Layla bolted upright in the hotel room, hearing the hammering at the door before the click of a lock.

Someone was breaking in. The deadbolt broke easily, and she reached over in the king-sized bed before realizing what she was looking for. And before she realized that the person she was searching for wasn't there.

Hayden.

He'd told her not to wait up for him when she'd left the rehearsal dinner early, saying she was too tired to stay up past eleven pm. He hadn't told her where he was going. She should have cared, but she was honestly past the point of believing that there was anything worth fighting for.

Whatever had existed once between them had been shattered by lies and mistrust and, on Layla's end, a girl with too many facial piercings.

She didn't need him. She didn't need him to protect her from a burglar. They weren't even staying in the same room, anyway, but a conjoining suite with a door that connected the two bedrooms. So why was her gut instinct still to roll over and shake him awake?

The door was shoved open, a male silhouette illuminated in the hallway light briefly before the door slammed shut again, like the eerie sound effect of a low-budget horror movie.

She grabbed anything that could help her, rolling out of bed and staying close to the ground in a low crouch. In her position, it was too hard to reach for a lamp to swing at the intruder. She scrambled, crab-walking over to the wall that led to a balcony.

The intruder advanced, and she caught the faint glint of metal in the moonlight that slanted through the curtains. A gun.

Her hand closed around a cold metal bar: the leg of the ironing board that she had opened this morning to iron her dress. That felt like a lifetime ago. Then she moved her hand an inch further, and found the clothing iron where she had left it.

Trailing her hand along the cheap plastic surface, she touched the cord, and traced it to the iron's plug. Reaching for the wall's electrical socket, she jammed the iron's plug into it, praying that it would go in on the first try. It did, despite her shaky hands and the blinding dark.

"Who's there?" said the intruder, his voice slurred. The tenor of his voice was muffled slightly, and she realized she still wore the earplugs she had shoved in that night to avoid any sounds from neighbours through the thin hotel walls. "Come out, come out wherever you are..."

Her blood ran cold. Puffs of steam hissed from the iron as she latched onto the handle.

Should she knock over the ironing board and use it as a shield from gunfire?

Was this man a shoot first, ask questions later type of guy?

Or should she simply make an escape to the balcony?

She had no time to think when a bullet pierced through the ironing board. A scream erupted from Layla's throat. Waving a hand over the metal surface of the iron, she found that it was searing hot.

The attacker was mere feet away her. She swung the iron at him, unplugging it from the wall with the force of her volley. He hollered in pain, letting her know that she'd hit her mark. The sounds and smell of searing flesh caused her stomach to roil, but she kept her grip on the iron, slamming it down over and over, ignoring the hand that the man reached out to seize her, to push her away, his firearm forgotten on the carpet.

She didn't know how long they stayed there, wrestling on the carpet, locked into a battle with no clear victors. But it could have been seconds or hours later when she heard the knocking on the door.

"This is the Maryland Police Department! Open up!"

Seizing the gun, she tucked it into the waistband of her drawstring pants, shoved the iron back into the closet, and grabbed the connecting door, letting it shut quietly behind her.

Inside the conjoining room, she panted for breath, back against the wooden surface as she gripped the cold metal of the gun, hard and solid against her hipbone. Through the thin door, she could hear the police, harsh questions and whispered interrogations.

Hayden must have crawled off of the floor, then. He must have made his way out of the deepest pits of hell that she had placed him in, and found his way to the door, pulling it open. There was no other reason, after all, for the police to be questioning him through the door. What an absurd notion. She really was losing her mind.

It was the adrenaline rushing through her blood. The same adrenaline that had started when she'd heard him burst into the room, and had only intensified when a shaft of moonlight had illuminated his face, and when she had recognized his anguished scream of pain, an earplug falling out of her ear. Layla had only heard him shout that way one time before: when he'd been shot and in the hospital where they had run out of painkillers.

That had been six months ago, though. Since then, she'd tried to suppress that strange, brutal urge that rose up in her. The instinct that was, perhaps, the beginning of the end. Or maybe it would have ruined the two of them from the start, causing them to splinter apart like nothing more than a house of cards.

Six months ago, right before he'd left the FBI. He'd been called in to do a simple case of a missing politician's child. Some senator. She couldn't remember who. It hadn't mattered, not then. Almost nothing had, when she'd heard he was hurt.

Then, moments after hearing he was in the hospital, she'd realized something, something that would forever separate them. When she'd heard he'd been shot in the line of duty, her first emotion hadn't been panic or concern. Instead, it had been something like... relief. Satisfaction.

Why?

The night before, they'd had one of their worst fights.

One, which, compared to the tense silences and fraught looks they shared now, seemed almost like bliss.

But then, it had felt like the end of the world. He'd shouted at her on their wedding anniversary, I have a job to do! And my duty comes first!

If you're going to choose your job over your wife every time, you never should have gotten married!

Well sometimes, I wish I never had!

