The Husband They Bought To Die

Chapter Five: The Dead Man's Phone

By nine that night, everything Gideon owned fit into a single canvas bag. Three shirts, a spare pair of trousers, a razor, and the worn jacket on his back. Three years in the Whitlock house, and that was all it amounted to.

He was folding the last shirt when the closet door opened. Iris stood there in jeans and a dark coat with car keys in her hand. She looked like a woman who had spent hours arguing with herself and had finally lost.

"Get your bag," she said. "I'm driving you to the station. There's a midnight train north, and you're going to be on it."

Gideon straightened slowly. Of everyone in this house, she was the last person he had expected to climb those stairs tonight.

"Your grandmother will hear about it," he said. "So will Preston."

"Let them." Her jaw tightened. "Last night you didn't take the train, and today Celeste told you to be gone by nightfall. I know this family. If you leave on foot, I don't think you'll make it to the end of the street." She held his gaze. "I'm not asking how you did what you did to those guards. I don't want to know. I just want you somewhere they can't reach you."

He looked at her for a long moment. For three years she had walked past him in hallways as if he were invisible, and now she was risking what little standing she had left with her family to drive him away from it. Something tightened in his chest that had nothing to do with danger.

He had checked the street twice since noon, and the black car from Bell's note was gone. He had to leave the house tonight anyway. She never needed to know he would not be getting on any train.

"All right," he said.

Her car was a small gray sedan, practical and a little old. She drove fast and in silence, out past the lights of the old town and onto the river road, where the Harrow ran black and wide beside them and the street lamps grew farther apart. Iris kept both hands tight on the wheel. Once she glanced at him as if she wanted to say something, then turned back to the road.

Headlights appeared in the mirror. They came up fast, far too fast, with no horn and no signal. Gideon twisted in his seat. The car behind them was black, and as it swept beneath a street lamp, he read the plate. He knew every character on it, because Bell had written it in blue ink.

"Iris, brace!"

The black car slammed into their rear corner. The sedan spun with its tires screaming and smashed through the guardrail. For one sickening second the world turned over, and then they hit the muddy slope of the riverbank in a crunch of metal and glass. The car came to rest on its side, its headlights still burning across the reeds.

Gideon's ears rang, and he tasted blood. Beside him, Iris hung against her seatbelt, dazed, with a cut bleeding at her hairline. Up on the road, car doors slammed, and he heard the flat, unmistakable sound of a pistol slide being racked.

Four men were coming down the slope.

He kicked out the cracked windshield, sawed through Iris's seatbelt with a shard of glass, and pulled her free into the mud. "Stay down," he said. "Don't move until I tell you."

Then he went to meet them.

The first man reached the bottom of the slope with his gun raised. Gideon came at him low and fast out of the dark and drove his heel into the side of the man's knee. It shattered with a crack like snapping wood, and the man went down screaming. The second fired wide. Gideon caught his wrist, twisted, and stripped the pistol from his fingers in one smooth motion. He turned it on its owner, and the man threw up his hands and stumbled back toward the slope.

Behind him, Iris made a small, stunned sound. He had never let her see this side of him. He had never let anyone in that house see it.

Then a third man stepped out of the reeds ten feet from where she crouched and leveled his gun at her head.

Gideon didn't think. He threw himself between them. The shot cracked across the water, and something tore a burning line across his ribs. The impact spun him sideways and knocked the pistol from his hand into the mud. He didn't stop. He hit the gunman before he could fire again and finished it bare-handed, an elbow to the jaw, a forearm across the throat, a knee to the chest, until the man went limp in the reeds.

On the slope, the others had seen enough. Three of them scrambled back toward the road, two of them dragging the one with the ruined knee, and moments later the black car roared away into the night. The fourth man lay where Gideon had dropped him, unconscious.

In his jacket pocket, a phone began to buzz.

Gideon pressed a hand to his bleeding side, knelt, and took it out. There was no name on the screen. He answered and said nothing.

"Hello, nephew." The voice was calm, cultured, almost fond. Gideon had last heard it on a riverbank three years ago, just before the gunshot. "You should have stayed in the river."

Lucius Morrow spoke as if he were discussing the weather. He knew about the Whitlock house and the storage closet. He knew about Marker Forty-Seven. He knew about the girl.

"Let me save you some time," Lucius went on pleasantly. "You know the Meridian charter as well as I do. An heir accused of crimes against the family forfeits his seat forever, unless he's cleared before the next Meridian Gala. That's thirty days from now. On that night, the Council confirms me as chairman for life." He let it settle. "So you have thirty days to prove you didn't kill your father, without ever saying your own name aloud. I do wish you luck."

Gideon's grip tightened until the phone creaked. "Then come and find me yourself."

"Oh, I won't need to." Lucius sounded faintly amused. "Until then, everyone you touch will bleed. I'll start with her."

The line went dead.

Gideon turned. Iris was kneeling in the mud a few steps away, caught in the white glare of the wrecked car's headlights. She must have reached for him when the bullet hit, because her hands were dark and wet with his blood. Her face was as pale as paper.

"Your name isn't Gideon Gray," she whispered. "Who are you?"

Before he could answer, sirens rose in the distance, coming fast along the river road.

Gideon looked toward the sound, and his expression turned cold. He knew exactly who the police in this city worked for.