SUPREME WAR GOD The Despised Son-in-Law Returns

Chapter 11: Two Inches From the Left Boot

Kira's POV

The man in my scope didn't run, and in five years of hunting and being hunted, nobody had ever done that to me.

I lay flat on the steel catwalk of Crane Six, forty meters above the container yard, with my cheek against the rifle stock and the harbor wind tugging at my hood. My red dot sat in the center of his chest. A soldier would have dropped behind the nearest bollard, and a civilian would have screamed for the police.

He stood on the dock road in his cheap grey clothes and looked up at the crane, straight into my lens, as though he could see the color of my eyes.

"Who the hell are you?" I whispered.

Two nights ago, Old Gus had sent the Legion's emergency code from a payphone on Lantern Street. That code hadn't gone out once in five years. I'd locked up the Red Fox Bar, packed my rifle in pieces inside a guitar case and ridden the night bus nine hundred kilometers south, telling myself the old cook had finally cracked. Then tonight, standing at the back of the Grand Imperial ballroom with a tray of champagne I'd stolen, I'd watched the president of the Northern Star Bank bow to a scarecrow in work boots.

The Commander was dead. I'd read his treason file a hundred times; I'd lit a candle for him every Frostgate night behind my own bar while drunk clerks asked me whether it was my birthday. So who was this?

There was one way to ask without shaking his hand. I moved the dot off his heart, laid it two inches beside his left boot and squeezed.

The rifle punched my shoulder. Concrete burst beside his foot in a spray of grey chips, and the crack of the shot rolled out across the black water and bounced back off the warehouses.

He didn't flinch. He looked down at the little crater, then up at the crane again, and he nodded once, the way a teacher nods when a student finally gets a sum right; then he started walking toward me.

"Oh, come on," I muttered.

I tracked him through the glass. He walked into the canyon of shipping containers stacked four high at the foot of my crane, and the steel walls swallowed him.

From up here, the container rows were a maze of red and blue rooftops with black cracks between them. I could cover the open road all night, but I couldn't cover a single one of those cracks.

I had two choices. I could stay on my perch, blind and safe, and lose him; or I could climb down into his maze and find out what kind of fool walks toward a sniper.

I've never been good at the safe choice. I kept the rifle in my hands, swung onto the ladder and went down fast, my boots ringing on the rungs and the cold rail burning my palms.

At the bottom, the yard smelled of diesel, rust and fish guts. Shallow puddles lay between the containers, shining orange under the dock lamps. I moved into the first row with the rifle up and my breathing slow.

I stopped at the end of a blue container with old Korvath lettering half scraped off its side. Beyond the corner was a crossing between four stacks, the only open ground in the row. If he wanted me, he'd want me there.

I eased the barrel past the edge of the steel, and a hand closed around it.

It came from the side, out of a slot between two containers where no grown man should have fit. It didn't pull. It pushed my barrel straight up toward the sky, so smooth and fast that my finger tightened on instinct, and the rifle fired at the clouds.

The bang slammed off the steel walls, and my ears rang.

I let go of the stock with my left hand, ripped my knife from my belt and put the point under his jaw before the echo had died. He held my rifle high in one fist, I held his life an inch from my blade, and for one heartbeat neither of us breathed.

Up close he was thinner than he'd looked in the ballroom. Blood had dried in a brown crust at his left temple. His eyes were dark and calm, and they looked at my knife the way a farmer looks at rain.

"You still lead with the muzzle in close quarters, Frost," he said quietly. "I told you that at Red Ridge. The barrel goes around the corner first, and the man waiting there gets a free handle."

The knife shook in my hand, and I hated it for shaking.

Nobody alive had called me Frost in five years; the bar regulars called me Red, and the police files called me deceased.

"Anyone could know my name," I said through my teeth. "Draven has the whole Legion roster in a filing cabinet. A good actor, a fresh scar, a few old stories..."

"Then ask me something Draven doesn't have."

I pushed the knife a hair closer, until the tip dimpled his skin.

"After Red Ridge, the Commander carried a starving kid down the mountain for three days through the snow, on his back. He never put it in a report, and he never told the brass." My voice came out rough. "What was the boy's name?"

He didn't hesitate.

"Pip Hollis. Seven years old, one boot, a cough like a goat." The corner of his mouth moved. "He bit me twice on the first day because he thought I meant to sell him. On the third day, he couldn't say Commander, so he called me Uncle Mander. You laughed so hard you fell off the supply truck."

My knife hand dropped. I hadn't decided to let it drop; it simply went. The rifle slid out of his fingers and clattered onto the wet concrete, and then my knees followed it down into a puddle, cold water soaking through my jeans.

I knelt in the muck of a container yard in Eastbay and shook so hard my teeth knocked together.

"They told us you sold the pass," I said. "They showed us documents and signatures. They said you ran with Korvath gold in your saddlebags and fell off a cliff drunk." I couldn't stop talking now. "I didn't believe it. I swear on my mother's grave I never believed it, but I couldn't prove a single word, and then they came for me too, so I had to die, and I've spent five years pouring beer for the clerks who typed those documents..."

"Kira," he said, and my name in his mouth stopped me better than a slap.

He crouched in front of me and took my face in both hands for a second, the way a field medic checks a soldier's pupils after a shell lands too close.

"Get up, Major. You'll ruin your knees, and I'm going to need them."

I laughed, a stupid wet sound, and wiped my face on my jacket sleeve. He pulled me up by the elbow. I picked up my rifle and checked the bolt, because my hands needed a job.

"You look terrible, Commander."

"You look like a bartender."

"I am a bartender. I make a mean whiskey sour." I looked him over, at the shoes held together with tape, the torn shoulder seam and the bruised knuckles. "Gus said you'd been living with a rich family up on the hill. He didn't say they'd been dressing you out of a charity bin."

"They had their reasons. Most of them were bad ones." He glanced back toward the dock road. "How long have you been in Eastbay?"

"Since yesterday morning. Long enough to learn Gus's tea-shop watcher by sight. Tonight he followed you from the hotel, sat in his car while you ate something on the harbor wall and sent a photo of you to somebody." I slung the rifle across my back. "He types fast for a man who never reads his newspaper."

"Who did he send it to?"

"I don't know yet. I will."

He studied me, the way he used to study a map before a battle. "You rode nine hundred kilometers on a bus with a rifle in a guitar case because an old cook made one phone call. That isn't loyalty, Kira. Something is burning."

I took a folded sheet of paper from inside my jacket. It had gone soft from being opened and closed too many times. I didn't hand it to him yet; I held it a moment longer, because once he read it, the night would stop being a reunion.

"Something is," I said. "I didn't come to Eastbay to cry in a puddle, Commander." I pressed the paper flat against his chest, right where my red dot had been. "In thirty days, they're going to kill your brothers on live television."