Claimed By My Enemy

Uncle Eiden’s truck caught fire at a red light on the Blue Hills Parkway, and Quill McMahon walked into Harrow House twelve minutes late, smelling of burnt upholstery, with two coffees in a cardboard tray.

Róisín was waiting at the top of the stairs.

“You’re late.”

“I know.”

“You smell like a bonfire.”

“Eiden’s truck.” He held out the second coffee. She took it, which meant she’d forgive him eventually. “Engine went up at the lights. We had to push it onto the shoulder.”

“Is he all right?”

“He’s standing on the parkway telling a state trooper it’s a known fault.”

“Is it?”

“Third time this year, so it’s known to me.”

She fell into step beside him down the corridor. Harrow House had been an inn in the eighteen hundreds and still smelled of it: beeswax, damp stone, a century of woodsmoke soaked into the beams. Neutral ground. Nobody’s wolves had marked it in living memory, which made it the only building in Massachusetts where a McMahon and a Pesaresi could sit in the same room without somebody bleeding.

Mostly.

“Who’ve they brought?” he asked.

“Diego. Zunino. The old adviser with the eyebrows.”

“Vanni.”

“And the cousin.”

Quill slowed. “Colas’s here?”

“Came in smiling.”

“He’s always smiling.”

“More than usual.”

Quill tucked that away and pushed open the door.

The long room had windows on three sides, and the Pesaresi delegation had arranged themselves along the far end of the table like a family portrait someone forgot to hang. Folders squared to the table edge. Maps pinned flat at each corner with glass paperweights they’d obviously brought from home. Davide Vanni, eyebrows first. Mazzi Zunino writing in a notebook he angled away from everyone. Colas Pesaresi, forty and handsome, turning his phone face down on the wood with a pleasant little smile.

And Diego, alone at the walnut desk under the east window.

Diego didn’t look up.

He was reading, one hand flat on the page, the other resting beside a coffee cup, the sleeves of his charcoal shirt rolled twice to the same point below each elbow. He’d been sitting in that chair for twelve minutes, and he was going to make sure Quill felt every one of them.

“You’re late,” Diego said, and turned a page.

“Uncle Eiden’s truck caught fire.”

The page stopped halfway over. Dark eyes lifted.

“Why?”

“No idea.”

“You were in the truck.”

“Yeah.”

“And you don’t know why it caught fire.”

“I’m not a mechanic, Pesaresi. I was in the passenger seat eating a scone and then there was smoke.”

Diego looked at him for a long moment. “How do your people still possess territory?”

Quill grinned. “Natural selection.”

Vanni made a noise into his hand. Mazzi wrote something down.

Quill didn’t go to his chair. He never went to his chair first. He walked the length of the room instead, past his own empty seat and Róisín dropping into hers, all the way to the writing desk under the east window where Diego had set up a second workspace, because one table apparently wasn’t enough for a Pesaresi. He hopped up onto the edge of it.

“Get off,” Diego said.

“No.”

“That’s eighteenth-century walnut.”

“Congratulations to the tree.”

“Get. Off.”

Quill reached over, picked up Diego’s coffee, and drank some.

Black and bitter. It tasted like the inside of Diego’s mouth probably did, and Quill put that thought in the river where it belonged.

“Needs sugar,” he said.

Diego’s face didn’t move at all. “I am going to kill you.”

“See? Now we’re negotiating.”

He set the cup back down on its exact ring. Then he dug into the inside pocket of his jacket, pulled out a hunting knife in a worn leather sheath, and laid it on top of Diego’s papers.

For the first time that morning, Diego properly stopped.

He’d lost track of that knife at the last session. Quill had watched him look for it—coat, then table, then under the table, his face going flatter and flatter—and hadn’t said a word, because by then the knife had been in Quill’s back pocket, and the edge on it had been a crime.

Diego drew it from the sheath and turned it to the window. The steel was clean for the first time in years, oiled, the edge honed so fine it caught the light in one thin unbroken line.

“You took this,” Diego said.

“You left it on the table.”

“Where anyone could have picked it up.”

“Anyone didn’t. I did.” Quill swung his boot against the desk leg. “You’d chipped it. There was a nick the size of my thumbnail. What’ve you been doing, opening crates?”

Diego said nothing, which meant yes.

“It’s Solingen steel. It’s older than both of us. You’re an embarrassment.”

“Give me the sheath.”

“You’ve got the sheath.”

Diego slid the knife home and set it down beside his cup, squared to the edge of the page. His thumb stayed on the handle a second longer than it needed to.

Quill looked away first. He always did, with Diego. Holding that stare was like standing too close to the platform edge when the train came through.

He went to his chair.

There was a plate at his place.

He hadn’t brought a plate. Nobody from his side had brought a plate. It was one of Harrow House’s heavy white ones with a crack in the glaze, and on it was a sandwich—prosciutto, provolone, roasted pepper—cut into two neat triangles.

