Page 122

"I did."

"You made me swear I'd never put a man near her again." A beat. "I have no idea what she’s doing right now. That’s the whole point."

He's right. I made him swear to do nothing, to not go check on her, even if I threatened to walk off a ledge to make him break. He's told the story a couple of times since, how I came apart on my own men that night. Rafe doesn't tell stories, so it must have been a performance worth repeating.

I've told myself for a year that letting her go was love in action. Right now the opposite feels like love. I reach across the bed for her some nights, this woman who set fire to my body and my house and walked out with both still burning, and I allow her all the payback she needs. Because the fire was mine to earn. Fact.

You'd think a year would sort a grown man out.

I even tried the cure everyone swears by. Took a woman to dinner a few months back, mostly to stop Constantine’s yapping. Clever, lovely, said the right things, no idea who I was, which was most of the appeal. I sat in a restaurant I'd have chosen for Manon and watched this poor woman's mouth move, all the while thinking about my wife telling me I'm not funny while she lost a fight with her own smile. I paid before the food came. Drove the woman home, apologized, then sat on my couch until the sun came up. She was perfect, and that was the problem. She'd never once want to bury me in a gold-plated casket.

I gave Manon the divorce. Gave her the freedom and the money she wouldn't touch. Then I did the part that actually cost me, which wasn't the explosion she thinks broke me. I stopped following her life.

Is she still eating badly? Is she still alone? Not my circus. Keeping up with Manon Valmont was the one act I was ever truly great at, and now I sit in the empty ring.

"Laszlo." Rafe, still there. "I'm sick of this. You want me to check anyway. One call. You'll at least know who the girl is by morning."

I want to. God, I want to. One call and I'd breathe again.

I look at the woman on my table. "No," I say.

He makes a sound that's pure disgust.

"Stay on the ID. Tell me as soon as you have it." I get down on the floor and start putting my instruments back, one at a time, in order. "I'll do her right in the meantime."

"Hmmm." Closest thing to an agreement he owns.

I hang up and get to work.

The result comes a little after six. Rafe pulled strings.

It isn't her. Of course it isn't.

I wait to feel better and I don't. Relief isn't a thing I have much practice with.

Her name was Ana. Twenty-four. She came out of a fire in a lockup down by the water, one that used to be ours before Ferro took it, and she landed on my table because the unclaimed dead in this city all wash up on it sooner or later. The report calls the fire undetermined. It calls her a runaway. Five attempts on her own life. A missing person's report her mother filed eight months back that nobody ever chased.

None of my men set that fire. I check, because I need to know whose war it was, and the answer comes back nobody's.

Except she's Manon's height. Manon's hair, near enough. Manon's build. And the fire took enough of the rest of her that the things I'd know my ex-wife by, the scars, the marks, the map of her I could draw with my eyes shut, are gone. It stands to reason I needed confirmation. What's left could have been my wife or a stranger who was unlucky enough to be built like her. That's the horror of it. I know Manon’s body better than anyone alive, yet I couldn't rule out this was her.

Here’s the kicker: A girl who looks exactly like my estranged wife doesn't walk into an untraceable fire on the exact stretch of water my turf war has been waging on for a year. I know how coincidence stacks. I know how a message stacks too, and this one was meant for me.

Then I make myself stop, because the war is won. There's no one left standing who could send me a corpse wearing my wife's face. I spent a year making sure of that, so I try not to think about her. It's bad luck and somebody else's mess.

I finish her before I leave. Washing the soot off the side the fire didn't reach, I comb her hair out. It’s the same shade as Manon's. I do what can be done with the ruined side. Nobody's paying me for this. I just won't put a girl in the ground wearing the worst night of her life. It's the only kind of apology I excel at, the kind the other party can't hear.

I have not forgotten the ear on that tray in my and Manon’s bedroom. I tore this city down to the studs looking for the man who walked in wearing a Ferro coat, and I never found him. My memory is long. Whoever it was will answer, and I'll be the one to collect.

But that's a bill for another night.

Tonight there's a funeral I need to attend. I organised it myself.

CHAPTER 34

Laszlo

We hold the funeral at the Basset house, in the big viewing room at the front, the one with the good carpet and the doors that don’t carry sound.