CHAPTER 5
Julian
◆
There is a particular arithmetic to moving a person the world has decided to erase, and I had run the numbers on Sloane Mercer twice before I ever laid eyes on her.
The safehouse had burned to the studs hours ago, her phone had died with it, and somewhere a coven was tallying the partner it had bought and the outage it had arranged and the patience it had been willing to spend.
The ledger of the night was already badly out of balance, and I do not, as a rule, agree to carry debt I cannot price.
I wound my father's watch while I waited for them in the lay-by, the crown turning under my thumb in its small ratcheting increments, the only orderly sound for miles.
The cruiser ticked under me as the engine cooled.
Above the ridge the front had begun to assemble itself, a low slate ceiling sliding in off the lake, and I could already taste the change in it, that particular charge that comes before rain, which is to say I could taste the timetable narrowing.
Grant's touring rig came over the rise first, heavy and blacked out, and behind it Omar's stripped tracker, and behind that — wedged on the back of Grant's bike with her spine perfectly vertical, refusing to lean into the man saving her life — the cargo.
She is not cargo, I corrected myself, and filed the correction as an irregularity to be examined later.
They pulled in. She came off the bike before Grant had it fully settled, which told me a great deal: she would rather risk the fall than wait to be helped down from it.
I have moved senators, witnesses, and one ungrateful racehorse, and not one of them ever refused the hand at the bottom of the step.
This one stood in the gathering dark in a ruined suit, soaked to the knee, auburn hair coming loose around a steel pen jammed through it, and looked at me the way I imagine she looks at a clause she intends to kill.
"You're the third one," she said. "The expensive one."
"Julian Cross. " I straightened off the cruiser and let her take the inventory she was so plainly conducting — the coat over the cut, the watch, the absence of mud on me. "And you're the attorney who's worth more dead than alive. I've read the file. You undersell yourself in person."
"That a compliment?"
"An appraisal. I don't give the other thing for free."
Something moved at the corner of her mouth that fell a long way short of a smile and a longer way still from surrender.
Grant had gone to the treeline, gray eyes flat, counting the approaches under his breath.
Omar had the paper map out already, head tipped, reading the wind.
We were a machine that had run a hundred routes, and she had walked into the middle of us and decided, visibly, to audit the lot.
"All right, Mr. Cross. " She folded her arms. "Sell me the route. The other two talk in threats and weather. I want logistics."
So I gave them to her, because logistics are the one currency I never debase.
Ninety minutes to the airfield if the front held off; rather less than that if it didn't and we were obliged to outrun it.
The flooded culvert past the overlook, which the storm would make worse.
The patrol that ran the county road on a schedule I had paid, some years ago, to learn.
I laid it out the way I lay out everything, balanced and periodic, the cost of each leg named.
She listened the way very few people listen — without waiting for her turn. When I finished she said, "You bribe the marshals."
"I retain them. Bribery is a transaction. Retention is a relationship. " I let the irony sit under glass where it lives. "The difference is whether they'll testify against you afterward."
"God. " It came out almost admiring. "You're worse than I am."
"Darling, I have been doing this since before you passed the bar. I am considerably worse than you, and I have lived long enough to be at peace with it."
---
We rode out as the first rain came, fat and slow, then quick.
I took the lead because the route was mine; she rode behind me by Grant's arrangement, which I gathered had been negotiated and lost on her end with great prejudice.
Her hands rested at my sides with the slack neutrality of someone touching a railing she resented needing.
Even at speed, in the wet, she would not hold on to me one degree more than physics demanded.
I understood it before I had any right to. It is the posture of a person who has decided that needing a thing is the first step toward being destroyed by it.
The rain came harder. The world reduced itself to the cone of the headlight and the hiss of the tires and the smell of it — cold water on warm asphalt, kerosene somewhere far off on the wind, and under all of it, faint and infuriating, her.
Expensive shampoo gone to rain, and beneath that the iron thread of fear she kept on a tight leash, and beneath that something I had no business cataloguing at forty miles an hour in a storm.
