Page 38 of Mongrels United
Maryan glared at Nash, stepped around him and stalked down the corridor. Grady could almost see the steam trailing her.
“You do have a way with people, don’t you?” Grady told Nash, as he came over to where she stood with one foot in the doorway so the door wouldn’t close.
Nash scowled. “People like me just fine.”
Grady ignored the rebuttal. “What are you doing here?” She kept her voice down.
He rolled his eyes. “Looking for you.” His volume matched hers.
“How did you know to look here?”
He shrugged. “You told me to come to the Bridge. When I got there, you weren’t there, and no one would say why. Westcott wanted to scrape out my brains, along with a psychologist…” He paused. “Only reason you wouldn’t be there to figure out this thing with the…” He looked around. The corridor was empty. “The only thing that would keep you away from finding out more about the Bellish would be something like this. You live in the Esquiline. This is the first place I looked.”
“I’m not sure if I’m impressed or just relieved that no one on the Bridge told you where to find me.”
“I didn’t ask anyone,” Nash said. “They’re your people. I knew they wouldn’t tell me.” His gaze flickered toward the bed where her father lay. Then back to her. “That’s your father, isn’t it?”
She nodded, her heart doing a funny little squeeze and flop.
Nash’s voice dropped even lower. “What happened, Grady?”
She rested her back against the wide frame of the door and turned her head to look at the bed. “As near as Jackalyn’s Guards can put together, my father went out to buy fresh coffee at the Esquiline Markets. Which he does, sometimes, because they brew it from actual beans, there. If he’s had a restless night, or brooded over something…” She couldn’t help leaping to her conversation with her father about her missed dinner, and his worry over her. Had he seen through her lie about the danger around Bellish? “We don’t know who did it yet, but someone attacked him and left him unconscious in the alleyway by the store. That’s where they found him.” She rolled her head back to look at Nash.
He was leaning against the other side of the doorframe, too, his silvered gaze steady. “Robbery?” he asked.
“About an hour ago…at least I think so, I’ve lost track of time…anyway, not long ago, my father’s writing box was found for sale in one of the Wall District curio stalls. The owner of the stall said a little kid with big eyes asked him to buy it, said his dad was sick, so he gave the kid a couple dozen credits…” Grady swallowed.
“Damn…” Nash breathed. Then, “What’s a writing box?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Grady said tiredly, her gaze going back to her father. “Whoever it was—and it wasn’t the child, the child was just the fence—whoever it was, they took what they thought was valuable, that would get them a few credits.” She brought her gaze back to Nash. “Perhaps to buy Bellish.”
He didn’t react to that, except to exhale heavily.
She turned to study her father. He hadn’t moved since she had arrived, but she didn’t want to miss the moment he did. The physician had told her that the next few hours would determine if her father would recover…or not.
“Hey.” Nash curled his hand around her arm. “Grady.”
She shook her head.
He drew her across the open doorway. “If I tell anyone, you can kill me,” he breathed, and pulled her against him. “Go on. Let it out.” And he pressed her head against his very warm, very large shoulder.
She tried to protest, but the words caught in her throat, twisted there, causing pain that made her eyes water, and abruptly she was crying in great heaving sobs that shook her.
She closed her eyes and wept, but the fury that had been ignited in her middle was not quenched. It became hotter and harder as her tears diminished.
Until finally, she pulled away from Nash and looked into his eyes. “Help me stop this. Not as your father’s son, but as you, because you…” She sighed. “You’re the only one I know who is just as scared and angry as me.”
He nodded and straightened from his lean against the door, which gave out a pneumatic hiss of protest. “So let’s get to work.”
Chapter Sixteen
When Grady didn’t suggest that they take separate routes back to the Bridge so they weren’t seen together, Nash relaxed, and only then realized he had been braced for her to request it. Instead, she walked fast in the direction of the train station.
“Let me buy a pod,” Nash said instead. “We’ll catch something, sitting on the train.”
“It’s sterilized every day,” she said, but didn’t protest as he headed for a pair of taxi pods parked between two houses.
He fired up the pod and programmed in the destination while she settled beside him and sealed the canopy. Her sigh was nearly inaudible, but her slump back in the seat was real enough.
