Page 6 of Crow’s Shadow

Byte picks up the burner and turns it in his fingers like a card trick. “Cheap. Cracked screen, so he was not precious about it. Give me an hour.”

“I’ll give you twenty minutes,” Loco says.

“If you give me an hour, I’ll hand you his mother’s maiden name.”

“Sy Renner.” Stryker leans back, arms crossed over his cut. “He is who your ghost rides for. Has to be. We clean for the man eight months and now somebody is walking our yard? No such thing as a coincidence.”

“Renner pays,” Buck says from down the table, because Buck counts, and to Buck a thing which pays is a thing you keep. “Pays better than the cartels ever did. Guns out through Ruin Ridge, product in through Nohaven, every box riding under a body no county man looks at twice. We are flush for the first time in years.”

“Flush graves fill up.” Mercy says it quiet. The chaplain does not talk much, and when he does the table leans in. “We took a stranger’s coin and let him learn our roads. A man learns your roads, he can walk them without you.”

“He is a buyer,” Stryker says. “Buyers order and pay. They do not case.”

“This one cases.” I look at him. “This one sends a man who leaves no prints.”

Stryker’s jaw works. He would put me through a wall if Loco gave him half a reason and some days I think he resents Loco for never giving him one. I am the club’s knife and he is the club’s rulebook, and a knife and a rulebook rub each other wrong by their nature.

“Renner wants a sit-down,” Loco says, and the table goes still. “Nohaven. Tomorrow night. Says he has a bigger order and a problem he wants our help on.” A beat. “Says the problem is personal.”

“Personal how,” I ask.

“Didn’t say. Man says little on a phone.” Loco’s eyes come to me, flat and sure. “You are going. You, Grim, Storm. Renner likes to look a man in the eye when he lies to him, so we give him eyes. Cold ones.”

Grim speaks for the first time, from the dark end of the table, two words dragged over gravel. “My favorite.”

“Nobody swings on him first,” Loco says. “We hear the man out. We learn what he knows and how he knows it. Then we come home and decide what he keeps breathing for.” He looks at each of us until it lands. “Eye for an eye. But we count the eye first.”

Byte makes a sound.

We all turn. He has the burner tipped toward his own face, the cracked screen throwing blue up under his eyes. Byte is twenty-six, cocky and has walked through more locked doors than any man at this table, and right now he looks like a boy who opened a closet and found it breathing back.

“Byte,” Loco says.

“There is nothing on here.” The swagger is gone out of him. “No calls. No contacts. No texts but the one Crow read. One app. One folder.” He wets his lips. “Photos. It is all photos, Pres. It is all her.”

He turns the phone around.

Shadow in the frame, three days back, at the market on Ruin Road, a sack of oranges in her fist. Shadow at the crematory door last winter, snow on her shoulders. Shadow at nineteen with the Ledger open across her knees. Shadow younger, and younger, the pictures running backward through her whole life.

Then Byte’s finger stops.

Five years old, maybe. Barefoot, soot black on her cheeks, behind her a house burns, orange eating the dark.

Something cold opens beneath my ribs. I know the doorway, I know the fire.

I carried her out of it.

And in twenty years, I have never told a living soul I was there.

Chapter four

SHADOW

Nobody tells me a damn thing, so I have gotten good at stealing it.

Church breaks near four. I know because I am parked on the bottom stair with the Ledger shut on my knees and my ears open, and men leaking out of a locked room drop more than they think when they figure the only girl awake is furniture. Buck goes by rubbing his face, muttering about oranges, which makes no sense. Byte goes by grey as old meat and does not clock me at all, and Byte clocks everything, so whatever he saw in there took a bite out of him.

Then Crow.