“If Dom would speak toanyone, it would help us all,” Heather said bitterly.
“I don’t need him to talk. Just listen.”
Heather shrugged. “My husband said he’s working on it. I’ll get him to email you if there’s any progress.”
The Waring parents made statements to the press hand in hand, in lockstep on their son’s innocence and the stable home they’d given him. Since they’d hired Took to consult on the case, he’d only seen them together once. The space between them was so full of blame, guilt, and resentment that they could hardly look at each other. He had practically been able to hear the unspoken accusations.Heather coddled him…. Liam pushed him too hard…. He/she/we should have seen something.
“Thank you.” Took held up the neat rectangle of the letter. “Can I keep this? I can make a copy and get this back to you.”
Heather gave the ivory paper a disgusted look and waved her hand in a brusque, dismissive gesture. “Keep it,” she said as she fumbled her bag closed. “I’ll remember what it says. Until my dying day.”
She hooked the bag over her shoulder and stood up. Then she stopped, as though there was something else she needed to do before she left.
“Mrs. Waring?” Took prompted as he stood up.
She blinked and cleared her throat. “I remember when I was Dom’s age,” she said. “I thought I was so grown up, an adult who wasn’t going to mess up like all the other adults in her life. Now I look back, and I was just a kid. I didn’t really know anything.”
Her hand worked around the strap of her bag as she talked, the leather twisted and folded between her fingers. She paused for a second to take a quick breath between words.
“Liam thinks that it was all nothing, that VINE framed Dom because of Liam’s political ambitions, because he’s a breathing man’s politician. I know that’s not true,” she said, the words like stones she had to spit out. Maybe it was the first time she’d admitted it to herself. Took was sure it was the first time she’d admitted it to herself. “I know Dom did something. I’m his mother and, like you said, I don’t need him to tell me, I can see it in his eyes. He did something, but not—” She jabbed a shaky finger at the drawer where Took had shoved the pictures. Out of sight obviously wasn’t out of mind. “Not that.”
Took wished he could reassure her, or at least part of him did. It had been easy to pick apart the Biters’ case against Waring with the detachment of nearly two years. Since Madoc pulled his fat out of the fire and reminded him what it was like to be part of the team, despite the unignorable suspicion that Madoc had betrayed him first, it felt disloyal to hope they’d fucked it up.
Took left the letter on the desk as he stood up. He settled on “If I can prove that, I will.”
She looked grateful. Took felt the weight of it against his shoulders as he showed her out. He wasn’t sure he was a good bet to be anyone’s best hope these days. The cat waited until Heather was gone and then mewed rustily for his breakfast.
That, Took thought as he headed toward the kitchen, felt more his speed.
He made a mental note to call the dispensary and get an emergency refill on his… medication.
“DID YOUgive her my address?” Took asked.
He stood at the window in VINE’s Charleston offices, close enough that he could feel the heat of the setting sun through the glass, and looked out over a skyline of narrow gray towers and brassy mosaics that glittered sourly in the sun. Most depicted Tepes in some form, his distinct crown—some rendered the pearls on his crown in ivory and others in glass, but all placed seven for the souls of the Solomonary—more faithfully recreated than the sketch of his stern face. Charleston had been one of the first footholds the Hazahad in the New World, and the boyars had wanted to show their loyalties hadn’t faded as they crossed the salt sea. They were all under The Salt now, but their stamp lingered on the city.
Took had lived there for over a year. Before that he’d spent a decade in Philadelphia, where they’d purged the mosaics but embraced the harsh, defensive lines of crenellated parapets and arrow-slit windows. He should be used to it by now, but sometimes he missed the low, easy sprawl of the towns out west, where he’d grown up… where the buildings didn’t need to stake the sky.
“She wanted to speak to you,” SSA West Crane said. The dim ghost of his reflection in the long, dark windows signed something and sat back in the big leather chair. “I didn’t expect her to turn up at dawn.”
“I think she turned up at midnight,” Took said. “I’m not used to being nocturnal yet.”
“Does it matter?” West asked inthatvoice, the one that was carefully uninflected to give the impression the question was free of weight when it wasn’t at all. Took knew the voice. He used to be the one to use it. Now people used it on him. “So someone knows your address. What’s wrong with that? Do you think she might tell someone else? That someone will find you that you don’t want to find you?”
Yes.
Of course he did, Took thought bitterly. He bounced from hotel room to randomly chosen parking lot because he was afraid that the vampire who’d snatched him would track him down again. Sometimes he woke up, curled into the perimeter of that fucking box, and he was too scared to straighten himself out in case his feet hit cold metal and he breathed in the stench of his own body as it rotted.
In case his escape had been a dream. Or a trick.
“It sounds stupid when you say it,” Took drawled as he turned around. He shrugged under West’s curious stare. “I guess secrecy gets to be a habit, and after everything that happened after I… got back, it’s been nice to leave the house without having to wade through the press.”
West chuckled and took his glasses off. Without the heavy, square frames, the SSA’s face looked younger, his eyes a ridiculous shade of blue. West was more pleasantly nondescript than handsome, but he had beautiful eyes. There had been a time when Took spent a fair amount of time appreciating those eyes.
“I doubt that will be a problem,” West joked with a crooked smile. “No offense, Took, but you’re old news.”
Took tried to pin down the flicker of nostalgic attraction that fluttered in his gut, hold on to it, but it faded like a ghost. Once upon a time, he’d been pretty sure he could fall in love with West, or close enough to make him the better choice. Now he didn’t know. They’d tried after Took got back, but…. Well, nobody wanted something that broken. Took couldn’t hold that against West.
“Maybe not once people find out I’m working for the Waring parents,” he said. “A VINE agent who wants to overturn one of VINE’s big profile cases? That’s newsworthy.”
