Chapter 13
1073 Words
The vibration of the phone against Chloe’s thigh felt like an electric shock. She stared at the cracked screen, the glow of Beatrice’s email illuminating the grime beneath her fingernails.
“He is a corpse that speaks.”
The words were a cold blade. Beatrice had always been the pragmatist, the one who saw the world in terms of assets and liabilities, while Chloe was the one who saw people. But to see her own sister describe Cassius—a man who had just risked his life to leap out of a third-story window with her in his arms—as a mere "corpse" made Chloe’s stomach turn.
Cassius was watching her. Even in his weakened state, his senses were attuned to the spike in her cortisol, the way her scent changed when she was afraid. He leaned against the damp wall of the rail tunnel they had ducked into, his eyes tracking the phone in her hand.
"Thy kin," he said, the word sounding heavy and bitter. "She reaches out through the glass brick."
"She’s threatening me," Chloe whispered, her thumb hovering over the 'Delete' icon. "She says she has footage of the man you fed on in the basement. She’ll tell the police I helped you murder him."
Cassius let out a low, mirthless chuckle that vibrated in the dark tunnel. "She uses the law of thy age as a tether. She knows thou art a creature of conscience, Chloe. She plays upon thy goodness like a lute."
He stepped toward her, his movements still slightly stiff from the silver wound. He took the phone from her hand with two fingers, looking at the glowing device as if it were a venomous insect.
"If thou returnest to her, she will keep thee safe in a cage of gold," Cassius said, his voice dropping into a solemn register. "She will scrub thy memory of me, and thou wilt go back to thy white halls and thy silence. Is that the life thou cravest?"
Chloe looked at him—really looked at him. In the dim, subterranean light, he looked like a nightmare, his clothes torn and stained with dark blood. But he also looked like the only thing in her life that had ever been honest.
"No," she said, her voice gaining a sudden, sharp clarity. "I'm done being the quiet one. I'm done being the 'good' daughter while she hides behind a suit and a gun."
She took the phone back and hurled it against the concrete wall of the tunnel. It shattered into a dozen pieces, the screen flickering once before going dark forever.
"Now they can't track us," she said, her heart hammering.
Cassius’s eyebrows arched in surprise. A slow, predatory smile spread across his face, revealing the tips of his fangs. "A bold stroke, Chloe of the Blue. Perhaps there is more of the fire in thee than I first thought."
"We need to get out of Boston," Chloe said, ignoring the flutter in her chest at his praise. "If Beatrice is here, she has resources. She’ll have the highways covered. We can’t take my car, and we can’t take a bus."
"The water," Cassius suggested, gesturing back toward the harbor they had just fled. "In my time, the merchants used the small skiffs to move silk and spice beneath the notice of the tax-men. Is there not a vessel we can... borrow?"
"You want to steal a boat?" Chloe asked, a hysterical laugh bubbling up. "Cassius, I'm a nurse. I barely have a parking ticket to my name."
"Then today," Cassius said, reaching out to catch her hand, "thou shalt learn the art of the shadow. Come. The sun is rising, and I must find a place where the light cannot find me."
They moved back toward the edge of the wharf, staying in the deep shadows cast by the massive shipping containers. The city was waking up; the distant hum of morning traffic was a reminder that for everyone else, this was just another Tuesday. But for Chloe, the world was narrowing down to the cold hand in hers and the desperate need for a horizon.
They found a small, weathered cabin cruiser docked at the end of a private slip, tucked away from the main patrol routes. It was old, the white paint peeling, but it looked seaworthy.
"Canst thou make it move?" Cassius asked, looking at the complex dashboard of dials and switches with utter bafflement.
"My dad had a boat when we were kids," Chloe muttered, stepping onto the deck. The wood groaned under her feet. "He used to make me do the docking because Beatrice was too busy reading law books and my younger sister was... well, she was the golden child. She didn't do manual labor."
She knelt at the ignition, her fingers searching for the spare key owners almost always hid in the side compartment. Her luck held—her fingers brushed against a cold piece of metal. She turned it, and the engine coughed, sputtered, and then roared to life with a cloud of grey smoke.
"Get in," she commanded.
Cassius slipped into the cabin just as the first rays of the sun hit the top of the Custom House Tower in the distance. He recoiled from the light, his skin hissing as if it had touched a stove.
"Go," he gasped from the floor of the cabin, shielding his face.
Chloe threw the lines, kicked the engine into gear, and steered the boat out into the choppy waters of the harbor. As the skyline of Boston began to shrink behind them, she looked down at the gold coin in her pocket.
She wasn't a nurse anymore. She wasn't the middle child. She was a woman steering a stolen boat into the unknown with a monster at her feet, and for the first time in twenty-four years, she felt like she was finally awake.
But as she looked toward the open sea, she saw a white wake trailing them from a distance. A sleek, high-speed Coast Guard cutter was turning in their direction, its siren beginning to wail across the water.
"Cassius," she whispered, her grip tightening on the wheel. "I think the 'Brotherhood' has friends in high places."
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