A shout cuts down the hallway like a blade. Not panic—alarm. Pru and I look at each other and move at the same time. Pru hunches over the doorknob and pulls out a small box, then a few metal tool-things that she very efficiently uses to pick the lock while I stand behind her and gape.
A moment later, after she peeks around the door jamb and determines it safe, we slip into the corridor, pressed against cool stone and walking fast. The lights are low. Men shout in two directions, which means they can’t agree where the problem is.
I have a feeling Tiernan and my husband have something to do with that state of affairs.
I hear him.
Not words. A tone. The sound a held note makes when it gets a throat.
I move toward it because I can’t not. Pru hisses my name and I ignore her because I have become exactly the kind of woman who goes toward the danger when it sounds like him.
The doorway is open a hand’s width. I push it with two fingers and step into a room that doesn’t deserve the word office because offices don’t have shackles on the wall behind a tapestry. This one does.
There are two men in it. Only one I care about in any sense of the word.
Nico stands with his hands raised halfway like a man who thought he was built for violence and discovered he was only built for its costume. He’s bleeding from the mouth enough to make him look human.
Cayce stands behind him—shirt half-open, eyes calm, knife in his hand.
He glances up when the door moves. Not frantic. Not embarrassed. Acknowledging. He warned me once that he had a face that doesn’t apologize. He’s wearing it now.
“I told you I was a monster,” he says, almost conversational, and then he leans and makes a small, exact motion behind Nico’s ear.
It’s efficient. It’s quiet. It’s personal in a way justice should be and isn’t.
Nico drops to the ground immediately. The blood is less dramatic than I expect, which is worse. He makes a small, wet choking noise as he struggles to move or breathe.
I don’t faint. I don’t scream. The taser in my hand begins to tremble and I squeeze it tighter, and then I step to Cayce and put my hands on his face.
“Look at me,” I say. My voice shakes and I steady it.
He does. Unapologetic. Waiting for the moment he breaks me.
“You warned me,” I tell him, and then I kiss him like a woman who heard the warning and walked toward it. His mouth tastes like copper and mint and the end of something I never wanted to start. When I break for breath, my forehead rests against his. “It’s okay. You’re my monster. It’s okay.”
Something gives in him that isn’t weakness. It’s permission. He breathes, once, like the first time someone believes you and it sticks.
Tiernan appears in the doorway with Pru right in front of him like the period at the end of a sentence. He takes in the room—Nico convulsing as he bleeds out, me pressed to Cayce like a restraining order reversed—and nods once as if his list is being checked in the order he prefers.
“We’re done,” he says, calm as weather. “Outer ring’s quiet. Boat’s waiting.”
Cayce wipes his knife on a handkerchief that has never been used for anything that delicate. He doesn’t look at Nico again. He looks at me. Every line of him asks a question without asking it:Can you still stand in my house and not break where you shouldn’t?
“Yes,” I say aloud, for us both. “Now take me home.”
Tiernan grabs Nico’s body by the foot and drags him down the hall.
“Tiernan,” Pru says, breathless with adrenaline, hair sticking to her forehead, eyes incandescent, “remind me to kiss you when we’re not in a murder room.”
“Noted,” he says. He does not smile. His ears might be pink, but I’ll never tell.
Cayce takes my hand, our fingers locking. His palm is warm, steadying the tremble in my fingers. We don’t look back.
On the terrace, the ocean is still pretending to be beautiful. The lanterns swing. My uneaten plate of fish is cooling. It’s obscene in its very ordinariness.
We move through the hedge, along the limestone path, and down to a waiting boat. Men melt out of shadows to become ours. Pru sticks close, and Tiernan scans the horizon, searching for any threat they might have missed.
At the bottom of the steps, I stop. The night air tastes like salt and iron and relief that hasn’t earned its paycheck yet. I turn to Cayce and put my fingers under his jaw, tilting his face down to mine.
