PART 3:

He crouched down to her level. She was gray under the skin and her eyes were too bright and the three stitches she’d run in the wound were more even than they had any business being. Can you move? “I’ve been moving for the last 2 hours getting ready.” Ready for what? “For you to show up.” She pressed the back of her hand against her forehead, a brief involuntary gesture, and then dropped it.

“I wasn’t going to leave without you having the drive first. In case.” He looked at her for a moment. She held the look without difficulty, which was either strength or fever or some combination of the two that had collapsed into a single expression. “In case you didn’t make it,” he finished. She didn’t answer that.

She reached up and he took her arm and she got her feet under her with the kind of controlled effort that made no noise at all. Standing, she was 3 in shorter than him and leaning about 15° to the right to keep weight off the wound, and she still somehow managed to look like she was making a deliberate choice about her posture rather than compensating for damage.

“We need to move before the second crew comes,” she said. “I’ve been counting intervals. They’ve been doing checks every 4 hours. We have about 90 minutes.” Gabriel looked at the drive in his hand, then at her, then at the bathroom. The blood, the needle, the bottle, the torn jacket on the tub’s edge. “The wedding,” he said, “is in 4 days.

” “Not anymore,” he said. He called Cord and Vasquez in, told them what to carry and what to watch, and started moving. Rowan walked out of the bathroom under her own effort and didn’t hold the wall, and Gabriel walked beside her and didn’t offer his arm because she hadn’t asked for it, and because some people’s dignity was the last structural element holding them together and you didn’t touch it.

In the car, she sat in the back with Cord and held the wound with both hands and stared out the window at the dark city moving past. And Gabriel sat in the front and held the drive and did not think about the wedding or his uncle or the 4 days remaining. He thought about the drive. He thought about what it contained.

He thought about 43 intercepts and the words your codes, Gabriel, and what they implied about how long this had been happening and how close he’d been standing to the edge of something catastrophic without feeling the ground slope. He thought about her sitting in that bathroom running stitches through her own side while she waited for him to come.

His thumb found the scar on his palm again. By the time the car turned onto the highway toward the estate, Rowan’s breathing had changed. He didn’t look back. ,  Cord said very quietly, “She’s out.” And Gabriel said, “Keep pressure on the wound.” And the city blurred past the windows, and the drive sat in his hand, and somewhere behind him, the woman who knew where all the bodies were buried had finally let herself stop moving.

The gates of the estate opened. The car pulled through. In 3 hours, Gabriel’s private physician would finish an assessment and tell him the wound had tracked along the lower ribs without piercing the plural cavity, and that the fever was a secondary infection and manageable, but that the blood loss was significant, and she needed 48 hours of stillness she almost certainly wouldn’t agree to.

In 4 hours, Gabriel would sit alone in his office with the drive plugged into an isolated machine and begin reading. And the architecture of the last 8 months would open in front of him like a building whose walls had always been made of paper. In 6 hours, he would make a call that would cancel the wedding, terminate the alliance, and serve notice to every man in his network that the next 72 hours were going to answer certain questions about loyalty with a finality that didn’t leave room for clarification.

But right now, in the car, the drive was in his hand, and the gate was closing behind them, and the night sat outside the windows without moving. Gabriel looked at the road ahead and let the silence be what it was. The physician’s name was Carver, and he worked for Gabriel the way men worked for Gabriel, completely and without asking questions that weren’t his to ask.

He’d been at the estate for 2 hours by the time Gabriel walked through the door, which meant Marcus had called ahead, which meant Marcus had been watching the situation more carefully than he’d let on in the car. Gabriel filed that away. Not suspicion, just notation. Marcus watching carefully was Marcus doing his job.

Carver met him in the hallway outside the guest room and delivered the assessment in the flat, sequential way Gabriel preferred. The wound was deep, but it not reached the lung. The infection was bacterial, likely introduced during the 30 plus hours she’d spent in an unclean environment with an open injury. The fever was 103.

4 and moving in the wrong direction. The stitches she’d run herself were adequate. He said this with something in his voice that wasn’t quite surprised, but sat adjacent to it. But the wound needed to be properly closed and irrigated before the infection established deeper. She conscious? Gabriel asked. In and out. She refused sedation.

Of course she did. She also asked me to give you this. Carver produced a folded piece of paper. Hotel stationery, the kind that lived in desk drawers in rooms people passed through. Written on it in Rowan’s handwriting, which was small and very precise and currently less steady than usual, was a sequence of eight numbers followed by two words, second partition.

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