All Chapters of THE SONGBIRDS CAGE: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

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

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

DarioMy father's handwriting has followed me my whole life. On birthday cards, on school reports he signed without reading, on the back of a photo of me at nine years old holding a fish nearly as long as my arm. Bravo, figlio. I'd have known that hand in the dark, and I knew it now on a sheet of heavy cream paper, in a boxroom that smelled of my grandmother's liniment."Tell me what that is," I said again, because she hadn't answered.She didn't try to hide it. That's the part I keep coming back to. She didn't fold the paper or say it's nothing. She sat very straight on the edge of the narrow bed with her bad leg out in front of her, a flat, bare calm on her face I'd never seen before like she'd waited eleven years for this door to open and spent all her fear on the waiting."It's the reason I came," she said. "Would you sit down? Please. This will take a while, and I'd rather say it to your face than your back."I didn't sit. I stood on the cold boards in my socks, the blanket falle

Wren’sWe'd lost the plan, so we needed a new one, and the only place left to find it was the study of the man who killed my father.Nobody liked the idea. Kiryan called it madness. Elena said it was the first smart thing anyone had suggested since Tuesday, which was worse. Dario said nothing for a long time, then, in a voice like a door closing gently, "I'll drive you." I didn't argue.It was a quarter to six on Thursday when we turned onto Via Corvo. The Marchetti townhouse stood at the end of it behind a wall of dark, clipped yew, a lamp already lit in the third-floor window. I'd first seen it from a taxi eight months earlier and thought, quite calmly, so that's where it happens.Dario stopped the car at the gate and left the engine running. His hands sat on the wheel at ten and two. I could see the pulse in his wrist."I can't go in," he said. "I've pictured him in my head for ten hours straight, and I know what I'd do.""I know.""Ask him why." He turned then, his face in the str

Wren’sAt ten thirty-eight, the terrace was the most beautiful place I'd ever been afraid of.They'd cleared the long stone shelf of everything but one table, white-clothed, running nearly its whole length, candles in glass, low arrangements of white roses. Below the wall the lake lay black and dead still. Behind me, through the open doors, the ballroom glowed gold, the waltz had slowed into something even softer, and thirty-odd guests had drifted out onto the flagstones with glasses in hand, wearing the pleasant faces of people waiting to be moved along.I sat at the Don's right hand, cane across my knees, back to the water. Eleven minutes earlier Vas had left his chair beside me with an apology about the Ambassador, and I hadn't seen him since. I hadn't seen Dario either. One row back, one seat in from the aisle, Kiryan sat like a man carved out of dark stone, his eyes finding mine every so often and moving away again, the way a hand checks a pocket to make sure something's still th