I walked it backward with my eyes closed so it would come out clean.
“Kitchen, two at the counter, radio and clipboard. Front door down the short hall on the right, garage straight ahead, basement behind us on the left. Mudroom’s a little cutout by the back door, ten steps from the basement door to the garage threshold, two more to that nook. I saw four men up there, heard a fifth I couldn’t place. With Keys, the watcher, and the tote-guy that makes eight. In the garage, pallets stacked shoulder-high, roll-up door halfway, rain and trucks idling. And,” my throat tightened, and I made it finish anyway, “a blonde chained to a pipe. A tattoo right here.” I touched my own collarbone. “She’s in bad shape, Cap.”
To my right, Sunshine made a sound like she’d been underwater too long. “A sun,” she whispered. Not the sky.
I slid my fingers to the seam between cages. Her hand came through the diamonds fast, bones bird-light and stubborn. “She’s breathing,” I said, because it mattered which facts we kept.
“Okay,” she said, not okay at all. “Okay.”
Cap shifted closer so his heat ran along my shoulder, his body doing the thing it always does, becoming a wall that never brags about being a wall. “Did anyone touch you,” he asked, filing by feel.
“No. Just Keys. He doesn’t like being told to hold by people who don’t mop.” I let out the breath I’d been holding since the mudroom. “Radio voices want you first. ‘No marks.’”
He nodded like a piece dropped into the slot he’d carved for it. Then he tilted his head until his brow touched the mesh and mine through it.
“He hurt you?” he said.
I shook my head. “Not yet.”
“Good.” He lifted his hands in the light so only I could see. The tie on his wrists looked tidy. It wasn’t. He turned them the smallest bit and the plastic gaped where it wanted me to think it didn’t.
“How,” I breathed.
“Later,” he said, which meant now, but quiet.
His mouth did that half-smile he never lets finish when the room is full of other people’s fear.
Above us, a dolly clanged into a doorframe and got cussed out. The clean voice said, “Keep numbers clean.” Somewhere in the kitchen a chair whined across tile; rain needled the windows like it was trying keys it didn’t have.
Cap folded to the base of the cage like he was settling, not scheming. He took the bit of wire I’d used to fish the water bottle earlier, looped it between his fingers, and set the bobby pin along the ugly weld. The screw followed, sliding under the lip where the seam met the floor. He worked slow, patient, only moving when footsteps overhead covered the scrape of metal. When the house went quiet again, he froze so clean even the air seemed to wait. I could feel the focus coming off him like heat.
“Talk,” he murmured, not because he needed noise, because he wanted my breath to throw a blanket over his.
“Front door’s down a short hall, two men standing there when we passed,” I said. “Garage is closer. I caught a line of light under the roll-up door and heard engines outside, diesel, more than one. Rain’s running off the eaves into a puddle by the back step. One guy’s out there smoking, keeps flicking ash into a fake fern like he thinks no one notices.”
“Copy,” he said, like he was radioing himself.
The weld whispered. The floor clicked soft, like a throat clearing.
Sunshine kept my fingers locked in hers. Across the aisle, Juno said a few words I didn’t recognize in a tone I did. It was a prayer sharpened into a blade.
Eight men,” I said quietly. “How do we take eight, Cap?”
He didn’t look up from the weld. “We don’t. We make them trip over each other and walk through the hole that leaves.”
“Solid plan,” I muttered.
“Best kind,” he said. “Messy for them. Quiet for us.”
Boots crossed above. Someone griped, “Ridge is a river.” Another snapped, “Move the tarp.” Then the clean voice came again, not tired at all: “Hold until green. Process the vet first.”
The air in our room tightened. Not louder. Closer.
Cap leaned harder into the work. He didn’t look up. His shoulder brushed the wire where my cheek was and that was enough. The weld gave a hair and held, like a lie deciding whether to keep lying.
“They’ll bring you first,” I said. I hated how my voice sounded around it.
“They’ll try,” he said, and the calm in it put the floor back under my feet.
