Page 72
"No. Raise her limit."
Petrov goes silent.
"Raise it," I tell him, standing up and buttoning my jacket. "She's gone and picked out the box she intends to put me in, Petrov, and she chose the gold-plated one. That's the closest thing to a love letter I've had off her since the wedding."
I hang up.
Tomek is openly grinning down at the carpet now. Février looks like a man who came expecting a grim war meeting and got a comedy instead, and I already know he's going to go home and describe every detail of it to Henri over dinner. Rafe is the only one in the room not enjoying himself. The thing is that after twenty years I know that when the man isn't laughing, there's a reason.
"Say it," I tell him.
"There's one more thing you need to know." He says it to the table rather than to me. "We've been losing clients all month. Families canceling their prepaid contracts, walking away from their deposits, taking their funerals to Ferro's instead. Six of them in four weeks. And people don't throw away a deposit, so I went through every one of those files to work out how each family ended up at Ferro's in the first place. Who put the idea in their heads."
"And?"
"Every single one of them came from the same place." Now he looks up at me. "The hospital. There's a doctor who works at the hospital morgue, and he's friendly with all the doctors. When a family loses someone, he's often the first person they deal with. Lately he's been slipping them a Ferro's card and telling them how wonderful the place is. He only started doing it a month ago. Because somebody he's fond of asked him to."
He doesn't need to say her name. The receipt is still glowing on Constantine's phone in the middle of the table.
So this is Manon. Standing in a hospital corridor sweet-talking some mortician into sending grieving families to my rival, purely to get under my skin. A wife taking her revenge on her husband, and doing it well, because of what he’s done to keep tabs on her. It's petty and it's clever, and knowing her, she has enjoyed every minute of it.
The trouble is that she has no idea what Ferro's actually is. I’m positive about that. It’s unfortunate that she’s doing this now of all times, but she’s the last person who’d be in on the bigger issue.
And underneath all of it, one thing needles at me more than the money or the video: I just saw my wife come home a few hours ago, beyond exhausted, barely able to get her shoes off. I told her to eat and sleep. I walked out that door believing I was leaving her safe, tucked up and dead to the world. And the moment my car cleared the gate, she got up, washed up, changed her clothes, and walked into the enemy's flagship showroom to buy herself a casket.
She doesn't know that the pretty showroom she filmed herself in moves heroin through its caskets. She doesn't know that the men who own it have bought traitors inside two families already. And as of this morning, thanks to a video she posted herself, those men know one thing about me that they never had to lift a finger to find out.
They know my wife walks into their buildings on her own and buys things from them. Now they have her name and they know who she is.
The anger drains straight out of me, all at once, leaving me with a sinking feeling. Dread, even.
"Find me the man behind Ferro's," I tell the room. "And Rafe, from today I want two more men on my wife, wherever she goes."
"She'll notice them. She notices everyone."
"Then she can throw out more of my money."
CHAPTER 20
Manon
I shut my locker then sit down for a minute to catch my breath. My hands are shaking slightly.
"Hey, I think we should grab a coffee together," says one of my colleagues, a handsome, dark-haired doctor I had a crush on once, way before Charles.
"No, I'm fine. I just need to get home and get some sleep," I say, giving him a warm and sympathetic smile. We were the last two surgeons left from our shift, and it was a tough one. A young girl passed and I couldn't save her. Fuck, why did I choose this job? Sometimes it feels like I can't cope, but in the end I do, because someone has to. Because sometimes, I save a life. Just not today.
"Manon, you did everything you could, but fate had other plans for this young lady," he adds, as if that changes anything. I don't think fate had anything to do with it. I just didn't try hard enough.
When he finally leaves, the silence is deafening. I try to breathe, but the sadness washes over me. It's close to nine in the morning, so I grab my things and head down to the morgue. I really should be going home, and it disturbs me to admit that I would love to be taken care of by my husband right now. It's been almost six months since circumstances brought us together, and as much as I loathe to admit this, we've developed a certain connection. I still hate his guts, but the man treats me well, and he takes care of even the slightest inconvenience.
The morgue is three floors down and cold as hell. The elevator doors open to mingling scents of bleach and peony, because Daphne, my friend and morgue technician, keeps a reed diffuser on her desk in open defiance of every regulation ever written. Last month it was fig. The dead of this hospital go out smelling like a spa in Provence and nobody has ever complained.
It’s been a while since I’ve been here, but I sorely need it today. I step over a box of files, then a second box, and follow the lamplight to her desk. There are four mugs on it, a packet of cookies, a screwdriver, and a paperback with the cover ripped off that I really need to talk to her about—you can't treat books like that. A jacket hangs on the chair behind her, halfway falling off. Behind her is the fridge wall, and every inch of it is spotless, labeled, perfect. The chaos runs right up to that steel and then stops dead as on that side, everything is in order.
Daphne has her feet up on a small filing cabinet. She’s eating cereal out of a mug, hair escaping from a chopstick. She's the classic redhead—stunning, slim, and utterly chaotic, though not every woman with red hair gets to look like that. She's extraordinary, even by those high standards.
"Oh good," she says, not looking up. "A live one."
