The Last Orphan
Chapter 44

Rathsberger and Tenpenny bookended Evan down the stairs, through the partygoers, past the tumbling waterfall and string quartet, and to the massive pivot door in the front, where a rugby scrum’s worth of no-necks continued to check faces and names. The two marines were sure not to touch Evan. Contact would be reserved for a future date.

They walked him out into a soft spitting rain, across the quartz driveway to the edge of the property where the front gardens met Meadow Lane. They halted once Evan’s boots hit asphalt, facing him from the rim of the lawn.

Line in the sand.

A half step behind Rath, Tenpenny glowered at him. Dew had caught in his dated mustache. His eyes were brown and forgettable.

Evan flat-out f*****g hated him.

Hated his cowardice in how he’d hidden behind his men upstairs. Hated how he’d clutched the younger woman inside and nuzzled her neck while pretending to steady her. Hated how he wielded his height as if it were something earned rather than a throw of the genetic die.

Evan stared up at Tenpenny, his best ask-yourself-do-I-look-scared glare. Rath withdrew the test tube once more, tapped it against his knuckles.

“You enjoy yourself,” Evan asked, “feeding ants through the face of Angela Buford’s pimp?”

When Rath smiled, it looked like a wound reopening.

Tenpenny answered, “Angela Buford? Never heard of her.” Forehead elevating, eyelids dimming, a partially suppressed grin twitching the edges of his mouth—microexpressions correlated with deception. “There’s so many girls around here.” He kept Rath’s bulk between himself and Evan. “I know your type. I learned folks like you inside and out from a lifetime as a fixer. You’re one of those guys who thinks well of yourself, who thinks he rises above it all. When we both know that if you had the access I do, you’d get your d**k dirty every chance you got.” A gleam of a smile. “Just like me.”

The rain was lighter now, little more than a summer mist stirred into the fog. Evan’s skin felt cold and raw, and he could feel paint melting down his cheeks. The mansion loomed at Tenpenny’s back, seeming to grow right out of him, an edifice of power, of faceless dominance. An echo of Joey’s words returned to Evan, cutting through the soupy air: I’m mad at the other asaltantes culeros who abused me just because I was there and small and had the right anatomy. He thought about how much bigger the other foster boys had been than him—the Mystery Man, too. How he’d once been a twelve-year-old knocked down on his hands and knees, drooling b***d onto the cracked asphalt of a handball court.

For a moment it felt like there was no bottom. That it would never end. Just an everlasting cycle of might against those with nothing more than a prayer and whatever grit they could summon out of thin air.

Tenpenny seemed to sense his thoughts. “You know the most fun part?” His leer hung crooked on his face. His sideburns were coarse, unclipped. “Knowing how to undress someone who needs convincing. It’s hard business. Getting the jeans off. They bunch at the shoes. You want to f**k them when they’re lively, you see. If you have to force it outright, then they get disoriented. That’s less fun. So you make them do the calculation. Will it hurt more if they get knocked around a little? Choked a bit in the heat of the action? If they get their face banged against the headboard? You want them to understand it’s most enjoyable for everyone if they. Just. Give. Up.”

Evan blinked against the rain. His thoughts pooled, dark and rageful.

“We’re locking down the estate,” Tenpenny said. “No more sneaking inside with your Halloween getup, cute as it is.”

The right side of Rath’s chin was shiny with rain or drool that had leaked past the seal of his malformed lips.

“I’ll leave the chitchat to you two.” Rath set the heel of his hand on the butt of his holstered pistol. “And I’ll leave the airy-fairy bullshit to Mr. Devine. But I want you to know. I’m a knife-and-bullets man. Just like you. But better.” He shuffled forward a half step, close enough for Evan to smell his sweat. His eyes were pretty blue, one clear as day, the other stabbing out through a morass of necrotic flesh. His voice came as a grumble bleared through his misshapen mouth. “You know how this ends, don’t you?”

The line sounded rehearsed, like something said by a sheriff in a two-bit western.

The rain picked up, fuzzing everything at a hard slant. The men didn’t retreat so much as fade back toward the house, and then Evan was alone on the desolate extravagant edge of Billionaire’s Row.

He stood with his face uptilted, feeling the mask melt off it.

The dynamics inside Luke Devine’s domain felt surreal and disorienting. Was he a nation-state as Naomi feared? His own center of gravity around which other power players rotated captively? The crazed genius whom Echo had described? He did emanate a kind of influence that was hard to put to words. It was as though he had a distortion field around him that warped perspective. Evan couldn’t get a handle on him.

Evan had approached Tartarus and Devine as he had targets in the past. But this mission was unlike any other. And Devine—in his unerring coolness, in his inscrutable manner, in the intel at his command—was different from anyone Evan had encountered.

