War God in Disguise

Chapter 6

"Was that Tiger I just passed on the corner?"

"Yes."

"Every month." She said it like a fact she was still, after two years, refusing to fully accept. "Every single month, and the committee just lets it happen, and you just — " she gestured vaguely at him, at the mop still propped against the wall, at the whole small shape of him " — hand over the money like it's rent."

"It keeps things from getting worse."

"Does it?" There was something sharper in her voice than usual, an edge that had nothing to do with him and everything to do with a company circling a drain and a Deputy Director who smiled too much in emails. "Or does it just mean the worst thing hasn't happened 'yet'?"

Jack had no good answer for that, mostly because it was the exact same question he'd been asking himself about his own years of standing still.

"I'll walk you to your car," he said instead.

"I have a driver."

"Then I'll walk you to the driver."

She almost smiled — almost, the ghost of something that might once, in a different life, have been easy between them — and then her phone buzzed with a name that made her whole posture change, shoulders drawing up like a soldier bracing for inspection, and whatever had nearly happened between them closed as quickly as it had opened.

"It's Samson," she said, already answering, already walking toward the door without waiting for him. "Don't bother. I've got it."

He watched her go anyway, all the way to the car, the way he watched her every morning without her noticing, because that was the promise, small and unglamorous and entirely invisible, the only kind of promise a man who'd buried himself on purpose was still allowed to keep.

Across the street, in a parked car with tinted windows and a half-eaten breakfast going cold on the dashboard, the man with the scar through his eyebrow watched Jack watch her, and made a note of exactly how long a man who was supposed to be nobody spent looking at a woman he was supposed to have no interest in.

"Three years," he said to Mara, in the passenger seat with a breakfast she hadn't touched either, "and he's still doing it. Still the same. Only fooling himself into thinking small is the same thing as being safe."

"You didn't have to take this job at all," Mara said. "Tiger's paying nowhere near what your usual clients do."

"Tiger's not why I'm here." The Bloodshot's easy tone thinned, just slightly, just long enough for her to notice. "I had a friend on that mountain. Not one of the ones Jack got out. I've spent three years deciding whether that makes him a debt I'm owed or one I owe him, and mopping floors for pocket change isn't going to help me decide any faster."

"Are you going to approach him?"

"Not yet." The Bloodshot smiled, unhurried, the smile of a predator who'd already decided the outcome and was only enjoying the shape of the wait. "Let him have his mop a little longer. Men like Jack only get interesting once they've run out of small things to hide behind.”

Three floors above the lobby he’d just finished mopping, none of it would have meant anything to Jack yet. He climbed into a bed too small for a man his size, in a room too bare to belong to anyone with a past, and slept the untroubled sleep of a man who still believed tomorrow was going to look exactly like today.

The screaming started a little after ten, muffled through two floors of concrete but unmistakable for what it was, and Jack was already moving before he'd consciously decided to move.

He took the stairs three at a time — not the elevator, the elevator announced itself, the elevator gave people time to compose their faces before he arrived — and reached the third-floor hallway to find Mr. Rhodes from 3C on his knees, one of Tiger's men gripping a fistful of his hair, the knife-carrying one from the lobby watching with his arms crossed and an expression of profound, practiced boredom.