The Drowned King Returns

Chapter Ten: Collect The Child Tonight

Graves poured himself a glass of brandy from a decanter on the shelf, then poured a second and set it in front of Nash. His hands were still unsteady. Nash left the glass untouched.

"You want to know about the Ninth Account," Graves said. It wasn't a question.

"Everything."

The old man sat down heavily in the chair across the desk. Bishop stood by the vault door with Fitch slumped at his feet, and for a moment the only sound was the faint hum of the lamp.

"Then I'm afraid I'll disappoint you," Graves said. "I have served it for ten years, and I could not tell you its name, its face or its voice. It has none of them. It never calls. It never meets. Its orders come through dead drops, a locker at the central station, a hollow book in the public library, a sealed envelope left in a church collection box. Never the same place twice. The instructions are always typed, always brief, and always perfectly clear."

"And payment?"

"That's the strangest part." Graves turned his glass slowly on the desk. "Every other client pays in money. The Ninth Account never has. It pays in objects. A painting that vanished from a museum in Vienna. A first edition that a dozen collectors would kill for. A violin. Rare things, beautiful things, things that are impossible to trace back to whoever handed them over. I sell them through people I trust, and the money goes where it's meant to go." He paused. "In ten years, I have met only one living person who came in its place."

Nash waited.

"Eight years ago," Graves said. "Three o'clock in the morning. I remember because it was the same night you vanished, and I had already received my instructions for your collection. I was sitting at this desk when the bell rang downstairs. I went down myself. I assumed it was a family come to make arrangements, people do sometimes, in the middle of the night." He looked at Nash directly. "It was Elara Sinclair."

The vault seemed to grow colder.

"She came alone," Graves went on quietly. "No driver, no coat, soaked through from the rain. She was very young, and very pale, but she didn't cry. Not once. She walked straight past me into my office, and she put a blue velvet box on my desk. Inside it was the Widow's Sapphire. She said it was payment, and she said it was settled with the people I worked for." His eyes went briefly to Nash's hands. "She was wearing a ring. A cheap little tin thing, it looked absurd next to that stone. I remember thinking it was the strangest thing I had ever seen on a Sinclair."

Nash's voice came out very low. "What did she say?"

Graves hesitated. Then he answered precisely, as if reading aloud from one of his own cards.

"She said, make sure he never finds his way back."

Nash went very still.

He didn't move for a long moment. He was hearing two voices at once. One belonged to a soaked young woman standing in this building eight years ago, placing a fortune on the Mortician's desk. The other was a little girl in a yellow raincoat, patting the stone of his grave as if it were a shoulder. Mommy says you're on a boat far away, and one day you'll find your way back.

Make sure he never finds his way back.

Two sentences, and the same woman had spoken both of them. One was a promise to a child, the other was an order to an undertaker. He turned them over and over, looking for a way to make them fit, and there was none. The woman who had paid to keep him buried was the same woman who had tended his grave with lilies for eight years and hung his tin ring around her neck.

For eight years on Black Toll he had known exactly who he was and what he wanted. Now, for the first time since the island, Nash did not know whether he had come home to save the woman he loved or to destroy her.

On the desk between them, a phone buzzed.

It wasn't Nash's. It was a thick black handset with no brand on it, lying beside Graves's lamp. The old man stared at it as though it were a snake.

"That's the encrypted line," he said. "Only one client uses it."

"Read it."

Graves picked it up with careful fingers and opened the message. He read it, and his mouth tightened. He turned the screen toward Nash without a word.

THE DROWNED KING IS IN KINGSREACH. PLANS HAVE CHANGED. COLLECT THE CHILD TONIGHT.

Beneath the text was a photograph.

It showed a child's bedroom, lit only by a nightlight shaped like a moon. A little girl lay asleep beneath a pink quilt, one arm flung over a stuffed rabbit with a torn ear, her dark hair spread loose across the pillow. Nash knew that face. He had last seen it pressed against the back of his coat in the rain.

Ivy.

The picture had been taken from inside the room, from barely a few feet away. The timestamp in the corner read four minutes ago.

The phone buzzed again in Graves's hand. A second message.

OUR MAN IS ALREADY IN THE ROOM.

Nash was on his feet before Graves looked up. The chair crashed over behind him.

"The Sinclair estate," Bishop said, already moving. "Forty minutes from here, maybe thirty-five if we don't stop for lights."

Forty minutes. In the pits, Nash had watched men die for being one second too slow, a heartbeat late on a block, a breath too slow on a turn. He had built his whole life since then on never being late again.

He was already running. Up the vault stairs, through the wrecked chapel with its overturned pews and dripping candles, out through the mahogany doors into the rain. Bishop's heavy footsteps pounded right behind him, car keys in his fist.

Nash pulled out his phone as he ran and dialed the number Juniper had given him, the one he had told himself he would never use. Elara's number.

It began to ring.

He pressed the phone to his ear and realized that his hand was shaking. In eight years, through the pits, through the uprising, through every night of blood and fire on Black Toll, his hands had never once shaken.

Until now.