Damian FINUCANE's Arc

Chapter 46 of 57

The informant's map led Damian and Rolo south to the walled house before dawn. They crouched behind a low ridge and studied the stone wall. Two gates, the pages said. Guards changed at first light. Damian read the schedule again in the gray dark. The rotation held tight. No gap to slip through, and the sky was already paling. If they waited for dawn, the fresh guards would flood the yard and seal every door. "We're too late," Rolo whispered. "The change is coming. Look." She pointed. A cart rolled toward the far gate, stacked with crates. Damian recognized the bright paint on its side at once. He had seen that smoothie shop before, in the city, where he killed the man in the glass tower. The boss had the same supplier haul his food here. The cart meant a door that opened without a fight. Damian moved fast. He caught the driver on the road before the gate and pressed a coin into his hand. "Ten minutes," he said. "Rest your horse. Say nothing." The driver looked at the sword, then the coin, and climbed down. Rolo grinned. She had run away from a circus and kept its tricks. "I can fold under a tarp," she said. "You drive." She burrowed among the crates of wraps and juice. Damian pulled the driver's coat over his shoulders and took the reins. His hands stayed steady now. He drove the cart to the gate and kept his chin down. A guard leaned out. "You're early." Damian only grunted and nodded at the crates. The guard waved him through. The wheels rolled onto the packed dirt of the inner yard. The wall closed behind them. Inside, cooks waited by a small kitchen door. Damian pulled up short of it, in the shadow of the wall. The old guards were trudging toward the gate to hand off. The new ones had not yet spread out. For one breath the yard hung empty of watching eyes. Rolo slid from under the tarp and dropped to the ground without a sound. Damian stepped down after her. They pressed to the wall and slipped past the kitchen into a narrow passage the map had marked. No shout rose behind them. The cart sat abandoned, its crates still stacked. Damian pressed his back to the cold stone and breathed. He was inside. The wall that had stopped him now stood at his back. Ahead, deeper in the house, the boss slept behind one more door. But the empty driver's cart would not stay unnoticed. A cook would find it. A guard would count heads. The moment someone asked where the driver had gone, the whole house would wake around him. Damian had traded his one clean way in for a place inside a locked trap. "We have until they miss the cart," he whispered. Rolo nodded. There was no path back through the gate now. The only way out was through the boss.