“She's pregnant and I'm bloodthirsty,” Nova adds, already peeling off her leather duster. “Wait. Reverse that.” Carefully, she drapes the coat over Wren's trembling shoulders. “Fine. Fine. But if there's stabbing, someone films it.”
“There's been stabbing,” Wren says faintly.
Everyone stops.
“I stabbed him,” she clarifies, to the gravel. “With ascalpel.”
A beat of silence. Then Cole makes a sound like a man falling in love.
“Oh, Ilikeher.”
“Trailer,” I say. “Now. Please.”
Jules carefully herds Wren to my trailer. “Come on, Doc. Let's get you a shirt that closes and something with alcohol in it. You can tell us about the scalpel. Spare no detail. I want angles. Depth of penetration.”
“Jules,” Elias says, sounding exasperated.
“What? I'm interviewing.”
Wren looks back at me over her shoulder—bug-eyed—and I hold her gaze until my trailer door shuts behind the three of them.
Then I turn to my brothers.
“Her boss. Dr. Howard Vance. Owns the practice in town.” My hands have curled into fists without my permission. “He came in while she was alone. Tore her blouse. Hurt her wrist.” The words taste like copper. “She got a scalpel in him and ran here.”
Nobody speaks for a moment, everyone taking it in.
“Well,” Silas says finally, sliding his hands into his pockets. “It sounds like the good doctor is overdue for a very long vacation. Unplanned. No forwarding address.”
“His wife's leaving him,” I say. “Wren mentioned it. A man in the middle of losing everything, drinking, sleeping in his car. Nobody blinks if he skips town. Might not even get reported until we're long gone from Thistlewood.”
“Might,” Jonah rumbles. He's got his arms crossed, and while he looks reluctant, he also looks resolved. I saw him look at Wren's wrist the same as the rest of them. “Two men vanishing from one small town in the same week is a lot to swallow, brother. Harlan's already got paint on hishouse and rumors in the diner. The town's awake. They'll start counting heads.”
“So we don't make him vanish.” Logan's voice is casual. Too casual. He's got that light behind his eyes, the one that used to scare the workers before they got used to it. “Failing practice. Wife's leaving him. He's been drinking. Everyone at that diner has watched him circle the drain for months.” He shrugs. “Sad, really. Man like that, losing his marriage, his money. Sometimes they just go out to the barn and don't come back.”
“A suicide,” Elias says.
“A suicide,” my twin confirms.
Silas is already nodding, the machinery behind his eyes turning. “It writes itself. He's got a stab wound that needs explaining, but a man who's decided to end it doesn't go to the hospital over a puncture. We control the scene, we control the story. Note's easy. I'll have his email history and his handwriting inside an hour.”
“The wound placement matters,” Cole says. “A puncture from a scalpel doesn't fit any self-harm pattern. We make sure the method we pick renders it irrelevant. Or unfindable. Self-inflicted shotgun blast to the stomach?”
“Then it's settled.” Elias plants the cane and looks around the circle. “Rowe, Silas, Cole, Logan. Tonight, after closing. Jonah, Marek, Teddy—we stay. The women don't leave the lot, and nobody who isn't ours gets within a hundred feet of them. If Vance called the police on her, they'll come here looking.”
“He hasn't,” Marek says.
We all turn. He's standing at the edge of the circle with his hands loose at his sides, those dreamy eyes on the middle distance, and for a second, I brace for tarot logic.
“You pulled a card on it?” Teddy asks warily.
Marek's mouth curves. “No. I thought about it for five seconds.” He looks at Teddy the way a teacher looks at a slow student he's fond of. “A man like that doesn't walk into a police station and say a woman he considers beneath him put a blade in him. He'd have to explain why he was close enough for her to reach. He'd have to say the words out loud in front of other men.” He shrugs, just with one shoulder. “His pride will kill the report faster than we'll kill him.”
Cole barks out a laugh. “I hate it when you do the mystic act and then it's just commonsense.”
“The common sense is the mystic act,” Marek says, and drifts back toward his tent.
Elias catches my eye. “Go see your woman. We move at midnight.”