29. Chapter 29
Bastien
They stage out of a logging yard seven miles from the compound, and by eleven the only thing anyone is waiting for is me to leave.
Jericho has me sit on the tailgate of his vehicle while he works a transmitter into the lining of my coat.
“Under the collar,” he says. “Don’t touch it. If you can find it, so can they.”
“What’s the range?”
“Through stone, poor. I’ll know you’re alive. I won’t hear a conversation.” He bites the thread and knots it. “If you want us moving, say the word.”
“Fenwick.”
“Twice. Once could be anything.”
Viktor walks the line of Craven’s dragons at the treeline and comes back without saying a word to any of them. Nadia has the map spread on the hood of a truck with a flashlight held in her teeth.
“Front doors on the signal,” she says, taking it out of her mouth. “Ward doors are Craven’s. Everyone else takes the vehicle gate.”
“And if there’s no signal?”
“Then we sit at that fence until first light, and nobody moves.”
Craven looks up from the map. “How long do you need inside?”
“An hour. Less, if she’s direct with me.”
“And if she isn’t?”
“Then it takes longer than an hour.”
Crowe is down by the fence with his back to all of it. I walk down and stand beside him and take the envelope out of my coat.
“Take this.”
He doesn’t put his hand out. “What is it?”
“The deed to the estate, signed over to you. There’s a letter with it. Both are witnessed, and Faine holds the second copy.”
He turns around.
“Put it back in your pocket.”
“It’s written so that it doesn’t have to go through a court. The house and the land go together, and the accounts under them are considerable. I’ve made it very difficult to contest.”
“I said put it back.”
“You’ll take it because of what comes with it.” I hold it where he has to look at it. “If I’m not out by dawn, you go to my house before dark, and you take her to Aurora.”
“Her.”
“Viktor will take her in. And Crowe—there are people in this yard tonight who will want her the moment they hear her name. Get her through the door before anyone does.”
“And after that?”
“After that, she’s yours to look out for. She’s twenty-three. She has a whole life ahead of her, and somebody has to stand behind her for it.” I push the envelope against his chest until he takes it. “I have made a study of who keeps their word. The list is short, and you’re on it.”
He holds the envelope without looking down at it.
“You’ve never said her name to me.”
“No. And I’m not going to say it in this yard.”
“I don’t need you to.” He puts the envelope inside his coat, and he takes a long time doing it. “I’ve known since you told me people were asking about Sangrey blood. I just wanted to see if you’d trust me with it.”
“I’m trusting you with everything else.”
“You are.” He pauses. “Don’t go in,” he says.
“That’s the fourth time you’ve said it.”
“I’ll say it a fifth.”
“I know what you think of the plan.”
“Then say the word, and I’ll take it to Viktor myself.”
“No.”
He puts his hand out. I take it. He holds on a second past the point where the gesture is finished, then lets go and turns back to the fence.
“Fenwick,” he says. “Twice.”
“Twice.” I pause. “Crowe…”
“What?”
“You’re a good man.”
“For a Turned, you mean?”
“For anyone.”
The gate is open before my car reaches it.
I’ve been coming up this drive since the fall, and it has never stood open. There are men at it, same as always. But the floodlights on the poles are off. Only the two nearest the doors are burning, which puts the whole yard in darkness and puts me in the light when I get out of the car.
Vasile is on the steps in a suit I’ve never seen him wear.
“My lord.” The bow goes lower than usual, and his heart is loud enough that I can hear it from the car. “The house is honored. Ecaterina has asked after you twice this evening.”
“Then we shouldn’t keep her.”
The lobby smells of bleach.
Only bleach. Every time I’ve walked through this building there has been blood underneath it—stale and thin, working up through the stone from the ward two floors down. Twenty people bleed into a building for long enough, and the building keeps it.
Tonight there’s nothing under the bleach at all.
I stop listening for it and listen for them instead. The heartbeats. Twenty of them, give or take, stacked through the floors below, the sound I’ve counted on every visit since the first.
Silence.
Turn around.
The chandelier is lit for the first time since I’ve been coming here. There’s nobody at the desk. Nobody on the stairs. The corridor to the client floor has been cleared of the men who usually stand in it.
I keep walking. The woman behind that door is the only route anyone has found to the top of this trade. Her letter asked for a private word after the audit. It seems the audit is over.
The office with the false window is laid out for a meeting. Two chairs. A low table. A decanter and one glass.
The woman at the mantel is small and gray-haired and dressed like a solicitor.
“Seigneur de Val-Serein. Ecaterina Borza. Sit down.”
I know the voice. Level, unhurried, awake at an hour that should suit nobody. It’s the voice on the other end of the line the night I bought Serenity. The voice that said my name before Vasile could, and added twelve percent to an already ridiculous number without hesitating.
She’s been watching me. I don’t know how long, and I don’t think I’m going to like the answer.
I sit. “I’m glad we could meet,” I say.
