24. Lorik
LORIK
There is a girl in a farmhouse outside Frederick who has three days left to be herself, and I am going to spend two of them stealing her back from the man who bought her.
I know about her the way I know about all of them: because I am the lawyer the worst men in this country trust with their souls.
Vance keeps a file with me. Asset protection, he calls it, the legal scaffolding that lets a senator launder the unlaunderable.
Three weeks ago that file gained a line item, a transfer of funds to a broker I’ve been mapping for three years.
A new acquisition. His discretion matter.
The thing he wanted my talents for. He told me about her over brandy and never once heard the part of me that was already counting the days until I could take her off his books and out of his life.
That is the obscene intimacy of what I am.
Vance sat across from me in my own office, swirling my brandy, and described the girl he had bought the way another man describes a car he is leasing. The broker, the price, the date she would be ‘ready.’ And he believed, because they all believe it, that telling his lawyer made it safe.
They cannot conceive of a man who would smile at the confession and then drive two hundred miles to undo it.
That blindness is the only weapon I have ever needed.
It is why I keep the worst men in the world close enough to whisper to me.
A monster trusts another monster with anything.
He never once suspects the monster is lying about which side he is on.
She’s nineteen. The same age as my wife. That isn’t a detail I’m able to set down.
“You don’t have to come,” Cas says, in the car, two miles out, the way he says it before every one of these.
“Send me. Stay home. You’ve got a senator nipping at your wife’s heel and your mother sniffing your fence line and a traitor somewhere in your own walls.
This is the worst possible week to leave. ”
“I know exactly what week it is.”
“Then stay.”
“I can’t.” And I can’t explain it to him in a way that doesn’t sound insane, so I don’t try, but the truth is this: every rescue I’ve ever run, I’ve run because of a thing I can’t undo, a name I can’t scrub off, a brother who used houses exactly like the one she is in and never lost a night’s sleep.
The Kovaci name has meant flesh for a hundred years.
My brother made it mean the worst kind. And the only thing I have ever found that quiets the noise of being his blood is being, in the dark where no one will ever know it, the exact opposite of him.
I don’t get to send a man to do my atonement.
It isn’t atonement if your hands stay clean.
So I don’t stay home. I never have. Besa, the old men in Albania called it.
A word my grandfather used like a blade and my mother used like a leash.
Your word is your life. You give it, you keep it, or you’re nothing.
I gave mine a long time ago, to no one, in the dark, the way I do everything that matters: that as long as I am breathing and these men keep buying people like cattle, I will get there first. As many as I can. For as long as it takes.
It will never be enough. That is the part Cas understands and I have long since made my peace with.
There are more of them than there are of me.
More buyers than nights, more bought girls than I will reach in a hundred lifetimes, every one I pull out of the dark a single hand against a tide that does not stop coming.
I do it anyway. Not because I think I can win.
Because the alternative is to be a Kovaci who looked at the machine his brother fed and decided it was not his problem, and I would rather die than be that man.
Some nights I suspect I eventually will.
Cas knows. Cas is the only one who has ever known. He learned what Vance and his kind do firsthand, before I did, before either of us was old enough to fight back, and there are reasons he enjoys this part of the work more than I do, reasons that are his to tell or not.
We have never once spoken about why this is the one thing we’ll both die for. We don’t have to. Some debts you pay in silence, beside the one other person who knows the shape of them.
The farmhouse has two men on it. Hired muscle, bored, watching a girl who has nowhere to run because they’ve spent three weeks teaching her there’s nowhere to run.
They are very wrong about that, because tonight she has us.
I won’t write down the next part the way it happened, the wet specifics of it, because it isn’t a thing I do for an audience and the men who died deserve no more words spent on them than the bullets I spent already.
It’s quick. It’s quiet. Cas takes the one in the barn and I take the one on the porch and neither of them ever understands that the most dangerous thing in their world that night isn’t a rival or a cop.
It’s a lawyer in a good coat who has decided their employer’s property is going home.
