Chapter 4 Dead Man's Handwriting

Raven

My hands wouldn't stop shaking, so I pressed the letter flat against my knee and read it again.

Smoke hung under the garage lights like fog on a river. A fire extinguisher hissed somewhere behind me. Men shouted over each other. A scorched piece of tire rolled across the concrete and stopped against my boot.

None of that mattered. Cole's handwriting mattered.

‘Rae, I'm sorry this is how you're hearing it.

Don't trust the police report.

Don't trust the name on my headstone.

The drive only opens halfway without the thing I never got to give you.

Keep it hidden. Keep yourself hidden better.

Raven, if you're reading this, one of the men you trust is lying. The other one killed me.’

I had read the last line first in the smoke. Now I read it last, and it hurt more that way. He had built up to it, line by line, like he was walking me toward a ledge.

"Raven." Damon's voice came from above me, low and even. "Give me the letter."

I looked up. A thin line of blood had dried along his cheekbone. Behind him, Jace stood with his hand clamped over the gash on his forearm, and he was staring at the paper like it might bite.

"No."

"That letter was in my safe."

"Your safe." I stood up slowly, because my legs hadn't forgiven me for the blast. "Why was my brother's letter in your safe?"

"He gave me an envelope the week before the bridge. He said to keep it sealed unless something happened to him." Damon's jaw tightened. "I never opened it. I never read it."

"You expect me to believe that?"

"I expect you to believe the seal was intact when I locked it away. You can ask Jace."

"Ask me what?" Jace pushed off the toolbox he'd been leaning on. His grin was gone. It had gone somewhere in the explosion and hadn't come back. "I've never seen that letter in my life, Rae. I swear to God."

"Don't call me that."

"Raven."

"No. Only Cole called me that."

He flinched, just a little, like I'd slapped him again. Good.

"I never saw it," he said quieter. "I didn't even know it existed."

"I know," Damon said.

He said it too fast. Before Jace finished the sentence, before he'd even asked a single question. I noticed, and I kept my face still, and I filed it away.

"You know?" I said. "Just like that? Your vice president says he's never seen a dead man's confession hidden under his own bike seat, and you don't even ask how it got there?"

"I'll ask when we're alone."

"I'm standing right here."

"Yes." His eyes held mine, gray and tired and steady. "You are."

A biker I didn't know skidded to a stop at the garage door, radio in his fist. "Boss. The safe in your office is open. Empty. Whoever hit the servers hit that too."

Damon closed his eyes for half a second.

"So that's how it got here," I said. "Somebody took it out of your safe and put it under Jace's seat. Somebody who knew where Cole's letter was and knew I'd come looking. Somebody who wanted me to read the last line in front of both of you."

Nobody answered. Jace rubbed the back of his neck. Damon looked at the floor.

"One of you is lying," I said. "That's what it says."

"Raven," Damon said, "whatever that paper claims, I did not kill your brother."

"I didn't either," Jace said instantly.

"Of course you both say that." My voice cracked, and I hated it. "One of you has to be lying, so naturally you're both telling the truth."

"That's not how it works," Jace said.

"Then tell me how it works, Jace. You were on that bridge. You told me yourself. You put your hands on his jacket while he bled. Why did he write that? Why would he write that about either of you?"

"I don't know."

"Damon?"

"I don't know."

"You both don't know." I laughed, and it came out wrong. "Great. That clears everything up."

Damon held out his hand again, palm up. "The letter belongs in the vault until we know who touched it."

"The vault just got robbed."

"Then somewhere safer."

"It's staying with me." I folded the page in half, then in half again, and slid it into my back pocket. "It was written to me. It's the only thing he's said to me in four years."

For a moment I thought he would take it. His hand curled slightly, like he was weighing the distance between us. Then he lowered it.

"Fine," he said. "But you don't show it to anyone else. Not yet."

"Why? Who else would I show?"

"Anyone who could use it." His eyes flicked toward Jace, and then back to me, and I saw him decide not to say whatever he was thinking. "Someone planted this where you'd find it. They wanted us at each other's throats. Don't help them."

"I'm not helping anyone. I'm reading."

I bent down and picked up the photograph.

It had slid out of the envelope when I tore it open and landed face down on the concrete, and somehow nobody had stepped on it. A little bit of ash had settled across the back. I wiped it off with my thumb and turned it over.

The room went quiet around me. Or maybe my ears were still ringing, and I'd stopped hearing everything else.

Cole. Younger than I'd ever seen him in a picture, maybe twenty, with grease on his cheek and his stupid lopsided grin. Next to him, a girl of about twelve with a gap in her front teeth, squinting at the sun.

Me.

I didn't remember this day. I didn't remember the picnic table, or the paper plates, or the plastic cups. But I remembered my mother's laugh, because there she was on the left, head thrown back, one hand lifted like she'd just been caught in the middle of a joke. Lorraine Calloway. Alive. Eleven or twelve years gone, and here she was, laughing at something off camera.

And behind my brother, standing straight as a post, one hand resting on his shoulder like a proud uncle, was a tall man with silver hair.

I had never seen him before.

"Who is this?" I asked.

Neither man answered. I turned the photo toward them, and for the second time that night I watched something cold pass between them.

"Damon."

"I don't know." He said it too slowly.

"Jace."

"I've never seen him." Jace swallowed. "Honest."

"Don't say honest. Everyone who says honest is lying."

"Okay, okay, I don't know him. That's the truth."

"Fine." I lifted the photograph higher, studying the man's face. Fifty, maybe. Good teeth. A kind smile. The kind of face you'd trust to hold your coat. "Then why is he standing with my family at my mother's picnic? Why does Cole look so happy to have him there?"

"Hold still."

Dez had come up beside Jace with a bag of gauze and a pair of scissors, and she was already unwrapping his arm like it was a birthday present. She was tiny and sharp-eyed, with a tattoo of a wrench winding up her forearm. She didn't look at me. She looked at the picture.

Her hands stopped moving.

"Dez?" I said.

"Mm." She went back to the gauze, but too slowly. "Nothing. Just got dust in my eye."

"That's not dust."

"Raven," Damon said. "Let her work."

"She knows him."

"I'm a medic," Dez said, still not meeting my eyes. "I know blood pressure and burn dressings. I don't know your friend with the nice hair."

"He's not my friend."

"Then he shouldn't be in your picture."

Jace hissed through his teeth as she cleaned his cut. Nobody else spoke. I stood there with a photograph in one hand and a dead man's letter in my pocket, and the strangest feeling crawled up my spine, like every light in the room had turned toward me.

Someone had hidden this picture for four years. Someone had left it where I would find it, right next to a warning. They'd wanted me to see this man's face.

I just didn't understand why.

Behind us, the television in the garage office flickered back to life.

The blackout must have ended. It had been dead since the breach, and now it buzzed and caught, a cheap wall-mounted screen with the sound turned low. A news anchor appeared, smiling too hard, the way they always do on charity segments. Behind her, a photo of a ribbon cutting. A stage. A crowd in nice clothes, clapping.

"...Sloane Harbor Foundation continues its tradition of giving with a record donation to the city's youth shelters," she said. "Developer and philanthropist Victor Sloane, a beloved figure in our community, was joined tonight by the mayor."

The camera cut to a man on a podium. Tall. Silver haired. Good teeth. He shook the mayor's hand, and a hundred flashbulbs lit his face, and he smiled the warm, patient smile of a man who had never once been afraid of anything. I raised the photograph beside the screen. It was the same man…