Page 151 of Flames and Blood

The pause on the line goes on long enough that I can hear his office behind him.

“Out this month, or out?”

“Out.”

“Since when?”

“A while ago. I’ve only just got around to saying it.”

He asks where he should send work now. I give him two names better than mine, and he takes them, and that’s the end of a career.

I put the phone down and sit in the quiet.

This is the part worth doing alone, where nobody’s watching me run through the implications. Work I’m good at, from people who don’t ask me questions. A city where I have never once been the strangest thing in it, and where the daylight is a problem I solved decades ago.

Against that, a mountain full of people who’ll be polite to my face and mean none of it.

It isn’t a hard choice.

That’s what would have surprised me a year ago. It isn’t even close.

I take three days more than I need, because she asked for a week and a week is what she’ll get. I spend them leaving my affairs in order. On the fifth night I lock the door behind me, and I don’t stand there looking at it, because it isn’t that kind of room and I’m not that kind of man.

Then I drive north.

There’s a second thing on my mind the whole way, and there’s nothing romantic in it.

Somebody walked out of that hall while her mother was still on her feet, and nobody has seen them since. Whoever it was knew what her cousin had done and let him do it. That person is still breathing. I really don’t like that.

It’s late when I reach the gate. Aldis is on it, which I don’t believe is an accident.

“She’s in her quarters,” he says.

“How is she?”

“She’s been down to this gate twice a night since you left.” He stands aside. “I didn’t say that.”

I move through the hallways of the Eyrie without drawing obvious attention, though I know I’m being observed. I reach a door to a suite I’ve never entered and take a moment to myself before I open it.

Her arm is out of the wrap. That’s the first thing I see when I walk in. She’s sideways in an oversized chair with a lamp burning low, and she doesn’t get up.

“You’re late,” she says.

“I’m a day over. You said a week.”

“I said take a week. That isn’t the same as spend one.”

“No.” I shut the door. “I didn’t need it.”

She goes very still.

“Say that again.”

“I didn’t need a week.” I come further in. “I knew it in that yard while you were still talking. I’ve known it since a road in the dark with nothing to do but drive. There was never a version of this where I left you and stayed gone.”

She’s out of the chair before I’ve said another word. She comes into me hard enough that I go back a half step, and both her arms come around my neck. For a long time, neither of us speaks.

“Say it out loud,” she says, into my shirt. “I want to hear the words.”