied. Out of the corner of her eye, Viper saw that she was scratching the back of her neck, as if she was trying to remember this particular event. The moment when a bullet hit a person so similar to the one she knew from the other side. “Why do you ask that?”

She didn't want to answer the second question, so she didn't. She asked another, following the path she had marked out for herself through this maze of her own thoughts. She just had to turn at the right moment to find the answer with the solution. Because, after all, some had to exist.

“Did you pull the trigger right away?”

She cleared her throat. She didn't notice when it became so dry. Her gaze moved over the boxes printed on the file of papers, looking for some sort of solace in this. And all she felt was disappointment in herself for not being able to write even a single sentence.

“I don't...” Killjoy hesitated. Maybe she tried to remember again and laughed nervously. Sabine was not laughing. Sabine was terrified that it would turn out to be something wrong with her. “I mean... I guess? I probably had no choice. If she also shot then you know...”

Viper remained silent. She sat and let Killjoy's words nestle in her head slowly but effectively. They reached the marrow of her bones and... made her aware. So strongly and bluntly that Viper could almost feel that very realization pressing her to the ground and preventing her from rising from her knees.

She didn't want to say it. She shouldn't even think about saying it, not to mention actually doing it. But the words pressed against her lips, and maybe if she couldn't describe the situation in a report, and Reyna's gaze then in the armory was too intense, now was the moment.

“I held back.” She felt as if a stone had fallen from her shoulders. And at the same time, something else overwhelmed her immediately afterward. “I didn't shoot right away and almost died because of it,” she said.

“But... why?”

Exactly, why? How all these years you didn't have a problem with it, you were ready to sacrifice everything in exchange for precision and efficiency to be perfect at what you do, and now you are defeated by everyday life just because... because you let yourself hesitate?

Viper swallowed her saliva. There was no turning back now. She couldn't just walk out of here, not only for Killjoy's sake, but... also for her own sake. And so she had to face it. And so she had to write it down on that damn paper.

So she took a breath. Then a second. Then another.

And then she told Killjoy everything. From Brimstone's phone call in the middle of the night, to the vulture flight and the separation of tasks on the mission. With every detail, she was able to describe what she was supposed to be doing and what every person present was supposed to be doing as well. She said who was on the balcony, the moment when Omega Reyna's head was right on the crosshair and the seconds filled with nothing but shock when the bullet slammed into the wall.

And when, on her last exhale, she ended the story with the moment where Reyna finished what Sabine couldn't, she felt that she probably wanted to collapse into the ground. Her eyelids were burning. She didn’t think she even knew if she could lift her head and look at the younger woman, who had been gazing at her like a picture for so many years, and was now once again experiencing her failure.

“I hesitated,” she said at last, bringing up the two words. “My hand twitched, I don't know.”

How is it that it turned out she remembered every detail, and when she looked at the piece of paper, the words stopped making any sense?

“Did you talk to Reyna about it?”

She knew that the topic of the mission was never going to be the main one. That wasn't what Viper was worried about, even if she tried to tell herself it was, because... because it was easier that way. The mission report was something trivial, schematic, and something she'd had in her blood for so long that she didn't treat it any differently than making her morning coffee.

It was the thoughts that came to her while drafting it that tormented her the most.

She could tell the truth. That she had talked, that she knew why her brain didn't want to admit that she probably already knew everything she needed to know and was damn scared of it. That Reyna brushed it off, she thinks it's okay because it's all so fucking easy for her, and Viper almost chokes on that thought with every minute she's in the same room with Reyna.

And still she doesn't want to let it get to her. Because this is pushing the limits. All of them that have ever existed in Viper's life. Those which she's been willing to defend to the death since she became so much different than she used to be.

“No.”

Liar.

She tried to talk, she really did. Somehow, though, she didn't have the courage to tell Killjoy that when she reached a certain point, she was only able to dodge Reyna and leave the armory with all the words stuck in her throat.

“Maybe you should?”

She shook her head.

“She won't understand.”

Wrong. She understood all too well. So well that Viper couldn't swallow it.

“And that's why you asked me specifically about Raze?”

Killjoy spoke calmly, softly.

She was the opposite of the panic that sparked in Viper's eyes when she raised her gaze to her. She looked as if Killjoy had shocked her. It was as if someone had stabbed her in the spine with a dagger and turned the blade and the pain took away her speech.

Viper knew about the fact that Klara was dating Raze. And Klara knew that Viper knew.

“It was just an example,” she replied immediately, trying not to sound like she was panicking and mouthed the first thing that came to mind. “I just meant someone...”

She couldn't get that one word out. She was afraid of it. She could feel it weighing on her tongue because she hadn't used it before.

“Close?”

Killjoy leaned against the top of one of the tables. There was nothing on her lips at first, then a slight smile danced there, as if to assure Viper that her slight suggestion was not poisoned.

Viper felt just the opposite. Her stomach got tied in a knot and she probably felt sick.

“I wouldn't call it that way.”

Wrong again. That's exactly the word she wanted to use.

“And yet you could have asked me about anyone, and you asked about Raze. And me and Raze...”

“Killjoy.” Viper felt as if someone had kicked her in the ribs. “No.”

“Don't you think Reyna is close to you?”

She stumbled to her feet. She was at war with herself, although she knew which thought would win out over the other.

After all, she knew how she felt in that bathroom in Mexico. She knew that whenever she tried to scratch Reyna out of her life, she exclusively bled, and she knew that nothing had been the way it used to be for a very long time.

Everything had changed in that apartment. Viper felt as if she had settled on some stable ground there and the whole world around her was spinning in a peaceful rhythm until that one damn phone call.

On the mission she was once again doused with the icy water of reality. That the world wasn't limited to those four walls, and that their everyday life was different.

Maybe that's why she couldn't admit that her feelings back then... now should have been foreign to her. Now maybe she had to believe they became strangers because the environment was no longer conducive.

She should have accepted that.

And yet she couldn't.

“Protocol has its rules,” she said, carefully weighing each word to lend gravity to her voice. To convince herself and Killjoy that this really was a solid argument.

She knew she was ignoring that rule precisely for Killjoy. And Killjoy knew Viper was doing it.

“But you didn't deny it.”

Klara continued to stare at her. She stated a fact, once again. And she was right.

Viper wanted to protest. That she was going to. That it had nothing to do with her or that Killjoy was catching her by the word and exaggerating.

She said nothing.

Killjoy took her phone out of her pocket at the sound of the notification. Apparently she wasn't going to add anything. Because she had said enough.

In Viper's opinion, all too much.

“Sorry, I have training.” She threw it into the silence loosely. As if they were talking about the weather or the next invention. As if for Killjoy it was also all so simple and easy to digest.

“Sure, don't worry.” Replied Viper, breathing out. The words barely squeezed through her throat, but she tried to ignore it. “Good luck.”

She forced a smile as Killjoy walked out of the lab.

And it fell off her face as soon as the door closed.

***

Viper clenched her hands on the front of her clothes for a long moment. Her gaze was fixed on the window as she tried not to focus on the clicking of medical instruments.

She felt the gentle tingling of the healer's power on her skin for the second time in a day, and counted every second of its duration, because along with the tingling of the power itself... Skye's gaze was there, too.

She didn't feel good about it. Anxiety was growing in her, although she tried to pretend it wasn't like that at all, and clenched her hands on her clothes just to keep them from slipping off during the treatment, because it worked better without any barriers.

“Soon there will be no trace.”

She didn't even nod. She ignored the comment because there was more than that one statement hanging in the room. Viper knew the burden of unspoken questions all too well for Skye to hide it.

“I know it doesn't look very good, but I assure you it looks worse than it is,” she said. Immediately afterward, she grunted, wanting to get rid of the lingering tension in her throat. “Just take care of what you need to take care of.”

Skye felt caught off guard. Anyone would feel that way, Viper knew. She knew that feeling, when you lower your head in shame and there's a tightening under your ribs because the other person saw through you faster than you had planned.

Sabine knew that Skye’s eyesight had already been anxiously watching the battlements on her skin during the first round of treatment, which did not include the glass wounds. They were never meant to be the part. They weren't the ones that drew the eye, they weren't the ones that prompted the question that Skye probably had on the tip of her tongue, and Viper didn't want to hear.

“Sorry.”

She ticked off a point in her head that said that sooner or later that word would come up. She had expected it. She had expected everything, ever since she understood that the damage from the mission was too serious to do without the use of power. And yet she felt that uneasiness as the footsteps of both of them veered dangerously onto that damn thin ice.

“It's okay.”

It wasn't okay. She didn't want sympathy, because she always felt naked like that. Skye saw her life written in scars, and it was a sight she would probably never forget again. Maybe it was necessary and Viper had to show it to her in order to heal the wounds but still... she blamed herself for not coming up with something better. She could have waited it out, even if accompanied by pain and a few sleepless nights.

“You know, if...”

You want to talk about it? She wasn't going to risk the question ringing out to the end.

“No,” she answered immediately. Although she was sitting with her back to Foster, she knew she had kept her in an uncomfortable position between movement and inaction. “They're old. Sometimes I forget they're there at all.”

She lied.

She never forgot.

Every minute of her life since that event, she had felt every inch of taut skin. She remembered the layout, the shape of that largest scar and several smaller ones scattered along the sides, as if for that small moment the fire had grown bored with that one area and decided to disperse.

Only Reyna saw them.

She pressed her lips together.

“Everyone has some,” Skye muttered. If she was tense, she did her best not to show it. “It's part of the job, I'm not going to judge you,” she said.

“I wasn't going to assume you would.”

She lied again. Sometimes she was horrified by the ease with which she did it.

Skye focused on treatment, Viper stared out the window. The discussion was over. It was going to be, because if they had been standing in front of this thin ice before, now they had stepped on it, and it was beginning to crack.

So she backed off, resorting to what worked out best for her - silence.

And as was usual in such situations, she heard everything. The radiator, the fluorescent light humming in the background and the ticking clock. Everything else sharpened as she tried so hard to focus on the silence that the pressure she was putting on herself was blocking her.

That's probably why Skye surprised her when she dared to speak up again. Apparently for her, silence was not so comfortable.

“I valued your work.”

Viper gave up turning her head at the last moment. Her eyebrows drew together tightly, and the breath she took was like a kick in the stomach. The conversion took place without looking into each other's eyes, and Viper at least found comfort in that.

“What?” The question came out of her mouth quieter than she expected.

Maybe she didn’t even believe she had asked it until Skye said she could let her clothes loose now and the treatment was over. She threw Viper into the cold river and didn't even realize it. She began gathering utensils from the cart and cleaning up her surroundings, apparently finding nothing surprising in the fact that Viper didn't flinch once she straightened her clothes.

She didn't seek her out with her eyes, lowering them to the floor. It was as if she was somewhere nearby.

“As a commander,” Skye explained. Or at least she thought she had explained something. “Well, you know, earlier,” she added. Later she hesitated, as if she wasn't sure she could say everything she wanted to. But she sighed. “It was somehow safer back then. I guess.”

Sabine blinked. She still didn't turn around, feeling the surprise take over her body very effectively, because for the first few seconds she didn't even know what she could answer.

“Why are you telling me this?”

Skye flashed in the corner of her vision, bringing the scissors back to wash.

“Because you're not the first person to be patched up during this week. You probably won't be the last one either,” she muttered, and Viper found a surrogate of weariness in her voice. Maybe keeping this information to herself made her tired, maybe it was something else. Maybe she didn't want to say it at all, and yet she did. “There's been too much going on in the medbay lately. I mean, more than usual.”

She paused. She finished her thought and hoped Viper would figure out the rest. Later, Viper would understand why she hesitated. Right now she just caught the look Skye sent her casually. And she knew there was no way back now.

Viper usually knew a lot, but now her face was full of questions. She needed to know, and not for the mere fact of having that knowledge anymore. She needed to know because she felt it could give her much more than just awareness.

“Haven't you noticed that lately a lot of agents are coming back battered?” The question hung in the air. Skye wasn't sure if she wanted to continue, Sabine saw that. It was as if they were talking about something that was strictly forbidden. About realities. “A scratch here, a scratch there. A broken leg, an arm, a bullet or two. I'm not saying it's tragic, it's just... it used to be that most of us came back in one piece. You know, when you were in charge together with Brimstone.”

“Are you scared?”

Viper didn't even register the moment the question left her lips. She didn't intend to use Sage's name in the conversation, because she didn't need to at all. They both knew around whom the topic revolved.

Skye took a breath. It was the first time since Viper had come to medbay that she had stopped in full view of her, and Viper couldn't shake the feeling that she looked like a student who got a stomach ache under the blackboard out of nervousness.

No wonder, no one liked this subject. Everyone avoided it like a fire, pretending the problem didn't exist, so bringing it to light was never pleasant.

But until now, Viper thought she was alone with it.

“I don't know. It's unstable, I think. And I'm not the only one who thinks so,” Skye finally confessed, weaving her arms across her chest, as if that would help her play up the appearance that she's not at all uncomfortable talking about it. “Jett has never broken an arm before. Reyna usually doesn't even get a scratch, and Deadlock hasn't cut her thigh all the way to the living flesh in all the time she's been working here.”

“The missions are getting more difficult,” Viper stated. “It's normal that injuries are more frequent.”

Neither she nor Skye believed it.

“Don't you know what I mean, or are you just pretending because Brimstone told you to?”

Sabine blinked. She had expected directness from many mouths, in many forms. But somehow she never thought that Skye, who usually sat and listened more than took part in discussions, would be one of those who would take the last word out of Viper’s throat. Rather, the Australian was one of those composed and positive people in most situations.

And now Viper felt downright uncomfortable with how easily she was caught off guard.

“What does Brimstone have to do with this?”

After all, their conflict couldn't have been that noticeable, right?

“It's enough for me that the atmosphere between you two can be sliced with a knife, and you're not in the position you should be in,” she replied as if nothing ever happened. “I don't know what all the fuss is about with the command, but I do know that since Sage's signature is on the paperwork instead of yours, I stopped liking the way our returns to the base look.”

She didn't say anything more after that. Because she probably didn't need to say anything else, and she knew that Viper didn't really require any further explanation from her.

A blind man would be able to see that something was wrong. All the confusion on missions, in paperwork, conflicts that, although unspoken, manifested themselves in sharp glances and rarely exchanged words.

Viper left the room not long after. Instinctively, she glanced at the chairs next to the door, but they were now empty.

Entering here, she passed Reyna, who was also waiting for a medical check-up after the mission. She didn't look in her direction, although she knew that Reyna had done just the opposite. She couldn't look at her after what she had said to her in the armory, what she had thought, much less face what Reyna might have thought.

So with a quick step she walked through the vestibule door.

“Where are you going?”

She almost jumped up. She twitched at the sight of Zyanya, who gracefully blended in with her surroundings, leaning against the wall of the hallway, and asked the question so calmly that Viper had only one conclusion.

She was waiting for her. Of course she was. In fact, how could she expect anything else?

She wasn't going to get out of her rhythm. She hadn't had time to digest it yet, but she wasn't going to show it either. She had to remain neutral, as she always had.

No matter what mess she had in her head.

She didn't stop. She moved ahead, aware that Reyna would follow right behind her, but probably subconsciously hoped that she would get tired of it in a while.

Although, after all this time, she should have known that it had stopped working a good while ago.

“To the swimming pool.”

She threw out the first thing that came to her mind. It was an exceptionally stupid idea.

“Not at all.”

“Well, then to the lab.”

“Really?”

Reyna easily kept pace with her, and Viper didn't know if she felt good about it. Because she had no idea where she really wanted to go except ahead and as far away from her own thoughts as possible. So she chose the most natural option that came to mind at the moment.

“Okay, I'm going to go smoke,” she finally stated. And before she had time to rethink her own behavior, she added. “Are you coming with me or not?”

Her second question was to erase her discomfort. The fact that she tangled in her answers at first, and Reyna could probably sense her uncertainty a mile away. She was supposed to cover her tracks credibly enough to put Reyna's mind at rest, at least for a moment, when that one time she would decide that Viper could handle herself and didn't need her.

And instead she probably shot herself in the knee with that proposal. Because Reyna agreed.

***

Viper was used to the fact that it was Reyna who usually started the conversation. Maybe it was because she didn't like to show that something was bothering her, maybe it was because she preferred to keep certain things only in her head, or maybe it was because she was more comfortable that way.

Usually she matched the topic that was thrown around.

Now she started it herself.

“You shouldn't agree to what Brimstone is proposing to you.”

Reyna fired up her cigarette a second later, and looked at Sabine, who was leaning against the front wall of the building, staring somewhere between the swaying trees.

“You already know he won't let go,” she countered with a sigh, letting the smoke out through her nose. She often caught herself looking at Viper then, when they went out to smoke. Maybe Viper wasn't focusing on her then, because smoking brought her a solace she wanted to leave for herself. “I can just speed it up and get it over with,” she said.

“But that won't change anything.” Viper held the cigarette elegantly in her slender fingers. Her eyebrows were gently furrowed, perhaps she was thoughtful. “Skye already knows that something is going wrong. Deadlock and Jett do as well. It's only a matter of time before it starts to get to the others, and the more we mess around, the less they'll trust us and things will get twice as screwed. And I don't know if that's a good vision if they already feel threatened.”

“Even if, they still have no influence on what Brimstone will order. I don’t think that this will be the first thing in their careers that they will have any doubts about.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Other than a few pieces of paper, nothing will change,” Reyna said.

“But you're not the one who should be signing them,” Viper added. She was steady in her assumptions. “He should never put responsibilities on you that aren't yours, especially when the rest of the Protocol figures out that something is wrong. Another moment and they'll start asking about the genesis of this whole mess.”

“You know that's not a problem for me?” asked Reyna. Gently, but confidently. She was famous for her determination, her efficiency. And that's what she wanted to be now. Determined and effective. “I can accept this job. As for the rest of the agents, however it may sound, that's already Brimstone's problem. He created it himself, so now let him solve it himself too.”

The one time Reyna didn't look at Viper, Viper looked at her. She let the smoke out through her nose, squeezed the cigarette a little tighter.

“But it still won't work in the long run.” She was right. Reyna knew it, they both knew it. And worse, they probably all knew it, except Brimstone. They could only sigh. “How many more such scams will the Protocol have to endure before it comes to the conclusion that it does no good and never will?”

Sabine was probably tired. That's how it seemed to Reyna. That every sentence that came out of her mouth about the current situation dropped like a stone on her shoulders. Because she was right, Viper was in too deep, focusing much of her life on work to the point where she probably couldn't live any other way. She couldn't imagine herself in any other place, and struggled to choose one where she wanted to be when it was all over.

“If he continues doing what he's doing now, it will get him faster than he thinks,” Zyanya replied, smiling slightly, to the comfort of her soul. “Karma always comes back. And if Skye can see it now, the rest of us will also sooner or later understand that people shouldn't be chased out of positions where they've proven themselves.”

“Do you think the agents will rebel?” The question sounded downright unrealistic from Viper's lips. She herself parched slightly, as the very vision of such a thing somehow refused to cross her mind.

“Maybe not today or tomorrow. But I doubt that Brimstone will be able to withstand the resentment, if it eventually happens. He'll have to do something to regain their trust, and then you'll be back in your place.”

“And I'm supposed to watch him wreck the Protocol until then? Just like that?”

“Didn't he already do that the moment he suspended you?” Reyna drew smoke from her cigarette, and this time Viper was looking at her very closely. “The moment you're where you're supposed to be, you'll fix the whole mess faster than he has time to apologize to you. He could use a little drama, and the agents will feel safe when they know they're being properly taken care of.”

Sabine wanted to speak up, even if she had no idea what exactly was supposed to go through her throat like that. She didn't know what she should confide in coming here first, and once she started, she didn't know what to do about it next.

Even if she wanted to smoke, she wanted to do it in solitude. That was her first thought. Soothe her thoughts, stare aimlessly into space for a while and listen to the sound of the wind humming her a song.

But once Zyanya was here... Viper didn't regret it at all. She answered all her concerns and questions without a stammer, as if this time it was she who had the course of this conversation ready in her head instead of Viper. So that Sabine didn't feel so alone with her own mind.

“Skye seems to be thinking about what she saw,” she said.

Another topic she wanted to tick off in her mind. She knew she didn't have to explain to Reyna exactly what she meant. Reyna knew, she expected it. Maybe even from the moment she had stumbled into that room on the mission and saw Viper lying on the crumbled glass.

“She asked?”

Viper shook her head.

“No. She said it was a part of our job and she wouldn't interfere. But I don't believe she'll just forget about it.”

“You know, she's a healer. She's seen more than one scar.”

“You're probably right.” The cigarette smoldered snottily in her fingers, illuminating her face as it always did and as Reyna remembered. “Actually, I don't know why I'm telling you this,” she said.

“Silence can sometimes be awkward.” From the corner of her eye, Viper watched Zyanya push her cigarette into the ashtray and watched it go out. Later, she folded her arms over her chest and leaned with her back against the wall right next to Viper, as if the distance between them suddenly seemed too big. “Sometimes it's better to throw away what lies on your stomach,” she said.

Viper had a lot of things lying on her stomach. And every second she thought about it, that weight pressed her more and more to the ground. The fact that Zyanya didn't push, the fact that Viper was here with her at all now, even though she was convinced that after the situation in the armory she wouldn't be able to be in her company for even a minute. The fact that she was finding answers to her inquiries and doubts as if she had been doing it all along and didn't even have to focus on it.

The fact that they both loved the silence so much, and now Viper was the first to break it.

She took two more inhales of the drug. For peace of mind so that her lungs, suddenly compressed from nerves, were filled with a familiar warmth and tickling sensation.

“If that's the case, then... I haven't thanked you yet.”

Now her cigarette, too, was finishing its life next to that of Reyna's in the glass ashtray. She felt Reyna's gaze on her, but this time she decided to reciprocate the look, even after a long moment's consideration.

“For the trip to Mexico. And, well, for saving my life.”

The corner of Reyna's mouth lifted. She laughed briefly.

“It’s nothing, really.”

Viper didn't respond. She could leave it at that and then it would be safest. Everything would stay the same, even if she knew perfectly well that nothing would ever be like that again.

“Not for me.”

Lately, however, she liked to complicate her life.

Before she went back inside the headquarters, she leaned over and left a gentle kiss on Reyna's cheek. After that, she no longer looked back, heading down the corridor to her room.

For that moment, it had to be enough.

Chapter 51: FIFTY ONE

Deadlock ran her fingertip over her half-empty beer mug for a very long moment. Maybe she even forgot where she was sitting and how long she had been sitting, because it wasn't until she focused that she heard the bland music coming from the speakers above the bar. And hell knows since when it was actually playing.

Maybe it wasn't the smartest thing she could have done during the pass. Maybe she was just wasting her time, taking a seat at the Norwegian bar and thinking about things she probably had no control over anyway, or things she couldn't undo anymore.

But here she was anyway, every now and then taking a sip of cold beer and plucking at the edge of the glove covering her bionic hand. Not that she was ashamed of it, but somehow... she didn't particularly care to brag about it, especially when there was quite a crowd around.

Sometimes she wondered if she couldn't just come back here. Rent some kind of apartment, find a normal job and start life again, this time as an ordinary, unimportant citizen of her native country, who smokes one cigarette every morning and goes to the store to buy some bread.

The protocol was supposed to bring her... she didn't know herself, maybe some sense of entitlement to something important. Something given to her by Ursa, where she was a kind of elite individual. She was good at what she did, Ståljeger appreciated her, and she thought it would stay that way forever.

And then her friends were killed in front of her eyes by a blood-thirsty beast that took away both her family and her arm.

Mechanical fingers tightened in her gloved hand.

The Protocol gave her the constancy of what was happening. A team, a purpose. Many of the things she lost as she bled to death on the floor of that building before Sova took her out.

And then she met Sage. And then everything seemed all too normal to be true. And then it turned out she was right, because that's exactly how it all started to go the wrong way, and that's how she ended up here, staring into a mug of beer and plucking at that stupid glove.

She took another sip.

“Iselin?”

She swallowed. She turned right, then left at the sound of her name and searched the crowd for someone who might be the author for a few moments, until her gaze finally fell on the figure of a man who, unbeknownst to her, approached the bar, pulling his hat off his head.

She glanced at him, not understanding for a second what he meant. She could tell it wasn't her, that it wasn't her name. That's probably what she should do to protect her privacy.

But beneath the long beard and a few wrinkles, something familiar lurked.

Her eyebrows lifted when she realized what it was.

“Diego.”

It had been so long since she'd uttered the name that she felt it didn't fit her tongue, She barely mouthed it when she matched the man's features to one that hadn't yet completely blurred in her mind.

The man sat heavily on the bar stool next to her, clutching his hat in his hand as if his life depended on it and the shock took away his ability to stay upright. Icy gray eyes roamed the entire silhouette of the huddled Iselin, as if he didn't know what to focus on so to be sure.

His hand hovered over her shoulder and he hesitated for a moment before placing it there and squeezing.

“Yes. Damn yes it’s me… Jesus, I thought you were dead,” he said. The whisper was heartbroken and for a second Iselin thought they were both going to cry, but then she realized it was just shock. “Oh my God, it's really you.”

“I'm sorry.” That was all she could mouthed as her gaze focused on her friend's hand clenching on the material of her turtleneck so tightly that it was beginning to wrinkle. “I didn't... I couldn't say anything.”

Diego let out a mouthful of air, took his hand off her shoulder and combed through his tangled hair with his fingers, still staring at Iselin as if she were a ghost.

No wonder. To Ursa, she was dead along with the rest of her squad. Buried by radivore on that one mission. For Ståljeger, perhaps even more dead. They noted her death when they didn't find the body, and the suitable report lingered somewhere in someone's desk drawer and never saw the light of day again.

Just as Deadlock never saw her Ståljeger brethren the entire time she was recruited into the Protocol.

“How did you survive?” The question almost rang in her ears. “I was there, I saw the bodies... Christ, there was so much blood, I thought that thing tore you to shreds and took you with themselves...”

Iselin clenched her bionic hand into a fist and hoped that the noise of the working prosthesis would drown somewhere in the general noise of the bar.

She laughed briefly, bitterly. Maybe that was the only way she could react to get rid of the guilt that suddenly began to choke her like never before.

“I thought it was over for me as well.” Reflexively, she pulled at the hem of her glove. A nervous habit she had acquired in public. “It's a terribly long and really complicated story,” she said.

“You're lucky that it shocks me too much to look at someone who is formally dead.” The silence that followed all luck lasted only a moment, because she wouldn't have been able to stand it any longer. “Where have you been?”

Iselin bit her lip. She should have buried her past in Ursa the moment she crossed the threshold of Valorant headquarters, but somehow... somehow she could never forget what had happened. Who she was. Honestly, she couldn't even remember if she had ever let herself miss home. The cold of the Norwegian wind, the crunch of snow underfoot, or watching the stars with friends as the wind ruffled the unfolded tents.

The Protocol was a secret organization. Hell, probably all organizations in this world were like that, so did it really matter? She would have jumped on fire for Diego those few months ago, and with reciprocity. Maybe she'd even be willing to sacrifice her arm one more time if it meant Ursa wouldn't have to lose members.

She thought about whether a new team had formed.

“I've been recruited,” she finally said, embracing her mug with her hand. She watched as the drink sloshed against the glass walls, trying to choose the right words. "No one except me survived, so maybe I just wanted to run away. And it was easier for Ståljeger to consider me dead." She sighed. "I know it sounds crazy. But after the Svalbard incident, I don't think I was able to go back to the way things were before, no matter how much I wanted to."

Diego let out an overly long breath. He looked as if all this information was very slowly coming together in his head, and he was trying to somehow encompass it all with his mind. Deadlock was probably afraid to look at him, because if she had to choose, she would much prefer if he didn't notice her at all when entering the bar than if he had to do so and look at her resentfully the whole time.

