Chapter 2 · Fourteen Tides

"Hands on the cage." Marco didn't look up from the manifest clipboard. "Both of them." The freight elevator groaned shut behind us, chain-link folding into itself with a clang that rattled through my molars. Twenty minutes ago I'd signed occupancy on a counting-room cot in front of half the harbor. Now he had me boxed into steel the size of a closet, and it smelled like diesel and old fish blood. "I signed your paper," I said. "That doesn't mean This was captivity: no way out, touch-her-and-die if the rival reached the glass, body betrayal soaking my skin while dark mafia heat and sensory drag held the vault. you get to frisk me." "It means exactly that." He set the clipboard on the crate beside him. "Your husband ran chips out of this pier six years running. I'm not putting a Crowe in my counting room without checking what she brought with her." "I brought a coat and a duffel." "Then this'll be fast." He crossed the gap in two steps, no warning, and his hand landed flat on my collarbone — not a shove, just pressure, backing me into the cage until the diamond mesh printed cold through my coat. Colder than the mesh were his eyes. "Get off me." "You want to walk into that room clean, or you want customs finding a transponder sewn in your lining at hour one?" His other hand found my lapel, two fingers working the top button loose, quick, clinical, like he'd done this to a hundred women and none of them mattered. "Fourteen tides, Mrs. Crowe. That's how long you're mine to check." "I'm nobody's anything." "You're the die-holder sleeping under my roof. Tide two starts tonight. Thirteen left before I stop asking nice." The second button gave. The elevator lurched into motion, a low shudder climbing through the floor into my knees, and I hated that my hand grabbed the wall strap instead of grabbing him. His knuckles trailed the length of my throat on the way to my collar — not gentle, and not an accident. "There's nothing in the coat." "I decide that." He was close enough I could feel the heat off him through two layers of wool. His mouth found my ear, low, bored, like he was still reading the manifest. "Chips get sewn into hair too. Your husband liked the collar. His brother liked braids." His fingers found the twist at the back of my head and pulled it loose in one motion. My hair dropped around my shoulders while his palm stayed there, spread flat against my scalp, thumb tracing the shell of my ear like he was listening for a signal only he could hear. "Get your hand out of my hair." "Nothing there." He didn't move it. "Good girl." My pulse was slamming at my throat, and he felt it — I knew because his thumb slid off my ear and down to the vein, resting there. Not choking. Counting. "Hundred and ten," he said. "That's not cold, Mrs. Crowe. That's something else." "That's fear, you son of a bitch." "Sure." His mouth was an inch off my jaw now, close enough his breath stirred the loose hair at my temple, and neither of us stepped back. The belt strap over my shoulder had gone taut in my fist, knuckles white, and his eyes dropped to it and came back up slow, filing it away. "You done?" My voice came out wrong. Rougher than I wanted. "Almost." His free hand spread the coat open at the collarbone, cold air hitting skin that had been covered thirty seconds ago. I felt every inch of the gap between his palm and where it would have to go for this to actually be a search and not — whatever this was. He stopped there. Flat hand, collarbone, thumb sitting in the hollow of my throat where the pulse still slammed against him. "No chip," he said. "I told you that." "You told the room a lot of things today. Widow. Smuggler's widow. Somebody's mouth said that loud enough for the whole floor to hear, and you didn't correct them." "Because correcting a room full of federal agents at a fish auction wasn't the move, Marco." His name in my mouth did something to his jaw — a tightening, fast, gone before I could name it. He stepped back half a foot, cold air rushing into the space he left, and buttoned my coat himself, one button then the other, rough and quick like he regretted opening it at all. The elevator stopped. The cage door didn't open. "There's a chip," he said, "under the plate on lot one-fourteen. Your husband's serial's stamped on it. Customs doesn't know it's there yet." My stomach dropped faster than the car had. "You're lying." "I don't lie about federal exposure. I spend it." He reached past me and hit the release. The cage rattled open onto a corridor of white cold and rising steam. "You run before your fourteen tides are up, that chip gets found. Today. I won't even have to make the call." "What do you want." He looked at me the way you look at something you already hold the paper on. "Fourteen tides in my counting room. You don't go near that plate." He stepped into the corridor, one hand still braced on the cage like he wasn't finished. "There's a second chip too. Bigger than the first one. Older serial." "A second — what does that even—" "That one's not for tonight." The steam curled around his boots, and for a second the cold room behind him looked like it went on forever, rows of hanging crates disappearing into white. "That one I only pull out if you make me." "Marco—" "Sleep in the counting room, Mrs. Crowe." He was already walking, already half swallowed by the steam, and he didn't turn around when he said it. "Sweet dreams about lot one-fourteen." The cage stayed open behind him, humming, and I stood there with my coat rebuttoned wrong and my hair down around my shoulders and no idea — none — which serial number was going to be the one that ended me. "Who entered the door code after leftover?"