Prodigal Son (Orphan X #6) - Gregg Andrew Hurwitz Page 0,127
with four pronounced sides and something approximating right angles at the corners. His chest defined enough to catch shadow. His hair, still glistening from the shower, perfectly in place, not a single stray. Steam thickened the atmosphere of the room, fogging the edges of the mirror.
He walked into the hotel bedroom. The suits hung neatly in the wardrobe, a waterfall of luscious fabrics, some bought on Savile Row, others cut to perfection by a Hong Kong tailor. Everything outside him—flesh and muscle, cloth and leather—was as close to perfection as could be humanly managed.
And even so, all that armor barely held the chaos of his inner self in the shape of a person.
He’d cleaned out Queenie’s room next door, gathered her personals and dragged them in here. Her corpse was with the city coroner, and he would have to think long and hard about how to cut through the red tape without incriminating himself. To get to her body, his female self.
But right now only one reality mattered to him.
Killing the Nowhere Man.
On the mattress his phone rang, vibrating on the Four Seasons comforter.
He walked to it, the air cool against his bare body, and picked up. “She’s dead.”
His voice was low and sonorous, occupying the other space, the space of the him he hid from the world. He was embodied.
Even the doctor seemed to sense it, allowing a rare pause. “What does it feel like?” he asked.
Declan thought about it. “It’s a kind of pain too deep to feel. So there’s just numbness. And nothing left to care about. Which means I can do anything.”
As the doctor’s mouth cracked open, a faint puff of air came over the line, something well shy of a moan. “That’s how I feel,” he said. “All the time.”
His voice was hushed, perhaps with awe. Maybe even something approaching empathy. But when he spoke again, it sounded flat once more, the humanity compressed out of it. “I’m delivering the drones tomorrow at midnight. Skeleton crew at the base means fewer eyes, fewer questions, fewer protocols. I’m using my personal team of contractors for maximum oversight.”
“Because the last team did so well at the impound lot.” Declan’s voice, when deep, carried a different kind of authority. He wasn’t afraid to let out his anger, his judgment, in full. In the fullness there was a sort of calm.
Now he could practically hear the doctor thinking about the slight to his team and deciding not to challenge it.
Instead he said, “That’s why I’d like you there. Keeping an eye on the transport from afar. In case anything unexpected happens.”
“I will be the only unexpected thing from here on out,” Declan said, and hung up.
He got into bed, his exhaustion pasting him to the mattress. He felt all the points of his body where it touched the sheets—heels, calves, lower back, shoulder blades, base of his skull.
Before he could dread the coming darkness, he was asleep.
Three minutes or three hours later, he awoke into half consciousness.
His body locked down, tendons pulled piano-wire taut. Even his Achilles tendon ached, his feet flexed painfully, cramps knotting the arches.
Lungs wouldn’t release. Head couldn’t turn. Just his eyes moving to the door.
Sure enough, there came the scrape against the wood.
Still alive, still alive.
His chest turned concave, unwilling to stretch and afford air.
The clawlike slash of fingernails flaking the paint. The door bowing inward, into his psyche itself. Then the latch released and swung inward to reveal that feminine silhouette. The long, long nails candy-apple red, the light moving through them from behind to put ten glowing points at the ends of her hands.
His heartbeat pounded out a distress signal: Still alive, still alive.
Now she was bedside, transported in the blink of an eye.
He’d kicked down the sheets in his sleep, the pillow cold with dried sweat beneath his neck. He wanted to scream to wake up his sister, but there was no voice.
And there was no sister.
The head cocked, that stylish bob bobbing. I will punish your dirty parts out of you. You will learn.
The quivering flesh of his arms, his neck, his inner thighs bare to the dead of night, bare to her to teach them what she needed to.
His mouth lurched for air, just a sip to get out the word, the tracks in his brain laid down to produce the only two syllables he’d known in his whole miserable life that could bring comfort.
Queenie.
The loss came again, fresh as a slit to the throat.