Which meant that to face him Evan had to be different, too.

baby mobile chiming a nursery rhyme

The water ran chalky and opaque down his black shirt. He peeled it off, used it to wipe his face. Beneath he wore a lab-engineered undershirt designed with an adversarial pattern to confuse machine-vision algorithms and thwart facial-recognition software.

raw sobbing from another room

The air smelled of salt and perfume and champagne. The front of the house was surprisingly free of guests, a peaceful break in the storm after the late arrivals had trickled in. Twinning rows of exotic foreign cars funneled to the porch. The massive front door was closed, guards and valets sheltering from the rain inside.

his tiny, tiny hand gripping a smooth white rail

And then

letting

go.

The rain tapped Evan’s bare face as he looked up at the broken sky. He dropped the black shirt, smudged white with makeup, in the mud, strode back onto the property, and rang the doorbell. Even over the din of the party, he heard throaty chimes, deep like organ pipes.

The towering pivot door yawned open, a break in the sheer face of the mansion.

A half dozen guards formed a semicircle in the foyer. In their suits they looked like a receiving line at a wedding. Behind them the party pulsed and roared. Tenpenny and the surviving marines were nowhere in evidence.

“The Nowhere Man here to see Mr. Devine,” Evan said. “Please ask if he’ll receive me.”

The guards instinctively stepped away from him, widening their gaps but holding the line. One patted Evan down over his clothes, his hand freezing when it reached the outline of the ARES pistol snugged in the Kydex appendix holster. When Evan removed the 1911, the men tensed as if braced for an intercontinental ballistic missile to come through the roof. When Evan handed his weapon over, the guard breathed out a gust of relief.

One of the others pressed forefinger to earpiece, turning away and murmuring something in a Slavic accent. A bead of sweat trailed from his sideburn to his collar. He kept his eyes on Evan the entire time.

The guard nodded at the voice on the other end and then nodded again. “Please,” he said to Evan. “Come in.”

As Evan moved a few steps into the enormous foyer, the lights pulsed—the gargantuan chandelier, the sconces, the accent lights—all of them all at once. The string quartet stopped midnote. The rain-bars ceased, their final downpour vanishing into the floor. The staff stopped moving—the guards, the busboys, the caterer’s assistants with their silver trays—and a moment later the guests did as well. A silence asserted itself through Tartarus, everyone paralyzed in a kind of awe.

And then the staff members clapped their white gloves briskly and the partygoers streamed out, some still holding glasses and appetizer plates. The string quartet folded up their act as neatly as street musicians. Staff left platters and stations. The throng surged toward the entrance, funneling past Evan and out the colossal door at his back.

He stood in place, holding firm against the current.

As the last guests flowed out, Evan sensed movement way up above on the second-floor landing.

Luke Devine stood near the top of the staircase, his palms resting on the railing. He wore a beautifully fitted suit—a costume change?—and it struck Evan that he hadn’t taken note of Devine’s clothing before, an uncharacteristic lapse.

Devine beamed down; he looked positively delighted.

“Didn’t mean to interrupt the whole evening,” Evan said.

“This is what the party was for,” Devine said. “You.” His voice found resonance off the walls and ceiling and came back legion.

“Are we gonna keep shouting like Romeo and Juliet?” Bizarrely, Evan’s voice did not echo as Devine’s did. “I’m rusty on my iambic pentameter.”

“Of course not.” Devine nodded at the stairs. “If you’ll join me.”

He made a magnanimous gesture eastward toward the master wing of the building. The place was so massive that cardinal points seemed necessary; it was like orienting on a mountain range or an open prairie.

Evan moved up the stairs past the three monkeys. His boots made the only sound, rapping against the wooden steps hollowly, as if requesting entry.

Devine stood on the landing above, backlit severely so he was nothing more than an outline of a man. Somehow, magically, he was holding the ARES 1911, though Evan had not seen his pistol conveyed upstairs during the mass exodus.

The interminable staircase seemed to grow longer even as Evan mounted it. Devine held the pistol out to his side. Tenpenny appeared to claim it, glared at Evan, and then retreated from view, leaving a suspended trail of smoke from his cigarette.

At last Evan reached the top, Devine waiting patiently with a posture suited to a military portrait. Over the small man’s shoulder, Evan cast an eye at the alluring scarlet door. He wondered just what it would take for him to see behind the curtain.

“Welcome back,” Devine said.

He coasted smoothly across the Calacatta marble. His head and torso glided evenly at Evan’s side; his footfall made no sound.

They reached the door. The upholstery was tufted silk with big glossy buttons.

“Why don’t you come in.” Devine palmed the previously locked door, which swung inward on lubricated hinges without so much as a creak. “I’d like to show you exactly what I’m up to.”

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