Page 4 of Crow’s Shadow

Nova folds onto the cushion beside me and puts a beer in my hand I did not ask for and open my mouth to wave off.

It goes like this with the women, always has, so woven through my days I stopped marking it as odd. Ember passes Ariea the salt a breath before Ariea reaches for it. Nova answers the question still forming behind my teeth. We move around each other the way a body moves its own two hands, no looking, no asking, and an hour ago I would have called it love, or habit, women worn smooth against each other across years. Tonight it feels like something with teeth.

“You looked thirsty,” she says. “You’re staring again.”

“I’m not.”

“You’ve been not staring at that man since you grew tits.”

I drink the beer. “Classy.”

“Accurate.”

Across the room, Crow’s head turns a fraction.

Nova see it too. Her grin turns vicious. “And apparently not one-sided.”

“Shut up.”

“Didn’t say anything.”

“Your face did.”

Nova takes a drink, still grinning. “My face has excellent instincts.

Sable works the room in a way she did not used to. Friendliest of the club girls, always, an easy laugh, easy hands, but tonight the laugh lands a half-beat late and on the wrong men, and twice I catch her drifting toward the hallway to the offices where the girls do not go, her phone cupped and glowing against her jaw. When she feels me clock her, she smiles too wide and turns her back.

Nova follows my gaze. “She’s weird tonight.”

“She’s always weird.”

“Not this kind.”

I file it. I file everything. The book in the floor safe keeps the club’s dead, but I keep a second book nobody knows about, the one behind my eyes, and Sable goes into it tonight beside a cheap black phone and three words I cannot unsee.

The heat and the racket build until I need air more than I need to watch him, so I slip out the side door the way I disappear out of everything, unseen. The night comes cold and clean after the clubhouse. Gravel shifts under my boots. The bikes stand in their long chrome row, catching the moonlight.

And a man stands at the fence line.

Not Crow. I know the shape of Crow in the dark better than the shape of my own hands. This one is leaner, stiller, wearing the black like he had it cut to measure, and he waits at the edge of the lot where the floodlight quits, the exact seam of dark where the watcher stood over the graves an hour ago, a lifetime ago, my sense of time coming apart in my chest.

He is not looking at the clubhouse.

He is looking at me.

He watches me see him, and he smiles. Two fingers rise to his temple and taps there, slow, deliberate, the kind of gesture that says he can see straight through bone and into whatever I keep hidden underneath. Then he speaks. His voice crosses forty feet of cold black and lands in the hook behind my breastbone, in the one place Crow has spent twenty years refusing to touch.

“You are a long way from your mother, Shadow.”

My blood quits moving. The beer bottle creaks in my fist, glass protesting under my grip.

I have never given him my name. I have no mother, no past, no country, everyone knows the girl from the cracks came from nowhere. And this stranger has just put the one word I’ve hungered for my whole life into my hands.

Mother.

Behind me the side door bangs open. Boots on gravel, and Crow’s voice saying my name, sharp, wrong-sounding, afraid in a way I have never once heard from him. I turn to point the man out, to scream, to do the one useful thing.

The fence line is empty.