Page 32 of Rune’s Solace

It was nice.

I should’ve known better than to notice.

It went wrong in the parking garage.

We’d come back to the car, the three of us, still relaxed and happy off the lunch, Fiona digging in her bag for the keys she never could find, and a man stepped out from between two parked cars, and it was Tom Montgomery, and everything stopped.

He looked awful.

That was what I noticed first, because faces are always what I notice first. You look at the face before you listen to the words, because the face usually tells you what kind of night you’re about to have. Tom’s said he hadn’t slept right in days. He’d lost weight too, and when he came toward Brenda his hands stayed out where she could see them, like even he knew he looked like somebody she ought to run from.

“Brenda. Please. Just — five minutes. I’ve called and called and you won’t — please. I just need to understand what happened.”

“Tom.” Brenda’s voice went flat and careful, but I saw her hand find the strap of her bag and grip it. “You need to go on. This isn’t… you can’t just walk up on me in a parkin’ lot.”

“I don’t know how else to reach you. You blocked me. You went cold, you won’t tell me why and I have gone out of my mind trying to figure out what I did.” He took a step and Brenda took one back and I moved without thinking, got myself half in front of her, and Fiona came up on her other side, the three of us closing ranks the way you do. “I’m not — God, I’m not going to hurt you, I would never — I just need to know what I did wrong. Whatever it was, just say it, and I’ll go, I swear I’ll go.”

And I watched it happen to Brenda. I watched the thing she’d been forbidden to say for weeks, the true thing, the only thing, the thing Devil had ordered locked behind her teeth. I watched it climb up her throat and press against the back of them, because he kept saying what did I do, he kept asking for the one answer she wasn’t allowed to give, and there’s only so long a proud woman can stand there being begged for a lie.

“You want to know what you did.” Her voice shook. “You really want to stand there and make me say it.”

“Brenda — ”

“Evie recognized you.” It came out of her in a rush, low and furious and finally, finally free. “You came walkin’ into High Voltage with me on your arm before you ever sat across from Evie, like I didn’t have people in this world who loved me, like there wasn’t a soul around me with eyes in their head. She knew your face the second she saw it. So don’t you stand there and ask me what you did.” Her chin came up even as her voice broke. “You know exactly what you are. And now you know that I know it. That’s what you did, Tom. You made me love a badge.”

The change in him was the worst thing I’ve ever watched come over a person’s face.

Because up until that second he’d been a man in pieces, begging. And the instant she said Evie, the instant she said Agent, something else moved in behind his eyes and took over, and I watched the heartbreak get folded up, put away, something colder step forward in its place. He understood. All at once, standing there, he understood that his cover was gone, that she knew, that if she knew the club knew, that everything he’d been building had just died in a parking garage. His eyes moved over us, then the garage, then the ramps and the exits.

He wasn’t Brenda’s Tom anymore. I didn’t know this man. Apparently she hadn’t either.

“Okay,” he said. Quiet now. Emptied out. “Okay.”

“Get away from her.”

I about jumped out of my skin.

Horse was just there.

I hadn’t heard his boots, hadn’t seen him coming across the garage. One second it was the three of us and Tom, and the next Horse had planted himself between Brenda and Tom like somebody had dropped a wall there.

“You heard me.” Horse’s voice came hard and even and it was the evenness that was terrible, the sound of a big man spending everything he had holding still. “You get in your car and you get gone, and you don’t come back around her. Not on the street, not on the phone. Not anywhere, not ever.” His hand had found Brenda. It was on her arm, then her back, drawing her in behind the wall of him without him seeming to decide to do it, a thing his body did on its own. And I saw Brenda feel it, saw her go still at the touch of the exact hand that had wanted her for fifteen years and never once let itself claim her where the world could see, claiming her now, finally, in front of God and the parking garage and the man she’d tried to replace him with. “She’s got people,” Horse said, glaring at him. “Always did. You just never could see ’em, same as you never could see a thing sittin’ right in front of your face.”

Tom looked at Brenda for a long moment. One last look, and it had everything in it, all of it, the real feeling he’d never get to prove and she’d never let herself believe. And then he put it away too, behind the badge, because the job was all he had left now and the job said run.

“I’m sorry,” he said. To Brenda. Only her. And then he turned and walked, fast, toward the ramp, a blown agent with a catastrophe to go manage and nothing to show for any of it but a woman who’d never speak to him again.

And that should have been the story of that day. That should have been enough for one parking garage.

We stood there in the ringing after, all of us shaky, Brenda’s breath coming hard, Fiona’s hand on her shoulder, her eyes on her father’s back with something in them I didn’t have time to read. Horse hadn’t let go of Brenda. Brenda hadn’t made him. The world had tipped sideways and was slowly trying to right itself, and I stepped back to give them room, turned a little, looking around the garage.

And I saw him.

Down the row, half hidden behind a concrete pillar, a man stood between the parked cars, not walking to one or coming from one, just standing there while everybody else moved around him. Watching us. Maybe he’d been there the entire time. And when I saw his face—

His face.

I know that face. I know it the way you know the thing that made you. I have seen it over me, above me and in the doorway of every nightmare I’ve ever had, and my body knew it before my mind could argue, my heart stopped, the garage tilted, everything went strange and loud, and some awful thing in the deepest oldest part of me that had spent nineteen years learning exactly one lesson stood straight up and screamed it —