Part 2
Rosie’s fingers had worked themselves into the loose knitting of her mother’s cardigan. Hannah tried to ease them free, then gave up and held her more tightly.
The protected room had a narrow cot, bottled water, and a clock whose second hand made a cheap plastic click. Hannah watched it pass the same number three times without understanding what the number was.
“Mama?”
She bent her head.
“Did Rook get hurt?”
“No, honey.” Hannah kissed the warm place above her daughter’s ear. “He’s guarding us.”
The dog had gone inside with them, but when Walter checked the corridor and opened the door, Rook had taken up a position just beyond it. Now he lay across the entrance, his eyes on the far end of the hall.
A guard set water beside him. Rook didn’t turn his head.
Upstairs, Nico called Everett Kessler.
“I need you at the house. Immediately.”
His second-in-command arrived before the clock in the study struck the next hour. His coat was brushed clean, his gray hair undisturbed, and he listened without interrupting. Eleven years beside Nico had taught him when questions would be welcome.
He asked about casualties, the breach, and whether Hannah and the child had seen the attackers.
Nico answered only what he chose.
“Find the contract,” he said. “And until I say otherwise, those two have left this property. That’s the story outside this room.”
Everett gave a sober nod.
“Someone made a terrible mistake,” he said. “I’ll find him.”
After he left, Nico opened the bottom drawer of his desk. The photograph inside showed Thomas Whitcomb at a restaurant opening, smiling reluctantly at whoever held the camera. Nico had disliked that picture. Thomas looked like a man about to explain why the bill was wrong.
He had been dead two years.
Nico set the photograph faceup on the blotter.
Hannah found it there the next morning when she came to the dining room. Walter poured coffee, left a basket of warm rolls between them, and shut the door behind him.
She remained standing until Nico moved a chair out for her.
“You think this has to do with Thomas,” she said.
“Tell me what he didn’t tell me.”
Hannah sat. The burn on her ankle had raised a small blister, but she hadn’t noticed until she put on her shoes.
“A week before he died, he came home after midnight. I was angry. Dinner had been sitting there for hours.” She rubbed a thumb along the seam of her cup. “He didn’t argue. He put his hands on my face. He’d never done that before.”
Nico waited.
“He said if something happened, I wasn’t to trust anybody.” She looked directly at him. “He included you.”
A delivery cart rattled somewhere beyond the door.
“What else?”
“I thought he was exhausted. He’d been checking old accounts, bringing work home. I told him to sleep.” Her thumb stopped moving. “That’s what I told him.”
Nico remembered the parking structure, Thomas’s sedan, the four shots that had been explained away as an encounter with the wrong people. He had gone to Hannah’s apartment himself, his coat dripping on her entry rug, and told her to bring Rosie and a bag.
For the first six months they had stayed in the little guest lodge behind the main house, where Hannah could shut a door without passing armed men. Later she had insisted on earning her keep. Nico had objected badly, making it sound like an order, and she had answered by reporting to the kitchen the following morning.
“Did Thomas leave her anything?” he asked. “Something he wanted kept?”
“The music box. It was her third-birthday present.”
“Where is it?”
“In her room. She sleeps with it beside the bed.”
Before he could ask another question, Rosie came through the door in a nightdress covered with little sailboats. She went straight to Nico and caught two of his fingers.
“Rook won’t be happy.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“His party got spoiled. Come fix it.”
Hannah started to rise, but Nico was already allowing himself to be led out.
The terrace had been cleared. A garden chair stood against the wall, the pink hat tucked into its seat. Rook lay beside the place where Rosie’s table had been, watching the entrance gates.
She knelt and rubbed the space between his ears.
“We’ll do it over,” she promised.
The dog let out a breath and rested his chin against her knee.
Later, Walter found Nico in the room where the household weapons were kept. Nico had disassembled a pistol, though it had been cleaned the previous evening.
Walter pulled out a stool.
“You’ll wear the finish off that.”
Nico put down the cloth.
“Say it.”
“You brought that dog home inside your coat. Seven weeks old. The vet thought putting him down would be kinder.”
“I remember.”
“You wouldn’t sleep. Wouldn’t let anybody else feed him. Then wouldn’t let the handlers train him.” Walter rested his hands on his knees. “He took a bullet outside the freight warehouse for you. Stopped the man who came through your kitchen. Stopped Serrani’s man outside your bedroom when they came over the roof. And he pulled Lorenzo’s cousin out of the river besides.”
Nico glanced toward the open door.
Across the courtyard, the sunroom windows framed Rosie sitting on a rug. A storybook lay open on her lap. Rook’s head rested beside it, too large to fit comfortably on her small legs. She had dressed him in a crooked blue bow tie.
“She can put her hands anywhere,” Walter said. “A stranger can’t get within six feet.”
Hannah appeared at the doorway, following Nico’s gaze.
“For six months after the funeral, she didn’t speak,” she said.
Nico turned toward her.
“The doctor called it selective mutism. We were told not to press her. There wasn’t much else they could promise.”
Through the window, Rosie moved her finger beneath a line of print.
“When we moved into the main house, everybody warned us about him,” Hannah continued. “She sat down beside him before I could stop her.”
“What happened?”
“She introduced herself.” Hannah’s mouth trembled. “Just a little hello. I hadn’t heard her voice since Thomas died.”
Nico looked back across the courtyard. Rosie turned a page, carefully lifting Rook’s ear out of the way first.
“Walter. More men on the grounds tonight. Change the rotation. Two inside, where I can see them from the stairs.”
Walter stood.
“And keep it off the regular schedule,” Nico added. “Tell the men yourself.”
In the corridor beyond the courtyard, Everett stood where a pillar concealed him from the weapons room. He watched the child bend close to the dog’s ear, then watched Nico at the opposite window.
He took out his phone and walked until the carpet swallowed the sound of his shoes.
When the call connected, he said, “They’re both still breathing…”
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