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“He told everyone to evacuate, he made the right call there, but then he tried to get to one of the land cruisers and go back to headquarters,” Maxwell continued. “He was insistent. Wild. He and Mal’ik came to blows.”
“What?” Sebastian repeated in a higher pitch, spinning to Oliver now.
Oliver nodded. “Mal’ik said he had to incapacitate him before he would see reason.”
“He did,” Maxwell confirmed. “I was there. I’ve never seen Hess like that.”
“But that…” Sebastian’s palms got clammy, and his skin flashed both hot and cold. Hess had reacted like that? About him? In front of everyone? With Kaston burning around him? “That wasn’t about me, specifically. It was about…Kaston, or something.”
Maxwell gave him an almost sympathetic look. “It was about you.”
Hess had tried to get back to him. Sebastian crossed his arms in front of him and looked down. With all his plans falling apart and his men watching, Hess had tried to get back to him. Sebastian shifted, feeling off-balance, then lifted his head to scowl at Maxwell.
“What, did he think I would be taken down that easily?”
Maxwell raised his eyebrows in an unimpressed look. “No, actually. Martha and Mal’ik thought you would be taken down that easily. Hess insisted you would still be fighting.”
Oh. Sebastian tried to stifle the pleased, proud feeling that gave him and keep his lips from curving up into a giddy little smile, but from Maxwell’s narrow eyes, he wasn’t successful. Under Maxwell’s searching look, Sebastian finally understood something that had confused him at the time.
“That’s why you asked if I felt safe with him last night.” Sebastian straightened and pointed at Maxwell as the realization clicked into place. He pointed the finger back at himself as he continued, “I’d always known that Hess was an asshole”—then at Maxwell—“but you never seemed to think so. I wondered why you thought I should be moved.”
“He was being irrational back at Kaston, and he was being irrational when you were brought in.” Maxwell pulled himself up tall, revealing a hint of the steel he had in him. He played the sweet doctor so often, people could forget he had a spine of iron. “Irrational men are dangerous men.”
“It sounds a lot like he means the opposite of harm to Sebastian,” Oliver finally spoke up with a frown.
Maxwell just shook his head. “You’re thinking rationally.”
Oliver didn’t look convinced, and Sebastian didn’t reply right away. He knew that buried somewhere in Maxwell’s history was something deeply unpleasant. He didn’t know specifically what it was, but he had seen the scars of it every once in a while when that steely, uncompromising look came into his eyes. This was one of those times, and Sebastian wasn’t completely convinced that Maxwell’s fear of irrational men made any sense when applied to Hess.
Hess was rational to a fault. Extremely thorough and thoughtful, with every decision justified by facts, evidence, and sound logical arguments. Sebastian could have laughed. That rationality with a complete lack of any tempering humanity was exactly his issue with Hess.
“Hess doesn’t mean anything for me,” Sebastian sneered at Oliver. “And he certainly doesn’t mean anything to me.”
Hess’s attempted brave—foolish—rescue back at Kaston. Hess sweeping him into his arms and depositing him into his own bed when he stumbled home. Hess’s sweet words and his worshipful touch, and the way he had looked at him this morning when he’d asked him to breakfast. None of it meant anything coming from a man who could make the decisions that Hess could make—who could leave their men to rot and take for himself the worst possible weapon Sebastian had ever encountered. And so none of it meant anything to Sebastian.
“Hess is a cold, heartless asshole.” Sebastian grabbed his data tablet off the table next to Maxwell and made a connection to the dartboard’s screen. “He doesn’t care about anyone, and he certainly doesn’t care about me.”
He rifled through the stored images on his data tablet until he came to that shot. The one that had played over every screen in every system across the sector. The one the newsreels loved and loved to hate. He flicked it up onto the dartboard screen, and in a second, the dark, intense eyes of Leon Hess stared down at him from it.
“He might win this goddamn war, but he’ll whittle us down to nothing in the process,” Sebastian growled as he stared at that image. It had been taken on the roof of the capitol building that they now stood in, just before Hess had ordered the blank, black flag of the Resistance to be raised over it. Hess glared at the camera with a gun pointed straight into the lens, seconds before he pulled the trigger.
Sebastian had always thought he looked so striking in it.
He grabbed the rest of the darts and lined himself up.
“Sebastian…” Maxwell’s warning voice did nothing to slow Sebastian once he’d gotten on a roll, and he didn’t even turn around.
“Did you know he knew Kaston was compromised?” Sebastian threw a dart, and it landed on Hess’s chin. “He knew Kaston was compromised, and he did nothing about it. He sacrificed it and everyone in it without a second thought. And he won’t even save them now!”
It was easier to feel the anger. Self-righteous anger was an easy feeling to hold. The hurt and disappointment and the confusion, those were the feelings Sebastian hated. The warm, fuzzy feeling he’d had this morning when he’d woken up in the quiet of Hess’s room, with Hess’s soft, tired smile on him.
Sebastian threw another dart, and this one hit Hess’s cheek. What did Hess’s feelings even mean? They couldn’t mean anything if he was still willing to discard everything Sebastian said about the gas, about what it could do, and about what he had seen. And what did the feelings of a man that could unleash such horror on people even matter?
“Sebastian.” Maxwell’s voice had a harder note in it now, but Sebastian just threw his third dart.
“I don’t care, Maxwell. If it wasn’t for him—”
“Sebastian,” Maxwell barked, and that made Sebastian turn around because he’d never heard such—
