The Mercenary Queen Strikes Back novel · Chapter 3 of 24
Chapter 3: The Rooftop
In Zoria City Vaughn finds her on a roof. She wins the fight and cuffs him to a pipe, then a woman calls her by her real name.
Two nights later, Astrid lay on a rooftop in Zoria City, watching a house she had never been inside.
The Swinton mansion filled the whole hill across the street, with lit windows on every floor.
Rain ran down the back of her neck.
In the third window from the left, a woman sat alone at a desk with her head in her hands.
It was the woman from the newspaper.
Astrid had watched her for two hours.
The woman never once looked up.
"Duncan," Astrid said into the earpiece. "Tell me again that I shouldn't just knock."
"You shouldn't just knock. You have a prison number and an Interpol warrant. Wait for the gala."
"I'm tired of waiting."
"You waited twenty-three years."
"That's why I'm tired."
Behind her, a boot scraped on wet gravel.
She rolled left, and a fist hit the roof where her head had been.
Vaughn Garrow stood over her, soaked to the skin.
There was a cut on his forehead where the tile had hit him, and his shirt was torn at the shoulder.
"Evening, 5081," he said.
"You look terrible, Garrow."
"It's been a long week."
"How did you find me?"
"The cook," he said. "She sold you the shift roster, and she sold me your bread roll. It came wrapped in paper from a house in Zoria City. Only a woman looking for her mother goes there."
"Clever."
"I'm not here to be clever."
He swung again.
She caught his wrist in both hands and twisted, and he went down on one knee on the gravel.
He came up with his other hand and hit her across the jaw.
Her head snapped sideways.
She tasted blood, and she laughed.
"You hit hard for a man who only fights people in chains," she said.
His face changed. He came at her low, and she met him halfway.
They crashed into the chimney stack.
He was bigger than she was and heavier and trained, and she had trained too, in a harder school.
He got an arm around her neck.
She drove her elbow into his ribs, twice, and he grunted and let go.
She spun and kicked the back of his knee.
He fell flat on his back in the gravel, and she dropped on top of him with her knee on his chest.
His chest rose hard under her.
She held his wrist against the gravel, and neither of them moved.
His eyes were dark, and they were fixed on her face.
Rain ran off her chin and onto his collar.
"Get off me," he said.
"Say please."
"I will see you back in that cell if it's the last thing I do."
"You will be late," she said.
She took the cuffs off his own belt.
He swore and fought her, and she closed one cuff on his wrist and the other around a rusted drainpipe.
The steel clicked shut.
He yanked at it and the pipe did not move.
"You can't do this," he said.
"I just did."
She pulled the radio off his shoulder, dropped it on the gravel and stamped on it twice.
Then she took his phone from his pocket and dropped it into the gutter pipe.
"Now nobody can call anybody," she said.
"They'll find you before sunrise."
"They'll find you first. You're the one who's tied up."
"People have died on this island because of you."
"Twelve people, I know." She stood and wiped her mouth on her sleeve. "Keep your voice down. Someone might call the police, and then you'll have to explain who you are."
"I'm the chief of the guards at Devil's Isle."
"You're a man handcuffed to a drainpipe in the rain."
She walked to the edge of the roof.
"Astrid," he said. "Wait."
She stopped.
"How did you know my name?"
"It was in the bread roll too," he said. "The cook read it before she gave it to you."
"Then you're not as clever as you think."
She went over the edge of the roof and down the fire escape in four fast drops.
The street below was empty.
She crossed it, with rain in her eyes and her jaw burning, and stopped at the corner of the wall around the Swinton house.
She looked up at the third window.
It was dark now.
A side door in the garden wall opened, and a woman in a grey cardigan ran out into the rain.
She had no coat and no umbrella.
She was crying, and she was looking straight at Astrid.
"Astrid?" the woman said. "Is it you?"
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