Fresh tears welled in her eyes. She dashed them away with a furious swipe of her hand and glared at him.
“I tell you that you’re going to kill my son, that they’re going to cut his heart out and bury his body where we’ll never find it—” Her voice cracked harshly, and she stopped for a second to take a ragged, damp breath. “Never find him. And you want to know how I got your address? Does it really matter?”
Took shoved his keys into the pocket of his trousers. He could have made it home last night. It was only two hours from Appleton to Charleston. Even with the midnight rush hour, he could have made it back in time to sleep in his own bed. Instead he’d crashed in a McDonald’s parking lot, slouched in the front seat of his car as he watched the dull-eyed employees yawn and trade milkshakes for joints under the neon glare of the Golden Arches.
“I guess not,” he admitted as he took the steps to the front door. The house hadn’t felt safe when no one knew he lived there. It wouldn’t change anything that now people did. He bent down to scoop the cat up from the doormat. It hissed in disgruntlement at being handled—a flash of white fangs and the pink curl of its tongue—and scrambled up his arm, claws hooked in his shirt, to perch on his shoulder. “You might as well come in. If someone sees you on my porch, everyone will know where I live.”
Heather exhaled sharply between her teeth. “You do remember that you work for us,” she said.
“Billable hours, Mrs. Waring,” Took said as he keyed in the security code and pushed the heavy, steel-core door open with one foot. “Until the clock starts on this dawn consultation, you’re just another solicitor who’s ignored the sign.”
She gave him a dirty look but held her tongue as she stalked over his threshold. “You shouldn’t let your cat outside,” she said as she passed him. “White cats can’t take the sun.”
“Snack does what he wants,” Took said. To prove the point, Snack used his shoulder as a launch pad to leap over to the carved ball that decorated the banister. He didn’t look like a white cat, he looked like a talented child’s drawing of a cat, with milk-pale fur and crayon blue eyes and nose. Took could swear the kitten had been darker, his fur gray and his eyes green, when someone tossed him into Took’s box. Maybe he’d just been dirty. Snack stretched and dug his claws into the polished wood, his tail crooked up in a question mark as he gave a pointed, rusty mew. “And he can take care of himself. My office is down the hall.”
Snack didn’t bother to follow them. The cat sitter would have left his food out. He just liked to make a reproachful point when Took was away for longer than a couple of days.
It was optimistic to call the small room in the back of the house an office. There was a computer and a filing cabinet, but Took had barely used either. His therapist had suggested he try to write a book, to distract himself from the emptiness of his day-to-day with the memory of adrenaline. Took hadn’t gotten very far. He’d never had the patience for stories and, right now, thoughts of the past just reminded him on the stuff hecouldn’tremember.
There were chairs and a desk… currently covered with glossy, bloody pictures of Dom Waring’s crime scenes. Took cursed under his breath and ducked around the desk to sweep the photos off and into a drawer. Red and white, shattered bones, and wet meat.
“I’ve seen them all,” Heather said in a tight, precise voice as she sat down. “The ones we didn’t see in court the press were happy to show us.”
“Still,” Took said as he shoved the drawer shut and slid into the leather swivel chair. The still-raw skin on his back, open under his shirt, ached dully with something like pain. It wasn’t exactly welcome, but in a weird way, it reassured Took. When the sun was up, he felt close to human, enough to remember what it was like. He tried to hang on to that. The thought that he might forget one day scared him. “Not what you need before breakfast.”
Heather sat back and raised her chin with brittle defiance. “They’re just ugly photos,” she said steadily, “of ugly things. It’s sad and it’s horrible, but it’s nothing to do with me. Because my son didn’t do that to people. He’s just who they blamed for it. And who they’re going to kill for it.”
She broke up and covered her mouth with her hand. Her knuckles pressed down hard against her lips as she blinked back a fresh spill of tears. Her grief made Took look away uncomfortably and wonder what to do if the dam broke. It wasn’t easy to comfort someone when you didn’t entirely trust yourself that close to their throats or the crook of their arms.
That admission made Took’s humanity feel a lot further away. He pushed his tongue against his teeth. They were sharp enough to cut, and his own blood was like burnt molasses as he swallowed it, but they were still where they belonged.
“Do you have the letter from The Salt?” he asked. “The latest one.”
It was a distraction that worked for them both. Heather sniffed, wiped her eyes on the back of her wrist, and pulled the bag into her lap. She had to wipe her eyes again, pinch tears away between her finger and thumb, before she could dig into the dark interior.
“Here,” she said as she finally pulled out the creased, ripped-open envelope. Her hands trembled slightly as she looked at it, frozen for a second, then thrust it toward Took. “It arrived yesterday, by special courier. He said… he said that nothing I have to say would be heard.”
The familiar seal of The Salt was stamped in blue ink on the envelope and embossed in raised threads of silk on the heavy sheet of paper inside. Took unfolded it on his desk and looked it over quickly. He’d seen execution notifications before. A copy of this one would have been sent to Madoc and the director of VINE so they could attend if they wanted.
The date of execution had always been a grim sort of tick mark for his personal files. Job done. Monsters gone. It had never been a functional deadline before.
“Tell me you can stop this,” Heather said.
Took hesitated. He knew—it was an itch down deep in the fold of his brain—that VINE had missed something. That didn’t mean Dom Waring was innocent, not innocent enough to sway The Salt, anyhow.
“I can try.”
She choked out a rough bark of laughter. There was no real humor to it, just a desperation that didn’t know where else to go.
“You know, you could lie,” she said. “I won’t mind.”
“Trust me,” Took said. “You would. Eventually. People always do.”
She closed her eyes and pulled her mouth into a blind, ragged smile. “Right now,” she said bitterly, “I can hardly face tomorrow, never mind ‘eventually.’”
Took averted his eyes from her pain for a second time. He folded the heavy notification letter back into the ruler-straight creases to give her a moment to compose herself.
“As I said before, it would help if I could talk to your son,” he said when he finally looked up.
