Page 40 of Sting of Sin

The clubhouse phone rang.

Hex went rigid. "It’s Holly."

He put it on speaker.

No voice. No hello, no Holly, nobody saying a word. Just a line open into somewhere, a room with a hard flat echo, the hum of a machine, and under it, far off and horribly calm, a man's voice going on and on and on, gentle and level and endless, saying things we couldn't quite make out to someone who never answered.

The whole room stopped breathing.

She couldn't talk. Wherever she was, whatever had finally cracked her open and turned her, Holly couldn't say one word, because he was standing close enough that the phone was catching his voice. So she'd done the only thing left to her, powered the phone on under his nose, dialed us blind, and hidden it somewhere with the line still open, and prayed to God we'd understand what she couldn't say.

"It's live, that's all I need." Rex's voice had gone flat and fast, his fingers a blur. "Phone's talking to towers, two of them, three, I've got it triangulating. Hold on. Hold on." The map bloomed up on the screen, circles swinging wide and then drawing in, narrowing, closing. "Come on, give me the overlap, come on—"

The circles snapped shut on a single point.

A quiet road. A dot at the end of it, well off the county line, nothing around it for a mile in any direction. The kind of place a man could scream and no one would ever come.

Throttle already had his keys in his fist.

"That's her," Rex breathed. "That's the phone. Thirty-one minutes if you—"

"Twenty," Throttle said, and he was already moving, already at the door, and I was the half step behind him now that he'd been behind me all morning, the two of us going out as one thing. In the doorway I caught the back of his neck the way he'd caught mine in that hallway a lifetime ago and pulled his forehead to mine, hard, one second, so he'd know.

"Together," I said.

"Together." His eyes were wet and his jaw was iron. "Come on, brother. Let's go get my sister."

And we ran for our bikes with the whole Devil's House at our backs, and we rode like the dead were chasing us, toward the one place I should have been looking the entire time.

Not out there. Never out there.

At the end of a quiet road, in a quiet house, where a patient man had been waiting to finish what a single minute in the woods had interrupted.

I opened it up till the engine screamed, my brother's light blazing beside mine, and I prayed to a God I'd given up on to let us be in time, and behind us the whole club came on like thunder.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

HE SETTLED BACK into the chair like a man with all the time in the world, and he began, and while he talked two things started happening that he didn't know about.

The fog was thinning. Whatever Holly had given me had been meant to walk me quiet out a gate, not hold me under for hours, and slow, so slow, the feeling was creeping back into my hands, my feet, the wires reconnecting one at a time. I kept my eyes half-lidded and my body slack and let him think I was farther gone than I was. The other thing was lower, under the fog, and it was new: I was getting angry. I had been afraid for four years. I had not once gotten angry. It was clean and it was hot and it was the most mine thing I'd felt in a very long time, and I banked it, and I kept it low, and I listened.

"I saw you in a nightclub," he said. "Did you know that? You were young and vivacious. You were dancing with your friend, and you were laughing, like nothing could touch you." He smiled at the memory, fond, fond, God help me. "I knew inside ten seconds. I have a sense for it, the way some men have a sense for a good horse. The frightened ones hide it well, but I always know. You were perfect. Hiding some deep sadness. Already a little haunted. What would it take to bring all that out?”

"You didn't know me," I said. It came out cracked, barely there, but it came, and I watched it please him, the broken little sound of it. “Why take a chance one me?”

"No," he agreed gently. “I didn’t. And it wasn’t desire, Beatrice, if that's what you're reaching for and I’m positive it is. I want to be honest with you, you've earned honesty. I selected you. There's a difference, and it matters, and by the end you'll understand why it's the kinder of the two." He folded his hands. "Love is so careless. Selection is attention. I have given you more pure, patient attention than any man who ever claimed to love you. Than the one on the motorcycle, even. Especially him."

The anger banked hotter. I kept my face slack.

"The boyfriend was simple," he went on. "I won't dress it up. I found a pretty, sadistic, greedy young man and I paid him to be exactly the boy you'd want. To be patient. To be kind. To never push. To earn that careful trust of yours one inch at a time, because I knew it couldn't be taken from you, a girl like you, it had to be given. And you gave it to him." His head tilted. "That's the part people never believe about my work. I don't break the lock. I convince you to hand me the key. The boy was the first key. You walked into those trees on your own two feet, holding the hand of someone you trusted, because I had spent four months making sure you trusted him. You were never taken, Beatrice. Not really. You were delivered. You delivered yourself."

Something in me went white. "He's dead," I said. "Eli and Caleb—"

"I know." For the first time a flicker of something cold crossed the warmth. "They were very thorough, your two animals. They got every man who put a hand on you that night. The boy. The four I hired to help break you." He leaned in, and his voice dropped into that low smooth register, the woods register, the one that lived in my nightmares. "But they never got me, did they. Because I wasn't a hand on you. I was the voice. I stood forty feet back in the black and I told those men exactly how to hurt you, exactly how to keep you quiet, exactly what we were waiting for, and not one of them ever knew my name or saw my face, so when your brother and your lover tore the truth out of that boy, there was no thread on the other end of it. They killed my instruments." He sat back, satisfied. "You can't follow a song back to the man who only ever hummed it."

I thought of Eli this morning, we got them all, Bee, we got every one, sure of it, sure for four years. And of me telling him, you didn't get the shadow. I'd been right. I was always right. The knowing rose up in me like a tide and I had to hold my face still against it.

"The man on the hill," I made myself say. "The crew. The one I felt. That was you."