Chapter 14: The Gray Coat

We lost Clem's car at the second bridge.

My second called in a plate and a direction, and then nothing.

The silver sedan had gone into the fog off the harbor road.

"She had an hour's start on all of us," Nolan said from the passenger seat. "She's been planning this since the first dinner."

"She's been planning it since she was four," I said.

I turned the car toward Pier 9 and did not say anything else.

My warehouse was dark and cold, and it smelled of oil and rope.

I put one lamp on over the crate table and poured two glasses of Fergus's rye.

Nolan stood in the doorway and looked at the stacked boxes, the maps on the wall, the pistol cases lined along the back.

"This is where you live?" he asked.

"This is where I work. I live upstairs."

"It's a good room."

"It has two exits and a lock I picked myself." I handed him a glass. "Sit."

He sat on a crate, and I stayed on my feet.

I had been carrying the thing for nineteen years, and I could not get it out sitting down.

"Your father's men were on that dock," I said.

He went still.

"The night I was handed to Fergus. I was seven.

"It was winter, and the planks were wet.

"Six men in black coats stood between me and the water."

"Roz."

"Askew men. I know the coats. I've seen them on every one of your father's guards since I got here."

"Roz."

"And there was a boy," I said.

I looked straight at him.

"He was maybe twelve. He had dark hair and a split lip.

"He took off a gray wool coat and put it on me.

"It smelled of cedar, and nobody told him to."

Nolan put his glass down very carefully on the crate.

"I slept in that coat for two years," I said. "I never told Fergus where it came from. I never told anyone, until now."

Keep reading free with an account. Start They Chose the Wrong Daughter from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.