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Chapter 84: The Real Target

Auteur: PEACEFUL
last update Date de publication: 2026-09-24 14:35:58

Kiryan

I have never been good at sleeping. In my line of work it's a habit that kills men, and I lost the knack of it at nineteen, in a flat in Vyborg, with my brother's blood drying on the floorboards beside me. Since then I rest the way a cat rests in pieces, one ear always turned toward the door.

So it was me who heard the stairs.

A little after three. The farmhouse creaked in the cold like an old ship, but this was different uneven, a step, a pause, a step. I sat in the armchair by the stov
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  • THE SONGBIRDS CAGE   Chapter 85: Before The Storm

    Wren’sWe planned for two days, and by the second night I'd stopped being able to hear the plan.It had turned into a kind of weather. Words drifted past me across the kitchen table sight lines, rotation, fallback, that grim phrase acceptable losses Kiryan used the way other men say lunch. Elena had drawn the whole of Belmare on the back of a wallpaper sample and pinned it over the wood stove with a fork. Dario had marked the boathouse in red. Someone had drawn a small sad face on the stone wall of the terrace, and nobody would admit to it."Again," said Kiryan."From the top?" Dario rubbed his eyes. "We've done it nine times.""We'll do it ten. It's the tenth time a man remembers."So we did it ten. At six, the Don receives. At eight, dinner. At ten-thirty, guests gather for the toast, and a footman in white gloves would lead me to my seat at the Don's right hand, and I'd sit, and smile, and be the woman everyone had been told I was. Elena would be inside in a caterer's black, radio

  • THE SONGBIRDS CAGE   Chapter 84: The Real Target

    KiryanI have never been good at sleeping. In my line of work it's a habit that kills men, and I lost the knack of it at nineteen, in a flat in Vyborg, with my brother's blood drying on the floorboards beside me. Since then I rest the way a cat rests in pieces, one ear always turned toward the door.So it was me who heard the stairs.A little after three. The farmhouse creaked in the cold like an old ship, but this was different uneven, a step, a pause, a step. I sat in the armchair by the stove with the lamp off and my pistol on my knee, and didn't move until the shape reached the bottom stair and I saw the cane."It's only me," she whispered."I know. I could hear you thinking on the landing."She let out a small breath through her nose, almost a laugh. She had a blanket around her shoulders and her hair down, and in the red light from the stove she looked younger than she was and more tired than anyone should be. The leg was bad tonight I could tell by the tightness at the corners

  • THE SONGBIRDS CAGE   Chapter 83: The Third Hand

    Wren’sThe farmhouse north of the city belonged to nobody. Dario told me that twice on the drive up, like repeating it might make it true. No name on the deed, no phone line, no neighbours nearer than a mile. A kitchen with a wood stove and a long scarred table that had fed shearers a hundred years before we ever sat at it, eating our own bad news.I hadn't slept. Two nights of smoke still in my hair, even after scrubbing my scalp raw. The Palermo Street fire cost eleven men their jobs and one man his life a night watchman named Benedetto, sixty-one, who'd gone back inside for his dog. The dog lived. I couldn't tell you why that was the detail that kept me staring at the ceiling at four in the morning, but it was.Elena arrived at ten with a canvas bag over her shoulder and mud to her knees. She'd walked the last half mile from the road so the taxi wouldn't see the house, and when she stepped through the door she stopped, looking at the two men sitting at either end of my father's kit

  • THE SONGBIRDS CAGE   Chapter 82: Forced Alliance

    DarioThe cold-storage hall on Pier Nine had been dead for six years, and it still smelled of fish.I stood in the middle of the concrete floor with my hands in my coat pockets, counting the exits again. Two loading doors, chained shut from the outside by Luca's men an hour earlier. A fire stair on the north wall. A rusted catwalk running along the ceiling that anyone with a rifle and some patience could reach in under a minute. I'd already decided where I'd stand if this went wrong and decided not to stand there, because she'd be sitting on a crate out in the open, and I wasn't going to put a wall between us.She sat on it now. She'd arrived forty minutes before either of us, with only my driver and a flask of something warm, and picked her spot without asking anyone. A wooden crate stamped with the name of a company that didn't exist anymore, angled so she could watch both doors. The cane lay across her knees. Her left leg stretched out in front of her, and every so often she presse

  • THE SONGBIRDS CAGE   Chapter 81: The Unlikely Ally

    Wren’sElena Voss kept her office above a shuttered bakery on Carrow Street, and the stairs were the first thing she got wrong.I had counted them from the pavement. Nineteen steps, steep, with a rail that wobbled at the sixth. Nobody who wanted visitors chose a place like that. Somebody who wanted to watch how a person arrived did.My left leg was already complaining. It always starts the second the car door shuts, when I'm scared and pretending I'm not a low burn from hip to ankle that no amount of good posture can argue with. I hooked the cane over my wrist, took the rail in my right hand, and climbed the way I always climb: good leg first, bad leg following like a passenger who hasn't decided whether to get off. At the eleventh step I stopped and pretended to read my phone. By the fifteenth I didn't bother pretending.The door at the top stood open."You're slower than I was told," said Elena.She leaned in the doorway, one shoulder against the wood of a tall woman in a grey wool

  • THE SONGBIRDS CAGE   Chapter 80: She Takes the Wheel

    Wrens Kiryan found me on the landing.I don't know how long I'd been there. My cheek had gone numb against the brick. A neighbour had come down the stairs, taken one look at me, and gone back up without a word. When the street door finally opened, I heard boots taking the steps three at a time, and then he was on his knees in front of me, his hands hovering as if he was afraid to touch me."I'm all right," I said."You're not.""No. I'm not." I let out a breath that was half a sob. "But I'm going to be."He gathered me in. He didn't say anything clever or soft. He just held on, one hand cupping the back of my head, his chin on my hair, and let me shake. In that quiet I understood what nine years of loyalty had really been made of. Not devotion, Patience. The kind that sits outside a door until it's needed. I thought of him in the reeds all night, and of every night before that, and how I had never once asked what it cost him. It was a great deal to owe one person.When I could talk a

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