Chapter 5 - THE PRICE OF AN INVESTMENT
The green emergency light cast sickly shadows across Marcus Kane’s face.
He didn't look like the man who had laughed at my dining table.
He looked like a butcher measuring a carcass.
Behind him, Cecelia Vance smiled.
Her golden dress was smeared with black grease from the service corridor.
In her manicured hands, the steel tire iron looked grotesque.
“She’s not worth it, Graham,” Cecelia purred, her voice dripping with venomous amusement.
“She’s just an investment, remember?”
“A cheap one.”
Graham did not lower his gun.
His Kimber remained locked onto Marcus’s forehead.
His posture was rigid, carved from granite, but I saw the slight, violent twitch in his jaw.
“You’ve been skimming from the Savannah accounts for eighteen months, Marcus,” Graham said softly.
His voice was terrifyingly calm.
“Julian Vance didn't buy you.”
“You offered yourself to him for thirty percent of my docks.”
Marcus shrugged, his thumb cocking the hammer of his suppressed pistol.
“You got soft, Graham.”
“Ten years playing the respectable married man on the Battery.”
“Attending charity galas.”
“Buying antique silver for a woman who sits in the parlor while we take the federal heat.”
Marcus took half a step forward.
“The Commission wants a boss who rules with an open fist, not a man who checks with his wife before he approves a contract.”
“I never checked with her,” Graham said, his voice flat.
“I know,” Marcus laughed.
“We heard you in the lounge tonight.”
“*‘She still thinks I wear this ring for her.’*”
Marcus’s eyes flickered toward me on the brick stairs.
“She heard you too, Calloway.”
“Look at her face.”
“She knows what you are.”
I stood three steps down in the cold darkness of the tunnel.
My bare feet were bleeding onto the mossy brick.
My hand clutched the pearl-handled .22 behind the folds of my navy skirt.
I looked at Graham’s broad back.
He didn't turn around.
He didn't look at me.
“Drop the weapon, Graham,” Marcus commanded, his barrel shifting toward my forehead.
“On three.”
“One.”
“Two—”
Graham didn't drop his gun.
He dropped his shoulder.
He lunged forward, throwing his entire two-hundred-pound frame into Marcus’s chest.
The suppressed pistol discharged with a muffled phut.
The bullet tore through the meat of Graham’s left upper arm, blood spraying across the stainless steel prep table.
Graham didn't even grunt.
He slammed Marcus against the industrial dishwasher, his right forearm driving into Marcus’s windpipe with the force of a hydraulic press.
The suppressed weapon clattered across the linoleum.
Behind them, Cecelia screamed, raising the heavy steel tire iron with both hands.
She swung it toward the back of Graham’s unprotected skull.
I didn't think.
I didn't calculate.
Ten years of polite society, of tea parties, of smiling for society photographers dissolved into pure, raw survival.
I stepped up from the cellar stairs.
I leveled the pearl-handled .22 with both hands.
BANG.
The tiny gunshot sounded like a whip crack in the tiled kitchen.
The round struck Cecelia Vance’s right knee.
The bone shattered with a sickening, wet pop.
Cecelia shrieked, dropping the iron bar as her leg gave out beneath her.
She collapsed onto the wet floor, clutching her bleeding knee, sobbing in high-pitched agony.
Graham twisted Marcus’s neck until the cartilage popped.
Marcus went limp, slumping unconscious onto the floorboards in a pool of gray water.
Silence slammed back down on the kitchen.
Only Cecelia’s ragged sobbing and the hum of the refrigerators remained.
Graham stood over Marcus, his left sleeve soaked in dark, arterial red.
He turned slowly.
He looked at the smoking barrel of the tiny gun in my hands.
Then he looked into my eyes.
The shock on his face was absolute.
He had lived with me for three thousand six hundred and fifty days.
He had thought I was porcelain.
He had thought I was a calendar keeper, a hostess, a convenient ornament to make bankers trust him.
He had never seen the woman who could pull a trigger without blinking.
“Eleanor,” he breathed, his voice hoarse.
Footsteps echoed from the ballroom corridor.
Heavy.
Fast.
Dozens of boots running toward the kitchen.
Julian Vance’s reinforcements had breached the inner doors.
I grabbed Graham’s uninjured right arm.
My fingers dug into his wool sleeve, leaving bloody prints from my own cut feet.
“Move, Graham,” I ordered, my voice cutting through the smoke.
“Or die here with your investment.”
May you like
He didn't argue.
He kicked the iron cellar door shut, threw the secondary deadbolt from the inside, and followed me down into the black abyss beneath Charleston.