She didn't know if she was proud of her own choices. Maybe she wasn't. Maybe she'll regret for the rest of her life that she didn't return to Ståljeger, that she didn't give others a sign of life, and that that death certificate actually lay in a drawer somewhere. Maybe Valorant had indeed partially filled the hole in her story, but that little piece of the void remained somewhere anyway.

But she couldn't turn back time. She had to live with the version of herself she had chosen over the other and the choices she had made.

“Please, say something.” She didn't even realize when her throat tightened. She thought she could better endure the silence, that she would be able to stand up for her own decisions. “You have the right to be mad at me, if you don't want to talk then I will get that, really,” she said.

“Iselin, I just found out that you are alive, when for six months I thought otherwise.” She looked away. Maybe she was afraid of the end result of that thought. "And I would just walk out like that now? Shit, you don't even know how much I missed you."

The Norwegian woman felt her eyes well up with tears. The weight fell off her shoulders with a bang, and she laughed, this time sincerely, and nodded gratefully. She left the mug alone and placed her hand on the bar counter, taking a few deeper breaths to chase away the moisture under her eyelids.

Iselin never had any siblings. She grew up as the only child of her parents, most of her life aware that she would have to go through most things in her life alone. She never thought of this as a bad thing, as it had always been that way, and was reconciled to the idea that she did not and would not have a brother or sister.

She spent her first adult years in the army. And sometimes she wondered if this wasn't the result of her subconsciously looking for some kind of family substitute, after her parents died quite young. Later, when she entered the ranks of the best fifteen cadets at the military academy, she found herself in Ståljeger, where she met many people for whom she would have given her life more than once.
Diego was not directly a member of Ursa. He supervised their missions from headquarters, but served in another subdivision himself, which did not change the fact that whenever she and her Deadlock unit returned to base, they always found themselves in each other's presence. Their little family.

And then she realized that the term brother or sister didn't necessarily refer to blood ties at all.

“This is something new,” she said, once she had collected her thoughts. “I mean, different from radioactive teddy bears,” she added when she felt that she was actually lighter. “It's actually quite a ride,” she said.

“You know how to get a person interested.”

Iselin furrowed her brow. And then she finished her beer and jumped off the stool, and before Diego had time to ask, she placed the money on the counter along with her lighter.

She tried not to smoke. The process of quitting smoking had been dragging on for some time, but she told herself that sometimes everyone needs that cigarette in their lives.

“We won't gossip here,” she chuckled and, zipping up her jacket, patted her friend on the shoulder. “Come outside, the walls have ears.”

***

“Valorant Protocol,” she finally spoke up as the long-forgotten gray smoke escaped through her lips. “That's where I am now.”

The wind wailed between the buildings, though Iselin found comfort in the sad song. There was plenty of snow, the cold was everywhere and her toes were slowly starting to feel familiarly numb, which was probably a sign for her to slowly head back inside, but she probably wanted to enjoy it all more.

Diego raised his eyebrows and then furrowed them, she saw from the corner of her eye.

“Should I know that name?”

Deadlock only snorted with laughter, shaking the ash off the end of her cigarette with a gesture too habitual for it to be obvious that she was at least trying to quit.

"If you don't know it, it's better for us. I think it indicates well," she concluded. "But I haven't fallen far from the military. A lot of things are repeated, so who knows, maybe it's just me who likes this kind of atmosphere." She inhaled a puff of smoke. “Although I didn't think I could ever describe my future job as saving the world.”

“And that's how you describe it?”

Diego probably found it hard to tell if Deadlock was serious or just some elaborate puzzle that didn't lead to anything, and she just wanted to make a joke.

She shrugged her shoulders.

“My team is something like a staff of superheroes high on radianite.”

Diego first burst into laughter, because fact is, it was as funny as it was true, but soon after, the laughter subsided, and Deadlock noticed the consternation on his face. Maybe he was wondering whether he should say what was on his mind, or whether it was better to leave it to himself.

He only spoke up when he took a drag of smoke.

“This, on the other hand, I may know,” he said.

“A staff of superheroes?” She laughed. “Come on, I didn't know they existed until they spoke up.”

"Not everyone waits for something like this. Some find out on their own."

Iselin averted her eyes from the high-voltage cables, lightly blowing in the wind, and glanced sideways, as if she didn't believe the words belonged to her friend.

"What do you mean? Were you looking for Protocol?"

She reflexively looked around, at least as if a crowd of people had suddenly gathered under this very bar, ready to overhear any information they exchanged with each other.

She trusted Diego. She had no doubt that he couldn't have done anything wrong, but I guess she still felt minimal anxiety at the very thought that someone might be following her and the rest when they had no idea.

"Well, I wasn't necessarily ‘looking’, I was just... you know how it is. Someone says something, and you remember it like it's seriously something important."

She did not feel at all reassured by this statement. But she knew she had to remain calm.

“What did you hear?”

She nonchalantly shook the ash off the tip of her cigarette. It began to burn to the end and she tried not to think about the urge to reach for another.

The smoke was carried away by the Norwegian wind.

"A few years ago, a buddy of mine got hired at the front desk of a hotel. As far as I know, it was supposed to be some kind of cover so he could lounge around for a while, I don't remember, but whatever. I think your, as you put it, superheroes high on radianite stayed there."

Iselin raised an eyebrow. The chance that she would meet her old friend at the pass was almost nil, but the chance that someone this friend once knew would associate with the Protocol was, in that case, on the downside.

“Why do you assume it was them?” she asked.

“Maybe it's stupid, but... he was talking about a woman in an extremely tight black and green outfit.” He smiled shyly. Maybe he wasn't sure if he could make a joke out of it or not. "No one from ordinary special units wears something like that, if it was indeed the kind of outfit he described. The other one was talking about some kind of healing and also looked... well, unusual. Besides, they were supposedly alone in the building, and who rents out the entire hotel for two people if not someone most of the world shouldn't know about?"

“Did she have red hair?” She asked the question before she could stop herself. “The other woman?”

She had a certain feeling. And she herself didn't know if she wanted to check if she was wrong, but it was too late.

"Probably not, as far as I know. They were certainly long. And I'm sure she was terribly angry about something, because I still remember him telling me that." He paused in his thought. Maybe he was putting the rest together in his head, but he still approached it loosely, because that smile that was exchanged when they met years later was wandering around somewhere. “I don't remember the names, because some he mentioned, but the world is small, so I wouldn't even be particularly surprised if they were part of your team.”

“Sage?” For some reason, her throat tightened, saying that name. But she didn't know herself anymore, whether from shock or disbelief that she might be about to know something she maybe never should have known. “Did the first woman call the second one Sage?”

Diego seemed surprised that Deadlock asked this question. He looked at her, probably concerned by how stiff she sounded.

He could tell himself that it was because of the temperature, that they were actually standing in the cold, where the wind hummed and muscles involuntarily stiffened. But he knew a little about Deadlock and guessed that it wasn't coming from nowhere. Not this time.

“Yeah, I guess... I guess so,” he said finally. Iselin clenched her jaw, and it didn't escape his notice either. “You know, I don't want to come off as brash, but you're starting to scare me a little.”

She ignored the second part of the sentence. She felt a lump start to grow in her throat that she couldn't swallow. Probably she even held her breath.

“If you know what they were talking about, you have to tell me,” she finally replied. Slowly and calmly, trying to soothe the nerves that, not knowing when, had surfaced. She felt it was something bad. She felt it was something bad and inevitable. “It's really important,” she said.

"It's hard to tell. I know they were arguing. That whole Sage was furious, and the other one generally didn't look too good. He even wondered if she was sick and whether to call, you know, an ambulance or something, but decided not to stick his nose into that." He put out his cigarette in an ashtray attached to the railing. “They rented one room for the entire stay, but only the one of them left the room at all,” he said.

“Sage or the other one?”

"Probably Sage. Somewhere after a week, when he came for his shift, the key was on the reception counter, and they disappeared," he added. “So far he doesn't know what it was about, but he himself admitted that it was pretty damn weird.”

This time it was Iselin who put out her cigarette. And this time the urge to light another one right away was stronger than ever.

“Fucking shit.”

Diego was unlikely to understand why she said that. But he nodded, taking a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and holding it out toward Deadlock, as if he read her thoughts.

“Fucking shit indeed.”

***

“You need to stop sneaking around like that.”

Reyna didn't make much of Brimstone's remark, who, after a second, put the game controller down on the cabinet under the TV. The tournament with Gekko went well and had just ended when Mateo got a reminder for his sparring with Yoru and left, but Brimstone was apparently in no hurry to get going.

That's why he was surprised by Zyanya's sudden presence at the doorstep of the entertainment room (the one that wasn't under renovation), although he probably tried to pretend that wasn't the case at all.

Reyna shrugged her shoulders. With her gaze she followed the movements ogr Liam, who was probably purposely all too slow in unplugging all the cables and closing the applications with the remote control for the TV, without forcing himself to make a more extensive comment.

“I agree,” she said instead, stopping Brimstone in mid-step. “I'll take the job if this is the only way out.”

It wasn't the only way at all. And they probably both knew it, but neither of them wanted to admit it. Actually, Reyna could, in fact quite willingly, make Liam realize that in fact the best and only way to get things back on track was to give Viper the job, but she decided not to.

If she wanted to teach him a little lesson in humility, she had to pretend to be extremely ignorant of life for that moment.

"Alright. I'll send you the most up-to-date data from all the cases that started along with guidelines for what you'll do."

Maybe he was hoping that the conversation would end at exactly that point, and Reyna would disappear as quickly as she had appeared here. Maybe that's the way it usually happened, that he got what he wanted, demanded and required, and the rest just blindly followed that command. Which probably indicated that Reyna had been right before, and Brimstone would indeed get what he wanted, no matter how much time he gave her to think about it.

He was wrong.

Reyna wasn't even going to budge. She leaned sideways against the door frame, perhaps subconsciously taking away Liam's escape route in case he wanted to leave her alone with this information without going into details.

“I hope Sage doesn't have access to the database,” she said, seemingly reluctantly.

Even if, on the other hand, she was very eager to make him aware that if Sage was around her when she didn't want her to, only one person would come out of a given room alive.

She tried not to think about how her terrified pulse felt under her fingers. She would become addicted. Or she would develop an urge to do it again. As much as it would take.

“Cypher discharged her from the administration on my recommendation, you should be added by this afternoon,” he said.

“And are you sure Sage won't get involved?”

Maybe she shouldn't ask that and dig too much into it. But she wanted him to know that. That she wouldn't think twice if Sage even tried to bend the limit of her patience. That she would know that next time she wouldn't end up with a bruise on her neck that could easily be covered up.

And at the same time, she knew her value in the Protocol, so Brimstone could not get rid of her. A soothing feeling of satisfaction.

He furrowed his brow.

“Since when do you dislike her so much?”

She was tempted to say everything she knew that Viper had told her. Something that only she and Viper knew about Sage, and something that would absolutely bury her pristine image in Protocol's eyes.
But she couldn't do it. Not unless Viper let her.

So she just parried with laughter, as if the question was exceptionally stupid. Well, for her it was, for Brimstone less so. Although, after all, it was not the first time she had said something like that in his presence.

“Are you surprised?” she asked. Brimstone did not answer, she intertwined her arms on her chest. "Ever since she sat down with you at the helm, all we get is a kick in the ass and nothing works, which you already know, because I told you about it. Get used to it."

"And you're going to be mad at her for the rest of the world about the same thing? We've been on this topic for the umpteenth time, Reyna."

“If you think this one is the last one, you're wrong,” she muttered, although she knew he heard her perfectly. "She deserves to talk about what is happening. Besides, I'm not the only one."

She stuck the pin exactly where she wanted it and how she wanted it. She struggled to hold back a smile at the surprise that momentarily appeared on Brimstone's face. And at the same time she managed to take an interest in her fingernails, pretending that she had unconsciously just said exactly that sentence.

“What do you mean by that?”

It's that everything is falling apart, and you're here, playing stupid games, as if you're either unaware of it or pretending exceptionally well, which drives me crazy. The fact that you don't know who you're managing, the fact that terrible things were happening under your nose, and you never even fucking asked her if she was okay.

And she thought about Viper again.

Viper thanked her. In a way that didn't fit her. In a different way, so different that the fact that she let people think about her as someone bad somehow hurt Reyna more.

Insensitive, too harsh. Everything wrong, everything constantly wrong. But no one ever asked. No one ever sat down with her, perhaps in the dark of night, and let her cry into their shoulder. Because to others, she always had to be fucking strong, and they believed that was always the case.

She clenched her jaw for a few seconds before she spoke up.

"People talk. Didn't you know?"

She felt like laughing just to make him feel stupid.

"Reyna, spare me this. Let's act like grown-ups."

She kept her retort to herself only because she bit her tongue at the right moment. And it's a shame, because maybe if for once Liam had been confronted with the accusation that he was the one acting like a child, it would have made him realize something.

Although frankly at this stage she was already beginning to doubt it.

"Skye knows something is up. Well, and she herself has stated that she is not the only one. She mentioned Deadlock and Jett and how long do you think it will take before this thing spreads further?"

Liam put his hands in his pants pockets. He got serious that second when the last echo of Reyna's words rang out. It was about time, dammit.

“What exactly did she say?”

She was tempted to tell him to ask Skye himself and face the consequences of his decisions. But it was a waste of her nerves, because she was starting to feel sick of being here.

“Nothing other than I did,” she concluded. "That too many things are uncertain, that they feel anxious and that you can see the differences in the schedules of the different agents. Your week off didn't work, Brimstone. They won't forget so easily, and until you do something about it, you can't sweep this pile of garbage under the same rug."

“That's why you are where you are.”

She looked at him as if she didn't believe what she had just heard. She didn't expect an admission of rightness, in fact she knew very well that she wouldn't get one, but she probably would have preferred silence to something like that.

“You realize that this is like putting a band-aid on an open fracture, right?” Brimstone didn't answer. Not surprisingly, in his place she probably wouldn't have anything wise to say either. “When are you even going to inform Viper that she's supposed to be helping me?”

“When you show up in the system as an administrator, I'll send her an email.” He apparently decided to ignore the first part of her statement, and she involuntarily snorted in disbelief.

“So you don't even have the balls to look her in the face?” she chuckled before she could stop herself.

Brimstone didn't seem outraged, and even if he was, he didn't show it from himself. In fact, he was all too irritatingly calm, while Reyna felt her fingers begin to clench tighter on her own forearms with each passing second.

"I don't need you to criticize my ways of communication, so let it go. If you care so much about it, you can let her know, but believe me it would be better if we settled it by email."

“You're fucking pathetic,” she growled suddenly. She wasn't going to hold back, not now. He couldn't do anything to her anyway, he needed her too much. It gave her a sense of security and that longed-for freedom of speech. “You've been building this place brick by brick with her, and now you're tucking your tail because you're afraid of confrontation.”

Brimstone took a step forward. Then another. He entered Reyna's space, consciously violating it, because maybe he wanted her to feel that she had overreacted.

She felt no such thing, continuing to tighten her hands on her forearms. She faced his gaze, proudly lifting her head, even when they were less than half a meter apart. She wasn't going to let him intimidate her.

She was ready for the fact that he could slap her. She wasn't Viper. She hadn't been friends with Brimston for years. She had no right to say that, as one of her subordinates.
But that didn't stop her, and she didn't feel bad about it.

“Do I look like a coward to you?” he said slowly.

Zyanya furrowed her brow. Her gaze traced the entirety of his face, where there was suddenly this wave of suppressed rage that was pleasant to watch. She returned to his eyes, lifting her head higher.
She wanted to be sure he was looking at her when he said those words.

“No. You look weak.”

She pushed herself away from the doorframe, turned on her heel and left.

She intended to look at the gym, just to keep from going crazy for the rest of the day.

***

Viper sometimes wondered if not knowing about some things would work out for her. The less she knew, the better she would probably sleep at night, sparing herself unnecessary thoughts and just living day to day from event A to event B without much conclusion.

And yet she had just stared at Reyna's blood test results and regretted having any medical knowledge. It probably made her feel her own heart in her throat.

A list of efficiency statistics of the other duelists, provided to her by Jett, piled up next to her. She wasn't particularly surprised that Brimstone hadn't reported them to her personally, but on the other hand, maybe if he had at least tried to look her in the eye and been shaken by the shoulders as he should have been long ago, she wouldn't have let out an unusually long breath with her mouth.

She felt like taking all those papers and tearing them to shreds. All they showed was that she should fight harder for her job. Force him or Sage to take concrete steps before this all went too far.

Yoru hasn't been on a mission in almost two months. And Phoenix's results on the shooting range had clearly deteriorated in a matter of weeks. On top of that, there were a few other problems that she had managed to find out.

Then there was Reyna. The cortisol level in her blood was way above normal, and Viper could imagine all too well what havoc could be happening in her body at this point in combination with radianite.

She couldn't let her be in command now. No matter who was written in the papers, Reyna couldn't be sent on a leadership mission alone, even if the world was about to collapse.

The fact that Reyna wanted to be in command stirred Viper’s mind enough. In general, Reyna had lately specialized in messing with her head, rearranging long-established blocks, paving new corridors in the intricate maze of their relationships that went through walls and, even though they had no right to exist in theory... they somehow worked.

That's why she kissed her cheek in gratitude. Because Reyna had messed with her head and stirred so much and so incessantly that Viper stopped distinguishing between how things were supposed to go and how they were currently going. And that alone should have given her the signal to end it. That she should start protesting, maybe set clearer boundaries.

And she didn't do that at all. Although she could have.

Looking at these results, it was beginning to come to her that she just... couldn't.

Couldn’t cut herself off. Couldn’t walk indifferently past the tattoo of the sun, stretched out toward her at a moment when she thought death would reach her. Couldn’t look at the statistics, reconciling herself to the idea that Reyna was indeed the best duelist, and it had to be that way. And not feel anxious at all, reading the elevated cortisol levels in her blood, and instead treating it as a normal side effect of stressful work.

She wiped her face with her hands. Routine was something she had so far greatly appreciated. She thought she would be fine with returning to headquarters. After all, her job wasn't changing, and she liked constant things.

And now she was distracted. The bucket of cold water, instead of sobering her up, only made her yearn more for the warmth she didn't think she needed until now.

Everything became more convoluted, and she couldn't focus. All she could think about was that damn tattoo on the inside of her warm hand over and over again as fear squeezed her throat. She thought about the fact that although she didn't say it out loud, she was terrified by the realization that she couldn't kill Omega Reyna.

Because she suddenly became different from every other Omega agent. Because she had become familiar. Because, dammit, Viper had broken her own rules and was now feeling the consequences when her finger hesitated on the trigger.

It didn't mean anything, after all. It couldn't.

Viper couldn't feel that way.

But it was because of Reyna that she couldn't pull the trigger. Because that one opponent looked like her. Omega Reyna looked like Zyanya, whom Viper saw so often, was close to, whom she knew, whom she...

Oh.

The pen fell to the floor, but Viper didn't even try to pick it up.

Oh.

Chapter 52: FIFTY TWO

She felt her muscles tremble with fatigue, and another drop of sweat ran down her back, marking her skin with an unpleasant chill.

Her lungs were filling with hot air, but that didn't stop her. She needed to get rid of this... everything from inside. She hoped that this tension in her veins would begin to disappear with more hits to the punching bag and that the screeching in her ears would be drowned out by the jaws of the suffering chain it was swinging on.

She hit it again.

What if she hadn't made it in time? What if she'd had to watch the river of blood pooling on that concrete? And all of that because there weren't enough of them.

Another blow, followed by the next one.

Because Brimstone ignored everything. Damned asshole, whose power was already coming out through his nose, thought that he would always wield it and no one would dare to oppose his orders. He didn't understand anything, blindly following what Sage told him, trying to wash her dirt off his own hands.

She felt her knuckles hurt even through her gloves. She wasn't going to stop at all. She was aiming more blows, ignoring the drops of sweat that ran down her nose, the burning muscles of her legs, the sports bra that stuck to her body almost like a second skin. She had no idea how much time she spent here already.

Viper. Viper would manage it. Viper would clean up all the mess they had introduced. But they didn't want to give her a chance, telling her that she was doing something wrong. That she was bad as a commander, as a person, as a second boss. They saw her mistakes everywhere, while being blind to their own, because, after all, it was always more fucking convenient that way.

Her arm began to burn with a living fire. She didn't stop, even if she felt she would have to bandage her hands.

Viper could feel. Hell, Viper felt more than all of them. She cared about everything the rest of them didn't notice, until she didn’t. And then the problems just started.

That's why she could have died. That's why her heart was beating at that moment with such a deafening sound that Reyna felt that terrified rhythm with every inch of her body. That's why her breaths were quick, as if they were going to be the last ones before death at the hands of Omega Reyna would take her.

It didn't matter that Sage was with them and could revive her. Because Sage might not have been there, now they would just get lucky.

If Omega Reyna hadn't held back from firing those two seconds, Viper would have died at the hands of someone she couldn't kill because she looked like her.

When the hit fell, it was deafening. The bag came off the hook and slammed against the floor in front of Zyanya.

She stared at it for a moment, panting heavily. Maybe in the first moments she didn't believe that it was lying there and that she had actually ripped it out of its place.

Trembling muscles, sweat trickled down her temples, which she could already feel even on her own lips, grimacing at the salty aftertaste. Her throat was dry and her breaths were shallow and fast.

She should be worn out. She should be. And that should make the tornado of her thoughts stop humming so persistently, at least for a while.

But she didn't seem to feel any better.

“Whatever it did to you, I wouldn't want to be in its shoes.”

She raised her head. Raze was holding her water bottle, sitting on the windowsill in a break from barbell squatting, and seemed to have fused with her surroundings so effectively that Reyna only remembered her presence when she spoke up.

She unfastened the velcro of her gloves and dropped them to the floor. She squatted by the hook on one side of the bag, and picked it up.

The urge to train had passed, so she simply moved it against the wall, with the idea that she would report it somewhere further away and Phoenix, or whoever, would hang it up again.

She felt that trying to lock it up in place again would only irritate her more.

“Sorry,” she replied. “I didn't mean to lash out.”

She sent Raze an apologetic smile as she turned away. Not that it would explain her, but it’s always something. Lashing out was quite... quite an understatement, and she knew that the Brazilian was probably more surprised by the whole incident than Reyna was.

Any way you looked at it, a punching bag was more likely to be associated with hanging from the ceiling than lying on the floor. Maybe if Reyna had cared to rebuke herself for the excessive force used, she would have done so, now she could only sigh.

She reflexively glanced at the tattoos on her wrist, as if to make sure the Empress wasn't about to wander into the thresholds of the gym. But aside from her bubbling frustration and excess energy, which even torturing the bag with her fists didn't help get rid of, her other form of being kept at bay. And that was a good thing. She didn't need it here now.

Which didn't change the fact that she wasn't particularly happy by the thought that Raze had witnessed this rather peculiar show of force. She'd rather want nobody to see that. Especially after the last mission.

“Don’t worry, really.” Raze shrugged her shoulders, although Reyna couldn't shake the feeling that she was looking at her more than usual anyway. “You know, I may not be very good at that, but if you want to chat or something, feel free.”

Reyna brushed away a few strands of hair that stuck to her sweaty forehead. She took a few deeper breaths and swallowed her saliva, as if only now realizing that she could no longer stare aimlessly at the floor if she wanted to look like nothing was actually happening.

“It's complicated,” she finally said, deciding to take the middle option. “As much as I'd like to, I don't even know what I could tell you.”

She snorted, faking her amusement. In reality, she was strangely embarrassed by this. Because there was something shameful about losing control of her own strength right after she had been exhausting herself to her last breath for the last hour. Maybe it would have been better if she had been here alone. Or at least with someone who was also a radiant. It probably would have been a little easier to avoid the concerned gaze.

“I wouldn't have been thrilled either if they had taken me off the pass earlier,” muttered Raze, putting the watter bottle down on the ground. “It’s fine to be pissed about it.”

Reyna rested her hands on her hips, furrowing her brow at these words.

“I'm not pissed.”

“No?”

Raze's gaze fell on the bag standing against the wall. Zyanya involuntarily glanced there as well. With minimal guilt, she returned her gaze to the younger woman, but shook her head.

“It's not what you think,” she said. She must have looked extremely foolish saying that, because she knew perfectly well how she looked at that moment. She wiped the sweat from her upper lip reflexively. “I just wanted to get some exercise,” she said.

“As far as I know, you don't have a workout today.”

This was not difficult to deduce, because even a blind person would have noticed the very obvious absence of Zyanya's name from this week's schedule. Which, on the other hand, contrasted with the amount of assignments she got for missions over the past few weeks.

“It's... an individual need.” She took a long time to find the right wording, probably because fatigue was slowly but effectively flooding her brain with a wave of fog. Finally. That, in turn, was a good sign. Who knows, maybe muscle fatigue will sooner or later turn into head fatigue and this flurry of thoughts will finally disappear after all. “A one-time thing,” she said.

“A need to lash out?”

“Not really.”

“Reyna, I may be younger, but I wasn't born yesterday.” For some reason, the way Raze glanced at her made Reyna feel uncomfortably exposed. “I'm not forcing you to tell me anything, but if that could help... go ahead. It's better for you than to finish yourself to death here.”

She wondered if this had anything to do with her appearance. Probably yes, she probably looked like she actually had a problem. And she looked that way all too clearly, since Raze could so easily see that something was wrong.

Because there was something wrong. Lots of things, she could have even listed them alphabetically.

Instead, she simply reached for the water and nodded with that uncertain smile.

“I appreciate it. But I can handle it.”

She wasn't sure if she had told the truth.

***

“Why is everyone acting like they're at a funeral?”

Cypher's hand hovered over the chess board, pausing to think about her next move. Fade rested her elbows on her knees, leaning forward slightly, as if to show that she cared about the answer.

However, he placed a pawn on the next box before answering.

“This question is very out of context,” he stated.

Fade glanced fleetingly at the board. She was losing, although she expected it, especially if her thoughts had been completely elsewhere for quite a while.

Maybe playing chess after a long trip wasn't as good an idea as she thought at first.

“I know there was a mission. Did something happen there or what?”

She made her move, not really caring about it. That's probably why Amir muttered something to himself, as if surprised by the move. She probably did something stupid on the board.

“The mission went according to plan, you shouldn't worry about it.” Another move. “Check.”

“I'm concerned because you haven't even raised your head at me once since we started playing,” she replied, not thinking for a second that she was actually about to lose. She saw that Cypher hesitated. He put the pawn back in its place, giving up his move. “You know something.”

Amir sighed. Fade thought it was a very interesting phenomenon that he was a spy and a very good one, by the way, and yet Hazal had learned to read many things from him without him realising. Which she could call one of her greatest successes, because Cypher didn't take off his mask even in front of her.

His body language was enough.

“It's not about the mission.” Fade sent him a pensive look, which he saw this time when he actually raised his head for the first time. “But about Reyna.”

“You know she'll kill you if she finds out you're spying on her?” she asked half-jokingly, half-seriously, raising one eyebrow as if in a gesture of mockery. A feigned one, of course. It was no secret that Reyna... well, she didn't really get along with Cypher. “She doesn't like your toys,” she said.

“That's something I've learned in time,” Amir stated. He glanced at the chessboard from time to time, as he probably hoped that Fade would return to the game after all. “But it's not my fault that I have access to all cameras throughout the headquarters.”

“And to think that you're the one pointing out to me that I speak in riddles.” Fade folded her arms across her chest, leaning back more comfortably in her chair. Things were getting interesting. “Get it out of your system, Cypher. Just without too much fuss this time.”

