Page 58 of Shatter

He looks at me for a long time.

Then he nods, slowly, and stands up.

"Okay." He picks his cut up off the back of the chair and shrugs into it. "I'll tell him."

"Will he make me?" My voice cracks on it.

He stops with his hand on the doorknob.

"He'll have to go through me first." He doesn't turn around.

Then he's gone, and I'm alone with the drive in my fist and the word Carrow still hanging in the air where I left it.

He comes back an hour later with two cans of Coke from the machine downstairs and a message.

"Tor says you've got time." He sets one of the cans on the nightstand beside me, sweating cold drops onto the wood. "Not forever. But time."

"How much?" I pick up the can and hold it against my wrist.

"He didn't say." Hakon pops the tab on his own can and leans against the dresser. "He's putting Aren and Ulf on the Laurent guy, checking motels and rental counters. Vanir's watching the airports."

"And if they find him?" I watch his face.

Hakon takes a long swallow of Coke and doesn't answer.

He doesn't need to.

* * *

They don't find him.

Two weeks go by, and nobody finds anything.

No gray SUV, no men in nice suits asking about cousins.

No strangers at the gate, no cars slowing on the road outside the fence.

Nothing.

It's worse than if something happened.

Every night I lie awake listening to the bikes come and go through the gate.

When one of them backfires, I'm sitting straight up in bed before I know I'm awake, my hand clamped over my ribs.

My ribs are better now.

I can take a full breath without the knife of it catching halfway down.

Vail took my stitches out on the tenth day, sitting cross-legged on the bed with a pair of tiny curved scissors and a pair of tweezers, humming along to something on her phone.

The scar underneath is pink and shiny and raised, a long, crooked line down the inside of my left forearm.

I keep running my thumb over it.

The bruises are gone, except for a faint yellow shadow at the edge of my eye I can only see in bright light.

My roots are two inches long now.