EIGHT
Anthea
It felt prettyfitting to examine the scene of the Hell Kickers’ betrayal by night. It couldn’t have been much earlier than this when the Nobles and the Hell Kickers had agreed to meet up for the exchange.
The desolate parking lot lay behind a couple of run-down warehouses, not the sort of place anyone with good intentions generally ventured. A sour, chalky scent hung in the air. It’d rained since the shootout, but not hard. A few faint bloodstains still marked the pavement.
By my phone’s flashlight, I charted out the positions of the vehicles. It seemed most likely that the Nobles had stopped their truck here, where a few pebbles had been crunched under the wheels, and the Hell Kickers would have parked across from them to leave a good gap in the middle.
One of the marks of blood was right in the middle of the space. Another two lay around where I thought the Nobles had been and one on the Hell Kickers’ side. Based on that, we’d obviously suffered more fatalities, but there must have been other bodies that’d fallen without leaving as much of a mess lingering behind. It was hard to draw definite conclusions.
I did take a little satisfaction from the thought that our people had given back what they’d gotten at least a little before they’d gone down.
Most of the casings that’d been left by the guns must have been collected by the police as evidence. I only spotted a couple that’d tumbled over near the side of the warehouses, lost among the tufts of weeds.
I stalked along the buildings and studied the walls and windows. One pane had been shattered—recently, from the lack of grime on the scattered shards. By a bullet in the fray? I made out a couple of definite, fresh bullet marks on the worn brick.
The second one made me pause and frown. Maybe I’d misjudged the positions of the crews. It didn’t really make sense that anyone would have been aiming in this direction if they’d been staked out where I’d assume, unless someone’s aim had gone ridiculously wide.
I took out a notepad and made a quick sketch of the layout and the locations of the stains and the signs of shots. I could study it more later at my leisure and see what else occurred to me.
There wasn’t much else to see. For the sake of thoroughness, I walked over to a large shipping container that was standing way off by the neighboring building. As I reached it, I paused.
There were scuff marks on the pavement around its base that suggested it’d been moved recently. The rainfall had probably washed away most trace evidence, but there was a greasy smear about the size of a dragged fingerprint on the far side that didn’t yet have much in the way of blown grit clinging to it.
Of course, the cops had probably manhandled the container making sure it didn’t contain anything related to the crime. No doubt they’d have hauled it back to the station if it would have fit in the evidence locker.
I made a note of its position, the site of the scuff marks, and possible fingerprint all the same. There was no such thing as beingtoothorough. If I’d learned anything in my studies and experiments at putting those studies to practice, it was that you never knew when a seemingly random detail might become the key to victory.
It’d been overcast during the day, and the lingering summer heat had vanished quickly with the darkness. A cool breeze licked over me. I folded my arms over my chest, wishing I’d brought a jacket, and hustled back to the street where civilization still reigned.
I hailed a cab rather than calling an Uber so that I could pay in cash. I wouldn’t put it past Marcel Rosano—or various other members of the Hell Kickers—to be tracking my credit cards and any other accounts they could manage to hack into. Anything that connected to the internet could become a liability.
I had the cab drop me off a few blocks from the house and slunk the rest of the way through the stately streets of Carroll Gardens on foot. The thin nylon rope I’d used to rappel down the side of the house was hanging exactly where I’d left it. I watched the streets around the corner brownstone for a few minutes, and when I got an opening with no traffic in sight, I darted across the street and immediately clambered up to my bedroom window.
It was a little slower going up rather than down, but I made it to my open window without provoking any shouts of alarm. I hefted my leg over the ledge, rolled the rest of my body inside, and was just straightening up with a swipe of my hand over my hair when an unexpected voice stopped me in my tracks.
“We do have doors, you know.”
I froze in place, my gaze darting to the spot the voice had come from. The room was dark, only hazed faintly from the streetlamps down below, and the figure standing by the door was little more than a silhouette. Still, I recognized the lean frame and even voice well enough to identify him based on nothing else.
I crossed my arms over my chest. “Yes. Like the one for my bedroom. Which you seem to have ignored.”
Lucan took a step forward, bringing his pensively handsome face into slightly sharper focus. His dark brown eyes bored into me. “It’s my house. Every room is my room if I happen to want to be in it. Where did you go that you wanted to keep such a secret?”
I cocked my head. “Here’s the thing about secrets: they stop being a secret if you start telling people about them.”
Lucan’s expression tensed. I was pissing him off—good. It’d pissedmeoff when he’d just stood there watching while Darius practiced his seductive skills on me this afternoon.
Way back when, I’d always felt a little more connected to the middle Rosano brother than the other two, as much as I’d thought I’d gotten along with all three of them. Lucan understood the appeal of books and absorbing knowledge, like I did. He said what he meant without posturing or sly asides, which had been a relief after all the politicking even within the Noble family back home.
At least, I’d thought he’d said what he meant. He’d clearly been hiding some things from me and lying about others, or we wouldn’t have ended up here.
The frustration—no,anger—stirred up by that thought propelled me across the room.
“If you’re not going to come clean, I can tell my father that you were sneaking around and hiding things that could be dangerous to the family,” Lucan said.
I came to a halt just a couple of feet from him, watching the way his chest rose with an abruptly drawn in breath, the way his hands closed at his sides. As if my being this close affected him. As if he were holding himself back from touching me.