The Lawless Man With A Thousand Chains

009 The Rented Husband

The birthday lunch came back to life with indecent speed.

Inside ten minutes the great room had rearranged itself into a celebration. Champagne poured, chairs pulled in around Shane Dutton, and the coffin already being polished into a story worth retelling.

Death had come to the house and left again. The Quinn family did what families do with a survived catastrophe and started turning the terror into an anecdote.

"He walked in and the Iceman simply fled."

"That's the Dutton name. That's forty years of standing in this city."

"And that ex-con nearly got us all killed. Cheap, he says. To the Iceman's face."

"Do you understand what he almost did to this family?"

"He's a rented husband, and not a very good one. Vanessa, dear, didn't his own family want him either?"

"Two days. She's had him two days and he's already cost us the house."

The laughter went around the table like a plate being passed.

Vanessa stood at the edge of it with a glass she hadn't touched.

She had walked into this house with a hired stranger and a clean plan.

Inside forty minutes he had told her father she was pregnant and announced his prison record to the entire family. Then he insulted the most dangerous man in Dorne City for sport.

By every measure her world used, the morning was a disaster with her name on it.

And underneath all of it sat the thing she had watched, and it wouldn't dissolve.

The Iceman staring at the back of the room for three long seconds before he retreated. Before Shane's car was even parked.

She turned and found Damon standing by the windows. Quiet, unbothered, holding nothing.

Vanessa crossed to him and dropped her voice to an edge.

"I don't care that you're useless. I hired useless."

Her hand swept the room, the family, the whole wreck of the morning.

"But this was deliberate. First a pregnancy that's physically impossible.

"Then announcing your record like it's the weather, and then picking a fight with a man who brought a coffin to a birthday party."

Her voice shook. Most of it was rage and the rest of it was fear.

"Do you have any idea what you cost me today? Any at all?"

Damon looked at her. For a second she felt examined, like a patient describing the wrong symptom to a doctor.

"Would you like me to answer that," he said, "or would you rather I stay useless and quiet?"

Ask him. Ask him why the Iceman was looking at him.

She heard how the question would sound out loud.

She saw her father's face, and forty relatives already writing the story of the ex-convict who thought a mob boss feared him.

"Stay quiet," Vanessa said. "That's what you're paid for."

"Then that's what I'll do."

Across the room, Shane Dutton was accepting a drink from Marcus and telling the story again with his hands.

Damon put the name away with the other things he would need later.

Marcus had an arm around Shane's shoulders and his voice pitched to carry the length of the room.

"Don't give the paperwork a second thought. It's a whim and a courthouse stamp, and it's reversible by Friday. There's no world in which my daughter stays married to a convict."

He raised his glass.

"You're the only man I'd ever accept in this family, Shane. The only one."

"Father. Drink something. It's over."

In his chair by the fireplace, Elias Quinn sat holding a birthday whiskey he hadn't tasted.

He had survived his seventieth birthday, and so had his family.

It hadn't been the shield that saved them. It had been a boy from a construction dynasty with a good tailor and a well-connected father.

So the prophecy was wrong, he told himself.

The thought wouldn't hold any weight.

Forty years of accuracy didn't simply fail on the appointed day. Something had happened in this room, and the wrong man had taken the credit for it.

Elias was too old and too tired and too flooded with relief to go chasing it.

Forty years, and the disciple never came.

Damon watched all three of them from the window.

The family, celebrating a rescue nobody had performed. Vanessa, apologizing for him to people who despised him.

And Elias, mourning a shield that was standing eight meters away.

None of it complicated him. A paid job, two weeks, ten thousand dollars and a clean divorce.

He put down the water glass nobody had noticed him take. Then he walked out through the side door without a word to anybody.

It was not yet noon when the cab climbed out of the city.

Summit Ridge sat above Dorne like a private country. Winding roads under old-growth trees, and lakes flashing between the trunks.

The houses sat so deep in the trees that you passed their gates for kilometers before you saw a wall.

At the top of it stood Turner Mansion.

The driver pulled over well short of the top and put the handbrake on.

"This is as far as I go."

"There's another two kilometers of road."

"Not to that house there isn't. Nobody drives up to the Turner place, and nobody's been through those gates in years."

Damon paid him and got out.

He walked the rest. Eight years in a place where the cold lived in your bones made an hour of sun worth having.

Halfway up, the birds stopped singing.

The quiet spread through the treeline in a wave, branch by branch, as he passed. It was the kind of silence wild things make when something bigger than them is moving through their territory.

Damon noticed it and kept walking. The mountain remembered what he was.

Harlan had slid the deed across a chessboard two winters ago.

"Most lavish house in the city. I built it to retire in and then I got life, so take it. Just tell my people up there before you break anything."

The deed was in the canvas bag. So was the electronic key.

The canvas bag was in a lost luggage system between two airports, and it held everything he owned. The money, the armies, and the marriage contract.

Which left him walking up his own mountain like a man on his way to burgle it.

He was halfway to the summit when he heard the engine.

It came around the bend behind him at a pitch no road surface justified.

A low black Porsche, wound out past the redline. The tires screamed as it slewed across both lanes and came off the racing line completely.

It did not correct.

That was the detail Damon noticed first. A driver who has lost control fights the wheel.

This car came around the curve with no fight in it at all. It drifted across the tarmac in one long arc, straightened up at speed, and pointed itself directly at him.

Damon didn't move.

He watched the windshield.

A slumped shape behind the wheel, dark hair fallen forward, hands loose in her lap. Not steering, not braking, and not conscious.

Two tons of car, closing at a hundred and forty kilometers an hour.

Damon had no reason at all to step aside for two tons of car.

But there was something else in it, and he had felt it from a hundred meters back. Something cold sitting in the driver's chest, coiled up and waiting.

Rampage energy, folded up and waiting to go off.

He set his stance, dropped his weight through his heels into the mountain, and drew his right fist back.