CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
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VICTORIA
At six forty on Thursday I was crossing the yard toward Marcus’s car when Adrian caught up with me.
“Victoria. Behind me.”
“We’re going to Fell Street.”
“I know.” He was looking over my shoulder. “Behind me. Now.”
Bex came off the roof stair so fast her mug went over the rail.
“Northeast post! Ten — that’s ten!”
Rennick came over last. Nine hollow men dropped onto our gravel ahead of him, at the same bare patch of iron Luca had been fighting all week. Rennick had a different nail gun this time. No hose. A battery pack rode under the grip.
He had come to keep us here while somebody finished at Corinne’s house.
“Pike, the drum,” Adrian said. “Bex, call Karim. Tell him to get the boy. Don’t wait for us.”
Then Adrian’s shoulder was between my face and the gun.
Luca came out with a sack of salt-iron. He tore the corner and walked backward, laying a white arc from the roll-up to the drum.
We had rolled the forge’s hearth frame into the yard an hour earlier to work on the dead posts.
It stood breathing beside the salt, its heart plate orange under the coals.
Two of the hollow men stepped into the line and lost their edges. Coats, shoes, a belt. No bodies left inside them.
“Does that work on him?” I asked.
“On the hollow ones,” Luca said. “Not on him. He’s just a guy.”
The gun coughed. Beck went down near the drum with a nail in his thigh.
“Inside,” Adrian told Pike. “Get him behind the wall.”
Marcus came through the narrow space between me and the fence. The first hollow turned with him. The second reached across its shoulder, and his shirt opened in a long line over his left ribs.
Eight inches. Blood to his belt.
“Marcus.”
“It’s fine. It’s — okay. It’s not fine.”
He pressed his forearm against it and drove the thing into Luca’s salt with the other hand. Pike put another into the white. A third folded under the iron bar a man brought from the shop.
Four left. Rennick still moving.
I pulled a folded towel off the parts cart and pushed it into Marcus’s hand.
“Hold that. Not your shirt.”
He looked down at it, then at me.
“Bossy little courier.”
“Try listening.”
He did. The smallest, best thing in that awful yard.
Adrian got to Rennick and tore the gun off the strap. He threw it under the bench and went for the man. Rennick ducked behind one of the hollows and ran into the shop.
The four remaining things turned toward the open roll-up. Toward the box under our floor. Toward the room where I slept.
Luca looked at the forge.
“No,” I said.
He had already put the salt down.
“Frame first,” he said, taking the sledge from the wall. “Legs are pinned. They’ll go.”
They went. The first swing dropped the hearth frame into the gravel. The second tore the housing back. He worked around the heart plate, not through it, freeing the thick square with his own name cut into its edge.
“Luca.”
“I’m talking so I don’t stop, trouble. Let me talk.”
“There are gloves.”
“Not for this.”
I remembered him at the anvil on Sunday. Break the forge and give the heart away. My bare hands carry it. The name takes the hands with it.
“No,” I said again, and there was nothing useful left in the word.
He got the plate clear. Both palms underneath. The sound of skin meeting that iron was small. Much smaller than it should have been.
Marcus was at my side with the towel clamped to his ribs.
“He’s giving away his claim on it,” he said. “Crane can’t borrow a name that isn’t holding anything for its maker.”
“He’s burning his hands.”
“I know.”
Luca carried it forty feet. Not fast. Not heroic in the way a picture makes things heroic. One boot in the gravel, another, the iron level while his beard shook against his chest.
I took a step toward him.
“Don’t come closer, trouble. I’m not done being like this yet.”
He braced the plate against the northeast post and drove his heel into the wedge at its foot.
The yard shut.
The four hollow men came apart where they stood. Clothes dropped onto our gravel. The smell of the closed room went with them.
Luca’s hands hung open at his sides.
Nobody cheered. Pike got Beck through the door. Bex came running with the kit. Adrian caught Luca by the elbow, and Luca shook his head toward the shop.
Rennick was inside it. Alive. Looking for another tool.
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Rennick swung a wrench at Luca’s shoulder. Luca took it and kept coming. He did not close either burned hand.
He hit Rennick with the weight of his forearm and drove him against the bench. The wrench dropped. Rennick tried to reach it. Luca put his shoulder into him and took them both to the concrete.
I stood under the roll-up with Marcus beside me. He had one hand on the track and the other holding the towel in place. His breath came short around the wound.
“You don’t have to be here,” he said.
“I’m staying.”
Luca did not talk. No account of the work, no joke to make a room easier. He kept Rennick away from the fallen wrench with his knee and used his elbow until the man stopped fighting. Then he stopped.
For a moment I could hear the harbor gulls again.
I wanted Rennick to get up and give Luca a reason to do it once more. I am not proud of that. I am not going to lie about it either.
Adrian went to the floor, checked him, and looked at Marcus.
Rennick was dead.
Marcus took the phone from his jacket. Bex brought the moving blanket and covered him. Nobody made that smaller by calling him a problem that had been handled. There was a man under the blanket and we had all been there when it happened.
Luca got to his feet. He looked at me, then at the gate.
“That was for the gate.”
It was what he could say while he held his hands away from his body.
