The Princess and The Rook

The cab got stuck at the airport exit, and it was the bikes' fault.

A hammering that came up through the seat and settled behind her back teeth. On the dash, the driver's little plastic saint shivered on its suction cup. Ahead of them, cars were easing onto the gravel shoulder one after another. Nobody honked. Nobody so much as tapped a horn.

"Sovereigns," the driver said. "They don't run the airport road unless something's going on."

"Something's always going on with them."

His eyes found her in the mirror. "You know them, miss?"

"No."

Not a lie, exactly. She'd spent five years making it true.

They came down the service road in two staggered lines, black leather, a crown-and-rook patch stitched across every back. She lost count around thirty. At the head of the column, alone, rode a man with no helmet.

He wasn't doing anything. That was the annoying part. He rode the way other people sat on a couch, one hand on the grip, the other resting on his thigh, dark hair getting shoved around by the wind, and the whole line behind him held its spacing like it was tied to him with string.

He lifted two fingers off the grip.

Every engine dropped to idle. Then every engine cut.

The quiet was worse than the noise. June could hear the cab's turn signal ticking. Two cars back, a kid started crying in a minivan.

The man turned his head. Not toward her. Toward the whole stopped line of cars, slow and unbothered, a landlord checking on a building.

The rider beside him leaned over and said something, and the man answered, low and lazy, the wind carrying it through June's cracked window in pieces. "...tell him the answer's still no. He can ask again Tuesday."

Then he laughed. One corner of his mouth went up first. And half the drivers on the shoulder seemed to let out a breath at the same time, as if he'd said fine, carry on.

June knew that profile. She knew those shoulders. She had spent most of one summer, at seventeen, leaving rooms he walked into.

Rook Mercer.

Nobody called him that to his face, not the way she was thinking it. The Prince, they said, in the bars on Pier Street, in the courthouse hallways, in her stepmother's dining room with the volume dropped. His father held the title. Everybody knew who did the work.

"Miss?" The driver again. "It's green."

"Sorry. Jet lag."

The engines roared back all at once, and the column pulled away, and she watched the back of that black cut until the road bent and took it.

She hadn't told anyone she was coming home. Not Dom. Not the Reyeses.

Definitely not the Sterlings. She'd booked the ticket at three in the morning in a rented room in Edinburgh, twenty minutes after a phone call she still couldn't think about all the way through.

Nadia Frost was sitting cross-legged on a hospital bed with a legal pad on her knee, drawing boxes.

"Fault tree," she said, without looking up. "You start with the failure and work backward to the root cause. Guess what the root cause is."

June looked. At the bottom of the page, circled so hard the pen had gone through the paper: COLTON.

Something that had been clenched in her chest since Edinburgh let go so fast she nearly sat down on the floor. "You told me you had a bug."

"I said I was under the weather. I didn't say which weather." Nadia's head came up. Her whole face changed. "Oh my God. You came."

"Of course I came." June dropped onto the edge of the bed. "What did they say?"

Nadia put the pen down. She looked like a person working out how to carry something heavy through a narrow door.

"Myelodysplastic syndrome. My bone marrow's making bad blood. Some people call it pre-leukemia, which I hate, it sounds like an opening act. Intermediate risk, stage two. Decent odds it turns into the real thing. Chemo starts Thursday."

"Okay." June's voice sounded odd to her. "That's the bad news."

"That's the bad news. Want the good?"

She really did.

"Chemo only manages it. It doesn't cure it. And there's a good chance it wrecks my ovaries on the way through, so I probably can't have kids." Nadia shrugged. "I never wanted them. One less form to fill out."

June waited for the punch line. It didn't come. "That's the good news."

"I'm a glass-half-full person. Work with me." Nadia tilted her head. "My dad died of this. Same thing, same age. I figure it runs in the family like a bad haircut."

"And Colton?"

The smile went. "Colton." Nadia picked the pad back up and tapped the circled name. "Four years. We came back here to build the shop together. He held my hand in the biopsy waiting room. And while I was in the ER getting the results, he cleared the operating account, walked out with six of my nine engineers, and took the Whiteout files."

"All of them?"

"Two years of drive design. Calibration tables. The test-bench data." Nadia laughed, one dry breath. "Turns out a finance guy can carry a lot of hard drives."

June didn't say anything. She had met Colton Pryce three times. Good teeth, good handshake, the kind of man who remembered your birthday and used it later.

"I'm not crying about him," Nadia said. "I didn't cry when I signed the chemo forms by myself. It's just the money and the—"

"Give me your phone."

"What?"

"Your banking app."

Nadia handed it over, confused. June opened her own and typed in the numbers.

Every month for five years, Dom had wired her money. More than rent needed, always with the same note: for whatever.

She had spent almost none of it. It had piled up in an account she avoided opening, like a debt she didn't know how to name.

She pressed send.

Nadia's phone buzzed in her hand. She read the number and went white. She read it again out loud, and the sound that came out of her turned heads in the corridor. "This has too many zeroes. Did you hit a key twice?"

"No."

"June."

"It's an investment." June closed a hand around hers. "I want fifty percent."

