She studied him, cigarette poised, amusement fading to unease. “How could you possibly know that?”
“Please,” he said, the word almost breaking. “Tell me everything.”
Her lips parted, then closed. The tease drained from her face. She looked away, tapping ash delicately into a crystal tray, lost somewhere far from the room’s perfume and light. “It started about a week ago,” she whispered. “The nightmares. I dreamt I was taken somewhere underground. There were candles everywhere, and the air was wet, heavy. An X-shaped cross stood in the corner.” She drew another drag, her hand trembling slightly as she bit a polished nail, expression distant. “But last night… it was so much sharper. I was trapped in some kind of round chamber, and I couldn’t move. I couldn’t get out.”
Rick gripped the armrests to keep from showing how hard his heart was hammering in his chest. “Is that all you remember?” His voice came rough, almost pleading.
She frowned, searching her memory. “I could smell the river. Or sewage, maybe. There was also a sound. A drip, steady. And something else, low, far away. Like… like a distant thunder. That’s all.”
From the bedroom came Glen’s shout, impatient and playful: “Babe! Either tell that copper to join us or send him packing!”
Rick was already standing, haste knotting his muscles. “Thank you,” he said hoarsely.
The mask slipped over her like lace. She smiled through the smoke, eyes sultry. “Please excuse my latest admirer,” she purred. “He’s new and not very smart.” Rising, she drifted closer, her perfume wrapping around Rick. “Though he’s got apoint.” Her fingers slid down his tie, gaze heavy-lidded. “So… what do you say, Detective?”
Rick’s expression stayed unreadable. “Sorry, doll. Not my scene.” He tipped his hat, lips tightening.Besides, I already got my hands full with your twin.
Her laughter rippled low and warm as she led him toward the exit. “A cop with principles,” she said, opening it with a soft click. “How quaint.” She paused, one hand on the frame, studying him. “I hope you solve your case.”
So do I, he thought, holding her stare for a moment before stepping back into the hush of the hallway. The door shut behind him, sealing her charms inside. He drew a breath heavy with resolve and strode toward the elevator.So do I.
The weight of Ivy’s words pressed behind his ribs as he emerged onto the ground floor and crossed the marble foyer, reflections of the storm streaking down the glass front like veins. He checked his phone before the revolving doors spun him out into the gray afternoon.
‘64 Willow Lane, Carfax,’Kitty’s message read. Gordon’s family home address.
He knew the place. Old Town, Calgrave’s crumbling heart, where time had gilded the rooftops and then forgotten them. The cracked stone façades full of history still whispered of ballroom nights and brass bands, but the gilt was peeling, the beauty tired beneath its paint. Allure and corruption in the same breath. Carfax lay by the river, close to the Blue Bridge.
Lightning cracked across the sky—sharp, roaring—and something in Rick’s gut locked into place.A sound like distant thunder. Not weather.A train.The Blue Line ran under the Bellona River at that exact stretch, its steel coaches rumbling through the Stanwyck tunnel and rattling the ground every half hour. Willow Lane sat right next to those tracks, just past where they surfaced again.
Christ. That’s it. That has to be it.
He swung into the driver’s seat and slammed the door behind him, shutting out the downpour’s drumming. The brim of his hat streamed water, droplets running off in rivulets along his shoulders. The engine flared to life, gauges lighting up, and before the echo faded, he was already pulling away from the curb. Tires hissed over the flooded asphalt, spray leaping behind him as he floored it through the streaming traffic.
Rick gritted his teeth, knuckles white on the wheel. The wipers beat a frantic rhythm as the streets blurred past, silvered by the thunderstorm. Every light, every block, every breath was now a countdown.
Hold on, kid. Please, hold on.
Chapter Fifty-Five
(12:44 p.m.)
The candles flickered, their light growing dim, wax running in slow rivers across the stone. Ash’s gaze clung to the inky line where the circle had thinned under the leak’s relentless measure. His breathing was a metronome keyed to the drip: patient because there was nothing else to be. Shadows dragged themselves along the grimy walls, tall and trembling, until the room seemed to breathe with him.
The air lay thick and clotted; soot, smoke, and mildew pressed against his senses until he could taste it. His muscles had begun to ache from the hours of immobility, the cold floor a chill reminder of how long he’d waited. Power coiled under his skin, a hunger sharpened by impotence, desperate to move, to run, tofight.
One more drop. Just one.
He looked up; the bead gathered on the rusted pipe, a silver sun quivering at the lip. It swelled, hung for a heartbeat too long, then loosened and fell, splattering over the last trace of a crimson thread. The border opened like a wound.
Ash straightened and surged forward, stepping beyond the line.Free.
He stood naked in the candle glare, every nerve a live wire. The fury that rose was a hard, ancestral thing—the rage of capture and defeat, of being stripped of choice and strength. Gordon’s face flared in his mind like a bell: the quiet voice, the careful hands. He would pay. That was not a promise so much as the shape of his next breath.
He lifted his gaze back to the rusted pipes overhead, tracing the damp seam along the underside of the thinnest tube. A tiny trickle pulsed through it—clean, he prayed. Stepping closer, he focused his attention on it: a narrowing of will that gathered in the palms, in his veins, in the back of his eyes. There was a taste to it, a low keening under his skin as if some great muscle had found purchase. The candles guttered as the air wavered; a pressure built in his skull until his vision throbbed. The metal groaned. A thin fissure split with a quietplick, releasing a narrow, steady stream.
Ash caught a few drops in his palm, sniffed—no rot, no chemical sting—then cupped both hands beneath the leak. The water was cold enough to lance his bones. He drank greedily, enough for the dizziness to ease before forcing himself to stop. Strength returned in a slow bloom.Time to go.
The bulkhead doors loomed ahead, iron-lipped and crusted with the stains of corrosion. He shoved at it, but the iron did not yield; the door was latched from the other side. Once more, he narrowed his focus, the air tightening with a faint tremor as he pressed his will against the weak point. Steel answered with a complaint. The hinges quivered; rivets whined. He felt the metal’s grain, the little give where rust had rotted the seam, the exact place where force would unmake attachment. He pushed, not with fists but with pressure that rode the bones like a tide, and the bolts began to scream.