Then I go inside, and I find her.
She’s wedged into the corner of an upstairs room with a chair leg in her fist and her knuckles white, her whole body coiled to swing it.
And that, the fight still in her, the refusal still alive in her after three weeks of them trying to drown it, is the thing that puts the lump in my throat every single time.
I stop in the doorway. I keep my hands where she can see them. I make my voice the gentlest thing I own, the voice I have only ever used on one other person.
“I’m not one of them.” I crouch, slow, lower than her, smaller than her, because a man who wants to be believed makes himself the least threatening thing in the room.
“The two men who were watching you are dead. Nobody is coming for you tonight or ever again. I have a woman waiting in a car who’s going to take you somewhere they will never find you, with a new name and a new life and people whose entire job is making sure no one ever does this to you again. ”
I hold her terrified stare. “You can keep the chair leg. You can swing it at me if it helps. But you’re going home, and the man who bought you is never going to touch you, and he’s never even going to know your face from the others he’s buying right now.
Because by the time he realizes you’re gone, you’ll be nobody he can find. ”
She doesn’t drop the chair leg.
She drops, instead, all at once, a three-week dam giving way. She sobs like something breaking, and I stay crouched in the doorway and let her. Because the worst thing you can do to a person who’s had every choice taken from them is take one more—even the choice to fall apart at their own speed.
Sister Leah is in the car. She’s run the relocation end of this for the whole three years and she has the gift I don’t.
The warmth that doesn’t have a body count under it, and the girl goes to her the way the drowning go to the shore.
I never learn the girl’s name. That’s the rule.
I don’t get to keep them. I just get to make sure someone else does.
What I do get to keep is the rest of it. Before we put the farmhouse to the torch I pulled three weeks of phones, and somewhere in that data is the broker, the route, the next name on Vance’s list, and the thread that runs all the way up to a senator’s manicured hand.
This girl is a rescue. She is also the first loose stitch in Roland Vance’s operation, and I am going to pull it until the whole filthy garment comes apart in my fists.
He tried to buy my wife with a necklace.
I am going to answer him by taking apart the empire he built one bought soul at a time, and he will not know it is me until he is already standing in the ruins of it.
It will take two days to move her north, through the relays, to the place even I’m not allowed to know the location of.
Two days I have to be on the road, away, off the board.
Two days when Roland Vance is going to open a file and find a hole in it the exact shape of the girl he paid for, and start, finally, to suspect that the man who keeps his secrets is the one bleeding his supply.
Two days I have to leave my wife.
I call the house from a gas station at three in the morning. Besnik picks up on the first ring. The estate is locked down tighter than it has ever been with double the men, the dogs out, every camera live, my mother’s name on a kill-on-sight list at every gate.
Brooklyn is asleep, Drini tells me when Besnik hands him the phone, fed and safe and impossible and dreaming in my shirt, and there is no one on this earth who can get to her behind those walls.
I have built her a fortress. Eighty men, trained dogs, a solid wall, a name on every gate that means shoot first and apologize never.
I have done everything a man can do to make a place safe, and still, hanging up that phone in a freezing gas station two hundred miles from her, I feel the wrongness of the distance like a hook behind my sternum.
It isn’t a thought. It’s lower than a thought. It’s the primal part in me that learned, the night three men walked into our foyer, that unbreachable is just the most expensive lie I’ve ever told myself.
“Tell her I’ll be home in two days,” I say. “Tell her—” I stop. Drini waits, patient, kind. “Tell her I said don’t burn down my kitchen. She’ll know what I mean.”
I hang up, and I get back in the car, and Cas looks at me across the dark.
“She’ll be fine, Lor,” he says, reading me the way only he can. “Nobody gets past Besnik. Nobody’s stupid enough to walk onto your land. We move the girl, we come home, we go back to war.” He starts the engine. “Two days. What’s the worst that happens in two days?”
I should know better than to let a man say a thing like that out loud.
“Drive,” I tell him. “The sooner the girl is safe, the sooner I’m home.”