Chapter 18
brOCK
They were waiting for me.
I came up a long private drive lined with live oaks older than the Republic, and the house at the end of it stopped me for half a second even in the state I was in—a great Lowcountry mansion lit up gold against the dark, columns two stories tall, piazzas stacked one over the other down the side, the kind of place that got built when somebody had more money than God and wanted the world to know it.
Wrought iron. Brick the color of dried blood.
A fountain somewhere I could hear but not see.
And men. Armed men, moving easy and spread-out across the grounds with the loose discipline of people who did this for real, long guns slung, eyes already on the jalopy before I'd cleared the gate.
Half a dozen, at least, more shapes back in the dark.
They swarmed the car the second I stopped, and for one ugly heartbeat every instinct I owned came up screaming—until I saw they weren't coming for me. They were coming for Darren.
They had his door open and four sets of hands on him before I'd killed the engine, lifting him out of the seat smooth and fast, somebody already calling for the clinic, somebody else snapping orders, low and clipped.
They carried him up the broad stone steps and in through a set of doors tall enough to ride a horse through, and just like that, he was gone inside and I was standing by a stolen wreck with blood drying on my arms, watching an operation I had no part in run like clockwork around me.
Then, Tommy came out the front.
My brother. Older than the last time, harder through the face, a sidearm riding in a drop holster strapped to his thigh the way you wear a gun you expect to use.
But it was him—that loose-shouldered walk, the Valentine in him that no amount of years takes off a man.
He came down the steps two at a time and we met at the bottom and grabbed each other hard, a real embrace, the kind brothers who've been scattered to the corners of the earth give each other when they wash up in the same place alive.
"God, it's good to see you," he said into my shoulder.
"You too, little brother."
He pulled back and held me at arm's length and looked me over, and the grin that had always lived on his face flickered up and didn't quite catch.
"Wish to hell it was under better circumstances," he said.
I didn't argue.
His eyes dropped to my arm, the right one, the sleeve dark and stiff where the dash had opened me up. "That needs looking at."
"It's nothing."
"Humor me. We've got people." He was already turning me toward the steps with a hand on my good shoulder. "Come on."
But I'd stopped, looking up at the thing I was about to walk into—the columns, the lit windows, the gunmen in the dark, the sheer impossible scale of it.
"Tommy. What is this place?"
He followed my gaze up the face of it. Something moved across him, a weighing, a man deciding how much of a thing he could say standing in a driveway.
"Long story," he said finally. "For right now, it's just a safe place to get you patched up. The rest keeps till you're not bleeding."
I let him steer me in. There wasn't much else to do.
The inside of that house hit me harder than the outside.
A great hall that opened up two full stories, a staircase that split and curved up both sides of it like something out of an old picture, a chandelier hanging down through the middle throwing light across a floor laid in stone.
Oil paintings the size of barn doors. The air smelled of beeswax and gun oil, an honest pairing if there ever was one.
Money and violence, side by side, neither one apologizing for the other.
Everywhere, people moving with purpose. This wasn't a home. Homes don't hum like that.
Tommy walked me back through it and down a stairwell to a lower level, and the old grandeur fell away to something clean and modern and bright—and then we were in a clinic.
A real one. Better than some field hospitals I'd bled in.
Exam tables, monitors, a glass-fronted cabinet of supplies, the cold, clean smell of a place built to put men back together.
Two of them came at me in black scrubs, a man and a woman, both of them carrying that unhurried competence you only get from doing it under fire.
"On the table," the woman said. Not unkind. Just done asking nicely a long time ago.
"I'll be back," Tommy said. "Soon as they clear you. We've got a lot to get into." And he was gone.
They worked me over like professionals, which is to say like people who'd been lied to by hard men a thousand times and had quit taking our word for anything.
The cut on my arm wasn't deep—they cleaned it, taped it, told me it wouldn't need stitching.
Then they ran me head to toe. Lights in my eyes, fingers down my neck, hands pressing my ribs, the whole catechism.
What hurts? Rate it. Did you black out? Track my finger.
I told them the truth. That's a thing operators learn slow and the smart ones learn for good—you don't lie to the doc, because the doc is the one keeping you in the fight.
Arm's sore, I said. Got a headache, not a bad one.
Ears rang till about ten minutes ago and now they've quit. Outside of that, I'm green.
They didn't take it on faith. They confirmed every word of it with their own hands and eyes first. Only then did the man give me a short nod, the closest thing to a thumbs-up that kind gives, and another armed fella appeared in the doorway to walk me back up.
