Chapter 4

I lowered the revolver, but I did not put it away.

"Say it again," I said. "My name."

"Laura Roal." He said it slow this time, careful, like he was handling something breakable. "Or Lawl, if that's easier for you to answer to now. I don't care what you call yourself. I care what you are."

"And what am I."

"Still finding that out." He rubbed a thumb along the edge of his jaw, a small motion, the kind a man makes when he's deciding how much truth to hand over. "That's the honest answer. I've studied what the pit does to bodies that go in and don't stay dead. You're the first one who came back talking."

"Lucky you," I said. "Front row seat."

"I didn't say lucky." Something flickered behind his eyes, gone before I could name it. "I said first."

I stepped back, putting a full body length between us, enough room to think without his voice pressing on me the way it had in the narrow street. He didn't follow. He stayed exactly where I'd left him, hands loose at his sides, patient in a way that made the wraith under my ribs sit up and take notice.

"You've been watching for me for months," I said. "Why."

"I told you. I wanted to know if you'd come back changed or come back gone."

"That's not why. That's what. I asked why."

He held my eyes for a long moment, and I watched him choose his next words the way a man chooses a step on ice he already knows is thin somewhere.

"Not tonight," he said.

"Give me one good reason not to walk away right now and never let you find me again."

"Because I'm the only person in this city who can tell you what's happening inside you before it happens," he said. "The hunger. The way it eats a little more of you every time you use it. You've felt that already, haven't you. Some part of tonight that didn't feel like yours."

I didn't answer, which was its own kind of answer, and he knew it.

"I'm not asking you to trust me," he said. "I'm asking for a trade. You let me study what the pit did, blood, breath, whatever's left of a pulse in you. In exchange, I keep your name where it belongs. Buried. Nobody in this city finds out Laura Roal is walking around in a mask, not from me."

"And if I say no."

"Then you spend the next thirty days wondering if I'll change my mind." He said it flat, no threat in his voice, just a fact laid on the table between us. "I'd rather not be that kind of leverage. But I'm not going to pretend I don't have it."

It was, I had to admit, an honest kind of dangerous. I had grown up around men who lied about what they wanted from me. This one was telling me exactly what he wanted, out loud, and somehow that was worse, because I couldn't decide yet if it made him safer or not.

I thought of Justin, who used to say honesty was a weapon he only handed to people he trusted. I had believed that, once. I had believed a lot of things a knife had since taught me to unlearn.

"Fine," I said. "But I choose what you get to study, and when."

"Fair."

"And you stop following me. If you want something, you come find me the ordinary way. Not through alleys."

Something almost like a smile crossed his face, there and gone. "I can live with that."

"Can you," I said. "Living seems to be something you're careless with. Mine, at least."

That landed harder than I meant it to. He didn't flinch, but his jaw tightened, just slightly, just enough that I saw it.

"I didn't kill you," he said, quiet now. "I found what was left after someone else did."

"You're the one who decided what came back."

"I decided you'd get a choice," he said. "That's not nothing, where you came from."

We stood there a moment, both of us breathing, though only one of us needed to. The street had gone fully dark around us, the last lamp down the block guttering low, and somewhere past the rooftops a dog started barking at nothing, the way dogs in this city always seemed to know when something dead was standing too close.

"There's a body I want to ask you about," I said finally, changing ground because I didn't trust myself on the last one. "A man at the rail yard. Bound with a knot I invented. Someone wanted me to find him specifically."

Weston's face did something complicated, interest and worry both at once, the kind of look a man gets when a puzzle he's been working suddenly gets a piece he didn't order.

"Show me," he said.

"Not tonight." I used his own words back at him, and watched it land. "I choose what you get, remember."

He accepted that with a small nod, no argument, filing it away the way I filed away everything useful. For a second I almost respected him for it, the way you respect an opponent who doesn't waste breath pretending a loss didn't happen. Then his voice changed, dropped lower, less like a bargain and more like a question he'd been holding back since the alley.

"What do you remember," he said, "about dying."

The question landed somewhere under my ribs I hadn't braced for. I felt my hand move before I decided to move it, fingers finding my own throat, the place where a blade had opened me a year ago, smooth now, unmarked, no scar left behind to prove any of it had happened at all.

No pulse under my fingers. No blood. Just the memory of a knife, and a voice I used to trust, and the sound the dirt made when it closed over my face.

I opened my mouth to answer him, and found I did not know where the truth stopped and the wraith's version of it began.