Page 94 of Bought for Blood

She has all of it.

“Who told you?”

“You did, in part. Your behavior was out of character. That made me curious. It didn’t make me certain.” She sits back. “What made me certain arrived five days ago. In detail. Including the timings.”

Five days.

The meeting was six days ago. Fourteen people around one table, and inside twenty-four hours, everything said in that room was traveling to this woman.

“There’s nobody in your ward,” I say.

“There’s nobody in the building at all. We moved everything on Tuesday.”

Twenty people. Moved quietly, in under a week, to somewhere completely unknown. I’ve been basing my understanding of this operation on the branch I could see. Whoever Ecaterina works for can empty a building without leaving a mark on it, and that’s worth more to the Court than anything else I’ve learned tonight…if I get to tell them.

“Your friends will lie in that grass until it gets light,” she says. “Then they’ll search an empty compound and go home, and by then you’ll be somewhere else.”

I get my weight forward, and I get half out of the chair.

That’s as far as I go. The door opens behind me, and there are four of them. They aren’t guards, and they don’t rush.

I take two of them down before my legs stop working properly. The third gets an arm around my throat from behind and holds on. The fourth puts the iron on me, runes cut all the way around, two bands on each wrist. When I pull against it, the burn runs to my shoulders and stays.

I keep pulling. It doesn’t do anything. I do it anyway.

Then I lunge at Ecaterina, and what’s left of her men barrel into me. Something in my left arm gives. I hear it before I feel it.

Broken.

Putain.

They put me face down on the rug, and they hold me there, and Vasile stands at the door the whole time and doesn’t come in.

Ecaterina crouches down where I can see her. She’s careful about her knees.

“I’d have liked to keep you as a client,” she says. “You were an excellent one. But you’ve spent time in my house with the Nocturne Court standing behind you, and that leaves me with two questions. What have you traced of this operation beyond the building you’re lying in? Which of our other houses, how far up, and what your Court intends to do about it.” She pauses. “And where the woman you bought is being kept.”

I’m quiet.

“You’ll answer both. Everyone does eventually.” She stands and brushes her skirt down. “But not here. At first light your friends come through that fence, and I want this building to disappoint them completely. Get him up.”

They pick me up.

The one who put the iron on me runs his thumb along my collar, finds the stitching, and cuts Jericho’s work out of the lining with a pocketknife. He drops the transmitter on the floor and grinds it under his heel. The mantel clock says ten past one.

Then he tapes my mouth.

I have been many things. Freight is new.

They carry me out through the back of the building, past the stairs I’ve walked up every week since the fall, and the whole place is silent. No handlers. No boots. Empty.

At the loading door, three vans stand with their engines running. Delivery plates. Deliveries use the north track every night of the week. Nobody watching that fence will see anything worth waking a radio for.

They put me on the bench seat between two of them, and the vans roll out at delivery speed.

Forty feet into the treeline, on my left, I can hear them. Eight slow heartbeats, lying in the wet grass, waiting on a signal that no longer exists. Their orders are plain. No signal, nobody moves before first light. I sat at that table while Viktor gave the order, and I called it acceptable.

The vans reach the main road and turn north.