CHAPTER 24
Cassian
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“They took my belt and my laces, and they put the belt in a bag with a number written on it.”
“They gave me a blanket, a bench, and a lad who kept apologising for the coffee.”
Nobody answered him. A jug of water stood at the center of the long table and the ice reseated itself with a small knock. Nobody had poured any. Rian made the night small on purpose, and I heard every part he left out of it.
He left out the vouchering, and the receipt he signed for his own weapon.
“Tell them the rest,” Luca said, without looking up from his cup. “Tell them what time they let you sleep.”
“They let me sleep when I stopped answering,” Rian said. “That is the rest.”
Marion Beck sat at the far end with her glasses pushed up into her hair. The folder in front of her stayed shut.
“The District Attorney declines to seek charges at this stage,” she said. “That is a posture and it is not a promise.”
“Say the worst version out loud,” Luca said. “Otherwise everyone here invents a better one.”
“The worst version is a grand jury and a very long wait,” Beck said.
“I can wait. I have got nowhere in particular to be.”
Rian put his right hand down on the table. “The inquiry stays open, and I am not going to pretend that keeps me up at night.”
The bruise under Luca’s stitches had gone the color of an old plum. Matteo sat nearest the door and breathed shallow. Ana was on my left with her coat still buttoned to the throat.
I had written the page before we came in. I set it down where she could read it and squared it to the edge of the table.
“I am resigning the protective contract this morning, in writing, and I am telling you first.”
Ana read it where it lay.
“The insurer voids the whole detail, not only me. All three of you carry that with me.”
“Then we are all uninsured, and nobody at this table is remotely surprised.”
Luca said nothing. Matteo said nothing. Rian’s line said everything the four of us had ever needed to say to one another, and none of us would say it again in different words.
Ana turned the page a quarter turn toward herself with one finger. “You have made yourself a witness with no client, which is the worst chair in any room.”
“It is the only honest one left to me. I have wanted out of that contract for a long time.”
“Sign it and date it,” Beck said. “For the record, I heard a resignation and nothing else at all. Go north. Stay in the state.”
The corridor outside had one window at the end. I carried the coffee in my left hand because the right forearm will not turn that far. Eleven stitches run along the outside of it and the skin pulls when I ask it to.
Ana stopped beside me, looked at the cup, then at me, and said nothing about either one.
“Twenty-six days ago we took you out of that building.”
“You did. I have read every statute that covers it.”
I set the cup on the sill. “Then you know what I signed away in that room.”
“I know exactly what you signed away, and we are going to talk about it in your kitchen.”
She put two fingers flat on the back of my right hand, on the scar. Then she went down the corridor ahead of me and did not turn to see whether I followed. She has stopped checking. That is a load-bearing change and I felt the structure take the weight of it.
Rian drove. He steered with the heel of his right hand, and the left stayed low on his thigh where he could forget it.
“Pull over at the bridge and let me have it,” Luca said.
“I am driving. Sit back and admire the countryside.”
“Let him drive,” Ana said. “He needs something to hold on to.”
He did not pull over, and we did not make him, because taking the wheel off him would have cost more than the drive. Ninety-one miles. Two hours, because we ran the counter-surveillance loop anyway. Habits outlive their reasons.
Harrow Point had gone gold along the top of the treeline by the time we came up the track. A north wind crossed the eleven acres with an edge on it. We stood on the boot porch and I opened the channel through the roof repeater and put it on speaker.
“Kestrel Six is retired. Nobody carries that call sign again, ever, in any file.”
Sasha Ilves took her time, and her voice came back level and correct. “Logged and closed at Harrow Point, Kane. I will never read that number out again.”
“Say the name as well,” Rian said. “The number on its own is a filing code.”
“Owen Bell. That is the name that belongs to it.”
Luca had his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the barn. “He was twenty-six and he was the only one of us who was ever any fun.”
Matteo laughed, once, and the ribs caught it and closed the sound off halfway. Owen used to eat standing up over a bin so nobody could make him sit down. I closed the channel.
The kitchen smelled of creosote and last night’s ash. Ana put her coat over a chair and stood at the end of the table without pulling a chair out, which is what she does before she takes an inch off a room.