I went to him. Not to touch the burns. I put my forehead against his chest, above the soot, and stood there long enough for him to lean his chin on my hair.
“You’re not finished making things,” I said.
He said nothing. His breathing changed.
Bex’s phone rang before either of us moved.
“Karim’s in,” she said. “The police car left when the shooting started here. Teddy’s upstairs. He’s alive.”
“And Corinne?”
Bex looked at the screen as though the answer might change if she read it twice.
“Get in the car, Tori.”
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Mara Vance met us at the outer gate. She had come down from the loft as soon as Bex called. She had a medical bag in one hand and no patience for men who called wounds scratches.
She secured a pressure dressing over Marcus’s ribs and covered Luca’s hands. Beck went with one of the club’s drivers for treatment. Rennick’s gun stayed bagged in the office. The phone went with Marcus.
“Both of you come straight back,” Mara said. “That is not a figure of speech.”
Nobody argued. Even Adrian only nodded.
Fell Street took twenty minutes. Karim met us on the step with a phone held out. A neighbor’s camera showed an unmarked van arriving while Prine’s cruiser blocked the far end of the street. Corinne and Teddy had gone into the house. Rennick had come out alone.
“Just after five,” Karim said. “We couldn’t see past the patrol car.”
I went through the door before Marcus could decide how to tell me not to.
Corinne was in the back bedroom. Her reading glasses were still on their chain. The curtain was half caught under the window sash, and there was one gold candy wrapper on the dresser.
I am not going to make a picture of her out of the rest.
I had heard her say honey six years running. The room had no voice in it now.
Marcus stopped in the hall behind me.
“Vic. Don’t go back in there.”
“I already went in.”
“Then don’t do it twice.”
I held out my hand. He showed me what he had found on Rennick’s phone.
ASHBY, CORINNE M. Cause of death, cardiac arrhythmia. Date of death, 09/17/2025. A completed certificate, already filed, with a doctor’s name neither of us knew.
Wednesday. Yesterday.
“She was alive yesterday morning,” I said. “I talked to her.”
“I know.”
“They wrote this before they killed her.”
“Yes.”
I stared at the date until it stopped being a date and became my own receipt. Fifteen-oh-five. A thing acknowledged before it happened. Paper making a room for the thing a man intended to do.
“He did it to her too.”
Marcus did not ask what I meant.
“No more lost originals,” he said. “No more trusting his files. We keep every piece.”
Upstairs, a board creaked.
“Teddy,” I said.
“Bex is with him.”
Luca went up with his wrapped hands held out. I heard his voice through the ceiling, careful and ordinary.
“Arms around my neck, buddy. Don’t look down the hall.”
“Is my mom downstairs?”
A silence. Then Luca, not lying to him.
“Victoria’s going to talk to you. First we get you somewhere warm.”
“My inhaler’s on the dresser.”
“I’ve got it, sweetheart,” Bex said. “And your dinosaur.”
The boy came down around Luca’s neck, all knees and elbows. Luca carried him on his forearms. Bex walked beside them with one hand ready under the boy’s back, and for once he let somebody help with the weight.
Teddy looked over Luca’s shoulder for me.
I followed him out.
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We told him in Mara’s car, away from the house.
No stairs between us. No closed door with people talking on the other side. His dinosaur sat on his lap with one leg in his fist.
“Your mom died, Teddy,” I said. “Someone hurt her. She can’t come back.”
He looked at the house. Then at me.
“No.”
“I’m so sorry.”
He shook his head once, furious, exactly the way Corinne did when a screen gave her a wrong number.
“She said after school.”
“I know.”
“She said.”
Luca sat beside him with his useless hands on his knees. Teddy crawled against his side, the dinosaur trapped between them, and Luca bent over him without trying to make him say anything else.
I called Daniel Ashby from the number Corinne kept on every school form. Teddy’s father worked inland during the week. He answered on the second ring. He was still saying Corinne’s name when I handed the phone to Mara.
Then I got out of the car and put both palms on the roof because I could not keep standing without a piece of steel to hold.
Adrian came to the other side. He did not tell me to get back in.
“She was afraid,” I said. “She did the wrong thing because she was afraid for him. I didn’t forgive her.”
“You didn’t have to forgive her to want her alive.”
That broke something the rest of the morning had not reached.
I put my face down on my arm. He came around the car, and when I reached for him he was there.
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Back at the Forge, Mara stitched Marcus’s ribs while Bex kept an eye on the loft. Teddy had fallen asleep with his shoes on. Daniel was on the road. A friend of Mara’s was getting the real account of Corinne’s death to someone who did not take money from Crane.
Luca sat through the treatment of his hands without looking at them. When Mara told him the deep damage would not heal like an ordinary shifter’s burn, he looked toward the gate instead.
“It’s holding?” he asked.
“Yes,” Adrian said.
Luca nodded once. Not because that made it all right. Because it was the one question he could bear to ask.
Marcus held up Rennick’s phone. “An appointment. Monday. The weighbridge.”
“The equinox,” I said.
He turned the screen toward me. No one put it away because I had cried.
I looked at the three of them. Marcus held together by stitches, Luca’s trade gone into the gate, Adrian watching my face and trying not to decide what I could stand.
Then I looked at the floor over the box.
“I want to see the book.”