Chapter 29 — Huntress
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I stepped one pace forward through the pine-office doorway and the latch clicked shut behind me, and Marcus Thorne turned his boar signet once and smiled at the door. “Come in, little huntress. Let's finish the family business.”
One second. That was all that stood between the dock boards outside and this room, and I carried it in my body like a held breath.
The sleet hissed on the boathouse roof and struck the one battery lantern on the desk and bled under the door as a thin orange line where Gideon's flame stood upright out on the dock.
The wire mic taped to my sternum under the thermal pressed with every inhale, the ledger copy crackling faintly against my skin, and somewhere twenty yards west Dante's boots grated once on wet wood and then went still.
I did not replay the gate or the blackout.
The ram had done its work. The lights had died at eleven-oh-four the way Iris promised they would.
What was left was this room and the man in it.
The office smelled of charred pine and old gasoline and hot lantern glass.
A desk scarred with ring stains. A wall of hooks hung with coiled dock line and a rusted gaff.
A battery lantern throwing hard shadows up the plank walls.
Marcus stood behind the desk in a charcoal overcoat with the collar up, his white pocket square folded to a blade in his breast pocket, his cane planted beside his right shoe with the weighted head catching the light.
He was sixty-one and soft through the middle and exact in every movement, and his eyes did the slow travel down my thermal and cargos and boots and back up to my throat where my mother's locket sat.
He lingered on Lark's cornflower-blue ribbon tied around my right wrist and smiled wider, the way men smile when they think a ribbon means soft.
“You came dressed for work,” he said. “Good. I hate when they dress for weather and call it courage.”
“I dressed for the lake in November,” I said. “You dressed for a portrait.”
His laugh was short. Behind the desk, half in the lantern shadow by the fuel locker, the office guard shifted his weight, a thick young man with a deckhand's hands and a folding knife clipped to his belt.
Dante could not see him from the dock. I could, and I logged him the way I had logged everything since I was twelve and learned to count exits before I counted people.
Door behind me. Lantern on the desk. Gaff on the wall.
Guard by the locker. Marcus and his cane.
Five feet of pine boards between us smelling of lake rot.
Marcus lifted his left hand and turned it over, palm up, an invitation with a hook in it. “The ledger copy first. Tape and all. Then we talk about your sister and what door she dies behind.”
My knee throbbed where the crescent scar pulled in the cold. My heart beat once hard against the taped plastic on my chest. No, the hunter said, flat and clean. His order. My knife.
“I brought something else first,” I said, and slid my left hand into my left cargo pocket and closed my fingers around the Huntress-red lipstick.
He watched me with genuine curiosity as I twisted the tube up, painted my mouth in two practiced strokes without a mirror, and capped it and dropped it back in my pocket.
The wax smell cut through the char for one second, cherry and chemical, summers I would never get back.
Then I walked the three steps to his side of the desk, close enough to smell the bay rum under the gasoline on his coat, close enough to see the broken vessels at the corners of his nose, and I took his face in my left hand and pressed my mouth hard to his cheek and left the mark there, red and exact.
“What,” he said, very quietly.
“Signature,” I said. “Proof. Countdown.”
His hand closed on my left wrist before the last word finished, fingers grinding into the narrowest part where the bruise from October had gone yellow and healed.
The pain went straight up my forearm into my teeth.
That was the monster marking himself, the second wrist-grab by a man who did not love me, and I let him hold it one full second so the wire heard the cloth of his sleeve and the grunt in his throat and there would never be a version of this night where he said he never touched me.
Then I moved.
The stiletto left my right boot sheath with its small steel snick, mother-of-pearl warm from my skin, and I drove it up under his ribs on his lunge as he swung the cane, short and exact, the way Felix taught Ophelia and me in the salvage yard with a phone book and no poetry.
The cane's weighted head caught me across the left cheekbone on the way in and split the skin in a hot line and knocked my head sideways into the lantern light.