Cypher thought for a moment. Not that Fade thought it was anything strange, looking at what had been going on around them lately. No one wanted to speak up when there was no absolute need for it, no one wanted to complain, or take unnecessary risks that the walls would actually have ears and something would spread where it shouldn't, only generating even more conflict.

“From what I saw on the footage, she was at the gym today. Maybe she's still there.” he said finally. Hazal nearly rolled her eyes until Amir took in a lungful of air. “I don't know much about training, I'll admit.”

“But?”

“But something must have upset her,” he murmured. Still speaking with hesitation, Hazal also got the impression that he had lowered his tone of voice. He weighed each word more, and although he did this very often, now the spaces between one part of a sentence and the next, were larger. “She was irritated. I don't know much about radianite either, but even for her capabilities, it was a little... above the norm.”

Fade furrowed her brow. She hadn't had a training session with Reyna for a long time for known reasons, and besides, Brimstone had rarely paired her with Zyanya before, but it was no secret that her physical strength was on a different level from the others even then.

Above the norm didn't sound very good.

“Have you told anyone about this?”

In her head, she asked herself if there was actually anyone. Brimstone was not particularly suited to such conversations lately and, as Fade had already discovered for herself, Sage was out of the question. But Hazal probably would have preferred someone else to know about this than just the two of them anyway.

“There was also Raze in the room,” he replied. “But I don't want to chatter, Fade. You ask, I answer, I'd rather not get into it.”

“Someone has to talk to Reyna.”

She didn't believe she would ever say that sentence since discovering some of Zyanya's Viper-related matters. She shouldn't get around it, and she shouldn't have her fingers in it as long as they had an agreement. But she couldn't get rid of the flicker of that one red light in the back of her head.

“There aren't many candidates.” Cypher sighed. He was right. “You said yourself that I don't have a chance. Well, and to tell you the truth, I would rather not brag that this information came from me. I value my life, and I prefer to keep it that way.”

“The only person who can do it is Viper,” Fade concluded.

For some reason, that sentence came out of her mouth faster than she could stop herself. She had expected a surprise from Cypher, and although Amir didn't show it from himself, she could sense it in the one way in which he tilted his head.

“Viper?”

If she didn't know certain facts, she wouldn't believe it either. Fortunately, she has learned to reliably pass over the details that no one but the members of this strange deal should know about.

“She knows her file more than anyone else, she was at her recruitment and knows what she is capable of. If anyone should present the facts about Reyna to Reyna herself in the most literal way possible, it would be Viper.”

She thought she sold the information pretty well. Cypher nodded, acknowledging her point with that distinctive murmur she had heard so often.

“This is a solution that needs to be considered,” he concluded. “Before the damage is done unnecessarily.”

“It won't be done.” Finally, she could at least breathe a little. And although she didn't believe she would say the next sentence, she did. “I'll take care of it.”

Fade followed the idea as long as it was fresh. Until the thought occurred to her that most conversations with Viper make something twist inside her, and she usually ends up regretting having spoken at all after a minute or two.

But she told herself it was just this once. Because of this stupid gut feeling that she couldn't get rid of. Maybe it was even a matter of some sort of contractual radianite solidarity between her and Reyna, leaving aside that conspiracy of silence.

She hadn't set her sights on Viper being happy to see her when she opened the lab door, and she was right. Although she felt that in addition to the obvious resentment about the probably interrupted work, there was also surprise on Viper's face.

Well, Fade didn't believe she was here either, so she could call it a draw.

“We have to talk.” She pushed off from the frame of the sliding door and passed Viper at the threshold, stepping inside, carefully escorted by the chemist’s sight. “It's about Reyna.”

Viper was clearly not pleased with the way Hazal had barged into the room, but Hazal, in turn, was well aware that otherwise she probably wouldn't have had a chance to get inside.

Viper closed the door and only spoke up when she leaned over her laptop and approved some operation to run.

“Did she get under your skin by another bite-back?”

Fade rolled her eyes at the mocking tone. She might have expected something like that. She could have sworn she saw a minimal smile at the corner of Viper’s mouth.

She intertwined her arms across her chest as she watched Viper disconnect some kind of flash drive from the USB port and put it back on the table.

“I can assure you that if it was all about something this stupid, I wouldn't bother myself to come here,” Fade replied.

Sabine nodded, though so minimally that for a moment Fade thought she was just imagining things. She could argue. Viper could argue, too. Their common language mostly consisted of these little splinters that they stuck into each other effectively every so often, because there was only this much they could do to keep the arrangement stable.

But she had to admit Fade was right this time. Even if she didn't like it very much that Fade had just come to the lab, which Viper considered her private area. She probably didn't want Hazal to see what she was working on. Neither to violate her space, where Fade usually wasn’t.

“Okay, what's the matter?”

“She's working too much.”

Viper snorted.

“As if I didn't know that,” she whined. “Why do you think I had crossed her off the schedule?”

“I guess it didn't quite work out, since she was at the gym today. And not to jog on the treadmill.”

Viper turned to face Fade, who was probably prepared for this. For the mere eye contact, that momentary uncertainty in her gaze and furrowed brow.

Fade decided to bail Viper out by asking another question.

“Listen, I don't want to shittalk about who did what wrong right now, because I have neither the strength nor the desire to do so. Just... I don't know, make her do some tests or something,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “And talk to her, just to be sure, because it's more likely she'll tell you something than anybody else.”

“To be sure about what?”

She knew well about what. The results of Zyanya's already ordered blood tests lay somewhere here next to her, and she looked at them every time she even casually glanced in that direction. But Fade's presence here... could not and was not unfounded. Fact is, they didn't like each other. They didn't get in each other's way. And yet, she came to report something to her, in person.

She had to know this version of events.

Fade sighed.

“If everything is okay with her,” she replied. “She's been kind of pissy lately. If she will spread it on missions... well, you know it yourself, I won't explain it to you.”

Viper knew. Her gaze fell on a flash drive on the table. The flash drive, whose uprising coordinates she had just traced after spending hours cracking the cipher.

The flash drive, which was the key to the mission to which Reyna was to contribute as co-commander.

“Okay, I got it,” she said.

“And one more thing.” Hazal turned on her heel just as she was about to start walking toward the door. “You don't know that from me.”

Sabine actually didn't care how Fade found out what she found out. And she assumed that it had been passed on to her from someone, and that this someone didn't want to be outed. She wasn't going to argue about it.

“Alright.”

Fade nodded. She immediately left the lab, leaving Viper alone.

***

Deadlock put her suitcase in a corner as soon as she crossed the threshold of her room. She hadn't even unzipped her jacket since coming from the hangar, her gloves were still on her hands and she could even swear she felt the softness of the pilot's seat on her back.

It felt strange to fly Vulture alone, but it was probably better this way. She could listen to the hum of the engines without feeling guilty that she should at least try to strike up a conversation with her companion. And even though Norway was far from the base and beside her only Reyna got the Vulture, it surprised her that she actually got it to use alone.

She knocked the gloves off her hands and threw them on the bed. She almost ripped the sleeves of her jacket off her shoulders, which she treated the same way she treated the gloves.

Moments later she was already in the hallway, still wearing her heavy winter boots. It's a good thing she didn't run into anyone, because she probably wouldn't even know what she could say, how she could explain the rush and the too-fast return to headquarters. How to explain the fact that perhaps she had discovered something she shouldn't, something that had long ago been buried in the Protocol's basement and no one had looked into it for a long time.

When she opened the medbay door, Sage immediately turned toward her. That is, she didn't have to look for her for too long, which is even better.

“Iselin?” Maybe Deadlock shouldn't think so, but she felt something inside her flip over at the sound of her name in Ling's mouth. “You came back earlier?”

Deadlock slammed the door behind her. She locked it, although until now she didn't think a lock would ever be needed in medbay at all.

She ignored Sage's question. She stepped inside, stomping loudly on the tiled floor with her trappers. She felt some indefinable feeling of fury begin to suffocate her, though she didn't even manage to croak a word.

“Tell me you didn't do anything to her.”

The sentence barely escaped her lips, and until now she hadn't realized how tightly she was clenching her jaw. How her fingers begin to go numb in her clenched fists, and how her breath almost gets caught in her throat as she can only take shallower breaths.

Sage furrowed her brow. She held a pen in her hand, probably filling out some documents. She put it down slowly. Too slowly.

“Iselin, what are you talking about?”

Iselin couldn't look at it. Nor could she listen to it. She swallowed her saliva before she spoke. With each passing second, she grew more and more unable to stand the way Sage was saying her name.

“Viper,” she said. And she watched with something like disgust as Sage opened her eyes wider, the way someone who has just been reached by the realization that there is no way to escape does. “A few years ago. Norway. A hotel where you had one room. Viper, who was injured. Should I go on?”

“How do you know about the hotel?”

And then Iselin already knew that nothing would be the same now.

Ling barely got the words out, but there was something in her voice that was missing from her previous explanations or apologies.

Cold.

The cold of the past that had caught up with her. The cold of a past that no one was probably ever going to know about, and now Deadlock walked across that threshold with a whiff of that very past in her hands.

Maybe her voice broke. Maybe Sage was even afraid of the tension on Iselin's face, her clenched hands and tense expression, as if she was holding back with all her might so as not to start yelling at her.

But that cold was there. Deadlock felt it on her skin. She pressed her lips into a narrow line and put two fingers to her temples, as if her head suddenly ached.

“It doesn't fucking matter,” she barely choked out. She took a breath into her lungs only to huff. She took a step forward, and had the impression that Sage twitched, but didn't take her eyes off her anyway. “Tell me what happened there,” she commanded.

“It won't change anything. And you shouldn't dig in it.”

Ling's voice was a little startled. Still just as cold, though. It was as if she was giving Deadlock an order to march away.

Deadlock hadn't been a soldier for a long time.

And before she knew it, her bionic fist slammed into the desktop, and the echo carried around the room like an ominous omen.

Sage jumped up. She closed her eyelids shut for a few seconds, as if she needed to get used to the quiet rumble, and only then looked in that direction. The hand mechanism was clenched, one of the pens rolled down the tabletop and landed on the floor.

Iselin just looked at her.

“Don't even try to order me around now.” She didn't take back her fist from the tabletop. “I'm going to find out anyway. From you, from Viper, or from hell knows what source, but I'll find out, so don't make me walk out of here with nothing, or it will get unpleasant.”

Sage never thought about how strong Deadlock is. Did the radivore's fluids in her bloodstream make a difference, or did it just allow her to survive after losing her arm in that brutal way.

But in that second it occurred to her that of the two of them, she was the weaker one. That didn't make her lower her head. She wasn't going to back down that easily, even if she had to grab a razor to stay afloat in this sea of the past.

She didn't realize it when she clenched her teeth herself.

“Whatever anyone has told you, you don't know both sides of the coin,” she said slowly. “You don't know everything about Viper.”

Iselin shook her head. She would have snorted if it weren't for the fact that she was too angry for that, and probably every such gesture pushed her more and more to raise her voice.

And she didn't want to cause a scene. Not until she got the clear information straight.

“As it turns out, not about you either. And now I find out that you were with her in some hotel, arguing about treatment when she was injured and then you were the only one leaving the room.” She took a step closer. She leaned over Sage on purpose so that she would have no way to escape. Deadlock rested one hand on the armrest of Ling's chair, while she continued to hold the other on the table top. “So I'll ask again. What the fuck did you do to her, Sage?”

Sage bravely endured the Norwegian woman's stare. Even braver than she would have expected from herself.

Because Iselin had never looked at her that way before. This way full of resentment, perhaps even something that bordered on disgust. And even though, after all, it hadn't been that long, Deadlock's gentle and sometimes boisterous gaze from the beginning of their relationship now evaporated as if it had never existed.

She lifted her chin higher, trying to get past the realization that she was once again being cornered in this unpleasant way.

“I did what she deserved.”

The sentence rang out to the end and consternation appeared on Iselin's face, growing stronger with each passing second. Maybe she didn't believe those words actually belonged to Sage. Maybe she never put Sage in a different light than others did, and now the vision of her… taking revenge was downright surreal.

“What do you mean by that?”

Sage tightened her fingers on the edge of her seat. Her gaze fled somewhere to the side for a moment, as if she needed to think about whether she actually wanted to say the inevitable without clashing with Iselin's cold gaze.

“Viper's research contributed to the mass genocide at Kingdom facilities.” Now she couldn't stop. There was no going back. “Women, children, disabled people. Her private and unsupervised projects while she was back there were the launching pad for thousands of people to die like rats. Are you still saying I'm the only one who did something wrong?”

Deadlock shook her head. She wasn't sure what she could say, wasn't even sure what she felt, looking at Sage at that moment.

“She wouldn't have let it happen.”

She herself couldn't believe she had said that sentence. She didn't know Viper very well, her stay here still only lasted six months, but... but of one thing she was sure. Viper knew the values. Her whole life revolved around Protocol and she knew it and its rules to the point of exaggeration.

And the fact that she believed this thought more than a person she may have even loved not so long ago might have hurt her, if not for the fact that this coldness beating from Sage was all too foreign.

“Will the fact that she wouldn’t let it happen return life to those who died?” Iselin's eyebrows furrowed and she let the air out in a short huff. She didn't want to believe it. She didn't want to believe that those were Sage's exact words. “She always wanted to be better than everyone else. By creating the Protocol and planting herself at the very top of it, she pretended that all the things she did didn't happen. She never admitted to her research, never suffered any consequences of her own ambition, because as soon as she overreached and abandoned the project while still in the Kingdom, she sat down at the helm of the Protocol.”

“So you admit that she had no control over what would happen with the research?” asked Deadlock, with a substitute for that hollow laugh that suddenly reminded her of her army days. “She had no control over what would happen, and you did something to her?”

“You don't know how many killed and maybe still kill what she created.” Sage said. Iselin continued to hold the armrest of her chair, feeling her hand begin to go numb because of how hard she did it. “What I did is nothing compared to what she would face in the Kingdom if they found out anyway,” she said.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Iselin pushed against the chair, shifted back and Sage twitched slightly. “She refuses your treatment. She rarely wants to be in the same room as you at all, and you're telling me this is fucking nothing? Tell me what you did or I swear I will lose it, Sage.”

She was already losing it. Slowly, but effectively. Iselin felt as if she couldn't breathe, as if someone had kicked her in the ribs and told her to run uphill.

Sage had no way out. She would not be able to run away from her now. Yet it was her silence that irritated Iselin the most. That gaze, which was at once as if Sage was hoping Deadlock would simply nod and leave without a word, and at the same time so remorseless that Iselin felt the tendons in her hands tighten more and more.

“I didn't entirely heal her when she got injured. The body fought the rest on its own. That's why I was the only one leaving the room at the time. Maybe I gave her a substitute for what they were experiencing in the Kingdom facilities while she was here filling out some damn reports in cozy office.”

Deadlock shook her head. The words didn't want to form into sentences, and the sentences didn't want to fit the face she had just seen in front of her.

“I feel sick looking at you.”

She pushed back and straightened up right after almost spitting that sentence right into Sage's face.

She walked out of the medbay. As if she never wanted to go back there again.

Chapter 53: FIFTY THREE

“I must remember that I find you here often.”

Viper looked up from her book and turned to Reyna. Zyanya entered her bedroom with a towel slung over her shoulder and a bottle of water in her hand, the one not holding the door.

She sighed, wiping her forehead a moment later, as if hoping to get rid of at least some evidence of where she had just been.

And it wasn't as if her sports bra, sweatpants, sweat-drenched hair, and almost visibly trembling muscles had given her away the moment Viper's gaze fell on her. She was aware that her accent became extremely pronounced when she was tired, and she was also aware that Viper knew this.

She had no way to defend herself in this situation, but she tried anyway.

“First, you need to remember the definition of the word rest,” Viper said, picking up a bookmark. She fiddled with it for a moment and Reyna thought it was probably because she didn't have a pen to play with. “I think there have been some... inaccuracies.”

Zyanya sighed. Viper knew what she was talking about. She may have even emphasized that last word on purpose, looking her straight in the eye. Still, Reyna couldn't shake the feeling that somewhere on Viper's lips lurked that one, smug smile that said she had indeed caught her red-handed.

She didn't answer right away. She put the towel back in the bathroom, and Sabine heard her close the washing machine. Then she put the water bottle back on the nightstand, but all the while she could feel Viper's gaze on her. She wasn't going to let it go until Reyna answered.

“Okay, you got me,” she said finally, turning to face Sabine. Hearing this, she put the bookmark back in the book and raised her eyebrows as if waiting for further explanation. “I went to work out a little, to, I don't know, clear my head.”

“There are many ways to clear your head.”

Reyna placed her hands on her hips. She felt the need to lower her head just so Viper couldn't see so clearly that her breathing was still rapid.

She probably saw it anyway. The weight of Sabine's gaze always took on an almost physical dimension. She felt it move from the top of her head, through her shoulders rising and falling with her breath, her abdominal muscles, ending at her calves, as if she wanted to record the image in a database and analyze it properly. Reyna should be used to it by now. Probably.

She straightened up more, a strand of hair fell on her forehead, but she didn't brush it away. Viper's gaze fell there, but that didn't stop Reyna from changing the subject fairly smoothly.

“Have you been here for long?”

Viper apparently didn't like her being the one who was sitting when Reyna stood up at her desk to check the phone she had left there, so Viper got up. She also folded her arms across her chest, perhaps out of habit, perhaps to add more seriousness to the situation than Zyanya would have liked.

“A while,” she admitted truthfully, glancing at her book to emphasize that she had found something to do while waiting for Reyna. “I guess you had a lot to clear up.”

Reyna laughed briefly. She nodded in a gesture that could be interpreted as submission. She couldn't convince Viper otherwise, nor did she even try. Besides, her current physical condition didn't help her in the slightest.

“If it saves me any credit, I didn't plan it.”

“I don't think it does,” Viper muttered. She looked at Reyna for a few seconds, as if expecting her to protest, but she didn't seem to intend to. Not that she expected anything else; she had the winning pieces in this game. “Judging by what's here.”

She moved the stack of papers closer to her with a single finger. Just as Zyanya had been focusing her attention solely on Viper's face until now, she now frowned, glancing at her hand.

She managed to read her name, and the tables filled with medical terms clearly gave her the answer to what Viper was holding. Which didn't mean she understood why she had brought it up.

“Why do you need my bloodwork results?”

Reyna wanted to reach for the file, but Viper snatched it from under her nose and held it facing her. Zyanya tilted her head. She expected Viper not to answer right away. And she was right.

“How many checkups did you skip?” she replied with a question. Reyna leaned her hands on the tabletop behind her, her eyebrows still furrowed and an uncertain smile playing on her lips. “Except for the one before the incident with Sage.”

“You know I'm not a fan of needles,” Reyna said after a moment. She shrugged. “I felt fine, I had no reason to go there.”

“That's not an answer.” Viper shifted her weight from one leg to the other. She instinctively stuck her hip out more and rested her hand on it. She still held the results in her other hand. “You're losing.”

Reyna knew it. Her brain was still foggy from the exercise, which didn't help her come up with any explanations. Anyway, they didn't make sense, because Viper saw everything and knew everything.

“Probably.”

She didn't like to admit her mistakes.

She didn't have much to say in her defense. Nor could she hide from the facts that Viper now held in her hand.

“Your cortisol levels are high. Way above normal.” Reyna sighed again and rubbed her face with her hand, as if to sober herself up. Maybe she could even tell Viper that she really didn't have the thought for it right now, but it wasn't that simple. “Whatever Brimstone tells you, you can't lead the next few missions.”

“So he sent you an email after all?”

“I didn't expect him to come talk to me in person anyway,” Viper said without much emotion. “Besides, maybe it's for the best, because I don't know if I want to look at him. I'm not even officially listed in the paperwork.”

Zyanya often found herself harboring the false hope that Viper could be dissuaded from a given topic if she tried hard enough. And each time, Viper made it very clear to her that this was impossible.

Viper put the stack of papers on the desk. Perhaps even with a clear emphasis on the gesture. Zyanya lazily followed her hand with her eyes, and Viper was aware of this, just as she was aware that the contrast between the two of them at that moment must have looked quite comical from the side.

Sabine wore a perfectly ironed turtleneck under her jeans. From time to time, a strand of hair fell over her face, but she didn't tuck it behind her ear because she was more concerned with keeping her arms crossed over her chest and giving Reyna a lecture, who radiated heat from her muscles. her ponytail held together only by faith and prayer, and her pants hung obscenely low on her hips, although Sabine hadn't even noticed when they had slipped down.

However, she looked away in time. She also hoped that Zyanya wouldn't notice this one pause.

“I'll go on the next mission. The agents will obey my orders because they probably won't want to argue, you'll just sign the plan and... I don't know, guard some corner and get a little bored.”

Again, that tone that brooked no opposition. Viper was truly a master at using it.

“That's not very... commanding of me,” Reyna laughed softly. “Besides, I don't mind being useful there.”

“I do.” Sabine raised her head higher. She was taller than Zyanya anyway, so she didn't need to do that, but she probably wanted Reyna to be aware that she was hitting a wall on this issue. “The others could use some work too. The more work, the more experience, and we value the experience of all our agents, don't we?”

Reyna couldn't disagree. Well, she could, but knowing that when Sabine resorted to such formal speeches, she probably wouldn't get very far anyway.

“What will Brimstone say?”

“You've already done too much for him,” Viper replied immediately. She was right, again. She was silent for a moment, her gaze shifting from Reyna's face to the desk top exceptionally quickly. As if she was suddenly ashamed to look at her, even though a minute ago she had been doing nothing else. “And... for me too.”

Zyanya shook her head. She smiled slightly, and even though Sabine wasn't looking at her, Reyna sought that contact. Intentionally or not, she sought it.

“Come on, it’s nothing big.” She shrugged. “You know it's just paperwork. Besides, you would have done the same in my place.”

Viper bit her lip. She nodded in agreement, silently. She seemed to agree, although Reyna felt... that Viper didn't know what to do about it. Somewhere there was a contradiction that Sabine skillfully hid, still not looking at her.

Only after a moment did she raise her head, as if she had to make sure she was ready to do it now.

“Now maybe I would,” she said. Carefully. She weighed every word, her voice perhaps even trembling slightly, and it was then that Reyna's fatigue-blurred consciousness sharpened. “Some time ago, I would have slit your throat for that.”

“With the right motivation, you would do it now, too.”

It was meant to be a joke. She even laughed briefly, feeling that the atmosphere had suddenly thickened and the need to lighten it arose on its own.

But when she looked at Viper, there was no calm in her eyes. Not even amusement.

When she looked into her eyes, she saw only concentration. She was focused on Reyna's face, although she herself couldn't decide whether she wanted to look at her lips, her eyes, or both at once, seeking silent permission there. She even saw the moment when she swallowed, very heavily, her shoulders rising as she inhaled and falling as she exhaled.

“I think you're wrong.”

Another sentence, uttered in silence, echoed like the tolling of a bell. A sentence that stopped time in an indefinable way, thickening the air. A sentence that made Reyna involuntarily clench her fingers on the edge of the desk when every word and every sound reached her fully.

She moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue.

“Wrong?”

Reyna could laugh again. Treat it as a reason for a joke, a casual argument that they would soon forget anyway. After all, she could have misinterpreted something, Viper could have just been joking, and this innocent exchange was never meant to lead to anything more.

And yet she didn't. In that one second, something shifted, the dynamics of the entire conversation turned 180 degrees, as if its beginnings had never existed or were slowly fading from both their minds.

Viper watched her lips closely when the question was asked. She wanted to remember how it formed on her lips. To make sure it was there, and that she now had to answer and there was no turning back. To say anything, one word out of two possible. A simple task, and yet she chose neither.

She took a step closer to Reyna. It was harder to hesitate in her gestures.

Again, she thought, Reyna saw every cog turning in her mind, and before she knew it, she held her breath.

“I wouldn't kill you, because attacking someone who doesn't want to defend themselves is immoral.” Zyanya raised her eyebrows. Minimally, barely noticeably, but enough to betray her surprise. “You wouldn't hurt me, Zyanya.”

Reyna didn't even realize when she gasped. Not because she was outraged. More because she felt as if Viper had ripped the breath from her lungs with that one sentence and squeezed it in her own hand.

After all, just a few minutes ago, she had shown herself what she was capable of. She had thrown off that damn punching bag, made Raze uncomfortable, and maybe if Reyna had focused more, she would have even noticed her accelerated heartbeat as she watched her from the other corner of the room. She remembered well the thud of Omega Reyna's body falling when she had put the bullet in her head without batting an eye.

And now Viper had said that sentence confidently, as if she were playing a game of chess and knew perfectly well that she would win as soon as the pieces were set. She was just waiting for a reaction to create the appearance that it was still a game, and not... A completely finished round, the outcome of which she had known from the beginning.

In one second, Reyna simply stared into her eyes.

In the second, she grabbed her wrist.

In the third, she pulled her close and kissed her.

Viper almost fell on her, the edge of the tabletop digging into her thigh, but she didn't even feel it. The only thing she might see later was a long bruise.

However, she didn't have the time to think about it. She immediately placed her hands on Reyna's hips, forcing her to murmur into her mouth, and herself to swallow a gasp in her throat when she felt how perfectly they fit inside her hands.

Viper wasn't going to protest. Maybe she even expected it, because she expected many things. Maybe she predicted that Reyna would do it, maybe she even predicted that her hips would fit in her hands. Maybe she knew all this before she even came here, and yet she didn't come up with an escape route. She hadn't figured out the external path she could take if it came to that.

They had kissed so many times. God, it should be normal by now. That was the arrangement, their perfectly functioning, efficient, and unambiguous arrangement...

“Do you have to be so smart?” Reyna gasped, almost directly into her mouth. The words fell on Sabine's lips and stayed there as she swallowed during that brief pause. “Know everything?”

It sounded almost like a growl. That was probably what Reyna wanted. To sound annoyed that Viper could somehow reach her core time and time again, without ever stopping.

Sabine wanted to answer. She even opened her mouth, but couldn't get a word out. Reyna grabbed the back of her head with one hand, still leaning her weight on the other. She leaned back, but it didn't matter because she pulled Viper right behind her.

“So you're not going to kill me?” Viper asked hoarsely.

Zyanya shook her head. For a split second, her gaze fell on Sabine's lips, as if she couldn't believe she had asked the question. Immediately after, she focused on her eyes, making sure she would see every syllable she uttered, every sound and every noise that would soon spill from her lips.

Her heart was already pounding in her chest, a purple glow permeating her tanned skin.

She didn't pay attention to it. She lifted her chin higher.

“I would let you cut my throat open if you wanted to.”

Sabine's breath was warm on her cheek. She could feel it on her eyelids. She had to close them a moment later, surprised when the desk creaked slightly under Viper's weight.

Because Viper pressed her body against her, as if she had suddenly run out of oxygen and Reyna was the only remaining source of it in the universe. As if Viper lived only because she could kiss her, as if the words Reyna had just spoken gave her energy, and her body, still hot from working out, almost morbidly trained, was the last thing that could keep her warm.

Reyna was always hot. Always. She warmed up very quickly, despite that stupid vampire stereotype, and now, after training, now that her muscles were still trembling from the effort, Sabine wanted to make them tremble only because of her.

“Do you want the world to taste your blood?” Reyna gasped as Viper's slender fingers tangled in her hair at the back of her neck and forced her to tilt her head back, giving her access to her neck. “Then you should taste some first, right?”

Reyna purred. And she wanted to shake her head, swallow, maybe both at once. Because it was a crazy idea. It was... a damn dangerous idea. The worst, most extreme idea.

And one that could only come from Viper, who ran her tongue along the column of her neck, murderously slow and deliberate.

Fuck, she couldn't even remember what they had just been talking about. Maybe nothing. Maybe something important, maybe not, but whatever it was, it had blurred into a jumble of single words in Reyna's mind.

