The Forgotten Heir

Chapter 4: An Old Colleague Doesn't Knock

Daniel was at the front door before Mira had even registered the sound.

"Stay upstairs," he said, low and even, the same voice he'd used over Lady Wilcox's body a few hours earlier.

"Daniel-"

"Please."

She stayed at the top of the stairs, out of sight but close enough to hear, and Daniel went down into the dark house alone, moving without turning on a single light, like the dark was something he trusted more than she'd ever seen him trust anything.

He didn't open the door right away. He stood beside it, back against the wall, and waited.

Three knocks. Even, unhurried. Then a voice through the wood, quiet enough that it wouldn't carry to a neighbor's porch.

"If you're going to stand there deciding whether to shoot me through the door, Ash, at least have the decency to admit you don't own a gun anymore."

Daniel's shoulders dropped, just slightly, and he opened the door.

Standing on the porch was a woman in her forties, silver threaded through dark hair pulled back tight, wearing a coat too well-tailored for one in the morning. She looked past him into the dark house with the practiced ease of someone checking a room for threats before she'd even finished her sentence.

"Renata," Daniel said.

"You look terrible," she said. "Domestic life suits you like a bad suit."

"What are you doing here."

"Making sure you were still alive, mostly. And now making sure nobody else finds out you are before we're ready for that." She stepped past him into the house without waiting to be invited, which told him more about how urgent this was than anything she'd said out loud. "You made quite an impression tonight, Ash. Cardiac stabilization technique, pressure point sequence, the whole signature. In front of sixty witnesses and at least one hospital board member who knew exactly what he was looking at."

"She would have died."

"I'm not saying you should have let her." Renata turned to face him fully now, and whatever warmth had been in her voice a moment ago was gone. "I'm saying that technique isn't taught anywhere outside four people on this planet, and three of them are currently on assignments I can't discuss with a man who resigned three years ago. Which means the fourth person just told an entire room of the city's most well-connected people that he's still alive and still capable."

Daniel said nothing.

"Do you understand what that means," Renata pressed. "There are people who have spent three years believing the ghost of the Verity Order's best field commander died quietly somewhere overseas. That belief was useful to a lot of people. Including some of them who are very relieved you disappeared, and who will be considerably less relieved to learn you didn't."

"I'm not coming back, Renata."

"I didn't come here to ask you to." She reached into her coat and produced a slim black case, no bigger than a phone, and set it on the entryway table between them. "I came here because within forty-eight hours, at least two networks that used to answer to us are going to know your name is active again. One of them is going to want to recruit you. The other is going to want you gone before you remember anything useful about what happened eighteen months ago. I'd prefer you're not standing in your kitchen unarmed when they decide which one they are."

Daniel looked at the case but didn't touch it.

"What's in it."

"A way to reach me, if it gets bad. And something you're going to need a lot sooner than you think." Renata's expression shifted, just slightly, into something almost gentle, almost sad. "I know why you left, Ash. I was there. I watched you carry Callahan's body out of that building yourself because you wouldn't let anyone else touch him. But whatever guilt you're punishing yourself with by pouring wine for people who don't deserve to be in the same room as you, it's not going to protect the woman upstairs. Only knowing what's coming will."

From the top of the stairs, quiet enough that neither of them noticed, Mira had heard every word.

Renata was gone within another minute, as silently as she'd arrived, leaving Daniel standing alone in the dark entryway with a small black case in his hands and three years of careful stillness finally, unmistakably, starting to come apart.

He looked up the staircase.

"How much did you hear," he asked.

Mira came down slowly, arms wrapped around herself against a cold that had nothing to do with the house's temperature.

"Enough," she said, "to know we're not safe here anymore."