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"That would be lovely," she said in a dead, elegant voice.
Following him into his study, she helped settle him into his chair and looked around at the sloppy stacks of paper. What a mess. There were black leather binders crammed to the point of breaking. File folders stuffed wide. Spiral-bound notebooks with pages lolling out of their confines like the tongues of dogs. White loose-leaf paper sprinkled here and there, as if the pages had tried to fly away and gotten only so far.
It was all his diary, or so he maintained. In reality, it was just pile after pile of nonsense, the physical manifestation of his mental chaos.
"Here. Sit, sit." Her father cleared off the seat next to his desk, moving over steno pads that were held together with tan rubber bands.
After she sat down, she put her hands on her knees and squeezed hard, trying not to lose it. It was as if the debris in the room were a spinning magnet that made her own thoughts and machinations rotate even faster, and that was absolutely not the help she needed.
Her father glanced around the office and smiled as if in apology. "Such industry for a comparatively small yield. Rather like harvesting pearls. The hours I have spent herein, the many hours to fulfill my purpose..."
Ehlena barely heard him. If she couldn't afford the rent here, where would they go? Was there anything even cheaper that didn't have rats and hissing cockroaches in it? How would her father fare in an unfamiliar environment? Dearest Virgin Scribe, she'd assumed they'd hit bottom the night he'd burned down the proper house they'd been renting. What was lower than this?
She knew she was in trouble when everything got blurry.
Her father's voice continued on, marching across her panicked silence. "I have endeavored to record with faithfulness all that I saw..."
Ehlena didn't hear much more.
She cracked in half. Sitting in the little side chair, swamped by her father's mindless, useless prattle, confronted by her actions and where a bad call had landed both of them, she wept.
It was about so much more than losing the job. It was Stephan. It was what had happened with Rehvenge. It was the fact that her father was an adult who couldn't comprehend the realities of their situation.
It was that she was so alone.
Ehlena held herself and wept, hoarse breaths barking out of her lips until she was too exhausted to do anything but sag into her own lap.
Eventually, she heaved a great sigh and wiped her eyes with the sleeve of the uniform she no longer needed anymore.
When she looked up, her father was sitting stock-still in his chair, his expression one of utter shock. "Verily...my daughter."
See, this was the thing. They might have lost all the monetary trappings of their previous station, but old habits died hard. The reserve of the glymera still defined their discourse-so a great wailing session was tantamount to her flipping onto her back at the breakfast table and having an alien bust out of her stomach.
"Forgive me, Father," she said, feeling like an utter fool. "I believe I shall excuse myself."
"No...wait. You were going to read."
She closed her eyes, her skin tightening up all over her body. On some level, her whole life was defined by his mental pathology, and though for the most part she saw her sacrifices as his due, tonight she was too raw to be able to pretend the crucial importance of something as worthless as his "work."
"Father, I..."
One of the desk drawers opened and shut. "Here, daughter. Take into thy hands more than just a passage."
She dragged her lids open...
And had to lean forward to make sure she was seeing things right. Between her father's two palms was a perfectly aligned stack of white pages about an inch thick.
"This is my work," he said simply. "A book for you, mine daughter."
Downstairs in the Tudor safe house, Rehv waited by the windows in the living room, staring out over the rolling lawn. The clouds had cleared, and a half-assed moon hung winter-bright in the sky. In his numb hand, he held his new cell phone, which he had just clipped shut with a curse.
He couldn't believe that above him his mother was on her deathbed and that at this very moment his sister and her hellren were speeding to beat the sunrise to get here...and yet work was raising its ugly horned head.
Another dead drug dealer. Which made three in the last twenty-four hours.
Xhex had been short and to the point, which was her way. Unlike Ricky Martinez and Isaac Rush, whose bodies had been found down by the river, this guy had turned up in his car in a strip mall parking lot with a bullet through the back of the skull. Which meant that the car had to have been driven there with the body in it: No way anyone would be stupid enough to pop a motherfucker in a place that undoubtedly had security-camera coverage. As the police scanner hadn't reported anything further, though, they were going to have to wait for the newspapers and the morning news on TV tomorrow for more details.
But here was the problem, and the reason that he'd cursed.
All three of them had made buys from him within the last two nights.
Which was why Xhex had interrupted him at his mother's. The drug business was not merely deregulated, but totally unregulated, and the stasis point that had been reached in Caldwell so that he and his high-level broker colleagues could make money was a very delicate kind of thing.
As a big player, his suppliers were a combination of Miami traffickers, New York harbor importers, Connecticut meth labbers, and Rhode Island X makers. They were all businessmen, just like him, and most of them were independents, i.e., unaffiliated with the mob here in the States. The relationships were solid, the men on the other end as careful and scrupulous as he was: what they did was simply a matter of financial transactions and product changing hands, just like any other legitimate segment of the economy. Shipments came into Caldwell to various residences and were transferred to ZeroSum, where Rally was in charge of the sampling and the cutting down and the packaging.
It was a well-oiled machine that had taken ten years to set up, and required a combination of well-reimbursed employees, threats of bodily harm, actual beatings, and constant relationship building to maintain.
Three dead bodies was enough to throw the whole arrangement into the shitter, causing not just an economic shortfall, but a power struggle on the lower levels that no one needed: Someone was picking off people on his turf, and his colleagues were going to wonder if he was doing a discipline or, worse, being disciplined himself. Prices would fluctuate, relationships would be strained, information would get twisted.
This needed tending to.
He had to make some calls to reassure his importers and producers that he was in control of Caldwell and that nothing was going to impede the sale of their goods. But Christ, why now?
Rehv's eyes shifted to the ceiling.
For a moment, he fantasized about giving it all up, except that was just bullshit. As long as the princess was in his life, he had to stay in business, because there was no way in hell he was going to let that bitch take down his family's fortunes. God knew Bella's father had done enough in that direction by making bad financial decisions.
As long as the princess was aboveground, Rehv would remain the drug lord of Caldie and he would make his calls-although not in his mother's house, not during this family time. Business could wait until family had been served.
Although one thing was clear. Going forward, Xhex, Trez, and iAm were going to have to keep an even tighter eye on things, because sure as shit, if someone was ambitious enough to try to knock off those middlemen, they were more than likely going to attempt a run at a fat boy like Rehv. Trouble was, it was going to be important for Rehv to be seen around the club. Showing face was critical during unsettled times, when his contacts in the biz would be looking to see if he was going to run and hide. Better to be perceived as the person who might be doing the killings than a pu**y-ass who ducked out of his turf when the going got tough.
For no good reason, he opened his phone and checked for missed calls. Again. Nothing from Ehlena. Still.
She was probably just busy at the clinic, all caught up in the hustle. Of course she was. And it wasn't like the facility was in danger of being sacked. It was in a remote location and had plenty of security, and he would have heard something if anything bad had happened.
Right?
Damn it.
With a frown, he checked his watch. Time for two more pills.
He headed into the kitchen and was drinking a glass of milk and popping more penicillin when a pair of headlights hit the front of the house. As the Escalade pulled up in front and its doors opened, he put his glass down, plugged his cane into the floor, and went to greet his sister and her mate and their young.
