Chapter 3 - The Broken Span
The safe house on Prytania Street did not exist on municipal records. Built in 1858 by a cotton factor who feared slave rebellions and yellow fever in equal measure, its foundations were three feet of red brick sunk into Mississippi silt, shielded from the road by a canopy of live oaks dripping with Spanish moss.
Wren woke to the hum of an air filtration unit and the smell of cedar shavings and clean linen.
The pain came first—a deep, throbbing heat in her right thigh that felt as though someone had driven a dry pine stake through the muscle and set it smoldering. She sucked in a breath through her teeth, her hands instantly searching the sheets.
“Lie still,” a voice commanded.
Cormac sat in a wingback chair five feet from the foot of the four-poster bed. He had changed. The damp charcoal suit was gone, replaced by a dark wool sweater with the sleeves pushed up to his forearms and slate-colored trousers. A laptop sat open on a small gateleg table beside him, its blue light washing across his jawline.
Wren tried to prop herself up on her elbows. The room tilted violently, a wave of nausea washing up from her gut. “Where... where is this?”
“Prytania Street,” he said. He did not get up, but his eyes tracked every centimeter of her movement with clinical precision. “You’ve been unconscious for four hours. Pelletier put two bags of saline through your arm and thirty milligrams of ketorolac into your hip. If you try to stand, your quadriceps will split, and Pelletier will have to charge me for another hour of needlework.”
Wren let her head fall back into the down pillow. Her throat felt coated in chalk. “Sable?”
“Teague has the perimeter at Berth Nine boxed in,” Cormac said. His voice was steady, rhythmic, designed to lower her heart rate. “Julian is inside the machine shop with four men. Sable is alive. They haven't moved her because they don't have an exit route they like.”
“How do you know she’s alive?”
“Because Julian wants to trade her for the drive.” Cormac gestured toward the laptop. “I plugged it into an air-gapped machine twenty minutes ago. I looked at your numbers, Wren.”
Wren stared at the plaster ceiling medallion above her. The nausea was receding, replaced by the familiar, cold clarity of her training. “The shear failure indices on the Crescent Causeway?”
“The eastern approach,” Cormac recited calmly. “Pylons fourteen through twenty-two. Delacroix substituted high-slag aggregate for marine-grade Portland cement to save twelve million dollars on the municipal bond contract. The core samples you pulled show forty percent moisture infiltration after eighteen months.”
“If a Category Three hurricane hits the mouth of the river during high tide,” Wren said, her voice gaining timber, “the lateral wind load on the upper deck will shear pylon eighteen at the mudline. The whole span will pancake into the shipping channel. Hundreds will die. And Delacroix has the state inspection reports locked in a safe deposit box in Baton Rouge.”
Cormac closed the laptop with a quiet click. “It’s a masterpiece. It isn't just an audit; it’s an indictment that will bring down the entire Delacroix trust, three city commissioners, and the deputy director of the Port Authority.”
“Then give it to the feds,” she said, turning her head toward him, her knuckles knotting into the sheet. “Give it to the U.S. Attorney tonight. Trade the evidence for an emergency federal warrant on Berth Nine. Get the marshals into that warehouse.”
Cormac looked at her, his expression unreadable. In the shadows of the high-ceilinged room, his face seemed carved from limestone.
“You think like an engineer, Wren,” he said quietly. “You believe that once a structural fault is documented, the collapse is prevented by protocol.”
“That’s how civilization works.”
“Civilization stops at the levee,” Cormac said. He stood up. He was a broad man, but he moved without the displacement of air, crossing to the side of her bed like an incoming tide. He looked down at her, his dark eyes holding hers until she felt the heat rising in her neck. “If I call the U.S. Attorney, Julian Delacroix will have a tip from the clerk’s office within twelve minutes. He will put a bullet in your sister’s head, drop her into fifty feet of river water, and board a chartered Cessna out of Lakefront Airport before the marshals have even signed their vehicle requisitions.”
Wren’s breath hitched. “Then what do we do?”
May you like
“We don't call the authorities,” Cormac said. He reached down, took the glass of water from the nightstand, and slipped an arm behind her shoulders, lifting her with effortless, terrifying gentleness so she could drink. “We use the bridge.”
***
