34
BROCK
She went under deep, the way she had the night before, dropping all at once into the sleep of somebody who'd carried more than a person should. I waited until her breathing went long and even, then eased out from under her, tucked the blanket where I'd been, and slipped out without a sound.
Tommy's door was next.
He was up. Sitting by the window with a glass of something he wasn't drinking, and he looked up when I came in like he'd been waiting on me.
"The airport," I said.
"Handled. As handled as a thing like that gets." He set the glass down. "It'll stay a mess a while. Cameras, witnesses, a dead civilian, a hurt officer—there's no making that vanish, only managing how it sits. We're managing it." He met my eyes. "I'm not laying blame on you. There isn't any. Just facts, and we deal with the facts."
I nodded. Fairer than I deserved.
"I need to talk to Dad."
Something crossed his face—not surprise. More like relief that the thing he'd dreaded had finally come so he could quit dreading it. He stood.
"Yeah," he said. "Come on."
He led me a long way. Down the corridor, down a back stair, through a wing that went quieter the deeper we went, ‘til we'd crossed nearly the whole footprint of that vast place to a set of rooms in the farthest corner of the estate. I clocked it the way I clock everything. The man at the center of all this, kept at the edge of it. Couldn't tell if that was Byron hiding or Byron hidden, and I filed the question.
Tommy knocked once and opened the door.
My father rose from a small table by a lamp when we came in.
This was the first time I got to actuallylook.And I stood in the doorway and looked at Byron Dane for the first time in many years.
Older. Gray almost all the way through, lines cut deep. But the same man under it—big through the shoulders the way all his sons are big, the same jaw I shave every morning, the same hands. Time hadn't bent him.
What threw me was his face.
I'd come in braced for hardness. For years, I'd carried the picture of the relentless, exacting man who drove us like green horses, who wasrightand never easy, though he loved us. I'd expected to find him older and meaner for whatever he'd done in the dark. Instead, what looked back at me was soft. Not weak—nothing in Byron Dane was ever weak. Worn down to something gentler than I'd ever known him to be. What came off him, plain as heat off a stove, was grief. He looked at me like a man looking at a thing he'd loved and lost and not quite gotten back.
It knocked me sideways worse than hardness would have.
"Sit, please." That voice. "There's a lot. I'll give it to you as fast as I can."
We sat. Three men at a little table in the corner of a mansion, and my father started to talk.
"Dominion Hall was built on stolen money," he said. "I'll start there, because you'll hear it eventually and I'd sooner you heard it from me. Billions. I took it off an outfit called Department 77—government, black as they come, started for good reasons and gone rotten the way those things do. By the end they were a cancer. So, I gutted them. Turned everything they had against them and built this out of the wreck." He held my eyes. "I won't tell you it was clean. I'll tell you it was right. I did it to protect what was mine. Every dollar in these walls is blood money put to better use than the bastards who bled for it ever meant."
A lot, and only the start. "All right," I said. "Keep going."
He drew a breath, and I watched him brace for the next part the way you brace to set a broken bone. His hand, flat on the table, wasn't quite steady. I'd never in my life seen that hand anything but steady.
"You and your brothers in Valentine," he said. "The seven of you. You grew up thinking that was the whole of it. My sons, your mother's sons, the Danes of one ranch in one Texas town." A pause. "It wasn't the whole of it. Not by a long way."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning there's more of you." Plain, no cushion on it. "More sons. Mine. Raised just like you—in a home, by a mother, my name on them, me drifting in and out of their lives same as I drifted in and out of yours. Then gone, same as I went gone on you." His jaw worked on that last part. "Seven in Charleston. Seven in Montana. Your seven in Valentine. Three houses. Twenty-one boys, every one a Dane by blood and by name, and not one of you knew the others walked the earth until this past while."
The room tilted half an inch.
Seven and seven and seven. All Danes. All his. Fourteen of them out there I've never laid eyes on.
I caught myself counting the exits. Two—the door we'd come in, a second behind a curtain that probably gave onto a balcony. Pure reflex, mapping a room in my own father's quarters while he told me I had fourteen brothers I'd never met. I couldn't switch it off. I've never been able to switch it off.
