Chapter Four: Dinner and Stone

He asked her on a Friday.

Not in person. By text. Because apparently that was how Harlan Voss operated. He showed up, he ordered, he stared, and then he texted you later from somewhere you couldn't see him.

*Dinner. Tomorrow. Felker's on Third. Seven.*

It wasn't a question. None of his sentences were questions. They were arrangements. Decisions that had already been made, delivered to her phone like weather reports. Tomorrow: rain. Tomorrow: dinner with a man who owned buildings.

She should have said no. She should have said I don't know you. She should have said you texted me about my boots and that's weird, Harlan.

She said: *I get off at four.*

*I know.*

"Of course you do," she muttered, and got ready for bed.

Saturday. Her day off. She spent the morning writing, which meant she stared at her laptop and wrote four hundred words about a woman opening a door and finding another door behind it. Then she deleted three hundred of them. The novel was stuck. It had been stuck for months. The woman in the house kept going deeper and Josie kept not knowing what was at the center.

She pulled a card. The Lovers again. She was starting to take it personally.

At six, she showered. She put on jeans that fit her right, a black top that showed her collarbones, and the boots. The boots were scuffed brown leather, broken in, comfortable. She'd bought them at a thrift store in Tucson three years ago. Marcus had hated them. She should have taken that as a sign.

Felker's was on Third Street, a steakhouse with exposed brick and candles in amber glass. The hostess knew Harlan's name. The hostess knew Harlan's table. The hostess walked Josie past six full tables to a corner booth where Harlan sat with a glass of something dark and his sleeves rolled up.

He stood when she sat down. Old-fashioned. Deliberate.

"You look good," he said.

"I look like I own one pair of boots."

"Those are good boots."

"Don't start with the boots."

He almost smiled. Almost. That crack in the stone again. She was starting to see that Harlan's face was a wall with a door in it, and the door opened sometimes, just a crack, just enough to let light through.

They ordered. She got the short rib. He got the bone-in ribeye, rare. The waiter brought bread and olive oil and left them alone.

"Why Ash Harbor?" he asked.

"Fresh start. Bad breakup. You know."

"Tell me about the breakup."

"No."

"Fair." He tore bread. His hands were big. Clean nails, no calluses. Hands that hadn't worked a day of manual labor, but hands that looked like they could. "I grew up here. Born here. My family built half this city."

"Voss Development."

"Before that. Voss men have been in Ash Harbor since the beginning. Since before it was called Ash Harbor." He looked out the window. Third Street was quiet, the lamplight pooling on wet pavement. "There's a history to this place that nobody talks about. Old families. Old money. Old rules."

"What kind of rules?"

"The kind you don't break." He looked at her. "I told you. Never say what you don't mean. That's one of them."

"And the others?"

"You'll learn them."

The food came. They ate. He asked about her writing. She was surprised he'd noticed. She'd mentioned it once, in passing, while pouring his coffee. He'd remembered.

"A horror novel," he said. "About a house."

"With rooms that keep appearing."

"That's interesting. A house that grows." He chewed. He chewed slowly, deliberately, the way he did everything. "Maybe the house is alive. Maybe it's not growing for her. Maybe it's growing because of her."

Josie set her fork down. "That's actually good."

"I have my moments."

She laughed. She hadn't expected to laugh with him. He was so controlled, so careful, so built from straight lines and right angles. But there was something under it. Something warm that pushed against the cold like a furnace behind a steel door.

After dinner, he walked her to her door. The laundromat was closed. Beacher Street was dark and quiet and smelled like rain.

"Thank you," she said. "For dinner."

"Thank you for the company."

He stood there. On the sidewalk. Hands in his pockets. Looking at her with those green eyes that did the thing where they held on too long.

"Goodnight, Harlan."

"Goodnight, Josie."

She went inside. She locked the door. She leaned against it. Her heart was doing the stupid thing again, that galloping, that flutter she hadn't felt since before Marcus, since before the desert, since before everything went flat.

She looked out the window. He was still standing there. Looking up at her window.

Then he turned and walked away.

Underground. Below Ash Harbor. Below the sewers and the subway tunnels and the foundations of buildings that had stood for two hundred years. Below all of it.

The room was stone. Lit by wall-mounted torches that shouldn't exist in the modern era but did, because some things didn't change just because the world got electricity. Stone walls. Stone floor. A long table carved from a single piece of black oak.

Two men stood across from each other.

Harlan Voss unbuttoned his collar. Dane Kowalski turned his ring. They looked at each other the way two dogs look at each other across a fence. Not fighting. Not yet. Measuring.

"The girl at the coffee shop," Harlan said.

"Josie." Dane said her name like he was tasting it. "Yes."

"You know I've been seeing her."

"I know you took her to Felker's. I know you walked her home. I know you stood on the sidewalk like a lost dog."

Harlan's jaw tightened. "You've been seeing her too."

"I've been getting coffee. She makes good coffee."

"She makes terrible coffee. You order honey lattes."

"I like honey."

"You like her."

Dane smiled. That big, face-changing smile. In the torchlight, it looked different. Less warm. More teeth. "So do you, Harlan. That's the problem."

The room was quiet. Torchlight moved on the stone.

"There's a way to settle this," Harlan said. "The old way."

"The claim."

"The claim. She says it. Willingly. During the act. 'I am yours.' First one to hear it wins."

"Wins what?"

"Territory. The harbor district. Everything south of Mercer Line."

Dane looked at him. Turned his ring. The symbol on the ring was a circle with a claw inside it. The mark of The Hollow. The society that had run Ash Harbor since before it had a name.

"And if neither of us gets her to say it?"

"Then we both lose. And she chooses."

"She's human, Harlan. She doesn't know what we are."

"Then she chooses as a human. Without the claim. Without the pull. Without any of it."

Dane was quiet for a long time. The torches flickered.

"Deal," he said.

They shook hands. Dane's ring clicked against Harlan's knuckle. The sound echoed off the stone walls and went nowhere.

Above them, Josie Vargas pulled a tarot card in her apartment. The Moon. Illusion. Things hidden. The card of beasts and the things that walk in the dark.

She didn't know what any of it meant.

Not yet.