Chapter 6 - Tensile Strength
By midnight, the fever had returned to Wren’s blood.
Pelletier had warned Cormac that secondary infection was the real killer in through-and-through wounds. The bullet had carried fragments of denim, street grit, and grease into the deep tissue of the quad. Wren lay on the leather sofa, her face slick with cold perspiration, her teeth clicking together as chills racked her slender frame.
Cormac sat on the edge of the low table beside her, a damp linen cloth in his hand. He wiped the sweat from her forehead with slow, mechanical precision.
“You should have let him take the files,” she muttered through dry, cracked lips. Her eyes were unfocused, tracking the shadows of the cypress beams above. “He’s right. The city will protect him. They’ll bury the audit. They’ll say I was an unstable employee with a grudge.”
“They won't,” Cormac said, dipping the cloth into a bowl of ice water.
“Why do you care?” she whispered, her hand rising from the blanket to catch his wrist. Her fingers were burning hot, her grip surprisingly strong despite the delirium. “You’re just like him. You move things in the dark. You take your percentage from the river.”
Cormac looked down at her fingers circling his wrist. He did not pull away. “Julian Delacroix builds things that break so he can charge to rebuild them. I move freight. If a barge sinks, my people drown. I don’t run broken steel, and I don't let broken men run my river.”
Wren let out a harsh, breathless laugh that turned into a grimace of pain. “An honorable gangster. Is that what you are?”
“I am an accountant who carries iron,” Cormac said. “Sleep, Wren.”
“My sister,” she mumbled, her head rolling to the side. “Sable doesn't know how to survive without me. She thinks the world is a gallery. She thinks if you make something pretty, someone will pay for it.”
“She’s asleep in the guest room downstairs,” Cormac told her, his thumb unconsciously smoothing the line between her arched eyebrows where tension had carved a deep furrow. “Teague is outside the door. Nobody is coming through that gate tonight.”
“You shouldn't have caught me,” she whispered, her voice fading down to an erratic murmur as the midazolam took hold again. “I was supposed to drop the drive and die in the street. That was the calculation. The debt dies with the debtor.”
Cormac’s hand went still against her forehead.
*That was the calculation.*
She had known they were behind her. She had known the bullet was coming. She hadn't crawled to Magazine Street to be saved; she had crawled here to make sure her corpse was traded for her sister’s freedom before Julian’s men could recover the drive from her pockets.
He looked at her profile—the straight, sharp nose, the pale hollow of her cheek, the fierce, irrational stubbornness that lived in the line of her mouth even while she was unconscious.
“You calculated wrong,” Cormac said into the empty room. “I don't accept dead collateral.”
May you like
He sat with her through the three o’clock watch, listening to the river boats groan against the pilings below, watching the needle of his brass compass tremble and settle, tremble and settle, true north unchanging in the dark.
***
