Thirteen Stitches

Chapter Eight: Ninety Seconds

The dark exploded into noise.

Six hundred people screamed at once. Chairs went over, glass shattered, and the floor shook under a stampede of heels and dress shoes surging blindly toward the doors. Someone slammed into Ezra's shoulder and spun him around. He couldn't see his own hands.

Then the emergency lights flickered on, pale and red along the walls, and the hall swam back into view.

Augustin Draycott lay on the marble three feet away, one arm flung out. A dark stain was spreading across the white front of his shirt, just below the collarbone, and his mouth opened and closed without sound.

Ezra didn't hesitate. He dropped to his knees, tore the gray coat from his shoulders, folded it into a thick pad and pressed it into the wound with both hands. Blood welled warm through the wool and over his knuckles, and he leaned his full weight down.

"Stay with me, Mr. Draycott. Look at me."

He knew exactly what he was holding. Every family in this room wanted that coat. For it, his grandfather had been beaten nearly to death and Ezra had been framed and offered thirty million dollars. Now it was a bandage soaking up the blood of a man whose family might have paid for all of it.

Abel had told him never to take it off. He pressed harder.

The crowd had pulled back into a wide, shocked ring, and someone was shouting for a doctor. Then a voice tore through everything, raw and furious.

"Grandfather!"

Lucian shoved through the ring of guests, his golden hair fallen across a face gone white. He saw the old man on the floor, the spreading blood, and Ezra Lockwood kneeling over him with both hands buried in his chest. Something in Lucian's eyes went blank and cold.

He ripped a pistol from the holster of the bodyguard beside him and pressed the barrel to Ezra's temple.

"Get your hands off him."

The metal was cold against his skin. The ring of guests drew a single breath, and Ezra felt his own pulse beating against the muzzle.

He didn't move.

"Lift my hands and he bleeds out in ninety seconds," he said, his voice level, almost calm. "Shoot me or call an ambulance."

Nobody breathed. Six hundred people watched the heir of Draycott Bank stand over them with his finger on the trigger and his chest heaving. One second. Two. Ezra kept his eyes on the old man's face and his weight on the wound. Three.

Then Augustin's hand rose from the marble, trembling and spotted with blood, and closed around his grandson's wrist. With what little strength he had left, the old man pushed the gun down until it pointed at the floor.

Lucian stared at him, and his hand began to shake.

"Lucian Draycott." Isolde's voice cut through the hall like a blade as she strode across the marble with her phone at her ear. "I'm Deputy District Attorney Isolde Varne, and you're holding a gun to the head of a man rendering aid." She turned on the bodyguard without breaking stride. "Take your weapon back. Now."

The bodyguard pried the pistol from Lucian's slack fingers. Lucian didn't resist. He sank to his knees on his grandfather's other side as if his legs had been cut from under him.

Isolde faced the room. "The ambulance is four minutes out. As of this moment, this building is sealed by order of the District Attorney's office. No one leaves, and no one deletes a single photo or video. Every phone in this room is evidence."

Across the hall, Brannigan was already pushing through the guests toward Ezra, one hand going to the cuffs on his belt.

Isolde didn't even look at him. "Touch him, Detective, and I'll charge you with obstruction before you finish the sentence. He's the only person in this room keeping the victim alive."

Brannigan stopped. His hand hovered at his belt, then dropped.

Those four minutes were the longest of Ezra's life. His arms burned, his knees went numb on the marble, and the coat beneath his palms grew heavy and sodden. The old man's breaths came shorter and shallower, but they kept coming. Then the paramedics arrived in a rush of blue uniforms, and someone else's hands replaced his, pressing the ruined coat back down.

"Keep that on it," a paramedic snapped. "Let's go."

As they lifted Augustin onto the gurney, his bloody hand found Ezra's collar and dragged him down with startling strength. His lips were gray, his breath a rattle.

"It was never the Tide, boy," he whispered. "Ask who paid for the fire."

Then his fingers slipped away, and the gurney was moving.

Ezra stood too fast and nearly fell. By the time he found his balance, the gurney was disappearing toward the service doors in a crush of paramedics, guards and Draycotts, with Lucian running beside it. The gray coat lay across Augustin's chest, a dark, heavy shape riding away into the crowd.

Ezra started after it, and a uniformed officer stepped into his path.

"Nobody leaves the hall, sir. DA's orders."

It took twenty minutes of statements and names, of Isolde's sharp voice organizing the chaos and Ezra standing in the red light with his hands drying brown and stiff, before he could slip down the same service corridor he had walked in through.

He found the coat halfway along, crumpled beside a linen cart as if someone had tossed it there in passing.

He knelt and lifted it. The wool was heavy with blood and already going cold. When he turned back the lining, his breath stopped.

A perfect square had been cut from the inner layer, clean and precise. Each corner carried four tiny diagonal notches so the edges would lie flat without fraying. Ezra knew that notch. Abel had taught it to him at the cutting table when he was eleven, guiding his small hands on the shears.

With shaking fingers, he counted the panels. The scales of the Varnes, with their gold stitch already cut. The ship's wheel. The rearing horse. Twelve crests in all.

The thirteenth panel was gone, the one with no crest and only the date his mother and father had died.