Her chair is empty.
The jacket is still draped over the back of it — her jacket, the one with the deep pockets she's worn since the night I appeared at her motel door. But the chair holds only the shape of where she was, and when I scan the room — the Siren at her table, Juliet bent over her notebook, Marisol near the door — Wren isn't anywhere in it.
A doorway on the far side of the room. The hallway beyond it dim, leading deeper into the club. She slipped away while I was on the phone — back room, a quiet corner to wait out whatever comes next. She does this: moves through spaces without announcing herself, takes up exactly the amount of room she decides to and no more. She's fine. She's in the next room. The building is secured.
Nico's call is burning in my pocket. La Sirena is eight minutes away. The Zayas are massing and Gunner is in the holding room and the defense needs coordinating and I should be in the car. My feet should be at the door.
I look at the doorway she passed through.
Thirty seconds. I'll find her, say goodbye properly, and then I'll go.
I cross the room and step through into the dim corridor, moving toward where she went.
25 - Wren
Logan should be gone. He said as much the moment we stepped through the door — Nico’s call was clear, the Zayas are massing outside La Sirena. He got us settled, confirmed the perimeter with Pawlikowski, and then stood in the middle of the room not leaving.
So I slipped into the back corridor to give him space to go. But instead, he followed me. His phone is in his pocket now. He keeps not looking at it.
"Tell me about Jimmy," I say.
He looks at me. His jaw works once.
"He was a fixer, like me," he says. "But apparently he needed more thank-yous than I do."
I wait.
"You don't look like a man who caught a traitor," I say. "You look like a man who caught a friend."
I put my hand over his. He doesn't move it away. I tug him back to the main room.
The stage is empty. The poles catch the dim light from the emergency lighting and hold it. We're sitting in a strip club but nothing about what's happening between us is transactional anymore.
His phone buzzes again. He pulls it out, glances at the screen, places it face down on the nearest table. He's borrowed every second he can. I can feel the minutes running out around us like a tide turning.
"Are you okay?" he asks.
Simple. Quiet. Just that.
I open my mouth to sayI'm fine.The words are right there — I've said them so many times they've worn a groove, easy and automatic.I'm fine. We're managing. Mom is comfortable.
I look at him.
He's not asking about Mom. He's asking about me. And I don't know what the answer is. I have never been asked to find out.
For six years, I was the one who checked.Are you warm enough. Is the pain bad today. Did you eat.I learned to read her breathing in the dark — the difference between sleep and something worse. I tracked her medications in a notebook I kept on the kitchen counter, three columns, times and dosages and whether she'd kept it down. I was sixteen when it started and twenty-two when it ended and in all those years between, no one ever turned the question around.
My father stopped looking at me when she got bad. He looked at the bottle instead, and then he stopped coming home, and I stopped leaving notes. Friends drifted away. And then she was gone, and I sat in that room and waited for the grief that never came.
Then five years of nothing. Dirty motel rooms, strangers in the corridors, cities that all looked the same.
And now this man — this complicated, violent man who cannot make himself leave a strip club even when Nico is on the other end of the phone sayingnow— has asked if I'm okay. Asked it the way you ask someone when you actually want the answer.
Not once did someone ask me that. Not in six years of her dying and five years of drifting through the aftermath.
"I—"
The crack opens.
