Chapter 5: A Man Who Knew Too Much

On the twelfth day, Julian Hale came to the warehouse.

Mara was standing at the cellar door with a clipboard when she heard the footsteps, quick and angry.

She turned and found her ex-fiancé in the doorway, his tie loose and his handsome face red.

"You think you can do this to me?" he said. "Humiliate me in front of everyone, take up with my brother—"

"Julian." She kept her voice low. "Please leave."

"The board suspended Mother last week. Do you know that? Because of you."

He crossed the floor and grabbed her by the arm. His fingers dug in. "You owe us. Everything you have, you have because—"

The warehouse door slammed.

Mara had never seen anyone move that fast.

One moment Kane Voss was at the far end of the room, and the next Julian was against the wall with a forearm across his throat and a pair of eyes in front of him that had gone entirely black.

"Touch her again," Kane said, in a voice as soft as a closing door, "and I will take the hand."

"Kane—" Julian choked. "She's using you—"

"I know exactly what she's doing." His grip did not shift. "Better than you ever did."

Mara dropped the clipboard. "Kane. Let him go."

He did not move. His whole body was strung tight as wire, and his breath was coming hard.

She had seen that look once before, in the snow, on a night that had not happened yet.

She stepped closer and laid two fingers, very lightly, on his wrist.

"He isn't worth it," she said quietly. "Violence isn't evidence. And I want to win clean."

For a long, long moment, nothing moved. Then, slowly, Kane's arm dropped. Julian slid down the wall, gasping.

Kane stepped back and looked at her, and the black went out of his eyes all at once, leaving something raw and almost frightened in its place.

"I'm sorry," he said hoarsely. "I lose control when—"

"I know." She was surprised to find that she did. "It's all right."

Julian fled without another word.

Silence settled in the warehouse, broken only by the small sound of rain beginning on the roof. Kane stood very still with his hands at his sides, staring at the floor.

Mara took a breath. "Come on. You look like you could use soup."

She had a small gas stove in the corner of the cellar, and they ate canned tomato soup out of tin mugs, sitting on upturned crates in the lamplight, with the cat curled between them.

It was almost peaceful. Mara found herself talking, more than she had in months, about Madame Ilse's tailor shop, the pastries she'd burned, the old woman in 14B who kept pressing tea on her.

Kane listened with a stillness she was beginning to recognize as his version of attention.

"You don't talk much," she said, at last."I don't have much to say." don't believe that."

He turned the mug in his hands. "I'm not good at it. Words. I'm better at... doing."

She smiled into her soup. "Well. You're very good at that."

He looked up. For a moment, his face softened so completely that she forgot to breathe.

"You hated canned peaches," he said.

"What?"

"You always did." He was looking at the shelf where she had stacked a case of fruit, and his voice was low and absent, a man talking to himself.

"You'd give them to the children, and pretend you'd already eaten. You said you didn't like the syrup. But you did. You just never took any."

Mara's spoon stopped halfway to her mouth.

Rain tapped on the roof. The lamplight shivered. In the corner, Ember lifted his head and fixed Kane with a long, unblinking amber stare.

"Kane," she said slowly. "I've never told you that."

He froze.

It was the smallest thing. His hand tightened on the mug. A single muscle jumped in his jaw.

For one second his composure cracked straight down the middle, and she saw, in his eyes, the same terrible, tender look from the snow.

"A guess," he said. "A lucky one. Peaches are a common dislike."

"Yes," Mara said quietly. "They are."

He stood, too quickly. "I should go. It's late. I'll send the car."

"Kane—"

"Goodnight, Mara."

He was gone before she could finish. The door swung shut behind him, and the rain closed in.

Mara sat alone in the lamplight, with a cold mug in her hands and a cat watching her with solemn eyes. The silver letters crept slowly into the air, soft as breath.

KANE VOSS.

Debt recorded: one life.

Note: the debtor remembers.

She stared at it for a very long time.

"Ember," she said, finally, in a voice that did not sound like her own. "Why would the Ledger say that?"

The cat did not answer. But the silver line glowed steadily in the dark, and slowly, like a door opening onto a cold, bright room, Mara began to understand.

Eighty-one days.

And there was only one man in the world who had known her before she died