One organization, top to bottom. Comped at the top, paying below, every man in it a believer.
The men who put a brick through Marie's window.
The ones who ran her off Highway 92.
The same ones who came for Finn's address and killed my parents in a kitchen to get it and didn't.
They owned the place they kept me.
They didn't stumble into it, they didn't buy a night from strangers, theybuiltit, and they filled it, and they came back on their scheduled weekends for years.
I sat in a hole under their feet and thought the men upstairs were nobody, were random, were a different evil than the one that touched Finn's life.
My hand goes still on the page.
I'm hearing it now, what I'm saying and what she's saying, and it comes up in me slowly, the way cold water comes up in a boat you didn't know had a hole.
"Imani."
"Mm?"
"These names. The regulars." My mouth's gone dry. "They're all?—"
"Ironwood." She says it plainly, and she doesn't look at me while she says it, because she's kind. "The eleven regulars are all Trask's men. It's his place, Mila. His people. Deep down, I think you knew that."
"I know." And I do. But knowing a place belongs to Ironwood is one thing, and names are another, names aremen, and there's a pull at the back of my skull now, a date. A date I know in my body, and I don't want to look at it and I look at it anyway. "The last full weekend in April. What names are on it?"
She goes still.
I watch her go still.
Imani, who reads a bad room before she reads a word. She stops writing, and she doesn't turn the page, and she looks at me instead of the ledger.
"Mila?"
"Turn the page."
"Why that weekend?" She sets the pen down."Why do you want that one?"
I can't say it, because saying it out loud makes it real, so I only look at her, and she looks back.
It moves between us without a word, because she was merchandise once too.
She knows there are dates a woman carries in her body that she'd never put on paper.
"Please," I say. "Turn the page."
She turns the page.
And there it is.
Last full weekend in April, and I don't need her to read it, because I can see it—my handwriting's nowhere on it, but the night is.
The night written down in a dead man's shorthand as a line item, a room and a length of time, and a dollar figure and a set of initials.
I know that room.
I know that length of time, because I lived every minute of it with a man's hand closing on my throat and his voice going flat while he told me he was going to kill me.
