Chapter 10: Pretty Little Psychopath
Rowan pulled the trigger.
The sound was small and dry in the frozen room. A hollow click. Nothing else.
Across the storeroom, Cassian had not moved. Behind Rowan, Marcus drew in a sharp breath.
And for the first time in many days, Rowan Quill smiled.
He turned, slowly, and pointed the empty gun at Marcus. Then he reached into the pocket of his hoodie with his free hand, took out a fistful of bullets, and opened his fingers. They fell and bounced across the concrete at Marcus's feet, bright against the frost.
"Your men called me a psychopath," Rowan said, "because I didn't panic. I'm not cold. I was just paying attention."
Marcus stared at the bullets. Then at Nolan, standing by the back door. Then at Rowan.
"You don't understand what you've..."
"I understand everything," Rowan said. "My father left a message in the back of his notebook. Tell Rowan it was never him. It was M.V. I found your file on Subject R.Q. in your basement. I know you poured the fuel on Harrow Street. And tonight you told me you killed Gideon Marlow." He lifted his left arm and turned back the cuff of his sleeve, just enough to show the silver edge of the disc stitched inside. "Every word you've said for the last forty minutes went straight to Detective Imani Reyes."
For one long second, nobody breathed.
Then Marcus's right hand went to his left, and he began turning his wedding ring, around and around, faster and faster.
"Kill them," he said. "Both of them. Now."
The tattooed man raised his gun.
The lights went out.
Somewhere far away, in a room full of screens at the top of a harbor tower, Bex had cut the power to Pier Fourteen. The storeroom dropped into total darkness. Men shouted. The compressor stopped.
Rowan had spent forty minutes memorizing this room. He took four steps to his left in the dark, reached out, and his hand closed on the cold metal of the red valve. He wrenched it down.
A roar of freezing vapor filled the room. Thick white fog poured from the vent and rolled across the floor and up the walls, so dense that when someone switched on a phone flashlight, the beam stopped half a meter from the lens. No one could see anything. No one could aim at anything.
A hand grabbed the back of Rowan's hoodie.
He knew it was the tattooed man by the smell of his cologne. Rowan did not pull away. He stepped back into him instead, trapped the wrist against his own chest, turned his hip, and threw. The man hit the floor hard. His gun skittered away across the concrete, and Rowan kicked it into the fog.
A shot cracked through the white.
It came from the direction of Marcus's voice and went toward the place where Rowan had just been. Before Rowan could move, a heavy body slammed into him from the side and took them both to the ground. He heard a sharp intake of breath, very close to his ear, and then a low sound of pain.
"Cassian."
"I'm fine." It came through gritted teeth. "Shoulder. Stay down."
At the back of the room, a door banged open, and Marcus's voice rose, furious. Then Nolan's, louder than Rowan had ever heard it: "No. You're not going anywhere." A scuffle. A thud. Then Nolan again, shaking: "I'm unarmed. I'm unarmed. I give up."
The front door burst open.
Flashlights cut through the fog, a dozen of them, and voices shouting Police! Nobody move! Boots on concrete. Someone opened the loading doors, and the white vapor began pouring out into the rain.
When the air cleared, Marcus Vane was on his knees near the back door with his hands cuffed behind him and his gold glasses lying cracked on the floor. The man with the anchor tattoo, whose real name, Reyes would tell Rowan later, was Rook, lay face down with the others, with officers standing over them. Nolan sat against the wall with his hands on his head, crying.
Detective Reyes stood in the middle of the room with her badge on a chain around her neck.
"Marcus Vane," she said, "you're under arrest for the murders of Gideon Marlow and Elias Quill, for arson, kidnapping, attempted murder, and the manufacture of a controlled substance. You have the right to remain silent. I'd use it, if I were you."
As the officers lifted Nolan to his feet, he looked across the room at Rowan.
"Thank you," Rowan said.
Nolan shook his head. "Don't," he said hoarsely. "I don't get to be thanked for this. I just get to stop making it worse."
Rowan did not hear the rest of what Reyes said to him. He was on his knees beside Cassian, both hands pressed hard against the front of his left shoulder, holding pressure.
"Paramedics," he shouted. "Now."
Cassian's face was pale in the flashlight beams. His eyes were open.
"Stay with me," Rowan said. "Talk to me. Name the bones of the hand."
Cassian made a sound that might have been a laugh. "Scaphoid," he said. "Lunate. Triquetrum. Pisiform. Trapezium. Trapezoid. Capitate." He took a breath. "Hamate."
"All eight," Rowan said. His voice was not steady anymore. He did not try to make it steady.
Reyes crouched beside them for a moment while they waited. Her jacket was wet with rain, and her coffee cup was nowhere in sight for once.
"Forty-three minutes of Marcus talking," she said. "Clear as a phone call. Bex sent it to three different servers before I even got in the van." She looked at Rowan. "You're a lot of trouble, Quill."
