Page 16 of Crow’s Shadow

“Boss, she’s not secured to the—”

“I said leave us. She is not going to hurt me.” A pause, and I hear the smile land in it. “Are you, Shadow?”

I get my first real look at him as the guards file out. Not what I built in the dark. I had made him a monster, all teeth. He is worse. He is a gentleman. Fifties, silver at the temples, though something under the skin of him feels older than that, a coat that cost more than the car I drove into his trap. He pulls a second chair out of the shadow, sets it a careful few feet from me, and sits the way you sit down to coffee with an old friend, elbows on his knees, studying my face with a terrible tenderness.

“There she is,” he says softly. “Maren’s eyes. You have no idea what it does to me, looking into Maren’s eyes again after all this time.”

“You keep saying that name like I am supposed to know it.”

“You will.”

“Untie me and say it to my face without your babysitters in the room, then.”

He laughs, delighted, a real laugh, and it is the most frightening thing he has done yet. “Oh, she has spirit. Good. I would have been so disappointed if they had let it go soft in you, all those years in a garage full of grease and dead men.” He leans in. “Tell me something. Your club. Do they even know what they’ve had under their noses all these years? Keeping you, using you to tend their precious little book while Crow guards diamonds and calls it stone.”

“The book is what is valuable,” I say. “And you will never read a line of it, because I am the only one who can. So, whatever you think this is, whatever you think you are going to squeeze out of me—”

“I do not want the book, sweetheart.” Gentle. Almost sorry for me. “I told you as much in Darkwater. Were you not listening? The book was bait, sweetheart. I needed you outside of those gates, away from your cleaner and his gun. And you walked out all by yourself.”

And there it is. The R code. Two coffins out three weeks back, forty-one pounds of hardware under a dead man named Alvarez, a buyer I have been writing into my own book for eight months in my own careful hand and never once laid eyes on.

“Renner,” I say. Not a question.

Something pleased moves through his face. “So, the book does talk. Yes. Sy Renner. Your club’s newest, most generous client.” The smile cools by several degrees. “And your mother’s oldest friend. Though friend is not the word she would have chosen, by the end.”

“What did you do to her?” The words are out before I can kill them, and his smile tells me I’ve given him exactly what he wanted. It tells him I care. It tells him a mother I never got to have is a bruise he can press with one soft thumb.

“Ah.” He sits back, and something in him settles, satisfied, a card player who has seen my hand. “No. Not yet. That is a gift, Shadow, and gifts are for people who have earned them, and you and I are only just getting acquainted.” He tilts his head. “Would you like to know what happens now? Nothing. That is the part you’ll hate most. You’ll eat, you’ll sleep. Nobody here touches you unless I allow it. And every day, you and I will talk. Until you understand what you are.”

“And then?”

His smile barely moves. “Then you choose me.”

“I will never choose one single thing you—”

“You will.” No heat in it at all, which is what makes it unbearable. “They always do, in the end. Well.” A flicker crosses him, there and gone, something that on another man I would call grief. “Almost always. Your mother was the exception. Your mother looked at everything I was offering her, and she said no.” He stands, smooths the coat down the front. “And you have seen how that ended. Or you have not. But you will wish you had, when the day comes and I tell you.”

I should keep my mouth shut. I should sit small and frightened and let him walk away thinking he has me read. But the wild thing in me has been down in the dark all my life, unseen, unclaimed, and something about this soft-spoken monster talking about my mother as if she is his to grieve pulls it all the way up my throat.

“She said no to you.” My voice comes out steadier than I have any right to. “Good for her. Must have looked at you and seen exactly what I see. A man with all that money and power who still has to tie a woman to the floor to make her listen.”

For the first time, the tenderness slips. Only at the edges, but I see what lives underneath it. Patience without kindness. A man who could wait years to hurt me and call the waiting love.

“You are going to be so much more trouble than she was,” he murmurs. “I find I have missed it. That particular kind of no.”

And that is when it happens.

And this is when it happens. Something punches awake behind my sternum.

Not Crow. Not the strange pull I’ve spent half my life pretending I don’t feel. This is mine. It rises hot and vicious through my chest, fed by fear and fury and one I have never been allowed to own.

Mother.

The lights explode, every dead work light strung along the cannery ceiling, forty years cold, blows at once.

Glass comes down out of the dark in a long bright rain. Both guards crash back through the door with their guns up and their voices high, shouting words I cannot hear over the ringing in my own skull. The whole ruined building has gone black but for the gray falling through the broken roof, and I am sitting in the middle of it with my heart trying to climb out of my mouth and no idea, none, what I just did or how I did it.

Renner does not flinch. Renner does not so much as glance at the glass raining down around him.