The Drowned King Returns

Chapter Five: The Widow's Sapphire

The satellite phone buzzed on the table at four in the afternoon. Nash answered it before the second ring.

"Your police captain has been a very busy boy," said Moth.

His voice crackled across three hundred miles of ocean, thin and cheerful. Moth was Black Toll's resident hacker, a skinny prodigy who had once robbed three central banks without leaving a trace, and who had been crated and shipped to the island by people who preferred his talents buried. He lived in the old radio room now, surrounded by humming servers.

"Tell me," Nash said.

"Harker made three calls this morning, all within an hour of you walking out of his precinct. The first went to Ravell Tower, private line, top floor. The second went there too, twenty minutes later, after nobody gave him the answer he wanted. The third is the interesting one. Unregistered number, no owner, no billing history, no location. It picked up on the first ring."

"Who answered?"

"Nobody. That's what I mean." Moth's cheer faded. "Harker talked for ninety seconds, then the line went dead. I tried to trace it back and found nothing. The number doesn't exist anymore, it's just gone."

Nash looked out the window at the gray rooftops of Kingsreach. "It listened."

"It listened," Moth agreed. "Whoever the Ninth Account is, boss, they know the dead are walking now."

Across the room, Juniper sat on the edge of the narrow bed with her knees pulled up. She had been hidden here since they came ashore, a rented room above a closed bakery near the docks, and for two days the city had been searching for her. She had heard every word.

"So it's working," she said when he hung up.

"It's starting to." Nash picked up the folded invitation from the table. It was cream and gold and heavy, the Ravell tower embossed in one corner. Juniper's name was printed on the front. "Tonight we make it hurt."

The Belvedere Grand had not changed. The lobby was still all marble and mirrors, and there was still a towering display of white lilies beside the front desk, the same one he had robbed for Elara on a summer evening when he was nineteen and broke. Nash walked past it without slowing down.

The ballroom on the top floor glittered. Five hundred of Kingsreach's elite filled it, the men in black tie and the women in jewels that could have paid off small nations. At the far end, on a low stage draped in white silk, stood a long signing table set with two gold pens and two leather folders. Tonight Ravell Holdings and the Sinclair family would make their merger official in front of the whole city. Tristan Ravell stood beside the table with a champagne glass in hand, laughing at something, and Elara stood next to him in a white gown, as pale as the silk behind her.

Nash walked in with Juniper on his arm.

The first person to see them was a waiter, who dropped a full tray of glasses. The second was a city councilman's wife, who screamed. After that the whole room turned at once, and the name went through the crowd like a shockwave.

"Juniper Sinclair!"

"The missing girl, they said she was kidnapped..."

"Who is that with her?"

Marguerite Sinclair pushed through the crowd so fast she nearly fell. She seized her youngest daughter and pulled her into her arms, sobbing, clutching the back of Juniper's head the way she might hold a baby. Over her daughter's shoulder, her eyes found Nash.

He studied her face and couldn't read it. There were tears on her cheeks, and her whole body was shaking. But a mother's relief and a guilty woman's terror could look very much the same from the outside, and Marguerite Sinclair had spent her whole life hiding what she felt.

On the stage, Tristan set down his glass.

He had been humiliated twice in two days. His men had been crippled in a cemetery, and the thief he'd sent to die in a cell had strolled out at dawn with a lawyer. Five hundred people were watching him now, and Nash could see him deciding that it was not going to happen a third time.

Tristan took the microphone from its stand.

"Ladies and gentlemen." His voice boomed through the speakers, warm and wounded. "Some of you saw this man at the Sinclair home last night. For those who didn't, this is Nash Redfern. Eight years ago he seduced my fiancée, robbed her family and ran. Now he's crawled back from wherever he's been hiding, and tonight he parades poor Juniper in here, God knows how he found her or what he did to her, to extort the family that took him in."

The crowd murmured angrily. Juniper twisted in her mother's arms. "That's not true, he saved..."

"Shh, darling." Marguerite held her tighter.

"But I'm a generous man," Tristan went on, spreading his free hand. "And this is a night for happy endings. So here is my offer, Redfern, in front of everyone. Kneel. Right here, right now. Apologize to the Sinclair family for stealing the Widow's Sapphire, and I'll make sure the charges disappear. You can walk out of this city a free man." He smiled. "That's more than a thief deserves."

Five hundred faces turned toward Nash, waiting for him to kneel.

He walked toward the stage instead.

The guests parted for him without quite meaning to. He climbed the two shallow steps, stopped at the signing table between the gold pens, and reached into his inside pocket. He took out a small box covered in worn blue velvet and set it down on the white silk, directly in front of Tristan's folder.

Then he opened it.

Under the chandeliers, the Widow's Sapphire burned blue. It was the size of a walnut, cut into a perfect oval and ringed with old diamonds, and the light inside it seemed to move like deep water. A gasp went through the ballroom. Half the people in that room had seen it in photographs. A few had seen it on Marguerite Sinclair's neck at charity balls, years ago, before it vanished along with the boy who supposedly stole it.

Nash had found it two years ago, the night after the uprising, locked in the wardens' vault on Black Toll. The ledger beside it had been very clear. Payment received, one sapphire. In exchange for one parcel. His own name was written in the column beside it.

He looked out over the silent room.

"I never stole this," he said. "It was used to buy my death. Someone here knows who paid."

Three people reacted.

Marguerite Sinclair's champagne glass slipped from her fingers and shattered on the marble floor. At the end of the signing table, Edgar Ravell, Tristan's silver-haired father, stopped with his hand frozen halfway to his pen. And Elara, standing in white beside her fiancé, closed her eyes like a woman hearing her own sentence.