I have a rule about cataloguing people I move.
The rule exists because the one time I broke it, I learned precisely what I was worth in someone else's accounting, and the scars on my wrists are the receipt.
I keep the cargo at the length of a contract.
It is safer for everyone, and it has kept me, against all odds, alive.
I did not, on that road, manage to keep the rule.
---
The overlook was a gravel turnout above the valley where the corridor opened up, and I stopped us there because the culvert below had already gone over its banks and I needed to read the water before I committed three bikes and a marked woman to crossing it.
The rain was sheeting now, the slate ceiling come all the way down, and the valley below us was nothing but black with the storm walking across it.
She came off the bike too fast again, stiff and cold, and the gravel was slick with runoff, and her foot went out from under her.
I caught her.
I want to be precise, because precision is the only honest thing I own.
I did not decide to catch her. The usual machinery in me that opens a ledger entry and weighs who will owe whom never so much as stirred.
My hand was simply at the small of her back and her hand was fisted in the lapel of my coat and we were closer than the file had ever suggested we would be, close enough that the rain ran off my jaw and onto hers, close enough that her warmth and my warmth — and I run hot, we all do, a few degrees past what a human expects — made a small impossible furnace in all that cold.
She did not pull away.
The catch hadn't undone the rule; her not-pulling-away did. She looked up at me with rain on her lashes and those gray-green eyes doing the arithmetic she always did, and for once I watched her arrive at a sum she clearly did not approve of and refuse, for one breath, to discard it.
"You can let go," she said. Her voice had lost its courtroom edge.
"I'm aware."
"Then do it."
"In a moment. " I heard my own voice drop, the way it does when I am furious, though furious was the wrong ledger entirely; this was something I had not felt in a very long time, and I had no place to file it. "You're shaking, darling. Allow me the courtesy of pretending it's the cold."
Her breath came short between us. The rain smelled of bergamot off my collar and rust off the gravel and her, all of her, fear giving way to something with a great deal more heat in it.
I felt my own control go thin as wet paper.
I am the man who does not lose cargo, who keeps his composure the way other men keep a pulse, and who has, under every provocation in thirty years, taken nothing that was not freely and fully offered with the price agreed in advance.
I bent my head anyway.
She tipped hers up to meet me. Her fingers tightened in my lapel — pulling, not pushing.
Her mouth was a breath from mine, close enough that I could feel the warmth of her exhale, close enough that the want of it sat in my chest like a low growl I did not let her hear.
An inch of dark air remained between us, then half of that, the whole careful architecture of thirty-nine years balanced on the head of that pin, and I, who price everything, would in that instant have paid any sum named —
Headlights swept the turnout.
Two of them, hard and white, raking across the gravel as a vehicle crested the road behind us, and Grant's voice cut the rain like a round through canvas. "Down. Now. " His pistol was already out, his pupils already blown wide and black, the wolf at the surface.
I had her behind the cruiser and my body between her and the road before the lights finished their pass.
I did it without thinking, which is its own diagnosis.
The vehicle slowed — a county patrol, the marshal's marker on the door, the very schedule I had paid to know running three minutes early in the storm.
It idled. A spotlight ghosted over the turnout, found three motorcycles and a tarp-covered shape that was, by my arrangement, exactly what a marshal expected to see on this road and would be paid to keep on not seeing.
The light moved on. The patrol rolled away down the grade, taillights smearing red in the wet, and the night closed back over us.
I became aware that my hand was still flat against her sternum, holding her down, and that under it her heart was going like something trying to break out of a contract.
"Patrol," I said. My voice had gone level again, which cost me more than I will admit. "Retained, as promised. Early, which I'll have words about. You can breathe."
She let out a long breath against my wrist. Then she removed my hand from her chest with two fingers, the way you'd return a document unsigned, and stood, and put the courtroom back on like a coat.
"That," she said, "did not happen."