Page 28 of Crown of Ash

Nate came out of the kitchen doorway with the towel still in his hand.

"Dray took me to Velvet, and tonight he took me to the clubhouse off Telegraph. I spoke to Sovereign. Got my head straight about a few things."

Ghost's hands came off the keys.

Jude lifted his head.

Marcus had spent his whole career learning to hear a room instead of a person. This room gave him silence. The extractor fan ran over the burning rice. Down the building a compressor cycled and shut off.

Sovereign. A detective sergeant with fifteen years and a pension and a spotless jacket… sitting downwith the president of the Lords of Darkness Outlaw Motorcycle Club, with no wire and no warrant and no supervisor read in.

Andre had just walked into a building full of criminals and handed them the rope with which to hang him if they wanted. Saying they were confidential informents would only buy him so much grace… and not nearly enough to save him.

Marcus's ribs ached.

"He's telling the truth," Ghost said.

Zain rounded on him. "How?

"Because his phone sat at a dead-end service road off Telegraph for fifty-one minutes starting at 19:37." Ghost shrugged one shoulder, still on the floor, still not looking up. "And because he knows I know that, and he said fifty. Man's bad at rounding."

"You still have my phone tracked and backed," Andre asked and didn't sound overly surprised.

"I have everybody's phone." Ghost typed. "Yours is the boring one."

Zain's shoulders came down half an inch and then went straight back up, because coming down was a concession and Zain was not finished.

"That doesn't make him safe," Zain said. "That makes him reckless. He sat with Sovereign. You know what that is? That's him burning his own house down so we'll believe he's not holding a match."

"Yes," Marcus said.

Everyone looked at him.

"That's exactly what it is." He was still standing between them. He had not moved. "And it's the most useful thing anybody's done for this crew in nine hours."

"Marcus-"

"Elijah's stable. He's twenty feet down that hall with Trip on the door and Jack not letting go of his hand." Marcus let it come out flat and complete, because Zain needed numbers and not comfort, because comfort would have been an insult. "I have a meet at Crimson tomorrow. The leak has a shape, and now it has a second set of eyes on it from the inside where we can't reach. You've been walking this floor for two hours because there was nothing to do. There's something to do now. Tomorrow. Not tonight."

Zain's jaw worked.

"Jack would've said something funny by now," Nate said, from the doorway, not looking up from the pan.

It went through the room like a crack running across a windshield. Jude made a sound and pressed the back of his wrist against his mouth. Seth closed his eyes.

"Yeah," Zain said. His voice came apart on the one syllable, and he pulled it back together in front of the whole room, both hands closing into fists at his sides. "Yeah. He would've."

Seth went to him, sensing that now was the time to bring his man down from the edge.

He came off the arm of the couch and got a hand flat between Zain's shoulder blades and steered, not hard, and Zain let himself be steered. That was the apology. At the mouth of the corridor Seth stopped him and said something against the side of his head that Marcus did not hear and was not meant to, and Zain put his forehead down on Seth's shoulder for the length of one breath.

"Twenty minutes on fresh rice," Nate said, to nobody. "I ruined the first batch because of this drama. I'm making it again."

"Make less," Jude said. First words in ninety minutes. His voice was shot. "Nobody's going to eat eleven people's worth of rice."

Nate looked at him for a second, and then crossed the room and put his mouth on the top of Jude's head, then went back into the kitchen.

Which left Ghost on the ground pretending to work, and the two of them.