Chapter 2 The Cost of Staying Alive
Cains P.O.V
The south bank of the Crest River was not the kind of place people came to at four in the morning unless they were doing something they didn't want witnessed. That worked in my favour.
I moved along the waterline until the mud gave way to cracked concrete, keeping low, keeping to the shadows under the bridge's overhang. Every step cost me something. The wound in my chest had stopped bleeding but the cold was making everything seize up, and I was moving like a man twice my age. I didn't let myself think about that. I just kept moving, because stopping felt like a decision I couldn't take back.
The Ledger hovered at the edge of my vision the whole time.
I'd tried closing my eyes to make it disappear. It didn't. I'd tried focusing directly on it and it sharpened, filling in details I hadn't noticed at first , there was a second line beneath Marcus's entry, small text, almost like a footnote. "Four additional debts pending identification" I filed that away and let the panel recede back to its resting position. There would be time to understand what I was dealing with. First I needed to survive long enough to deal with anything.
I knew this part of the city. The south bank neighbourhood was not on any official map, but everyone who lived there knew to lay low. There were Pawnshops and cash-advance places and a bar that technically closed at two but kept serving until someone made it stop.
I needed one thing: Rook.
Rook Navarro had been a field medic in a war he didn't talk about and a surgeon here for the fifteen years since. He stitched up the people the city didn't care about and he kept his mouth shut, which in this neighbourhood was the only currency that mattered. I had sent him business over the years, people from the Devereaux operation who needed quiet fixing. He owed me the kind of debt that had nothing to do with the Ledger.
His place was above a closed laundromat on Colton Street.
It took me longer than it should have. By the time I reached the second floor landing I was breathing through my teeth, one hand pressed flat to my chest, feeling the slow wet warmth that meant the wound had opened again. I knocked twice, then once, then twice, the pattern he'd told me, years ago, during a conversation I hadn't known I'd need to remember.
A long pause and then the scrape of a deadbolt.
Rook Navarro looked at me the way a man looks at something that defies a straightforward explanation. He was in his fifties, grey at the temples, with the kind of permanently tired face that came from decades of being woken up by exactly this sort of situation.
"You're dead," he said.
"I'm aware of the confusion."
He looked at my chest. At the blood soaking through what was left of my shirt. Then he stepped back and opened the door wider, because Rook was, at his core, a man who let the wound in front of him override whatever else he was thinking.
"Get in."
He worked without talking, which I appreciated. The bullet had gone through cleanly and he confirmed what I'd already suspected, probing the entry and exit with the detached precision of someone who had seen much worse. He cleaned it, packed it, stitched the exit wound and sealed the entry with medical tape because the angle made stitching difficult, and he told me three times to stay still.
I asked for a phone while he worked.
"Who are you calling at five in the morning?"
"Someone who will want to know I'm alive."
He handed me a burner without further comment. I turned it over in my hands for a moment, thinking about who actually fit that description. The honest answer was a short list. Most of the people I'd called friends over the last decade were Devereaux people, and Devereaux people would report back to Marcus before they finished expressing sympathy. What I needed was not a friend. What I needed was someone who had their own reasons to watch the family burn.
I thought about Sable Voss.
I'd crossed paths with her twice in the past year,once at a Devereaux property exchange she'd been watching from the outside, once in a conversation that had lasted exactly four minutes and told me more about her than she'd probably intended. She was a broker. She dealt in information the way other people dealt in product, which meant she always knew more than she showed and she was always calculating the value of what she was looking at. I had no idea what she'd do with the information that I was alive. But I was reasonably certain she wasn't loyal to Marcus, and right now that was the most important qualification anyone could have.
I didn't have her number. But I knew someone who did.
I made the call. Kept it short at thirty seconds, asked for a name, a location, a time. The person on the other end didn't ask questions, which was why I'd called them.
Rook handed me a glass of water and something for the pain that he didn't name and I didn't ask about.
"You're going to need rest," he said. "Real rest. Not whatever you're planning."
"I'll rest when the list is shorter."
He looked at me for a long moment with those tired eyes. "How long is the list?"
I thought about the Ledger hovering at the edge of my vision. Five entries pending. Marcus at the top, burning like a five-star debt that had been accumulating interest for ten years.
"Long enough," I said.
He gave me a cot in the back room and a change of clothes that were slightly too big and I lay down in the dark and stared at the ceiling and did not sleep. I thought about Marcus's face when he pulled the trigger, the way he didn't hesitate
I let myself feel it and finally let myself feel the anger.
The Ledger pulsed quietly at the edge of my vision.
Debt One: Open.