I did not make a sound. I set my feet on the pine boards, felt the blood run warm over the pearl grip, pulled back three inches, and put it in again in the same place because the first one was intention and the second one was punctuation. Cold. Exact. Short.
The doorway filled behind me.
Dante stood in the held door with his suppressed Glock down at his side and his shoulder bleeding through the black henley where the old graze had reopened, rain standing in beads on his hair, and he did not enter unasked.
He held the door. That was the whole of it and the whole of him, the man who carried my brother and sister out of a burning house at nineteen and kept a steel watch fourteen years and confessed without excuses holding my hands, standing in a rectangle of sleet-dark with his eyes on mine while I finished it. Witnessed. Mine.
Marcus made a wet sound and backhanded me on the way down, his signet raking across my nose with a crack I felt in my molars, and the blood came at once, hot and fast over my lip.
He went to his knees on the pine boards with the red kiss still printed on his cheek and both hands pressed to his side and disbelief all over his face, the office guard lunging one step from the fuel locker before Dante's muzzle found him through the doorway without Dante moving his feet.
“Drop it. Hands,” Dante said, low and level, and the folding knife hit the boards and skittered under the desk.
I stood over Marcus with the bloody stiletto in my hand and blood running off my chin onto my black thermal in speckles, breathing through my mouth in counts I had practiced for months, four in and four out, and I reached down with my free hand and took the white pocket square from his breast pocket, unfolded the blade of it once, and pressed it to my own nose and pinched shut.
The cotton went red at once. The wiper wiped.
Somewhere in the dark outside, water slapped the pilings and a far siren washed the lake road and faded.
“Julian ordered,” Marcus whispered, blood at the corner of his mouth. “In oxblood. You little—”
“I know,” I said through the square. “I counted the numbers. I read the hand. This is the part where you stop talking.”
He stopped. The lantern ticked as the glass heated.
The guard lay prone with his hands laced behind his head and Dante's eyes flicking between him and me, and I bent at the knees and worked Marcus's boar signet off his right finger with my bloody fingers and dropped it in my right cargo pocket for Quinn.
Evidence. Custody. The kiss mark stayed on his cheek, red against the gray going into his skin, and I was glad of it with a gladness that had no lilt in it at all, only arithmetic closing.
Dante's voice came from the doorway, soft, with the two seconds built in the way he always built them now. “Coming to you. Two seconds. Tell me where.”
“Here,” I said. “Hands where I can see them. Then we run.”
He crossed the three steps and stopped with his hands open at his sides, rain and lake water dark on his coat, his eyes doing the quick travel over my cheekbone and my nose and the square pressed red. “Nose broken,” he said. “Cheekbone split. Walkable.”
“Walkable,” I said. “Runable. Go.”
We went out through the held door into the sleet with the bloody stiletto in my right hand and Lark's ribbon darkening with rain on my right wrist, and the cold hit the blood on my face like a slap.
Twenty yards of dock boards ran west over black water to the third piling, slick and shining under nothing but rain, and at the end of them Gideon Slade stood over my sister with the cracked Zippo burning upright in his right hand and a blue line already blooming low along the planks toward Ophelia's bound knees.
Ophelia sat against the third piling with dock line around her ankles and knees and chest, her mouth gagged with a strip of gray cloth, her dark hair plastered to her skull, her whole body shaking so hard the piling shuddered with it.
The accelerant stink rolled off the boards thick enough to taste, sweet and wrong over the lake rot, and Gideon looked up as we ran with his face lit from below by that small upright flame, grinning the way men grin when they think fire makes them a god.
“Huntress,” he called through the rain. “Come watch your blood learn to swim.”
“Ophelia,” I screamed, or tried to, through the blood and the square.
The rain struck the blood-warm steel of the stiletto and hissed nothing, steel too cold to steam, and my boots hit the boards and slipped and caught.
Beside me Dante stopped six yards out, planted, raised the suppressed Glock in his bare right hand in the rain, and did the thing he had priced once and promised once, the off-book kill that kept my hands on Marcus alone.