The Golden Blood Husband

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE ONLY LAW

By noon, Stroud's men were everywhere. A gray sedan sat across from the front gates. A man in a delivery uniform had been fixing the same garden sprinkler for two hours, and another loitered near the garage, smoking and watching the doors. Every exit of the Ashcombe mansion was covered.

Lorcan counted them from the kitchen window, a cold cloth pressed to his bandaged temple. On Friday night, those men would be inside the house, and he would need loyal hands of his own within these walls. Nadia's team was strong, but they were strangers here, and strangers would be noticed. Only one place in the city could give him people who belonged on these streets. Compass's Port Selwyn branch ran out of an old fish market on Pier Six, and its boss, Rocco Tierney, had stopped answering Nadia three months ago.

On Thursday afternoons, the cook always sent Lorcan to the harbor for fresh fish. Today was no different. He walked out with a canvas shopping bag, and the gray sedan followed him all the way to the pier, then parked at the entrance to wait.

The fish market was a cavernous old warehouse that stank of salt and diesel. Lorcan walked past the busy front stalls and through a plastic curtain at the back, into the part of the building tourists never saw.

He stopped. Beside the long steel ice tables, where Compass's crews once sorted legitimate catch from smuggled cargo, stood rows of white medical coolers. Every one of them was stamped with a small golden seal.

"Help you, friend?"

The man who spoke sat on a crate near a rusty space heater, heavy and broad, with gold rings on almost every finger. A dozen dockworkers had stopped working to stare at the stranger in the cheap sweater.

"I'm looking for Rocco Tierney," Lorcan said.

"You found him." Rocco looked him up and down, taking in the bandage and the canvas bag, and grinned. "And who sends a beggar to my door?"

"The Navigator."

For a second the whole warehouse went silent. Then Rocco threw back his head and laughed, and after a moment, his men laughed with him.

"The Navigator is dead," Rocco said, wiping his eyes. "Three years dead. Everybody knows it except that woman in Lagos who keeps calling me. Compass in Selwyn doesn't belong to a ghost anymore. It works for whoever pays." He spread his ringed hands toward the coolers. "And lately, the Circle pays very well."

Lorcan looked at the golden seals and thought of Arlo, so pale his veins looked painted on. "Do you know what's inside those?"

"Don't know, don't care." Rocco waved lazily at his men. "Throw this one in the harbor. Maybe he'll float back to whoever sent him."

Five of them came at once. The first reached for Lorcan's collar and found himself flipped over a hip onto the wet concrete. The second swung a gaff hook, and Lorcan stepped inside the arc, broke his grip, and drove a palm into his chin. The third and fourth tried to grab him together, and he cracked their heads against each other with a dull knock that echoed off the rafters. The fifth hesitated, then charged anyway, and went down with a single short punch to the stomach.

It took less than fifteen seconds. Lorcan stood among the groaning men with his canvas bag still in one hand, breathing as steadily as when he had walked in.

Nobody laughed now.

Somewhere at the back, a cane tapped against the floor. An old man limped forward between the ice tables, bent and thin, his face as creased as old sailcloth, his eyes clouded white with cataracts. Lorcan's chest tightened. Old Tobias was eighty now. Fourteen years ago, he had found a starving runaway hiding under his nets, still smelling of smoke, and he had fed him and asked no questions. Together, with one leaky rowboat and a stolen radio, they had built the first thread of what became Compass.

"Say something else," Tobias rasped. "Let me hear you."

"You still mend your nets with the left hand," Lorcan said quietly, "and you still lie to everyone about how old you are."

The old man's face crumpled. His cane clattered to the floor, and he lowered himself, trembling, onto one knee.

"Boy," he whispered. "You came home."

Then a dockworker by the ice tables put down his knife and knelt. Another followed, and another, until one by one the whole crew had dropped to their knees on the wet concrete, heads bowed.

Rocco was the last. Sweat ran down his face as he rose from his crate, and slowly he knelt too.

Lorcan helped Tobias to his feet first and pressed the cane back into his hand. Then he turned to Rocco and spoke loudly enough for every man in the building to hear.

"Compass has one law. It had it when we were nothing but a rowboat, and it has it now." He let the silence stretch. "We never sell people."

Rocco swallowed hard. "I didn't know what was in the coolers, I swear."

"You knew enough not to ask." Lorcan crouched in front of him. "Here's your punishment. You'll keep working for the Circle. You'll smile, take their money, and do everything they ask. And every word they say to you comes straight back to me."

Rocco nodded so fast his rings clinked.

"Start now. Tell me about the Garden."

"It's on the Delmar estate," Rocco said quickly. "Up in the northern hills. A private conservatory, all glass. We deliver there at night. We never go past the loading door."

Lorcan's head came up. Delmar. "And the Ashcombe job? The heart?"

Rocco hesitated, then saw his face and kept talking. "That cooler was going to the Delmar estate too. The heart was never for the Ashcombe boy. It's for Lucius Delmar, Fabian Delmar's father. He's dying, same rare heart disease as the kid, same blood. The Circle promised him the first match they found." He licked his lips. "The Ashcombe boy was always going to die. Nobody was ever going to give him anything."

Lorcan thought of Thaddeus blinking letters through his tears. Not for Crispin. The old man had known, or guessed, and he had tried to warn him with the only voice he had left.

Rocco's phone buzzed on the crate beside him. He glanced at the screen and flinched. "It's him. The doctor. Stroud."

"Answer it. Speaker."

Rocco pressed the button with a shaking finger. Stroud's smooth voice filled the warehouse. "Mr. Tierney. I need six of your strongest men at the Ashcombe estate on Friday night. Discreet, reliable, and not squeamish. We have a donor who may fight back, and I want him restrained before the procedure begins."

Rocco looked up at Lorcan, his eyes desperate.

Lorcan nodded once.

"Of course, Doctor," Rocco said, his voice almost steady. "Six men. They'll be there."

Stroud hung up. Lorcan picked up his canvas bag and looked at the kneeling crew around him, the very men the Circle had just hired to hold him down.