Page 57 of The Beast
I shut my eyes. Opened them.
"Get out," I said.
He didn't argue. Didn't push. That, at least, was the same, too. He just nodded, slow, like he'd expected no better and didn't blame me for it. He reached down and unbuckled the belt and opened his door and got out into the gray afternoon.
He was about to close it when the last thing rose up in me, and I leaned across the seat.
"Dad."
He stopped. Bent back down into the open door so we were level, eye to eye, his face in the frame of it the way it used to fill the doorway of my childhood.
"Yes, son?"
I spat it out before I could think better of it.
"I'm going to burn Dominion Hall to the ground," I said. "Whatever it is. I'm going to burn it down to the dirt, and thenI'm taking the one good thing this city gave me and I am leaving, and I am never coming back."
I watched his face fall. The sadness, deepening, sagging the lines of him. And then—I watched it change. Watched it firm up and go hard and resolved, the old look, the one that ended arguments at the dinner table before they started, the face of a man who has decided a thing and will not be moved off it for love or money or God.
"You can't do that, son," he said. Quiet. Iron under it. "I built Dominion Hall. With my own two hands, out of nothing, for reasons you don't know yet." He held my eyes. "And it's yours now. You hear me? It's yours. You can't burn it down. A man doesn't burn down his own home. His own blood. His own family."
My mind went white.
What?What in the everliving hell did that mean—it's yours, I built it, your home, your family—what was that house, what wasanyof this, what had my brother walked into and my father risen from the dead to hand me?—
I didn't have a single word for it.
So, I didn't give him one. I sat back, dropped it into reverse, and peeled out of that lot hard enough to leave rubber on the cracked concrete. I left my father standing alone in front of a boarded barber shop in the rearview, getting smaller, not chasing, just watching me go the way I'd spent years imagining he never had.
I drove.
I drove with no destination, the way you do when the thing in your head is too big to sit still under. Worked the mirrors out of pure habit, checked for tails I half hoped to find because a tail I coulddealwith, a tail was a problem I had tools for. There wasn't one. Just me and an armored car and a poison spreading through my chest that no road was long enough to outrun. I triedto empty my head. Tried to put it all in the box and shut the lid the way I've shut a thousand bad things. The box wouldn't hold it. Every time I got the lid down it blew open again—it's yours, you can't come back, those men deserved to die, drive.
I'd had it figured. An hour ago I'd had the whole thing mapped clean—fix it, pay the Donovans, pull Tommy out, take her, gone. Simple. And now the map was ash and I was driving in circles in a city I hated with a dead man's voice in my ears and no plan left at all.
And then, after a while, somewhere in all that noise, one clear thing surfaced.
There was exactly one place in the world I'd felt sane in the last twenty-four hours. One room. One person. The only thing on this earth that had ever quieted the noise without blood in it.
Her.
I hauled the wheel around in a U-turn that laid the tires screaming across two lanes and I pointed the nose back at Wentworth Street. I drove like the devil was on me, because maybe he was, and the only shelter from him I'd ever found was a dark-haired woman in a room over a frame shop.
I took the stairs three at a time and hammered the door.
She opened it, and I saw it all over her in an instant—the anger, banked and ready, the hurt under it, the whole speech she'd been building since she drove away from me, loaded and aimed and about to fire.Where were you? Why didn't you call? Because of you, my father—All of it, right there in her eyes.
I did not care.
I could not have cared less if the building was burning. I'd just sat in a car with my dead father and had the bottom torn out of everything I knew, and I had one need left in the whole wrecked world and it was standing in front of me in the doorway with fire in her eyes.
I reached out and pulled her into me and crushed her against my chest, and she stiffened—startled, a sound of surprise muffled against me, her hands coming up to push?—
—and then I kissed her. Desperate, no finesse in it, a drowning man's kiss, everything I couldn't say poured into it because I had no words left and this was the only language I had.
And she kissed me back.
The stiffness went out of her. Her hands quit pushing and grabbed instead, fisted in my shirt and pulled, and the anger turned into something else without ever losing its heat. I walked her backward across that room full of her secret work toward the sofa with my heart cracked wide open and aching in my chest.
