Page 35 of Shatter

I stagger a step.

My hands stay down.

When I straighten, blood fills my mouth where the inside of my cheek split, and I look at him again.

Nobody in the room moves, not Emil staring at the table or Rati with his arms still folded.

Tor shakes out his hand and looks at me for a long moment, his breath coming heavy through his nose.

Then his face changes.

The fury doesn't go anywhere, but it sinks back behind his eyes, cooler, like a fire banked for the night.

"You couldn't leave her there." He says it low, almost to himself.

It isn't a question.

"No." My voice cracks. "No, sir."

"You'd have been a piece of shit if you did." Tor turns and walks back to the head of the table. "It's the only reason you're still standing in this room with a patch in your future instead of your ass on the other side of the gate."

"Any one of us would've done it." Rati's voice comes from the wall, gravel and smoke.

It's the first he's said since we came in.

"Any one of us would've fucking called first." Tor drops into his chair, and it groans under him. "But yeah."

He scrubs both hands down over his face.

"Vanir." He doesn't lift his head.

"Diner's got one camera." Vanir finally looks up, pushing his glasses down onto his nose. "Front door, cheap Wi-Fi setup uploading to a cloud account in the owner's name. Password was the name of his dog. It's gone. The last two weeks are gone, so it looks like a glitch."

"Street cams?" Tor drums two fingers on the table.

"Nearest traffic cam's at Tennessee and Ocala. It'll have the sedan going in and the Corolla going out." Vanir shrugs. "Grainy, at night. Nobody's pulling it unless somebody reports a crime."

"Then nobody reports a crime." Tor pulls his phone out of his back pocket and sets it on the table, face up. "Gunnar?"

"Gunnar and Oskar took the truck." Rati pushes off the wall. "Should be there by now."

The phone on the table buzzes.

Tor taps it and puts it on speaker.

"Go." He leans toward it.

"We're here." Gunnar's voice comes through tinny and low, a hiss of wind behind it. "Body's in the truck, and Oskar's driving the sedan out now. Florida plates, rental out of the Jacksonville airport."

"Blood?" Tor's eyes cut to me.

"Hosing it down." A pause crackles on the line. "Hakon dragged him through a lot of it. There's a trail where she crawled, too. Jesus. She crawled a long way."

I close my eyes.

Behind my lids, the dark smear stretches across the asphalt, forty feet of it, all the way to the diner's locked front door.

"Fire lot out past the Wakulla line." Tor rubs his thumb along the edge of the phone. "Car and everything in it. The body goes where the last one went."