1.6. A Million Razor-Sharp Reasons

The rain, perhaps sensing a real corker of a symbolic gesture, chose that moment to introduce itself.

Annalise tsked and fixed her hat back on her head. “One hour, all,” she repeated. “Spread the word, if you please, and if someone could fetch up breakfast for my little hellions.”

The crowd began its murmuring dispersal. Seth looked for his path through the bodies.

A heavy-ringed hand landed on his shoulder. “Seth, my boy.” When Rohan il Agante had descended from his balcony, Seth wasn’t sure. But here was the patre. “Let’s get out of this shower, yes?”

Seth actually preferred it out here, he wanted to say, but Rohan was already steering him toward the manor. And Rohan’s men—Polecat, Sure-Thing, this real prick named Prichard—were already at his back.

“Now, Seth,” Rohan said, when his voice could safely be halted by the stone walls of his manor’s vestibule. “How do we feel?”

“All right, considering.”

“Sleep well?”

“Uh. All right, considering.”

“Considering…?”

“Well, it was in a barn.”

“A stable, son,” Rohan corrected. “Stable’s for the animals we keep. Barn’s for the animals we kill.”

Polecat and Prichard looked at one another, sharing a silent discourtesy for this mostly-wrong metaphor.

“I think she knows, patre.” Seth’s composure broke. “I think she’s just waiting, but she knows.”

“Now how would she know?” Rohan grinned unkindly. “Who’d tell her? Are you thinking of turning yourself in?”

“I’d—” Seth had been thinking of that, exactly. But as the words marshalled on his tongue, he realized what this was, and his response beat a hasty retreat back down his gullet. “What do you think I should do?”

“I think you should keep walking with me,” Rohan said. “My office.”

“Okay. Now—” Seth slowed down. His escorts did not, and he picked up speed again just to keep from tripping into them.

“Rotten business, Seth.” Rohan shook his head. “Rotten bloody business. Just bad luck compounding. You saw my face, when we opened that box. Yes?”

“I did. You were stricken.”

“Stricken,” Rohan confirmed. “I didn’t know what this was, either. And I wish I had. Wouldn’t have mixed you up in it, that’s for sure.”

Seth stopped walking completely, then. The man behind him put a hand on his shoulder.

“Patre,” Seth said, mournfully. “Please.”

“I’m sorry, son.” The pain on Rohan’s face, to his credit, seemed real, and the apology as honest as anything the patre had ever allowed past his lips. “I wanted this last chance for you.”

“I,” Seth said, without much of a plan for the next word, which was just as well because that’s when they jumped him.

“No,” he snarled. “No no fuck you no !”

“Get his legs. Legs, you—”

“Hit him. Someone—”

“Stop. Stop moving.”

No. No, no no. This was not over while his head was on and his heart beat. This was not over until he was in the ground. Bright pressure; hot salt. A bellow of enraged pain.

“Fucking saints!”

The grip on his shoulders went slack.

“He fucking bit me. Fucking Seth .”

Seth thrashed, dropped to the floor hard, kicked harder, connected with something that even a hardened crook can’t train himself to shrug off, was rewarded with a yelp.

And like that he was free. Clutching hands finding only scraps of clothes and air. He bolted.

“Go.” Rohan’s shrill scream followed him down the tacky portrait hall. Not a trace of paternalism remained. “ Go, you stupid fucks, go! After him!”

“Sure thing.”

Seth went sprinting through the double doors of the manor, lungs thundering, and just about bowled over poor old Shaffer, who was where he usually was, begging for braces by the patre’s threshold.

“A brace, milord!” Shaffer wailed after him in his three-tooth lisp. “A brace or even a solitar would do, milord!”

“Pick your fucking marks better, Shaffer!” Seth threw a dismissive hand in the air. “I told you!”

Through the ebbing crowd he stumbled toward the great black-iron carriage, caution forgotten, all elbows and apologies.

Confess, he told himself. That buys you time. You know they want you dead, you know Annalise is offering mercy. She’ll almost certainly kill you at some point; she’s a Verdugo, and that’s what they do. But if you can convince her to spare you at first, and maybe kill Rohan to boot, you’ve got time to figure out your escape route.

“ Out of the way, ” someone cried, from the killhouse he’d fled. “Out of the way, damn you! Patre’s business!”

A final desperate lunge, the infuriated shove of a cussing cooper, and Seth spilled to his hands and knees in the gathering muck before a pair of shapely calves in tall black riding boots. He scrambled his way to his feet. Annalise was leaning on Demetrius’s flank, staring at him with a concern he could only call motherly, and a barbed bolt of guilt stuck him through the chest.

“My name is Seth il Gutierre,” he said. “And it was me. I stole from you. It was me, Annalise, and I’m sorry as fuck. I can help you get it back. It was Patre Rohan il Agante who made me do it, and his men are chasing me and—”

Annalise seized him by the collar and spun him around toward the carriage, one huge steel-cable arm locked across his chest. “Ofelia,” she called.

Her daughter dropped from the carriage and scrambled to her side, sandals flapping. “What?” she asked, around a mouthful of toast.

“You got another in ya?” Annalise asked.

“Not if you need me to stand up for the rest of the day.”

