Page 2 of Till Death Do Us Part

I put the gun away, checking my tail for any pursuers. Nothing. He really did trust these men in here with his life. And he saw how that ended up for him.

He probably had others in the perimeter. They’d be concerned if they heard the music stop.

Besides. I hated to leave a song unfinished. I could still see my father’s face, contorted with anger as I sat at the piano, just a little girl trying to make her daddy proud.

Again, he’d say.

Again, and again, and again. First about the piano. Then about the money. Then about the murders.

Until I’d had to shoot him. Again. And again, and again, and again.

I sat at the piano, and I played the rest of the song.

It really was a beautiful piece.

Glenn was a crooked-nosed man with one blind eye that had a ghostly pale iris, and it focused on me while I dropped Petrov’s signet ring on the desk.

“I trust you didn’t make too much of a scene,” he said, his voice low and rough. The office was dark, lit only by candlelight—Glenn didn’t trust electronics, not even a light bulb, in his office. The tall, arched window at the back looked out over the gardens, dark in the cloudy night and drenched in the rainfall, and Glenn was flanked by two of his attendants when I entered, and then in eerie silence, his right-hand man, Quayle, who never spoke. Only killed.

Normally, anyone who walked into Glenn’s office without being specially invited didn’t last long before Quayle put them in a body bag. But Glenn couldn’t risk losing me.

“In and out in under fifteen minutes. His bodyguards were dealt with. All shot to death, all with guns out. Anyone looking at the scene will think it was a firefight among them. And Petrov won’t cause us a problem again.” I gestured to the signet. “Ever.”

He nodded, sliding the signet to the side. One of the attendants, the fool, misinterpreted the gesture and went to take it, and Glenn slapped his hand away, turning on him in an instant with a handgun pressed into the attendant’s chest. The attendant went deathly white as Glenn roared in anger.

“You don’t touch anything in my office without the signal. Who the hell do you think you are?”

“I—I’m sorry, Sir—”

“Give me one good reason not to pull this trigger right now and get one of any number of people to replace you.”

He struggled to swallow. “I—it won’t happen again, Sir. I swear.”

“Easy, Glenn,” I said coolly. “We’ve gone through enough bullets today.”

Glenn looked at me. The room held its breath.

Finally, he put the gun away with one last foul look at the attendant. “You’re lucky I’m in a good mood today,” he said. “The next time you touch something without being asked to will be your last. The Blackbirds don’t tolerate failure. Leave. Both of you,” he said, gesturing to the other attendant too, and they left the room swiftly. “You too, Quayle,” he said, nodding to the man with the slick black hair and hollow gaze at the side of the room, and with his coat snapping around his knees, Quayle left the room.

With just the two of us, Glenn slid me a folder.

“The Horizon project is nearly ready,” he said. “With Petrov out of the picture, there’s just one thing left.”

“The South Yard.” I took the folder, opening it to a dossier. A woman, brown hair and eyes full of laughter, together with two people who looked like younger siblings, a brother and a sister who might have both been college-aged, the sister in a wheelchair. Glenn spoke the words that were next to her picture on the dossier.

“Elaine Whitner. Inheritor to the South Yard. She doesn’t understand its strategic importance. To her, it’s just a tract of land in the industrial zone. To us, it’s the key to controlling the entire arms industry. You’re going to leverage that informational asymmetry… and you’re going to make her hand it over to us.”

“I killed a man an hour ago, Glenn. I don’t get a little bit of time to relax?”

“Once this is done, you’ll have anything you want to.” He leaned over the desk, narrowing his eyes. “Remember why we’re doing this, Vera.”

“I know.” I looked past him, out the arched window, at the rain streaking on the glass. “I made a promise.”

I knew what happened to people who betrayed the Blackbirds. You didn’t betray family.

I had my misgivings about the project. But the Blackbirds were my family. The only family I had, anyway. Deeply flawed, and deeply poisonous, but wasn’t every family?

“The inheritance contract says it can’t be sold for seven years,” Glenn said. “You’ll have to find a way for her to agree it will be left to us after her death.”