Page 29 of Subduing the Shark

Jack told it again. The same details, the same flat voice. He didn't soften it or excuse it. He laid out the plan the way Dresden had laid it out, clinically, point by point. Lady Leo listened the way Lady Leo listened to everything, with her full attention and no visible reaction.

When Jack finished, she picked up her phone.

"How many men do you have at the shiver house?" she asked.

"Three, without me. Dresden, Rashe, Lichen."

"Dresden is the leader."

"Yes."

"The other two follow his orders."

"Rashe does. Lichen is more unpredictable."

Lady Leo dialed a number and spoke into the phone for less than a minute. Harold caught fragments. Names he didn't recognize. An address he did. Instructions that were brief and precise and left no room for misinterpretation. She hung up and set the phone on the table.

"I have men on their way to the shiver house now. Dresden and Lichen will be in council custody within the hour." She looked at Jack. "Rashe?"

"Rashe won't be at the house. He goes out at night. I don't know where."

"Then he is a loose end." She didn't say it with alarm. She said it the way she said everything, as a fact to be managed. "He'll know something happened when he comes home and the others are gone. Will he run?"

Jack shook his head slowly. "Rashe doesn't run. He retaliates."

"Against whom?"

"Whoever he can reach. He's not strategic. He's not like Dresden. He'll go after whoever's closest and weakest." Jack paused. "Bethany lives in this building."

Lady Leo's composure cracked. Not visibly, not in any way that would register on camera, but Harold saw the lioness surface behind her eyes for a fraction of a second, the predator responding to a threat against her child. Then she picked up her phone again and made a second call and this time her voice was harder and the instructions were shorter.

"Bethany's door has a deadbolt and she knows how to use it. I'm sending someone to sit outside it." She set the phone down. "You. Shark. Why are you telling me this?"

Jack met her gaze. It must have cost him. Lady Leo's stare could flatten anyone and Jack was already running on fumes. "Because they're going to hurt people I've watched you protect. Because I sat on a couch months ago and said okay to something like this and I'm not going to do it again."

"You could have let it happen. You could have been their map. You would have been safe."

Jack hesitated before speaking. "Safe isn't the same thing as being alive."

Lady Leo studied him. Then she looked at Harold, and what was in her face was not surprise but confirmation. It was the look of someone who'd been waiting for a piece to land and had just watched it drop into place.

"You want him with you," she said to Harold.

It wasn't a question. Harold didn't treat it as one. "Yes."

She turned back to Jack. "Go somewhere safe. Not the shiver house. Not the club. Somewhere they won't look for you."

"The pool," Jack said. "The dolphin facility. Nobody from the shiver uses it. They think shifting at a public facility is beneath them."

"Go there. Stay there until we have Rashe."

Jack looked at Harold. The look was brief and full of things that neither of them could say in front of Lady Leo at four in the morning. Then he turned and left.

Harold listened to his footsteps on the stairs and had to physically stop himself from following. Lady Leo watched him not follow with an expression that might have been sympathy if she were a person who dealt in sympathy.

"Stay here," she said. "I need you at the building. If Lichen comes to Bethany before my man arrives, you're the closest."

Harold stayed. He went downstairs to the main floor and took his position near the hallway and waited. The club was dark and silent and every sound in the building registered through his ears like sonar. The elevator. The stairs. Footsteps on the floor above. The distant hum of the refrigeration unit behind the bar.