I had no idea how many rooms were up here. From the size of the downstairs, there could be fifty or more.
We walked along the glass walls until some tiny detail I couldn’t discern signified an entrance. Barrons pressed his palm to a dark-glass panel, which slid to the side, then he pushed me into the room. He didn’t step in with me but continued moving down the hall to some other destination.
The panel slid closed behind me, leaving me alone with Ryodan in the room that was the guts of Chester’s. It was made entirely of glass—walls, floor, and ceiling. I could see out, but no one could see in.
The perimeter of the ceiling was lined with dozens of small LED screens fed by cameras that panned every room in the club, as if you couldn’t see enough of what was going on merely by looking down past your feet. I stayed where I was. Every step you take on a glass floor feels like a leap of faith when the only solid floor you can see is forty feet below.
“Mac,” said Ryodan.
He stood behind a desk, couched in shadow, a big man, dark in a white shirt. The only light in the room came from the monitors above our heads. I wanted to launch myself across the room and attack him, claw his eyes out, bite him, punch him, stab him with my spear. I was astonished by the depth of hostility I felt.
He’d made me kill Barrons.
High on that cliff, the two of us had beaten, cut, and stabbed the man who’d been keeping me alive almost since the day I arrived in Dublin. And I’d wondered for days that had felt like years if Ryodan had wanted Barrons dead.
“I thought you tricked me into killing him. I thought you’d betrayed him.”
“I kept telling you to leave. You didn’t. You were never supposed to see what he was.”
“You mean what you all are,” I corrected. “All nine of you.”
“Careful, Mac. Some things don’t get talked about. Ever.”
I reached for my spear. He could have told me the truth on the cliff, but, like Barrons, he’d let me suffer. The more I thought about how both of them had withheld a truth from me that would have spared me so much agony, the angrier I got. “I was just making sure that when I stab and kill you, you’ll come back so I can do it again.”
The spear was in my hand, but suddenly my hand was in a huge fist, and the tip was pointed at my own throat.
Ryodan could move like Dani, Barrons, and the others. So fast I couldn’t defend myself. He stood behind me, arm snaked around my waist.
“Never make that threat. Put it away, Mac. Or I’ll take it for good.” He jabbed me with the tip of the spear in warning. “Barrons wouldn’t let you do that.”
“You might be surprised what Barrons would let me do.”
“Because he thinks I’m a traitor.”
“I saw you with Darroc myself. I heard you in the alley last night. When deeds and words align, the truth is plain.”
“I believed both of you were dead. What did you expect? The same survival instinct you admire in each other offends you in me. I think it worries you. Makes me more unpredictable than you’d like.”
He guided my hand to the holster and tucked the spear back in. “ ‘Unpredictable’ is the key word there. Did you flip, Mac?”
“Do I look like I flipped?”
He brushed hair from my face, tucked it gently behind an ear. I shivered. He bristled with the same kind of energy Barrons did—heat, muscle, and danger. When Barrons touches me, it turns me on. But when Ryodan stands behind me, locking me in place with an arm of steel, touching me tenderly—it scares the hell out of me.
“Let me tell you something about flipping, Mac,” he said softly against my ear. “Most people are good and occasionally do something they know is bad. Some people are bad and struggle every day to keep it under control. Others are corrupt to the core and don’t give a damn, as long as they don’t get caught. But evil is a completely different creature, Mac. Evil is bad that believes it’s good.”
“What are you saying, Ryodan? That I flipped and I’m too stupid to know it?”
“If the shoe fits.”
“It doesn’t. Point of curiosity: Which camp are you and Barrons in? Corrupt to the core and don’t give a damn?”
“Why do you think the Book killed Darroc?”
I knew where this was going. Ryodan’s theory was that I wasn’t tracking the Sinsar Dubh; it kept finding me. He was about to tell me that it had killed Darroc to further its goal of getting closer to me. He was wrong. “It killed Darroc to stop him. It told me no one was going to control it. It must have learned from me that Darroc knew a shortcut to containing and using it, and it killed him to prevent me or anyone else from discovering it.”