Vengeance Wears No Crown

CHAPTER 5

The lighthouse fire happened when I was sixteen, half a world away already, clawing my way up through work I don't like remembering in detail. I heard about it secondhand, a single line in a message from a contact who thought I'd want to know Ironport news, and I hadn't thought about it since.

Now it sat in my chest like a stone.

"The lighthouse burned two years after she died," I said. "If she hid something there, it's gone."

"Maybe." Feld didn't look convinced, and something about his uncertainty steadied me more than false comfort would have. "Or maybe someone burned it down because they found out the same thing I just told you, and wanted to make sure nobody else ever went looking. Fires like that don't happen by accident in a city run by men who profit from making inconvenient things disappear."

Wren was already typing, fast, methodical. "Pulling the original fire report now. If it was arson dressed up as an accident, there'll be inconsistencies buried in the investigation, same as your mother's death. These people are thorough, but they're not creative. They reuse the same playbook."

"How long," I asked.

"Give me an hour."

While she worked, I turned back to Feld, who looked smaller now than when we'd first brought him inside, like the telling of it had cost him something physical. "Why now," I asked. "Ten years of silence, and you break it the first night I'm back in this city, before you even know for certain it's me."

"Because I recognized you the moment you crossed that street," he said simply. "Your mother's walk, like I said. And because I'm an old man who's spent a decade hating himself for staying quiet, and I decided a while ago that if her son ever came home, I'd rather die telling the truth than keep living with the lie." He met my eyes, steady despite the tremor still in his hands. "I owe her that much. I owed her more than that while she was alive, and I failed to give it to her in time."

There wasn't anything I could say to that which wouldn't sound hollow, so I said nothing, and let the silence be its own kind of acknowledgment.

Cross broke it instead, practical as always. "We can't keep him here. If that car finds this building, it's not just him at risk."

"I have a place," Feld said quickly. "Somewhere safe, off the harbor authority's radar. I'll disappear again if I need to. I've had ten years of practice."

I studied him, weighing the risk of trusting a man I'd known for less than an hour against the alternative of turning away the only lead I had on my mother's killer. In the end it wasn't really a choice at all.

"Cross will get you somewhere safe," I said. "But you're not disappearing completely. I need a way to reach you."

Feld nodded, some of the tension easing from his shoulders now that the decision had been made for him. "There's a bookshop on Kessler Street, three blocks from the old fish market. The owner owes me a favor from a long time back. Leave word there if you need me."

Cross moved to the door, waiting, and Feld rose unsteadily to his feet. At the threshold he paused, looked back at me one last time.

"Your mother would be proud of the man standing in front of me," he said. "And terrified of what that man is capable of. Both things can be true, son. Try to remember that when you find whoever did this."

The door closed behind them, and the safehouse went quiet except for the soft clatter of Wren's typing.

I sat down across from her, exhaustion pulling at me for the first time since I'd stepped off the plane, and watched her work in silence for a while, my mind circling the same unfinished sentence Feld had carried for a decade. Betrayal doesn't always wear a stranger's face.

"Got it," Wren said finally, turning her screen toward me. "Original fire investigation report, Ironport lighthouse, eight years ago. Ruled accidental, faulty wiring in the lamp housing." She scrolled, highlighting a line near the bottom. "Except the lighthouse had been decommissioned three years before the fire. No power run to it at all. There was no wiring left to fail."

"Someone falsified the report."

"Someone with enough reach to make a fire marshal sign off on a cause that doesn't exist," Wren said. "Same fingerprints as your mother's case. Whoever did this either works directly for Draycott, or is powerful enough that Draycott's people didn't dare ask questions."

I thought of Feld's warning. Someone closer than you think. Someone whose face wouldn't look like a stranger's.

"There's something else," Wren added, quieter now. "I cross referenced ownership records for the land under the old lighthouse. It transferred hands eighteen months before the fire, sold by the city for a fraction of its value to a private buyer through three shell companies." She hesitated, and I recognized the same reluctance Feld had shown before delivering the name of the man who'd wanted my mother dead. "It took some digging, but I traced the final shell company back to a real name on the filing paperwork."

"Draycott," I said, already braced for it.

"No." Wren looked up at me, and something in her expression told me the ground was about to shift under everything I thought I understood about this city, about my family, about the ten years I'd spent building myself into a weapon aimed at the wrong target the entire time. "Kade, the land was purchased under the name of your uncle. Daniel Mercer."

The name hit like a fist to the chest, because Daniel Mercer had vanished the same year my mother died, and I had spent a decade assuming, the way everyone assumed, that grief had simply driven him away from a city that reminded him too much of his sister's death.

I had never once considered that he might have left because he was the one who'd killed her.