Chapter 4

Sabine came for me in twenty, the way she always did, and drove us down to the bar on the docks. Loud, dark, nobody in it who cared who I was.

She sat across from me, matched me drink for drink, and didn't ask questions.

My phone buzzed on the wet table. Rafael.

It wasn't what it looked like. She got dizzy, I caught her. I'm coming to you. Wait there.

Sabine read it upside down and had the phone out of my hand before I could stop her.

"Dizzy." Her thumbs were already moving. "He caught her. In a locked back room, with his mouth on her neck." She hit send on something I didn't read and set the phone face down. "There. Now he knows what we think of dizzy."

He said he was coming. So I waited.

Not because I believed him. Waiting for Rafael was just the last habit I hadn't broken yet.

Sabine fell asleep on my shoulder around four. I stayed up and watched the door until the sky went gray. Then I stopped watching it.

He never came.

Dawn brought a message instead.

Celeste had a panic attack. I couldn't leave her. I'll make it right at the claiming. Founders' Day. Don't forget the date.

A minute later, her post.

The two of them under one blanket, her head on his chest. One word underneath. finally.

A year ago that photo would have kept me on the bathroom floor for a week. I looked at it, put the phone face down, and asked Sabine if the kitchen was still serving. I was hungry.

Sabine watched me eat cold fries at six in the morning and looked more worried than I felt. "You're scaring me," she said. I told her I was fine, and this time it was almost true.

Founders' Day came four days later.

Every family in the city turned out at the old shipping hall on the water. Somewhere in Rafael's jacket was the ring he'd finally chosen. Tonight, in front of all of them, he was going to make me his wife. Two years I'd waited for that. Now I stood at the back of the hall and couldn't have said where the ring was, and I didn't care.

The trouble came right on time. It always did when Celeste needed him close.

Gunfire near the loading doors. Screaming. The lights went out. And Rafael did what Rafael always did. He found Celeste in the dark, put himself between her and the noise, and pulled every last man off me to get her to the safe house.

"Stay in the car," he said, already moving away. "Lock the doors. I'll come back for you."

He wouldn't. He never had. This time I needed him gone.

Odette was already at the car when I got there. Not inside with the family, where the doctor should have been. Here. Engine off, back door open, a bag at her feet.

"Now or never," she said.

I got in. She'd thought of all of it. The blood smeared across the driver's seat was mine, drawn slow over the past week into little tubes she kept cold. Enough to make them stop looking. My tracked phone went in the glovebox. My rings came off into her bag, all but one.

Odette knocked the car out of park, and it rolled off the end of the pier without me in it.

The water took it fast. Ten seconds, and the surface went black and flat again.

I took off the wedding band and left it on the dock where they'd find it. He could bury that.

Odette's boat sat low under the pier, engine already running. I climbed down into it, and she pushed us off.

I didn't look back at the hall, at all its lights and all its families. I was already thinking about the people waiting for me on the other side of the water.

And what it was going to cost Rafael Sciarra when they found out what he'd thrown away.