She only remembered that at some point Viper's hand had settled on her stomach, forcing her to suck in air. Then it only got worse, because the touch remained there, and she still hadn't answered the question.

She couldn't concentrate.

Viper's thumb hooked onto the elastic of her sweatpants, moved along her hipbone, all while her lips were pressed against her neck so perfectly that at times Zyanya was sure she had either lost her mind already or would lose it in a second.

She could have grabbed her wrist and pushed her away. She could have done it at any moment.

She did nothing.

“It's dangerous,” she managed to croak. It was these words that made Viper stop what she was doing and move back a little. Her breath tickled the wet marks too much. “And irresponsible.”

That was probably true. Reyna was absolutely right, which Viper could admit to her right away, even though she could feel the warmth radiating from her body, see the glow of her heart, and, to be honest, could barely collect her thoughts.

“I want to show you something,” she whispered. The voice bounced off the edge of Reyna's ear, and she felt that in another second, her own knees would betray her. “Just a taste?”

Zyanya felt her blood rush from her entire body to her head, shutting down all functions responsible for clear thinking. Her lungs were constricted, and she was almost certain that her blush was visible even on her dark skin.

If she didn't have to support her weight on her hand, and if her other hand wasn't tangled in Viper's hair, she would probably have to rub her face with it to at least try to bring herself back down to earth.

“Fuck, Sabine, don't talk to me like that.”

Viper laughed. Low, deep, more to herself than to Zyanya, as if awarding herself points for winning this strange game of chess. She deliberately pushed every boundary, with that one thought stubbornly clinging to her mind. She intended to achieve her goal.

Even if it was disturbing in its own way. Maybe even bizarre and twisted. Maybe it was something no one else would have thought of if they had any regard for their life.

Reyna's head buzzed at the sound of the desk drawer opening. She knew very well what was in there. Viper apparently knew it too. Too well. So well that Reyna wanted to curse her for it, because she was showing once again that she knew her better than Reyna could ever have imagined.

Reyna’s spare knife flashed slightly in the afternoon light. She should have kept it in the armory, somehow to predict this, so she wouldn't have to watch Viper put the blade to the tip of her index finger, mere millimeters from her face.

Viper engraved this image in her mind. How Zyanya's pupils dilated, her breath still coming out of her mouth in trembling waves. Her gaze did not leave Viper's hand, as if she didn’t want to… no, as if she couldn’t believe that she would really do it.

She focused on the tip of the knife pressed against Viper pale skin.

God, she should stop her, say something, yank that fucking knife out of her hand and throw it on the floor so it would stick in the boards and stay there.

She couldn't even move. Uncomfortably leaning against the desk, with Viper between her legs, breathless and still dazed, she watched as Sabine touched her skin with the blade.

It was sharp enough that she didn't have to do much to make a drop of blood appear on the surface of the wound and glisten in the afternoon sun. So innocent, so small. It could have been accidental.

Zyanya shuddered at the sound of the knife being placed on the desktop. The noise was quiet, but her heightened sense of hearing allowed her to hear it as if every other sound in the room had ceased to exist.

She almost closed her eyes when Viper parted her lips, pressing her thumb against them. Still, she wanted to look at her. She had to look at her, because she felt that even if she wanted to, she couldn't look away. Her own pulse pounded in her ears as the tip of Viper's injured finger was placed perfectly under her fang.

Sabine frowned. She was breathing quickly herself, in short, jerky gasps, watching the blood leave a red streak on the white of the tooth, but she did not pull away. She didn't move, allowing herself to leave that distinctive painting right there until Zyanya closed her mouth around the wound, running her tongue over it so gently that if Sabine hadn't seen her jaw move with her own eyes, she wouldn't have known Reyna had done it.

Zyanya's murmur quickly turned into something that balanced so precariously on the edge of a moan that it would only take a slight push for Sabine to describe the sound that danced in the vampire's throat with that very word.

Oh, it was beautiful. Mesmerizing.

Reyna fed her radianite exclusively on souls. She never needed anything more, never even tried to take anything more than what was already a high price. But she never thought it was possible either. Because it was more risky, more... animalistic. She thought she hid it well enough, that no one knew about it and never would.

But Viper knew everything. She couldn't hide many things from Viper, and as it turned out, this was one of them.

She held on until Sabine slowly, painfully slowly, and at the same time so deliberately, smeared delicate scarlet on her lower lip as she withdrew her hand.

Reyna seemed afraid to close her mouth. To taste that blood again, straight from her own lips, under Sabine's watchful gaze, who seemed to be waiting for just that. With her heartbeat echoing in Reyna's head, which she could no longer distinguish from her own, with her breath falling on her blood-smeared lips.

So Zyanya licked her lips with her soul on her shoulder.

Her head was spinning. And she wasn't the only one.

“See?” asked Viper, her whisper trembling and so wonderfully unsteady that if Reyna hadn't felt numb enough, Sabine's tone of voice would have brought her to that state. “You wouldn't hurt me.”

“You're driving me crazy,” Reyna choked out, almost half-consciously. Almost faintly, because she was weak in Viper's presence, what she did to her, and how easily she crushed all her inhibitions in her hand.

Her head was buzzing, and she could still taste the metallic flavor of blood on her tongue, like exceptionally strong alcohol that her body couldn't digest.

That's why she couldn't stop. All Viper had to do was move a little closer, and Reyna brushed her lips against hers, immediately clinging to her, pulling her hips closer to her. Her hands slipped under the chemist's turtleneck, which she had previously torn from her pants, and if Viper hadn't gotten rid of it herself, Reyna would probably have torn it to shreds.

She gasped when Viper threw her clothes somewhere on the floor and kissed her again. Each time harder, more violently, as if she couldn't get enough of the moment, forever dying of insatiability.
They both knew where this was going. Again. But neither of them stopped.

Reyna let herself be pulled forward when Viper hooked her fingers under the elastic of her pants, meaningfully pulling her closer. She surrendered easily, consciously following Sabine's command.
But it was Viper who murmured in surprise into her mouth, feeling Reyna's hands on the underside of her thighs. Immediately afterwards, she was lifted up, instinctively wrapping her arms around Zyanya's neck and legs around her hips, who took a few steps, knowing the way to the bed by heart.

She sat Viper down on the mattress. She moved away for a moment to cross her arms over her chest and pull her bra over her head, tossing it onto the pile of clothes that now meant nothing.

She had reservations, perhaps for a few seconds, that she didn't look her best at that moment, but Sabine managed to dispel any doubts before they gained momentum. She immediately reached for the clasp of her bra, suppressing the thought that her hands were shaking.

Reyna straddled Viper's lap, immediately cupping her face in both hands, as if she wanted this kiss to be etched into her mind like a tattoo. She moaned as she moved even closer, her knees sliding across the sheets on either side of Viper's hips, and now she could feel her breasts against her own without any barrier.

Viper's fingers danced across her ribs as she wrapped her arms around her waist. Somewhere along the way, she came across a scar or two, subconsciously already knowing where to find them.

She knew Reyna's body. It was as natural to her now as the fact that she once couldn't stand being in the same room with her.

And now she remembered where her scars were. Where her most sensitive spot was, the one that drew those sounds from her throat that were reserved exclusively for her.

For example, her stomach, where Sabine now placed her hand and could feel it heaving from her rapid breathing. She glanced in that direction. At her own hand, molded to the shape of reliable muscles. But to ask a question, she raised her head.

“Can I...?”

“Don't even try to ask me anything, just touch me.”

Reyna's gasp dripped with desperation that she would probably have been ashamed of in the past.

Viper swallowed. She wanted to do what Reyna asked. Because there was something in her voice that was hard to resist, something that pleasantly tickled Sabine under the skin, and she knew she was addicted to it.

But at the same time, keeping Zyanya under her command was even better. She could grant the request or put it off, stretching the already tense strings of her patience, keeping her under complete control. And she submitted to her, every damn time.

And yet Reyna bowed to no one. Ever. That was what characterized her.

She ran her fingernail down her stomach. Reyna fidgeted restlessly on her thighs, swallowing quick breaths. She followed the movement of Viper's forearm tendons with her almost drunken gaze as she created invisible patterns on her skin, sometimes stopping in the hollows between individual muscles, sometimes barely grazing a piece of skin with the top of her knuckle.

“Sabine.”

Viper used to hate it when Reyna used her name. She would pick on her for it every time, because she felt that along with her name, Reyna was also stripping her of her safe space, and doing so in an extremely irritating way. Even Brimstone rarely called her by her name, and Zyanya… Viper was ready to scratch her eyes out for it, because she was deliberately pressing on her sore spot, knowing that Viper would feel it.

Now she only felt that the way that one word came out of Reyna's mouth made her almost completely wrecked.

Zyanya's voice had always been demanding. During missions, she conveyed information clearly and concisely, and her opponents usually heard only her low chuckle a second before losing their lives at her hands.

When she was angry, her accent emphasized her words more strongly. The same was true when she was tired. Viper had noted the characteristic way she pronounced certain words, but even though her name was also on that list, she never quite got used to it.

Not when she pronounced it that way.

When they were half-naked and she could feel the warmth emanating from her body. Or see the glow of her heart, from which lines of tattoos entwined her arm.

Viper kissed her, probably wanting to know how that word tasted from her lips, which still had that characteristic metallic taste. Or maybe she just thought so. Maybe she was already drunk.

Reyna blindly found her wrist, wrapped her fingers around it, and regardless of how intimate the gesture was, she moved her hand down her body. She thought she was sure of it, that even though she was pretending to be in control of what was happening, she didn't feel like she had completely lost her mind.

Until Viper's fingertip first brushed against the elastic of her sweatpants, then slid further. Viper felt nothing but the heat pouring over her from the vampire in chaotic waves.

She was breathing heavily, often panting into her mouth when she ran out of air, but she didn't let go of Viper until it was absolutely necessary. She wanted to look down, to see Viper's fingernail sliding across her skin, to connect how she felt with what she was experiencing, but at the same time she was sure that with that sight, another piece of her decency would be brutally torn from her body and mind.

Although she was probably deluding herself that she still had any left.

Zyanya instinctively spread her legs, her knees bending on their own, wrinkling the sheets. The air was thick, settling heavily on her shoulders and squeezing her lungs.

Her moan was not restrained in any way, although she hung her head and seemed to try to stifle it by pressing it into Viper's neck.

The hickey was still there. She remembered sucking on that skin herself, accompanied by the echo of flowing water. She was ready to do it again right away, one movement of Viper's fingers was enough to make Zyanya feel an irresistible urge to sink her teeth into her neck.

To stay there. To not stop. To not even think about moving away. To be there forever, even though the thought was so sudden and complicated that Reyna had a moment of doubt as to whether it belonged to her.

“Fuck, just like that.”

She said the words before she could stop herself. She was aware that if anyone other than Viper saw her like this, her reputation would be ruined. With her voice almost stuck in her throat, trembling and half-naked, she pressed her face into the junction of Sabine Callas's neck and shoulder, trying not to fall apart from the moment her touch fell on her body.

Sabine Callas, whose wrist disappeared behind the elastic of her pants, and whose other hand was tangled in Reyna's loosely tied hair, knowing that this was her weak spot.

“Do you want more?”

She wanted to say yes. That she wanted more, infinitely more, every time, everywhere, and whenever it came to Viper's touch on her skin.

She could only moan, clenching her hand on Sabine's shoulder and nodding frantically.

At least as if she were afraid that the offer would expire at any moment. Viper would vanish into thick air and Reyna would not be able to pull her back to her again.

When Sabine complied, the kiss became hungry.

Reyna didn't know where to put her hands, unable to decide on one place, so she wandered her touch over Viper's bare skin as if she wanted to engrave a map of her body in her memory.

She held her face close, desperately trying to wrap her arms around her waist. Her fingers wandered over her shoulder, shoulder blades, and the back of her neck, where she remembered well the pattern of the writhing snake tattoo.

All this while her hips chased pleasure, feeling the blood boiling in her veins.

She could hear Viper's heartbeat. She could hear her own. Both were tangled together in the chase, creating a confusion in her head that she could almost get drunk on.

She pulled away only to gasp for air. Her abs tensed, she knew she couldn't hold out much longer, that she was seconds away from finally reaching her limit. She squeezed her eyelids shut, as if she wanted to say something, although she had no idea if she could utter a single word.

“Look at me.”

She had to swallow before she realized what that sentence meant. Her head spun, breaking through the barrier of numbness, and for a moment she thought she wouldn't be able to comply with the command, because her head suddenly felt heavy, her eyelids stuck together, and she was so damn hot that she felt like every muscle in her body had melted long ago.

She looked up when a single finger of Viper's free hand was placed under her chin. The same finger from which she had earlier licked that insane blood.

She bravely faced the green. Even if her neck twitched from time to time as she swallowed saliva through her dry throat, even if Viper's wrist still disappeared obscenely behind the edge of her pants, even if she was convinced that she was trembling in a way she couldn't control, even though every inch of her body was burning.

Viper didn't stop. Her movements were deliberate, perfectly aimed, but even then she didn't take her eyes off Zyanya, as if she wanted to know exactly what reaction she was causing.

And no matter how dazed she was, no matter how much she wanted to lower her head when the blush crept up her neckline, reaching all the way to her heart, which glowed, purple fell on Viper's chin, marked her cheek, her jawline, Reyna burned that image into the inside of her eyelids, holding her gaze.

Swallowing saliva. Looking straight into the eyes of the snake that had been so poisonous to her not so long ago. And now it consciously entwined her, leaving her with no escape. Begging her never to let go, holding her in this embrace until she had no strength left.

Then the same cup overflowed. Red wine spilled in waves like a tsunami, drowning out the existing world. Time, space, and matter stopped in their own existence for those few moments when Zyanya's nails dug into Viper's shoulder, and she, looking her straight in the eyes, her head held high, whispered her name one last time, no longer ashamed of anything.

The finger disappeared from her chin when the world stopped spinning. Only Sabine's head tilted in that characteristic way, as if she were looking at something so interesting that the rest of the universe ceased to exist. As if now she had seen something she wanted to remember forever.

And it was Reyna, whose collarbones rose and fell in ragged breaths, dictated by the rhythm of her pulse. Reyna, whose hair was disheveled, some strands tickling her face, her ponytail almost completely undone, swaying dreamily.

Reyna, whose purple eyes shone in the glow of her radianite heart and looked straight at her.

Reyna, whose three words were on the tip of her tongue, yet she couldn't get them past her lips, and Viper had no idea.

So Reyna just rested her forehead against Viper’s shoulder, swallowing several times before she could speak. She thought she even laughed softly, though she wasn't sure. She could smell Viper, her hair tickling her cheek. Viper now placed her hand on her side a little shyly, as if she wasn't sure if it would fit there.

“Now I really have to take a shower,” Reyna muttered hoarsely.

Viper burst out laughing, and Zyanya joined her. That was probably good.

Yes, it was good.

Chapter 54: FIFTY FOUR

Skye peeked around the corner and breathed a sigh of relief when she saw Deadlock leaning on the railing of their favorite viewpoint.

She took a few more steps along the rocky path, fine gravel scattering from under her heavy boots, but finally let out a breath and stood next to Iselin, copying her position.

“Girl, what is that pace?” she asked when Iselin turned her head toward her. “Either you were being chased by a wolf I don't know about, or you're aiming for a new record, which is...” She looked at her watch. “...one hour and twelve minutes.”

Deadlock seemed surprised herself. She hadn't thought it was so obvious that she had sped up, and she felt a little embarassed about it.

It was early morning. If what Skye's watch said was true, it was barely past 8 a.m., and she was already standing on top of the mountain that they climbed almost religiously every week in hopes of a new record.

Everything would have been fine if she hadn't sped up too much. No wolf was chasing her, but she couldn't say she wasn't running away from anything either.

“Sorry,” she said. She tried to laugh to mirror Skye's attitude so far, though she wasn't sure if she succeeded. “I didn't mean to rush like that.”

Foster waved her hand. She took her backpack off her shoulder and took out a bottle of water. She took a few sips, looking at the view in front of her. The sun had been up for a while, but the air still had the chill of night. Skye’s wolf was lingering somewhere behind her, she could hear its rustling footsteps.

“It's something you should be proud of,” she said. She gave Deadlock a friendly nudge with her elbow, and it might have stayed that way if she hadn't frowned a moment later as she screwed the cap back on the bottle. “Although, to be honest, you don't seem really happy about that.”

Deadlock had no illusions that Skye wouldn't notice that something was wrong, in fact, from the moment they left headquarters. Just yesterday she thought she was good at hiding her feelings. She believed that despite everything, her time in the military and at Ursa had toughened her up not just physically. Maybe even here, many agents had an opinion of her that was far from reality, simply because she maintained the facade instilled in her during the army duty.

But today she felt physically ill, and even years of hard training couldn't cover it up.

She could lie. That was always an option. Would it bring her relief and give Skye a credible answer? Probably not.

If she had to trust anyone from Protocol at that moment, Skye was still her first choice. Possibly along with Killjoy. Actually, not much could go wrong at this point anyway.

“Have you got an answer to something, didn't know what to do with it and ended up regretting asking about that in the first place?” she finally asked. Almost in one breath, and Skye became even more convinced that something was weighing on her shoulders.

The initiator leaned more comfortably on the railing. It creaked familiarly.

“Sounds pretty... disturbing.” Deadlock couldn't deny it, so she nodded in agreement. “Personally, no, but you know, it's always better to talk about it. The longer you keep it bottled up inside, the more you'll feel it.”

“What if I don't know if I can talk about it?” She paused for a moment. She wanted to continue, but she needed a break, even if only for a second. “It's... something very serious.”

She sensed that with that one sentence, she had thickened the fresh air around them. Skye became serious, her uncertain smile disappearing somewhere far away, as if it had never been there. Deadlock rarely saw her so serious, and it felt strange to her that she was the cause of it.

“Is it about the Protocol, or something personal?”

She couldn't say that it was actually both. That Sage, in a way she didn't know, was a painful experience that wouldn't go away, but only grew.

Because it would be easier if they just broke up, got over it, and then went back to life.

Meanwhile, Deadlock found out what she found out by some damn accident.

“The Protocol.”

“If it's serious and affecting the Protocol, then I think it's best if you go to Brimstone. That's what he's there for.”

Deadlock grimaced at the very thought. Even if Skye was right and it was not only the most reasonable solution, but probably the only one.

There was no one else. Viper was out of the question. She wouldn't be able to look her in the eye, for one thing, and for another, what would she actually say? Ask if it was true? The look on Sage's face when she realized she couldn't escape what Deadlock knew was convincing enough.

“If I do that, a lot of things can go very wrong.”

“More than they already have? I don't think so.”

Although it sounded slightly humorous, Skye's face twisted into a grimace. They both knew why. Because even though everyone seemed to believe that everything was fine and that what was going on around them was a mystery to them, they were aware. Too aware.

Worse was the fear that they didn't know where it was all leading. Neither when it would stop, nor what was actually driving the whole spiral, nor what the consequences might be.

“Honestly, it's possible,” Iselin sighed. She ran her hand through her hair and combed it a few times. She shook her head. “But maybe you're right. If everything's going to hell anyway, maybe one more thing won't make a difference.”

“Or maybe it will finally shake someone up,” Kirra suggested. “That would actually be useful.”

Deadlock pressed her lips together. She nodded a moment later, and although she should have felt better, she felt as if her steps on the way back were unnaturally stiff.

***

“Known as Dead Lilac. Witnesses claim he is bulletproof and has a string of murders to his name, including several under unexplained circumstances. I quote, ‘they melt into thin air, and then it's too late.’”

Brimstone turned away from the shelf and glanced at the stack of papers thrown on his desk by Viper, who crossed her arms over her chest and seemed to be about to leave the office, because she turned on her heel a second later.

“What is this?”

She stopped at the door. She rolled her eyes. She really didn't feel like looking at Brimstone, let alone having a conversation she could avoid.

“The basis for recruiting a new duelist, which you would know if you had at least looked through these papers instead of asking obvious questions.”

She realized that her reluctance was obvious, and that was what made Brimstone sigh heavily. Not that she particularly cared, because she didn't intend to stay here any longer than necessary.

“Deadlock joined barely six months ago.”

“I don't see your problem.”

Brimstone didn't even glance at the stack of papers, staring intently at Viper. He was probably hoping that the chemist would feel at least a little intimidated. He failed, because Viper bravely met his gaze. If either of them was going to feel uncomfortable in this situation, she wasn't going to let it be her.

“She doesn't have as much experience as the rest of us, and I'm supposed to take on another agent who needs to be watched?”

She felt a strong urge to shove those papers down his throat.

“Deadlock is doing fine, don't make up a problem where there isn't one.”

“That doesn't mean that a killer who has been working alone and suddenly has to work with a team has to be the next risk.”

She shifted her weight to her other leg, and Liam closed the binder he was holding and put it back on the shelf.

“Do you dislike this idea because it's mine, or because it's actually a bad one?” she asked. “Because if you're choosing emails over conversation, I'm starting to get the impression that you're running away from everything related to me.”

She didn't add that if she were doing what he was doing, she would probably behave the same way. Nor did she add that she actually liked not having to talk to him too much because he moves back into some corner on his own. She said it because she wanted to trip him up with the fact that she knew. That she knew that since she had recovered, Brimstone had been making everything difficult for her, countering every suggestion with a counterargument, and that everything between them was one big, never-ending war.

“There was no need for me to call you here in person.”

“Bullshit.” She probably wouldn't have come anyway. But if there was ever a time in her life when she could be spiteful toward Liam, this was it, and she intended to take advantage of it. “Don't you think supervising the missions is serious enough that you could bother to swallow your resentment toward me for once in the last few months?”

“That's exactly why I'm not doing it.” He gestured toward her with his hand. She didn't even bother to be indignant anymore, so she just raised her eyebrows, as if in disbelief that he dared to do that. “You can see how it looks.”

“You're the one who has a problem with me that I don't know about, Liam.”

She expected him to put his fingers to his temples in a gesture of fatigue. He always did that. Or he would press the bridge of his nose, which he probably picked up from her, and she was growing less and less fond of it.

But he didn't respond. And she was going to respond for him.

"You're pushing me away from the position we established together. You're blindly following Sage's lead. Sage screws up, so you send everyone on vacation to forget about it. Then you push Reyna into the position, ignoring her health results and recent mission participation statistics. You don't want to recruit others just because, you claim you've got everything under control and all of that because I said something wrong once and suddenly I'm no longer fit for work? I don't believe it."

She blurted it all out in one breath. And yet she probably didn't even come here with the intention of getting rid of her tormenting thoughts. It wasn't part of the plan. She was just supposed to drop off the papers and go back to the lab in peace, thinking that she wouldn't get anything else out of it anyway.

But Viper missed her job. Her official job, not just filling out forms that only few people read anyway because no one cared about them. She missed the feeling of having a greater purpose, maybe a little responsibility, which she had always carried on her shoulders, and now that it was practically gone, she felt too light. She missed her job because she felt she had been there so long that she couldn't live any other way.

“We're not going to talk like this.”

Viper laughed silently.

“Of course not. Because when something is uncomfortable and the facts start to sting your eyes, you treat me like a brat and send me to my room, right?” She hissed. Then she shrugged. “But yeah, sure, send me another fucking email. I'll read it in between cleaning up the mess you made in the schedule and regaining the trust of agents who are losing faith in your ability to handle what's going on around you.”

She knew Brimstone would flip through the papers and maybe even read them when she wasn't looking. But she also knew that would be the end of it, because recruiting Dead Lilac was too risky to plan the mission on his own.

She slammed the door. She should have gotten used to the fact that leaving Liam's office had ended this way most often in the past few months, yet she still hadn't learned to take it calmly.

Everything was fine as long as she didn't look at him and see the man he had ceased to be to her. As long as she didn't see the traitor whose reason for betrayal she didn't know.

As long as she didn't demand an explanation in his eyes as to why he was treating her this way.

“Viper, can we talk for a moment...”

“I'm busy.”

Deadlock disappeared behind her back as she passed her in the hallway. She didn't even think about what she might want from her, but she didn't repeat the question.

Well, at most, Viper will get another email.

***

Deadlock found it difficult to decide whether she should enter Brimstone's office after the echo of the creaking hinges continued to reverberate down the hallway. For a long moment, she stood in the hallway, unsure of what to do with herself.

It crossed her mind to leave it for another day. Several times, in fact. Maybe it was a sign from fate that it wasn't the right moment yet, maybe the conversation with Skye was only meant to be a prelude to action, not its main catalyst.

Her fist hovered in the air in front of the door, stopping her from knocking. It probably looked ridiculous from the side, but she couldn't move any further.

So she gave up on knocking and just pressed the door handle.

There was no turning back now. The moment Brimstone turned his head toward her and his hand was lifted from his temple in surprise, Iselin felt an invisible wall appear behind her, separating her from everything that had happened before that moment.

“I need to talk to you about something.”

She didn't even ask if they could talk now. She pretended she hadn't passed Viper in the hallway and had no idea about the slamming door. Probably because if Brimstone refused her, she would never come back here again.

She had no idea if anything would come out of her mouth. She shoved her hands into her pants pockets, feeling the human one start to sweat instantly.

Liam frowned. He scanned the Norwegian woman from head to toe, looking for anything that would explain why she sounded so nervous.

She had no idea what Brimstone would do with this information. She had no idea where it might lead and whether her actions would bring down any walls that had been built into the Protocol some time ago.

Maybe she should discuss it with Viper first? Ask if she should even bring it up or not, make sure that Sage hadn't made up this gruesome story on the spot and that Diego hadn’t mistaken Viper and Sage for someone else?

On the other hand, Viper had been silent on this specific subject for as long as Deadlock could remember. Apart from her dislike for Sage, she showed nothing, mentioned nothing. If she hadn't told Brimstone by now, she probably intended to take this story to her grave.

And if no one took matters into their own hands, the silence would last forever.

“Sure.” He hesitated, and she knew why. She could feel herself turning pale. “Are you okay?” She nodded, even if it was so stiff that her neck almost hurt. “Sit down.”

She pulled up a chair opposite his desk. She sat down in front of him. And between them was a wall that Iselin was tasked with breaking down.

“I came back early from my pass.”

She didn't know why she said that first. Perhaps she wanted to delay the inevitable, or hoped that once she said the first sentence, the rest would somehow follow.

Nothing like that happened. A lump formed in her throat, and it was difficult for her to tell if it was anger or stress. Or an explosive mixture of both feelings.

“Yes, I noticed.”

She took a deep breath. She felt that breathing had suddenly become extremely difficult.

“I came back early because I found out something,” she added. Her gaze unconsciously avoided Brimstone's eyes. Instead, she fixed it on the desktop and focused on the pens lying there. “About Sage. And Viper.”

Liam was unaware of how difficult it was for her to say those two names. However, he frowned before placing his hands on the tabletop.

“You found out something about Sage and Viper… while being in Norway?”

“By accident.” Her bionic hand rustled slightly as she clenched it into a fist on her thigh. “It doesn't matter anyway.”

She had piqued his interest. And that was probably what made her stomach knot up and her heart sink. He made a gesture with his hand that could only be interpreted as meaning she could continue.

She couldn't even tell why she was so stressed. It wasn't her conflict. She had just learned something from someone when she wasn't expecting it and it turned out to be something important. She should have known that this wasn't something she could ignore once Diego had finished speaking, she should have been prepared to pass it on somewhere else sooner or later.

Maybe it was a matter of her own remorse that she had been misled by what everyone said about Sage and Viper and she had simply accepted the situation as it was. She never asked questions, she didn't feel the need to, the feeling that something was indeed wrong had been dormant and she didn't even know when it had happened.

“Did Viper ever tell you why she hates Sage?”