And I'll say it again because it kept being true: the place was vast. We went back up through halls and past rooms and I lost the count of doors. You could've quartered a battalion in that house and had wings left over.
My escort left me in the kitchen. Which was where I found my brother with his fist in a plate of bacon.
He had a strip of it halfway to his mouth and froze when he saw me, then grinned around it, caught dead to rights. "Cook went down to the cellar for something," he said, chewing. "Woman’s got no idea what I do to a kitchen left unguarded."
I felt something in my chest come loose for the first time since the studio.
"You remember the Twix?" I said.
He started laughing before I'd finished saying it.
Because we both went straight there at once—September, the bag of Twix our mother bought on sale for Halloween two months early and hid up in the high cabinet, and how all seven of us found it, anyway, and how we hauled it out to the barn and sat in the hay and ate the entire thing, every last one, fingers gone gold and brown with chocolate and caramel.
The look on her face when she found the wrappers.
A solid week of extra chores apiece, and worse than that, the shame of having to pool our money and buy a replacement bag before the trick-or-treaters came, so the whole town wouldn't know the Dane boys had eaten Halloween.
"Wyatt cried," Tommy said, wiping his eye, "because he thought you were gonna let him take the fall."
"I would've, too. He was the slowest. Easiest to catch."
We laughed like that for a minute, two grown killers in a stranger's grand kitchen, and for that minute we were just boys in a barn again with chocolate on our hands and nothing in the world after us.
Then it ran down, the way those things do, and the weight came back into the room.
"All right," I said. "Who were they?"
I pulled out my phone and brought up the photos—the two faces, slack and gone in the streetlight—and handed it across. Tommy thumbed through them, and his jaw set, and he grunted low.
"Yeah," he said. "About like we figured."
"Talk to me. These the same trouble you called me about?"
He set the phone down on the counter and was quiet a moment, working it, fitting pieces together behind his eyes.
"There's a man," he said. "Name of Craine.
Dominic Craine." He said it like the name tasted bad.
"Couple of run-ins, each one worse than the last. And what he's doing—what he's set up to do—is make it look like we're in a shooting war with a militia outfit out of West Virginia.
Backwoods boys, the kind that mail-order their politics.
Make it look like Dominion Hall and a bunch of hill country zealots are settling some turf thing with bodies in the street. "
"Are you?"
"Course not." A flash of the old grin, gone fast. "Weren't anyway. But this here's the third time they've come at us, and they're getting bolder about it, and now they've gone and pulled you into it your first night in town." He shook his head. "I'm sorry for that, Brock. Truly."
I shrugged. A man gets ambushed in an American city, you handle it and move on. "What's the play? We hit the militia?"
"Maybe. Down the line." He leaned back against the counter. "But the militia's the hand. Just a pawn, we think. Craine's the head. He's the one we need, and that's the whole problem, because Craine as he sits right now is untouchable. Man's a Deputy Director at the FBI."
That landed cold. The incorruptibles. My father's curled mouth.
"You go at a sitting federal deputy director head-on," Tommy said, "you're not solving a problem, you're committing suicide and handing him the rope. So, we've pulled in. Battened down. Here, we can see them coming. Here, it's safe."
"And here is what, exactly?" I looked around the gleaming kitchen, the staff, the wealth of it. "You keep saying it like it's a word I'm supposed to know. What is this, Tommy?"
He took a breath. Took his time with it.
"Dominion Hall," he said, "is the headquarters of an international defense outfit. A private one. Big. Bigger than you'd believe sitting here." He met my eyes. "And we're the good guys, Brock. I know how that sounds. But we are."
I frowned at him. "That's what every private army on earth says. Right up until the day they're not."
"It's not that." His frown came back to match mine. "I'm telling you, it's not what you're picturing."
And then, he stopped. Just—stopped, with his mouth half open on the next thing, and I watched him hold it back, swallow it down, a man standing at the edge of a thing too big to just say in a kitchen. There was more. A whole world more, sitting right behind his teeth, and he wasn't letting it out.
What is it? I thought. What aren't you telling me?
I never got to ask.
Because another of the armed men came through the kitchen door, quick, and crossed straight to Tommy and said something low and urgent.
"Where?" Tommy asked, snapping around.
The man's eyes cut to me. Just a flick. Then back to my brother.
"Craine's been spotted," he said. "At his girl's place. The studio off Wentworth."