Bloodline of Retribution: The Disowned Prodigy novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Sunday Dinner

Lena's POV

The Donnellys' porch had three steps, and Ken had looked at them for a full minute before we arrived.

"Two men can carry him," he said to the stove when I told him on the phone. "Or I'll build a ramp."

"Dad, you can't build a ramp by Sunday," Roxie said.

"Watch me."

By the time the black car pulled up, there was a plywood ramp with a coat of grey paint still tacky on one side.

Keir looked at it from the car window for a long moment.

"He built that this week?" he asked.

"Since Thursday night. He wired the whole yard for six years and he's never built anything he couldn't see the end of."

"I'll walk it up," Keir said.

"You'll roll it."

"Then roll me."

He had been quiet all the way from the compound, with one hand pressed flat on his left thigh.

I saw him press his heel into the footplate, hard, and watch his own knee as if it owed him money.

"Does it hurt?" I asked.

"No."

"Then what is it?"

"Ask me later."

Ken stood at the top with his arms crossed.

When the chair came up the ramp without a wobble, he nodded once.

"You're taller than the report said," he told Keir.

"What report?"

"The one in my head."

Peg came out of the kitchen with a dish towel over her shoulder and looked him up and down.

"Do you eat?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Not enough. Sit."

The stew was beef and barley, with biscuits that Peg had made twice because the first batch had burned.

Keir ate two bowls.

Ken ate three and told a long story about a ship that had caught fire in the yard in 1998, and Keir asked all the right questions and said exactly the wrong thing about the insurance, and Ken laughed until he coughed.

Roxie put a second biscuit on my plate without asking.

"He's good," she said quietly, tilting her head at Keir. "Dad doesn't like anybody."

"He liked you."

"I'm his daughter. It doesn't count." She grinned. "You look happy, Lena."

"I look tired."

"Same thing, sometimes."

Her green coat hung on the hook by the door, next to Ken's work jacket.

I had returned it on the way in, and she'd hung it up with a flick of her wrist.

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