Chapter 86: Taken To Felix's House

POV: Selina

Felix's other mansion was nothing like the first one. That was the first thing I noticed when the convoy pulled through the gates at four in the morning.

The first house had been a statement. Everything in it had been positioned to communicate something about the man who owned it, the art, the furniture, the proportions of the rooms, all of it calibrated to produce a specific impression.

This house was different. It was large but it felt lived-in, or like it had the capacity to be lived-in, which was not something I would have associated with Felix before tonight.

I stood on the front steps while his people moved around us with the efficiency of a night operation concluding, and I looked at the house and thought about the fact that I had been in this city the entire time and had not known this place existed.

There was a great deal, it turned out, that I had not known. Amaya appeared at my shoulder. She had been quiet in the car, not the withdrawn quiet of someone who was broken but the processing quiet of someone who was taking inventory, which I recognized because I had been doing the same thing in the seat beside her.

She looked at the house and then at me with an expression that asked several questions simultaneously and committed to none of them.

"One room," I said quietly. She nodded immediately.

"One room."

Felix showed us upstairs himself. He had offered a guest room on the east wing, a large one, well-appointed, the kind of room that in any other circumstance would have been exactly what I needed after the weeks I had just had.

I looked at it and thought about sleeping alone in a room I didn't know in a house I hadn't known existed with Martin still somewhere in the city and Amaya down a hallway and the general principle that everything I thought I had figured out had proven, repeatedly, to be less figured out than I believed.

"I'd prefer to stay with Amaya," I said.

Felix looked at me. Then at Amaya. Then back at me, with the expression of a man recalibrating something without showing the recalibration.

"There's a room with two beds at the end of the hall," he said. "If that works."

"That works," I said.

He showed us to it without commentary. It was a good room, two actual beds, a window that I noted faced the garden rather than the street, a bathroom with a door that locked from the inside.

I looked at the lock with the specific approval of someone who had spent weeks in spaces where she didn't control the locks.

Felix stood in the doorway after he had shown us the room and looked at us both for a moment with an expression I was too tired to fully read.

"There's food in the kitchen," he said.

"Help yourself to anything. I'll be downstairs if you need..." He stopped, then started again, slightly differently.

"I'll be downstairs." He left without finishing the sentence. I listened to his footsteps go down the hall and then sat on the edge of the bed and put my face in my hands for approximately thirty seconds, which was the private allotment I had decided on for feeling the full weight of the last seventy-two hours.

Amaya sat on the other bed and did something similar, though with her hands in her lap and her eyes closed rather than her face covered, which was her version of the same process.

Then I lay down, fully dressed, and pulled the blanket over myself, and I was asleep before I had finished deciding to be.

Morning arrived with the particular stubbornness of mornings after nights that should have been longer.

I woke to the sound of the house, different sounds from the bunker's underground hum, different from the petrol station's mechanical quiet, different from anything I had woken to in weeks.

The sounds of a large house with people in it, some distance away, the domestic percussion of an inhabited space.

I lay still for a moment and let my nervous system run its assessment of the environment, door locked, Amaya breathing steadily in the other bed, daylight at the edges of the curtains, and arrive at the tentative conclusion that the immediate situation did not require action.

I got up and washed my face and looked at myself in the bathroom mirror for a moment.

I looked like someone who had been running for weeks and had recently stopped. I looked like exactly what I was.

I found a toothbrush still in packaging in the cabinet, someone had prepared the room, which told me Felix had called ahead, which told me he had been certain enough that we would be here to arrange for it, which I filed away without attaching an interpretation to it yet.

When I came back into the room Amaya was awake and sitting cross-legged on her bed with the focused expression of someone who has been thinking since before they were fully conscious.

"How are you?" I asked.

"Functional," she said, which was Amaya's honest answer and therefore more reassuring than fine would have been.

"You?"

"The same." I sat on the edge of my bed.

"We should talk about what comes next."

"Yes," she said.

"But first I need coffee and I need it to not be made by either of us because I don't have the concentration for the cardamom ratio." I almost laughed.

Almost...

The kitchen was large and well-stocked and empty when we came downstairs, which meant Felix had either anticipated that we would prefer to navigate it alone or had made a deliberate decision to give us space, and either way the result was the same, a kitchen we could occupy without performance, without managing anyone else's presence.

Amaya found the coffee and made it with the automatic competence of someone who doesn't need full consciousness to run the process, and I found bread and butter and the particular relief of ordinary food after weeks of other people's cooking choices and the bunker's climate-controlled provisions.

We ate at the kitchen table in the morning light and said very little, which was the right amount. Felix appeared at nine.

He came into the kitchen with the careful quality of someone who has decided in advance to take up as little space as possible and is applying that decision with deliberate effort, which was so unlike the Felix I had spent weeks running from that I registered it as information before I registered it as anything else.

He nodded at us both, asked if we had found everything we needed, and made himself coffee at the counter with his back to us for long enough that it functioned as a diplomatic gesture, giving us the option of conversation without requiring it. Then he turned around and looked at Amaya directly.

"I owe you an apology," he said. Amaya looked at him with the level, assessing gaze she brought to things she was not yet ready to judge.

"Yes," she said.

"You do."

"The way I treated you and your boyfriend." He said it plainly, without constructing justifications around it.

"It was wrong. I was using you as leverage against Selina and that was not something I had the right to do." He held her gaze.

"I'm sorry." Amaya was quiet for a moment. The kind of quiet that was doing real work.

"David is okay?" she said finally. Her boyfriend, she hadn't mentioned him since before the bunker and the name landed between us with the weight of something she had been carrying privately.

"He's fine," Felix said.

"I had someone check. He's been looking for you." A pause.

"I can have someone reach out to him if you want. Carefully, in a way that doesn't create a trail Martin could use."

Something moved across Amaya's face, relief, quickly contained, the way she contained everything significant.

"Yes," she said. "Please."

Felix nodded and stepped out of the kitchen to make a call, and Amaya looked at her coffee cup with an expression I recognized as the specific effort of not crying in a context where she had decided not to cry, and I reached across the table and put my hand over hers for a moment and didn't say anything.