Blackthorne

12. Lock and Key

LOCK AND KEY

NICO

Iknew the manor well enough to leave it.

Mateo was the important part. Every morning at seven-fifteen, his phone rang, and every morning he stepped out the side door to answer it. Ninety seconds, give or take. From there, the front gate was close enough if I moved fast and did not look like I was moving fast.

I had been counting the gap for two days.

That was not the only thing I had been counting. I had counted every time Mateo looked at me and chose not to say anything. Every time he handed me a coffee like nothing had happened. Every time he made some stupid joke and gave me a way to laugh instead of explain myself.

We still had not talked about the fitting room.

Three days had gone by, and he had not pushed once. Somehow, that made it worse. If he had cornered me, I could have been angry. If he had made it awkward, I could have blamed him for that too. Instead, he was careful with me, and I did not know what to do with careful.

So when his phone rang, I picked up my coat and bag and walked through the foyer like I belonged there.

By the time I reached the train, my hands had stopped shaking.

The seven-thirty crowd ignored me with the practiced disinterest of New Yorkers in transit: a woman with a stroller, a man with a kit bag, a kid in a school uniform with one earbud hanging loose. No one watched me like Draco did. No one watched me like the house did.

For the first time since the basement, I was alone.

I almost cried into my coffee.

Instead, I drank it, got off at my stop, and walked the four blocks to the shop with my collar turned up against the cold.

The bell over the door rang. Evie stood behind the counter with her arms folded, and she did not say hello.

“You absolute fucking prick.”

“Hi, Ev.”

“Don't hi Ev me. I have been calling you, I have been texting you, I have been eating about it, Nico. Do you understand what I'm telling you. I have been stress-eating, and I do not stress-eat, that is your coping mechanism, you have given me your trauma response and I want it back...”

“I'm alive.”

“You don't look alive. You look like a man who's been wrung out. What the fuck is going on with your face?”

“My face is fine.”

“Your face is grey, Nicolás.”

I came around the counter and stopped two feet from her. “I'm okay.”

I leaned on the counter and rubbed my eye. The shop smelled the way it always smelled, and the smell of it landed in my chest like a hand pressing down.

“Is he hurting you?” she asked after a while.

“No.”

“Is he going to?”

I thought about it longer than I should have. “No. Not me.”

“I hate that you still think being useful is the same as being loved.”

“I'm okay, Ev.”

“You keep saying that.” She didn't move off the counter. “Look at me and say it like you mean it, and then I'll believe you, or at least pretend to, which is the best either of us is getting today.”

I looked at her and meant it as hard as I could. “I'm okay. I'm not in any trouble I didn't walk into with my eyes open. I've got a way to keep Remy alive, and I've got you holding the shop.”

She studied me a long moment.

“Fine. But I'm watching. You go quiet on me and I will come find you, and I will make a scene the size of this whole block. Are we clear?”

“We're clear.”

“Get out of my counter.”

I stepped away from it and went into the back, into the small workspace where I'd spent a third of my life restoring furniture, and I put my hands flat on the bench and breathed.

The bag at my hip felt heavy. It had felt heavy all week, if I was honest. Drake had hissed at the drawer where I kept it. He had refused to sleep on that side of the bed.

I lifted the bag onto the bench, opened it, and took out the box. The bloodstone sat where I'd left it. The chamber caught the workshop light, and the red inside moved with a slow, unhurried tilt, as if it were paying attention, and it looked darker than it had at the roadshow.

My fingers were on the chain before I decided to touch it. The chain was warm.

I did not remember choosing to put it on.

The pendant settled against my chest like a key sliding into a lock. I shut the velvet box, put it back in the bag, rolled my shoulders, and zipped my coat to my throat, as if a zipper could do anything about what I'd just walked myself into.

Evie looked up when I came back out front.

“I'm running errands. The bank, coffee, maybe the supplier on Twenty-Third.”

“Take your phone.”

“I've got my phone.”

