Home / Mafia / A Prey For My Enemy / Chapter 181 - Chapter 190

All Chapters of A Prey For My Enemy: Chapter 181 - Chapter 190

190 Chapters

Blood On His Collar

The lamp flame moved. Nobody touched it."Kain," Tatiana said. "Whose blood."He was quiet for so long she thought he might fold again, the way he had folded all night, weighing futures. But this time something in him seemed to give out instead, a wall that had been standing since before she was born finally taking more weight than it was built for."Your father's," he said.The kitchen made no sound at all."There were two of them in the culvert," he went on. His voice was flat now, emptied, the voice of a man reading his own confession. "She was in the water, half under the ledge. He was propped above her, holding the ledge apart with his back so she could breathe, and he had been doing it for hours, and it had killed him. Not the men. Not a wound. He was dying when I got there. He had been dying for months, everyone in the house knew it, and he spent the last of it on a drainage ledge in the rain." He looked at her. "The blood on her collar was his. He'd

Chapel Road

No one slept.Tatiana knew this because she was in the kitchen until the rain thinned to nothing, and when the first gray light came into the windows she was still there, and so was everyone else. The old man dozed upright in his chair like a sentry, never quite under, waking fully at every sound. Mikhail stood watch by the door in shifts with two of his men, who had arrived an hour before dawn in silence and set themselves in the house's corners like furniture that watched. The woman who might be her mother sat across the table with her hands around a cup of tea gone cold an hour ago, staring at the stove.And Kain sat by the window with the waxed-canvas documents on his knee, not reading them. Guarding them, the way he had been guarding things her whole life.At first light, Tatiana stood."Saint Hedwig's," she said. "The chapel above the clinic road. The reliquary. We're done deciding things in kitchens.""Tatiana." Kain rose. "If Madam wanted you there,

Retaining Love

For a moment the chapel held its breath with her.Madam came down the aisle slowly, unhurried, an old woman in a travel coat with rain still darkening the shoulders, and the others moved for her the way weather moves around a stone. Mikhail shifted his weight and did not reach inside his coat. The old man stood very straight, and his face had become a portrait of himself, all composure and no man behind it. The woman who might have been Tatiana's mother lowered her hands from her face and stood with them at her sides, empty, like someone who had been waiting fifteen years to be found and had just discovered the search had ended in the wrong place.And Kain, Kain only watched, with an expression Tatiana could not read at all, and that frightened her more than anything else that morning."You were in the floor," Tatiana said. "For how long.""On and off, three years." Madam stopped at the second pew and rested one hand on its back, as though the chapel were her ho

Dear Father

The word went through the chapel like the draft from an opened tomb.The old man did not deny it. That was how Tatiana knew it was true. In fifteen hours in his company she had learned the one thing about him that never varied: lies came to him as naturally as breath, and every one of them had a purpose. He stood in the last pew with his hands folded and his face gone gray, and he said nothing, and the silence was the first honest thing he had given anyone."Say it again," Tatiana said to Madam. "Slowly. He is your father.""He is my father." Madam's voice was level, but her hand had left the pew back and come to rest at her side, and it was trembling, the first unguarded movement Tatiana had ever seen from her. "I was born in the winter his wife was sent north. My mother was the registrar at the clinic, the woman who taught me that a manifest is only paper. He never acknowledged me. He didn't need to. He watched me the way he watches everything he owns, from a dist

Four Notes From Her

The woman did not reach for her. She only stood, close enough that Tatiana could smell rain and wool and something faint underneath, lavender kept too long in a drawer, and she began to hum.Four notes.The first Tatiana knew. The second she knew. The third and fourth rose where her memory had always put a stumble, a wrong step she'd been climbing over her whole life without knowing it was there, and the woman smoothed the step away with her voice, and the melody came down whole, the way a lock turns when the key is finally the right one.Somewhere behind her, the woman who had raised her made a small sound. Not protest. Recognition, and surrender inside the recognition.Tatiana's eyes burned and she let them. There was no one left in the chapel to be steady for."I remember," she said. It came out barely there. "Not you. The floor at the end of the bed. The boards were cold. You said—" She stopped, because the sentence had arrived fully formed, from whereve

