Page 73 of The Beast
"Of course," he said. "The Donovan family will be left in peace. They've suffered enough as it is—the loss of a close family friend is a hard thing. Mr. Whitaker, was it? A tragedy." He said it without a flicker, and the cruelty of it was that it didn't sound cruel; it sounded like sympathy. "Consider that penance enough, on their account. I'm not an unreasonable man, Mr. Dane. I'm not a monster. The rest of this is between your family and me. The Donovans were never my concern. They were only ever a way to reach you."
He let that breathe. Let me hear all of it.
"All I ask," he said, "is that you try."
"Okay," I said.
He looked at me a moment longer, satisfied, the way you look at a tool you've finished using and intend to use again. Then he nodded once, and the tinted glass rolled up between us, and the three SUVs pulled off the shoulder one after another and slid back into traffic and were gone, lights dark now, just three more dark trucks on a Sunday highway.
I stood there a second in the wind off the passing cars.
Then, I walked back and got in beside her.
The driver had the sense not to ask. Pulled us back onto the road smooth and said nothing. I was grateful for it.
Mary Catherine asked. Of course, she did. She turned to me, and under the shock there was a question she needed the answer to more than she needed air.
"My family?"
"Safe," I said. "All of them. Your father, the business, everybody. It's done. Nobody's going to touch them."
She searched my face for the lie and didn't find one, because there wasn't one—and here's the strange part, the part I couldn't explain even to myself. I believed Craine. I trusted the word of a man I despised, a man who'd just gotten a good person killed and called it penance. I couldn't tell you why except that I've spent a career reading men, and Craine wasn't a lunatic. He wasn't killing for the joy of it. He was a man with aims, working a plan, and somewhere in the cold machine of him there was a calculation that the Donovans cost him more attention than they were worth. He'd cut them loose because keeping them tangled in this was a liability, not a prize.
And that told me something else, something I tucked away in the back of my mind where I keep the things that come in useful later. A man like Craine, a sitting deputy director, has a positionto protect, and a position like that does not survive a city getting too loud, too bloody, too visible. Today had been useful to him. But there was a line past which all this noise stopped being his weapon and started being his problem. Push him to that line and the whole shape of the fight changed.
I didn't know yet how to use it. But it was there. I filed it.
"Where are we going now?" she asked. Her voice was small and far away but it was hers. She was still reaching for the next thing to hold onto, still trying to put the world back into an order she could stand in. I loved her so much in that second it about took my legs out.
"Dominion Hall," I said.
The fortress. The mansion full of armed men and stern faces and secrets the size of continents. The place my father built with his own hands and handed me from beyond a grave I'd dug for him in my own heart. There were answers in that house. The truth about Trueborn, whatever the hell it was. The truth about all of it. And there was a man waiting in it, alive, with my own eyes and my own jaw and a lifetime of explaining to do.
I pulled Mary Catherine into me, gentle, and she came, and let her head down onto my chest. I felt some of the shaking start to ease out of her. I put my chin on the top of her head and I closed my eyes against the dark windows and the afternoon sliding past.
And I tried to picture how in God's name I was going to walk into that house and stand in front of Byron Dane.
I didn't have the first idea.
But she was breathing slow against my chest, and her family was safe, and for the length of one highway, that was enough to carry. The rest, I'd deal with when it was in front of me.
The way I always do.
33
MARY CATHERINE
Dominion Hall arrived the way things arrived in dreams—gradually, and then all at once.
The drive had been long live oaks, moss-hung, the kind that made you feel you were traveling backward in time, and then the gates, and then more oaks, and then the house itself, lit against the sky in a way that made no sense for a building that was also, apparently, an operational center for a private defense organization staffed by armed men. It looked like somewhere a big family had been collecting money and oil paintings and had run out of walls.
Which, I was beginning to understand, was more or less accurate.
I registered it from the vehicle window the way I'd been registering most things—at a remove, through glass, images arriving without their proper weight attached. Columns. Piazzas stacked two stories. Wrought iron. A fountain I could hear before I could see it. Men at the perimeter who looked at the car and then looked away, which was its own kind of language.
Brock helped me out of the vehicle.
He didn't ask if I needed help. He came around, opened the door, and put his hand out. I took it because my legs had not yet fully rejoined my body from wherever they'd gone on that crosswalk. We went up the broad stone steps together and through a set of doors tall enough to ride something through.
