Page 35 of Iron Debt
“Niamh or the scout?” I said.
“Don’t make me choose.”
The city glowed through the window. The Clyde was a band of darkness cutting through the light, and the dockyard cranes stood against the sky like sentinels, and the four of us sat on the floor of a penthouse eating out of a pizza box with curry sauce on our fingers and the threat of something larger and darker pressing against the glass, and it was, improbably and irrevocably, the closest thing to safety I had felt since I’d arrived in Cairndhu.
Not safetyfrom. Safetywith. The complicated, entirely unprecedented feeling of being in a room with three men who had individually and collectively upended my life, and who were eating chips on the floor because the protocol for emergency relocation apparently included donner meat, and who were – in this hour, in this configuration, with the munchie box empty and the sauces drying and the city glowing – something I had no category for.
They were just here. And I was just here. And theherewas enough.
Ewan reached for the last pakora. His hand stopped. He looked at the box, then at me.
“We’re going to have to tell her about the Winter Wager eventually.”
The room changed. The warmth contracted. Al’s stillness, which had been comfortable, becamewatchful. Lachlan’s face reassembled – the smile, if it had been a smile, was gone.
“Not yet,” Lachlan said.
I looked at Ewan. I looked at Lachlan. I looked at Al, whose eyes were on me with the steady weight that meant he was sorry about something that hadn’t happened yet.
“Tell me now,” I said.
The munchie box sat between us. The chips were cold. The pakora was unclaimed. Nobody moved to do anything about any of this.
Lachlan took off his glasses. He cleaned them on the hem of his shirt – the most domestic, least controlled gesture I had ever seen him make. He put them back on.
“The Winter Wager is a high-stakes private game hosted by the Gravedigger,” he said. “Once a year. Invitation only. The buy-in is twenty thousand. The real currency is territorial.”
“And?”
“And this year, we intend to use it to break his supply line.”
I waited.
“You’re the Ace,” Ewan said. Quietly. Without the performance. Without the grin. “You’re the play, Morven. The Living Ace. That’s what the balcony was for. That’s what the dress was for. That’s what all of it was for.”
The penthouse was very quiet. The city lights moved on the glass. My shoulder was still touching Lachlan’s arm. The curry sauce was drying on the empty box.
I looked at the three of them – the planner, the fixer, the enforcer – and I understood, with a claritythat landed like a physical blow, that the cage had never been the destination. It had been the staging ground.
“And if he wins the hand?” I said.
I didn’t look at Lachlan when I asked. I looked at Al.
The silence that followed was the loudest thing in the room.
CHAPTER 20
The Living Ace Plan
MORVEN
The munchie box was pushed to the side. The chips were cold. Nobody moved to do anything about this.
Lachlan explained the Winter Wager the way he explained everything – completely, precisely, and with the cold elegance of a man for whom a plan was an art form and the execution of it was the closest thing he experienced to joy.
The Gravedigger hosted the game annually at a location disclosed seventy-two hours before. Last year, the old Brae Hotel on Loch Lomond. The year before, a private residence in Dunoon. The buy-in was £20,000 per seat. The players were McInnis’s inner circle and a rotating selection of outsiders invited for the appearance of neutrality. The game was Texas Hold’em, five-card, played over one night with escalating blinds that guaranteed resolution by dawn. The stakes were nominal. The real business happened in the corridors – agreements made between hands,territories negotiated during breaks, the entire evening functioning as a diplomatic summit disguised as a poker game.
The Syndicate had never been invited. Lachlan intended to change that.
