The Golden Blood Husband

CHAPTER TWO: SEVENTY- TWO HOURS

Voss's hands shook so badly that Lorcan took the phone from him.

The thread belonged to a contact saved only as Caduceus, and it was a long column of cold messages about delivery times and preservation fluid. Lorcan typed slowly, reading each word aloud so the doctor would remember what he had supposedly written. "Complication during induction. Donor developed severe arrhythmia. Heart unstable, harvest unsafe tonight. New time, Friday midnight."

"They'll know," Voss whispered. "They always know."

"Then you'd better sound convincing." Lorcan pressed send.

The answer came in seconds, as if someone had been sitting in the dark waiting for it. Approved. The buyer will not wait twice. Fail again and both donors are harvested.

Lorcan read it twice, then handed the phone back. Seventy-two hours. The clock had started, and Esme's life was ticking inside it.

He made Voss close the cut on his chest with six neat stitches, then sent him out through the service tunnel with one instruction: answer every message as if nothing had changed. Voss went without arguing. Men like him always understood fear better than loyalty.

That left Gloria. She stood against the wall with her arms wrapped around herself, pearls crooked, mascara smudged. For three years she had looked through Lorcan the way people look through furniture. Now she couldn't look away from him.

"Are you going to kill me?" she asked.

"No." Lorcan pulled his shirt over the stitches. "You're going to go upstairs, wash your face, and sleep. In the morning you'll lay the breakfast table like you always do. You won't call anyone. Not Clement, not Crispin, not your lawyers."

"And if I do?"

"Then the people who own Voss will learn their order fell apart in your basement." He met her eyes. "You saw what they were buying. Do you really think people like that stop at me? They'll come for Crispin next, and they won't bother with an anesthetic."

Her face crumpled. She nodded too fast, again and again, and fled up the narrow stairs without another word.

The rain had started by the time Lorcan reached the roof. He stood beneath the water tower, where no camera in the house could see him, and dialed a number he had not touched in three years. He half expected it to be dead.

It rang once. "Who is this?" The woman's voice was sharp, with a Lagos lilt worn smooth by years of airports.

"Nadia."

Silence, then a breath that sounded almost like pain. "No. You don't get to do this. We searched for you for a year. We buried an empty coffin in Lisbon because the men needed something to bury."

"I know."

"You know?" Her voice cracked. "Three years without one word. Every vulture from Rotterdam to Cape Town came for our routes. Half the ports think the Navigator is a ghost story we invented to scare them."

Lorcan closed his eyes and let the rain run down his face. The Navigator. Only a handful of people alive had ever seen his face. Compass had started with a rowboat and a stolen radio when he was fourteen, and over the years it had grown into a network of fixers, smugglers, and information brokers spread across forty ports. It moved what needed moving and learned what needed learning, and it had been built for one purpose.

When he and Esme were children, they had been caged in a place called the Nursery, a quiet building full of orphans with rare blood, where wealthy strangers paid to keep their own veins full. He had escaped the night it burned, and Esme had not. Every secret Compass ever bought had been a step toward the people who ran that place. Three years ago, the trail had led to a respectable family called Ashcombe, and he had walked through their door with nothing but his blood.

"Nadia," he said quietly. "Esme is alive."

For a long moment, Nadia said nothing.

"I'm sending you a photo. There's an IV bag in the frame. I need to know where it came from."

Twenty minutes later she called back, all business now. "The lot number belongs to a supplier that ships to only one client in your city. St. Oriel's, a private rehabilitation clinic in the north district. Very quiet, very expensive, and owned through shell companies I haven't cracked yet."

"Crack them."

"Lorcan." She hesitated. "If she's really alive, they'll be watching for you."

"They've been watching me for three years," he said. "They just don't know who they're looking at."

At seven o'clock, Lorcan came down to breakfast in the faded gray sweater he had worn for two winters. The stitches pulled with every step, but his face showed nothing.

The dining room was all polished oak and silver. Gloria stood at the sideboard arranging plates with hands that wouldn't stay still. Crispin lounged at the head of the table in a silk robe, pale and handsome in the fragile way of someone who had been sick all his life. Across from him, Uncle Clement was cutting into his eggs.

Clement looked up, and his fork slipped from his fingers and rang against the china. He recovered quickly, dabbing his mouth with a napkin, but Lorcan had seen his face in that first second. It was not the look of a man surprised to see someone at breakfast. It was the look of a man who had expected never to see him again.

Lorcan poured himself coffee.

"Look who finally crawled out of bed," Crispin drawled. "The Blood Bag overslept. Try not to get anemic before my next draw. You're not worth much else."

Clement chuckled a little too loudly. Gloria said nothing at all. Lorcan sat in his usual chair at the far end of the table and lowered his eyes, exactly as he had every morning for three years.

Then the front door opened.

Heels struck the marble hall in a quick, angry rhythm, and every head turned. Annika Ashcombe walked in still wearing her travel coat, rain on her shoulders and her dark hair pulled tight. She was supposed to be in Geneva. Instead she was here, and her gray eyes went straight past her mother and brother to the man at the end of the table.

She crossed the room and slapped a thick envelope down beside his coffee cup. The papers slid halfway out, and Lorcan didn't need to read the heading.

"Sign," Annika said. "You're out of this house tonight."

Lorcan looked at the divorce papers, then at his wife's cold, unreadable face. If he walked out of this house, the Circle would lose its donor before Friday, and when the Circle lost a donor, it simply took the backup. Esme would take his place on the table.