He’s gone.
“Mark?” Softer. Then, to herself: “Where the hell did he go?”
I slip out of the office and melt into the master bedroom doorway, close enough to smell her perfume. She spins, almost colliding with me without seeing me, then catches the black smear of crows outside the window and staggers back, hands flying to her mouth.
“God.God. What is happening?”
Talon arrives at the top of the stairs a beat later, all worried-fake-ally. “Ma’am? If he left you with these questions, that’s not on you.”
Her eyes snap to him. “He wouldn’t. He—he wouldn’t leave.”
Nathaniel appears below. “Sometimes people run when they know the questions are bigger than the answers.”
A sound breaks out of her. It’s absolutely terrified.
“He wouldn’t.”
But she’s not sure.
The birds scrape the glass with hooked feet, a hundred little knives. A neighbor screams downstairs about omens. Someone yells to get back inside. The sky is a single black eye.
It’s a beautiful shitshow.
And technically, Jessica’s innocent. Technically, she doesn’t deserve this fear and pain. But this fear and pain can save her.
She won’t be in a relationship with a man she doesn’t even know anymore.
She’ll think he ran away.
And one day, she’ll get over it.
“Ms. Dilano,” Nathaniel says, “you should probably step out. If the state calls us back, the property will be busy. Cameras. I’d hate for you to be caught up in that when you have nothing to do with his… work life.”
Her expression crumples.
“His work life,” she repeats, dead and soft.
She looks past Talon at the guest bath, at the mirror that has nothing to offer her, then back at the window where the sky looks like a funeral.
“Okay,” she says. “Okay. I can’t—this is—”
She clutches her bag and moves like someone leaving the scene of a car crash before the sirens arrive. She goes down the stairs fast and when the front door opens, the sound of thecrows swells, so she darts to her car. The engine coughs, and in a moment, she’s gone.
Talon’s shoulders ease half an inch. Then he looks at me with that fox-smile.
“Souvenir time?”
I tip my head toward the office. “Top desk, right.”
He winks and slides into the office.
Nathaniel’s eyes are on me again, asking a question he already knows the answer to. I tilt my chin toward the garage.
“Go,” he says, already moving. “I’ll buy him thirty seconds.”
He pads down the stairs and opens the front door like any polite visitor. The crows lean. The neighbors lean harder. He tells a woman with a stroller, “Better go home, these birds might turn dangerous!”
I slip back through the hall, down into the garage. Cassian has Mark trussed like a parcel behind the bins.
