Three for a girl
Four for a boy
Five for silver
Six for gold
Seven for a secret never to be told
I get the creeping, nagging feeling that there’s plenty of omens there if I want to unpack. But I blink and look away from the crows before I can count them. Today’s not a day for fuckingomens.My father had a thousand of these stupid sayings and not one of them ever did him any good.
I shift my grip on the shotgun and try, with all the willpower I possess, to settle into the patient stillness that has gotten me through every job worth getting through.
This is it. The final job. Then you’re free of your father and your uncle and the Bratva, forever.
But the Zen I’m seeking doesn’t take root.
Too many things are still unsettled and uncertain. Raymond wasoffthis morning. Too jolly by miles. Too hands-on with Bill. Too goddamn smiley. I’ve spent years watching him preen and bluster around the firm, so I know the shape of his moods. This morning is wrong-shaped.
What if he knows?
I work that thought over. Bill’s wife could have said something about what she saw last night. And if she did, then what? Is that what’s behind that ugly fucking grin? What if my plan today is not actually my plan at all, buthis?
Twigs crunching drag my attention. Off to my right. Too close.
My hand drops to the safety.Slow, slow, no sudden movement. I turn my head only as much as I need to.
A figure steps out from behind a birch. I snap the gun into place, whirl around, raise it to my shoulder, thumb off the safety, and prepare to kill or be killed?—
But then I stop.
It isn’t Raymond.
It’s Bill Oglethorpe.
“Easy, son!” he cries out, palms up, his own gun broken open and tucked under his arm. “Just me.”
“Mr. Oglethorpe.” I let my hands soften on the wood. “Sorry. Reflex.”
“Good reflex.” His eyes flick down to my white-knuckled grip and back up. “Most of the boys out here couldn’t shoot themselves in the foot if they tried. You hold a gun like a man who’s held one before.”
“My father taught me.” It isn’t a lie, exactly. Just an enormously pruned version of the truth.
Bill nods. He looks, in this light, much older than he does in the office. HIs skin is grey and thin. The wax cap pulls down too low over his ears. There are fine red threads in the whites of his eyes that seem to me like a combination long night of not enough sleep, too much booze, and perhaps something else, too.
If I had to guess, I’d say he’safraid.
“Come talk with me for a minute, Satyrin,” Bill says. He’s drifting deeper into the woods, toward a gap in the trees where the trunks begin to cluster closer. Wary but without a choice, I close my own gun, sling it under my arm to mirror him, and follow.
We move maybe ten yards. Not much, but enough that the buzz of voices from the assembled men sinks into the snow behind us. Bill stops where two birches grow out of the same root and you can’t see anyone on either side unless you stick your head out.
He lifts his flask, unscrews the cap, takes a long pull, screws it back. Strangely, for a man who’s always quick to refill my drink, he doesn’t offer me any.
“How long you been with the firm now, son?” he asks, eyes on the trees.
“Four years this March.”
He nods to himself. I suspect he knew that already. “You’re sharp. Sharper than half the partners. I’d have made you partner last spring if it weren’t for—” He stops himself and smiles a little, sourly. “If it weren’t for politics.”
