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“We have to figure it out for her.”
“It’s impossible!” Archer snarls, his voice low so only a hiss travels across the room. “She’s asking to be shot in the fucking head.”
“She’s asking for compassion,” I argue back. “And a chance to say goodbye to her dying mother.”
“And when Vallejo’s soldiers take her out on the way there?” he growls. “What was even the point? Her mother still doesn’t get to see her. She gets no closure before she dies. And our witness is dead.”
“Our witness is a person.” I stalk closer. “A living, breathing human being who had a life three days ago. She didn’t ask to be brought into this, and she still hasn’t agreed to testify. She’s being told what to do at every turn, and no one is stopping to give her a voice.”
“Her voice is the one shouting about fake mustaches and big hats! She’s twenty-one-years-old. She doesn’t know this world the way you and I do. She doesn’t seem to grasp the finality that is death. So forgive me for not putting a lot of weight in her voice, Banks.”
“I’m four years into pre-med.” Rory’s gentle tone tears me around and brings me to a stop to find her standing in the doorway. The rage in her expression has been replaced with a deep pain. The tantrum she was throwing, swapped with wisdom beyond her years. “I know exactly how final death is. I know that, after this week, or maybe next if we’re lucky, my mother is going to be dead. And once that happens, it’s forever. I won’t get to bring her back. I won’t get to share anything with her anymore. I won’t get to hug her. And I won’t get to make sure she knows she’s loved.That,” she presses, swallowing so her throat bobs, “is the finality in death. I’m asking you in the nicest way possible to help me see her.”
Her phone bleats, surprising us all, but none more so than Rory herself as she jumps and rescues the device from her back pocket. She reads the screen, and the instant whatever name on the front registers in her mind, her entire body slumps. Sniffling, she looks up and shows us the ringing phone. “It’s the hospital. But it always hurts, because I don’t know if it’shercalling to talk to me. Or if it’s her doctor, calling to tell me she’s passed.”
Licking her lips and swiping her thumb across the screen, she turns from us with moisture in her eyes, tears that strip my soul. “Hello? This is Rory.”
I hold my breath, like whatever she says next has the power to make or break us all. So when her voice cracks and she exhales, “Hey, Mom,” I release my breath again and turn away. “For fuck’s sake.”
My entire being is tangled up in the life and death of a woman I’ve never even met before.
“We’re gonna have to get them back in the same room,” Fletch rumbles, scrubbing a hand through his inch-long hair. “It’s all fun and games to keep a girl alive. But letting her mother die in her absence is cruel and goes against everything we stand for.”
“I don’t know how to make it happen.” Archer walks to the fireplace and rests his hands on the mantel. He wraps his fingers around the edges and bends, as though to stretch his shoulders and back. “Vallejo’s people already told us who she is, where she is, and that she’s dying.” He shakes his head side-to-side. “How the fuck do we get Rory in there to see the woman, when we know for a damn fact they’re watching the place?”
“Maybe we bring the mother to us,” Fletch ponders. “Put her in an ambulance. Transfer her to another facility for palliative care. Bring her here instead.”
“They’re gonna follow her wherever she goes,” Archer counters. I have nothing useful to add. I have no plan, and I don’t know this city. So I leave the detectives to their own devices and instead, I follow the scent of lavender and bergamot through the house that smells of stale air otherwise.
The stark contrasts make it ridiculously easy, so much so, I intend to air this place out tonight and fill it with a myriad of scents so that, if at some point, these assholes come looking for Rory, they won’t follow their nose right to the panic room she’ll be stuffed inside.
“You sound so tired, Mom.”
I step into the kitchen and glance around for Rory’s sweet voice, and although I come up empty, I catch sight of her shoes just around the corner. I hear the groan and squeak of an old staircase.
She’s sitting down.
So I stay where I am and press my back to the wall. To listen. Because I’m a nosy bastard, and Aurora Swanson is a woman guarded. She keeps herself all bottled up somewhere deep inside her soul so the woman I know is just a mere fraction of who she is underneath.
And the woman underneath somehow has the ability to make men bend to her demands. Not just me, but the hardened Malone, too. He’s a dick, and he pushes her hard. But he’s put her in his own family’s home, instead of some shitty little shack in the backwoods of Montana. He worries for her, but he’s still going to come up with a plan on how to make a trip to the hospital work.
He’ll never be someone I consider a friend. And the jury is still out on whether he trades powder for money just like his daddy did before him. But he cares, and for that alone, I know Aurora wields a magic so few others do.
“Yousound tired,” the woman, Eleanor, counters without a shred of remorse. “Are you sleeping, baby?”
“Yeah.” Rory sniffs, forcing a lightness into her tone. “I have this massive paper due soon, and it’s sending me a tad insane. But I’ve got it under control. I was going to try to visit you today, Mom. But I—”
“It’s okay,” the woman cuts in before Rory can come up with an excuse. “Whatever it is, sweetheart, it’s okay. I promise.”
“I’m gonna get there, okay? These last few days have been nuts. Definitely not what I was expecting on Sunday when I was thinking about the week ahead.”
“Is Nolan giving you trouble again?”
Frowning, I make my way to the long, stone kitchen counter and lower onto a stool. I hold my breath and pray the chair doesn’t squeak in protest.
Who the fuck is Nolan?
“No.” Rory snorts in response. “I mean, he calls every few days and tells me how he’s got a fellowship at some hokey ass school I don’t care about. He and Mrs. Robinson got funding for some research thing they’re doing together about the Second World War. I dunno.” She sniffs again and shrugs; I catch the shadowed movement along the hall. “The war is dead, and so are my feelings for that idiot.”
