The City Owes Me Blood

Chapter 5 Daniel

The lock sliding home sounded louder than any of the gunfire from that night.

Scott was at the door in two strides, testing the handle, throwing his shoulder against the steel with a force that should have moved it and didn't. Lucy watched the muscles in his back go rigid with the effort and felt something cold settle low in her stomach, and it wasn't the locked door that put it there.

It was the way he still hadn't answered her question.

"Scott."

"Not now."

"You don't get to say that to me, not after tonight." She held up the photograph, her hand steadier than she expected it to be. "Who is Daniel?"

He turned from the door. In the buzzing half-light of the single bulb, his face looked older than it had an hour ago, older than it had any right to look on a man who couldn't be much past thirty.

"My brother," he said.

The word landed strange in the room, like it didn't quite belong to him, like he'd had to reach somewhere far away to find it.

"You don't have a brother. There's nothing about a brother in…." She stopped herself before she finished the sentence, because she'd been about to say in your file, and admitting she'd read a file on him at all felt like the wrong thing to confess in a locked room with no way out.

"There wouldn't be." He said it without judgment, like he already knew what she'd almost admitted. "I made sure of that. Daniel's been gone twelve years, long before your father ever walked into my life."

"Gone how?"

Scott's jaw worked. "Hale Richard."

The name hit differently this time. Not as an abstract threat, not as a shape in the dark. As a wound Lucy was only now realizing had been sitting under everything else all along.

"He killed my father," she said slowly, "and he took your brother."

"He didn't just take him." Scott's voice dropped to something Lucy had never heard from him before, not the cold control of the club, not the steady authority of the apartment. Something raw and much younger. "Daniel was seventeen, he got caught running a debt for Hale that wasn't his to run, and Hale decided the lesson mattered more than the boy. I was twenty, I found out three days later, when what was left of him showed up on our doorstep in a box too small for what should have been inside it."

Lucy's stomach turned over. "Scott."

"I built everything after that." He said it flat now, exhausted, like a confession he'd never planned on giving her. "Every deal, every alliance, every ounce of power I have, all of it built one brick at a time so that Hale Richard would never again be able to touch anyone I loved without going through me first."

"And now he has my mother."

"And now he has your mother." Scott closed his eyes briefly. "Which means either I already failed the same way twice, or this is the moment I finally get it right."

The overhead bulb flickered, buzzed, and went dark.

For one heartbeat the room was pure black, and Lucy's pulse spiked hard enough that she heard it in her own ears. Then, from somewhere beyond the steel door, footsteps, Slow, Unhurried, The particular confidence of someone who already knew the door wouldn't open from the inside.

"Get behind me," Scott said quietly.

"No."

"Lucy."

"I had a gun on you some hours ago and you didn't tell me to get behind anything." She raised the weapon he'd handed her in the car, planting her feet the way five years of training had drilled into her. "We do this together, or we don't do it at all."

Something shifted in his face, not quite a smile, too much was wrong in the moment for that, but something that looked, for half a second, like the closest thing to hope he'd allowed himself all night.

The footsteps stopped outside the door.

A long, deliberate pause. Then a voice, smooth and unbothered, drifted through the steel like it had all the time in the world.

"Scott, It's been a while."

Every muscle in Scott's body went taut.

“Hale," he said, and the single word carried twelve years of grief compressed into something sharp enough to cut.

"I see you found the photograph." A soft, almost amused exhale came from the other side of the door. "I wondered how long you'd let her go without knowing. It's rather touching, honestly, watching you protect her the way you couldn't protect him."

"Where's her mother?"

"Closer than you think." A pause, unhurried, cruel in its patience. "You have thirty seconds to decide something for me, Scott, and I'd think carefully, because I only intend to offer this once."

"Decide what?"

"There's a second door on the west wall of that room, It leads to a stairwell, and the stairwell leads out, I'll open it for you." His voice didn't change register at all, which somehow made the words land worse. "But only one of you gets to walk through it. It's left for you to choose which."

Lucy's blood went to ice.

"You're insane," Scott said. "I'm not choosing anything."

"Then I'll choose for you, and I promise you won't like it half as much." A metallic click sounded from somewhere in the wall, a bolt disengaging, exactly where Hale had said it would be. "Thirty seconds, Scott. The clock started when I stopped talking."

Silence swallowed the room.

Lucy's eyes found the west wall, found the faint seam of a second door she hadn't noticed until now, half hidden in shadow. Her heartbeat roared in her ears, counting down a clock she couldn't see.

"There has to be another way out," she said. "There has to be."

"There isn't." Scott's voice had gone strange, stripped of everything but certainty. "I know this building. I know exactly what's behind that first door, and it isn't a way out for either of us."

"Then what do we do?"

He looked at her, and in the dark, in the twelve seconds left of whatever countdown Hale had started, something settled over his face that Lucy would spend the rest of the night trying to understand.

"You go through the door," he said.

"No."

"Lucy."

"I already told you. Together, or not at all." Her hands were shaking around the gun now, adrenaline and fury and something far more terrifying underneath both of them. "I am not walking out of here without you."

The lock on the far door released with a heavy, final clunk.

And somewhere behind them, on the other side of the steel they'd come through, a second sound followed it. Footsteps, many of them, moving fast, closing in.

"Time's up," Hale's voice said, almost gently, through the wall. "Choose.”