There are prisons for men the law can hold.And then there is North Pole Tartarus Penitentiary, built on the roof of the world for everything the law can only bury.No trial had ever been broadcast from Tartarus. No release had ever been announced.Governments that officially denied it existed quietly paid for its heating.On this gray Alaskan morning, for the first time in its history, its gates were opening to let someone out.They ground apart, and the sound went across the yard and came back off the mountain.Up in the towers four guards watched it happen and not one of them put a hand near his weapon.The warden had signed the release himself at four that morning. Nobody above him objected. None of them wanted to be the man who kept Damon Huntley locked up.Damon Huntley walked out into the wind. Black hair, a plain prison coat, eight years older than the boy they'd thrown inside.He didn't look back. He moved like an apex predator that has never once needed to hurry.Sixteen year

The wine came down on the table hard enough to slop over the rim."You have the wrong person. I didn't place any ad, and if I had, I wouldn't have a stranger announce it to me in a public bar.""The woman on the phone said red dress, front window."Damon didn't move."You match. If it isn't you, I'll go."But the woman was past being offended, and she was looking at him properly now.He was still sitting there with both hands on the table, as comfortable as a man in his own kitchen. Any other man caught like this would already be out on the pavement inventing a reason.Vanessa Quinn had come here tonight to meet a man her best friend had promised to deliver. Somebody presentable enough to play a husband for two weeks.The friend's candidate had stopped answering his phone an hour ago.And this one had walked in off the street and said the most humiliating sentence in the language without blinking.She priced him in four seconds. Broke, nobody, and nothing left to lose.That was the who

Four minutes later the door opened again, and this time it came off one of its hinges.The man who came through it wore white from his collar to his shoes. Broad, thick-necked, heavy mutton-chop whiskers.Twenty enforcers filled the corridor behind him.This was the Iceman, and he ran most of Dorne City's underworld. The white suits were famous.The name came from how many people turned up in the harbor every winter.He took the room in with one sweep of his eyes.Two men folded on the carpet and two more in a hole in the wall.Lila crying, and one young stranger sitting in a chair without a mark on him.The Iceman had walked into a hundred rooms like this one. Cheap muscle, too stupid to have asked whose city he was standing in.He priced the young man at nothing and stopped thinking about him.Then he walked over to Daryl and put a boot into his ribs."Your stupid games again.""Apologies, Mr. Iceman. Lila wanted a new car."The Iceman turned his back on him and looked at Damon, who

The room went so quiet that a champagne flute settling onto a saucer three rooms away came through the walls.Then Marcus came off the fireplace shouting."Pregnant? Since when?""Since yesterday."Damon said it like a man giving somebody the weather.Vanessa's breath stopped somewhere in her throat.Yesterday. They had known each other for eleven hours and they had never touched.Most of those hours they had spent in front of a bored civil clerk.The lie was enormous and he delivered it cheerfully. A laugh nearly got out of her before she caught it.And now the words were in her grandfather's house and there was no taking them back.Marcus knew a lie when he heard one. His fists curled."You lying son of a bitch."CRACK.Elias's walking stick came down on the marble like a gunshot, and forty voices died at once."How could you do this to us, Vanessa?"Elias's voice had been hollowed out."You've thrown away everything I have protected for forty years. In a courthouse. On a whim."His

The birthday lunch came back to life with indecent speed.Inside ten minutes the great room had rearranged itself into a celebration. Champagne poured, chairs pulled in around Shane Dutton, and the coffin already being polished into a story worth retelling.Death had come to the house and left again. The Quinn family did what families do with a survived catastrophe and started turning the terror into an anecdote."He walked in and the Iceman simply fled.""That's the Dutton name. That's forty years of standing in this city.""And that ex-con nearly got us all killed. Cheap, he says. To the Iceman's face.""Do you understand what he almost did to this family?""He's a rented husband, and not a very good one. Vanessa, dear, didn't his own family want him either?""Two days. She's had him two days and he's already cost us the house."The laughter went around the table like a plate being passed.Vanessa stood at the edge of it with a glass she hadn't touched.She had walked into this house