Quill looked across the room.

Diego was reading again. “You haven’t eaten.”

“I ate.”

“What?”

“…Scone.”

“You said you were eating the scone when the truck caught fire.”

Quill opened his mouth.

“Eat,” Diego said.

“Stop ordering me around.”

“Then stop behaving like an idiot.”

Quill ate the sandwich.

Beside him, Róisín took a very long drink of her coffee and stared straight ahead with the face of someone who’d been watching this exact exchange for years and had given up expecting it to make sense.

The Neponset strip took an hour and forty minutes to get nowhere.

It was a mile and a half of riverbank between Milton and Hyde Park: a boatyard, two bait shops, a stretch of marsh and a row of houses where nine McMahon families had lived since before Quill was born. The Pesaresi wanted patrol rights. The McMahons wanted the Pesaresi to fuck off. Twice a year somebody rewrote the terms and twice a year somebody’s cousin got drunk and pissed on a fence post and it all started again.

“Your wolves cross the river at the boatyard every night between one and three,” Diego said, laying a patrol log on the table. “We have dates.”

“Those are kids.”

“They’re wolves.”

“They’re sixteen and they’re going to Dunkin’.” Quill leaned back until his chair tipped onto two legs. “You want them to stop crossing, move the Dunkin’.”

Mazzi’s mouth twitched. Vanni’s eyebrows climbed toward his hairline.

Colas laughed. It was a warm laugh, nicely pitched, and it went on half a second longer than the joke deserved.

Quill let his chair drop.

He’d known Colas Pesaresi as long as he’d known Diego. The cousin was the friendly one. He asked after Quill’s nan. He’d remembered Síle’s birthday once and sent a card. He’d put a hand on Quill’s shoulder at a funeral and said, Terrible business, all this, and meant it, or looked like he meant it, which on some men came to the same thing.

Today, he’d checked his phone three times in a quarter of an hour. Each time, he turned it face down again and smoothed his tie.

Quill noticed people. It was the only thing he’d ever been properly good at. Vanni’s hands shook worse in the mornings now. Mazzi had started going grey at one temple and was pretending otherwise. Diego pressed his thumb into the old scar across his palm when a conversation went somewhere he didn’t like, and he’d done it twice since the word boatyard came up.

Colas’s smile stopped at his mouth.

“—which is why,” Diego was saying, “we’d propose a joint patrol on alternating—”

Róisín’s phone buzzed against the table.

Then again.

Then it didn’t stop.

She looked at the screen and the colour left her face as fast as a tap being turned off.

“Quill,” she said. “Outside.”

He was on his feet before she finished. Behind him, Diego’s chair went back too, and Diego’s voice came low: “Sit down, Mazzi.”

The corridor was cold. Róisín had her phone pressed flat to her chest.

“It’s Fiachra.”

Quill’s whole body went still. “What about him.”

“Síle found him at the boatyard this morning. Down behind the bait shop, under the dock. He’s—” She stopped. Started again. “He’s torn up, Quill. His arm, his side. They’ve got him at Dr. Keane’s. He’s in surgery.”

Fiachra was nineteen. He was cousin Bridie’s youngest, and he’d cried when his goldfish died last year, and he still couldn’t shift without tripping over his own back legs.

“Who,” Quill said.

Róisín held out the phone. A photo from Síle: Fiachra’s jacket on the clinic floor, soaked dark.

“She says it reeks of them,” Róisín said. “Pesaresi. The whole dock does.”

Quill took the phone. He zoomed in on the jacket. Zoomed out. His thumb found a crack in the edge of the phone case and worried at it until a piece of plastic snapped off in his fingers.

“Call Da,” he said. “Tell him not to do anything until I’m there.”

“Quill—”

“Tell him.”

He handed back the phone and went inside.

The room had gone quiet. Diego stood at the head of the table. Colas was still sitting, hands folded, face arranged into concern.

Quill walked the length of the room to the walnut desk. He picked up the knife he’d sharpened, carried it back, and laid it flat on the table between himself and Diego.

“My cousin’s in surgery,” he said. “Somebody opened him up under the boatyard dock last night and left him there, and the whole riverbank stinks of your family.”

Nobody moved.

“Tell me your people didn’t do this.”

Diego looked at the knife. Then at Quill.

“My people didn’t do this.”

He said it without raising his voice, without one word more, and held Quill’s eyes the whole time. It went straight down through Quill and landed under his ribs like a stone dropped in a well.

He believed him.

Years of this man, and Quill believed him in an instant, without evidence, over a photograph of his cousin’s blood on a clinic floor.

It was the most frightening thing that had happened to him all morning, and his uncle’s truck had exploded.

Before he could open his mouth, the door behind him banged off the wall.

Cian stood in it, breathing hard from the stairs, eyes gone wolf-yellow at the edges. He had a pistol in his right hand, and it was pointed at Diego’s chest.