"I know."
"Good trouble." She stood up. "Your father would have been proud of you."
When the stretcher came, Cassian reached for him with his good arm, and Rowan leaned down, and they held on to each other for a moment, carefully, while the paramedics waited.
Two days later, Rowan walked into Cassian's hospital room carrying one cream envelope.
Cassian was sitting up in bed with his left arm in a sling. The surgeon had said the bullet had missed everything important. He watched Rowan set the envelope on the blanket.
"The scholarship," Rowan said. "I'm ending it. I've already applied for a student loan, like everyone else in my year. I'll pay back what you've spent. It will take a long time."
"You don't have to..."
"I know I don't have to. I want to." Rowan sat down in the chair. "I don't want to be your debt, Cassian. I want to be your choice."
Cassian was quiet for a long moment.
"I'm sorry," he said. "Not for paying. For hiding it. I told myself it was kindness. Really, I didn't want to face you. I treated caring about you like something I owed, instead of something I could just say."
"Then say it."
"I care about you," Cassian said. "More than I know how to explain. And I agree. No more debts. No more secrets."
He told Rowan the rest then, simply. He was going to take Rourke Maritime out of the Tide. All of it. He would close the parts of the business that had never been legal, give the street crews time to find other ways, and testify for Detective Reyes about what he knew of Marcus and the Compact.
"I'm not doing it for you," he said. "I'm doing it because your father trusted me with his life, and I want to be the man he thought I was."
There was a knock at the door. Theo stood there, with Juno behind him.
He looked at Rowan first. "I'm sorry," he said. "For the gala. For the roof. I don't have an excuse, and I'm not going to make one."
"Thank you for going to the police," Rowan said. "That mattered."
Theo nodded. Then he looked at Cassian, and at the space between the bed and Rowan's chair, and something in his face settled.
"I'm the one who broke things," he said to his father. "Not you. You don't owe me not being happy."
Cassian held out his good hand. After a moment, Theo took it.
When Theo and Juno had gone, Cassian looked at Rowan for a while without speaking.
"Can I ask you something difficult?" he said.
"Yes."
"They put that drug in you four times. Harrow Street. The gala. The roof. The hospital." He chose his words carefully. "How do you know that what you feel is really yours?"
Rowan did not answer right away. It was a fair question. It was exactly the question he would have asked.
"I'll find out," he said. "And then I'll tell you."
That afternoon, the hospital lab sent Rowan his final test results. There was no trace of any drug left in his system. The toxicologist had added a note after reviewing the Halcyon files: D-glass acts only on memory formation and recall. No effect on mood, attachment, or emotional response.
Rowan read it twice. Then he walked back down the corridor to Cassian's room, handed him the page without a word, and waited while he read it.
Chosen, he thought. Not dosed.
The weeks that followed were busy. Marcus Vane was charged on every count, and Halcyon Biotech was shut down while investigators went through its basement. Nolan pleaded guilty to his part and agreed to testify, in exchange for a shorter sentence. Diane came to Rowan's apartment, sat at his kitchen table, and apologized for not believing him. The medical school cleared his record and reinstated him with a formal letter he did not bother to frame.
Five months later, on a gray afternoon in early spring, a new sign went up on Harrow Street.
ELIAS QUILL FREE CLINIC.
The brick shell had been rebuilt, the windows replaced, the wooden cabinets restored exactly as they had been, each drawer labeled in brass. Beside the front door hung a small glass frame. Inside it was a brass lighthouse keychain, worn smooth.
When the ribbon was cut and the small crowd had gone inside for coffee, Rowan stayed on the pavement, looking up at the sign. Cassian stood beside him, one step away, the way he always did. His arm was out of the sling now.
"Ask me properly," Rowan said.
Cassian turned to face him.
"Rowan Quill," he said. "I'd like to be with you. As equals. No debts. No secrets. Will you let me?"
"Yes," Rowan said.
Cassian lifted his hand and waited. Rowan stepped closer. The kiss was short and light, under the fine spring drizzle and the orange glow of the harbor cranes blinking in the distance. When it ended, neither of them moved away.
That night, they ate dinner at the top of the harbor tower. Priya and Juno argued about surgical technique. Bex had brought takeout from three different places. Theo sat at the end of the table, quieter than he used to be, but laughing when Bex stole his fries.
Halfway through the meal, Bex slid a wrapped box across the table to Rowan. Inside was a white coffee mug. Printed on the side, in neat black letters, were the words PRETTY LITTLE PSYCHOPATH.
Everyone went silent, waiting.
Rowan laughed. It came out loud and sudden, and it surprised him more than anyone. He held up the mug.
Outside, across the black water of the bay, the crane lights blinked orange through the glass on three sides of the room. On. Off. On.
Rowan did not count his pulse. He did not need to check whether he was feeling something.
He knew.