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The Vision She Hid 102
The corridor smelled like cordite, cheap cologne used by the sort of guys that don’t get invited to family reunions. Elky’s men were efficient at their cleanup, dragging bodies the way you’d haul sacks of flour you’ve ordered from Amazon by accident. Elky’s operators were quick and discreet as usual, as if the marble had signed a non-disclosure agreement. The two prisoners were hauled in the opposite direction, wrists cinched behind their backs, feet sliding like kids caught stealing candy.I leaned against the wall, trying to get a cigarette out of a pack I haven’t touched for ages, just for the sake of it. When the smoke clears and the echoes die, you need something to do with your hands. Just relying on sarcasm wouldn’t calm the nerves.“Neat work,” I muttered.Elky didn’t answer. He was crouched near the vault doors, touching the edge where one of the intruders made a clumsy attempt to mount a micro-cam. His crew filed past, two heading toward the orchard with night scopes, anothe
The Vision She Hid 101
Elky checked the vault panel—untouched. The black metal doors watched him with the arrogance that’s survived multiple architects and at least two mafia coup d’etats. He pressed his right palm to the biometric panel, just to hear it purr. The light blinked friendly enough. He didn’t open the door. This was not the time for demonstrations.“Speak,” I told the prone kid, and crouched so my voice would get to his ears before his courage did. “Who sent you?”He made the mouth noise mercenaries make when they think torture is next and want to audition for pity. “Don’t— We don’t— I don’t know the names.”“You know a name,” I said. “Better two names. Maybe a coat color. Maybe the smell of something expensive or extinct or mean.”“We— we don’t get to see our customers. We got a voice on the phone, okay?” His words clattered down the stairs of a bad accent toward the basement of outright bullshit. “The voice sounded strange. Like it was modulated or something. It sounded like a robot. Said we h
The Vision She Hid 100
Big Elky opened his mouth to answer—but fate decided to toss its hat into the scene.A guard hit the door with shoulders he’d earned in messier fights. He didn’t bother with apologies; Elky didn’t require them after midnight.“Boss,” he said, breath even, voice not. “South fence camera’s out. Someone just cut power to the east wing.”The lamps faltered two degrees, as if to confirm the rumor. The shadows lengthened like they’d spotted something delicious.Elky was already moving—gun to palm, phone to pocket, mind to war. He didn’t look at me—he knews better than to waste time on choreography of the partner that knows all the steps by heart.“Lock the interior doors,” he told the guard. “No one moves without a buddy and a reason. East corridor fallback to the red line. If a man doesn’t know the countersign, assume he’s our target and shoot him on the go.”The guard nodded and vanished, taking with him the illusion that we were having a chat instead of walking onto a stage that burns do
The Vision She Hid 99
He let out a breath that had not earned the right to be called a laugh.“If he’s alive, he’s a candle flicker to the last breath,” he said.I tapped the name with a fingernail; the page tapped back.“My mother wrote he had dead eyes and suede driving gloves. You’re telling me he looked worried and not that healthy.”“I’m telling you something else. He courted my mother,” Elky said, very quietly, as if volume might summon ghosts. “Not with flowers and silly poems. He courted her trust. And her dowry, of course.”He said dowry like most men say gun.I let that sit, the way you let a drink breathe before you remember you were never that patient. “Sleazy of him, isn’t it? Did Rupert know?”“Rupert knew everything that made him bigger,” Elky said. “And nothing that made him small.”“Meaning?”“Meaning he played host and measured his knives in the basement.”“And where were you?” I asked. “In the cradle, practicing that brow wrinkle?”“In the nursery,” he said, with a smile you could shave
The Vision She Hid 98
The page under my pillow hummed the way a wire hums when it has too many messages to carry.“Fine,” I told the ceiling. “Vulture is Anatole, I got it.”In the hallway, steps paused. Guard’s, because the air didn’t tense up. He didn’t knock at the door. He doesn’t if there is no urgent need to leave or to fight. Not when the thing in the room is bigger than trouble outside. Then the handle turned a fraction and stopped, as if the door was making a promise to both of us: not yet.I lifted the pillow, slid the journal out again, and opened it at the glossy word. It gleamed back at me like a tiny knife under a streetlight.Whoever had rewritten it wanted to make sure no one mistook the metaphor for accidental doodling.The rain leaned on the house like a man comfortable in his skin. I exhaled, slow and heavy, and tasted ink on the back of my throat. Somewhere down the corridor a clock began to insist on counting seconds. Elky’s study still smelled like lemons of a better century.I put my
The Vision She Hid 97
I rubbed the bridge of my nose and felt the headache that waits for the right moment to flourish. I ignored it and kept reading my mother’s diary.Two beautiful boys asleep while we bargain with the future of addiction under lemon blossom. Anatole says profits the way priests say grace. He says my name like a new language he is learning. I do not like people learning languages just to find their way to me.The entries sharpened. My mother started to use fewer adjectives and more nouns. Her familuar laboratory tone creeping in; the one she used when the conversation stopped being about tea and started being about poison.Lucia went with that straight to her dad. Rupert refused Anatole’s claims. The typical Christoforou, Anatole smiled as if refusal were a style he admired in other people. The guy comes from a family that never let him earn anything—including his cruelty.There is a particular ache that comes from recognizing your mother’s survival tactics and realizing you’ve borrowed
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