“Darlin’, times have changed. I don’t control the world as I used to. I’m a simple businessman, working my trade in this public house.”
I didn’t believe that, not for one second. He might be a businessman, but I doubted there was anything simple about it.
“You must know something,” I insisted, peeling off a handful of twenties and dropping them onto the desk in front of him.
His eyes flicked to the cash, just for a moment. “I have heard tell of a woman interested in speaking with you about that night.” He sat back in his squeaky chair, linking his hands behind his head, just like Luc often did, but with considerably more malice.
Confusion engulfed me. “A woman? Who? I don’t know any women from back then. Not who are still alive.”
“Alive or dead is a fluid thing these days, my Rose. What grim’s hand would be strong enough to pluck a flower in its prime?”
I saw only the flick in his eyes to the spot behind me to warn me of danger I hadn’t even heard over the music oozing from the bar. I had but an instant to glance behind me, to catch sight of the bartender’s face, before I felt a needle-sharp pain in my back.
The world went black, and gravity called me home.
—
I awoke to pain. A lot of it, and spread across my body. My vision was blurred, my head pounding, and I could taste blood.
Slowly, the world stopped spinning, and fabric came into focus.
The jeans I was wearing. I was sitting in a chair, looking down at my legs, my head hanging limp from my shoulders. My feet were below me, manacled by an impressive chain to a bare concrete floor that was dotted with blood, probably mine.
My shoulders ached, and my fingers were numb. My hands were behind me, my wrists tied together tightly behind the chair. Multiple zip ties if the biting pain was any indication.
I looked up and blinked back spots. A standing light was pointed at my face like an interrogation scene in a movie Luc would have enjoyed a little too much—and probably quoted from afterward.
Longing filled me, but I pushed it down.
First, stay alive, I told myself. Then you can think about feelings.
I heard shuffling ahead of me. “Hello? Who’s there?”
No one answered, but I heard what sounded like a children’s lullaby.
“Be still and sleep, my child,” she sang. “Be still and sleep, my child. For if you wake, the monsters will take you right to the Rookery.”
I squinted through the light at the darkness ahead, trying to gauge shapes and distances. “Who’s there? Show yourself. Danny? Is that you?”
But it wasn’t Danny. She stepped into the light, and the nightmare deepened. It was Iris, and too much the same as I’d last seen her.
Like a supernatural version of Miss Havisham, she appeared not to have changed clothes in decades. Her dress was torn, the fringe missing and bare in spots like an animal with mange. Her hair was flat and matted, and dotted with paste-jewel clips and brooches. Her skin was scarred and twisted, pocked in spots where bullets had undoubtedly penetrated.
Had she been here, in this place, for nearly a century? Hiding from the world, reliving what she’d seen? Had the violence, or her experience of it, sent her into madness? Not so mad, perhaps, that she couldn’t make a deal with the devil, pay Danny and his cronies to lure me here.
However she’d done it, how hadn’t I known? How hadn’t I saved her?
“Iris,” I said breathlessly, my mind suddenly whirling, a decade of history being rewritten, and guilt quickly piling up. “You’re alive.”
“And so are you, I see.” She reached out and slapped me, hard. My cheek sang with pain, and I tasted fresh blood again.
“I was in the priest hole,” I said. “I’d been looking for the brandy, remember?”
“You left me there. You left her here. And you walked out like you were something really special. Just the absolute bee’s knees.”
She threw a copy of the magazine at me. “All this time, you little bitch, I thought you were dead. Come to find out you were in Chicago. Hiding out and showing off. Showing your nice little tits for the camera. You left us there to die!”
“I thought everyone was dead, Iris. Everyone was dead.” Still, I searched my memory for any clue that I’d been wrong, that I’d left her there to be found by Danny O’Hare, or to crawl out alive. But I found nothing. There’d been only the smell of death, the absolute stillness of it, and the tinny sound of sirens in the distance.
I’d made a mistake. But Iris didn’t much care.
She slapped me again, this time from the other direction. My eyes watered from the sting.
“Tonight we’re going to replay that night.” She stepped out of the light, and I heard the glug of liquid flowing from a bottle. I sniffed and smelled alcohol.