Then he'd walked out, slammed the door, and left her. He'd just gotten in the car and driven to work, to save the whole goddamn world, like she was nothing.

Like they were nothing.

Maybe it was the first crack in the glass. Or maybe it had been broken all along.

#

Vihaan drove toward the Underwoods' house under the cover of darkness.

Gas prices were rising, but he couldn't bear the thought of taking the subway here like some sort of peasant, stuck in there with the rest of the panicked masses who were far below the levers of power, hardly capable of understanding that he was the one who had caused the blackout. Not to mention the lack of air conditioning was a major impediment to him even attempting to go anywhere near those torturous underground tunnels so very like rat mazes made for laboratory experiments.

He doubted that was a coincidence. The elites did not care about those beneath them. He had been scorned until he'd ingratiated himself with them, and he wasn't eager to return to that life before he had clawed his way up to the corridors of power, drenched in blood and grave dirt.

Pulling his new Lexus–an exact copy of Jacob's own, except for the license plate–into their driveway carefully, he thought he might have reconsidered his plan. The lack of streetlights was unsettling and making it difficult for him to avoid running over one of the neatly pruned shrubs next to the walkway. He had, of course, orchestrated this blackout easily, seeing that the president was far from popular now. A city-wide blackout in the centre of American power in the free world would make it far easier to destabilize the leader's already-nosediving popularity. Combined with the soaring inflation, widespread unemployment, and threats of embroiling himself in yet another Middle Eastern war... Well, it wouldn't be looking good for the POTUS.

Despite his earlier assignation with the First Lady, Vihaan wasn't foolish enough to think that power lay with the First Lady, the Second Lady, or either of their husbands. That was why he played both sides. He made himself useful enough to the White House and their need to remain as pristine and scandal-free as possible, aside from a tan suit here or there, but he wasn't about to pretend that he was some courtier catering to the royal family. Vihaan had his own interests, and he'd see to them for as long as he could still draw breath.

No, the real power lay not in an election that happened twenty-five times a century, but in those who weren't elected. The bureaucrats running OSHA or the CDC or the FDA, the deep state actors in the FBI and CIA, any number of men and women who slaved under anonymity behind the cover of an acronym.

Turning off the ignition, Vihaan unlocked the car door, stepped onto the walkway, and carried his briefcase in one hand. In the dark, any neighbour who bothered to glance out the window might mistake him for Senator Underwood himself in his suit and tie. Though, of course, the Senator was stuck in D.C., not Maryland, and wouldn't be home until at least the next morning.

The Senator's young son who had impregnated Carly was likely at his Georgetown dorm, while Jacob's wife was at some charity function tonight, pretending to care about the homeless or disadvantaged youths.

Which left the house vacant. And since the blackout had reached their neighbourhood, leaving the home unprotected by their fancy security system, it would be the perfect time for him to take what he needed. He never did something without a dual purpose. This blackout had both cemented the final nail in the President's coffin of dreams to run for re-election, while also giving him the opportunity to steal something quite valuable to his old friend.

An NDA.

The bump key he'd had made to the house opened easily, and he made his way to Jacob's study, using his phone's flashlight to maneuver through the mid-century modern townhouse. The Oriental carpet was thick and plush under his bare feet. He had worn flip flops, easy to put on and take off, brand new and unlikely to be traced back to him should he need to make a hasty exit. On second thought, the skin cells might rub off, so he put the pair of sandals into his briefcase.

Passing a bathroom door left ajar, the industrial kitchen with polished metal surfaces that looked like a crumb had never dropped onto its countertops, and the formal sitting room, he finally found the study.

The door creaked open, and he set down the briefcase, his phone's light casting an eerie glare on the shelves of law textbooks–all for show–and a heavy mahogany desk, in the first drawer of which were Cuban cigars. If he moved one of the volumes on the shelves, he knew, it would trigger a mechanism that revealed a safe behind the shelves.

Finding the right book, which was no easy feat in the near-dark, he pulled it out and almost laughed. It was The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a text he'd read in his required undergraduate English class years ago, the contents of the slim paperback speaking volumes.

He set down the book on the desk as the shelves slid apart, revealing a state of the art safe. The safe, however, was one that he'd seen the senator unlock many times before. He changed the passcode once a week. However, he also rotated between passcodes, a bad habit that made it easy for Vihaan to enter the right one.

Having found the document, he replaced The Reluctant Fundamentalist and let the shelves seal shut again. Skimming the NDA quickly, he ascertained that it was the file he was looking for. There had been nothing else in the safe besides a few gold bars and even a gold bullet–the senator was a fan of hedging his investments with precious metals–but neither of those interested him. It was the twenty-first century and he traded in the most valuable currency of all.

Secrets.

Shame could compel a man to do anything.

Fear could corrupt a man into any shape.

And the truth? Well, when it was revealed, it could be downright toxic.

And some would do anything to keep it from being exposed.