Page 41 of Rune’s Solace

“Kid said an animal. Snake, maybe a lizard, it had legs so he couldn’t tell. Dark. Blurred out. He said it looked like somebody did it in a garage with a pen.”

Something went across Devil’s face.

“That’s not a garage,” he said.

“No. It’s not.”

“That’s a cell.” He sat back. “Prison ink, on the neck, where every cop in the county can read it. That’s a man who did long enough that he quit worrying about how he looks to the world outside.” He tapped one finger, once, on the desk. “That’s not a kid. That’s not some campus creep who liked her hair. That’s a hard man, Rune, out recent, and he’s standing on a college campus in the middle of the day where he does not belong, watching a nineteen-year-old girl.”

“That’s how I read it.”

“That’s how it is.” He got up and went to the window with his hands behind his back and looked out at the yard, at the men on the walls, at all of it. And I stood there and let him think, because you don’t rush him, and because I knew what was coming and I’d already decided I wasn’t going to like it.

“It’s not Drago,” he said.

I’d known he’d say it. It had still put a stone in my gut.

“Walk it with me,” Devil said, turning around, and he wasn’t being dismissive. He was doing the thing that makes him what he is, laying it out to see if it broke. “Drago wants Zeynep. That’s what our man inside heard, and he’s paying somebody outside to take her. Now what in the hell would a man Drago’s paying want with Amy? She’s not in the club. She’s not connected to any of it. She’s somebody Brenda brought here who goes to school across the river, and wouldn’t know Drago if the bastard walked up and introduced himself.”

“I agree, and it makes no fucking sense.”

“You’re getting paid to take Mystic’s pregnant woman off a compound full of armed men, you don’t spend two days learning the schedule of some other nineteen-year-old girl at the College of Charleston. Doesn’t get you closer to Zeynep. Doesn’t get you through the gate. Doesn’t do a damn thing for the job.”

“You thinking what I’m thinking?”

“It’s her.” Devil’s said, and something dark came into it. “It’s whatever she came out of. Rune, she walked into this compound a year ago half starved with marks on her, and Brenda has never told a soul on this property one word about where she came from, and I never made her, because it wasn’t a threat.” He shook his head slow. “Girls don’t just run. Somebody’s been out there all this time. And now somebody with prison ink on his throat is standing near her at school looking at her like, how’d the boy put it?”

“Like she belonged to him.”

“Like she belonged to him.” Devil let that sit in the room. “That’s not a contract, brother. That’s a man who’s come to collect.”

I felt the floor of it. He was right about that too, and it was worse than being wrong.

“So here’s how we’re playing it.” He came back to the desk. “The wall around Zeynep doesn’t move. Not one man. Drago’s still Drago, that’s still coming and I’m not thinning that for anything on this earth. Mystic’d take my head off, and he’d be right to. But you.” He pointed at me. “You stay on her. Just you. You don’t leave her, you don’t hand her off, you don’t let her out of your sight from the second she walks out that gate to the second she’s back through it, and if she so much as goes to the mailbox you’re behind her.”

“I don’t plan on letting her out of my sight.”

“Other thing.” He sat down and pulled a pad toward him. “I’m putting Mystic on her history.”

“How much?”

“All of it.”

My eyes came up.

“Birth records. School. Addresses. Family. Anybody who’s ever had legal claim to her, anybody who lived under the same roof. If there’s a man out there who thinks that girl belongs to him, I want a name before he gets another chance to stand across a street from her.”

He wrote something down.

“Won’t be quick. Dawson’s common, and we never ran her when Brenda brought her in. She gave us a name and that was enough because Brenda said it was enough.”

“Still is.”

Devil looked up at me.

“I’m not digging through her life for sport,” I said. “We’re looking for him.”

Something in Devil’s face shifted. Approval, maybe. Gone before I could call it.