Chapter 10: Hush Money

Chapter 10: Chapter 10: Hush Money

The message came on a Tuesday, five words long.

My office. 3 p.m. —G.H.

Ironfang’s headquarters was a converted warehouse in the Dockside district, all brick and steel beams and polished concrete, the kind of place that wanted you to know people had once worked there with their hands. Monster trophies lined the lobby: a wyvern skull, a pair of ogre tusks, a stuffed basilisk whose glass eyes followed you across the room. Elias had walked past them a hundred times on his way to the porters’ locker room.

He had never been upstairs.

Vance met him at the stairwell. The archer had a fresh bruise on one cheekbone, and Elias was pleased to think Dex might have put it there. Vance didn’t say a word. He just looked Elias up and down, the way you’d look at a dog that came home after being hit by a car, and walked him up two flights to a frosted-glass door.

Garrick’s office was big enough to park an SUV in. A wall of windows looked out over the street and the cranes along the river beyond. The opposite wall was covered in photos of Ironfang’s history: Garrick shaking hands with an Association director, Garrick holding a boss core up for the cameras, Garrick beside a silver-haired man wearing a council lapel pin, whose face Elias recognized from the news but couldn’t name.

And a guild photo from three years ago: six hunters in front, two porters at the back. Elias didn’t know either porter. He had never seen them on a raid.

He filed that away.

"Pierce." Garrick didn’t get up. He sat behind a desk the size of a dining table, in a charcoal suit instead of armor, looking rested and pleasant, like a man who had never shoved anyone into anything. "Sit. How are the ribs?"

"Healing," Elias said, and sat.

"Good. Good." Garrick smiled. "You gave us all a scare."

Behind Elias, Vance closed the door and stayed there, leaning against it.

Garrick opened a drawer and took out an envelope.

It was thick. Not nice-bonus thick. Brick thick, so full that the flap didn’t quite close. He set it on the desk and slid it across the polished wood with two fingers.

"Survivor’s bonus," Garrick said. "Ironfang takes care of its own."

Elias looked at the envelope. He didn’t touch it.

"The Association will call you in for a follow-up," Garrick went on, as casually as if he were discussing the weather. "Standard procedure after an irregular. They’ll want your account." He leaned back. "Officer Dunn tells me you hid behind the pillars until the boss burned itself out. That’s a hell of a story."

"That’s what happened."

"Of course it is." Garrick’s smile didn’t move. "And the door?"

Elias kept his face very still. "What door?"

The pause went on just long enough to be a test.

"Exactly," Garrick said softly. "It was dark. It was chaos. My people were dying, and you were scared out of your mind. Nobody would blame you for not remembering how you ended up on the wrong side of that wall."

"I don’t remember much," Elias said. "It was dark."

"Memory’s a funny thing." Garrick tapped the envelope. "It tends to get clearer when you’re not worried about money. How’s your sister doing? Mira, isn’t it? Merridan General, fourth floor?"

The room went very quiet.

Elias had known men like Garrick his whole life: guild masters, landlords, the debt collector who knocked on their door the week after the Crimson Break. Men who never said the threat out loud. They didn’t need to. They just let you know they knew where you kept your soft things.

Somewhere behind his ribs, in the grey place, he could have sworn he felt Aveline go still, as though she’d heard a sword being drawn in another room.

He thought about saying it. You shoved me. You sealed the door. You left me to die and told the cameras I volunteered. He thought about the Oathbearer echo and Quick Step, and about how far across this desk he could get before Vance moved.

Then he thought about bed fourteen. The stabilizer. The pink envelopes. The new treatment the doctors kept mentioning in careful voices.

He picked up the envelope.

"She’s doing better," he said. "Thank you for asking."

Garrick’s smile widened by a single millimeter. "Glad to hear it. Ironfang looks after its own, Pierce. Remember that."

"I’ll remember," Elias said.

And he would. Every word. The photo on the wall. The two porters he’d never met. The councilman’s pin. The exact way Garrick had said fourth floor. He folded it all up as neatly as the cash and tucked it somewhere deep, where it would keep.

Dex was waiting in the lobby, sitting under the stuffed basilisk and bouncing one knee.

"Suspended," he announced as Elias came down. "Two weeks without pay, for ’assaulting a senior member.’" He made air quotes. "Vance’s face assaulted my fist, but sure."

"I’m sorry."

"Don’t be. Best thing I’ve done all year." Dex fell into step beside him toward the doors. His eyes went to Elias’s jacket, where the envelope made an obvious square. "So. How much was the bribe?"

"It’s a survivor’s bonus."

"Uh-huh."

They pushed out through the glass doors into the cold: dock wind and the smell of diesel. Elias was halfway down the steps when Dex stopped and looked back up at the building.

In the second-floor window, a figure stood behind the glass of Garrick’s office. As they watched, it raised a tumbler to its mouth. Even from the street, they could see the hand holding it shaking so hard the liquid sloshed.

"Did you see his hands?" Dex said quietly.

Elias had. He’d seen them upstairs too, when Garrick slid the envelope across the desk: a fine tremor in the fingers. He had filed it under nothing.

"Six years," Dex said. "Six years I’ve hauled for that man. I’ve seen him punch through a troll’s skull. I watched him walk out of a B-rank break with his arm on fire, laughing." He shook his head slowly. "I’ve never once seen his hands shake."

The figure in the window turned away.

Elias looked at the building for a long moment. Then he turned and walked toward the bus stop, the envelope heavy against his ribs.

Garrick Holt was afraid. Of the Association, maybe. Of the cameras. Of a porter who should have died and didn’t.

Elias filed that away too.