Brimstone didn't seem to like that question. He seemed to flinch when she said Viper's nickname and she immediately remembered the slam of the door and the curt tone she had encountered just two minutes ago. However, she didn't have time to worry about it, because she knew that the longer she delayed, the greater the chance that she would simply get up and leave the office, claiming that she had changed her mind.

“Viper doesn't like talking about Sage. When I tried to get something out of her, she avoided me and then disappeared into the lab. She didn't want to talk about it, so after a while I stopped pushing,” Liam replied truthfully. Iselin could see that he still didn't understand and didn't know what he was about to hear, because he was probably still trying to understand why she was so tense. “Why are you asking?”

Was Deadlock surprised by Viper behavior? No. And while she didn't know her very well and had her issues with her as well at the beginning, she knew that she could understand it. No one liked to be weak in the eyes of others. Not these days, and not in this job. Especially not when you're the second main pillar keeping the Protocol afloat.

She took another deep breath. She felt that as soon as she left this place, she would have to for a smoke.

“Because I know why she hates her so much.”

***

“Reconnaissance, downloading recordings from Cypher's cameras, maximum three people from Omega Earth, unless Sova's drone was wrong.”

Reyna handed Viper a stack of papers as soon as she entered the office with a cup of coffee, asking what they had to do.

Reyna knew she wouldn't have to wait long for Viper after she sent a text message saying she had access to the database of ongoing or pending operations. She could probably handle it herself without much trouble, but first of all, she didn't feel like it, and secondly, the fact that Viper would be supervising what she was doing gave her some sense of security.

After all, she was mainly supposed to sign her name on those papers. Anyway, she didn't consider mission planning to be her cup of tea.

“Take your legs off the desk,” Viper muttered, quickly glancing at Zyanya, who was leaning back in her chair, having made herself completely at home in the office.

“I don't even have my shoes on it,” she replied. Viper didn't answer, just took a sip of her coffee. “And I could have. At least Brimstone would have something to do,” Reyna added gruffly, shrugging her shoulders.

Viper still didn't answer. She put her coffee down on the table and placed a stack of papers next to it. She flipped through it without saying a word, and Zyanya even thought for a moment that maybe she had read something wrong before and that the description Viper was reading meant something really serious.

“I've located the flash drive,” she said suddenly, and she didn't look directly at Reyna, she managed to keep her eyes on the piece of paper in front of her nose, as if she had said the sentence completely by accident. “I have the coordinates.”

She didn't need to add which flash drive she was talking about. They both knew what she meant. Reyna even looked for some sign of uncertainty on Viper's face, maybe a slight grimace, that they had entered into a serious topic, perhaps less comfortable than the previous one.

But she found nothing of the sort. Sabine continued to stare at the pile of papers in front of her and looked as if that was all she was doing right now.

But Reyna knew it was a lie. That Viper was probably just reading the same line of text over and over again, really waiting for the echo of her own voice to stop sounding so uncomfortable in the room. Until the spoken sentence settled somehow steadily on the floor and reached not only Reyna... but also Viper herself.

Saying things out loud somehow made it easier to realize certain stuff.

“So what are you going to do now?”

Viper put the documents away. They were no longer of any value, even though they were the reason she had come here in the first place. And Zyanya took her legs off the desk.

“First, we need scans of the building. I'll have to get Sova involved, maybe Killjoy. But that will only be the beginning, so...”

“So Brimstone needs to know.”

Viper didn't like that sentence. It didn't matter that it was true, and no matter what she did, she couldn't deny it. She could only bite her lip, fighting the discomfort, and nod her head.

“Yes.”

It was almost like hammering the last nail into the coffin. Not that she wasn't aware that this moment would come someday, she had told Reyna herself that she couldn't escape it and until now she had been convinced that she was used to the idea.

But now it was somehow different. The echo of that one word carried unpleasantly through the room.

She was aware of the papers lying on the desk. That this wasn't why she had come here. That she should be doing something completely different, something less complicated.

“You know we'll figure something out, right?”

She turned her head toward Reyna. She stared at her, and Viper returned the gaze, although she felt that their attitudes differed. Zyanya again looked as if every such sentence, every word of comfort from her mouth, was involuntary. As if she did it without even thinking about it, and yet she always hit the mark.

She always hit where Viper needed her to hit.

“We have no choice.”

She tried to brush her off in a neutral way, even though she knew she couldn't do that anymore.

“I'm serious. We can handle this.”

She was making everything worse again. She was making Viper sink deeper and deeper into this hole, slowly losing sight of any light. And even though she told herself she could still back out, she was starting to lose faith in that too.

She was contradicting herself. And she knew exactly why. But what scared her was that Reyna might know it too.

She took Brimstone's guidelines from the desk in her hand. Probably so she wouldn't have to look at Zyanya, because with every second that passed, she felt it was getting harder and harder to stay silent.

She pressed her lips together. She thought she could hold back and swallow her words once again, but before she could replay the conversation in her head, her own tongue betrayed her.

“You have to stop.”

She didn't like that her throat suddenly felt tight. That she sounded strangely weak, even though she wanted to say something that bordered on an order.

Reyna raised her eyebrows. She sat up straighter in her chair, as if someone had put a stick down her spine. Viper couldn't let her ask the question.

“Doing all that,” she finished, gesturing with her hand to... all of Reyna. She hoped she wouldn't notice that her hand was shaking and that she felt a lump in her throat the second Reyna's surprise turned back into that gentle patience. “All of this you... do for me,” she added. “You shouldn't.”

“But...”

“It's nothing?” she guessed. Reyna fell silent. Sabine knew that the fact that Zyanya didn't look even slightly offended pushed her even deeper. Only patience. After all, she always let her talk. “Do you think everyone would think that?”

Zyanya gathered her words. She was silent for a moment, perhaps too long for Viper to assume that what she was about to say would be just a spontaneous response.

Reyna had always been able to fend off her attacks. To break through her defenses, even if she had to squeeze through the smallest cracks to get inside. And she was doing it again, looking at her so intensely that Sabine felt as if she were being pinned to the floor.

“Since when do you care about other people's opinions?”

Since you mess with my head and I don't know what to do with myself.

“You know what I mean.”

Or I need you to say it out loud because I can't.

“Rumors?”

“Yes.”

No.

Zyanya crossed her arms over her chest. And Sabine was afraid that her lie was too obvious. Not that she couldn't keep it up, it was just... there was some awkwardness in the air that she couldn't shake off.

Reyna seemed to feel awkward too. Or maybe it was just a reaction to Viper's answer.

“Did you hear anything?” she asked.

She looked as if she was afraid to hear the answer, but at the same time she wanted it. Her confident attitude from earlier, with her legs on the desk and her characteristic smirk, had suddenly disappeared, and Reyna seemed downright... embarrassed.

Viper shrugged.

“Not directly,” she said. For a split second, her conversation with Killjoy crossed her mind, but she ultimately decided to keep it to herself. She hadn't processed it herself yet, so involving Reyna in it would be extremely foolish. “But they might notice something.”

“Something?”

Reyna had pushed her onto thin ice, and Sabine immediately began to lose her balance. She looked away.

“How many times have we wanted to scratch our eyes out in front of others?” she asked. Rhetorically, because they both knew what she was talking about. Sabine herself didn't understand why she suddenly felt ashamed. “It's not like that anymore. You don't have to try hard to notice it.”

Maybe she subconsciously said it more quietly than the rest. Maybe she didn't want to admit that not only could she see it, but so could the others. Because Reyna had done something to her that no one else had ever done before.

“When Deadlock joined, she said maybe a few sentences during her first month and today she was on a trip with Skye.” Viper waited for her to finish. “Everyone has the right to change their mind about something. I doubt anyone cares why we’re not trying to kill each other at every opportunity now.”

Viper wanted to mention Killjoy again. That Killjoy thought about it. Not only that, she had brought Viper into that thinking as well. And that her conclusions had weighed on Viper's shoulders ever since.

But she didn't.

“Maybe,” she replied. She didn't feel like the conversation was over, but she wanted it to be. At least to pretend that her head wasn't getting more and more cluttered. “Show me those plans.”

Reyna handed her the building plans from Brimstone again. They didn't return to the subject.

But maybe that was for the best. And for sure it was easier.

Chapter 55: FIFTY FIVE

Reyna's mind was in turmoil.

Not that this was the first time. But this time it seemed worse than usual, because before she had always managed to find some foothold, something that would allow her to stay close to the ground and now she felt like a rag doll tossed from one corner to another by her own mind.

She and Viper had planned the mission. They had assigned roles, agents, and cover positions. They had done everything they were supposed to do, and yet Zyanya stared at her cup of tea with a strange feeling of emptiness.

As if she hadn't finished something. And that something also joined the hurricane that was swirling in her head, causing her to grip the mug tighter and press her lips together as she stared at the floor.

She was aware that Viper was full of contradictions. She liked to maneuver between one and the other in such an efficient way that it was almost elusive. Reyna was also aware that she might not understand her, or at least not completely, no matter how much she thought she already knew her.

She thought she had accepted that.

And then Viper evaded her one conclusion and brought her closer to a completely different one.

Viper, who let her taste her own blood in a gesture of trust. Viper, whose heart beat faster when Reyna admitted that she would let her kill her. Viper, who called her beautiful when they were alone in that small apartment in Mexico, and later thanked her for those days with a kiss on the cheek that Zyanya couldn't forget because it couldn't have been accidental.

The same one who didn't want to admit all this, most of all to herself.

Even if she went further with every step, she denied it a moment later. And Zyanya could ask what she really wanted, what all these conflicting signals meant, and how she should behave, but then... she would be bending the rules of their damn arrangement.

She felt that it was becoming increasingly difficult for her to believe that it still existed at all. But if she told Viper that... she would expose her from that very comfort zone.

That it was supposed to be an arrangement. That she didn't have to understand those signals at all, because they weren't supposed to mean anything to her from the beginning.

She also didn't believe that Viper thought that way at that moment. And that was probably the worst part of it all.

She couldn't force her to explain because the arrangement was blocking her. And the silence and pretending that she was unaware of anything almost made her skin crawl.

“Are you using the kettle?”

She blinked. She hadn't noticed when Neon had entered the kitchen. She hadn't even heard her. She shook her head, trying to keep a neutral expression on her face.

“No, go ahead.”

Tala nodded. She was still avoiding her gaze. Although Zyanya thought things were better than they used to be and although she didn't want to say it out loud, she probably owed some of that to Fade.

Reyna wasn't going to push the conversation. The situation was... well, damn complicated, so she wasn't going to put any pressure on Neonl or demand immediate forgiveness. It was enough for her that Tala didn't slam the door when she left the room where Reyna was and that their joint training sessions (when they were still on the schedule) were just fine.

She wasn't going to rush her into anything. Besides... the current situation was forcing even Reyna herself to do some serious thinking.

“You didn’t hear me?”

Neon clicked the kettle switch. She didn't look at Reyna, focusing on the device.

A valid point.

“I was lost in thought.”

“So everything's okay?”

Reyna frowned. Neon continued to focus on the kettle and didn't look at her, but she seemed to realize that Reyna was doing the opposite, because she was standing almost stiffly.

“Why wouldn't it be?”

Neon shrugged.

“I'm just asking. We haven't had training in a while. And you're not on the schedule.”

Fair enough. She wasn't going to bother with some complicated explanation.

“Brimstone told me to rest.”

She preferred to ignore the fact that it was actually Viper. Neon nodded. It wasn't clear whether she accepted Reyna's words as the truth, but she didn't seem to want to argue about it. That wasn't what was bothering her, and Reyna knew it. The problem was that it seemed difficult for her to accept. She had a question for Reyna that she was afraid to ask.

“So you're okay?” she asked again, even more uncertainly than before, if that was possible.

“Neon, what's going on?” Reyna replied. “Why do you think something's wrong with me?”

Tala tapped her finger on the tabletop and took a breath.

“I shouldn't admit this, but I know what happened at the gym,” she finally said, only daring to look at Reyna as she uttered the last word. “And before you say anything, don't ask me how I know, and preferably... don't tell anyone that I know.”

Fade. That was Zyanya's first and probably accurate assumption. She often wandered around the headquarters unnoticed, and if not her, then her nightmares and powers, from which she drew more information than anyone would have liked.

“It was nothing serious,” she replied. Neon wasn't satisfied with that answer, because her expression didn't change. “I had a little argument with Brimstone, that's all.”

“So if something was going on, you would tell me?” Neon insisted, though Reyna could see she felt a little uncertain asking the question. “I'm still not convinced about all this, but you know, it's not like I wish you bad things.”

Reyna didn't need to ask to know that she was talking about Viper. Although ‘all of this’ was an accurate description. Viper was changing all of this. And in an increasingly uncontrollable way.

“I know and I'm fine,” she replied. “Brimstone has just been getting on my nerves lately, that’s all.”

Neon nodded. One might assume that the conversation was over, but Zyanya saw the question lurking there. She wasn't going to press the issue; she felt that Tala would break down on her own, so she just waited with her for the water to boil.

“Is it still going on?” she asked finally. “You and...”

“Yes,” she replied more quickly than she intended. For some reason, she found it difficult to bear the mention of Viper’s nickname in this conversation. “But I don't think it's a good idea to talk about it. I don't want to argue.”

Maybe she also didn't want Neon to ask her uncomfortable questions that Reyna was afraid to answer. And confront it. Even if only with herself.

“I won't forbid you this anymore,” Neon muttered. And that's when Zyanya realized that she would probably prefer Neon to be angry. To snap at everyone, frown, and roll her eyes. Because that was somehow easier. “It is fine for you so I won't interfere.” She shrugged.

“Have you changed your mind?”

And she promised herself she wouldn't dwell on it. She shouldn't. But somehow it just came out. Maybe the vision of Neon changing her mind was disturbing in a way, because if she saw something... it meant that Reyna wasn't just lying to herself in an exceptionally hopeless way.

“Let's just say I got used to it,” she said, apparently either not noticing the hint of unease on Reyna's face or ignoring it. “I just wanted to ask. And I'm glad you're okay, even if I don't show it.”

“Can we catch up later?”

Maybe she was being cowardly by changing the subject. Maybe it was childish of her. But at that moment, it was the only thing that came to mind, and Neon agreed, replying that she had something else to do.

And Zyanya couldn't shake the feeling that Neon hadn't missed her evasion.

***

“You have the plan printed out, I’ll send the details by email. We need to prepare the Vulture and program the autopilot, I’ll take care of that when I have a moment. You can notify the agents, their assignments are on the first page.”

Viper had no intention of prolonging her stay in the office any longer than necessary. To be honest, she didn't even look at Brimstone when she came in, because her gaze immediately focused on the printer where she had placed the documents. She didn't intend to say hello either, because she didn't really feel like it.

Developing a strategy with Reyna went smoothly. Sabine may have been experienced in what being a controller actually entailed, but somehow... she was usually alone in the room, with a cup of coffee and an open laptop. And the fact that Brimstone also dropped in there sometimes distracted her more than it helped.

Zyanya simply kept her company. Her combat experience was invaluable, many of the things she said significantly sped up the whole process, and she couldn't deny that the information from Reyna, who was indeed usually in the thick of the action, was significant.

But even that didn't seem as important to Viper as it should have been at the moment compared to Reyna’s company itself. She wasn't entirely happy with how she was dealing with it.

If the hurricane in her head could even be called ‘dealing’. She felt like it had been raging in her head for so long that she had learned to push it to the back of her mind and pretend it didn't exist. However, a quiet whisper always lurked somewhere, and no matter what she did, she couldn't completely suppress it.

She was still standing with her back to Brimstone, and only after a moment did she realize that his silence was not only becoming more and more prolonged, but also somehow strange.

He was silent as a grave, and it wasn't the kind of silence that would prompt her to continue talking; it was the kind of silence that falls when you don't know where to start.

She frowned.

Her first instinct was to leave. To escape another wave of tension and nerves that she didn't need right now. Whatever Brimstone wanted to say, she had neither the strength nor the desire to hear it. She didn't care if he sold her another one of his emotionless ‘thank yous’ while continuing to play this sick game of pretense.

But he was silent.

For too long.

“I know what happened on the mission in Norway.”

Sabine's heart sank to her feet.

She couldn't even blink. Take a breath.

She could only stare ahead, straight at the wall, ignoring the trembling of her hands, which had appeared suddenly and was now too late to even try to control. She could focus on how cold sweat immediately covered her skin, on how something inside her was screaming and urging her to run away, but she couldn't move.

Sabine couldn't even flinch.

“What?”

It didn't even sound like a question. The word didn't even sound human, as if it didn't belong to her.

She heard Brimstone get up from his desk. The chair wheels squeaked on the panels, heavy footsteps approached her, and in that second she also heard the door of an invisible cage slam shut.

She still didn't move. Only her throat tightened, changing her breathing to shallow whistles.

“I know what...” He paused for a moment. He seemed to take a deeper breath. She wasn't sure, but for a moment she thought that maybe it wasn't just her throat that was tightening. “I know what Sage did to you. I know why.”

She didn't want to hear it.

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

She could have bet he was pressing down on the bridge of his nose now. But she didn't want to look at him anyway. She couldn't do it. Whether it was shame, humiliation, or the awareness of such a huge failure that was blocking her was her business.

He took another step closer.

Sabine felt him encroaching on her personal space. She was beginning to suffocate from being watched and scrutinized. That she was probably being judged, even though she didn't want to be, because the way she was perceived by others had become so ingrained in her patterns that she preferred to lie to everyone rather than agree to let anything change.

“You do.”

This sentence echoed off the walls and hit her right in the spine.

“I assure you, I don’t.”

Each word squeezed through her throat with difficulty. Again she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was really just standing by and watching the conversation unfold instead of participating in it.

She didn't sound like herself. She hoped Brimstone would let it go, even though she knew subconsciously that it was too late for that.

She still didn't move a muscle. Her own shock paralyzed every fiber of her being.

“Sabine.”

“Don't call me that.”

A reflex.

Brimstone sighed.

“Viper,” he corrected. It didn't help; she still couldn't listen to it. She shook her head as if she disagreed with that too, even though she had no reason to. “Is it true?”

It.

That's what he called this. It.

The biggest failure of her life, her worst nightmare, and something that had followed her all these years like a shadow. Maybe even the reason why she was... the way she was.

She clenched her fingers on the edge of the tabletop where the printer stood. She should turn around and look him in the eye if she wanted anything she said to be credible. To deny or confirm the words of whoever had provided this information.

She barely swallowed.

She didn't know when tears had come to her eyes, although she had no idea what emotion had caused them. She wasn't going to cry. She stood stiff as a statue, unable to make even the slightest movement or blink her eyelids.

“What will change depending on my answer?” she croaked.

She turned after a long time to face him. Although it was hard for her to admit it... she had no idea who she was looking at.

After all these months, Brimstone's face seemed... unfamiliar. There was something strange about it, so strange that it almost overshadowed everything else. So much time spent bouncing off the wall he was propping up instead of helping her break through it, so many arguments, so much anger she would never have thought was possible... and now he was looking at her as if someone had stabbed him in the back.

This time, she wasn't that person.

And it almost didn't get to her.

“Everything.”

She nodded. She frowned. She wanted to believe him.

“You're lying. Consciously or not, but you're lying,” she said. She saw the consternation in his eyes. Maybe with a touch of terror, which in all this mess brought her at least some relief in the form of control. Because she knew everything. She could shake this place from top to bottom, and Brimstone could only watch. But instead of laying all her cards on the table, she kept him in suspense. "You won't get rid of her because she's needed. You won't tell the others because they'll refuse to cooperate and the whole Protocol will go to hell even more than it already has. Nothing will change, you just... know now. That's all. If you want to throw around your meaningless ‘I'm sorry’, don't bother, and if you want to help, then..." She took the papers in her hand and held them out toward him. Her hand was shaking. “Check it out and don't sabotage the mission I'm about to undertake at Kingdom headquarters, because Reyna will approve it anyway.”

“Viper, I...”

“What, you apologize?” She felt a tear running down her cheek, but she didn't even try to wipe it away. “I think you need to clarify whether you're talking about the months when you treated me like shit for no reason, or the fact that you never even asked how the fuck I felt when blood was spilling out of my nose like a fucking faucet.”

“I didn't know she was lying!”

The echo of his scream bounced off the walls. Viper shuddered.

Not because Brimstone never shouted, and she couldn't even remember a time when he raised his voice. Not because the sharp tones pierced her spine like a wave of persistent pins. Not even because these sudden sounds in a room previously filled with silence stood out like a scratch.

She flinched for another reason.

“Lying?”

She barely managed to utter the word. It was a little louder than a whisper and being only a small wave after the man's shout it almost faded between them, as if she had never said it.

Her eyes darted across his face, searching for proof of what he had said. She frantically analyzed every detail, praying silently that what she thought was not true. It couldn't be. It couldn't be, because then it would turn out to be even worse than she was prepared for.

But Brimstone closed his eyes, as if suddenly ashamed that she was looking at him at all.

“I didn't suspend you because you were strict towards the agents,” he finally said. Viper felt her ears start to ring, as if Liam's words were being replaced by random sounds that didn't resemble words at all... and yet each one was like a brick hitting her in the head. “Nor because you were sick.”

She exhaled with a gasp. She didn't even know she had been holding her breath until then.

She was unable to speak, staring blankly at Brimstone, as if she couldn't reconcile his appearance with what he was saying.

“Sage told me about your old... research.” He searched for the word for a long time. “I had to, I don't know, think it over? Consider what to do with it, at least for a while. With you at the helm, it would be difficult to get any... distance. I didn't know everything until now, Viper.”

“Months.”

He blinked. She continued once she had swallowed and fought the urge to turn her head away, because she felt sick almost immediately.

“You've been silent for months.” She wrapped her arms around herself as she put the papers down on the counter. The previous tear had long since dried on her cheek, and she could feel it pulling at her skin. “You could have just asked instead of... believing every word she shoved down your throat without batting an eye.” Her voice, though weak and broken in places, now clearly emphasized the drawn-out words.

She swallowed hard, not so much because her throat was tight with fear that she would burst into tears, but because she was suffocating with pain. Maybe anger. Maybe a sense of injustice and misunderstanding. Or maybe an explosive mixture of all these feelings that she couldn't digest.

“How could I be sure you'd even want to talk about it when it's been different for years?”

“So you preferred not to even try?”

“I know I made a mistake, but I can't turn back time.”

She bit her lip. Maybe to keep from swearing, maybe to bite her tongue in time, or maybe to keep from slapping him in the face. She didn't know what she wanted herself. She couldn't even tell if she wanted to see him apologize and be haunted by his own decisions, or if she'd rather just disappear from the room and pretend she'd never come here.

“So what are you going to do about it now?” she asked, with a certain amount of venomous satisfaction as she watched his face break as she snatched more cards from his hand.

Brimstone sighed again, and Viper refrained from pointing out that that was all he could do at the moment. She preferred to remain silent and watch him struggle as he tried to come up with something that wouldn't sink him even further.

“I don't know, just... give me some time.” She pressed her lips into a thin line and dug her fingers into her forearms. “I'll agree to this mission, whatever you have there. Let me do something about it, please.”

He was remorseful. She could see it in him. The problem was, she didn't know if it worked on her. She didn't know if she could sympathize with the shock he had experienced when she compared it to what she had been going through for the past few months.

“I'm going to burn to the ground everything you've misinterpreted all this time,” she corrected. Cold. Even though tears still slightly tightened her throat, she didn't want to look weak. “In case you assumed I wasn't going to clean up my own mess.”

She didn't comment on his veiled apology. She wasn't going to make it easy for him. Nor was she going to come up with a peaceful proposal and pretend that yes, now everything would definitely go back to normal, because there was no chance of that.

Even if she wanted to hope for it, Viper didn't know if she could believe that they would both forget what had happened and bury the hatchet as if it had never been there.

It crossed her mind that it was impossible.

“Send me the scans by email.”

She left the room.

***

“If the mission goes according to plan and takes less than twenty-four hours, we'll be able to start the first procedures with Kingdom that same evening. I'd send an email to Sova, he could leave the next morning if Vulture would be intact.”

Reyna looked up from her book when the previously undisturbed silence in the library was broken by this barrage of information.

She had learned not to question how Viper knew where Reyna was. She had come to terms with the fact that Sabine simply knew.

That didn't change the fact that those few quick sentences had effectively thrown her off balance, and she realized that she hadn't even had time to understand most of it when Viper had already sat down at her table and placed a cup of coffee on it, along with several stacks of papers.

Reyna, on the other hand, couldn't shake the feeling that her hands were shaking, and even though she was talking to her, she seemed to be doing everything she could not to look at her.

“As for tomorrow, you can stake out that channel, it's the link between sites A and B, so you'll be on hand if anything happens, but you won't have to stick your neck out and you'll probably be waiting most of the time.”

They had already discussed this. Quite recently, in fact.

“Viper.”

“I know you know this, but I could cover up one side with the smoke orb to buy you some time in case something happens, so you can change places.”

“Viper, look at me.”

She didn't. She was pointing at the building plans they had been looking at together for a good two hours earlier that day. They both knew them by heart, yet Viper couldn't take her eyes off them.

“I hope it won't come to that, but...”

“Sabine.”

Sabine focused on how the vampire's fingers wrapped around her wrist. She was sure she could feel how tense her muscles were. Reyna could probably hear her heartbeat too, if she chose to pick it out from among the dozens of other sounds reaching her ears.

She fell silent. But she didn't answer. Nor did she look up.

Even the radiator seemed to hum louder than her breathing, and the entire library waited for her to make a move.

Viper realized that choosing this place had been reckless. That looking for Reyna was reckless, because she was digging herself deeper and deeper with every step she took in her direction.

And yet she continued to do so. Even though she could have gone anywhere, she always somehow found herself next to her and more than that, by her own free will.

She clenched her hand into a fist. And then she relaxed it.

She felt Zyanya's gaze on her, piercing her profile as she tried to piece together the puzzle of her torrent of words with this sudden visit. She knew she had done wrong by giving herself away so easily, and yet... she didn't think she had the strength to try harder.

Maybe she just didn't want to be alone. But she tried to explain it anyway, so she preferred to resort to what she knew — work.

“Sabine,” Reyna repeated, less bluntly this time. More gently. As if everything Viper had tried to hide had slipped through her fingers and been laid bare. “Is something wrong?”

She shook her head. Although her lips were tightly closed, she knew she should say something. Deny it, yes, that would probably be best, even if it was a lie that didn't make sense anyway.

Not with Reyna.

“He knows about Kingdom and my old research,” she said. But the grip on her wrist didn't loosen in shock. It was still just as firm. Maybe if she dared to look at Zyanya, she would read something more from her face. “He knew all along.”

If Reyna was surprised, she didn't show it.

They were silent. For a long time. Maybe even an eternity, as the silence around them began to wrap around their bodies like a blanket, and the smell of books soaked into their skin for good.

“Sage.”

Viper heard the anger that settled on Reyna's tongue when she said that name. She was sure she frowned, clenched her jaw, and her gaze sharpened as the last syllable faded away.

If she had fought back tears with Brimstone, with Reyna she felt that one wrong question would be enough to lose completely. One more step forward, which Zyanya was not ashamed of, and Viper would be lost forever.

“She told him her version of events. He never asked for another,” she said, shrugging her shoulders as if to convince herself that she didn't care. As if she hoped the power of autosuggestion would be enough. “Now someone ratted Sage out and told him what she did in Norway, and he doesn't know what to do about it.”

“I'll kill her.”

“Reyna.”

Their eyes met. And they were so different that if Viper didn't know Zyanya, she might have felt that slowly awakening anxiety.

Vampire eyes were cold. Devoid of everything but focus on the target, narrowed as if they wanted to see everything better before deciding to attack, but that was usually limited to the battlefield, when instead of the pages of a book, Reyna held a rifle in her hands.

