SILVER: Acheron (A River of Pain) (The SILVER Series) (18 page)

Luka’s hands jolt her back to reality.

One hand slides over her stomach and comes to a rest on her hip, while the other slips under her neck and around her shoulder. Cradling her head in the crook of his arm, he plants a kiss on her before she even knows it’s coming. Her objections temporarily smothered, he pulls her hips toward him and holds her against him.

If Luka’s intentions were to ply her with alcohol and get to second base, hurrah: a few more minutes and he’d be able to return home victorious. Yet, this was never the kind of victory he wanted, and her tears stop him dead in his tracks.

Intoxicated beyond the capacity for rational thought, Silver couldn’t tell if it was the alcohol that made her instantly nauseas, or the sensation of Luka’s arousal when he’d pressed her body against his. She also couldn’t tell whether it was self-pity, or the sudden, crushing thought of Alex that made her cry.

All she knows for sure is that she has to pee and she wants to go home, and Luka is more than willing to oblige her on both counts. He makes sure she has privacy while she pees in an alley way, then he drives her home—or as close to it as she will allow him to get.

Silence eats at them the whole way there. Silver pretends to sleep, resting her head against the window, trying to ignore the uncomfortable jostling over every bump and corpse along the way. She also pretends not to notice when Luka hydroplanes in a pool of blood and water, flushed out from a butcher shop after a profitable night of bloodshed, and almost wipes out on a street corner.

“Sorry,” he mumbles.

Sorry for what, though? Almost killing them both? Or for coming within a hair’s breadth of taking advantage of her?

Either way, Silver’s too tired to give it much thought. She has the car door open before the vehicle even comes to a complete stop, in a deserted side street a couple of blocks away from the theatre.

Before she can get a foot on the ground, though, Luka stops her and places a hand on her arm. “About before …”

Bollocks.

Silver winces at the thought of having to flounder her way through a conversation of that emotional depth when she’s still half-cut, and kind of has to pee again.

“Don’t, Luka.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t make things complicated.” She brushes his hand away. “By all accounts, my life’s pretty messed up as it is.”

Rebuffed again, Luka lets her leave without argument.

Another cold, lonely night for all.

Cruel Favour

Three more weeks and a dozen more Dodgers.

With each new bounty, Silver continues to prove her worth as Maydevine’s ‘inside man’. He buys her lunch at least once a week, and they talk about nonsense—otherness and junk. He has a hot water tank installed in her bathroom so that she can shower like a proper human being, but she never invites him to see where she lives.

It’s embarrassing, for one thing. She’s hiding a strange female in her bed, for another. Clearly not a whore, Silver still has no idea who—or what—Alice is, but she knows much better than to let anyone working for Omega catch sight of her.

Luka continues to be Silver’s Police Division liaison, despite the shallow river of tension running beneath their ill-defined relationship. They still socialize beyond the scope of their working partnership, and Luka still takes chances where he can—still hoping her heart might melt for him one day.

Not today, though.

Today, her pager beeps at the strike of noon, and she’s summoned to an impromptu meeting in the back seat of Maydevine’s chauffer driven car.

“I don’t have him yet,” she pre-empts Maydevine’s reason for paging her as she gets inside. “If I did, I’d have paged Luka.”

“I’m not here for that, kid.”

Her appeal.

Silver’s heart sinks, and he sees it in her face.

“Not that, either.”

Relief.

Then, “What? What did I do?”

 “A man died yesterday.”

Silver shrugs. “Men die all the time. War sucks, remember? Or has the Police Division made you soft already?”

Maydevine ignores that, and heads straight for shock tactics.

“He was my best Enforcer.”

Silver’s heart practically stops beating. If this is going to be a job offer, she doesn’t want to hear it—she’s no executioner.

“Did Luka put you up to this? He thinks I need toughening up, is that it?”

Maydevine rolls his eyes. For the most part, any traits passed between them have gone from father to daughter, but this particular expression of annoyance has traveled in the other direction. He swears that neither of them ever performed that precise optical maneuver until the day she became a teenager.

“Really?” he sighs. “Since when have you known me to make professional decisions based on the whims of a lovesick boy?”

