A DEBT COMES DUE #3
“I don't know what you're talking about. I was just getting food.”
“You are lying to me. I told you at the start that I would know, and I have had a great deal of practice at knowing. Try again. Why did you go there?” I asked it without any heat in my voice, because heat was for men who needed the other person to feel their anger before it could do any work.
I preferred mine to arrive without warning.
“It's nothing. It's a shop. He doesn't have anything, he's not part of this, he's just—”
He stopped half a syllable short of the word.
“He's just your what, Mr. Venn?”
“Nothing. I didn't say anything.”
“Finish the sentence, or I will finish it for you, and you will not like the version I choose.”
“He's my brother, all right? He's my brother, and he doesn't know anything about any of this, and if you touch him I swear to every god that's ever existed, I will find a way to make you regret it, even if it takes me the rest of my life, even if you have to kill me to stop me.”
The threat was absurd on its face, a mortal man promising vengeance against a thing that could end him with one hand, and under different circumstances I might have found it entertaining.
I did not find it entertaining. I found, instead, that I believed him, and the belief sat strangely in me, in a way I did not examine and did not care to.
One moment I stood in front of the chair.
The next, my hand was fisted in his collar, the chair was clattering away behind him, and his feet had left the floor.
I drove him into the concrete pillar hard enough that the sound came back flat and wet off the far wall, and I held him there with his feet not under him, my face a hand's width from his, and I kept my voice quiet.
“I asked you to do one simple thing. You have spent it lying to me and making promises you cannot keep.”
He could not find the air to answer, so I eased my grip enough to give him some, and the breath he drew came back out red.
Blood ran down his chin and dropped onto my cuff, and the hunger rose in my throat at the smell of it, sudden and complete, and I forced it back down before it could become anything more than a feeling I noted and set aside.
His voice came out wrecked around the blood, but the anger had not left it, even now.
“Do it, then. Kill me. But you leave him alone, you hear me? You leave Nico alone or none of this was ever worth it to begin with. Take anything you want. Just leave him out of it. Please.”
I set him down more carefully than the moment required, my hands slower on his collar than they needed to be, and I did not examine why.
It was not mercy exactly, or if it was, it was a mercy I had not decided to extend on purpose, and that unsettled me more than anything Remy Venn had said to me in the last ten minutes.
“Amara.”
“Sir.”
“Have him cleaned up. He sleeps upstairs tonight, in a room with a bed and a lock on the outside, not the basement.”
“Of course, Sir.”
“And the brother is under my protection as of this hour.
Those words, Amara, in that order. I want them spoken where the right people will hear them spoken, and I want them entered in the book under my own mark before sunset, with Helena's hand beside it and Elias's beside hers. If anyone in this city, mine or otherwise, lays a finger on Nicolás Venn, they answer to Blackthorne directly, and I will not be in a mood as generous as the one I was in this morning.”
“Clear, sir.”
I looked back at Remy. He was crying now, properly, the anger finally spent, or at least buried deep enough that it had stopped doing him any good.
“Mr. Venn. Look at me.” He dragged his eyes up, red rimmed, furious and grateful in a combination I did not think he understood himself.
“Your brother is safe from me today. You have my word, and you have already learned this week what my word is worth. Whether it continues to hold will depend on him, and on you, and on a number of things neither of us can see yet. Do you understand?”
He nodded, then found his voice again, thin but still carrying an edge. “Why? Why do you care what happens to some guy who fixes furniture?”
It was, I noted, an excellent question, and one I did not have a real answer for.
“That is not a question you need answered today,” I said. “It may not be a question I can answer today either.”
“Good.”
I walked to the door, and Rowan opened it, and Mateo was already at the car with the back door held open. The rain had started up again, a thin, cold drizzle that never announced itself with thunder, it simply arrived.
“Boss,” Mateo said, holding the door.
“Astoria.”
He glanced past me at Amara, who was already a few steps behind, arranging Remy's cleanup with someone on the phone. “You want to change first? There's blood on your cuff.”
“No. Leave it.”
“All right. Astoria it is.” He held the door a beat longer than he needed to, the way he did when he had a question he had decided not to ask, and shut it behind me once I was seated, and we pulled out into the rain.