“I know. I’m sorry, girleen. Would you?”

Ofelia sighed and swallowed her bite. “Go.”

“Thank you. Make Tiago coddle you. Say it again, Seth. Fast.”

I. I—” Seth took a whooping inhale. “I stole the head.” Ofelia’s lips were moving, he saw. Whispering silently to herself. “Rohan il Agante coerced me into doing it.”

“Does he still have it?” Annalise demanded. Shit . Seth didn’t know what Ofelia was doing, but he had a feeling it meant he couldn’t lie his way out of that question.

“He sold it to someone. I can help you find them. He wants me dead. They’re gonna kill me.”

“Yes,” Ofelia said, and then her eyes rolled back and she fell forward. Seth squawked gracelessly and halfway grabbed her before she toppled into the muck.

Annalise dropped to a knee and caught Ofelia in the crook of her arm. She kissed her daughter on the temple, whispered something in her ear, then stood, bracing the dazed girl on her hip. “Tiago,” she barked.

Her son slid from the carriage’s front boot. His steel-toed boots slammed into the muck. “Madam Verdugo.”

“Take your sister and skip town. Rendezvous spot. I’ll meet you there.”

He asked no questions. Just scooped his sister into his arms and said, “Got it.”

Annalise caught Tiago just as he began to turn and held him fast for an instant. Her lips darted forward and planted a kiss on his forehead, on the same spot.

“Love you, Sunshine,” she said. “Be safe.”

“Gross,” Tiago said gravely, and bolstered his sister into a surer carry with a knee. “You eat too much.”

“You don’t lift enough,” Ofelia slurred as they made for the carriage. “And Mom says you have to coddle me.”

Annalise tightened straps and snapped leather as she loaded her blue-eyed beast up. “You swing a sword all right, Seth il Gutierre?”

“I swing it, but not all right.”

She hauled herself onto Demetrius with a swirl of black coattails. “How are you on horseback?”

“I get by.”

She reached a gloved hand down. “You a tits man or an ass man?”

“Why’s—tits.”

She yanked him upward and deposited him in front of her atop Demetrius. “Hold tight,” she said, and her thick arms sandwiched him as they seized the reins. “Go, Meat.”

In the stories, the horse always reared up before they took off. Demetrius didn’t. Demetrius just went .

They rocketed from Prossimo, and the town sprawled and dived aside in their passage.

“Right choice coming to me,” Annalise called over the pounding hooves and rushing air. “I’ll handle it. Do what I tell you.”

Seth clutched tight to Demetrius’ pale neck. The horse churred unhappily at his grip and shook his mane.

“Don’t grope Meaty. No shyness now, Seth il Gutierre. Stay in.” Annalise’s hand cinched around his stomach and tugged him back against her. “Not gonna turn you unlit through my clothes.”

Seth held the saddle horn and tried to get his breathing under control. Annalise’s jacket was open and her blouse beneath it was damp from the rain and there was a beating heart pressing against the back of his neck and making him aware—after a night and a morning spent trying to ignore the obvious—that certain parts of the murder machine he was riding with may have been chiseled from marble, but certain other parts were plump and warm and soft as eiderdown. He wasn’t sure if that was helping him calm down or making him breathe harder.

“Just my little joke, the tits thing,” Annalise added, as Prossimo fell away behind them. “I joke when the waves are rough. Bit inopportune, I know.”

“That’s okay,” he said, into the pelting rain.

“Think for me, Seth. Is there any place you know about around here with narrows in it? Abandoned building, rocky gorge. It’s about to be a numbers thing.”

“I—” Seth racked his brain. “I got nothing, Madam Verdugo. I’m sorry. Haven’t gotten out enough since I lived here.”

“That’s all right.” She turned the horse off the road and made for the treeline.

“Why’d we leave? They wouldn’t have attacked you in front of the whole town.”

“They wouldn’t have.” She slowed Demetrius to a canter. The rain pattered on the needles around them and the broad leaves above. “And that’s why we left. Gonna pick you up. Stay where I put you.”

“Do you have to?” he asked, and then she did, plucking him from the back of her horse by his armpits and depositing him on the forest floor.

“Verdugo Erheis was a cunt, to put it plain. My first tour of his old provinces, I’m avoiding what cuntery I can.” She swung one leg over Demetrius’ back and thumped to the ground next to Seth. “But I do have a quota. Like he did. Like we all do.”

She unslung her sword from Demetrius’ back.

“And I can’t execute anyone for mean looks and spittin’ on the ground.”

A lot of trees around here. A lot of places to hide. Big clanking Annalise, little scampering Seth. She had her back to him. About to turn around. If he was ever going to move it had to be right now.

Don’t , the Fox whispered. Stay.

Shut up, you bastard cat-dog thing. Maybe she was all smiles, maybe she put on a nice show, maybe her arms were big and her chest was soft, maybe she smelled like leather and orange blossom. But he’d seen what that sword did to crooks, and he was a crook, and she was a Verdugo . Verdugos didn’t spare men like him. Verdugos had a quota. Verdugos saw you as a balloon full of hexis, drifting through a million razor-sharp reasons to pop.

He bolted. Again.

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