Chapter 28 #3
"Victoria always said your father had a patriotic streak a mile wide," Craine said.
"That whatever else Byron Dane became, he'd never turn his guns on his own country.
Toward the end, I confess, I doubted her.
I thought—all those billions, all that new blood and new power, a family raised from the dead and handed the world.
Surely, that changes a man. Surely, the flag gets lighter when the vault gets heavy.
" He tipped his head, studying me, something almost disappointed in it.
"But here you are. Doing it the hard way.
The honorable way. Exactly as she promised.
It seems I owe a dead woman an apology I can't deliver. "
Victoria. I knew almost nothing of the woman—only the little my father had given me across that long table.
That she'd been Trueborn once, and been cut loose from it.
That she and Byron went all the way back to the beginning of the whole thing.
That she'd spent the years since building a knife for his back, and that when she died she'd left the knife to Craine—groomed him, aimed him, handed him everything she knew and everything she wanted and pointed him at my father like a loaded gun.
A dead woman's grudge, still walking around with a federal badge.
"So, which is it," I said. "You, or the Bureau?"
Craine smiled.
"I think," he said, "the Danes will have to decide that for themselves."
And in that smile, in the space behind it, I saw the whole of it.
It's the thing I do. I read people—the leak under the surface that tells you where a man really lives.
On a curb outside Mags's house, Craine had given me nothing, a wall with a wall behind it.
But a man who believes he's already won—he gets careless with the door he keeps shut.
And for one half-second, Dominic Craine left it open, and I looked through, and I saw exactly what was on the other side.
He was alone. Not a Bureau vendetta. Not the machinery of the government grinding toward my family.
Just this—one rogue man with a dead woman's grudge in his hands and enough stolen authority to rent himself an army in the dark.
Whatever he was doing here, the institution behind him didn't know it and wouldn't sanction it.
That was the answer. The whole answer my family needed, and I had it now, and it meant the war they feared was not the war they'd have to fight. It changed everything.
It also meant I no longer needed Dominic Craine breathing.
I didn't think about it. You don't, not at that range, not with what he'd done. The decision made itself and started the short trip from my brain down my arm to the hand that held the pistol—one more target, the last of the night, a bad man in a bed and a debt long past due.
Then, three things happened at once.
Max exploded—not a growl now but a full hard bark, savage, his whole body wheeling toward the walls, the seams, the thick, wrong walls.
Brock's voice detonated in my ear, stripped of every ounce of its calm: "Cash—I've got heat, multiple signatures, second floor, they just—where the fuck did they come from, there's six of them, they're right on top of you—"
And Craine's smile split wide, and he crossed his arms over his chest. The frame folded in on itself beneath him—the whole thing collapsing inward like a mouth closing—and dropped straight down through the floor.
Gone. A trap door swallowing him whole into the dark below, the lamp toppling in after him.
"Get out of there!" Brock, shouting now. "Cash, get out, right now, move—"
Too late.
I knew it the way I know the dead. Cold.
Complete. No argument in it. It had been too late since the porch, since the whine, since the light left burning like a welcome.
Craine hadn't been hiding in this house.
He'd built it. Every soft, open, careless thing about the place had been bait, and I'd climbed the hill and taken it in my teeth.
The one mercy in the whole of it was the single thing I'd gotten before the jaws closed.
I said it over comms, quiet. “It’s Craine. Not the Bureau.”
My family knew now. Craine and his cronies.
Not the country. Not the flag. One rogue man and the killers he'd bought—and against him, a family of the most dangerous men alive, freed at last of the one fear that had held their hands.
Whatever happened to me in the next thirty seconds, that knowledge was already flying back down the hill to Dominion Hall.
It was worth more than my life, and I'd have made the trade twice.
The thick walls came open.
That's what they were. Not walls. Hides.
Blinds built into the guts of a construction zone and lined with God knew what—foil, water, the cold-packed insulation that eats a heat signature and gives an infrared eye nothing at all to see.
Six of them had been standing inside the bones of that house the whole time, close enough to touch through a sheet of drywall, shielded from every instrument Dominion Hall owned, breathing slow six feet from me while I cleared a room I'd been told was empty.
The seams Max had snarled at split open along their hidden lines, and men came out of the walls.
Six of them. Kitted. Rifles up. Busting through clouds of construction dust into the room.
Fuck, I thought, with that clean, flat calm that comes down over me when the world goes all the way to hell. So, that's how it is.
I dropped my hand to Max and felt him come in tight against my leg. That good soldier. That reborn dog. Not one ounce of quit in him. Two of us. Six of them, and Craine gone through the floor.
Very well, I thought.
I brought the pistol up.
And the world exploded in gunfire.