FATAL CONTRACT

Chapter Five: The Severed Hand

In the mirror, Ava tried to angle her right hand from behind-right, turning the wrist inward.

She could not do it.

Her right shoulder was empty, and so was behind her. No hand clamped up, no stretch of dark red at the inside of her wrist facing up. Her arm was stiff, twisting against itself at the halfway turn, as if learning a move grown inside someone else's body. She lowered her hand and pressed her palm to the mirror, leaving five prints that slowly dried under her body heat.

Something had lodged in her that night, like a thorn, and she had not pulled it out. She pressed it deeper — she now knew clearly that it was the umbrella someone had handed her in the rain at her father's funeral.

But who that person was, she still did not know.

The door opened then. Lucian stood in the doorway, not entering, occupying only half the frame.

"Last night's cut of yours," he said, "was handled passably."

He wore no sleepwear, nor had he changed to formal dress — still the matte-black suit, tie knotted below the Adam's apple. The day was not fully light; the corridor's light was gray, falling on his face like a layer of ash. He reached out and set something on the low cabinet by the door — a silver-white blade, handle wound with black cord, its silver edge trapping a corner of gray light.

"You should have something handy," he said, and turned and left, as he had when taking the dagger from her hand last night, without one extra word of explanation.

She walked over and picked up the dagger. Heavier than she expected, abnormally cold, not like steel, like it had lain a night in snow. Last night he had said "the blade was mine to give"; today the dagger was back in her hand — last time he offered it of his own will; this time, it was as if completing the unfinished sentence from last night.

She tucked the dagger back into the skirt fold. This time, pressed against her ribs alongside the photograph and the torn page, there was an added coldness.

Breakfast was eaten apart. He sat at the far end of the long table, she at this end, the space for three between them. The coffee at his hand went untouched, the thin callus on his knuckle grazing the cup's rim. She stared at that hand — cool, as cool as when it had pressed the back of hers at the banquet. That wedding day those hands had been abnormally hot; she remembered. But now she only remembered, and did not think why.

The butler came in at nine, his steps quicker than usual.

"Madam," he said, "someone left something at the door."

It was a wooden box, palm-sized, paulownia wood, unpainted. The lid lifted to red velvet lining, and on the velvet lay a hand.

Severed clean at the wrist. The cut perfectly flat, as if sliced in one stroke. Below the break, a layer of hard skin at the thenar, a calloused ridge across the knuckles — the same hard skin, the same callus as the hand that had grabbed from her left last night, the one she had cut, the tip of its little finger also missing, the break just as flat — Mr. Zhou bore the same, and so did the man on the ground.

The fingers were curled, as if the dead still clutched something. The wound on the back of the hand ran from the thenar to the wrist bone — her blade's work, already clotted black-red. The same hand.

Beneath the box lay a note, in fountain-pen script, its strokes very steady:

"Mr. Zhou sends his regards to the madam."

Ava set the note back and closed the lid.

She called no one, nor went to the study for Lucian. First she counted what was in her hands: the photograph, the torn page, a silver dagger, and now this severed hand.

Last night she had held back a missing fingertip — the man on the ground, his left little finger lacking a segment, like Mr. Zhou's. She had said nothing.

Now Mr. Zhou had said it for her. Not with his mouth, but with a hand.

This was no threat. A threat is "move again and I'll do thus." This was a settlement: you moved against my man, I took my interest, the account is balanced, but the man lives.

Last night's small calculation of hers — well hidden, and dangerously hidden. Well, because she had not given her chip away for nothing; dangerously, because the other side needed no words from her — it delivered the answer to her door.

When she carried the wooden box to the study, Lucian was already inside. The curtains drawn, the desk lamp on, several documents spread on the table. At a glance she saw the heading of the top one — not Chinese, not English, a line of letters she could not fully read, and beneath it a photograph: a figure, half a face in shadow.

"Your investigation," she set the box beside the documents, "how much of it is the Zhou family?"

He glanced at her, his gaze sweeping the box, then back to the documents.

"Mr. Zhou owes my family an old debt," he said. "This hand is the interest."

"And when the interest is collected?"

"The interest collected, the man lives," he said in the same tone as last night's "tonight's cut was not something I taught." "You ask too many questions."

"You promised me two things," she said. "Stand at your side when I'm meant to appear, and the names of my father's old men still reachable. The second, I give you now."

She gave a name. Of her father's old men, this was the only one still able to pass word. Before she made last night's cut, she had already decided — if she walked out of that banquet alive, this account would be spent to buy something.

He listened, made no note, asked no detail, only slid the document with the photograph half an inch toward her.

"Take a look," he said, "don't ask."

The figure in the photograph she could not recognize. But on its back was printed a line, bearing the same surname the old man by the window had spoken at the banquet.

Zhou Jingshan.

Her breath caught. Last night's conclusion she had "believed for half the night" — the man who killed her father, she had met tonight — cracked open a seam at this moment. Zhou Jingshan was someone who knew her father; knowing is not killing. Yet if the Zhou family owed the Lockes an old debt, then between her father and the Zhous, who owed whom?

She asked nothing. He took the document back.

"Your brother," he said suddenly, "someone will come to you in the next day or two."

Ava's fingers tightened on the skirt fold. The cold hilt of the dagger dug into her knuckle.

"Come to me, or to you?"

"First to you," he stood, as if tucking this conversation into his belt as well. "Think clearly: who gives you something, and what they finally ask you to repay."

He walked over and drew the curtains; daylight poured in and fell on the paulownia-wood box. The severed hand curled quietly in the red velvet, as if waiting for someone to claim it.

Ava closed the lid gently. She did not touch the hand.

But she remembered: Mr. Zhou sent his regards with a hand she had cut open herself. This account, she did not intend to keep only in her heart.

She walked out gripping the silver dagger, its weight on her wrist more solid than yesterday. Last night's "the blade was mine to give" turned in her ear — now the blade was in her hand, but the blood not on it. This cut, whose it finally was, seemed not yet settled.

And that phone call from her brother, four chapters late, was already in the hands of someone outside the door, ready to ring at any moment.