Page 12 of Crow’s Shadow

And on the floor beside it, small, dark and horribly familiar, a shape that stops my heart in my chest.

Not her. I make myself see it clear before the fear finishes me. Not her body. Her jacket. The battered leather one she takes off the hook by the chapel door, dropped in a heap like it was pulled off her, and beside it, thrown into the corner where it skidded, catching the weak light on its little chrome slide is the .380. Grim’s gun. The one he gave her two birthdays ago and pretended he didn’t.

She never went anywhere without it. She’d never leave it. And there’s one spent casing on the concrete three feet away, winking up at me, which means she got a shot off, which means she fought, which means whatever happened in this room, my Shadow did not walk out of it on her own two feet.

Grim crouches by the jacket. Goes very still. When he speaks his voice has gone somewhere I’ve never heard it go.

“Crow.” He lifts two fingers off the concrete, and they come up dark and wet and red. “This is fresh.”

The room tips. Twenty years of keeping myself cold comes apart at once, and what’s underneath is anything but cold. It is hard, ripping through ever wall I have put up to keep it buried.

They took her.

My hand closes around the .380 until the little chrome grip cuts into my palm. I want something alive in this room. Something with a throat but there isn’t anything.

Somebody took my Shadow.

Somebody walked into a room I could have kept her out of, put hands on her, and made her bleed onto this floor. She fought back. Got a shot off. Went down swinging with a gun a big man gave to her as a joke.

And while she was fighting for her life, I was forty minutes south telling myself she’d gone to sulk over coffee.

I saw the wild come up under the fear last night. She asked me for one thing, and I walked away because it was easier than giving it to her.

Somebody else set the trap. But I’m the one who sent her out into the dark alone to walk into it.

“Crow.” Grim’s on his feet now, watching me, wary, the way you watch a thing you’re not sure is still on your side. “Talk to me. What do we do?”

I look at the blood on his fingers. I look at the little gun she fought with. And the man I’ve been for twenty years, the quiet one, the controlled one, the ghost in leather who never feels a thing, I feel him step aside, and I let him, and I do not think I’m getting him back.

“We find every man who touched this room,” I say, and I don’t recognize my own voice. “And we put them in the ground. Slow.”

Chapter seven

CROW

Blood tells you things if you know how to listen, and I have spent years learning the language.

Grim wants to leave the second we have the jacket and the gun bagged. Wants to floor the hearse back to Grimstone and put the whole club on the road. It is the right call, the smart call, and I cannot make my feet do it, because I am down on my knees on the concrete of this gutted boathouse reading her blood like the last page she will ever write me.

“It is not a lot,” I say. The words come out of the cold man, the one who measures things. “Spatter here, low, off a blow. She was upright when it landed. This smear, she went down here, but there is no pool, no arterial, nothing that says she bled out on this floor.” I touch two fingers to the edge of it, tacky, going brown. “Couple hours. She was alive when they carried her out. She was alive.”

“Crow.” Grim crouches across the stain from me, and his voice is careful, the voice you use on a dog that has been kicked too many times to trust a hand. “You saying that for the case, or for you?”

“Both.”

“Then hear me. She was alive two hours ago. That’s a clock, not a comfort, and we’re burning it standing here reading floors.” He stands, holds a hand down. “Up. You are the best tracker this club has. Be that. Not this.”

He is right, and it is the only thing that gets me off the concrete. I take the hand.

That is when I see the chair.

Wooden, dead center of the room, angled a little off true like someone rose from it fast. And underneath it, kicked back into the shadow of the legs, catching nothing, black on black, a phone.

I have it before Grim finishes turning around.

“Burner,” I say. “Same as last night. Screen cracked the same.” My thumb wakes it. No lock. They wanted it found, or they did not care, and I do not know which is worse. One call log. One number, one connection, forty minutes ago, incoming, and I stand there in the gray light with the thing humming in my hand and I understand what it is.

“They put her on the phone.” My voice has gone somewhere flat and terrible. “They sat her in that chair and made her talk to somebody before they took her. This is how they run it. A voice in her ear before they took her.” I close my fist around it until the cracked screen bites my palm. “He wanted her to hear him do it.”