Paper and Fire (The Great Library #2)(19)

Jess was just about to shut his eyes again when Santi strode into the room, swept all of them with a look, and pointed to Glain, then to Jess. “You two,” he said. “With me.”

He executed a crisp turn and left, leaving Jess and Glain to scramble up and after with as much decorum as their battle-sore bodies could manage, while the rest of their squad stared holes in their backs. Santi didn’t pause as the door shut behind them. He continued a quick march down the long, plain corridor, then up a flight of stairs decorated with Anubis statues in alcoves, and to an office door with an armed guard beside it. Santi accepted the soldier’s salute with one of his own.

“Dismissed,” he told the guard, and watched the man leave. Then he opened the door and led the way inside.

Christopher Wolfe sat on one side of a large solid table. He was shackled at the wrists.

“Sit down,” Santi said to Glain and Jess as he shut the door, and gestured to a wooden bench at the side of the room. He was still wearing that cool military expression, and it gave Jess a creeping sense of unease. Wolfe in chains, Santi acting utterly unlike himself . . . And the four of them in a locked room.

Glain slowly eased herself down on the bench and glared at Jess until he sat next to her. Santi dragged a wooden chair, a noisy slide over the stone floor, and thumped it in place across from Wolfe at the table.

Wolfe finally looked up. He seemed drawn and exhausted and—so wrong to Jess—vulnerable. He lifted his bound wrists silently, and, when Santi shook his head, dropped them back with a heavy clank of metal to the table.

Though he’d brought the chair over, Santi didn’t sit. “You’re still under arrest, Scholar Wolfe,” he said in a quiet, calm voice that raised the hackles on the back of Jess’s neck. “You’re going to stay that way. You know why.”

“Nic—”

“No.” Santi cut Wolfe off clean. “I don’t want to hear it. Don’t you understand the consequences? One of my recruits is dead. Another may never regain the use of her arm. That’s you. That was your choice to put yourself at risk when you damn well knew better, and I told you to stay away!” There was a flare of emotion at the end of that small speech, and Santi paused, as if he hadn’t meant to let it out. When he started again, his voice was once again pressed flat. “Tell me why I should ever let you roam around unmonitored again.”

Wolfe hadn’t looked away from Santi’s face the entire time. Hadn’t blinked. Hadn’t displayed the slightest flicker of guilt or anger. There was a strange light in his eyes that Jess couldn’t reckon. “Because hiding me away isn’t working.”

“It’s keeping you alive. That’s what I care about.”

“Then you care too much,” Wolfe said. There was a tremor in his voice now, and in his hands, too. Something broken behind his stare. “You’ve locked me up. I don’t take well to that. As you know.”

Santi sat down slowly, as if he didn’t even realize he was ceding ground. “It was necessary. You haven’t been yourself.”

“You tried to get a message to me,” Wolfe said, looking past Santi at Jess and Glain. “What did you have to tell me?”

Santi quickly leaned forward and grabbed the chain of his manacles tightly to pull Wolfe toward him. “No,” he said flatly. “Stop. For the love of the gods, don’t you understand that someone just tried to kill you out there? The Archivist wants you dead. I trust today finally hammered the point home, since it was written in the blood of others this time instead of your own!”

“Captain,” Jess said, and Santi actually flinched, as if he’d forgotten them in his intensity. “Why did you bring us here if you won’t let me answer?”

“Because I want you to understand, too,” he said, and turned to stare at them. “Leave Wolfe alone. Don’t contact him. Don’t try. You see what happens—you’re the reason he came out of seclusion, to talk to you. He could have been killed. The Archivist is burning for an excuse to see him dead.”

Wolfe’s smile this time was strangely warm. It nearly looked normal. “The Archivist needs no scrap of an excuse to do that. No, Nic, be honest: you brought them here because you thought they’d take one look at me and leave me alone out of sheer pity.”

“Chris . . .”

Wolfe didn’t appear to regard his lover at all. He kept looking right at Jess and Glain. “I’m not insane,” he said. “I’m not on the verge of it. I may be stretched to my limits—my limits being admittedly lower than they should be—but you have something to tell me, and that thing is important enough that despite all the well-meaning captivity Nic has put around me, I will continue to risk my life until you tell me. He can’t stop that, and he knows he can’t.”

Santi gave a wordless shout of frustration and fury, knocked his chair over backward, and stalked around the room. His face was tense and pallid, and there was something else there—real fear, Jess thought.

“All right,” Wolfe said. “Ask.”

“It isn’t so much a question as something I need to tell you. All of you, I suppose, though I hadn’t thought it would go quite this way.” He swallowed, because he’d drawn Santi’s attention now, too. The weight of their stares felt heavy as an elephant on his chest. And speaking of his chest, the harness beneath his shirt seemed to pull even tighter on his bruised skin.