The City Owes Me Blood

Chapter 4 Forty-Eight Hours

"We're not doing what he wants."

Scott said it before Lucy had even set the phone down, and there was nothing soft in his voice at all.

"He has my mother."

"He has a photo of a woman tied to a chair. That's not the same as having your mother, and it's definitely not the same as you walking into whatever trap he's built for you alone."

"You don't get to decide that for me."

"I'm not deciding anything." He crossed the kitchen, and for the first time all night some of the control slipped out of him. "I'm telling you what happens if you go by yourself. He kills you both and calls it a lesson."

"A lesson for who?"

"For me." It seemed to cost him something to say it. "You're the only person in this city who could make me do something stupid enough to get myself killed. Hale's known that since your father died. Maybe longer."

Lucy sat down hard on the arm of the couch, the phone still clenched in her hand.

"She's been alive this whole time." Her voice came out strange and flat. "Four years, Scott. I sat at her funeral. I picked out the flowers."

"I know."

"How do you know any of this? How is it even possible?" She pressed the phone against her forehead, like it might cool whatever was burning behind her eyes. "Why fake her death? Why keep her alive for four years and only tell me now?"

"Because now is when it's useful to him." His jaw worked. "Hale doesn't do anything without a reason. If he's had her this whole time, it's because keeping her alive gave him leverage he wasn't ready to spend yet."

"Leverage for what?"

"For tonight." He nodded at the ruined jacket draped over the chair, at the red line on his own forearm under the fresh gauze. "The Onyx Room wasn't random, and it wasn't really about killing me. It was about putting you in that club when it went sideways, so Hale could finally attach a name and a face to the one thing that still makes me reckless."

The pieces came together in her mind, and she felt sick.

"He used me to get to you."

"He's been playing a longer game than either of us realized." Scott crouched in front of her, close enough now that she could hear the roughness under his voice. "Which is exactly why you can't go to him alone. If he wanted you dead tonight, you'd be dead already. He wants something else, and if you walk in there without a plan, you're just handing it to him."

"So what, I sit here and wait forty-eight hours and hope you figure it out?"

"No." He was already moving, three steps ahead of her the way he seemed to be about everything. "You help me figure it out. Because I know something Victor doesn't think I know."

"What's that?"

"Where he keeps the people he wants to disappear."

The building turned out to be a converted textile warehouse on the east side, four stories of blackened brick that hadn't seen daylight through its windows in a decade. Scott parked two blocks out and killed the engine, and neither of them moved for a moment.

"This is insane." Lucy stared at the dark shape of it through the windshield. "You said don't go in alone, and this is you going in with me."

"That's different."

"How is that different?"

"Because this time I know what's waiting for us." He reached into the glovebox, pulled out a second gun, checked the magazine with the same unhurried efficiency he seemed to bring to everything, and held it out to her grip first. "You still remember how to use one of these, or was that gun in your clutch just for show?"

"I had my finger on your trigger four hours ago. What do you think?"

The corner of his mouth twitched. "Fair enough."

They went in through a loading door on the north side, one Scott clearly knew far better than he should have. Lucy filed that away without saying anything, because there wasn't time to ask, and because some part of her had already stopped being surprised by how much of this world he understood from the inside.

The warehouse smelled like rust and dust and something chemical underneath it. Their footsteps echoed too loud on the concrete. A single bulb buzzed above them, flickering, throwing long shadows down a hallway that seemed to stretch further than the building's outside walls should have allowed.

"Second floor," Scott murmured. "Storage rooms, mostly. If he's holding anyone here, that's where they'd be."

They climbed the stairwell in silence, guns drawn, and Lucy's heart was hammering hard enough that she was sure it could be heard through the walls.

The second floor opened into a corridor lined with heavy steel doors, each one bolted from the outside. Her stomach turned at the sight of them. She didn't let herself wonder how many people had been kept behind doors like that, or for how long.

"Here." Scott stopped at the fourth door. A scuff mark scarred the concrete in front of it, fresh, like something, or someone, had been dragged across the floor within the last few hours.

He worked the bolt free without a sound and eased the door open.

The room was empty.

Not just empty of a person. Empty of everything except a single chair sitting in the center of the bare concrete, and on it, folded with an unsettling neatness, a woman's cardigan Lucy recognized instantly. She'd bought it for her mother three Christmases before the funeral that apparently hadn't buried anyone at all.

She crossed the room on legs that didn't feel like her own and picked it up. It still smelled faintly of her mother's perfume.

"She was here." Lucy's voice broke on the words. "She was here, Scott. She was just…."

"I know."

"So where is she now?"

Scott didn't answer right away. He'd gone still near the doorway, staring at something Lucy hadn't noticed, a folded piece of paper tucked beneath the chair leg, placed there deliberately, meant to be found.

He picked it up, unfolded it, and whatever color was left in his face drained out of it.

"What is it?" Lucy asked. "What does it say?"

He turned the paper toward her without a word.

It wasn't a threat this time. It wasn't even addressed to her. It was a photograph, printed cheap and grainy, of Scott himself, younger, maybe twenty, standing beside a man Lucy had never seen before, both of them laughing at something outside a building she didn't recognize.

Across the bottom, in handwriting she didn't know, someone had scrawled four words like a signature.

Ask him about Daniel.

Lucy looked up from the paper to Scott's face, and for the first time since the Onyx Room, something closed over his features that looked less like control and more like fear.

"Scott." Her voice had gone very quiet. "Who's Daniel?"

Behind them, without warning, the steel door swung shut with a heavy, final clang. On the other side of it, a lock slid home.