Page 11 of Crown of Ash

The flowers were already there.

Not wilted. Not the kind that had been sitting through a week of weather, petals curling brown at the edges. These were fresh, a day old at most, stems still holding water from whatever they'd been carried in. White chrysanthemums, tight-headed, mixed with orchids and gardenias. Not what his mother sent. Evelyn's were always the same order from the same florist on Livernois, loose garden roses in whatever pastel the season had, and she called him the week before every time to tell him she'd done it. She liked him to know. Grief without an audience felt to her like it hadn't happened at all.

She hadn't called this year. Not yet.

Andre crouched at the headstone anyway and brushed a few stray blades of grass off the base of it, out of habit more than need. The chrysanthemums sat upright, facing the sun, set down with some care. Somebody who'd done this before. Somebody who knew which direction the stone faced.

It sat with him for a second; Deon still had people out there, a name that meant something to someone besides the two of them. A friend never mentioned. Somebody from before. Andre couldn't bring to mind who might have send the flowers, which of Deon's friends from before… there were too many. He'd been the life of any party. There were things about his brother he'd stopped expecting to know a long time ago. This felt like one more of them, small and almost kind.

He stayed a minute longer than he needed to, then stood, brushed the grass from his knees, and rested two fingers against the top of the stone on his way past.

The gravel felt longer going back than it had coming in.

The precinct lot was mostly empty by the time Andre got back, the last few stragglers pulling out, brake lights fading around the corner in both directions. He turned the car off and sat there, one hand still resting on the keys.

The air inside had gone stale, heater blowing flat, the familiar cold that came with March in this city working its way in through every seal that didn't quite meet anymore. He could taste it, the cold, the metal of it, the particular working-class ugliness of an American car at the end of winter. The ache in his throat could have come from any of it: the air, the moment ten minutes ago when he'd caught himself wondering how long his brother's grave had had more people looking after it than him and his mother.

He'd known the answer once. He'd stopped counting after the first year, stopped noticing the day when the calendar came back around. He'd taught himself not to look, and it had worked, until it hadn't.

The car ticked, settling. A siren made its way across the city somewhere in the distance behind him, and he couldn't tell which direction it was traveling, whether it was coming toward him or not.

He put his thumb on the keyring, traced the raised letters on it, the grooves worn almost smooth with use. Three years was a long time for anybody to carry a grief that didn't belong to them. He didn't know a lot of people who had that kind of quiet in them. He wasn't sure he'd ever known more than one.

He didn't let himself think about who it was. If he did… he'd have to be willing to crack his chest open and examine his own beating heart for the name on it that had never faded. Not since the day he'd left.

He got out of the car and went back inside. There were fourty people lose in a trafficing pipeline run by a man who had bested him once. He wasn't going to let it happen again.

Chapter 9

Marcus heard the stairs before he heard the knock, a weight on the third step that wasn't Trip's and wasn't Zain's. He knew that weight on sound alone. He'd known it after long days at the courthouse and lazy Sunday mornings. Know it in passion… and in silence. Marcus knew Andry like he did his own heartbeat. Maybe because they were the same and always had been.

He didn't call out. He crossed the room and opened the door himself.

Andre stood on the landing in a coat too thin for March, hands in his pockets, breath still visible from the walk up. He didn't say anything right away. His eyes swept the room first, cop's instinct, and settled on Marcus last. There was a lifetime unsaid in those eyes, deep and dark. Marcus could drown in them, had done… and it hit him like a fist to the chest that he still missed this man with every breath in his lungs.

"Come in."

Andre stepped past him, close enough that Marcus caught the cedar under the cold air still clinging to his coat, and stopped just inside the door like he'd hit an invisible line he hadn't decided whether to cross.

The desk, scarred pale along one edge from years of a blade being set down too hard. The window faced north over the river, the water the color of old nickel this early in the year, light coming through thin and doing nothing to warm the room. The ceramic tray sat on the corner shelf, empty today, its rim gone carbon-black in a ring where paper had burned close to the glaze, over and over, for years. Andre had never been inside this room. Six years... Never once, not even at the start.

Marcus watched him take it in anyway. The desk. The window. The tray caught his gaze for a second and lost it as fast; Andre had learned a long time ago which questions Marcus wouldn't answer, and had never asked one just to watch him refuse.

"Nice view," Andre said, nodding at the window, and it wasn't really a comment on the view.

"Sit if you want."

Andre didn't sit. He stayed standing with his hands still in his pockets, the room's cold not fully chased out yet by the radiator ticking somewhere behind the wall. "You said you had something that couldn't wait for the phone."

"I did." Marcus went to the desk, pulled the folder he'd built over the last six weeks, and set it down between them without opening it yet. "I need you to look at something before I say what I think it means."

Andre's eyes flicked to the folder, then back up to Marcus, steady, already bracing for whatever this was going to cost him to hear. "Okay."

Marcus opened it.

The folder wasn't thick. Six years of work, and it wasn't thick, because Marcus had learned early to keep only what mattered and burn the rest. Ghost had protocols in place for their digital footprint, he knew that, but it would always be physical evidence that would sink a man. Send him to prison.

He slid the first page across the desk. A photograph, grainy, timestamped in the corner. A loading dock on the old Rouge frontage, chain-link half down, a panel truck backed up to the bay.