Her hand trembled as she turned the knob and the hinges creaked softly in a way that made her spine shiver. Musty air escaped like the oxygen molecules were getting off a crowded subway car.

It was darker than she remembered, and that was a problem. She didn’t want to turn on the crane-armed desk lamp given that nondescript car down on the street. But like the Feds knew the layout of her house? As if they’d see the light come on and suss out that she hadn’t been in this room for how long because it was where Gerry did his work for BioMed?

Besides, it was her damn house. She could go wherever she wanted to in it.

Stepping over the threshold, she nonetheless kept the lights off, leaving the door wide to let in as much illumination as possible from the hall.

As her shadow fell across the dusty desk, her head and shoulders created a blackened cutout in the middle of the fake wood surface. When the two security guards from BioMed had come to take Gerry’s computers, they’d left the monitors, the keyboards, the printer, the modem, all the wires. The discord and vacancies left behind in the workstation made her think of a corpse that had had its organs removed, the vital parts that had engineered life gone, the connective tissue and ancillaries all that was left behind.

Now useless.

Flipping on her phone’s flashlight, she made a fat circle with the shallow beam. Amazing how much dust there was. Probably meant she needed to change her furnace filters. Or clean, of course.

The chair Gerry had spent so many hours in was turned away from the desk, the seat and arms facing left. She could picture him pivoting with his feet, standing up … going to the bathroom. Had he felt odd? Had the need for insulin intruded on his concentration because he was hungry and about to eat?

But she couldn’t lose herself in all that.

Time was wasting. Although she wasn’t sure how she knew that.

Pushing the chair out of the way, she got down on her knees and looked under the desk. In her Nancy Drew mind, she imagined an envelope taped to the underside with her name on it. When she opened the thing, there would be a note from Gerry, in his messy handwriting, telling her what to do in the event of his death. Whether to be suspicious or not. And maybe at the end, there’d be an apology for him being so distracted and withdrawn toward her.

Nothing.

She sat back on her heels. Then she gave the chair an examination worthy of a proctologist, getting into all kinds of nooks and crannies of the padded seat, the undercarriage, the rollers.

Nothing.

There was a set of file cabinets off to one side and she opened each of the drawers, training her cell phone’s light inside them. For all of Gerry’s orderly thinking, he had sucked at the basics of life, like remembering to pay bills and file taxes and get car insurance, and the anemic collection of folders that had been laid down flat, instead of suspended properly on the slides, seemed like a symptom of his my-priorities-are-elsewhere. Going through the layers, she found his employee orientation packet from RSK BioMed as well as his first set of ID credentials that had given him partial access to the facility.

Seeing his face in the little picture made her breath catch.

God, he looked so young, all clean-shaven, smiling, and bright-eyed.

The image bore little resemblance to the second ID he’d gotten, the one that went with his top secret clearance. In that photograph, he’d been grim, his eyes narrowed and baggy’d, his face drawn from stress.

Where were those credentials, anyway? she wondered. He’d kept them with him always, even when he was in here.

Their disappearance hadn’t seemed relevant before now.

The rest of the documents in the cabinets formed a chronology of their major purchases. The titles to their cars. The contract and then the mortgage for their house. Brochures for the honeymoon to Europe that they had considered signing up for. There were also copies of the taxes for the years they had been in Ithaca. A term life insurance policy on her that was still good. A term life insurance policy for Gerry for which he had been preliminarily approved, but, because he’d never gotten the physical done, was not in force.

She could remember nagging him about that and getting nowhere. At first, he’d put it off because they’d been too busy getting settled in the house. Then he’d been too busy getting settled at work. And then they hadn’t really been speaking.

Sarah shut the bottom drawer and went over to the closet across the way. Opening the lever doors, she shined her light in.

Nothing but a bald hanging rod with two pant hangers on it and a set of shelves carrying a light load of Harvard-related paraphernalia of the academic variety: textbooks, notebooks, old laptops. She was about to close the doors again when she saw the pair of boots down on the floor.

Crouching, she picked one of them up, and as she saw the mud still caked in the tread, her eyes filled with tears.

Gerry had been as outdoorsy as an orchid. He burned to a crisp in any sunlight. He hated bug bites and bee stings and anything with more than two legs and an upright ambulation. Grass and trees were things to be regarded with suspicion, as they were nothing but housing units for creepies and crawlies. And bodies of water, particularly those with more than three feet of standing or rushing H2O? Forget about it. Somewhere he had heard that there were sharks at the mouth of the Mississippi that were capable of surviving in freshwater.

