Page 19 of Rune’s Solace

“Did you?”

“No.” I made myself unlock my knees. Made my shoulders come down out of my ears where they’d gone. Made myself be a girl on a sidewalk again instead of a girl in a hallway. “No, it wasn’t. It was nobody.”

He kept looking at me, not the street now, me, his face had gone gentle and worried in a way I couldn’t stand, because worried-about-me was a thing I had a very low tolerance for, it made me want to crawl out of my own skin. “You sure? You went — you looked like you saw a ghost, Amy. You went white.”

“I’m sure.”

I made myself sure. I’d done it before.

You always do this.

The guy at the bus stop was nothing. The man in the parking garage was nothing. That guy who walked behind you for three blocks was going the same direction. Not every man standing somewhere was watching me. Not every bad feeling meant something bad was about to happen. Sometimes I was just scared because I’d learned how to be scared really young.

“I’m sure,” I said again, surer, believing it more each time I said it, which is a skill and also a curse. “I’m just tired. Brenda, and — I’m tired. Can we go home?”

“Yeah.” He put his arm around my shoulders, easy, half for show and half because he meant it, the way he did everything, steered us toward the garage, he was warm, solid, and he smelled like the same cologne he’d worn since I met him, and I let myself be walked. “Course. Let’s get you home.” He stopped and looked at me. “You know what your problem is. You skipped lunch, and a body can’t run its little threat-detection department on an empty stomach. The department files a report on nothing. Guy leaning in a doorway. Case number one. It’s understaffed in there, Ames, it’s making things up to feel useful.”

“My threat-detection department is very well run.”

“Your threat-detection department needs dinner and a union.” He squeezed my shoulder. “Nobody was there, Ames. It’s a Saturday. It’s the prettiest street in the world. There’s nothing on it but tourists and me.”

“I know,” I said.

And I did. I decided to. By the time we hit the parking garage I’d put it away where I put the shadows, and I’d half-convinced myself it was exactly what Sawyer said, tired, empty-stomach, three days of not sleeping over a man and a garden, my nervous system doing its party trick, seeing a threat in a guy who’d probably just stepped into a doorway for a minute of shade and moved on.

Growing up the way I did made it hard to know when being scared actually meant something. I’d been scared so many times when there was nothing there, or nothing happening yet, that eventually you learned not to trust it. Otherwise you’d be scared all the time.

So I turned it down, the way I always did. Told myself a girl who reads danger into every doorway isn’t reading anything at all. And I didn’t say a word to anybody, not to Sawyer past what he’d already seen, not to a soul across that bridge, because there was nothing to say that wouldn’t just be the damage talking.

But that Saturday I got into my own car, locked the doors, and sat there for a second longer than I needed to before starting it. I turned the radio up on the drive toward the bridge and made myself sing along to songs I barely knew, because apparently being loud made me feel less alone. Behind me, the waterfront went dark blue and then black, and I told myself I wasn’t looking in the rearview mirror any more than usual.

I probably was.

CHAPTER NINE

WE’D SAT AT that table over Drago enough times by now that the room had stopped pretending it was going to be nothing.

First word had come in weeks back, secondhand, our man on the inside passing along that Drago was making noise. That’s all it was then. A caged animal running his mouth, and caged animals run their mouths, so we’d noted it, doubled a couple of things and gone on. But Devil didn’t call the full table twice over a man just talking. And he’d called it again tonight, everybody, patched and prospecting, phones in the box by the door and Bolt standing Sergeant-at-Arms with his back to it like he was holding the room shut.

So it wasn’t nothing anymore.

I took my seat and did the thing I’d been doing all week, which was try to keep my head where it belonged and out of my damn garden three nights back, off a pouch of tea and Amy’s fingers brushing mine and the way she’d stood there looking at me afterward. Wasn’t working worth a shit. But I’d learned a long time ago how to keep one part of my head on business while the rest went somewhere it had no business going, so I set my forearms on the wood and gave Devil what he needed.

Devil let the room settle. He was good at that. He didn’t grab a room, he waited until it came to him, and it always came.

“Our man inside got close to something real,” he said, when everyone stopped talking. “Drago’s not venting anymore. He’s working. He’s put word out through the wire that he wants a job done on the outside. Paying, or promising, I don’t know which yet, and it doesn’t matter.” He let that sit a beat. “It’s Zeynep. It was always going to be Zeynep. He’s not asking for us dead first. He’s asking for her to be taken, held for him, and everything else after.”

The table made the low sound a table like ours makes when a thing lands. Not loud. We’re not a shouting kind of club, not in church. Just a shift, a settling of weight, a couple of men leaning back and a couple leaning in.

I felt it go through me like everybody else. Zeynep. I could see her in my mind, watchful, careful with herself the way people get careful when they’ve spent a long time belonging to a man who counted every move they made. She’d come to us out of the worst Dragon Fire ever did, more than half dead of it, and it was Mystic who’d pulled her the rest of the way back to the living. Nobody’d have called those two. Mystic barely spoke, wore his war on the outside and worse underneath, that mismatched stare of his, one eye blue and one gold, that made most people look away before they knew they were doing it. She hadn’t looked away. She’d looked dead at the broke places in him, married him for them, and these last months I’d watched her learn to sit with her back not quite to the wall, watched her unclench in a way I hadn’t figured she had left in her. And she was carrying now. Four, five months along, starting to show it. Mystic’s kid. The men had gotten meaner about keeping those two safe the second her belly rounded, the way a club does when there’s a baby coming even if nobody says much about it.

And Drago wanted her carried back to a cage.

“He can’t get to her from a cell,” Gearhead said. “Whoever he’s payin’ can’t neither, not if we do this right.”

“That’s the job,” Devil said. “That’s why we’re all sitting here.” He put both hands flat on the table. “I want her covered like the president’s daughter. Beef all of it up: the walls, the road, the cameras, the family homes off-property. Nobody on this compound moves alone till it’s done. We rotate it round the clock and we start tonight.”

Mystic hadn’t moved at all since it started, hadn’t so much as shifted his weight, and when he spoke it came hard and final and not offered up for a vote. “Rotate whatever you want on the walls and the road. Ain’t nobody guardin’ her but me.”