The bell rang behind me and the wind immediately hit my face. Then, I started walking east.

The first reflection was late.

I caught it in the window of a deli on Lex as I walked past with a coffee in one hand and my phone in the other. For half a second the version of me in the glass moved before I did. Then it snapped back into place.

I stopped on the sidewalk, and the reflection stopped too, correct this time, the right face and the right timing. A man behind me stepped around with a muttered curse.

I was not crazy. I was not having a stroke. The pendant against my chest had grown warmer since I left the shop, warm enough now that I could feel it through my shirt.

I took out my phone and unlocked it. Mateo's name sat at the top of my favorites, because he'd put it there himself on the second day, and my thumb hovered, and for one stupid second I almost called him.

Across the street, a man was watching me.

I noticed him because he'd been on the block for two blocks now, always on the opposite sidewalk.

When he stopped at a streetlight, his face turned toward me with a stillness that made the back of my neck tighten.

He did not blink. The wind moved his coat, and the rest of him stayed exactly where it was.

I turned the corner fast.

Half a block down I slipped through the entrance of a hotel with a lobby pass-through and a side exit onto the next street.

I came out the side door, changed direction, and found him waiting at the end of the block.

A woman stood beside him now, her hands folded in front of her coat, and she had not been there a moment ago, and she was not blinking either.

“Fuck.”

I ran. I cut left, then right, then down a service alley behind a restaurant, jumped a low railing, came out onto a smaller street, and found the man there too, leaning against a wall, not remotely out of breath despite the distance I had just covered.

He lifted one hand in a small wave. Then he started toward me.

The pendant burned against my chest.

I ran past a bodega I knew, and the owner looked up, but his eyes slid over me as though I wasn't there.

I cut into another alley, the one that led to a courtyard and a back entrance I'd used on an old job.

I still had the key, but the lock did not turn.

I tried again, harder, and got nothing, and I shoved my shoulder against the door, once and then again, and the door held.

At the mouth of the alley, three figures stepped into view and stood in a line, blocking the way out. They had cornered me, and they knew it.

“Mr. Venn.”

His voice was clean, educated, and almost gentle, which somehow made the threat underneath it worse rather than better.

“How do you know my name?”

“We know a great deal about you. You've been very busy lately.”

“Who are you?”

“That is the wrong question. The right question is who sent us, and the answer is none of your business.” He smiled with teeth. “The old beast chose well. No wonder he wants you breathing.”

“Who?”

“Careful,” the woman said. “The lord wants the door alive. He didn't say undamaged.”

The pendant was so hot I could feel it through my coat.

The man stepped forward, and the others closed in with him, covering the last of the distance between one breath and the next. His hand was coming up, the woman starting forward, the third closing from the side, and there was nowhere to go, and my back was on the bricks.

My hand came up on its own, and the air caught them.

The man closest to me stopped mid-step with his weight not yet down, and his face went from calm to confusion in a single frame.

He tried to move and couldn't. The woman behind him took one more step and stopped the same way, the wind still moving her hair while the rest of her went nowhere.

The third tried to back up and couldn't.

I stood with my hand out and my arm shaking from the shoulder down, and there was a wet warmth on my upper lip, and I realized my nose was bleeding.

“What the fuck?” I whispered.

The man in front of me strained his jaw half open and got out a low growl. His eyes weren't on my face anymore. They were on my chest.

Then a sound came from the mouth of the alley, low and immediate, out of a throat I knew.

“Nico. Put your hand down.”

His voice cut through the haze that had settled over everything, and it took me a full second to place him standing there, closer than a man his size should have been able to get without my hearing him arrive.

I did not understand why he wanted me to let go of the only thing keeping these three from finishing what they'd started, and my body did not want to obey him.

But the certainty in his voice reached past the panic, and I trusted it more than I trusted my own instincts in that moment.

The instant I did, all three of them lurched back into motion at once, and the alley went from silence to violence in the space of a single breath.

