Boars caught up to the van a hundred meters further on, ramming the fender hard enough to send it skidding sideways into the drainage ditch, and Nate was out of the car and running again before it had fully stopped, gravel and mud spraying under his boots, his lungs still burning from the first sprint. The driver came out the front door with a pistol already up, and Boars put him down before he'd cleared the frame, two shots that folded the man against the doorsill and left him hanging there, one boot still caught in the footwell. Nate didn't stop to check him. He went for the rear doors instead, wrenching the handle, finding it jammed against the ditch's uneven angle, and slammed his shoulder into it twice before the metal finally gave. Luna was curled against the crates where he'd last seen her, wrists bound in front of her now instead of behind, blood crusted along one temple where the van's swerve had thrown her against something hard. Her eyes found his in the dim wash of the

The safehouse smelled like fresh paint and nothing else, the particular blankness of a place nobody had lived in long enough to leave a scent behind, and Luna lay on top of the covers with her shoes still on because taking them off felt like admitting she planned to stay here, and some stubborn corner of her still hadn't accepted that she wasn't going back to her own apartment, her own kitchen table, her own life. The bandage on her temple itched. She kept catching herself reaching up to scratch at the edge of it and stopping her own hand halfway, the way you stop yourself from touching a bruise you already know will hurt if you press it. Three days now. She'd slept most of the first one, whatever they'd given her at the facility still working its way out of her system in long, heavy waves that pulled her under without warning even in daylight. The second day she'd managed to eat something. Today she'd managed to sit up in a chair by the window for an hour before the light through

Nate didn't dial the number Jo gave him right away. He sat with the phone in his hand a long while first, in the dark of the apartment, the metal box from the bedroom sitting open on the kitchen table beside him where he'd carried it without quite deciding to, his father's photograph propped against the sugar bowl because there hadn't been anywhere else that felt right to set it down. Callum Vasser. Callum Osric. A boy who'd told a reporter he hoped somebody would finally pay attention to what happened at the docks at night, and a man who'd died three days after swearing, under oath, that he'd seen exactly what happened there twenty years later than anyone should have had to wait to hear it. “I met him.” The thought arrived slow, the way the worst thoughts always arrived, circling twice before it landed with its full weight. “William brought him to me. I sat across from a table from him. I thanked him for his courage and I never once asked what it had cost him to build the courage

Wilton read the coroner's file twice before he let himself feel anything about it, because feeling things first had never once helped him do the work properly, not in this life or the one before it, and he'd learned a long time ago which order kept a man useful and which order got him killed. “Cause of death: acute toxin exposure, ingested. Delivery vector: meal service, third-party contracted caterer, secure facility.” The report ran four pages, clinical, bloodless, the particular language of a system built to describe a man's last hour without ever once admitting it had failed to keep that hour from happening at all. Somewhere underneath the toxicology numbers and the chain-of-custody signatures sat a person Callum Vasser, Callum Osric, an old man frightened enough to testify against the richest family in the state and brave enough to do it anyway, and none of the four pages in front of Wilton said a single word about who he'd actually been before somebody decided his silence was

Frans read the court filing three times before he let himself feel anything about it, standing in his office at half past midnight with the overhead lights off and only the monitor's glow to work by, because feeling things first had never once helped him think clearly and he needed, tonight of all nights, to think very clearly indeed. “Order admitting supplemental testimony. Estate of Callum Vasser, also known as Osric.” He read the judge's own written opinion twice, the particular clinical language of a woman who'd clearly decided not to soften a single word of what she suspected “a documented pattern of interference consistent with efforts to suppress testimony connecting the deceased witness to an earlier, related death.” He set the printout down on his desk, very carefully, and sat with his hands flat against the wood for a long moment, the same posture he'd taken in his father's study a lifetime ago, before any of this had a shape he could hold. “Nobody knows it was me.” He t