Great, she thinks. Maydevine knows about that little kerfuffle. Luka probably confided in him—he was prone to that. Ever since they were kids, Luka would run his thoughts by Maydevine, and Silver hated it. She understood it, but she hated it just the same. Luka’s father was a good man—Police Division stock—but he was terrible when it came to imparting any fatherly advice upon his only son.

Maydevine, on the other hand, always knew just the right thing to say. He was stern, but fair and patient. He had the greatest respect for children who showed good sense and reason, and he wouldn’t talk down to anyone. No baby talk—not from this guy. He’d tell it like it was, or is, or how it was going to be. He was nothing if not consistent and reliable and deeply protective.

Now, though, Silver is questioning his motivation.

“I don’t kill humans,” she reiterates. “So don’t even bother asking.”

“It pays well.”

“I have what I need.”

“I’m not here to argue with you.”

“So I can leave?”

Silver opens the door, but doesn’t go anywhere; she has the sense that Maydevine isn’t quite done.

“There’s another reason I’m here,” he confesses, waiting for her to close the door again before he continues. “Do you want to know what all of this is doing to him?”

Silence.

Silver’s heart implodes.

Alex.

She shakes her head. “Not really.”

“You don’t care?”

“That’s not what I said.”

“Then you’ll want to know what he’s going through.”

“Stop it.”

“The man’s a wreck without you.”

“We’re not doing this right now.”

“You’re making a mistake, Ella.”

Silver shows her frustration by folding her arms, but she stays in the car, pouting like the little girl she used to be.

“I’m afraid you’ll push this too far, and you won’t be able to come back from it,” he keeps on. “You’ll destroy him.”

“Give it a rest, Papa, please.”

He can tell she’s holding back tears, so he stops. Her quick slip back into the informality of their father-daughter relationship shows her vulnerability, and he doesn’t want to hurt his child; he only wants to nudge her in the right direction.

“Why are you people all so convinced this is going to get better?” she says at last, her voice tight and controlled. “I’m not getting out of here, and you know it.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“If Alex knows I’m alive and my appeal gets denied, he’ll do something ridiculous—that, you
do
know.”

Her sharp inference is that Maydevine ought to know, from personal experience, how that tune goes, and should be able to whistle it from memory. He readily quit the Hunter Division for her, just as Alex would quit the Sentinel District completely.

“So, you’re doing this for him, is that it?” Maydevine tries to suppress the criticism in his voice.

“Obviously.”

“Very little you do is obvious to me these days, kid.”

“In the long run, it’s better for him if he thinks I’m dead. You, of all people, should be able to understand that.”

The silence returns.

Maydevine cares little for her condemnation of the choices he’s made. She’d die without him here, and that’s the cruel truth of it.

They both know it.

Finally, Silver reaches for the door handle again. “May I please be dismissed?”

“Depends. Are we still on for lunch tomorrow?”      

“Not if you mention his name ever again, do you understand? It doesn’t matter how right you think you are, I
know
what’s best for him.”

Maydevine lacks the energy to get into it with her, so he shoos her away.

“Page Luka when you find the Dodger.”

“Duh.” Silver rolls her eyes.

As it would turn out, that was kind of a lie. If she’d have paged Luka as soon as she caught the Dodger, what happened next, wouldn’t have.

*************************

In a broken down residential house in South Town, Silver thinks she has the drop on her Dodger—but she’s wrong. She should’ve paged Luka with the location and had him meet her there, just to be safe. He could’ve brought an armed unit of Agents, which would be appropriate given that this particular Dodger is a known arms dealer.

Maydevine’s orders were quite specific.

Find him.

Call in his location.

Don’t try to take him.

Good advice, if only Silver had listened to it.

Now, Silver is hiding behind an upturned table, trying her best not to get shot. “Put the gun down, shit face.”

“
You
engaged
me
, remember? Backing out of the fight now wouldn’t be good for your public image.”

The Dodger fires at her, his double-barrel shotgun taking out half of the table and only missing her by inches. Silver looks down at her HK USP and pouts to herself. Being this unprepared doesn’t exactly make her feel comfortable.