The man closest to Draco recovered first and lunged with a blade that seemed to appear in his hand from nowhere, and Draco caught his wrist before the strike could land.

For one long second the two of them stood locked together, and I understood, with a lurch of something uncomfortably close to relief, that whatever these three were, they were strong enough to make Draco actually work for it.

Mateo hit the alley a half second later, fully turned by then, and went straight for the woman before she could close on Draco's exposed side.

She got one hand up in time to rake claw marks down the side of his muzzle, and he answered with his full weight, driving her back into the brick hard enough that dust came down off the wall above her head.

The third circled wide, trying to come at Draco from behind, and I opened my mouth to warn him, but Draco had already put the wall behind himself before the man could close the gap, cutting off the approach without so much as a glance over his shoulder.

The man with the blade twisted free and got one good cut in, a shallow line across the back of Draco's forearm that welled dark almost immediately, and for half a second I forgot how to breathe watching it happen, because some stubborn part of me had believed, until that exact moment, that nothing in this city could actually hurt him.

The cut didn't slow him. If anything, his expression changed, and the careful economy he had been fighting with disappeared entirely.

He drove the wounded man back into the third one before either of them could recover their footing, and when the flanking man finally got close enough to matter, Draco ended it in one motion, the same economical violence I remembered from the office, except this time there was nothing careful about it at all.

It looked, for the first time since I had met him, like violence he actually wanted to be doing.

Behind him, Mateo had the woman pinned under one enormous paw, and she wasn't moving anymore either.

The last man, the one with the blade, backed himself into the dead end at the far side of the alley, breathing hard, Draco's blood still bright along the edge of his knife.

“Whatever he's paying you,” the man said, “it isn't enough. You don't know what's actually coming for the door. None of us do. We were just supposed to watch, that's all, we weren't even supposed to—”

Draco crossed the last of the distance between them almost unhurried, as though the man's voice were the only part of him that had briefly held his attention, and it ended the way the other two had.

I stood with my back against the bricks, both hands empty at my sides now, blood still running warm over my lip.

Then Draco turned on me. He crossed what remained of the alley in three strides, and his hand closed around my upper arm, tight enough that I felt it through the coat.

“You had the gall to escape and then walk yourself directly into this. What do you have to say for yourself, Nico?”

I could not answer him. My mouth opened, but no words came out.

My balance went, all at once, and my back found the bricks again because my legs had quietly given up on holding me.

Draco stopped.

His grip on my arm changed before anything else about him did, the anger going out of his hand first, easing into a hold that was closer to support than restraint.

His eyes moved over my face, then down to my chest, and finally settled on my throat, on the small shape hidden under the wool where the chain sat.

After that, the tension went out of the rest of him too, his shoulders dropping, his jaw unclenching by degrees.

His thumb pressed against the chain through the coat for half a second. For one moment, his expression changed entirely, the corners of his mouth and eyes both pulling tight in a way that looked, unmistakably, like grief.

“Breathe slowly,” he said, and stayed with me until I could.

“Thank you,” I said, once I could hear him again.

“Are you hurt?” he asked.

“I don't know. I don't think so. The blood is just from whatever that was, whatever I did.”

“We will talk about whatever that was, but not here.” He glanced once at the bodies behind him, then back at me. “I am not doing this in an alley with my name still cooling on the ground around three dead men. Can you walk to the car?”

I nodded.

He did not let go of my arm yet. “Mateo.”

“Boss.” Mateo had already shifted back, breathing hard, a long scrape down one side of his face closing even as I watched it.

“Find out who they belonged to. I want the hand that held the leash before sundown.”

“Yes, sir.” Mateo crouched by the nearest body, turned back its collar, and breathed in once, apparently memorizing a scent, then gave Draco a small nod and was gone, already on the phone before he cleared the mouth of the alley.

Draco walked me out with a careful foot of space between us the entire way, and it was only once we reached the car that I realized he still had blood, his own, drying along the back of one forearm, and he had not once mentioned it.