Chapter 6 — The Forger’s Hands #2
I wiped the blade clean on a shop rag from the table and folded the rag twice and tucked it under the steel worktable leg where it would not show unless someone went looking on their knees.
I stripped the lipstick from the tote zip pocket, twisted it up, painted my mouth fresh and slow while looking down at him.
Then I bent, gathered my hair to one side so it would not trail in the blood, and pressed my lips to his left cheek.
Firm. Deliberate. Huntress-red on cooling skin.
I sat back on my heels and looked at the mark. Perfect bow, perfect edges. My signature. My countdown. Whoever they sent to scrub this room would have to look straight at my mouth and know a woman did this and walked out smiling.
I blotted my lips once on a tissue, folded it small, and slid it under the desk blotter on the little office desk in the corner, out of sight.
I tied nothing new, moved nothing else. The blue ribbon stayed knotted at my wrist, darkened at one edge with a spray I chose not to examine too closely.
The tote stayed where it was. The bolt stayed shut.
The faucet kept dripping into the stainless basin, tick, tick, tick, like a clock with nothing to say.
That was when the rear alley door moved.
A lock turned with a soft deliberate sound, the kind made by a man who owns copies of things, and the narrow door swung inward on wet hinges.
Rain breathed in. A tall shape filled the frame, black wool coat beaded with water, charcoal henley dark at the throat, black leather gloves already on.
The suppressed Glock in his right hand came up and then lowered in the same second as his eyes took in the body, the blood, me kneeling beside it with my blade sheathed and my mouth perfect.
Dante Kross. The rumor with the lighter. Marcus’s Cleaner.
Six oh two in the evening. I knew the time because the wall clock above the sink said so and because his arrival landed like a struck hour.
He shut the alley door behind him without looking at it and stood very still.
Ice-gray eyes moved from Lang’s face to the kiss mark to my bloody right cuff to the tote under the table.
He catalogued the bolt, the rag I thought I had hidden, the tissue corner I thought I had hidden.
Nothing in his face changed. Only his breathing altered, one count longer on the exhale.
“Wren Halloway,” he said.
My name in his mouth sounded like a file closing. I rose to my feet in one motion, coat falling straight, and let him see my hands. Show teeth or show throat, baby. Pick one. I showed teeth.
“You are early, Cleaner,” I said. “Or late. Depends whose clock you keep.”
“Stay where you are,” he said, low and even.
He holstered the Glock under his coat with a practiced motion and drew out his phone instead.
He circled the body at a distance, careful of the blood pool spreading toward the drain, and took photographs in a grid.
Overhead, close of the wound channel through the shirt, close of the hands, wide of the whole scene.
The shutter clicks sounded obscenely loud under the press hum.
“I am going to announce my movements,” he said without looking up.
“I am putting the phone away. I am opening my left coat pocket. No surprises tonight.”
He put the phone away. From the pocket he drew a folded white sheet, a work order, creased twice. I could see typed lines and a box at the bottom with a signature I could not read upside down. His thumb brushed the fold once, a small tell, there and gone.
Then he looked at me. Really looked. At the ribbon, at the locket, at the blood on my cuff drying dark over latex.
“Who sent you the paper?” he asked.
“Nobody sends me,” I said. “I find my own reading material.”
Something that was almost amusement crossed his face and died.
He crossed to the stainless sink, laid the folded order on the dry side of the basin away from the drip, and took out the silver lighter.
Clack. The flame stood up yellow in the fluorescent glare.
He touched it to the corner of the paper and held it until the fire took, then dropped the sheet into the basin and watched it burn.
I stared. Cleaners do not burn their own paperwork. Even I knew that, and I was supposed to be the amateur in this room.
The paper blackened and curled, typed lines warping as the flame ate them.
He let it burn down to a fragile skeleton, then nudged it with one gloved fingertip until it collapsed into flakes.
Gray ash settled across the steel, and the left faucet kept dripping beside it, each drop pocking the ash darker.
The smell of scorched paper joined solvent and blood, sharp and clean and final.
“What did you just do?” My voice came out thinner than I wanted.
He closed the lighter. Clink. Back into his right coat pocket.
“I removed a variable that was going to get an innocent apprentice questioned for six hours,” he said, but the clinical diction cracked down the middle.
“The order had — it listed this address, a window, a method. If it stays in the file, the room gets processed. The boy gets pulled in. You get — ” He stopped.
Recalibrated. His jaw worked once. “Fewer variables is better. Fewer names in the file is better. That is all this is.”
It was not all it was, and we both knew it. His hands were perfectly still and his eyes were not. The man who processed feeling as telemetry had just set his own telemetry on fire and stood watching it turn to ash.
His phone rang. The screen glowed through his coat. He looked at it, looked at me, and answered on speaker without taking his eyes off my face.
“Report,” said a flat heavy voice I knew from charity dinners I wished I could forget. Marcus.
Dante looked straight at Lang’s body three feet away, at the kiss mark bright on the dead cheek, at my bloody glove, at the ash in the sink. “No trace at the shop,” he said. “Address is clean. Paperwork was a dead end. I am closing the file.”
A pause. Rain hammered the alley door. The faucet dripped. “And the forger?”
“Gone to ground,” Dante said. “I will pick up the trail from the street.”
“See that you do.” The line went dead.
Silence filled the back room like water filling a boot. Six twelve. The wall clock ticked over and I hated it for moving.
He had lied to his master with a corpse at his feet.
For me. For the girl kneeling in blood with red on her mouth.
I waited for triumph and felt something else climb the back of my throat instead, hot and unwelcome.
My hands started to shake, fine tremors at the fingertips, the aftershock I never let anyone see.
I curled them into fists and pressed them to my thighs and hoped the leather hid it.
Oh, Lark, I thought, and the name went through me like a second blade, what would you say if you saw me now, being looked after by a monster’s broom?
Eleven years old forever and I was twenty-six with blood under my nails and a strange man burning evidence so some nineteen-year-old apprentice would get to go home.
The crack opened and showed the girl underneath the Huntress for one heartbeat, grieving and furious and so tired of counting names, and then I sealed it.
I stripped off the gloves, right then left, wadded the bloodied pair small, and tucked them into my right coat pocket. I picked up the tote, checked the zip, slung it over my shoulder. My voice, when I found it, was almost my own.
“The boy out front,” I said. “He never saw my face straight on. Keep it that way.”
“The boy out front is going on a long delivery drive in four minutes,” Dante said quietly.
“Felix is outside. He will make sure of it. You will leave through the alley while the press covers you. I am going to step back now so you have the door.” He did, two paces, hands visible, giving me the room without ever turning his back on the body.
Announced, careful, like a man defusing something he respects.
I walked to the alley door on legs that obeyed because I ordered them to.
Rain gusted in, cold on my hot face. At the threshold I looked back once.
Lang dead and marked on the concrete. The order nothing but ash in the basin with the drip boring a dark crater through it.
The lie logged with Marcus like a stone dropped down a well.
Dante stood beside the sink watching me go, ash on his glove, fire gone from his hand, and the look on his face was the most dangerous thing I had seen all night.
I stepped out into the rain and pulled the alley dark around me like a coat.