I slipped Tomas's own watch on him, in the end.
I'm getting ahead. Let me stay in the room. You have to stay in the room.
I lost my minder at half past five the next morning the way you lose anyone — by being boring for long enough that they stop believing you'll be interesting. I took the cliff path down toward the water in the grey before dawn with the whole sea the color of a bruise, and the salt and the diesel came up to meet me off the old boathouse, that smell, always that smell, the smell of everything this family had ever buried.
The door was open. It shouldn't have been open.
I knew before I was through it. Three years of trauma bays teach your body to understand a room before your mind will let it — the particular stillness, the copper in the air under the salt. Tomas was on the floor between the hull racks, and someone had been thorough, and he was still alive, but only in the way that means not yet, and his eyes found me and were so relieved to see me that I nearly went down on my knees right there.
Instead my hands took over. They always take over. I was on the concrete with my palms jammed into the wound in his side before I'd decided to move, my whole weight into it, the way I'd shown Damian to lean on the stranger a lifetime ago, and I was talking, the low steady stream you give them, stay with me, look at me, I've got you, you're not doing this today —
"Who did this," I said. "Tomas. Who."
"Not — him." Blood in the words, a wet edge, and God help me I had heard this exact voice before, three years before, on a different table, another man spending his last breath trying to deliver something to me. "Not Damian. He doesn't — know. It's Emil. Emil and the — Rusenko. They want— " a cough took it, took so much of it, "—the thing your father— you're the key, they need you to— don't give them— " His hand came up and closed around my wrist, over the watch, the way the stranger's had, the way Damian's did in his sleep, everyone in my life reaching for that watch with the last of what they had. "Don't let them— open it. Whatever they promise. Once they have it they don't need — your mother. Or you."
"Tomas, stay with me. Stay in the room."
"Tell him," Tomas said. "Tell Damian I'm — sorry I doubted— "
The tide came in under the boathouse the way it does, and took the last of him with it, and my hands were still pushing on a wound in a body that had stopped needing them, and I knelt there in the blood and the salt and I could not, for a long moment, remember how to be a person instead of a pair of hands.
I had failed. I stay in the room and I had stayed and it hadn't been enough, and a good man was dead on the floor of a rich family's boathouse because he'd tried to tell me the truth.
It's Emil.
He'd said it. He'd said it with his life. Not Damian.
And here is the thing I am least proud of, the thing I will spend the rest of my life setting right: I did not believe him.
I knelt in Tomas's blood and I heard it's Emil, not Damian, and my mind — poisoned, grief-drunk, certain — turned it over and found a way to make it fit the story I already had. Of course a dying man would say it wasn't Damian. Damian owned him. Damian owned this coast, this water, this boathouse, the very concrete under my knees. Men who work for the Vosses die protecting the Vosses; I'd married into a family that inspired that kind of loyalty at gunpoint. Emil was a warm fool who'd told me too much and this was Damian cleaning house, silencing the one man who'd tried to warn me, and Tomas with his last breath was still too frightened of the Iceman to name him.
That is what grief does. It takes the truth and files it under the lie you can already carry.
I closed Tomas's eyes. I took my hands off him. They were red to the wrist, and shaking now, and I got up and I ran — not to the house, not to my husband, God, not to him — I ran to the one thing left that was mine to protect.
I called the Merrow from the cliff path with my heart going like a hunted animal.
It rang, and rang, and a voice that was not my mother's nurse answered, a voice I didn't know, smooth and unhurried and wrong, and it said, "Mrs. Voss. We wondered when you'd call," and the whole grey sea went silent around me.
"Where is my mother."
"Somewhere the tide can't reach her," the voice said pleasantly. "Yet. Mr. Roth would like a word. He's been so looking forward to it."
