Page 43 of Iron Debt
“I’m better than all right.”
He moved his arm. He looked at me. He looked slightly undone – his whole face loosened, the eyes wider, the expression of a man who has been carrying something for a very long time and has put it down and doesn’t quite know what his hands are for now.
I touched the red marks on my wrists. I pressed them. The pressure was a reminder – not of restraint but of the moment I’d asked for it, and the asking was the thing I hadn’t known I had in me, and the having of it was new and real and warm.
I slipped out before the rest of the house was fully awake.
The corridor was dim. Grey morning light through the high windows, the carpet silent under my bare feet, the house holding its breath the way it did in the early hours – not empty but suspended, waiting for the first sound that would make the day official.
I was three steps from my door when Ewan appeared at the far end of the corridor.
He was coming from the stairs – showered, dressed, carrying a cup of coffee like he’d already been awake for an hour and had opinions about the morning. He saw me. He stopped.
I looked at him. He looked at me. His eyes took in the bare feet, the T-shirt that was not mine, the slightly dishevelled quality of a woman who had slept somewhere that was not her bed and had not slept much.
Something moved across his face. Fast, contained, gone before it fully formed – but I caught it. A flinch of recognition, or of rearrangement, the look of a man recalculating the shape of a room he thought he understood. Then it passed. The warmth came back, but it sat on top of whatever had been underneath, and I could see the join.
He said nothing. He had the grace not to smirk. But the corner of his mouth did something – not a grin, not the deployed performance, but a smaller, warmer thing, a private acknowledgment that passed between us like a coin changing hands, and it said:I see you. I know. And the knowing doesn’t diminish anything.
I went into my room. I closed the door. I leaned against it.
On the bedside table, the locket lay where I’d placed it before going to his room. I picked it up. I heldit. I thought:Ewan is next.The thought arrived without shame and without fear and it sat in me the way the locket sat in my palm – warm, tarnished, exactly the right weight.
I wasn’t afraid of what I was becoming. I was afraid of how long it had taken me to start.
CHAPTER 24
Duncan’s Move
MORVEN
Iread the letter at my breakfast table and thought about all the ways love becomes a liability.
The tray had been left outside my door – toast, butter, a small pot of jam, tea with the milk already in it the way I liked, and a folded envelope tucked beside the napkin with the careful precision of someone who wanted it to look like it belonged there and didn’t quite manage it. The handwriting on the front was my father’s. The paper was wrong.
Duncan wrote on whatever was nearest – gas bills, Domino’s leaflets, the backs of Ladbrokes slips. This envelope was clean and white and sealed with the kind of care that suggested someone had watched him seal it. I turned it over. No postmark. Hand-delivered. Someone in this house had put this on my tray.
I opened it standing at the window with the Clyde grey and churning below the cliff and the toast getting cold behind me.
Morven, hen –
Don’t do what they’re asking. The Wager isn’t what they’ve told you it is. The man who runs the opposition has people inside the Syndicate and the plan they’ve shown you has a gap they haven’t mentioned. If you go to the table you’re the gap. I know you think they’re protecting you but protection looks different from where I’m standing and where I’m standing I can see things you can’t see from inside that house.
Please, love. Walk away. I’ve arranged a way out through the Greenock route – you only need to get to the station. There’s a woman at platform 2 who has an envelope with your name on it. Everything you need. Don’t tell them. Just go.
Your Da
The phrasing sat in my mouth like a coin – familiar and wrong.The man who runs the opposition.Duncan didn’t talk like that. Duncan talked about people the way he talked about horses: by name, by habit, by the particular flavour of trouble they carried. He would have saidMcInnisorthe Gravediggerorthat bastard from the dockyards. He wouldn’t have saidthe man who runs the oppositionbecause Duncan didn’t think in strategy. He thought in debts and bets and the localised geography of who owed what to whom.
A gap they haven’t mentioned.The phrasing was too precise. Too structured. Duncan’s warnings came infragments – half-sentences, looks across the table, the way he rubbed the back of his neck when he was about to say something he knew I wouldn’t want to hear. This was composed. This had been drafted.
And then:the Greenock route. A route. An arranged escape. A woman at a platform with an envelope. These were operational details. These belonged to a plan, and Duncan didn’t make plans. Duncan stumbled into consequences and hoped they wouldn’t last.
I folded the letter. I put it in the pocket of my cardigan. I left the toast.
Lachlan’s study was on the ground floor. The door was closed. I knocked once, opened it without waiting for the answer.
He was behind his desk. He was always behind his desk. The room smelled of his coffee and the dry, layered scent of old paper and leather from the shelves. He was reading something on his laptop and the screen cast a faint blue light across his glasses. He looked up.
