“If there was a debt, it was paid long ago.”
“It can never be paid. I might have lived through that beating, and the next, and whatever came after. But I wouldn’t be the man I am, sitting here now. That’s a debt I’m not looking to pay, or one you’re looking to collect.”
Summerset sipped brandy, two slow sips. “I would have been lost without you, after Marlena. That’s another debt that’s not looking for payment.”
“There’s been a weight inside me,” Roarke said quietly. “Since this began, since I found myself faced with the blood of children I didn’t know. I could shift it aside, do whatever I needed to do, but it kept rolling back on me. I think, like grief, it might stay there awhile. But it’s less now.”
He drank down the brandy, got to his feet. “Good night.”
“Good night.” When he was alone, Summerset went into his bedroom, opened a drawer, and took out a photograph taken a lifetime ago.
Marlena, fresh and sweet, smiling out at him. Roarke, young and tough, with his arms slung around her shoulder, a cocky grin on his face.
Some children you could save, you could keep, he thought. And some you couldn’t.
She got home late enough to consider just going up and dropping fully dressed onto the bed. A headache clamped the back of her neck, digging its hot fingers into the base of her skull. To avoid increasing it with sheer irritation, she pushed Trueheart at Summerset the minute they came in the door.
“Do something with his uniform,” she said, already heading up the stairs. “And put him to bed. I want him daisy fresh by seven hundred.”
“Your jacket, Lieutenant.”
She peeled it off, still walking, and tossed it over her shoulder. He probably had some household magic that got cherry fizzy off leather.
She aimed straight for the bedroom, then only stood, rubbing the back of her neck, trying to dissolve the rocks that were forming a small mountain range from that point and out to her shoulders. The bed was empty. If he was still working, and likely on her behalf, she could hardly crawl into bed and pull the covers over her head until morning.
She turned, her hand automatically slapping to her weapon, when she saw the movement behind her.
“Christ on airskates, kid. What is it with you and skulking around in the dark?”
“I heard you come in.” Nixie stood, this time in a yellow nightgown, with those sleep-starved eyes locked on Eve’s face.
“No, not yet.” Eve watched the gaze drop to the floor and didn’t know whether to curse or sigh. “But I know who they are.”
Nixie’s eyes flew up again. “Who?”
“You don’t know them. I know who they are. And I know why.”
“Why?”
“Because your father was a good man who did good work. Because he was good, and these people aren’t, they wanted to hurt him and everyone he loved.”
“I don’t understand that.”
She looked, Eve thought, like a wounded angel with all that tangled blonde hair surrounding a face haunted by fatigue, and worse. “You’re not supposed to understand it. Nobody’s supposed to understand why some people decide to take lives instead of living decent ones of their own. But that’s the way it is. You’re supposed to understand that your father was a good man, your family was a good family. And the people who did this to them, to you, are wrong people. You’re supposed to understand that I’ll find them and put them in a goddamn cage where they’ll spend what’s left of their miserable, selfish lives. That has to be good enough, because that’s all we’ve got.”
“Will it be soon?”
“Sooner if I’m working instead of standing here in the damn hallway talking to you.”
The slightest flicker of a smile curved Nixie’s lips. “You’re not really mean.”
Eve hooked her thumbs in her front pockets. “Am, too. Mean as spit, and don’t you forget it.”
“Are not. Baxter says you’re tough, and sometimes you’re scary, but it’s because you care about helping people, even when they’re dead.”
“Yeah? Well, what does he know? Go back to bed.”
Nixie started toward her room, then paused. “I think, when you catch them, when you put them in a goddamn cage, my dad and my mom, and Coyle and Inga and Linnie, I think they’ll be okay then. That’s what I think.”