Thirteen Stitches

Chapter Six: The Torn Hem

At three in the morning, the street outside Castellane Medical Center was empty except for Isolde's car and a black SUV idling at the far curb.

"It's still there," Ezra said.

"I know." She kept her hands on the wheel as if she might need to drive at any second. "It followed us two blocks to the coffee cart and two blocks back. Whoever's inside wants us to know they're watching."

Two state troopers now stood outside Abel's room upstairs. It was the first time since the raid that Ezra had gone more than twenty feet from his grandfather, and he had only done it because she said they needed to talk somewhere the Castellanes didn't own the walls.

His coffee had gone cold. He set it on the dashboard.

"You said I fixed your funeral dress."

Isolde watched the rain bead on the windshield for a long moment.

"Eleven years ago my mother died, and I was eighteen," she said. "The night of her funeral, the house was full of people in black drinking my grandfather's whiskey and telling me how sorry they were. I couldn't breathe in there. So I climbed out my bedroom window, and my dress caught on the iron gate on the way over. It tore from the knee to the hem." She almost smiled. "I didn't care. I just walked, for hours, until I found the only shop in Harrowgate with its lights still on."

Ezra saw it before she finished. A girl in the doorway at midnight with her shoes in her hand, her black dress hanging in two pieces, mascara running in long gray lines. He had been seventeen, working late on the first waistcoat Abel ever trusted him with.

"You stood in the door and didn't say anything," he said slowly. "So I asked if you wanted me to fix it."

"And you knelt on the floor with chalk all over your hands and sewed it while I cried like an idiot." Her voice stayed steady, but her fingers tightened on the wheel. "You never asked why. Not my name, not what happened, not why I was alone in Harrowgate at midnight. When you finished, it was pouring, so you put your coat around my shoulders and told me to bring it back whenever."

"You left it on the step the next morning, folded, with no note." He remembered finding it there. "I always wondered who you were."

"Now you know."

He looked down at the gray wool across his knees. That had been his first winter wearing it. He had wrapped a crying stranger in his grandfather's coat, and she had walked home through the rain with her own family's debt sewn against her back. Neither of them had known.

"Why did you run that night?" he asked. "It wasn't just the crowd."

Her jaw tightened.

"Before I climbed out, I went looking for somewhere quiet. My uncle Rupert was in the library on the phone, with the door half open, and he didn't see me." She looked at Ezra directly. "He said, 'Helena knew. And the tailor still has it.'"

Ezra didn't need to ask who Helena was.

"The coroner ruled it an accidental drowning," Isolde said. "My mother swam every day of her life. Everyone accepted it except me. I went to law school because of that phone call, and I became a prosecutor so I'd have the power to open files nobody wanted opened. When Rupert handed me the tailor's grandson at one in the morning, I didn't argue. I wanted to see you up close."

"And?"

"And you looked at my suit before you looked at my face." Something close to humor touched her mouth, then faded. "Rupert didn't give me this case by accident. He wanted me tangled in it, and now he's using it."

She turned her phone toward him. On the screen was a formal letter on cream paper, headed by the same pair of scales stitched inside his coat.

"When my grandfather had his stroke, he named me head of the family over his own son, and Rupert never forgave him. This afternoon he petitioned the Varne elder council to remove me. Our charter has an old clause that lets them remove a head who is unmarried and under thirty, if she's proven compromised." Her voice went flat. "I'm twenty-nine and single, and his proof is that I honored a debt to an accused attempted murderer. The vote is in six days."

"And if he wins?"

"Then Rupert controls the Varne name, and the Varne name controls the courts." Her eyes went to the SUV. "Whoever is paying him gets all of it."

Behind the tinted glass, the dim shape of a driver sat perfectly still.

"So what do you want from me?" Ezra asked.

"An alliance." She said it like a closing argument. "I'll hunt the men who raided your shop, every lead and print and camera in Harrowgate. You help me break Rupert before that vote. You know these families in a way no one else does. You've measured their shoulders, heard what they say in fitting rooms and seen what they hide in their pockets."

He studied her in the faint green glow of the dashboard. Less than a day ago she had offered him eight years in prison. She was also the girl who had cried in his doorway.

"Why should I trust you?"

Isolde held his gaze, and her voice went quiet.

"Because you never asked why my dress was torn."

They sat in silence until the rain stopped. When the sky began to pale, she drove him home through empty streets, and the SUV didn't follow. That bothered him more than if it had.

Mercy Street was gray and dripping in the first light. Isolde's taillights disappeared around the corner, and Ezra walked toward the shop, so tired he could have slept standing up.

Then he stopped.

A black envelope had been nailed to the door of Lockwood & Son with a single brass tack driven through its center. He pulled it free. The paper was heavy, its gilt edge catching the dawn, and inside was a stiff card printed in gold.

The Tidewater Ball. The Draycott Exchange. Eight o'clock tomorrow evening.

There was no name on it. Across the top, in elegant script, someone had written three words.

To the Bearer.

When he tipped the envelope, something else slid into his palm. It was a single thread of gold silk, three inches long, cut cleanly at both ends.