“You’ve made this house very profitable, Seigneur,” she says. “I wanted to look at you.” She takes the other chair. “Your account is open. That’s unusual. A client who buys an asset outright stops coming.”
“I found other reasons to come.”
“So I understand.”
She pours from the decanter and holds the glass out to me.
It isn’t brandy. I can smell it from where I’m sitting: iron, and under the iron a sharp green edge that only comes off blood with magic in it. Drawn within the hour.
The gate was open. The lights are off. There is nobody in this building.
But the man I’ve been playing all these months does not refuse this glass. Not from her. Not in this room.
I take it, and I drink it.
“There,” Ecaterina says. “Now we can be honest with each other.”
The heat arrives in my hands first. Then the backs of my arms. It doesn’t hurt, which tells me it was made by somebody who knew what they were doing.
“What was in that?”
“Something we keep for people our men can’t handle.” She sets the decanter down. “You’ll be able to talk for a long while. You won’t be able to do much else. It costs a fortune. I’ve authorized it four times in twenty years.”
I get a hand onto the chair beside me. My legs are numb.
“Fenwick,” I say. “Fenwick.”
Ecaterina waits, politely, until I’ve finished.
“Your coat is very well made,” she says. “Say it as many times as you like.”
“They’ll come.”
“They’re already here. On the access road and at the north fence.” She folds her hands. “And there are dragons in the trees on the east side, which I’ll admit I found alarming.”
She has all of it.
“Who told you?”
“You did, in part. Your behavior was out of character. That made me curious. It didn’t make me certain.” She sits back. “What made me certain arrived five days ago. In detail. Including the timings.”
Five days.
The meeting was six days ago. Fourteen people around one table, and inside twenty-four hours, everything said in that room was traveling to this woman.
“There’s nobody in your ward,” I say.
“There’s nobody in the building at all. We moved everything on Tuesday.”
Twenty people. Moved quietly, in under a week, to somewhere completely unknown.
I’ve been basing my understanding of this operation on the branch I could see.
Whoever Ecaterina works for can empty a building without leaving a mark on it, and that’s worth more to the Court than anything else I’ve learned tonight… if I get to tell them.
“Your friends will lie in that grass until it gets light,” she says. “Then they’ll search an empty compound and go home, and by then you’ll be somewhere else.”
I get my weight forward, and I get half out of the chair.
That’s as far as I go. The door opens behind me, and there are four of them. They aren’t guards, and they don’t rush.
I take two of them down before my legs stop working properly. The third gets an arm around my throat from behind and holds on. The fourth puts the iron on me, runes cut all the way around, two bands on each wrist. When I pull against it, the burn runs to my shoulders and stays.
I keep pulling. It doesn’t do anything. I do it anyway.
Then I lunge at Ecaterina, and what’s left of her men barrel into me. Something in my left arm gives. I hear it before I feel it.
Broken.
Putain.
They put me face down on the rug, and they hold me there, and Vasile stands at the door the whole time and doesn’t come in.
Ecaterina crouches down where I can see her. She’s careful about her knees.
“I’d have liked to keep you as a client,” she says.
“You were an excellent one. But you’ve spent time in my house with the Nocturne Court standing behind you, and that leaves me with two questions.
What have you traced of this operation beyond the building you’re lying in?
Which of our other houses, how far up, and what your Court intends to do about it.
” She pauses. “And where the woman you bought is being kept.”
I’m quiet.
“You’ll answer both. Everyone does eventually.” She stands and brushes her skirt down. “But not here. At first light your friends come through that fence, and I want this building to disappoint them completely. Get him up.”
They pick me up.
The one who put the iron on me runs his thumb along my collar, finds the stitching, and cuts Jericho’s work out of the lining with a pocketknife. He drops the transmitter on the floor and grinds it under his heel. The mantel clock says ten past one.
Then he tapes my mouth.
I have been many things. Freight is new.
They carry me out through the back of the building, past the stairs I’ve walked up every week since the fall, and the whole place is silent. No handlers. No boots. Empty.
At the loading door, three vans stand with their engines running. Delivery plates. Deliveries use the north track every night of the week. Nobody watching that fence will see anything worth waking a radio for.
They put me on the bench seat between two of them, and the vans roll out at delivery speed.
Forty feet into the treeline, on my left, I can hear them. Eight slow heartbeats, lying in the wet grass, waiting on a signal that no longer exists. Their orders are plain. No signal, nobody moves before first light. I sat at that table while Viktor gave the order, and I called it acceptable.
The vans reach the main road and turn north.
I count the turns for as long as the drug lets me count anything. Somewhere past the tenth, I stop counting.
Crowe is at a fence behind me with an envelope in his coat and instructions that begin at dawn. By tomorrow dark, he’ll have her behind Aurora’s wards. He keeps his word. It’s the only thing tonight I’d put money on.
And Ecaterina asked me where the woman is being kept. Which means she doesn’t know.
The heat comes up my arms again, heavier this time, the bone grinding where it’s broken, and I hold on to that one fact while the road carries me north.
She doesn’t know, and I’ll never tell her.