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The question sits wrong. Wrong shape, wrong angle, a question from some other conversation that has broken through to this one.

"Why would he ask about you?"

My father doesn't answer. He turns his untouched glass a quarter-turn on the map, and his eyes go to the black windows and stay there.

I brace myself for shouting and insults, but they never arrive. I know what to do with shouting. This is something else though. For some moments he isn't looking at me or Julien or the map, and whatever he's looking at instead is pulling him into some sort of darkness. Some deep-seated grudge, maybe, but it's hard to tell. Then it passes, and he seems to return to being my father again. Terrifying, yet him, as I know him.

Thirty years of feuding, I tell myself. That's all that was.

Février is watching him too, and the old man's face has shut like a door.

"Papa."

"It's nothing." His tone is smooth, present, and now he moves the glass to its original position. "It doesn't matter. What matters is this: the arrangement will not stand. Give me three days. There are other solutions."

There it is.

Other solutions. I grew up on other solutions. It's what took Thomas Berger's father out to the marina the summer I was nine, so the Bergers were gone by autumn. It's why Rémy at the gate has two fingers that don't bend. Other solutions always start the same way, with men in cars at night, and they end somewhere I'd rather not picture.

And the first solution—the very first, before any cleverness—is that the guarantee dies. And Julien follows it inside a week.

"Three days," my father says. "You do nothing. You contact no one. Above all, do not go near Novak."

I look at my brother. Julien's staring at the map, jaw working, halfway out of his mind, no doubt.

I look at my father, who has just lied to me. Not about the three days, but with his statement that this is solvable.

"Because of all this, I moved my shift to seven. Time to go and get some rest," I say, a statement which is both true and agrees to nothing.

At the door he kisses my forehead, both hands heavy on my shoulders.

"You were brave tonight," he says quietly, words for my ears only. "Stupid, but brave. You've never learned the difference."

"I learned it here." My head is now throbbing so bad, all I want to do is lock myself in my bedroom and sleep until all these problems disappear. But work beckons, and I'm not one for shirking my responsibility.

Something moves through his face that is almost a smile but I could be wrong. "Go sleep, mon cœur. Everything will be different in the morning."

We both know it won't be. But this family has always preferred a kind lie to a true word, and tonight I'm too tired to break with tradition.

Beyond everything, Laszlo Novak's face pops up in my head. He's watching me struggle with myself, my father, this whole fucked-up world … and then he breaks into laughter. Hearty, unbridled, from the gut. So animated for a man who deals with the dead on the daily.

A man who makes people dead.

I groan as I leave, an inner sound that never escapes my lips.

CHAPTER 3

Manon

Wendy Green is still in the fridge, and I have been awake since four this morning thinking about a woman who isn't dead. A woman that is etched in the very fabric of my being. I had a dream about her and woke up hard. Like a teenage boy still learning his way around his dick.

By nine in the morning, my house is filled with men who are discussing my personal life.

Rafe stands in front of my desk with his jaw set and doesn’t seem particularly pleased with the fact that I acquired a wife. Behind him are three of my captains, all of them apparently confused by the fact that they are in my office, yapping about we discussed this in the car.

I hate when people talk about me behind my back.

"Nicko's jaw is wired shut," Rafe says.