“Sit down, the four of you,” she said. “I am only going to do this the once.”
Nobody sat down. She let that go, which she does not usually do.
“I love the four of you, and I am not saying it in parts to make it easier on anybody.”
Nobody moved. I have stood in rooms where a shot was coming and none of them took the floor out from under me the way that did.
She came round the table and did it in order, and she built each one out of what that man is worst at hearing.
She stopped in front of me first and did not touch me. “You wrote seven rules to keep a door shut and I have read all of them twice.”
Then Rian, with her palm flat on the back of his cropped head. “You came through the wall for me exactly the way you said you would.”
Then Luca, and she put her hand over his mouth first, because it is the only thing that works on him. “You have never once talked me into anything, and that is why I believe you.”
Then Matteo, from two steps away, because two steps is his whole language. “You are the only man alive who has never looked away from me.”
Rian came across the kitchen, took her hand, and put it back where she had placed it.
“Ask me for anything, at any hour. That is my answer. All of it.”
He kept his own hand over hers and did not add to it.
“Ana,” Luca said, and then nothing else came. He has never in his life been short of the next sentence. He shook his head, once, and let her see that he could not.
Matteo crossed the two steps. He put two fingers on her sternum and tapped twice, and left them there until she tapped back.
I went last. I had written nothing down for it.
“I love you.”
I have given evidence under oath and it cost me less.
“I would like to hear all of that again,” Luca said, “at intervals, for the rest of my life.”
“You will hear it tomorrow, and the day after, and you will get sick of it.”
Then she put both hands flat on the table and said the other thing.
“What the four of you did to me was a felony, and I would not undo it.”
She said it in one breath, in that order, and she did not blink over the seam between the halves. Nobody argued. Nobody told her it was more complicated than that.
Matteo took the collar out of his pocket and set it on the table between her hands. Matte steel, hinged, no ring on it, nothing to attach anything to.
“Finish it,” she said. “You have had it in your pocket long enough.”
“I made you a thing instead. I have carried it since the night you said no.”
That is more than Matteo says in most rooms with four people in it, and he stepped back to where he could see her.
She picked it up and ran her thumb around the inside of the band, then went back over the same stretch of steel and pressed harder.
“There are four of these under my thumb and I know exactly whose they are.”
Four notches, cut inside where nobody would ever see them. Mine is the shallow crooked one. I have no gift for that work and I did it anyway with a needle file.
She held the band out to him on her open palm. “Put it on me. I want your hands doing it and nobody else’s.”
She took his wrists first, turned them over, and put her thumbs on the raw bands the ties left.
Then she lifted her hair off her neck and gave him her throat.
He closed the collar and the magnet took with a sound like a lock seating.
The steel medal on its black cord swung down against the band and rang once, thin, and stayed.
She put her left hand in her pocket and brought out the card.
A plain white index card, four by six. Seven rules on it in my block capitals, black ink, no punctuation at the ends of the lines. One corner has been gone since she threw it at Rian. The edges have gone soft as cloth, and the ink is gray where her thumb has worn across it.
“Give me a pen,” she said. “Black, if this house owns one.”
“On the windowsill, behind the jar,” Luca said. “It was there when we got here.”
She turned the card over on the wood and wrote on the back in capitals.
EIGHT THIS DOOR OPENS FROM MY SIDE AND I AM STILL HERE
She matched my hand. She has looked at those letters long enough to copy the way I close an E, and she did it deliberately, and I had to put both palms flat on the table.
“You have written it in my capitals.”
“I know. It is your card. I am only the eighth line of it.”
The collar had not done to me what that did. The collar was a thing given. That was a thing taken, in my own handwriting, off a card I wrote to keep her at a distance I could survive.
The bedroom over the stove takes its heat up through the floorboards, so the boards are warm and the air is not. One lamp. The japan-black paint on the bedstead lifts under a thumbnail in flakes the size of grain.
Ana sat on the low chest at the foot of the bed, dressed, collar on, the casing shut in her right hand.
I stood at the foot with my back to the door.
Luca sat on the floorboards at her left with his shoulders against the bed frame.
Rian was up against the headboard with the left arm loose in his lap.
Matteo took the chair by the window, two steps away, inside her sight line.
“Tell me the rule.”