9. Dane
Chapter nine
Dane
Reed stood at the door in the same posture he’d held since I’d put him there at six. He didn’t shift when I crossed behind him.
Cabot was asleep on the sofa in the parlor, one arm flung across his stomach, with his legal pad resting on his chest. He had been cross-checking his wedding names list with what he found online when his eyes finally closed. His pen slid out of his hand and lodged between two cushions.
Above us, I could hear Wiley’s voice, not loud enough to make out the words. He’d taken Samuel’s call at eight on the dot.
Farrow was standing at the entrance to the parlor, half-turned toward the hall, watching Reed. He hadn’t gone upstairs yet for his six p.m. sleep break.
The Patterson meeting would take place in the morning, at ten a.m. We’d identified three different routes to a Guardians-vetted office in Cambridge.
I slipped my phone into my pocket. “Time for the basement check.”
Farrow passed close by me on his way to the basement door. He brushed the small of my back with his hand. It wasn’t accidental.
“You don’t need to do this,” I said. “You can get some sleep.”
“Do you really think I can sleep upstairs while you go poking around in the dark by yourself?” He didn’t look back.
I gave Farrow a three-second lead and followed him down.
The basement stairs were old wood over older stone. Farrow descended, making no sound. I matched him.
He went left at the bottom, toward the back of the house. I went right.
The basement was what you’d expect under a Federal-style townhome. The fieldstone walls were damp. A newer gas boiler hummed low in the corner, feeding the radiators upstairs. A single bare bulb at the bottom of the stairs lit ten feet of floor. Past that, it was dark.
On my side, I checked an old coal chute first. The bulkhead doors at the back were padlocked from the inside. Two basement windows at street grade had bars and alarms set by The Guardians.
Across the room, Farrow moved around stacked cardboard boxes labeled “Christmas.” Beyond that sat three old chairs and a threadbare loveseat.
He came up behind me as I finished checking the perimeter. “Clean,” he said, low.
“Clean,” I said back.
I led the way as we took the stairs back up. To me, the kitchen was the least secure part of the house. The back door opened onto a tiny brick courtyard with a gate to a service alley. The courtyard walls were only waist-high to a tall man.
I checked the alarm on a gate that was too short to keep an athletic person out. Green. I checked the deadbolt. Set.
Farrow had stayed in the kitchen, checking the little window over the sink. “Did you see anything in the courtyard? I only saw a cat on the wall.”
“Whose cat?”
Farrow shrugged. “Could be our orange cat. Saw it last night, too.”
We did a quick check of the dining room and then returned to the central hall. Farrow stopped at the foot of the stairs and looked up.
I stopped behind him and listened. Wiley was silent. Reed rolled his shoulder once at the front door.
“Up,” I said.
Wiley’s door was closed. The light bled out under it in a thin gold strip.
The staircase to the third floor was narrower. It would have been constructed as stairs for the staff.
The temperature dropped when we hit the third step. At the upper landing, the air was distinctly cooler. The floor wasn’t in use, and the thermostat had been turned down to fifty. We told Cabot and Wiley that it was off-limits.
At the landing, we faced two doors, both closed. We did a quick check the day we moved into the safehouse and hadn’t been back.
I turned toward Farrow. His breath created small clouds in the cold air.
The chill worked its way through my shirt. The small hairs at the back of my neck stood up.
I’d held onto a question since the night we first met. We were alone, and I asked it.
“How did you know where things were in my apartment?”
Farrow hesitated only for a beat. “I answered it then, but it was the short version. Do you want the full answer or the quick one?”
“Full.”
“It was pattern matching. You live in a building where all the units have the same floor plan. I’ve been inside three apartments in that building over the last two years and a dozen more like it across the South End and the Back Bay.
It was different floors with different men, but they all had the same bones. ”
He watched me as he continued. “The towels go in the linen closet in the bathroom because it’s designed for that. More intimate objects are in the drawer to the right of the lavatory. A man like you wouldn’t keep them in the living room.”
He said it without a change in his vocal tone. If he were a principal, I’d have read him as truthful.
The radiator on the second floor below us ticked once and was quiet. I heard my pulse against the high collar of my shirt.
Three apartments in my building. A dozen more like it. He had walked me through his history in the flat, operational voice he used to report on a perimeter check.
“Is there anything else you know about my apartment?”
“Plenty.”
He didn’t elaborate.
“So, you’re saying I live in a hotel room.”
“I’ve never been in a hotel with someone like you, Dane. For what it’s worth, I haven’t been with anyone else since.”
Silence followed. He’d said it flat. No question hanging off the back of it.
Farrow read rooms for a living. He knew what he’d just handed me.
I closed the distance between us.
I reached for the side of his throat with a slight grip. I’d decided. His pulse jumped once under my fingers and then steadied.
I tilted my chin toward the door on the left.
He turned and opened it. I followed him inside.
The sole window faced the back of the building with curtains drawn. A bed sat against the far wall, stripped to the mattress.