And now, in the library, Ling’s nickname took on the tone of an order to attack.

Her gaze was sharp, fixed on Viper with that characteristic certainty for several unusually long seconds, until... it softened, as if with shame.

“She went too far,” she added. She almost croaked, trying to clear her throat of her heavy accent. “She should be kicked out in an instant, and he's still going to fiddle with her.”

She seemed to want to hit her fist on the table but stopped herself. At the last moment, she spread her fingers and laid them on the tabletop, exhaling through her nose.

“I can't change it. Neither can you. I just...” Viper didn't know what she wanted to say. And maybe that was what she needed to say. “This whole thing is fucked up.”

She didn't even catch the moment when the sentence ended with a sigh. A sigh that dangerously tightened her throat. And a sigh that finally softened Reyna's gaze completely.

Probably that's when she woke up.

She moved away from the table and, before Viper could protest, wrapped her arms around her, pressing her tightly against her.

Viper, however, did not seem to intend to protest at all. She rested her head on Reyna's shoulder, regardless of how much she was digging herself into this bottomless pit again or how much she was telling herself and Reyna that everything between them had long since gone off the rails.

“I don't know if I have the strength for this, Zyanya,” she whispered quietly, as if she didn't want even a fragment of that sentence to spread throughout the library. “I think I'm tired.”

Reyna's hand found its way into her hair and embraced her head tenderly, in contrast to the cold gaze of a few moments ago.

“We'll manage.”

Sabine Callas realized she hadn't heard that sentence in a very long time.

Because she had always managed on her own. All the problems were hers. All the solutions were hers, and she never included anyone else in them.

Now it was different. And maybe... maybe it was better.

Viper also put her arms around Reyna.

Chapter 56: FIFTY SIX

Reyna had felt all eyes on her so far. And although they were probably sometimes accidental, and certainly not malicious glances, with each one she felt her skin itch uncomfortably.

Because from the beginning of the mission, Viper had been giving orders, while Zyanya had been watching from beside her, nervously tapping out a rhythm on the handle of her vandal. It was impossible to hide that something was not as it should be.

Everyone saw her name written in the appropriate section on the documents, and now, instead of doing what a commander does, her role was limited to being decorative. She was aware that she was doing this for Viper, who, even before they left the base, had instructed her to let her take care of it. Reyna knew it would be better this way and no one would get hurt if they switched roles a little and gave Brimstone a jab, but still... the discomfort remained.

“Stop it,” she said, adjusting her grip on her weapon.

Sova frowned.

“I'm not doing anything.”

“But you knew it was said to you.”

If she felt comfortable with the silence in Viper's presence, it was quite the opposite with third parties involved. She couldn't pretend she didn't see it, and although it would probably be best if she didn't say anything, she somehow couldn't help herself.

The wind blew strongly on the stairs leading to the top of the old container they had climbed onto. And yet Zyanya had the impression that the moment her words were spoken, it fell silent, as if it too was waiting to see how the situation would unfold.

“Sova, if you have any questions, ask them now.”

Viper's voice was always like a razor blade. She dusted off the dirt that had settled on her outfit while preparing her sniper position, stepping between the two of them firmly enough to make Zyanya feel a little more comfortable.

The Russian took one arrow from his quiver before speaking. This surprised even Viper, as she thought he would simply retreat to his position with a shrug.

“Why isn't Reyna coming with me?” he finally asked. “Launching the drone is one thing, but the way to the recording site could be full od surprises. And before I cross the middle to the other side, I can get a bullet.”

Zyanya felt a slight twinge in her ribs. Not that she hadn't expected it. But still, the realization that her inaction was so obvious was a little depressing.

“That's why I have a view of the entire site from here, and you won't get any bullet. Reyna will be in the vents on mid, and on the other side you have Yoru and Omen. Didn't you read the brief?”

Sabine had an ability in shutting people up. She threw facts at them without even thinking, always hitting the mark. They always landed with a thud right at the feet of her interlocutor, delivered in a tone that no one argued with.

But Sova wasn't completely defeated yet. He was thinking about something, as if he wasn't sure how to put it into words to make it sound right.

“But Reyna is in charge,” he said finally. He didn't feel cornered or confused, even though Viper's eyebrows went up. “I don't blame anyone, but...”

“But you're looking for a problem where there isn't one.”

Reyna closed her mouth. But then she opened it again.

“Yoru needs more training. A little pressure won't hurt him, and we probably won't run into anyone anyway.”

“Is that why he stays closer to the squad than you do?”

“That's why he stays closer to the potential enemy.” 

Sova met Reyna's gaze, but a moment later he glanced at Viper as well. Viper, however, remained silent, as if waiting for his reaction. He had two options: either humbly accept the explanation they had given him or continue to delve into a subject he was far less familiar with than they were.

He let it go and prepared for his task. Reyna exchanged a glance with Viper, and they also parted ways, clicking the switch on the communicator.

***

“How much time would you give them?” Reyna muttered, leaning against one of the vent walls. “Before they will ask for explanations.”

Viper on the other end of the communicator was silent for a moment. Even if she had no particular reason to be, because they were talking through a private channel for now. Zyanya could only imagine her lying flat on the ground, her finger on the trigger of her sniper rifle. Maybe she was even looking through the scope, monitoring the empty stretches of land where Sova was no longer.

“Three weeks.” Although Viper couldn't see it, Reyna on the other end of the line nodded approvingly. “Questions have been rising for months, but today is your first command mission. Everyone has seen the brief and no one understands it. But for now, they're just surprised, no big deal.”

“Brimstone didn't schedule an organizational meeting. No one officially knows how the roles have changed.”

“Communication hasn't been his strong suit lately.”

A simple summary, but more blunt than anything else. Reyna could hear in Viper's voice that she had barely gotten the words out, and that was probably what gave her the final push to speak up on a topic she felt they had left very unfinished.

“And how are you?”

Reyna was a little ashamed that she hadn't asked the question earlier. She expected silence, and that's what she got. If it weren't for the hissing sound in the receiver indicating air being released, Zyanya might have assumed she was left alone on the line. At least for those few moments.

“Fine.”

“You know you don't have to lie, right?”

Viper felt as if she had been pressed against the roof of the container for good. Although Reyna couldn't see it, she adjusted her legs as if she had suddenly become uncomfortable.

“I'm not lying.”

She was lying. And Reyna didn't believe her. She could sense it even from several hundred meters away, as the wind played with her hair.

“You're not made of stone either.” Zyanya was sure of herself. The calmness of her voice spoke volumes, and it was Viper who was cornered in this situation. “So?”

She had no choice.

“It's been better.” The economy of words didn't surprise her. “But I'll get over it.”

“You don't have to.”

“What?”

“You don't have to get over it.” Zyanya shrugged as if Viper were actually in the link with her and could see it. “Brimstone acted like a total asshole, and Sage should be begging him and you to let her stay here at all, yet she's still not going anywhere. You don't have to feel good about it.”

She wondered what expression Viper had on her face right now. Had she pressed her lips into a thin line, as she usually did, or had that one delicate crack of uncertainty crossed her face, as if she didn't know how to react? As if she didn't know... how she could react.

“No one cares how I feel about it.” A bitter taste. “Brimstone is playing the beaten dog who had no mind of his own. It may be gnawing at him, but sooner or later he'll want to bury the hatchet without admitting too much guilt.”

“No one?”

“Except you.”

Reyna didn't care about being appreciated. She cared more about Viper understanding that she wasn't as alone as she was used to being. Maybe she should know that it's not just Viper who's watching the area with her finger on the trigger as part of her duties, but Sabine too. The one without the mask, without the vials of acid and toxins she spent hours perfecting.

“So how do you feel about that, Sabine?”

“You already asked me that.”

“We both know you can give me a better answer.”

She sighed. If Reyna had been there with her, Viper would probably have looked away. Have pretended that anything around her was more interesting, remained silent for a moment, and then changed the subject or shrugged.

Sometimes Reyna was surprised by how many Vipers habits she had managed to learn so far. How well she had gotten to know her over all this time. To what extent she knew all her reflexes that she was able to imagine a whole range of her reactions to a given situation.

“We're on a mission.”

“And we both know that nothing is going to happen here.”

“But this isn't the place for such conversations.”

“No place is.”

Silence.

“He made me feel weak.” Reyna realized that the momentary pause wasn't because Viper didn't know what to say. Or what to add, or how to behave. She knew that Viper was simply trying to come to terms with the fact that those words had come out of her mouth. “I didn't want him to know what Sage did. Because if he thought I was weak, everyone else would too. And now he's shown that I mean nothing to him, because he didn't even bat an eyelid as he drank in every word Sage poured into his throat.”

Reyna regretted being so far away. She couldn't put her hand on Viper's shoulder. She couldn't say that if she could, she would rip Brimstone's heart out and watch it beat in her hand until its last breath. And she couldn't hug her, just for no reason, maybe without even saying anything, just to show that she was there with her.

“It wouldn't have happened without you, Viper.” She cleared her throat so her voice wouldn't tremble. It couldn't, not now. Now she had to be the pillar Sabine could lean on. “The Protocol, saving the world. Finding homes for agents who couldn't control their own bodies after radianite. No matter how hard he tries, Brimstone can't make you think that you don't matter.”

“And what did it get me? You can see what's happening.”

Reyna bit the inside of her cheek. She realized she had never really thought about it. She hadn't considered it. But now, standing alone in the vents between sites A and B, with her weapon resting against her thigh and Sabine on the earpiece, the power of that thought was almost overwhelming.

“It brought me home. You gave me that.”

A moment of silence.

“Your home is in Mexico, Reyna. That's where you should be.”

She had expected that.

“If I hadn't joined the Protocol, I wouldn't even know that I could be more than a killer. Are you still saying it's nothing?”

“It wasn't just my decision.”

“But it’s you who put down your weapon when I wanted to stab you in the throat in some dark alley. You trusted me. And that's why I'm here.”

Viper felt the need to adjust her position again, even though it wasn't necessary.

She remembered that day. She remembered that it was raining, the sidewalk was flooded, and her footsteps splashed on the cobblestones as she moved through the streets of the capital in the twilight. She even remembered the type of gun that was bumping against her thigh under her coat when she came across that distinctive flash of purple.

She drew her weapon when Reyna attacked her. Reyna asked what she was looking for, holding the blade under her chin, as if the gun pressed against her forehead didn't impress her. That's how she was supposed to be. That's how the perfect Protocol duelist was supposed to be.

So Viper lowered her gun, trusting the vampire whose eyes glowed in the darkness.

Viper didn't answer this time. And Zyanya took that as a good sign.

***

Viper placed the flash drive on the desk. Cypher immediately glanced in that direction, turning to face her in his swivel chair.

“From the mission,” she said, brushing a speck of dust off her outfit, only because she didn't want to stand as stiffly as she felt. And it wasn't because the sniper position had taken its toll on her and several muscle groups were thoroughly numb. “Look through whatever is there and send the report.”

“Sure.”

He took the flash drive. He went back to typing on the keyboard, and Viper felt like asking what he was doing, just so she wouldn't have to ask what was most on her mind. At least not right away, while she could still feel the wind in her hair and the rough surface of the sniper rifle's trigger under her finger.

“Would you be able to check something for me?”

She asked the question deliberately, already almost at the door. As if she wanted to assure Cypher that she was leaving and that her request was just as fleeting.

“I can check a lot of things, Viper.”

The clicking on the keyboard continued. Maybe that was a good thing, because it meant that Viper wasn't the center of his attention and she could feel more at ease.

“It's about Brimstone.” The clicking stopped. Sabine felt less confident for a second because she sensed hesitation in the air, but she couldn't lose face now. “I'd like to know who's been in contact with him. The last forty-eight hours.”

“Viper, don't get me wrong, but spying...”

“It's very important.”

It was difficult for her to guess Cypher's expression through his mask. To be honest, he was probably the only person besides Omen that she couldn't quite figure out. Not counting KAY/O, of course.

Amir tapped his fingers on the tabletop and sighed.

“Am I supposed to believe that you never watch the cameras unless you're asked to?” she asked. Cypher didn't flinch, but she knew she'd hit a sore spot. Amir had something in common with Viper — he liked to know. And to watch. “It's not risky.”

Here, she could be tempted to say that she lied a little.

“Will you at least tell me why you need to know?”

“I just want to talk.”

She wasn't lying about that.

She had never given much thought to her relationship with Cypher beyond the fact that they worked together. She knew he didn't like her very much, and in fact, she should probably use a stronger word, but she didn't have time for that right now. Amir had no reason to help her, but she hoped that none of his reasons were strong enough to make him refuse.

Fortunately, he didn't refuse.

So, shortly thereafter, Viper, still fully equipped, knocked on Killjoy's workshop door and entered after receiving permission. Klara was sitting at a computer next to Deadlock, whose bionic prosthesis was connected by cables to several devices. Both turned toward Viper as she slowly closed the door behind her.

“I won't take long,” she said to Killjoy, forcing a reasonably convincing smile, as if to convince her that everything was fine. The fact that she didn't know if she was convincing herself more than her was another matter. “Can you give us a few minutes?”

“Sure.” Killjoy took her phone and headed for the door. Viper thanked her with a nod. “Call me when you're done.”

Sabine looked back at Iselin, but didn't speak until she heard the door close. Iselin bit her lip and looked away. She couldn't get up because her arm was plugged to the cables. Viper, though cruel, thought that maybe it was for the best.

In fact, she didn't speak after that either, because Deadlock spoke first.

“So you already know,” she said, still not looking at her. She was probably afraid to look up and see what she would see on Viper's face. “Who told you it was me?”

Viper crossed her arms over her chest. She was silent for a moment, because Deadlock's tense tone threw her off balance a little. She had expected Iselin to be less than thrilled about her visit. She had even expected her to deny everything, but Iselin did the opposite.

“I have my sources.”

Deadlock just nodded.

“Right.” She didn't argue. She looked up after a moment, and somewhere deep down, Viper even admired her for that. Not everyone would be able to do that. “I want you to know that I thought it would be better this way.”

The silence between one sentence and the next dragged on horribly.

Viper didn't know what to say. If she had to think about it, she didn't even know why she had come here. Why did she care who told Brimstone, why did she want to look that person in the eye? She had no plan for how she would react once she knew.

She just wanted to look at her face. That was all. And if there was more, she couldn't put it into words.

“I don't hold a grudge.”

Was that true? Didn't Viper feel damn small in the eyes of the Protocol now? So much so that she almost ceased to exist within its walls?

“I found out by accident.” Iselin's interjection surprised Sabine. She didn't think the Norwegian would be more willing to talk than... herself. “A friend of a friend was there when... she did that to you.”

Sabine's eyelid twitched.

“I won't stop you from judging me,” she said, deflecting the subject so skillfully that she thought Iselin would fall for it. “You can think whatever you want about me, it doesn't matter anymore. I just wanted to make sure my information was... accurate.”

For some reason, Iselin looked at her as if she didn't believe what she had heard. A bitter note crossed her face as she shook her head slightly, and Viper felt a twinge in her chest when she realized what it meant.

“I was in the military. I know you'll never get rid of that guilt.” Iselin was much more confident than Viper. She didn't like the contrast, but she couldn't help it, because she didn't know why she had come here. “We blame ourselves enough without someone else doing it too. So no, I don't think what you think I think about you. Even if I once called you a bitch and couldn't stand the way you behave.” Viper raised her eyebrows. Iselin licked her lips as if her throat had suddenly gone dry. “We all have some crap in our past.”

“And it doesn't matter to you?” Viper asked.

“You didn't know what was going to happen.” Sabine was probably surprised that third parties said this to her more often than she ever said it herself. “And I'm not saying what you did was right, but what Sage did to you was revenge. And we don't take revenge on our people.”

Viper nodded. Because she couldn't think of a better response. Because she wanted to do anything other than stare at Deadlock with a lump in her throat. Whatever her initial thought had been, she hadn't expected the conversation to end like this, and even if she wanted to leave the workshop, she couldn't move.

She wondered why she was going to tell Deadlock about her plans. Did she want to tell her because she really wanted her to know, or because, despite what she had heard, she subconsciously wanted to justify herself?

“I'm going to clean it up,” she said. She ignored the dangerously breaking sounds and only her willpower kept her from crying. Iselin's eyebrows rose slightly. “I mean, everything with Kingdom,” she added, even though she probably didn't need to explain further. “It's not official yet, and I'm not going to force anyone to participate, but if you'd like...”

“I'll help,” Iselin interrupted immediately. The silence that followed in Viper's head lasted for ages. “We're a team, after all.”

Sabine bit her lip. She didn't have to share her plans with Iselin. She didn't really have to share anything with anyone except Reyna. And yet she felt she owed it to her, even though when she came here she didn't even know if she was more angry or grateful to her.

Maybe she never assumed the truth would come out, even though that was extremely foolish. She convinced herself that if she tried to forget, she would forget, no matter how those events ate away at her every day, robbing her of sleep and the remnants of her own feelings. Perhaps she hoped that she would die here, as part of the Protocol, on a mission. One shot, one bullet straight to the heart or head, and darkness would envelop her.

Although Sabine Callas did not feel like a hero, she dreamed of a heroic death.

Even if, when Omega Reyna was behind the barrel of the gun, fear froze her to the core. And maybe she was greedy, wanting a more dignified death than that, but somehow she couldn't imagine her heart stopping beating at any other time than when the fight for ultimate freedom was underway. She would just close her eyes, knowing that their world was finally and truly safe.

And that vision was the best one. 

If she were to die on a mission to fight the Kingdom, would she feel fulfilled? Maybe. But maybe not. And something ached in her heart with relief that Deadlock wanted to join, even though she didn't have to.

“Thank you,” she said finally. She swallowed and straightened up more, as if to improve her appearance. “I'll go get Killjoy.”

***

“Viper is acting strange again.”

Raze stopped unscrewing the boombot's cover and turned to Killjoy. Killjoy, who, since finishing calibrating Deadlock's arm, looked as if she had a stomachache, at the very least. Raze didn't want to press the issue, but she couldn't hide her relief when she finally spoke.

Usually, their tinkering didn't take place in deathly silence. And the Brazilian really preferred to be able to help rather than watch Klara try to suppress something she wasn't talking about.

“Why do you think that?”

KJ shrugged.

“She's wandering around the headquarters. And when I went to make tea, she was standing by the coffee machine in her suit, staring at the wall. And as far as I know, the mission was in the morning.”

Raze moved away from the desk and rested her elbows on her knees, scratching the back of her neck. 

“I don't want to be insensitive, but that sounds like something Viper would do,” she began cautiously. “You know, she thinks a lot. And she drinks a lot of coffee. Maybe she had a tough day.”

Klara unscrewed one of the screws, but as soon as she put it down on the desk, she slumped back in her chair and sighed heavily, twirling the screwdriver between her fingers.

Raze fell silent for a moment. She watched Killjoy, many scenarios running through her head and far too many thoughts. And something almost squeezed her chest at the sight, so she moved closer. She wanted to be within Klara's sight so that she knew she would be heard every word. 

“It's not that,” she muttered. “I know her, it's something bigger now. But... I don't know, I don't think she'll tell me the truth anyway.”

Raze nudged KJ's shoulder, trying to get rid of the tense expression on her face, but when that didn't work, she took her hands in hers, turning Killjoy’s chair toward her.

She didn't want to look at her right away, but the Brazilian was stubborn, demanding that look.

“Hey, you won't know until you try, right? If you have a hunch, it's better to try than to suffer.”

“I just have a feeling that she thinks she's alone in everything.”

Raze stroked the back of Klara's hand with her thumb in a soothing gesture. She could feel that she was tense, and she wasn't surprised — Viper was important to her, in fact, at one time she was the most important person to her in all the mess she found herself in.

“She's the boss,” she said calmly, smiling playfully at her girlfriend. “Bosses want to be responsible for everything, whatever it is. And they don't want to involve anyone else because they consider it their problem.”

Killjoy didn't answer. Not at first, because she was staring at her hands, held by Raze, and at how her thumb was tracing small circles on her skin.

“I think she's tired,” she finally said. And it sounded so terribly sad that Tayane instinctively squeezed her hands tighter. “But she doesn't tell anyone because she won't let go anyway, even if she has to crawl across the floor with the last of her strength.”

“Honey, she's an adult. You trust her, she's smart, right?” Killjoy nodded, though the gesture lacked boldness and was more burdened with worry. “Well, then you should be even more sure that she's doing what's right. Besides... it's Viper. We both know she's a tough one,” she added with a slight laugh and felt relieved that Killjoy also raised the corners of her mouth, albeit a little shyly.

She still remembered when she met Reyna in the hallway of the medical wing, how she saw the dried blood and the question of whether it was Viper's blood barely escaped her throat. And then there was just that damn waiting, when she had no control over anything and could only stare at the ceiling, not even trying to fall asleep.

She didn't remember calling Tayane, trying to explain what had happened in fragments. But she did remember crying into her neck a moment later, when the Brazilian's hands soothingly stroked her shoulders, and after those few hours, she finally began to feel sleepy.

Raze stayed until morning. And Killjoy had probably never been so grateful to her for anything as she was for that one night.

Klara freed her hands from her partner's and embraced her neck. And Raze smiled and welcomed her with open arms, closing her in a hug.

“What's that for?”

This time, Killjoy smiled sincerely, even though Tayane couldn't see it.

“In general.”

“In general?”

“For being you.”

They sat like that for a few moments. Klara knew she would have to talk to Viper anyway. 

But for now, all she felt was peace.

Chapter 57: FIFTY SEVEN

This time, Viper heard Reyna's footsteps as she entered the laboratory and closed the door behind her. She wondered if Reyna had done it on purpose so as not to scare her, or if she simply wanted to show openly that she was there.

However, Viper did not turn around. She stood by the desk, her hands resting on the tabletop, her gaze fixed on the equation, as if she hoped that its sheer power would suddenly inspire her with the solution. She didn't even know how long she had been staring at it, but the rows of crossed-out lines spoke volumes.

Even her coffee was growing cold, pushed aside somewhere.

“Skye was looking for you. Apparently, she wants to do some final blood tests.”

Reyna stepped further in. Not that Viper had expected anything else, because it was becoming less and less likely that she would simply tell her that and turn back.

“I'll go check on her soon,” she replied, bravely enduring Zyanya's footsteps coming closer and closer, until she stood behind her at the desk.

She knew what she was about to hear. Especially when Reyna sighed in her characteristic way.

“Have you rested for even five minutes since we got back?”

Viper instinctively looked at her gloves. Her suit still had traces of dirt from the container she had patrolled from today and her shoes had left marks on the laboratory floor. Only her mask was lying on one of the tables, although she couldn't even remember which one, and she took off her gas backpack so it wouldn't weigh her down.

“I have to finish this, the sooner the better.”

“And you've been finishing it for four hours?”

Viper took a deep breath.

“I'll finish when I finish,” she replied. Reyna muttered something to herself, although she was standing close enough that the sound reached Viper without any obstruction. “This could be useful at the Kingdom facility.”

Perhaps she hoped that would excuse her. Although, judging by Reyna's mutter, there was little chance that anything would excuse her, even if she were to say that this formula could grant immortality.

This formula, whose equation occupied her mind in a soothing way, because then she didn't have to think about anything else.

About what Deadlock had told her. About what she had to plan and face if she wanted to bury her past for good. About Reyna, who, no matter how hard Viper tried to repress her, always appeared in her mind.

About the fact that she felt like she was slowly sinking into quicksand. It wasn't that she wasn't aware of this feeling or that it didn't register with her, it was more that she thought she could somehow suppress it. She would convince herself that it would pass, just as she had convinced herself of other things, and somehow it would be okay.

Maybe she would forget in a week, a month, or a year, but she would forget eventually. And she wanted to hold on to that. But just when she thought she was close to her goal, Reyna would throw her back to the starting line, appearing where Viper needed her most.

“You're exhausted, you will only get frustrated in this state,” Reyna said. Viper didn't flinch when Zyanya's hand rested on her shoulder. “And take that off, for God's sake, because it makes me uncomfortable to even look at you.”

Viper just muttered something under her breath. She tried not to think about the vampire's hand on her shoulder. Or about her sigh, which she felt on her cheek when she didn't answer. Or about the fact that she almost froze when Reyna's fingers began to wander around her neck, looking for the zipper.

“Reyna.”

She didn't know if it was meant to be a question, a call, or a rebuke. Whatever it was, it didn't stop Zyanya from locating the zipper.

And she could have started resisting the moment Zyanya pulled it down. And later, when she pulled the fabric away from her body, leaving her in a much more comfortable T-shirt and almost took her hands out of the sleeves and gloves herself, because Viper was too surprised by her persistence to do anything about it.

Just because Viper couldn't stop her for some reason didn't mean she was going to make it easy for her.

She was even going to scold her for it, because even though their mutual teasing no longer had the same power, it at least gave Viper some sense of control.

But when Zyanya finished tying the knot of the costume sleeves around her hips, her hands rested on Viper's shoulders, and she began to draw small circles with her thumbs.

“Zyanya, really...”

“Let me.”

She let her. She tried to keep her guard up, because she felt stupid admitting to herself that she had let go so easily, but when Reyna's fingers dug into her tense muscles with exceptional skill, she realized she was too tired to argue.

She let all the air out of her lungs and hung her head. She leaned on the counter with almost her entire weight, trying to focus only on the stinging pain of her stiff muscles, instead of on the fact that... that Reyna was again making Viper surrender to her more easily than any boundary would allow.

And then Reyna silently pushed a chair toward her, and Viper silently sat down on it. Reyna's hands were still on her shoulders and they too returned to their previous activity without hesitation.

“Better?”

Reyna's voice was like ice on a hot forehead. She sounded gentle, calm, soothing in a way, entering the tornado swirling around Viper and silencing it with a single flick of her finger.

And Viper didn't know how to feel about it. She breathed out, maybe even closed her eyes, but even though Reyna was right, she couldn't shake the feeling that it shouldn't be this way.

Sitting here, letting Reyna massage her as if nothing had happened. Allowing this closeness and not even trying to fight it.

Each time, she told herself that this was the last time and that next time she would set a boundary. And each time, it ended the same way.

“Yes, thank you.”

Reyna didn't stop, though. She skillfully broke down the hard muscles of her neck, and even though Viper couldn't look at her, she was sure that her gaze had fallen on the cup of cold coffee at least once.

“Have you eaten anything? Killjoy is making tortillas with Raze.”

She felt bad that she couldn't control how detached from reality she was. And she couldn't even figure out what was causing it.

Or maybe she could, but she didn't want to admit it.

Because everything was falling apart, and she was still trying to pretend that this was how it was supposed to be. That she had permission to attack Kingdom, that even Deadlock was on her side, so what could go wrong, even that Reyna was still helping her relax was planned and not because Viper didn't want to kick her out.

That everything was going its way and she wasn't lost in it at all. In what had collapsed a long time ago, and she couldn't rebuild that wall.

“I'm not hungry.”

“So you haven't eaten.”

Viper squeezed her eyelids shut. She should have gotten used to Reyna knowing some of her answers all too well, but in the context of today, it stung her more and more clearly.

“I really have to finish this, then I'll come over.”

Reyna took her hands away. And for a moment, Viper naively thought that the vampire had nodded and was simply going to back off. But then she heard her sigh, so characteristic that it almost made her throat tighten at the very thought of what it meant.

“All your inventions and devices are always buttoned up. We'll burn this building to the ground with our eyes closed, Viper.”

Viper stubbornly stared at her equation, even when Zyanya finally came into view and leaned her hips against the edge of the desk. It took her a few seconds to realize that not only was she being silent for too long if she wanted to appear credible, but avoiding eye contact was also costing her extra points. She could have bitten the inside of her cheek or shaken her head in resignation, silently showing Reyna that her argument had failed.

