Prodigal Son (Orphan X #6) - Gregg Andrew Hurwitz Page 0,126

Veronica drifted back into the kitchen.

Evan’s right forearm was tightly bound by cohesive bandages, triple-wrapped to form a flexible cast above the stapled incisions. He’d washed the knife and then, unsure what to do with it, placed it in the recycle bin.

The alcohol bottle sat empty on the table before him. He’d used it on the wound and then to wipe down the surface. He’d washed his hands, but still blood remained stuck in the seams of his knuckles.

“He okay?” Evan asked.

“Who the hell knows?” she said. “What a mess I’ve made of us all.”

“Did you tell him the whole truth?”

“So help me God. I figured I owed him at least that.” She adjusted her sash and kept on. “He’s washing his face, and then you’ll drive him back.”

She moved in a daze past him to the countertop, fussed with her pill bottles, then clapped her palm to her mouth and swallowed them dry. She set her hands on the tile facing away, her shoulder blades bunched, her head lowered.

For a time she breathed, emotion seeming to move through her. It was as though Evan could see the events of the evening catch up to her and settle inside.

She finally turned back, her eyes ablaze with an inner light that he mistook for indignation.

She moved closer, and he saw it was something else, something primal, a mama-bear instinct that he’d seen a time or two in mothers he’d helped when their desperation turned to fury.

“He told me what they did,” she said. “How they tracked you there. Tried to stab him in the throat. And that they want to … want to torture you both. There are more of them?”

Evan nodded.

“My son.” She rested a hand on his cheek.

The words arrowed right through the center of him. She meant it now in full, she’d earned it, and in a manner of speaking he had, too. He couldn’t find his voice, so he gave a nod.

“Are you as terrible as you say you are?”

“I can be,” he said. “Yes.”

Her eyes came alive, afire. She bent her head gently to kiss the back of his hand, and her lips came away faintly rouged with blood. She looked into his eyes, into the depths of who he was.

“Good,” she said. “Kill every last one of them.”

61

Family

Evan finished duct-taping a bedsheet over the sole window in the tiny rented room. Andre sat quietly on his bed, hands folded calmly in his lap, and watched. Since that AA meeting, a peace had descended over him. None of his usual banter or fidgeting was on display, even after the news Veronica had dropped on him. In giving in he seemed to have located a kind of peace inside himself.

Evan thought about when he’d worked on Joey’s shoulder, how it had been tender to the point of intolerability. It struck him that the same law of physics applied to any injury, physical or emotional. If you babied it, it stiffened even more, spreading the pain through you. But if you yielded, if you were willing to endure the white-hot agony of making vulnerable what you sought to protect, you had a shot at releasing it.

Evan turned around to face Andre. They’d opened the window earlier to vent the stale air and tidied the place together. The groceries they’d picked up were stacked along one wall, the mini-fridge stuffed. The taped bedsheet blocked the nighttime lights of neighboring buildings, the only illumination now the sterile glow of a lamp in the corner.

“You need to stay inside,” Evan said. “These next-gen drones can go window to window.”

“I hear that.”

“I’ll come back when it’s over. By Monday morning it’ll be done one way or another. Promise me you won’t leave this room.”

“I promise.”

“Promise me you won’t drink.”

Andre lifted his chin a touch higher. “I promise.”

Evan turned for the door.

“Hey,” Andre said. “We family?”

Evan paused. That sketch of Sofia stared at him from the wall, those beautifully rendered dark eyes. She was what to him? Some kind of niece? That was a question for another day.

He cleared his throat, breathed through the tension Andre’s question brought up in him, tried to relax into it.

“I suppose so,” he said.

“They say families are made,” Andre said.

“I don’t know nothing about that,” Evan said, realizing that the street cadence had crept once more into his voice. “But I’ll be here if you need me.”

“Yeah.” Andre nodded. “Me, too.”

62

Your Dirty Parts

Declan studied his naked image in the hotel bathroom. Each stomach muscle a distinct rectangle