ST. ANSELM'S HOSPITAL, SERVICE ENTRANCEThe key card worked on the third try, and the heavy steel door by the laundry clicked open onto a long yellow corridor that smelled of bleach and boiled cabbage, where a single trolley of dirty sheets sat abandoned under a flickering tube light, and from somewhere far above came the slow tired beeping of a monitor."Quiet," Ethan whispered."I'm being quiet.""You're breathing like a bloody horse.""I'm terrified, you arsehole, I'm allowed to breathe!" Sophia hissed back, with her back pressed against the wall and her hair plastered to her forehead by the rain, and Ethan, in spite of everything, felt the corner of his mouth twitch.Behind them Gabriel's car had pulled up in the dark, and the driver had taken Mia Finch from the back seat, still asleep, wrapped in Sophia's jacket with her rabbit under her chin, and driven off to the police station where a very pale father had been waiting for four hours with his hands over his face. It had been th

"Hello, Ethan," it said. "It's been a very long time since you almost got ripped off my neck collar bone, you motherfucking son of a bitch. I will ensure you suffer for fucking calling me your mother's killer." Ethan did not move, did not blink, did not so much as shift his weight on the grey linoleum, and in the dim emergency light his face went so perfectly smooth and so perfectly cold that Richard Morgan, standing three feet away with both hands folded on his cane, felt something move at the back of his neck like a cold finger. It was Gerald Cole. He knew the voice now, thick and wet and hissing through a mouthful of steel wire, the voice of a man who had spent his whole life giving orders and was no longer certain anyone was obeying them, and behind it, very faint, he could hear the clink of a glass and a woman's sharp breathing, and a clock ticking in some big warm room on a hill. "Well, father," Ethan said, in a voice as light as a feather, "the world doesn't revolve around y

THE STREET OUTSIDE THE HOLDING CELLS, MORNINGEthan looked at the open car door for a long, slow, insulting moment, then looked at the old man inside, then at the little grey rat of an aunt hunched in the front seat, and he laughed, a short ugly bark of a laugh that made the driver flinch."Get in?" he said. "Get in the fucking car with the man who has been feeding kids to a butcher? Grandpa, I've seen better kidnapping attempts in a Hollywood movie, and those had a budget of fifty dollars and a goat.""Mind your language, boy," said Silas Cole, still smiling."My language?" Ethan stepped up to the window, bent down, and put both forearms on the glass, so close that the old man could smell the charcoal on his fingers. "You sent your clown of a son to chop my mother's brother's legs, you poisoned half the city, and you want me to watch my fucking language? Sit your wrinkly arse back and listen to me, you decrepit, fossilised, tax-dodging pile of shit.""Charming.""I'm not done.""Plea

THE ASHFORD FAMILY CHAPEL, THE HILLSThe roof came down in one long, groaning, thunderous sheet of fire, and Ethan Cole, flat on his back in the wet grass with a hot lead box clutched to his chest and a woman in a black hat sitting astride his ribs, stared up at the black sky and said, in a very small, very polite voice, "Sophia, you're on my lung.""Shut up.""I can't breathe.""Good." She was slapping at his burning coat with both hands, her hat gone, her hair wild, her face streaked with soot, and she was crying and swearing at the same time, in a voice he had never heard from her in his whole life. "You stupid, stupid, suicidal bastard! You ran into a burning building! For a box!""It's not just a box.""I don't care what it is!""It's my mother's.""I don't care if it's the Holy fucking Grail, Ethan Cole, I will not be a widow at twenty six because you wanted to be a hero!" She grabbed him by the collar and shook him, hard, so that his head knocked on the ground. "Do you understa

"Sorry, kid," said Abel Harrow, and the pistol did not waver by so much as a hair.Ethan Cole looked at it, then at the scarred face above it, then at the sleeping baby on Gerald's knee, and he let out a long, slow, theatrical sigh, the sigh of a man who has been served a cold dinner in a very expensive restaurant."You know what, Abel?" he said. "I'd like to say I'm shocked. I'd like to say I'm hurt. But honestly, I picked you because you had the face of a man who sells his mother for a sandwich, and you've lived up to it beautifully.""Ethan.""Don't Ethan me, you dried up old walnut. Twelve years you've been hiding in a motel, drinking the cheap stuff, telling me 'that's why they chose you', and all along you were Silas's bitch.""It isn't.""What's his price? A pension? A cabin? A nice little urn for your ashes?""Ethan, it's not.""Shut up, Harrow," wheezed Gerald, through his wired teeth, in a gleeful whistle. "Let the boy talk. I do so love it when he talks. It makes me feel ri