Instead, feeling Zyanya's presence so clearly, Sabine did nothing but swallow hard through her tight throat.

“Sure,” she replied after a moment, forcing a crooked smile toward Zyanya. But instead of relief on the Mexican woman's face, Viper saw only mounting concern. “It's just... I feel like whatever we do, it won't be enough.”

She laughed bitterly. She knew she was making her situation worse and, instead of dispelling any suspicions, she was drawing more and more attention to herself.

“You can't think like that.” Reyna lowered her head slightly, as if to make sure Sabine couldn't escape her gaze. “You won't be alone with this. Not anymore.”

She was doing it again. Again, she was making Sabine's stomach clench in terror that she was losing control of her feelings. That she was losing control of what was visible and what she hoped to hide. That Sabine was facing something she never thought would stand in her way, and she knew she couldn't overcome it.

And it made Viper increasingly understand that she was unable to keep it under control, and that silence would not bring her relief.

She nodded, but did not speak to answer her. At least not on that subject.

“Let's go get those tortillas.”

“Get changed first.”

She didn't argue.

***

Viper wasn't used to having anyone else in the kitchen when she was there. In fact, she wasn't used to having people around her at all. And here she was in the middle of it, just like everyone else. Because she was part of them too, wasn't she?

And that's why she didn't feel very comfortable when she heard Phoenix and Jett laughing, mixed with the sounds of some game on TV and the clatter of pots and plates.

Reyna's hand gently pushed her forward, placed encouragingly on her lower back. She couldn't back out. That was probably Zyanya's intention, but Sabine wasn't angry about it this time, because she knew she wanted to escape. From the space where it was just her and the vampire and Viper also knew that this act smelled of her desperation, since she was resorting to spending time in a room crowded with people instead of Reyna alone, but she tried to ignore that thought.

At first, no one noticed her. She wanted it to stay that way, even though it was impossible. But she preferred to change it on her own terms.

“I see you're better at cooking than I am.”

Killjoy froze with a spatula in her hand. Fortunately, it was only her, because Raze gave Viper and Reyna only a slight smile as she carried plates for Jett and Phoenix, who they had a view on from their position.

The German woman quickly glanced from Reyna to Viper several times, as if she couldn't believe that Zyanya had really managed to persuade Callas to come here. Immediately afterwards, however, she regained her composure and shrugged.

Viper felt relieved when she saw her smile. Maybe it wasn't such a bad idea after all. Maybe everything could still be salvaged and it wasn't as bad as Sabine thought.

She just had to... remain neutral. That was all, and that was enough, because when Reyna's hand slipped from her back, Viper felt as if she had lost the support she had been clinging to so stubbornly until now. Zyanya's presence, now or at other times, even when she was hiding in the shadows, sending her single glances, which Sabine might not have responded to, but felt more deeply than anything else.

Zyanya's presence, which had become a constant in Viper's life, and... and Viper had to accept that she couldn't erase her from it. Not anymore.

“I'm trying my best,” Killjoy confessed a little shyly, “Although I'm not the chef.”

Viper glanced at Raze. The Brazilian had placed Phoenix and Jett's plates on the table, but she leaned her elbows on the back of the couch and focused on the two of them for a moment.

“They turned out great,” Zyanya said, and it took Viper a second or two to realize that the comment was directed at her, not Killjoy, who thanked her a moment later and went back to turning the meat in the pan. Viper didn't miss the fact that she almost did it with a jumping step. “Come on, I'll get you some.”

***

She felt like she was being watched.

Maybe it was because she was looking around the room excessively, or maybe it was because it was actually happening. Jett only glanced in her direction when she was probably waiting for the next level to load, and it could just as well have been accidental, but her strange paranoia was trying hard to convince her that it wasn't.

They stayed with Reyna in the kitchen overlooking the living room because Killjoy and Raze had joined the tournament and were cheering each other on.

She didn't want to get closer so as not to disturb them. And yet, Zyanya's proximity made the kitchen shrink to an almost claustrophobic size, where the air became thick and Sabine's self-awareness of certain things pierced through the ceiling.

And so she didn't move. She couldn't, drumming her fingers on the kitchen counter next to her empty plate. She could naively hope that it would escape the vampire's glowing eyes in the twilight. She could also stop fooling herself that this would happen.

But when Zyanya spoke, she didn't say what Sabine expected.

“It's good that you came.” Amidst the general buzz of conversation and laughter, Reyna's voice sounded calm again. When Viper glanced at her, Reyna looked just as nostalgic. She held a cup of tea in her hands, her gaze fixed on the agents playing for a long moment. “Killjoy didn't believe I could convince you.”

“Did you bet on it?”

She seemed a little relieved that the atmosphere (at least in her head) had eased a bit. She even managed to smile a little, although Reyna didn't see it anyway.

“No, but when I asked if she wanted you to come, she said she didn't want to disturb you at work because you must be busy.”

“She didn't lie.”

“And yet here you are.”

Viper surveyed the scene before her, but something stirred inside her when she heard Reyna tapping her fingernails on the sides of the cup. Perhaps she was exaggerating, but with that one gesture, Viper gained hope that she might not be the only one feeling the unnatural density of the air. After all, Reyna could hear her heart, she could be aware of the tension building in Viper's body and just pretend to buy her argument about the Kingdom mission. She could sense that something was wrong, but not press the issue.

Viper would probably prefer her to press the issue. Then she would rip off the band-aid faster, more violently. The outcome was unknown, but at least it would be over.

“You have a gift for persuasion,” Sabine replied, shrugging her shoulders. The tapping of nails had stopped, so she assumed Reyna had moved the cup to her other hand. “Sometimes,” she added, as if she felt she had said it too directly.

Reyna, however, ignored the second part of her statement. She put down her tea, the sound of glass being placed on the tabletop echoing strangely off the walls despite the prevailing noise. She folded her arms across her chest and positioned herself sideways to Viper, perfectly in the corner of her field of vision.

“Did I hear a compliment from you, Dr. Callas?”

Viper wanted to say that it wasn't the first. She still remembered the touch of Reyna’s warm skin in that small apartment in Mexico. How she stared into her eyes, how a drop of water ran down her nose and fell somewhere below, and Viper, though she didn't think she would, remembered that small detail.

She still remembered telling Zyanya that she was beautiful.

She frowned.

“I'm not heartless.” Only when the words were out did she realize she should have bitten her tongue. She saw Reyna raise her eyebrows and maybe even wanted to comment on it, but she held back. She had to cover up that statement with something equally strong. “Besides, I have a name, don't I?”

She felt her lungs tighten and the air grow thick. The atmosphere was no longer relaxed, and it was her own fault. Her feet were sinking into quicksand, and the more she struggled, the deeper she sank. She could give in to it.

Even though Sabine never gave up, now she probably had no choice.

Reyna stood next to her, her shoulder brushing against Sabine's, and she clenched her jaw reflexively. She had to give up, simply.

So little, and yet so much.

Just to let go.

Let herself be pulled into the quicksand and accept that she would never emerge, because she had been lost long ago.

The touch was gentle. Friendly and, in some unique way, more caring than anything Viper had ever experienced from other people.

“Alright, Sabine. Thank you.”

The last breath before submerging was full of tension. After all, it could always be the last one. She couldn't fight anymore, even if reason told her otherwise. Even if that little touch should have been insignificant, it wasn't.

She turned her head toward Reyna.

“Want a smoke?”

***

Viper's quarters were closer than the main exit. However, when she opened the balcony door, Viper felt as if she was doing it for the first time in her life. As if everything was new from that moment on and her life had become a blank page that she had to write on again, now in a different way than she had done all these years.

She used to not smoke on her balcony because she felt it was too private a space to do so. Selfishly, she preferred to spread tobacco smoke elsewhere, watching it disappear into the silence of the evening as she gazed at the ocean waves as far as her eyes could see.

She had broken this unwritten rule so many times that she was surprised at herself. After all, she liked her pedantry. Her habits, unchanged for years and set in stone, were now crumbling.

The wind blew playfully. It lifted Viper's hair into a dance as she took a lighter and a pack of cigarettes out of her pocket. She held them tightly for a few moments, as if it would somehow ground her. She took one out with the gesture of a heavy smoker and pushed it toward Reyna.

“Take it.”

“I have my own.”

“Take it.”

Reyna nodded in thanks and didn't protest. She took the cigarette between her fingers and was about to take her lighter out of her pocket, but then Viper handed her hers as well.

She didn't know why. Neither did Reyna, because she frowned, a little confused, but didn't say a word.

After some thought, Sabine decided that maybe she just wanted to see Reyna's slender fingers wrap around her property and leave invisible marks on it. Maybe she wanted to feel a little better about the fact that she should have quit a long time ago, but didn't, because someone else was using the lighter too.

Reyna lit her cigarette.

And so their peculiar ritual usually began. They watched each other when the other wasn't looking. They mapped out patterns in their heads, carved out images of how characteristically they held the drug between their fingers or how their lips formed when they exhaled smoke.

Reyna flicked the ash, which disappeared into the darkness, falling silently from the balcony. Maybe they should have taken an ashtray, because it was on the other side of the windowsill, but somehow neither of them moved.

Viper, on the other hand, took a deeper drag. When Zyanya wasn't looking, she exhaled the smoke, and it danced around her face, giving the illusion of relief.

She felt cold. She felt that for the first time in a long time, even a cigarette was of no use to her. She felt herself beginning to shake deeply and without restraint, clenching her fingers tighter and tighter around the drug, as if begging it to give her a little more time.

Reyna smoked quietly. Her eyes glowed from time to time, reflecting the light of the glowing tip. Her radianite heart was calm, although every now and then it would dreamily bathe her chin in light, perhaps to remind her that it was still there.

“I fucked up.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Viper saw movement as the words came from her mouth. Zyanya leaned her elbows on the railing, but her head turned toward Viper and tilted slightly.

Sabine squeezed the cigarette, staring into the evening space. She didn't know if she would be able to explain it logically. Because maybe she would never speak again, leaving Reyna with that statement, just as she had done all these months, avoiding uncomfortable turns with enough agility to make her think they didn't exist at all.

Reyna didn't have to ask questions for Viper to know she had them. She exhaled slowly, watching the smoke dissipate into the air.

Something stung her under her ribs. Fear, she thought. So suffocating, overwhelming, and omnipresent that as she exhaled the smoke, she felt like she couldn't breathe because the truth had finally caught up with her.

The cigarette trembled in her hand, but she didn't remain silent, giving her answer.

“I fucked up, because I think I love you.”

Only crickets. The sound of waves. The wind. Her hand began to shake uncontrollably, so she stubbed out the cigarette and carelessly trampled it with her shoe.

She couldn't look at Reyna.

She clasped her hands together, begging them to stop shaking.

She swallowed, because it wasn't the tobacco smoke that made her throat dry. She stared at the space in front of her, at the navy blue sky, the twinkling stars, and somewhere in the distance, the moon's reflections on the ocean waves.

She heard Zyanya take a breath. She heard that she wanted to say something, so she had to be the first, before this whole maze, which she had carefully woven from her own feelings, arrangements, and habits, would crumble in her hands completely.

She took a deep breath. She still didn't tilt her head, hiding in the shadows of the night and begging it for the shelter she so desperately needed right now.

She noticed how much her own breath had betrayed her, but she couldn't let that stop her.

If she didn't speak now, she would never do it.

“And before you say anything, I want you to know that I can't do love, Zyanya. I don't blush, I don't giggle or talk gibberish when I’m next to you and no matter what I do, I can't fucking grow those fucking butterflies in my stomach that everyone is talking about.”

Silence.

Silence.

Silence.

Viper felt her heart rise to her throat, and her eyelids began to burn dangerously in that all-too-familiar way.

But it wasn't supposed to be like this.

She could only bow her head, clasp her hands behind her neck, and with some indescribable anger, run her fingers through her hair. As if she wanted to punish herself and ground herself in this strange way. That it wasn't supposed to be this way, but it was. That she had no control and was somewhere else.

Before she could stop it, a single short, exceptionally broken sob escaped from her lips before she could hold it back.

She swallowed the tears in her throat, took a few jerky breaths, aware that she could perfectly imagine the expression on Reyna's face.

She slowly exhaled. Her voice was no louder than a whisper.

“And at the same time I can not not love you.”

She shrugged her shoulders, admitting what had been everything to her for the past few weeks.

With tears in her eyes, her hair tousled carelessly, her hands trembling, she faced the truth and could only laugh bitterly, as if it were some kind of defense mechanism.

As if laughter would give her the feeling that it wasn't so bad, that she could handle it, because she always had. That bitter, sad kind of laughter, when her breath stuck in her throat and the stars in the sky became only blurry spots of light, since her so often cold eyes now flashed with so many emotions at once.

She squeezed her eyelids shut when she heard a step. Then another, then one more.

“You didn't fuck up. And if you did, then I did so as well.”

Reyna's voice trembled.

It trembled with such emotion that Viper's knees almost buckled. The always confident Zyanya Mondragón now spoke these words directly to her, at once so confidently and yet so cautiously, as if she were treading on ice that could break at any moment.

And Sabine was afraid to lift her head, to meet those purple eyes that had once meant nothing to her, but now had become everything Viper didn't think she had been missing in her whole life.

Because with that one sentence, Reyna confirmed what Viper was so afraid to find out.

So she said the last thing. The last sentence that always belonged to her in conversations. This time it was like a knife stuck up to the hilt under her ribs, twisted and tearing apart everything that was solid. And the worst part was that Viper herself had sunk it into her body.

“But it won't work, Reyna. I won't work.”

Silence. She clenched her jaw, every muscle tensing as the words echoed in the night and fell heavily to the ground.

When she took a breath, waiting a long time for her own body to allow her to do so, she finally encountered Reyna's eyes on her way. Viper stood rooted to the spot in her pursuit. It was as if someone had grabbed her by the hood of her sweatshirt, ordered her to stop, take a breath or two, and wouldn't let go until she stopped struggling.

Viper had been running most of her life. From herself, from her own fears, from her own emotions, which she locked away in airtight jars, guarding them like the most precious treasure. Viper had been running from Sabine, who had always been a secondary character in her life. The one she wanted to bury so badly that the desperation with which she tried to do so completely blinded her.

Now she had to stop. Take a breath and slowly let it out.

Because there was peace in Zyanya's eyes. Solace. The boundless patience with which she looked at her, moving silently and smoothly in Viper's trembling space.

The cigarette disappeared from her hand, extinguished somewhere along the way.

Viper swallowed. Tears flowed silently down her cheek, but did not reach the ground.

Zyanya's breath brushed her skin as she gathered the few drops with her thumb and wiped them away before they reached the edge of Sabine's face.

She didn't notice Reyna approaching her because she was afraid to notice.

And she looked as if she wanted to apologize to her.

For everything. For being difficult, for the fact that even now Reyna had to treat her like porcelain, otherwise she would break. For not being able to do everything the right way.

As if she wanted to apologize for her own emotions and words that she could no longer take back.

She let her cheek be stroked with that gentle, soothing movement that she would have loved to snuggle into if she hadn't been so terrified.

“It doesn't have to work. But that doesn't mean there's no chance at all, does it?”

Viper let out a shaky breath. She just stared into those purple eyes, as if she couldn't put those words into a logical sentence. As if they gave her relief that took her balance and threw her off the slope.

The wind played with her hair, tickling her wet cheeks with its coldness, yet Zyanya's hand was warm. Good.

She trembled all over, trying to say something several times, but every time she opened her mouth, she closed it again. Her own mind betrayed her.

All she could do was cry.

And then, with unimaginable desperation, she covered Reyna's hand with her own. She was afraid that she would leave, disappear into thin air, and that this moment would never happen again, this one and only moment when Sabine Callas allowed herself to feel.

She clasped her fingers around Reyna's, pressing them against her own cheek. Nestling into the touch, clear, emphatic, real.

Because a weight had been lifted from her heart, and for the first time in her life, she felt alive.

She nodded, feverishly, perhaps a little desperately, afraid that if she didn't do it clearly enough, Zyanya wouldn't see it. She didn't hear her heart pounding, her uneven breathing.

Once, she might have been ashamed of that.

Now she felt only relief.

Reyna smiled. Warmly. Grounding. Only at her. As if the world had ceased to exist. And although Sabine wasn't sure, the vampire's eyes seemed to sparkle slightly too.

“If I kiss you now, will you let me?”

The voice of the woman Sabine once couldn't stand because it reminded her of her own failure now enveloped her tightly. It enveloped her aching, tired existence, so focused on death that she was convinced she could no longer think otherwise. It gave her existence a peace she thought she had lost all those years ago.

So, accompanied by the night, the sound of the waves, her own breathing, and Zyanya's hand on her tear-stained cheek, Sabine Callas nodded.

“I want you to say it.”

Because it was consent. Zyanya wanted her verbal consent, the certainty that they were entering a dead-end alley together. Where there were no raw, wild emotions based on physicality and a desperate attempt to pursue humanity in war through the most primitive means.

Zyanya was dying to hear the answer. To grab it and hold it to that damn radianite heart, even at the cost of her own life.

“Yes,” Viper replied. This time, Zyanya uncontrollably cupped her face with her other hand. “I'll let you.”

Reyna rested her forehead against Viper's, as if those words had completely robbed her of her ability to stand upright and she needed support. She gasped softly, with relief, with a short, broken laugh, embracing Viper even more clearly, even closer. Wanting the pattern of her skin to remain forever on her fingertips.

Like a tattoo, forever left on her body. Always with her, uninterrupted and inseparable.

But it was only when she looked fully into those green eyes that she was sure.

So she kissed her.

Viper's lips were soft. Delicate. Almost fragile. And the gesture was almost shy, as if Zyanya was afraid that one move too far would cause Sabine to somehow crumble in her hands.

She gently pressed her lips against hers. Remembering. Nestling into the experience, allowing herself to breathe as she felt the tension drop from Viper's shoulders and she, like a perfect piece of a puzzle, fit into her touch.

They moved their lips slowly. Like never before, because the fire had gone out somewhere, the wildness had fallen silent and obediently retreated into a corner, giving way to the present moment.

Where Viper carefully placed her hand on Zyanya's shoulder, unconsciously sliding her touch over the tattoo hidden under her clothes. Where Reyna's thumb involuntarily wiped the tears flowing from her eyes, as if she wanted to prove to Viper that she didn't have to be afraid of them. Where they tried to lose themselves in the experience, as if the war around them did not exist, and they were still just ordinary people who had found peace on this quiet evening.

Where Viper sighed into Reyna's mouth with a solace that could not be put into words. With feeling. With tenderness.

With love.

“I'm here, Sabine.”

Sabine nodded, squeezed her hand, holding it tightly, absorbing its warmth. Even if the world were to end.

“And I am here. With you.”

Chapter 58: FIFTY EIGHT

Reyna was used to sleeping poorly at Protocol headquarters.

She often wondered if it was because of the endless vigilance that her job had effectively programmed her to maintain, or if her body simply couldn't get used to the environment, even after all this time since she first set foot in her quarters.

She usually managed to sleep through the whole night mostly when she was sure that she had the next day off and could afford to rest without looking at any training schedule or mission roster.

When she thought about it, it was somewhat sad to realize.

But this time, her shallow sleep had its advantages, because when she opened her eyes, she felt that she had not woken up for no reason. And she was right.

Viper sat on the edge of the bed, her hands clasping the edges of the mattress, staring at the night outside.

Or early morning. It was hard to tell if she had slept so long or woken up so early.

And she probably didn't notice she was being watched until she sensed movement on the other side of the bed, and the rustle of bedding broke the previous, pristine silence. She glanced over her shoulder, already wanting to say something in protest, but she didn't get a chance to do so because Reyna had already propped herself up on her forearm and moved closer to her, as if she knew Viper was going to protest.

“It's okay, go back to sleep.”

The command was pointless, but she said it anyway. Zyanya never listened in such matters. And she never believed her either, so Viper just sighed when she felt Reyna's warm breath on her shoulder.

“And that's why you're awake right now?”

Viper pursed her lips. Then she relaxed them. In fact, she relaxed her whole body, as if she realized that keeping her guard up was pointless now, because Zyanya had seen too much.

“Brimstone sent a call to Sova and Omen,” she said finally, humbly accepting the warmth emanating from Zyanya's body on her slightly chilled shoulders. “They're leaving first thing in the morning.”

There was something strangely unfamiliar about the feeling of Zyanya being behind her, yet it did not make Sabine feel uneasy.

Since... the incident, she didn't like to turn her back on anyone, because she always felt that even an irrationally thick layer of clothing couldn't hide what was now permanently on her skin and anyone could see it if they tried.

Zyanya had seen it. Many times.

And she still had that damn gentleness that Viper couldn't get used to.

“They'll be fine. They're good agents.”

Although Sabine didn't turn her head toward her, she could sense that Zyanya was hesitating to put her hand on her shoulder.

Viper wanted her to do it. But she didn't say anything, leaving Zyanya with the decision.

It was all too much for her to comprehend. The novelty frightened her, the novelty of touch, the novelty of thought, even the fact that her analytical mind was no longer fighting with itself and was strangely silent on the subject, and yet she was still afraid that this step was wrong. That she had done something wrong again.

“Everything is suddenly moving fast, and I'm not keeping up,” she said finally, feeling that dragging out the process of pulling off this band-aid wasn't going to do her any good anyway. Maybe that was what this night was all about. To make her realize that she was no longer alone with these thoughts, even if it was the strangest feeling in the world. “This mission could be the worst thing that happens in our careers if we play it wrong.”

She could have just imagined Reyna's expression, but for some reason, she felt the need to look at her right now. Or maybe she wanted Reyna to look at her, finally getting rid of the heavy feeling that she would just sit silently on the edge of the bed for the rest of the night.

And so it happened. Not only that, Zyanya decided to put her hand on Viper's shoulder and squeeze it gently. She had been doing this a lot lately, but after these few long hours, the gesture took on a different dimension.

It was full, real. As if all the other times before didn't count.

“That's why we'll play it right.” The answer was banal, yet so straightforward. “And everything else will work out somehow, whatever it may be. It always does.”

Viper hated herself for the fact that no matter how much she wanted to simply accept this explanation, she couldn't do it. And again, the feeling that her work had become her whole life so much that she couldn't separate it from her character laughed in her face. She tried to hold on to what little optimism she had left, but reality always won out. That damn rationalism.

“What if I said a few words too many and now there's no going back?” she asked. She caught herself seeking comfort in Zyanya's eyes. And that's where she found it. “I said it would take a maximum of three weeks before the avalanche of questions came, but at the same time, I don't think I'm ready for it at all.”

Reyna sighed. Not because she was tired or bored, but because there was something particularly unpleasant about the whole situation.

It wasn't that the Protocol never had any secrets, because it did. And every organization or every person, in fact, had something they would rather hide from the rest of the world.

She sighed because, seeing the weight Viper carried on her shoulders, she began to feel its pressure herself.

It was always Viper who worried. At one time, perhaps together with Brimstone, but for a long time now she had been alone with it. She worried about what was, what is, and what will be so much that she couldn't sleep, and at the same time... she was the person who had the most to lose.

In the eyes of the agents, in her own eyes. In her field of work, which probably took up the largest part of her life. She could lose the Protocol she had created from scratch, and with it, her entire self.

“Maybe you can't undo it,” Reyna admitted honestly. Viper noticed the gentle, circular movement of her thumb on her shoulder. She tried to focus on it, on something solid and mundane. “But you're capable of controlling it more than you think. You said yourself that they'll find out everything eventually, so you might as well do it on your own terms.”

Viper thought for a moment. Maybe even a very long moment, but Zyanya simply didn't feel it. She knew that she was analyzing every word very deeply, looking for support in words that, even if she didn't know it, she needed to hear.

After all, Reyna always said what was needed.

“Go back to sleep, I'll lie down too in a minute.”

And this time she actually did.

***

“I want you to know that this pass is for the good of the Protocol, not for your convenience.”

Hearing these words, Sage already knew why she had been called. Why, on her way here, the air had seemed thick and somehow suffocating.

And that was probably why Brimstone hadn't even looked at her since she entered. He was shuffling papers in binders, putting them into folders, constantly keeping his hands busy and pacing around the office, putting them back in their place as if he wanted to do anything but sit behind his desk.

“I don't know how long it will take, but until you agree to apologize to Viper, I don't want to see you here,” he added. Sage noticed something in his voice that hadn't been there before when he spoke to her. A distance so great that it seemed insurmountable and a coldness that involuntarily brought Iselin to her mind. “And I'm removing you from command.”

“Apologize?”

The tone with which she uttered the word made the air vibrate. Brimstone stopped in his rampage, as if someone had suddenly stabbed him in the back, and turned on his heel, still holding the stack of papers in his hands.

“I don't think that's too high a price to pay for what you've done,” he hissed. As he passed the desk and stood next to it, a little closer to Sage, he suddenly seemed twice as big in her eyes. “If I could allow it, you'd be packing your things out of your locker right now, so have enough damn humility to at least do that.”

Sage pressed her lips together. She fought the urge to just let it go and leave it as it was without a word and blindly follow the order. Because she could have done that, and probably should have. But before she could stop herself, the words escaped her lips.

“If she had followed the mission guidelines, I wouldn't have anything to apologize for.”

Silence fell with a thud on the floor.

For a second, Brimstone seemed frozen in place, like a stone. He looked as if someone had punched him in the face.

“I didn't tell her to deviate from the plan. She did it herself.”

Brimstone took a step forward. It was an unusually heavy step, echoing in the empty room. He was much taller than Sage, and his shadow fell on her figure in an almost overwhelming way.

He clenched his hands into fists. On his face, besides the momentary rage, there was something else.

Disbelief.

As if Sage, standing in front of him, was so completely foreign to him that he had no idea who he was looking at. As if he couldn't comprehend that it was her he had been carrying the Protocol on his shoulders with all this time, punishing the wrong person.

And as if he couldn't comprehend his own blindness.

He took a deep breath, because he suddenly felt like he couldn't breathe. Maybe it was a way to calm himself down, maybe he really felt like he couldn't breathe. He closed his eyes for a moment, focusing on what he wanted to say, so that his words would hit exactly where they were supposed to.

“You had no right to leave her in that state. And you had no right to punish her, because it's your fucking duty to help regardless of anything else,” he hissed. With each word, he was closer to raising his voice, but he held back with all his might. “On top of that, you lied to me and put to shit every single value associated with belonging to the Protocol, so before I lose what little patience I have left, you're going to take these damn papers and get out of here until what you've done sinks in.”

Sage's eyelid twitched and her gaze wandered for a second. But then she looked back at Liam, as if to show him that she was sure of what she was about to say.

“So you don't think she broke any rules? Or do you just not care that...”

“We don't take revenge on our own people, for fuck's sake!”

If he had been standing closer to the desk, his fist would have collided with the tabletop. They could both hear the echo of the impact in their imagination, and it was probably even louder than it would have been in reality.

Now he could only relax his fist, only to clench it again.

She didn't say anything.

"So whatever argument comes to mind right now, don't use it, because I don't give a damn. I know what happened, why it happened, and I know that knowing all this, I still want you to get out of here immediately so I can clean up the mess your lies have created. And that is an order you will obey."

Sage met his gaze more boldly than she had expected of herself.

And only then did she leave.

***

The atmosphere was tense, and everyone who entered the meeting room seemed to know it, even though they didn't yet know the reason why.

Jett looked around a little nervously and stopped playing with her kunai, a moment later hiding the blade in her pocket as if ashamed. Yoru looked neutral at first, but when he saw Fade slumped in her chair and Phoenix playing with his ring, his eyes fixed on the tabletop, his confidence visibly wavered.

