Page 23 of Crow’s Shadow

“Eat your bread,” he says. “Grieve, if you like. It is good for you. It clears the ground.” He looks back at me over his shoulder, and the tenderness is total, and it is the most frightening thing he owns. “And when you are done grieving, think on the thing I keep telling you and you keep refusing to hear. The book was never the point. The club was never the point. The man you follow was never going to be enough to fill the hole I can see in you from across a room in the dark.” The door swings under his hand. “You were always the point, Shadow. You have been the point for twenty years. The only question still on the table is whether you walk into what you are on your own two feet, or whether I have to do to you what I did to her.”

The door shuts.

The chain is cold on my ankle. Somewhere above me the birds go over, free and indifferent, and I sit in the gray with a mother I’ve known for three days and a man who murdered her standing on the other side of the door.

He is coming for me. All of Grimstone is coming for me, because it is the code, no one left behind, and at the front of them, driving the long black car, will be the man who carried me out of my mother’s fire and never once told me whose fire it was.

I do not know anymore which of version of him I am waiting for.

I only know the thing in my chest is awake now, and it is done being unseen, and when the door opens next, for whoever opens it, I mean to be ready.

Chapter eleven

CROW

My chair goes over backward. The crack of it against the concrete is the loudest thing in the room, louder than the founding skull grinning down off the wall, louder than fifteen years of calling this old man, brother.

Loki does not move.

The stillness of him stops me two steps in, close enough to catch the stale whiskey coming off his skin. A man who thinks he is about to die throws his hands up. He begs, he swings or he bolts for the door. Loki only sits there, his mug crooked on the wood where he set it down wrong, and he watches me come, and he lets me.

“Crow.” Loco, says softly, he never has to be anything louder. “Stand down.”

“He sold her.”

“You don’t know that yet.”

“Marchetti gave him to me on a concrete floor.”

“Marchetti’s dead. Dead men in a torture chair hand you whatever buys them one more breath.” Loco rounds the table without hurry and fills the gap between me and the old man. “Your words. This room. You told me a man under the knife is a mirror. He gives you back the face you walked in wearing.” His eyes hold mine, flat and patient. “You walked in there wearing Loki.”

The truth of it lands somewhere below my ribs. It does nothing to slow my blood.

“Then let him say it wasn’t him.”

Every head at the table turns to the old man. Twenty years patched, our secretary. The one who set the floor safe with his own two hands, who looped the key over a half-feral girl’s neck the winter she turned nineteen, back when nobody else in this club would look at her twice. He opens his mouth.

Nothing comes out.

Stryker’s jaw locks with an audible click. “There. Look at him. There’s your answer, Pres.”

“Shut your mouth, Stryker.”

“Twenty years and he can’t say two words to clear himself.” Stryker is on his feet, the vein in his temple standing proud. “The girl’s gone. The book’s exposed. Every buyer we ever cleaned for is one leak away from rolling on us, and the man who keeps our paper is sitting there swallowing his own tongue.” He jabs a finger down the length of the table. “That’s not grief. That’s a guilty man doing the math on how much we know.”

“Enough.” Loco doesn’t raise his voice because he doesn’t fucking need to. Both palms come down on the table as his eyes sweep the room, and every man there knows better than to keep talking.

Then he looks at Loki, and the anger in his face shifts just enough to show what’s underneath it. This isn’t only about betrayal. This fucking hurts.

“Loki, look at me. Not the table. Me.” He waits until Loki finally raises his head. “Tell them it wasn’t you.”

The old man’s eyes come up. They go past Loco. Past all of them. They land on me, on the man this table sends down the hall when a thing needs doing, and whatever he sees coming for him across the wood, he does not flinch.

His voice, when it comes, is a scrape of nothing. “I don’t know,” Loki whispers. “God help me. I have to think. There’s something wrong with the shape of it and I can’t get my hands around it. Give me the room. Give me an hour. I have to think.”

“He has to think.” Stryker throws it at the ceiling. “You hear this?”

“I hear a man who isn’t lying to me.” Storm, quiet, from Loco’s right, the way he gets when he’s holding the peace together with his bare hands. He is the only one still sitting. “A guilty man walks in with his lie already built, Stryker. He doesn’t sit there falling apart trying to remember how they got him. I’ve watched Loki lie for this club for over a decade. That’s not what his lying looks like.”