The studio that had felt like the first space that was entirely mine felt different now. Smaller. Watched.
The walls I'd chosen had not been enough, apparently.
The things I'd kept private had not been private enough.
20
BROCK
They put me in a Bugatti.
I'd have laughed, if I had the time. Somebody tossed me a fob in that marble entry hall and pointed me at a low blue thing crouched in the courtyard that probably cost more than every house in Valentine put together. I dropped into it and fired it up, and felt the wrong of it right away.
The doors shut too heavy. The whole car sat too low on its springs, sluggish to settle, weighted down with something that wasn't engine. I knew that feel. I'd ridden in enough up-armored vehicles to know one through my own backside.
An armored Bugatti. A two-million-dollar supercar built to stop rifle rounds. There's rich, and then there's a kind of money that doesn't make sense, money with a war chest behind it. The longer I was inside the gates of that estate, the less I liked the smell of any of it.
And it did smell. That's the only way I know to say it. The whole operation had a stink on it I couldn't place, the way a room smells when somebody's standing just around the corner holding his breath. Too clean. Too ready. A private army witha clinic and an armory and a mansion full of stern, dead faces, and my own brother standing in the middle of it telling me they were the good guys with something the size of a continent stuck behind his teeth. I'd spent my whole life learning to trust the itch on the back of my neck, and the back of my neck did not like Dominion Hall.
But that was a problem for later. I built the order of things as I drove, the way I build any op.
One: get to Mary Catherine. Craine had been at her door, and a man like Craine doesn't knock on a door to say hello.
Two: get her somewhere he couldn't reach, and make a plan to put this whole city in the rearview.
Because I was done with Charleston. I'd been here a day and it had handed me an ambush, two corpses, a federal shadow over my family, and a brother knee-deep in something that reeked. The only thing this place had given me worth a damn was a dark-haired woman who'd jumped off a pier, and I'd decided somewhere on that drive that she was coming with me. I didn't know where. Didn't matter. Anywhere the air was clean and nobody knew the name Dane. She was the icing, the one good thing, and I was taking the icing with me.
Tommy had wanted to send people. A whole convoy of them—he'd nearly begged me to take an escort, four men minimum, said the streets weren't safe and I shouldn't move alone. I'd told him no. I move better alone. And there was a piece of cold logic under it too: if Dominion Hall knew Craine was standing at her studio, then Dominion Hall already had an eye on that studio. Somebody of theirs was parked within sight of her door right now, watching. Which meant I wasn't really alone going in—I just hadn't agreed to it.
I didn't love that either. But I filed it and drove.
I made the run across the peninsula faster than I had any right to, the armored beast eating the narrow lanes, one handon the wheel and the other checking the pistol they'd given me. I came up on Wentworth with my eyes already working the parked cars for the watcher I knew was there. Couldn't make him. Whoever it was, he was good.
Then, I was up the stairs and through her door and she was on me before it shut—not in the way I'd spent the drive half hoping. In words. Fast and hard, one on top of the next.
"Who is Craine, what investigation, what did you walk into, is it true the Danes are being investigated, did you know my father's business was—whoareyou, what is Dominion Hall, why does a federal deputy director know my name?—"
I put my hands up. Same as the alley. The universaleasy.
"Hey. Hey. Let me—can I take them one at a time?"
She stopped. Arms crossed, chin up, eyes bright and furious and scared all at once. She gave me a short nod that wasn't really permission, just a pause.
"Craine," I said. "I found out he existed about an hour ago. Same time I found out somebody's running a play to frame the outfit my brother works for. That's the truth, and it's most of what I've got."
"You mean Dominion Hall," she said. Flat. Sharp as a slap.
I stood there a second, thrown. Not by the words. By the way she said them—like they meant something to her, like the name had weight in her mouth. And by something else underneath it that took me a beat to catch.
"How do you know to call it that?" I asked slowly. "I never told you where Tommy was. And—" The other thing landed. "You saidDane. To Craine, the investigation, all of it. I never gave you my last name."
"Because the DanesrunDominion Hall." She said it like she was explaining water to a fish. "Everybody in this city knows that name and nobody says it out loud. And you're one of them."
"I'm a Dane," I said. "Yeah. That part's true." I watched her face when I said it and saw it harden, saw the word land as a confirmation of something she'd already decided. "But I'm telling you straight—I heard the wordsDominion Hallfor the first time tonight. From a man in a car. I came to this city because my brother Tommy called and said he was in trouble. That's the whole of what I know. Tommy, and trouble. I don't know that house. I'd never set foot in it before two hours ago."
She laughed.
Not a good laugh. A short, disbelieving bark of one, the kind people let out when a thing is too absurd to do anything else with.