Entry Number One

Tatiana looked down at the margins.Four values, stepping. Rising by a fifth, falling by a third, holding, resolving. A lullaby rendered in money, sixty years old, sitting under her eyes like a message in a bottle that had taken four decades to reach the shore it was addressed to."Hum it," she said to Vera. "Slowly. Once through. I'll follow the steps."Vera began. Four notes, the true ones, the version with no stumble in it, and under her breath Tatiana matched the melody to the figures in the margin, fifth, third, hold, resolve, and the clerk's cramped arithmetic opened under the tune the way a door opens for its own key."Each note is a digit group," she said, half to herself, working it on the altar stone with her finger in the dust of centuries of candles. "The rise is a date. The fall is a registry number. The hold is a mark. The resolve—" She stopped. Read it again. Read it a third time, because her mind kept refusing the shape of it. "The resolve is a signature of receipt. Th

Blank Receipt

The word hung in the candlelight. Mother. Madam had said it the way a drowning woman says the name of the shore, and the abbess crossed the last steps to her and took her daughter's face in both hands, and for a moment the two of them were simply that, an old woman and a dying woman holding each other in front of an altar, while the rest of the chapel waited to learn what it had just witnessed. "I'm not your blood," the abbess said gently, when she could speak. "Your mother was Hermann's wife, the registrar, and she died the winter you turned four, of the lung fever, and you were mine from that hour because there was no one else. I raised you in the north. I taught you the second set of books. I sent you back south when you were old enough to be dangerous." She touched Madam's hair, an old gesture, worn smooth by decades of repetition. "But I've been your mother for sixty years, and I will not be handed another name at the end of it. Not even by the truth." "The portrait," Stefan

The Number Before

The thing on the cord was a key.Kain drew it out from under his collar slowly, as though it weighed more than brass had any right to, and held it up into the candlelight. Small, hand-cut, gone dark with decades against a man's skin. It was the twin of the bird key from the wolf's compartment, except where that one's bow had been shaped like a bird, this one was shaped like nothing at all, a plain worn circle, the kind of key made not to be noticed, made to look like it opened nothing."It was around my neck when the trucks stopped," he said. His voice had changed. All night he had spoken as the guardian, the teacher, the man in the doorway. Now he sounded like what he had just told them he was. A boy, reading his own page. "I was four. Maybe five. No one was ever sure, which should tell you which column of which book I came out of.""Tell it," Tatiana said softly. "All of it. You of all people don't get a summary."Kain was quiet for a moment, gathering sixty y

A Caretaker Job

Nobody got out of the cars.The lamp burned on in the downstairs window, steady and unhurried, and the figure had withdrawn from the glass, and the ridge house sat above them in the dusk the way it had sat above everything for sixty years, holding its one cold room and its bricked wall and its second volume, patient as a held breath."Say the name again," Tatiana said."My mother." Vera had both hands pressed to the dashboard, and her voice was the sound of a woman holding a door shut against sixty years of wind. "Anka. Hermann's wife, the registrar, the one who taught me the notes on the chapel road. She put me on the train to the north herself. I was eight. She told me the notes were a door and I was never to stop humming them, and then the train moved, and by the time the convent took me in, the letter had already arrived saying she was dead." Her knuckles had gone white. "Lung fever. The abbess read it to me. We mourned her. I mourned her for fifty years, and I

The Last Page

The cellar air was cold enough to hurt, and nobody moved toward the box at first.It sat in its gap in the bricked wall exactly where a frightened man's hands had left it, sixty years of dust disturbed only by Anka's careful broom. Plain wood. Plain circle of a keyhole. The whole architecture of the family's hidden life reduced at last to the size of a bread box.Kain went forward, because it had to be Kain. He drew the cord out from under his collar, and his hand was steady, but Tatiana watched him touch the key to the lock the way a man touches a scar, testing whether the old pain is still resident. It turned. The lid opened without a sound. Whatever driver had oiled this hinge had oiled it in a century when things were built to outlive their secrets.Inside, wrapped in oilcloth that had gone stiff as parchment, lay the second volume. Thinner than the registry, bound in the same cheap cloth, its first page bearing Stefan's upright, clerkly hand.Names of the r

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