Brimstone watched everyone who entered, occasionally shuffling the papers on his desk without much purpose. He probably wanted to avoid looking like something was bothering him.

At least that's how it seemed to Reyna, who tapped her fingernail on the tabletop, watching with a sense of slowly growing irritation.

She didn't know what the meeting was about, because no one had been given any information other than that it had been added to today's schedule. The chairs were filling up, not counting the seats of Sova and Omen, who were on a mission. Each agent who had managed to show up entered with the same consternation as everyone else.

She didn't want to be here. She didn't want to look at Brimstone. Nor did she want to see the increasing number of scribbles appearing in the margins of Viper's notebook as she tried with all her might to keep her hands busy and blend in with the crowd because of Brimstone, because Reyna herself was involuntarily clenching her fists.

It annoyed her that she couldn't even show Viper any support. She couldn't even move closer to her so as not to invade her space, because it might be too suspicious in the eyes of the other agents.

By the way, she had a strange paranoia that all eyes were on her again.

So she could only sit carelessly, manspreading on her chair, restraining herself with the last remnants of dignity so as not to put her feet up on the table in a gesture of showing what she thought of Brimstone and whatever he had to say. She just clenched her fingers on her arms, keeping them crossed over her chest and glanced at Viper's notebook from time to time, hoping that at least once she would make eye contact with her.

Viper was stressed. Perhaps by scribbling in her notebook, she was pretending that she simply didn't care about what was going on around her, but Zyanya could feel the rhythm of her restless heartbeat.

“I see that everyone who was supposed to be here is here.”

All eyes turned to Brimstone when he spoke up right after Gekko sat down in his seat. Even Reyna followed the crowd.

Viper paused her pen movements for only a second. Her gaze did not linger on Liam, as if, apart from the words that came out of his mouth, he meant as much to her as the dust on the shelves of binders.

Zyanya found some kind of obsession in watching Brimstone at that moment. She was just waiting for him to hesitate, for his voice to tremble, or for him to stumble over his own words, although she didn't know what that would give her.

Except for the strange satisfaction that in all this mess, he was more uncertain than he probably thought at first.

“Omen and Sova are on a mission, but other than that, you've probably noticed that Sage isn't with us, and that's where I'd like to start.”

Even Viper glanced at the empty chair, this time following the rest. Her eyebrows furrowed, but Reyna couldn't tell if it was relief or concern that flashed across her face.

Because something had changed, and now no one could overlook it.

Brimstone took a deep breath, probably mainly because with each passing second, the consternation on the agents' faces only deepened, and they were clearly waiting for the explanation he had to give them.

Reyna saw Viper clench her fingers around her pen. She even thought she might break it as her knuckles turned white and her fingertips pressed almost flat against the barrel.

“Sage will not be present at headquarters or on missions for the foreseeable future. This is temporary, so you don't need to worry about it.”

Although no one said a word, every agent showed their surprise in some way. Cypher put down the tripwire he always played with during meetings. Yoru seemed to focus instantly, Jett just raised her eyebrows, and Phoenix exchanged uncertain glances with Raze.

Viper wasn't surprised. She glanced at Brimstone only occasionally, even though she showed no mercy to the pen, and the part of her hair that she usually tucked behind her ear now tickled her face irritatingly.

Zyanya wondered if she was missing something, or if it was just her imagination.

“Wait, Sage left?”

And yet it was Jett who broke the silence. Reyna was grateful to her for that, because on the one hand there was some comfort in this information, and on the other she had the same question, because somehow... she couldn't believe Liam's words.

“That's what I just said.”

It wasn't a very satisfying answer. 

Viper, on the other hand, just glanced back and forth between Sunwoo and Brimstone, monitoring the reactions of the others as well. She liked to observe, after all.

“What about the missions?” Phoenix interjected. Jett nodded in his direction, silently adding to the question. “If someone dies, then...”

“They won't die.”

Reyna immediately turned to Viper. Phoenix, Jett, and even Brimstone did the same.

Sabine's words echoed in the momentary silence until she broke it by putting her pen down on the table.

“Together with Brimstone and Reyna, we will take care of reconnaissance, mapping the terrain, and thereby strengthen the protection of critical locations in the areas where Omega agents are operating. We will focus on protecting Skye so that she can protect you all,” she said, leaning back in her chair. “Any more questions?”

“Why did Sage leave?”

Viper shifted her gaze to Yoru without hesitation. She didn't even seem surprised that the duelist who usually sat quietly during meetings, waiting for the clock on the wall to show the end time rather than was taking an interest in what was being discussed.

She didn't hesitate with her answer either, forcing Reyna to blink in surprise, even though she thought she would keep her composure until the end.

“Monastery matters.” A straightforward answer, requiring no elaboration. That was enough, and Viper didn't even try to signal that she intended to add anything else. “If that's all, we'll move on to current events within the scope of our tasks.”

Sitting next to her, Reyna had the impression for a few seconds that the Viper she knew outside the meeting room door had disappeared. In her place was once again the leader of the Protocol, a strategist, a controller who does not accept the word ‘impossible’ in her vocabulary. Strict, even too cold for those who do not respect her, and intimidating in her own peculiar way.

The sensitive version of Viper remained outside the door, even if only Zyanya knew that she would not stay there forever.

“When we receive information from Sova and Omen after their return, we will begin the process of liquidating one of the Kingdom's facilities in the coming days.” Reyna regretted that she couldn't even touch Sabine's ankle with the tip of her shoe to show her silent support, because she knew what she was about to say. “The facility has conducted or is conducting experiments on humans fueled by unauthorized research that I contributed to years ago, so participation is voluntary. I'm not going to force anyone to take part, because it's a personal matter and I'll understand if you're not on my side.”

None of the agents exchanged concerned glances, no whispers spread through the room. Every gaze was fixed solely on Viper, who now sat up straight in her chair, probably waiting for a wave of something that did not come, even though she was ready for it.

For questions. For outrage and hatred, an avalanche of accusations and grievances.

Nothing of the sort came, and a strange, overly thick silence fell over the room, in which even Viper did not feel comfortable. But that did not mean she let it overwhelm her; on the contrary, she got her way again.

“If you don't want to sign up or decline right now in front of everyone, you can do so when the list appears in the official schedule,” she added. “And that's all I have to say. You may leave.”

Even Brimstone didn't say a word, probably too surprised by the fact that Viper had taken over the entire meeting in a matter of seconds, and he didn't even have time to realize when the agents' attention had been taken away from him.

He had no intention of interrupting her, much like the crowd of bewildered agents.

The difference was that Brimstone was left alone in the room, watching it empty, and Sabine's footsteps were the last to echo in the hallway.

***

“You didn’t have to lie.”

Viper waited for Reyna to enter the lab with her so she could close the door. She didn’t even try to stop her at the threshold, because she knew that sooner or later she would talk to her about it.

“I couldn't keep quiet either. Brimstone wouldn't have gotten out of it, and there would have been a big problem,” she said, grabbing her lab coat from the back of the chair. “He was shocked himself because I made it up on the spot and I don't know how long the lie will last, but it has to be enough for now.”

Reyna was relieved not to find the same coldness in her voice that had accompanied her at the meeting. This was definitely better.

Zyanya folded her arms loosely across her chest. She watched Sabine pacing around the room, but did not invade her space, leaning against one of the walls.

Viper didn't have to defend Sage. She could have left it as it was and watched Brimstone stumble over his words. Yes, there would have been problems, a lot of problems, but Zyanya felt that if she were in Viper's place, she probably wouldn't have cared anymore.

And yet Viper stood up for her enemy. Even though she didn't have to and could have just watched everything burn around her, she decided to take steps that saved Sage from immediate doom.

“Was that the only reason?”

Viper didn't answer right away. It probably wasn't that she didn't have an answer, but rather that she didn't expect Reyna to see through her so easily. And besides, the question hanging in the air like that felt even worse than putting together an answer.

“Agents can't lose Sage.” A simple answer, though in light of current events, exceptionally painful in all its truth. “Nor what they believe she represents.”

Zyanya snorted involuntarily.

It was strange to be the less calm one in this conversation, especially when it was about Sage. Usually, it was Sabine who frowned and rolled her eyes, paying no attention to how much venom flowed from her mouth when it came to Ling.

“But those are all lies.” Reyna couldn't believe she was saying this. Viper didn't deny it, however, and when she nodded, Reyna felt even more surprised and confused than before. “They're supposed to feed on something that's an illusion until the end of the Protocol?”

“It used to bother me too,” she admitted. “I couldn't stand how Sage was perceived, knowing what she had done to me, but... I've thought about it and now it seems like the least important thing, judging by what's going on around us.”

Zyanya blinked. Viper, in turn, took a timer out of the drawer, seemingly not wanting to draw attention to the duelist's surprise. Or maybe it was easier for her that way. To pretend it didn't bother her.

Even if this time Reyna was convinced that it wasn't pretending, but a decision so rational that there was no more rational one. A decision that only Viper could make.

“Wait, so... so you don't want to correct this ever?”

She didn't hide the surprise in her voice, because she probably couldn't. And she thought that Viper could have expected that from her too.

“If I take away their current image of Sage and replace it with one they don't know and would probably fear, it will be the end of Valorant.”

“They're already afraid,” Reyna replied, less calmly than Sabine, which again sent a strange shiver down her skin. “They feel threatened, they feel that something is falling apart. It can't be reversed now, because too much has happened for them, for the Protocol, and for you. So why hide it?”

She wanted to understand. She wanted to understand why Sabine thought she was worth less than everyone else again. That her suffering wasn't significant, that the grief she had carried inside her for years hadn't accumulated enough for her to consider it something she deserved compensation for.

She wanted to tell her she was wrong. But she didn't get the chance.

“Because if they lose faith in Sage, they'll lose faith in everything else we do for the world.”

There was something so cruelly true in those words that Reyna fell silent.

Chapter 59: FIFTY NINE

Killjoy took off her headphones when she opened her bedroom door and found Viper standing there. Viper, in turn, could easily read the surprise on her face.

Well, she would have looked the same in Klara's place.

She rarely came here. In fact, she rarely visited any of the agents except Reyna in their rooms, because it always seemed to her like an invasion of their private space, which she claimed was better left unknown to her.

Well.

“Can I take a moment?”

It took Killjoy a moment to realize that she was staring at Viper as if she were a ghost, and she blinked like the question had thrown her off balance. But she opened the door wider and stepped aside.

“Sure, come in.”

Sabine nodded and took a few steps inside. She sat down on the edge of the made bed while Killjoy returned to her gaming chair when she saw that Viper had already chosen a place.

It was difficult for her to start, even though she knew what she had come here for. She could see that she had interrupted Killjoy's game, because the words ‘game paused’ kept reminding her that she might be disturbing KJ’s spare time.

On the other hand, there was no time for postponing it.

“I saw that you signed up,” she began.

She had nothing to twirl in her hands, so she interlaced her fingers and placed them on her lap to prevent any uncontrollable tremors.

“I wanted to earlier, but something lagged in the system,” Killjoy confirmed. “Good to know it's fixed now.”

Viper nodded again, digesting those words even longer than she expected to.

This Klara was no different from the Klara she had last spoken to. She didn't treat her differently, she didn't look at her differently, her tone of voice hadn't changed either.

She had no idea that Killjoy had also intended to talk to her before Viper arrived, and it was purely by chance that they both had the same idea.

“That's why I came here.”

KJ tried to understand this sentence, but for the first time since the beginning of the conversation, Viper stared at her clasped hands, as if she didn't want to give anything away.

As if she was ashamed of it.

“I want you to know what happened between me and that facility. You deserve to know.”

Contrary to Viper's fears, which seemed to be eating her up inside, the words came out of her mouth with exceptional confidence.

Killjoy didn't hesitate with her answer.

“I was at the meeting, I know what's going on.”

Viper didn't like explaining herself to people, but now she felt that whatever she said would not be enough. She had to say everything, as if she cared about Klara changing her decision, even though she didn't have to. As if she wanted to make sure Killjoy knew everything she needed to know before she entered Vulture.

“It was genocide.”

“You said it was a long time ago. And that the research was unauthorized.”

She didn't wait for Viper to interrupt her. It was a statement.

“Because it's true.”

“Then I don't care what happened back then.”

Viper instinctively raised her eyebrows. Maybe she shouldn't show how surprised she was by Killjoy, because she was supposed to be the authority here, but somehow she couldn't help herself.

“If it doesn't matter to you what I did at Kingdom with my inventions, why should it be any different with me?”

Viper interlaced her fingers more tightly.

“Because if I had never wanted to fulfill my ambitions with something that went beyond common sense, they wouldn't have killed so many innocent people.” She said it out loud. And it was probably the first time since she had discovered the truth. “That flash drive you found had tons of data from experiments based on my research that should never have been done.”

“Do you want me to change my decision knowing these things?”

She didn't know. She had no idea what she wanted to achieve with this conversation, and yet it was because of it that she had come here and, what's more, was still sitting here. Trying to convince Killjoy that she wasn't who she thought she was.

“I want you to be sure who you want to work with. I want you to know who I used to be before you decide to help me.”

“So now I know, and I want to help,” she replied immediately. “The Kingdom has done too much harm to wonder who was to blame.”

The sentence was such a simple explanation that Sabine, who always had an answer for everything, now fell silent, as if someone had ripped her tongue out of her mouth.

Because they always fought against what Kingdom did. They always fought, regardless of who did what, when and why, gathering all their forces against the whole.

But at the same time, she couldn't think of herself in the same way. She was ready to defend Killjoy's innocence for as long as she lived, knowing about her manipulation and how Kingdom had exploited her wisdom. She was ready to scratch out the eyes of anyone who dared to blame her, and when it came to herself... she would willingly go under the enemy's knife just to get rid of that damn feeling that she had failed all those people.

That Octavia was right, and Viper thought that putting on a mask and picking up a gun would erase all her sins.

And yet Deadlock joined her. Killjoy looked at her as if she knew all this and still ignored all her flaws. Or didn’t care about them.

“It's… really good to know,” she said. She tried not to think about how her eyes were itching hopelessly again and how she was getting worse at dealing with situations like this. “I really appreciate it.”

She couldn't cry in front of Killjoy just because she felt it would be extremely humiliating. At the same time, she was sure that this time it wouldn't be so bad, seeing the warm understanding on Klara's face, something Viper had missed so much in her whole life that she didn't even know what it was like to experience it.

So she stood up. Klara did too, as if prepared for Viper to end the conversation that way. And Viper could have just said goodbye and left, as she usually did, knowing that Killjoy wouldn't mind.

However, when they both stood up, Viper approached the younger woman and put her arms around her.

Killjoy was surprised, but quickly returned the gesture. She felt Viper's hand tighten on her sweatshirt and let her do it, exhaling.

They both needed it.

Viper needed to feel that she had more people around her than she thought. And Killjoy needed to feel that Viper wanted nothing more than honesty with her after she had failed her last time in that regard.

“Is that what's been bothering you? You know, lately?” Killjoy asked, a little shyly comparing to how she had been responding so far. Maybe she didn't know if she should ask. “I know you have a lot of work, but... you know.”

Viper slowly pulled away. Klara, however, wasn't shy about looking her in the eye. She clearly cared deeply about getting an answer, even if she realized the question might be inappropriate.

And Viper couldn't tell her that Reyna had come into her life in a way she never thought she would. Viper couldn't tell her that she had fallen in love with Zyanya in the middle of a war, when everything else was falling apart around them. She couldn't tell her that she didn't know if she could handle it all, because she was terrified of a feeling she had no control over and that contradicted everything she had preached for years in the Protocol.

She was afraid to admit to anyone that Zyanya had become close to her, because she was afraid that it would turn out that she was hopelessly terrible in this matter.

After all, Killjoy loved Raze. And if she wasn't very good at hiding it, it only proved how wonderful she was at loving. Killjoy could love easily. She loved Raze, she loved inventions, her hobbies, she loved... life.

Viper, on the other hand, was terrified that she couldn't do the same so easily.

“I think so, yes. I'm sorry if I stressed you out,” she said. Killjoy seemed relieved, which was a good sign. “This mission requires some... preparation. I've been thinking about it a lot.”

“If you want to talk, you know where to find me,” Klara replied. “But if we're going to kick their asses, I promise I'll do my best.”

Killjoy's promise seemed to be what Viper needed.

***

“I think I want to help Reyna.”

Even with her eyes fixed on the ceiling, Neon could feel the question instantly appear on Fade's face.

Quite suddenly, to be honest. And considering that they were both tangled up in the bedsheets, and just a moment ago there wasn't an inch of space between their naked bodies, Hazal actually had a right to be surprised.

“With what?”

Neon pressed her lips together. But only for a moment, because when Fade turned to the side to see her better, she couldn't tell her that it wasn't important after all.

“About this mission.”

Fade frowned.

“But this is Viper's mission.”

Tala shrugged. She stared unconsciously at the ceiling, as if looking for an explanation for her own decision there.

“If it's Viper's mission, Reyna will definitely be there,” she replied immediately. “And I don't think I want to sit here while she's there.”

Hazal leaned on her elbow. She found Neon's hand and grabbed it, as if to get her attention and pull her away from the ceiling, to look her in the eyes.

“That speaks well of you,” Fade admitted, squeezing the younger woman's fingers. Neon still wasn't looking at her, so she tried everything she could to change that. “And Reyna will be happy about it too.”

“So... you don't mind?”

Neon could be surprising sometimes. But at least now Hazal knew why she had been avoiding her gaze so much.

“Why would I?”

“You don't like Reyna.”

“That doesn't mean I have a problem with you maintaining your relationship with her.” Face shrugged as much as her position allowed. “I know she's important to you, otherwise I wouldn't be urging you to make peace with her. And I think you have, haven't you?”

Neon sighed. She bit her lip for a moment, as if unsure whether she should say what was bothering her. As if Reyna's affair was her shameful secret, and although it was ridiculous, that's how she felt.

“I can’t stop her anymore, so I guess I had no choice.”

The sentence hung in the air for a moment.

“What do you mean?”

“That Reyna won't leave Viper.” Even Neon herself didn't know if saying it out loud made it more real. If it was easier for her to come to terms with it. “She said her arrangement with Viper is still going on, but I don't think that's what's keeping them together anymore.”

“What do you think is keeping them together?”

Fade had always been patient. Sometimes too much so, persistently reminding Neon that she did many things too quickly, chaotically, and often got lost in her own thoughts. Yet Fade always set her straight, helping her understand those tangled thoughts.

“I've been learning from Reyna since I've been here, I know how she behaves. Now she's just different. More... relaxed. She has more freedom, she even jokes more often, and lately everything has been falling apart more often than it's getting better, so you can’t say it is not unusual.” She fell silent again. The final conclusion refused to pass her lips, even though it didn't make sense, because she herself had decided that she was okay with it. “I know it's because of Viper, even though I can't understand for the life of me how it could work.”

Only now did she look at Fade. With remorse and fear that she was coming across as insensitive. And selfish, too.

Because Neon had grown attached to Reyna. Because Reyna was like an older sister to her and filled, at least partially, the void left by her longing for the family she had left behind in the Philippines. Reyna wasn't afraid of her, knowing the power of radianite, how unpredictable it could be. Reyna taught her to control it, without putting any pressure on her, just understanding all her fears. Reyna was a support in Neon's fear, and Neon loved her for it in that special sisterly way.

And Viper was so very... different. Viper wasn't warm. Viper isolated herself, as if she wanted to do everything she could to make the Protocol feel more like a military base than a family.

And maybe Reyna was right, and Viper really wasn't the same as she used to be. Maybe Viper made Zyanya happy in a way so complicated that it was beyond comprehension.

But Tala still didn't know how to feel about it. She didn't want to forbid her from anything, let alone contribute to ending her relationship with Viper. What's more, she had promised this Zyanya herself.

“They're... a little different,” Fade began cautiously. “Maybe it's impossible to understand what keeps them together. But... but I think they've been through a lot. You know, shared experiences.”

“Maybe.”

Tala wasn't convinced at all.

“If there's something more between them, I think they love each other in a different way.”

“You can't love someone you've been trying to scratch the eyes out of for several years,” Neon muttered. “It's just a strange choice.”

“They're both unpredictable, so that would make sense,” she tried to joke, and she felt a little relieved when Neon lifted the corner of her mouth. “But feelings change, sometimes overnight. Apparently, they have something in common that we can't see, regardless of the fact that they've been trying to kill each other so far.”

Fade surprised even herself. She had deliberately avoided the subject of Viper because Fade really didn't want to run into her and everything related to her more often than absolutely necessary.

She never apologized to her for shooting her in the ear back then. Hazal, on the other hand, didn't even know if an apology would have done her any good, because the more she thought about it, the more she felt it was better to forget about it. She didn’t apologize for causing her nightmare too, after all.

They had a stable agreement, and that was enough for Hazal. Everything else related to Viper was pushed to the back of her mind.

And now she was almost going so far as to try to understand her. Her and Reyna, which she probably hadn't done once since the beginning of this strange peace agreement.

She squeezed Neon's hand, realizing that she had been silent for quite a while.

“You don't have to blame yourself for not being happy about her decision, because there's nothing wrong with that,” she said. “And Reyna probably doesn't blame you either, so if you're going to help her, she'll definitely appreciate it. If you want, I can join you too.”

Neon blinked.

“Wait... you'd do that for me?”

“It's important to you. And every pair of hands is useful on a mission, so why not?”

Tala kissed Fade so quickly that she barely registered the moment she wrapped her arms around her neck and pressed her lips to hers.

But she quickly redeemed herself.

“I assume that we can now move on to more pleasant topics?” she asked, lifting the corner of her mouth as the younger woman moved away to a minimum distance.

Neon just laughed and nodded eagerly.

***

“We could sneak in quietly. The scans showed a whole maze of basements, and not very well secured too.” Reyna looked up from the papers she was holding to glance at Viper, who was staring at the printed diagrams on the corkboard as if they were the last thing on this planet. “If Deadlock had set up sensors, we'd know who was on our tail and from which direction, if they noticed us at all.”

Viper continued to stare at the board, her brow furrowed.

“The problem is, if they don't notice us, they won't sense the threat.”

“And do we want them to sense it?”

Sabine turned to her, her gaze softening. Although there was also a very noticeable weariness lurking in it and Reyna would not be mistaken in assuming that, despite her best efforts, Viper had had a bad night.

“There are also shelters against earthquakes and air raids in the basement. Kingdom introduced a mandate to build them around the time I left,” she announced. Since they had entered here, her voice had been unable to shake off a heavy tension. “If they get scared, the most important personnel will go there.”

“So you want to gather them all in one place?”

“I want everyone who had a hand in this to be buried with the entire building. And if anyone is conducting genocidal research, those are the ones Kingdom will want to save.”

Zyanya nodded. She couldn't disagree. The conclusion made sense, so she turned the next page. Her gaze shifted to her own handwriting, which was unusually sloppy for her.

“We have Killjoy, Deadlock, Cypher, Brimstone, and Raze, plus the two of us,” she said, turning the page over, as if to make sure she hadn't missed anything. “At least for now. We'll assign the rest as we go.”

“And Neon and Fade,” Viper interjected, and seeing the surprise on Reyna's face, she added, “They signed up about fifteen minutes ago.”

Reyna raised her eyebrows, but immediately lowered them, returning to the stack of papers. She made a mental note to check in with Neon somewhere along the way.

“In that case, Fade could start this mess. Fear is a good trigger,” suggested Zyanya, and Viper nodded, scribbled something quickly on a small piece of paper, and pinned it to the map on the board. As it turned out, it was the initiator's nickname. “Raze will make some noise with her, then join us. The main generators are in the basements on the north side and so is the shelter, so when panic spreads and we go to the shelter, she can plant the bombs. Brimstone will cover the most important points, Neon can secure his back.”

“We don't want to hurt civilians. I don't care about those who have nothing to do with this.”

“Then let them escape. Fade will stay in the main hall, Killjoy and Deadlock will guard all exits except one.”

“They'll make sure everyone has escaped before the explosion.”

“Exactly.”

Viper made more notes and placed them on the map accordingly.

“What about the upper floors?”

This time, Sabine had the answer.

“Cypher will turn on the alarm. Communications at Kingdom are straightforward and to the point, people don't try to play the hero. If they order an evacuation, every employee will run as fast as they can to the established emergency exits; they won't hide on the upper floors.”

“What if our targets think the same thing?”

“These are people who aren't easily fooled. They're used to false alarms, and even if this one isn't false, their chances of survival in the shelter are bigger than in an attack they don't know if they can escape.”

This time, Reyna took a pen and a piece of paper and added more nicknames to the diagram. The map was starting to get crowded.

“How much time will we have to do this before everything explodes?” she asked as she stepped away from the board. “We don't know how many people there will be,” she added, even though Viper was well aware of that.

Viper's eyes jumped from one piece of paper to another. Some were blue, some were yellow, and others were green, and for some reason, she didn't like how cheerful the colors were compared to what they were dealing with.

“It doesn't matter. I’ll melt the lock with acid, when we get inside, I'll throw in a smoke grenade and give you a mask. The gas won't kill them, but it will effectively incapacitate them, leaving them conscious.” She didn't even stutter. “In terms of time, I want to ask them questions, and we have to make it out of there, so at least half an hour. Maybe thirty-five minutes.”

“Is that the gas you were working on?” Reyna folded her arms across her chest, unconsciously seeking eye contact with Viper. “Back then, in the lab.”

Sabine didn't answer directly, but nodded.

“I won’t show mercy.” The answer was cold, but blunt enough. Reyna didn't need Viper to sugarcoat things that didn't need to be sugarcoated. “They're not coming out of there alive, I want you to know that.”

“Alright.”

Reyna was familiar with death, after all. She didn't stop because of it, and death didn't stop because of her. She was also familiar with revenge, even if she hadn't had any contact with it in... a very long time.

“You know you don't have to come in there with me, right?”

She didn't know what she hoped to gain from the question. Was it to push Reyna away from the danger, or to give her another chance to think about whether she really wanted to take part, even though Viper knew full well that Reyna wouldn't change her mind?

Or maybe she just didn't want Reyna to watch Viper finish what she had once started in the most brutal and blunt way possible.

“I know.” There was not a hint of hesitation in that sentence. “But I'm not leaving you there alone with the people who destroyed your life, no matter how you want to end it.”

Sabine didn't say anything. She didn't know what to say at a moment like this, because it was hard for her to even figure out how she felt, standing in the office, planning a mission that hopefully would finally bring her peace, with Reyna by her side, and yet with this unimaginably thick tension hanging somewhere in the air between them.

As if it all fit together too well. As if it all was fake and she just let herself be fooled by fate.

“First of all, as soon as possible.”

They both agreed, nodding silently.

The plan was set. They were ready for what was to come. They were ready to fight it.

But before they parted ways, and the sound of the door closing broke the familiar silence, Viper brushed her lips against Reyna's cheek.

The gesture was so fleeting that Zyanya didn't even have time to be surprised.

“Thank you,” Viper said. Quietly, shyly. It didn't even fit with the Viper who had just been throwing out facts and details about the mission. That Viper suddenly receded into the corner. At least for a moment. “For everything.”

Zyanya lifted the corner of her mouth. She was about to say ‘you're welcome’, because Sabine could already sense it. She could sense that Zyanya would again consider her behavior ‘nothing big’ and say so when Sabine's hand rested on the office door handle.

And she didn't want that to happen.

So before she could get caught up in her reservations, she turned on her heel and, this time pulling Reyna toward her, kissed her on the lips.

Quick. But firm enough, to let Reyna know she really meant it.

If there was anything she could have done better at that moment, it was that. And for the first time, she didn't feel bad about that decision.

“You’re welcome.”

Reyna was predictable sometimes. In a good way.

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 1 of Monsters are gone, but we remain