I closed the door behind us. Farrow turned toward me.
I caught him by the front of his shirt and pushed him back against the wall beside the door. His back hit the plaster. He didn’t make a sound.
I placed my hand over his mouth.
It wasn’t caution. It was territorial. He understood, and the tension in his jaw eased under my palm. It was the only consent we needed.
Farrow’s pulse under my fingers ran faster than mine. He exhaled through his nose, hot breath moving across my hand.
I worked his belt open one-handed. He reached for mine. Neither of us undressed. I opened his jeans just enough—buckle, button, and zipper. He was hard, and I tugged the underwear down, exposing him.
He arched his hips and made a soft sound against my palm. I wrapped my fingers around his cock and stroked him .
Farrow was beautiful.
He was giving himself to me after he’d just told me he had chosen no one else since we met.
I pulled my hand off his mouth and turned his body to face the wall. Our combined heat negated the cold.
Farrow braced against the plaster with both hands. The skin on his neck was hot. He smelled like cherry cola and under that, the faint scent of gun oil he used to clean his sidearm.
I had condoms in my back pocket. They were standard equipment I carried, like a tourniquet and a backup magazine. The foil tearing was loud against the silence. Farrow grunted and reflexively spread his legs.
I sheathed my cock, spread lube on it from another small packet and didn’t waste time. The first thrust found its mark. Farrow took it the way I knew he would take it—silently, with his body quickly adjusting.
There was one short, caught breath. He was tight and hot, and he pushed his weight back into me. He wanted his share of my body.
The pace was fast. Farrow pressed his forehead against a braced arm. The line of his shoulders shifted under my chest with every thrust. I reached around and stroked his cock in the same rhythm.
A tremor passed through his body.
“Fuck, Dane,” he muttered. His first intelligible words.
I changed my angle, and the sounds told me he wanted it. I pulled almost out and made him wait. He pushed his hips back as far as they would go, and then I plunged deep once more.
I sped up the rhythm and reached out to place a hand over his mouth again. I was going to take him over, and I didn’t want to disturb the house.
His cock leaked precum over my hand. He shuddered.
Farrow came first, shooting against the wall. I watched the corded muscles of his neck as he grunted into my hand and pushed his hips hard back against me. His entire body locked, released, and locked again. I rode it out.
After two more thrusts, I came. I pressed my face against the back of his neck to muffle any sound.
I held still inside him through the aftershocks, and then I pulled my hand away from his mouth.
He took one deep breath and turned around.
I checked my watch. It had been five minutes, maybe six.
“This complicates the work,” I said.
Farrow was tucking his shirt in. “Babe, the work has been complicated since you walked into that bar three and a half weeks ago.”
“Farrow.”
He looked at me with a glint in his eye. “Relax. I won't announce this to the house.”
We came back down the stairs into the foyer and the front hall. Reed glanced over once at me and then turned back to watching the street.
The parlor was unchanged.
Cabot was still asleep on the sofa, head turned now toward the back of the cushions. The legal pad was still on his chest, lifting and settling with his breathing.
I crossed over to him and pulled the pad free. He didn’t wake up .
His handwriting was small, even, and slightly slanted to the right. He arranged the list in two columns. Names on the left, with relationships to the Harcourt family on the right. It was forty-three names, and he’d worked on it for hours.
Three names had stars beside them.
The first two names were familiar. The third stopped me.
Patterson, Helen — Harcourt Foundation board, 2018–2021. Memorial fund est. 2022.
I assumed it was a late wife of the editor. Cabot wrote her name down among all the other people who would either be guests or staff at the Harcourt wedding.
The Patterson meeting was just over twelve hours away. We were going to sit down across a table from a man whose dead wife had just shown up on a list of people explicitly connected with the Harcourt family. He was deeper in the family’s orbit than any of us, except for Cabot, knew.
He’d asked for the meeting. He’d told Eamon he had information that he needed to share.
A man whose late wife sat on a Harcourt foundation board was not a neutral source bringing us information.
I set the pad back on Cabot’s chest, in the same alignment. He didn’t stir.
Farrow had been watching me. He didn’t ask. He raised one finger almost imperceptibly. I read it as a question: Bad?
I nodded.
I crossed to the small console table where I’d left my rotation chart. It was a grid of the next seventy-two hours, names down the side and hours across the top. A pencil lay beside it.
My name ran from eighteen hundred to midnight. Farrow’s ran from midnight to oh-six hundred.
I picked up the pencil and moved myself forward to midnight to oh-six hundred.
If anyone asked, I would explain it as coverage logic. I was putting myself, a slightly more experienced operative, on the deeper part of the night when watchers might try to test the perimeter.
It wasn’t coverage logic.
I was giving Farrow the gift of more sleep.
Above us, on the second floor, Wiley’s door opened.
When he appeared in the parlor, he looked at Cabot on the sofa and then focused on the legal pad on his chest. He looked at me.
“You saw.”
“I saw.”
“Then we’re not having the conversation tomorrow that I thought we were having,” he said.