Chapter 7 - THE SAFE HOUSE BY THE COVE
Adrien stood frozen in the freezing marsh mud.
The wind cut through his wet shirt like razors.
"My father," Adrien repeated.
His voice was dead.
"He told everyone the pens were for smuggled freight," Isabella said.
Her teeth rattled in her skull.
"They weren't for freight."
"They were for collateral."
"Families who owed debts to the Voss council."
She looked him in the eye, defying him to deny it.
"My father owed three hundred thousand dollars on the docks."
"He couldn't pay."
"So your father took me."
Adrien closed his eyes for a fraction of a second.
His father had been a monster.
Adrien had known that since he was sixteen years old.
He had spent the last six years cleaning the blood from the Voss syndicate, cutting out the trafficking, turning the operations into legitimate shipping lines.
He thought he had found every skeleton in the family vaults.
He was wrong.
"Why did you come back to the house?" Adrien asked.
"Why work as my housekeeper for two years?"
Isabella pulled her soaked blouse tighter around her neck.
"Because the ledger with my family's debt was locked in your father's private vault."
"The vault only opens with two keys."
"One was buried with him."
"The other..."
"The other was the silver key around your neck," Adrien finished.
She nodded once.
"Daniel Mercer told me he would give me the ledger if I got the key from you."
"He told me I could burn the debt."
"I could be free."
Adrien looked toward the highway lights flickering through the bare willow trees a quarter-mile away.
"Daniel Mercer doesn't burn debts," Adrien said.
"He collects them with interest."
He unbuttoned his soaked cuffs and wrung out the water.
"We can't stay here. You're hypothermic."
He took her frozen hand in his.
Her fingers were like ice cubes.
He led her through the dense briars toward an old wooden boathouse rotting at the edge of the tidal creek.
It belonged to a fisherman who had run rum for his grandfather forty years ago.
It had been abandoned for a decade.
Adrien kicked the side door open with one blow.
The smell of dry salt, motor oil, and dry rot greeted them.
It was out of the wind.
Adrien found a workbench in the back.
Underneath lay an old woolen army blanket wrapped in oilcloth, preserved from the damp.
He shook it out.
"Take off the wet shirt," he ordered.
Isabella hesitated, her eyes darting to his face.
"Don't be stupid," he said quietly.
"Pride will kill you faster than Mercer's men."
She turned her back to him.
Her trembling hands struggled with the buttons of her soaked blouse.
Adrien turned away, scanning the yard through the cracked boards of the wall.
He heard the wet cotton hit the wooden floor.
He tossed the thick army blanket over her bare shoulders.
She pulled it tightly around herself, curling into a ball on an overturned crate.
Adrien picked up an old steel jerrycan from the corner.
He shook it.
Two inches of kerosene sloshed at the bottom.
He grabbed a metal coffee can, tore a strip of dry burlap from a sack, and poured the fuel over it.
He struck his Kimber's steel slide against a rusted iron bolt.
Sparks flew.
The third spark caught.
A small, yellow flame flickered inside the coffee can, casting dancing shadows across the spiderwebs in the ceiling.
Warmth pushed back the biting dampness.
Isabella held her hands over the flame, her breath shuddering.
"What now?" she asked.
"Now," Adrien said, pulling the silver key from his pocket and letting the yellow firelight play across its teeth,
"we don't run."
"Adrien, Mercer has thirty armed men and the entire council behind him."
Adrien loaded a fresh round into the chamber of his gun.
The metallic clack sounded like a gavel falling in a courtroom.
"Mercer thinks we drowned in that river."
"He's going to the downtown vault tonight to take the syndicate throne."
"And what will you do?"
May you like
Adrien looked down at her through the firelight.
"I'm going to let him open the door."
