Page 23

I could have been out of Ashlock inside two weeks.

And I was going to slow it all down for a woman who weighed nothing at all and would barely reach my chest.

Because a man didn’t take a thing before he knew what it was. That wasn’t hunger, that was stupidity, and stupidity was the one sin my father never forgave. I had a shape of her and nothing more. A tiny frame. Sugar. And a thousand small, careful movements a day, every one of them designed to make a room forget she was standing in it.

And that tremor.

There it was, every single time I said that surname. Something moved behind her eyes and she buried it. She answered to Vale half a beat too late and tried to hide it. I had no doubt that every time she heard it, she was translating it first. I had worn countless names in my life, so I knew what that half a beat cost.

She was running from something. I had never in my life been more certain of anything. So, yes, the order of things was simple enough, sitting on that bunk with her dressing on my arm and her touch on me still lingering like a burn.

Learn every hidden inch of her.

Every fact about my little nurse that existed anywhere in the world, I would discover it. And there would be plenty, because people are careless with themselves. They scatter their whole lives about and then hide behind a new name as though it were a locked door. I would soon know everything. Where she sleeps. What she eats. Who she speaks to and who she never calls. What she is running from, and who is doing the chasing.

I would pull it out of her safe little world one thread at a time and watch the whole thing come apart in my hands. That was the good part of it. Nobody ever tells you that.

Not just the taking.

But the knowing.

To learn a thing completely before you put a hand on it. To know which door she checks twice, and which name makes her flinch and how many seconds of silence it takes before she starts to talk. That was the part of the hunt that was worth doing slowly.

To truly know one’s prey.

After all, it was what I was best at. Unraveling lives bit by bit, until enough of it comes away to show what is underneath.

As for this plan, the warden was next on the list, and he would no doubt take longer. He had come to look at me on my first day, from behind glass, with two men either side of him. The way you look at something in a zoo you paid extra to see.

Soft hands. A wedding ring he turned around and around. Most likely a photograph of a family on a desk somewhere in a wing of that building where every lock works for him. Money didn’t buy a man like that. Money insulted him, and then he wrote a report about it.

No, a man like that is bought with what frightens him. And every man alive is frightened of something, and it is always sitting somewhere a telephone can reach. That was my whole trade, and my father didn’t raise a thug. He raised a man who finds the soft place in a house and leans on it until the house opens up and crumbles.

Speaking of plans in motion, a rolling library cart came around the block at four. A trolley, a bored trusty pushing it, and paperbacks with the covers hanging off them. Nobody looked twice at a man taking a book, and nobody in that building had looked twice at me since half past eight that morning when I proved how hard it was to break an insane man who bleeds for fun.

I held my hand out, already knowing the choice of book was made for me. I even smirked as one was put into my hand and I read the title… Hm… fitting. Yakov certainly had a sense of humor.

Although Crime and Punishment was apt, most would say my own story had a great deal of the first and not nearly enough of the second. Of course, the dead can’t complain.

As for the book, it had been hollowed out. Somebody with a steady hand had cut the pages into a neat rectangle, and lying in it, in the middle of hundreds of pages, was a phone the size of a cigarette packet.

The rest of that day went the way days go in here. Slow, and then slower. Evening meal, and the shuffle and clang of it. Then the last head count of the night, and the block went dark.

I waited it all out. And somewhere around midnight I dialed.

“Boss.” My second answered the call the way he always did.

“Report,” I replied, keeping my tone quiet enough not to be overheard. After all, there were always snitches with a death wish.

“It is all arranged,” he said. “Fourteen days. We have the extraction plan, and we will have enough of their uniforms bought and paid for by then to make it happen.”

Fourteen days. The very same fourteen days that would put me back in her infirmary to have the stitches cut out of me. I didn’t take even a second to think about it before I ordered,

“Hold it.” There was a pause on the line. In ten years, nobody has ever asked me to explain myself, and lucky for him, he didn’t start then. He simply asked,

“You are certain?”

“I have more pressing business here.” I was turning the wrapper over in my other hand while I said it. A fun-size bar, the paper gone soft and creased, lifted out of a trash can by the bed after she fled the room. And she did flee; there is no other word for it. I knew I intimidated her. The thought naturally brought me satisfaction. An easy weapon to use on her. It would also make the sight of that spark of defiance all the brighter when she was brave and bold enough to let it be seen.