The Golden Blood Husband

CHAPTER FOUR: FIND YOUR WAS BACK TO ME

There was no time to think, so Lorcan didn't.

He dropped the gearbox into second, and the engine screamed as the car bucked beneath them. Annika was thrown against her seatbelt with a sharp cry. The tanker swelled in the windshield, its silver tank glowing under the streetlights, and Lorcan yanked the handbrake halfway and steered toward the guardrail.

Metal met metal in a long, shrieking grind. Sparks sprayed past the windows, and the whole car shuddered as the barrier ate its speed. He dropped into first, hauled the handbrake all the way up, and held the wheel steady while the back end tried to swing out. The car slid, scraped, and finally stopped. The tanker's bumper was close enough to touch, and through the windshield Lorcan could read the warning painted on its tank. FLAMMABLE.

In the back seat, Annika was breathing in short, shocked gasps. Slowly, she lifted her head and stared at him in the rearview mirror. For three years this man had apologized whenever he parked a little crooked in the garage. He had driven like someone afraid of the car.

"Where," she said, her voice shaking, "did you learn to do that?"

Lorcan let his hands slide from the wheel and allowed them to tremble a little. "I used to deliver groceries," he mumbled. "In the winter. The roads were bad."

She didn't believe a word of it. He could see that in her eyes.

The police arrived within minutes, followed by a tow truck. A tired sergeant crawled beneath the car with a flashlight, and when he came out his face had changed. He held up a length of brake line, its end sliced smooth.

"This didn't wear through, ma'am," he told Annika. "Somebody cut it, and they knew where to cut so it would hold for a while and then fail on a hill."

Annika said nothing on the ride home in the back of the patrol car. She sat with her hands folded tightly in her lap, and every few minutes Lorcan felt her eyes on him.

It was nearly eleven when she found him in the kitchen, at the small table by the pantry where he had eaten most of his meals for three years. He didn't look surprised to see her.

Annika shut the door behind her. She had changed out of her torn stockings, but her face was still pale. "Who are you?"

"Your husband."

"Don't." Her voice was low and tight. "Tonight a man who can't park straight drove us out of a death trap like he'd done it a hundred times. When the brakes went, I screamed. You didn't make a sound." She stepped closer. "Who are you, Lorcan?"

He met her eyes and gave her nothing. "Someone who got lucky."

She searched his face for a long time. Every other night of their marriage, Annika had been the one to walk away first, a turned back, a closing door, heels fading down the hall. Tonight she stayed by the counter with her arms crossed, as if leaving would mean admitting that something had frightened her more than the bridge.

"Do you know," she said finally, "that I've never let anyone call you that name in front of me?"

He did know. He had noticed long ago that Crispin always swallowed the words when his sister walked into a room, and he had never understood why.

"I don't like what this family does to you," she said quietly. "I never have." Then, as if she had said too much, she straightened. "That doesn't change anything. Sign the papers."

She left, and Lorcan listened to her footsteps climb the stairs. She didn't know what he knew. The Circle needed him alive until Friday, so the brakes had never been meant for him. Someone had cut them on the same day Annika fought for Aurum. The Circle wanted her project dead, and that meant it wanted her dead too.

Long after the house had gone to bed, he climbed the east stairs to Grandfather Thaddeus's room.

The old man lay propped against white pillows in the soft glow of the monitors. A stroke had taken his voice and every movement except his eyes, and the night nurse had stepped out for her break. Thaddeus Ashcombe had built a pharmaceutical empire from nothing. Now he could only watch as Lorcan pulled a chair to the bedside and sat.

"I know," Lorcan said quietly. "I've known for years."

The old man's eyes fixed on him.

"Golden blood runs in your family. You have it, and Crispin has it. For thirty years you bought it from the Circle to keep yourselves alive, and you never asked where it came from." His voice stayed calm, but there was iron underneath it. "It came from children. Orphans in a place called the Nursery, bled until they were too weak to cry, and you paid for every bag. My sister was one of them."

Tears welled in Thaddeus's eyes and ran slowly sideways into the pillow.

The speech therapist's letter board lay on the nightstand, a simple grid of letters on laminated card. Thaddeus's gaze flicked toward it, then back to Lorcan, again and again. Lorcan picked it up and moved his finger across the rows, and the old man blinked whenever he reached the right letter. It was painfully slow. Thaddeus's eyelids trembled with effort, but he didn't stop.

O. T. F. O. R. C. R. I. S. P. I. N.

Lorcan stared at the words. Not for Crispin. He thought of the heart Voss had been ready to cut from his chest, and of Gloria believing it was meant for her son. Then who was it for? But Thaddeus had already closed his eyes, exhausted, his breathing shallow.

Lorcan set the board down and found himself thinking of Esme.

On her ninth birthday in the Nursery, there had been no cake and no candles, only a cold cell and a bent nail she had found somewhere. She had scratched a tiny compass into the wall beside their cot, four crooked points around a circle, and when he asked what it was for, she had smiled at him.

"So you can always find your way back to me."

Fourteen years later, every port that whispered the name Navigator was whispering it because of that little compass on a prison wall.

His phone buzzed. It was Nadia, and she didn't bother with a greeting. "I found it. There's a hidden ward under St. Oriel's. Six beds, all off the books, and IV bags marked with a golden seal." She drew a sharp breath. "Lorcan, they're clearing it tonight. You have one hour."