So therefore, it was possible that a mutant version of one could show up in the Finger Lakes of New York. Or Lake Champlain. Or Lake George.

And yet he had gone camping with her the first month they’d arrived in Ithaca. The pair of them had invested in hiking boots and a tent and some sleeping bags. She had promised him it would be a good time. He hadn’t exactly been thrilled, but he’d known she wanted to go and had been determined to make the best of it.

The weather had been terrible for late August. Rain both days.

They’d laughed about sharks falling from the sky. And this had been before the first Sharknado had come out.

Looking at the dried mud on the sole, it seemed unfathomable that he was gone. That this boot that had been worn so casually and then put away without any mindfulness was now in her hand as a symbol of everything that had been lost when he’d died.

She was touching both their history and their unfulfilled future. And the feelings that came up for her, the sadness and mourning, were so powerful, it was just as the pain had been in the beginning for her, the raw absence of him incomprehensible.

According to the calendar, she had had two years to get used to the death. Why then did it still hurt this badly?

Sarah turned the boot over in her hand—

Something fell out and bounced on the carpet.

Frowning, she pointed her little light source at it, and the warm glow of metal was a surprise.

A key. It was an odd-shaped key.

The painting of a French king slid back on the wall of Darius’s drawing room, revealing, just as it always had, a set of narrow, curving steps that disappeared into earth. A torch, mounted on the stone wall, frothed quietly, casting liquid yellow light over the descent. The smell was the same, candle wax and lemon.

As Murhder stood at the threshold, he told himself to go down, take the bedroom on the right, crash in the bed that he’d used before.

Instead, he looked back over his shoulder. Vishous was at a computer at the receptionist’s desk in the room beyond, the Brother’s black-haired head bent forward in concentration, the hand-rolled between his teeth releasing a faint tendril of smoke, the tattoos at his temple distorted from his frown.

Off in the distance, low voices percolated. And there was the smell of bacon. Someone was making a snack.

Four of the Brothers had stayed behind after Wrath had left. Vishous, Rhage, Phury, and some dark-haired, stocky male who had a scent reminiscent of the King’s. Had to be a blood relation, but other than that, Murhder didn’t know anything. Not even the male’s name.

Vishous had been at the computer for hours now, the three letters that had been handwritten and sent to Murhder fanned out next to him. Naturally, they had been read, and in retrospect, he’d been foolish to think he could hide the request that had been put to him from the people he was asking help of. But at least no one had argued about him searching for that son.

Yet.

Murhder had been mostly in the waiting area, his ass getting numb in spite of the cushioned chair he’d been given. Fritz, Darius’s ancient butler, had been as kind and solicitous as ever, insisting on delivering food which Murhder had eaten without tasting. But that had been how long ago?

The chiming of a grandfather clock, slow and laborious, began out in the foyer. Nine in the morning. With all the drapes in the house pulled and the inside shutters in place, it was impossible to tell day or night.

Murhder looked down the stone steps. Took another deep breath through his nose.

Then he stepped back into the drawing room and retriggered the release on the painting, watching the full-length portrait slide back into place.

Pain lanced through the center of his chest, the grief both unexpected and not surprising. “When did Darius die.”

When there was no answer to his non-question, he walked over to the waiting area’s desk. “Well?”

Vishous sat back in the swivel chair, taking a drag and then tapping the ash off the tip into a mug of cold coffee. “Who says he’s dead?”

“His scent isn’t anywhere in this house. Not even down where he sleeps.”

V shrugged. “Fritz is good with a vacuum.”

“Don’t play games with shit like this.”

The Brother regarded the glowing end of his hand-rolled. “Fine.” His diamond eyes swung up and met Murhder’s. “It’s none of your fucking business. How’s that.”

“He was my brother, too.”

“Not anymore.” Vishous shook his head. “And before you get on your high horse and go all right-to-know on me, I’ll remind you that you left the Brotherhood.”

“I was kicked out.”

“You chose to slaughter those humans. Do you have any idea what the cleanup was like? We saw it on the news after the humans found your little party out on that lawn. It was a national fucking incident. It took us two weeks of stripping memories to calm that shit down, and spare me the eye-for-an-eye shit. You created a lot of problems for us. Thank God the Internet hadn’t been like it is today or God only knows what would have happened—”