Chapter 8: The File

Dacre's POV

I did not sleep.

I have not slept a whole night in nine years, so that was nothing new.

But this was the first night I had spent under the same roof as the woman I had hunted.

I took the leather folder out to the porch and sat on the top step with it open on my knee.

My hunters built that file over nine years.

It held a Fourth Company roster, six redacted discharge forms and one recruiting pamphlet with a group photograph on the back.

Eleven cadets stood in two rows in front of a flagpole.

I had stared at that picture so many times the paper had gone soft.

I had never known which of the eleven it was.

Tonight I knew.

She stood at the end of the second row, seventeen years old, thin and sharp-elbowed.

She had a hand up to shade her eyes from the sun.

She was squinting and trying not to smile.

I had the whole of my life ready for a monster, and nobody had told me she would have a cowlick.

The cabin door opened behind me.

I did not turn around.

Cassia Coleridge sat down on the step, a yard from my hip, with her rifle case across her knees.

She looked at the photograph.

"That's me," she said.

"I know. Second row."

"Seventeen," she said. "My mother had just died. The Guard fed you three meals."

"I'm sorry about your mother."

"Don't be nice to me," she said.

"It's not niceness. It's a fact."

She was quiet.

The moon was thin over the pines.

"I won't show you the paper tonight," she said.

"All right."

"I'll show you where I lay," she said. "Then you can read it where it was written."

"All right."

"You don't argue," she said.

"I do not waste arguments on things I mean to do."

She breathed something that might have been a laugh.

Then she said, to the dark, "I saw his face. You should know that."

"Through the scope at six hundred yards, you can see a man's face. I was told to look for the hand."

"He was smiling when he raised it. I've seen that smile every night since."

I felt it in my throat before I felt it anywhere else.

"He was smiling at the Marshal," I said. "He thought it was finished. He told me that morning he was going to buy a house."

"Dacre."

"Don't tell me you've suffered," I said.

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