"Snowline is bankrupt. Anybody with a brain already left."

"Then I'm the idiot with the money."

Nadia opened her mouth. Shut it. Her eyes went bright and she looked at the ceiling, hard, like the tiles might help. "You're the only person I can count on," she told the tiles.

"Yeah, well. I'm here now." June pulled her in and rubbed slow circles between her shoulder blades. Under the hospital gown she was thinner than she should have been. "A man who only shows up for the good stretch isn't worth the trouble. It's fine. I've got you."

Ten minutes later Nadia had blown her nose, drunk half a bottle of water, and put on what June privately called her engineer face.

"Money keeps the lights on," she said. "It doesn't save the company. There's exactly one thing that saves the company."

"Tell me."

"The National Build." She said it the way another person might say the lottery. "Sovereign Sons. Forty chapters, four hundred custom builds over three years, plus the factory race team. Their council picks a drivetrain partner at Crown Run, and the partner becomes the standard. If we land it, Snowline is a real company. If we don't, Colton hands my drive to Vanguard, who sell it to the Sovereigns at cost and laugh about it."

"When's Crown Run?"

"Twelve days."

June's hand had gone still on the blanket.

"They came to my demo at the Expo last spring," Nadia said. "One guy, back wall, arms folded, didn't say a word for forty minutes. Two days later his office called. I've never sold anything so fast."

"Who was the guy?"

"Rook Mercer."

Outside the door, a gurney rattled past. June thought about two fingers lifting off a handlebar.

"You know him?" Nadia asked.

"Know of him. Everybody does."

"He hasn't returned one call since Colton walked. I think he's sitting on it, waiting to see who's left standing." Nadia flopped back against the pillows. "I'd go myself, but Thursday I'm going to be busy throwing up."

She sat up again. "Wait. You came back out of nowhere. Your family. Did they say you could?"

June didn't talk about them much. Nadia had a handful of facts, gathered over the years the way you collect sea glass.

A judge for a father. A stepmother. A brother who wasn't a brother, though June never used the word that would have settled it, and who was the only person on earth she said my about without flinching. And five years ago June hadn't gone abroad so much as been shipped there.

June had a shorter word for it. She never said it out loud.

"Worst case, they send me away again," she said. "I made my peace with that on the plane."

She believed about seventy percent of it.

Neither of them noticed the man in the corridor, the one leaning on the vending machine with his phone held low at his chest.

He took the picture without looking at the screen. It was already on its way to somebody else's phone by the time June left the room.

Dom Reyes was standing in the middle of a salvage yard with a purchase order in his hand when his phone buzzed for the ninth time in a row.

He read the group chat on his feet.

Boone had forwarded a photo of a hospital corridor with June in it, caught mid-turn, hair fallen across her cheek, wearing that faintly lost look she'd always had when she thought nobody was watching.

Boone had tagged him under it. Nine times. Ten. DOM. DOM. SHE'S BACK. DID YOU KNOW.

He closed the picture and opened their thread. No new messages.

The last time she'd texted first was two months ago. Happy New Year.

Three words, no punctuation, like the end of a sentence she'd decided not to finish.

The girl who had once narrated her whole day to him, every dog she'd seen and every kid she hated, had gone quiet by degrees, the way a tide goes out. He knew why. Knowing why didn't make it reasonable.

So she'd flown home without telling him. Fine. That fit the pattern.

It also made something in his chest do a thing he had no intention of looking at in a yard full of scrap.

"Boss?" The foreman was holding out a clipboard. Dom signed without reading it. The phone rang in his other hand.

"What are you doing that you can't answer a message?" Boone, at full volume. "June's back and you didn't tell any of us?"

"Why would I tell you?"

"She's my little sister too!"

"She's got a brother. It isn't you."

"Which is why I need to see her! Dinner tonight. Whole crew. I'll grill."

"You burn water."

"Then I'll order pizza and take credit. Come on. I miss her."

"You miss having somebody laugh at your card game."

"That's the same thing." A pause. "But also I miss her."

Dom hung up. Waved off the foreman. Dialed.

She was crossing the hospital lobby when the phone lit. Dom. She knew why before she picked up. News in this town moved faster than planes.

She answered while she was still deciding how to explain.

"You're back." His voice was the way it always was, unhurried, almost ordinary, and something in her chest that had been floating since Edinburgh came to rest.

"Yeah. Landed this afternoon."

"What were you doing at St. Brigid's? You sick?"

"I'm fine. Visiting a friend."

He didn't push. "Come to dinner. Send me where you are, Nico'll pick you up."

"Okay," she said.

The sky had gone the color of dishwater by the time she got outside. April in Port Halloran kept its cold after dark, and she turned up the collar of her trench and stood at the curb with her bag between her feet.

The Suburban pulled up fast. A boy in a prospector's plain vest came around the back and opened the rear door with a small, careful bow. Nineteen, maybe. She'd never seen him in her life.

"Miss June."

"You know who I am?"

"Everybody does," he said, and took her bag.

She thanked him. Bent to get in.

Stopped.

Someone was already sitting inside.