Page 37 of Bought for Blood

My fingers find my throat before I’ve decided to check it. Smooth. No mark, no ridge, nothing under my fingertips to prove any of it happened.

Two floors down, there’s a wall with nobody sitting against it.

Chapter 14

Bastien

I take the stairs to Crowe’s office two at a time and catch myself halfway up. I have never taken stairs two at a time. Stairs wait. Everything waits when you have forever.

I stand on the landing with my hand on the rail and make myself climb the rest at a civilized pace.

“It’s open,” Crowe says before I’ve knocked.

The desk hasn’t moved. The chairs haven’t moved. Even the crack in the yard window is the same crack. Below, a kid in overalls is working late under the floodlight with a radio going, some song with more optimism than talent. Crowe has a ledger open and a pen capped beside it. He looks at me, then at the door behind me, then back.

“Now you’re the one arriving unannounced,” he says.

“You started the fashion.”

“I had a reason.”

“So do I.” I don’t take the visitor’s chair. I stand at the window instead and look down at the kid coaxing something out of an engine. My fingers are tapping the sill before I feel them doing it. I stop them, flatten my palm against the cold glass instead.

“Before you start,” Crowe says. “A Meridian client turned up dead behind a club on the south side. New suit. Sixty years old at the outside. There wasn’t enough left of him for his sponsors to bury.”

“How unfortunate.”

“Name of Sterling.” His eyes stay where they are. “You sat beside him at an auction not long ago.”

“I sit beside a great many people.”

Crowe waits.

“It’s time to move,” I say.

“Is it?”

“I’ve been inside over two weeks. I know the intake schedule. I know the draw quotas and who sets them; not the name, but the level, and the level is enough to work with.” I turn around. “The Court wanted the source. Pull the thread I’ve given you and the source comes out holding the other end. We move.”

Crowe listens all the way through without touching the pen. When I finish, he sits back, and the chair creaks under him, and he looks at me for longer than the answer needs.

“No,” he says.

“No?”

“You told the Court months. It’s been weeks.” Crowe taps the ledger once. “What you’ve given me is a branch, its manager, and two rungs of a ladder. Good work. But a ladder with two known rungs isn’t a source. Move now, and the top desk clears out the same night. Or the stock gets drained and dropped in a river, because dead inventory doesn’t testify. Tell me I’m wrong about what they’d do with the evidence.”

The kid in the yard tries the engine. It turns over, catches, dies. My jaw is tight. I loosen it.

“Then we take the branch intact,” I say. “Fast, sealed, nobody warns anyone up the ladder. You have people for exactly that. I’ve seen two of them work.”

“And the other branches? You said yourself there have to be several. Faine’s intelligence has already seen signs of them.” He shakes his head once. “Take one, and every other branch is warned. The people in the ones we haven’t found pay for our impatience…yourimpatience, since I’m being blunt. This can’t be rushed. You knew that when you stood in front of Faine and gave her the timeline yourself.”

“Timelines change when the intelligence outruns them.”

“They do.” He picks up the pen, uncaps it, and lays it back down, which from Crowe is a speech. “Yours hasn’t. Nothing you’ve brought me tonight is new. It’s the same picture you gave the Court, with more detail filled in. Whatever changed, it wasn’t the intelligence.”

The radio in the yard sings on. I turn and watch the kid lean into the engine bay. I don’t answer, because the answer is two floors above a ward in a compound I can’t control, asleep behind a bolt I ordered onto a door.