Kodiak doesn’t look at me. “Sorry, little lamb, but he dies here. He laid hands on you and threatened us with the law. That’s two sins too many. Say your prayers, boy.”
Byron writhes, pinned, mouth gaping. “No! Please! I’ll keep your secret. I swear it!”
“I reckon I ought to let you run just to see how far you get,” Kodiak says, pressing steel to skin. “But I heard you right the first time. Men who run their mouth to the law don’t live long.”
“Have mercy!” Byron’s voice cracks. His eyes find mine, wild, beseeching. “Please, tell him!”
“She don’t answer to you,” Kodiak snarls. The knife glides, fast and sure. Crimson wells.
I clap a hand to my mouth and stumble back, bile climbing my throat. “Kodiak, no! Stop, please!”
But it’s too late. A wet, terrible sound fills the room. Byron convulses and gurgles, his pleas drowning in blood. It spills over Kodiak’s hands and sheets the floor in pools of red. Kodiak stays crouched over the body, chest heaving, knife dripping blood like syrup.
“Sweet Lord above,” I whisper, tears hot on my cheeks. “You killed him. You?—”
“He laid hands on you,” Kodiak says, rising to his feet. “He came up here to collect on his kindness, and had I not been here, he woulda forced you down. He was already dead the moment he stepped through that door.”
He wipes the blade across his thigh, streaking himself in the blood of the kill. His chest is slick with sweat, muscles taut, his body still humming with rage. Naked, terrible, smeared in gore. And—God help me—the violence has stirred him, his length not full but swelling, thick and dark. Proof his body had found delight in blood makes me tremble, ashamed.
Have I become wicked as he is, to want him when he delights in another man’s death? To find comfort, even desire, in the violence he commits for me, when in truth I am at the center of it? I matter more to him than mercy, more than another life. I shake my head, shuddering, words tumbling ragged from my lips.
“What have I done? You’re…you’re a monster,” I whisper. Terror grips me and I scream. “You’re a monster!”
Kodiak surges up. In one stride he is on me, his bloody hand clamping over my mouth, copper and iron in my nose.
“Quiet,” he breathes at my ear, hot and ragged. “You’ll bring the whole house down on us.”
I tremble in his grip, pulled between horror and the shattering truth that this man, this beast, would murder the world to keep me his.
“Alice,” he whispers against my ear, as if to soothe me. “He laid his filthy hands where they don’t belong, threatened us both. Far as I’m concerned, that’s as good as drawin’ iron.”
I’m numb.
The clerk’s body empties his veins onto the floor, and I fear I’ve woken in a nightmare.
Chapter 25
KODIAK
She thought she loved an outlaw till she saw what an outlaw was really about. It’s the only explanation I have for the silence. The distance. Truth is, I feel a fool. Shoulda known better than to believe a soft, pious thing like her wouldn’t be horrified by the likes of me.
Hope is a rope to hang yourself, and I’m long gone.
She don’t say a word while I tend the mess I made—just curls up in bed crying while I drag the poor bastard to the washroom. Not worth the trouble of hauling his bones out, stirring a ruckus, drawing more attention. Best we leave him for the law to find.
“Come on,” I say. “Get dressed. We’re goin’ now.”
Wash water runs red. I scrub, slip back into my gentleman’s suit, and scrawl a note.
PRINSESS IS DED.
Figure it’ll throw them off. Buy us time, hunting assassins from a kingdom don’t exist. Poor desk clerk casualty of a warthat never was. I shoulder the bag, coat heavy with gains, and creep down the stairwell, Alice trailing behind like she wants us both to hang. Can’t even hiss at her—the whole place echoes—so I stand at the bottom, watching her drift down like a ghost.
Horse and carriage wait in the alley, but my gut says no. My gut ain’t been wrong yet. Sun’s hid but rising soon. We need distance, and Alice’s warning rattles me: only so many roads out of New Orleans. Sherman’s men will be watching them all, sure as the vault was robbed. Virgil will see the wire by afternoon and know it was me. I almost laugh thinking on his face. But we got to vanish, not trot the open country in a carriage they might have seen.
Then the answer comes—a screech and a bellow, like a cow caught in a church organ. Lanterns glow yonder at the wharf. A ship.
That’s it.
