Chapter 22
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Ilet her go.
Of course, I let her go. What was I going to do—stand in the door of her own studio and keep her from her father on the worst morning of his life? I'm a lot of bad things. I'm not that.
So, I stepped aside when she said move, and I watched her take the stairs, and I listened to her car start down on Wentworth and pull away, and then I was alone in a room full of the truest thing she had with nothing left in my hands.
And I wanted to tear the world down to the studs.
It came up in me fast and black and familiar, the thing I keep chained in the cellar—it wanted blood.
It wanted to find Craine and put him in the ground.
It wanted the militia, every backwoods one of them, lined up and gone.
It wanted anybody whose hand had touched what just happened to that family, wanted them all, and it wanted it bad, because there is one cure I have always known for a feeling this size and I have spent my whole life administering it to other men.
I stood in the quiet and made myself breathe. Brought it down a notch. Then another. You don't run an op hot. Hot men make mistakes and mistakes get people killed, and the only person in this city I'd die before I let get killed had just driven off hating me.
So, I cooled it, and I made myself think the thing through clean.
And clean, it kept pointing the same direction. Back at that house. Back at Dominion Hall.
Sure, Craine was a corrupt son of a bitch.
Sure, he was running the federal machine for his own ends, leaning on a frightened woman, tearing apart an honest man's life to make a point.
But I'd been around the world twice and I'll tell you a hard truth I learned out there: that's not special.
That's every day. That's what men with a little power and no conscience have been doing since the first king put the first crown on.
Craine wasn't a monster. He was a bureaucrat with a long enough reach to be dangerous.
I had no more use for hating him than I had for hating the weather.
I'd watched good men—friends, brothers in arms—tie themselves in knots over Washington. How to find the rats. How to drain the swamp. How to fix a thing that had been broke on purpose since before any of us were born.
I never caught the disease.
I'm a simple man about it. I don't have politics. I have targets.
If a problem can be solved with a bullet, it's mine, and if it can't, it belongs to somebody with more patience and less sense than me.
Fuck Washington. Fuck the Bureau and its incorruptibles.
And fuck Dominion Hall, most of all, for being the reason the rats came scratching at Mary Catherine Donovan's door.
Because that was the part I couldn't think my way around.
None of this rain falls on her if her path doesn't cross mine, and her path doesn't cross mine if I'm not in this city, and I'm not in this city except that my brother got tangled up in whatever that mansion really is.
The line ran straight. Her father's ruin started in that house.
So, I made up my mind, standing there in the paint smell with the morning going on outside like the world hadn't tipped over.
I'd go back. I'd find Tommy and I'd have it out with him, plain as I knew how.
I'd tell him our time in Charleston was finished—mine, his, all of it.
I'd tell him Dominion Hall owed the Donovans a debt and was going to pay it, every dollar of that business made whole, every box returned, the father's name cleaned, and they were going to do it now, tonight, with whatever money and lawyers and leverage a place like that obviously had lying around.
And once it was fixed, we were gone. Done.
I'd pull my brother out of that pit by the collar, if I had to.
And I'd take her with me. She'd be angry a while.
Let her be angry. Anger, I could weather.
Once her father was back on his feet and Craine was a story she told instead of a fear she lived in, the anger would burn off, and she'd see I'd kept my word.
I decided that like I decide everything.
Like it was already true. She's coming with me.
I just had to put the world right enough that she'd want to.
I went down the stairs and out and dropped into the armored Bugatti and fired it up. I cut the wheel hard into a U-turn in the middle of Wentworth, pointing the nose back toward that house full of lies, and I had my foot moving to the gas—
—when I saw the man.
He was walking down the center of the street. Right down the middle of it, dead at me, unhurried, like the asphalt belonged to him and the idling two-million-dollar car in his path was a thing he'd move through, if it didn't move first.
My hand went to the gun without my telling it to.
Fuck this, I thought. The cold came down over me, clean and welcome, the way it always does.
They wanted a war. Fine. They'd brought it to her door and now they could have it at mine.
I sat there with my pulse gone slow and even and weighed it—decoy or shooter, was there a second man working an angle while this one held my eyes, would it be cleaner to just put my foot down and let two tons of armored steel solve the whole equation—
The man kept coming. And his face came up out of the sunlight’s glare and resolved, feature by feature, into focus.
I blinked.
No.
No, that wasn't—
No fucking way.
I knew that face. I'd know it blind, know it in the dark, know it at the bottom of the sea.
It was the face I still saw in the worst of my dreams and, God help me, sometimes the best of them—the face that had haunted me and steadied me in equal measure for more years than I let myself count.
The face of the man we'd put in the ground in our hearts a long, long time ago, the absence that had scattered seven sons to the seven winds.
He walked right up to the front of the idling car and stopped, and looked at me through the windshield with eyes I'd been seeing in the mirror my whole life.
My father.
Byron Dane.