Chapter 10 · Sutures and Stale Bread

June’s heels hit the gravel before her driver cut the engine.

Sixteen years of that click coming down the marble halls at Shore House. Now it was crossing my drydock before eight in the morning, with my boots still wet and somebody else’s blood on the toe.

Her driver got to my floor first. He’d come up twenty minutes ahead of her — big shoulders, company smile, a folder and a line about “just getting signatures.” Garrett put him down before I found my phone. Now he sat against the rail with his nose bent sideways and his wrist fat as a rope knot, breathing through his mouth.

Garrett stood over him, working a rag across his knuckles. Blood hit the pine. Drip. Drip.

“Up,” he said. Low. Even. “You’re bleeding on her floor.”

“I was just—”

“Now.”

The guy dragged himself upright one-handed, along the doorframe, and June had to step back onto the landing to let him squeeze past. He went down the stairs cradling that wrist like a bird he’d caught and didn’t want.

Cream wool coat. Cream boots that had never touched bilge water.