NIGHTFALL: THE BROKEN SON-IN-LAW'S LAST WAR

Chapter 10: A Masked Man

"Vivian, now!" I shouted.

I'll never know how she understood. Maybe it was fear. Maybe it was something older and stronger than fear. But Vivian Prescott threw her whole body sideways, and the metal chair tipped over and crashed to the concrete floor just as the woman's pistol fired.

The bullet sparked off the floor where Vivian's head had been a heartbeat earlier.

My own gun was already out. I fired once, and the pistol flew from the woman's hand, spinning away across the floor into the shadows. She cried out, shaking her grazed, bleeding knuckles, and then she came at me anyway, one-armed, a knife suddenly in that same stinging hand.

She was fast, faster than any of her men. She slashed at my throat, missed by a finger's width, and slashed again, and the blade opened a line of fire across my forearm right over the old burn scars. I caught her wrist, twisted, and drove her backward into a stack of crates. The knife clattered away.

She was still fighting when I pinned her to the floor with my knee on her good arm and my pistol under her chin.

"Do it," she hissed, her pale eyes blazing. "Finish it, God of War. That's what you do, isn't it?"

My finger rested on the trigger.

Every part of me that Black Echo had built said the same thing: she's dangerous, she'll come back, end it. My hand didn't shake at all. That was the worst part.

"Not tonight," I said.

"Why?" she spat.

"Because dead people can't answer questions. And you have a lot of answers."

I rolled her over, zip-tied her wrists behind her, careful of the sling, and tied her ankles too. She stopped struggling then. She just lay there on her side, breathing hard, staring at me as if I'd done something she couldn't understand.

Then I went to Vivian.

The chair lay on its side, and she was still tied to it, her cheek pressed against the cold floor, her eyes enormous. I cut the ropes with the woman's own knife and helped her sit up. She was shaking so hard her teeth chattered. When she tried to stand, her left ankle folded under her, and she gasped in pain.

"It's twisted," I said. "Maybe broken. Don't put weight on it."

"Adam," she whispered. "It's... it's you."

"It's me."

"You... those men... I heard them on the radio, they were so afraid..." She stared at the woman tied on the floor, then at the blood running down my arm, then at my face. "Who are you?"

"Your son-in-law," I said, and I picked her up in my arms.

She weighed nothing. For two years she had looked down at me from the head of her table, and now she clung to my jacket with both fists while I carried her down the metal stairs, out through the side door, and across the dark yard past five men tied in the mud.

At the open gate, under the one working lamp, I set her down gently on a pile of old sailcloth and wrapped my jacket around her shoulders. Then I took a cheap burner phone from my pocket and dialed the number on Okafor's card.

"Okafor."

"Saltmarsh shipyard," I said, keeping my voice low and rough. "Vivian Prescott is at the front gate. She's hurt, but alive. Five of the kidnappers are tied up in the yard. Bring an ambulance."

"Who is this?"

I hung up and snapped the phone in half.

Vivian was watching me. "You're not staying."

"I can't. Not tonight." I crouched in front of her. "When they come, tell them whatever you want. But you'll be safe now. I promise."

Her lips moved, but nothing came out.

I left her there under the lamp, went back inside for the woman, grabbed the black bag from the van parked behind the warehouse, and carried her over my shoulder through the hole in the fence, while far away, the first sirens began to wail across the marsh.

At three in the morning, the Gray Heron rocked quietly at the end of the marina dock.

I locked the woman in the small cabin below, cuffed to a pipe with enough slack to sit and lie down. She hadn't said a word on the drive. I cleaned and bandaged her knuckles while she watched me with those strange, pale eyes.

"Why bother?" she asked finally.

"Because I'm not like the people who sent you."

"You don't know who sent me."

"Not yet," I said.

She leaned her head back against the cabin wall and closed her eyes.

"You think tonight was a victory," she said quietly. "It wasn't. You've opened a door, Nightfall, and you have no idea how many people are standing behind it."

"Then you'll tell me," I said, "one at a time."

In the bag I'd taken from her van, I found three things. Two hundred thousand in cash, bundled in rubber bands. A tourist passport in the name of Irina Sorova, and hidden in its lining, a folded military card that told the truth: Major Irina Sorova, Ninth Directorate. And a black phone, heavy and encrypted, the kind I hadn't held in years.

The cash I set aside for a man I never met. A guard at the yacht club, about fifty, grey at the temples, with a wedding ring and a family who would never see him come home. By tomorrow, an envelope with no name would be on their doorstep. It wouldn't bring him back, but it was the only thing in that bag that could do any good.

The phone I slipped into my pocket.

At dawn, as the sky over the harbor turned grey, the police brought Vivian home.

I was waiting in the front hall with Natalie, Harold, and Tyler when Okafor helped her through the door on crutches, her ankle in a cast, my jacket gone and a police blanket around her shoulders. Natalie ran to her and held her, sobbing.

Okafor looked straight at me over their heads.

"Mrs. Prescott tells us she was rescued by a masked man," he said slowly. "She says she never saw his face."

Vivian lifted her chin. She looked at Natalie, at Harold, at Tyler. She looked at the walls and the floor and the stairs.

She would not look at me.

"That's right," she said, her voice steady and cold. "A masked man. I never saw his face."

Okafor held my eyes a moment longer, then left without another word.

Harold limped over on his walking stick. He glanced at the fresh bandage on my forearm, the one I'd wrapped in the truck, and then at my face. He gave me one short nod, the kind old men give each other when words would ruin it.

Tyler stood frozen by the stairs. For once, his phone was nowhere in sight, and he couldn't seem to decide whether to look at me or at his mother.

Natalie lifted her head from Vivian's shoulder and found my eyes across the hall. Hers were red and wet, and full of a question she didn't need to ask out loud anymore.

She knew.

In my pocket, the black phone buzzed once.

I turned away from the family and glanced at the screen. A new message had arrived in Westrian, not Tarkovan, from a contact saved under one word.

Patron.

Is the cook dead yet?