Page 186 of Problematic

“Step away from the desk.”

“I keep trying,” he said. “You keep making conversation.”

“Security is on the way.”

He smiled wider. “Security is here.”

I stepped out of the elevator. Every guard in the lobby turned toward me first. Relief moved across their faces for half a second. Then Scarn raised his gun and shot the front desk woman point-blank.

The sound cracked through the lobby. Her body hit the marble behind the counter. Blood spread fast across the silver veins in the floor. For one frozen second, no one breathed. Then every guard in Lux Tower pointed a gun at Scarn. And honestly? I was proud of their reaction time.

A dozen weapons. Red sightlines across his chest, his throat, his head. Scarn didn’t move. He kept the gun loose at his side, smoke curling from the barrel, expression bored.

“You have three seconds,” I said.

Scarn turned his head toward me with that dead little smile. “Tell them to stand down, Lux. I have something you might want to see.”

He lifted his other hand, revealing a phone, and my mark burned. My body knew before my mind caught up. I crossed the lobby. The guards shifted with me, guns still trained on him. Someone behind the desk was faintly sobbing. Another guard whispered into a comm for medical.

I stopped in front of Scarn. He held the screen between us. Olivia walked across it. My lungs locked. She moved down a sidewalk in her jacket, bag strap clutched tight in one hand, collar tugged up over the mark on her throat. She was alive. Breathing. The set of her shoulders angry enough to make something sick and tender twist through me.

The angle changed. Camera feed from across the street. Then above. Then from a parked car behind her. Several feeds on one screen, all live. She had no idea. A map filled the lower corner. Red dots surrounded her in a loose, tightening ring.

My hand closed around the mask. The black material bent under my grip with a soft, metallic groan.

Scarn watched my face, pleased with himself. “Pretty thing. Walks fast for someone with no clue how many guns are currently pointed at her.”

My nightmares surged. Every light in the lobby died for one pulsing second. When they came back, Scarn’s smile had slipped.

Good. I wanted to see fear in his eyes, his heart beating in my hand while he tried to bargain for his life.

A guard stepped closer. “Sir?”

I stared at the phone. Liv paused at a curb, turning her head slightly as a black sedan rolled into frame ahead of her. My grip crushed the mask out of shape. “Stand down,” I said.

No one moved.

I lifted my voice. “Now.”

One by one, the guns lowered. Scarn’s smile returned, thin and rotten. “Good,” he said, sliding the phone back into his coat. “Now let’s go upstairs, and we can talk about your recent excursion into the South.”

Scarn walked into my office with six armed men, blood on his shoes, and the smug expression of a man who thought he had already survived me.

He had not.

He’d borrowed time.

There was a difference. This would just be delayed retribution.

The elevator doors sealed behind his guards, and the office swallowed us in its usual cold black glass and silver light. My desk sat across the room, clean, polished, useless. The screens embedded in the wall behind it should have been alive with tower feeds.

Dead.

Every screen.

Blank.

No lobby feed. No exterior cameras. No ward grid. No tower status. No emergency channel blinking in the corner. Even the soft pulse of the security runes under the floor had gone quiet, which meant my tower had gone deaf at the same time my mate walked through a kill box six blocks away.