Chapter 18
CASH
By the time the sky lit gray, my brothers had turned a murder scene into a problem with a solution.
In my old life, a mess like the one on Mags's floor was a thing you walked away from. Here, it was a job. Ryker moved through the house like a man rereading a book he knew, taking in the angles, the blood, the two dead men. By the time he found me, he had the whole night worked out.
"It's handled," he said. No wasted motion in him—the leanest of them, and the stillest. I'd have made him for a fixer in any room in the world. "We've got people. Charleston PD, the sheriff. This never happened. Nobody's knocking on her door about it."
He glanced past me to where Mags sat in the wreck of her living room, a dog pressed to each side, her face gone somewhere far off.
"She's the variable," he said. Not unkind. "Everything downstream of tonight rides on her keeping quiet. Can she hold it?"
"She'll hold it," I said. "She's a colonel's daughter."
He studied me a second, nodded, and that was that.
A team stayed behind. Four of them, unhurried, men who'd done worse cleanup in worse places. Brock walked me out with his hand on the back of my neck. On the way, he looked back at the ruin of her little house and told me not to carry it.
"By tonight, you won't know it happened," he said. "Every trace gone. She'll walk back in and it's her house again. That's a promise." He squeezed once. "We take care of our own. Her included."
Our own. A day ago I hadn't had an own. Now, I had a houseful, and every one of them had become a thing I'd burn the world to keep.
We went out into the last of the dark. They'd brought a car around.
I walked Mags to it with an arm around her, Beans and Tiny pressed to her legs, refusing more than a foot of distance from her.
She got in. The dogs put themselves across her lap and she held on.
I stood at the open door a moment, cataloguing that she was breathing, that she was whole.
That's when the three SUVs came around the corner.
They rolled to a stop nose to tail across the mouth of the street, boxing us the way we'd boxed the airport road a lifetime and a day ago. Every man around me went hard in the same instant—hands drifting, weight coming up.
Not friendlies.
A door opened on the lead vehicle and a man got out. Just one. A suit, no weapon on him that I could see. Gray at the temples. He might’ve been handsome once. He looked at the pack of us like a man surveying a mess left on his lawn.
"The Dane brothers," he said. Mild. Almost fond. "Making trouble again."
I disliked him before he finished the sentence. Not a thought—the older thing, the read that comes up before my mind gets a vote. All of it said wrong.
Marcus drifted in at my shoulder. "Dominic Craine," he said, barely moving the air. "FBI. Deputy Director. That's the guy."
The one doing all of it. The federal weather I'd landed in the middle of, the reason a black jet had pulled me off a tarmac in Germany. And here he was outside Mags's house, the same night two men came through her door in the dark. There are no coincidences that big.
I walked toward him.
I felt the shift behind the tinted glass—men with rifles deciding whether I was about to be a problem. I felt the aim points find my chest and my head. I knew if I made one wrong move, I'd be dead before I finished falling.
It didn't touch me. It couldn't. That's the thing men like Craine never account for. Fear is the lever they pull. I don't have the fitting it screws into.
I stopped an arm's length from him. "This was you."
He didn't blink. "That's ridiculous. Two dead men in a private citizen's home—that's the machinery of Dominion Hall coming home to roost. What happens to a private army that thinks the law stops at its own gate."
I said nothing. I was reading him.
I got nothing.
That stopped me more than the rifles had.
I've rarely stood in front of a man and came up empty.
There's always something—fear, hunger, grief, the human leak that tells you where a man lives.
Craine had none, or had it walled so deep the wall was all I could feel.
A true believer, or a man with nothing left to believe with. I couldn't tell which yet.
"I'll make it simple," Craine said. "You've got family now.
So consider this a courtesy. The one and only.
Go to Byron. Tell him to give up what he's holding and fold this thing.
Pack up Dominion Hall. Walk away." Something moved at the back of his flat eyes, the first real thing in him, and it wasn't warm.
"Or the gloves come off. For real, this time. "
I held his eyes a while. Most men flinch from that look. Craine stood in it. I'll give him that much.
"I'll see you around, Director Craine."
Then, I turned my back on him and his rifles both—slow, so he'd understand what it meant that I could—and walked back to the car where the woman I loved was waiting with her arms full of dogs.
The SUVs sat a moment. Then, they pulled out one by one and were gone.
I crouched in the open door. Mags looked up at me over the heads of her survivors, eyes red and far away, still down in the worst of it. I put my hand to the side of her face and she leaned into it.
"Let's get you cleaned up," I said.
She nodded, dull. A person with a stalled engine.
So, I did the one thing I knew might reach her. Not because it was the moment. Because the only thing that pulls a person out of that pit is being needed by something that isn't done needing them.
"And one more thing," I said, "I'd like to meet Max. As soon as you’re ready."
It went through her like a current. Her eyes came back and found my face, and something moved behind them—the grief still there, but under it, a second thing, older and stronger. Purpose. The set of a woman who's remembered she has work to do and someone to do it for.
Good girl, I thought, and didn't say.
She was going to be okay. It would take time. But she was going to be okay. We were.
And Craine had another thing coming. He'd put his hands on the thing I loved and counted on my fear to keep me in line.
I don't have any fear. He'd just handed me the one weapon I've never had a use for, and pointed it at himself, and called it a courtesy.
I'd see him around. I meant it as a promise.