May Storm's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

May wiped her hands on what was left of her apron and stood. The body would need to be moved, but not yet. She stepped over the blood and walked to the open door. The locket lay where she'd seen it, half-buried in the dirt just beyond the threshold. She crouched and pulled it free. The chain was broken, the clasp torn. She turned it over in her palm. On the back, carved into the silver in letters she'd traced with her own fingers three years ago, were two initials beneath a shallow rose. May's breath stopped. She'd made this locket herself, soldered the setting for the sapphire, filed the edges smooth. She'd given it to a woman whose name she'd promised never to speak, whose face she still saw when she closed her eyes at night. The woman who'd had nowhere to go when her husband's men came looking. May stood and scanned the street. A wooden post stood ten feet from her door, a bird perched on the weathered sign that hung from it. The sign read nothing, its paint long faded, but beneath it in the dirt were fresh bootprints. Small ones. A woman's stride. The prints led from the post to where the locket had fallen, then back toward the far end of the street. May looked at the locket again, then at the dead man inside her shop. Someone had followed him here. Someone had been close enough to lose this. She closed her fist around the locket and stepped back inside. The leather binder sat beside the body, its brass clasps gleaming. She picked it up and tucked it under her arm, then grabbed the dead man's shoulders and dragged him toward the back room. The woman she'd built this shop to protect had been here, had seen this, and had run. May locked the door behind her and set the binder on her worktable. The shop would open in three weeks, but the network had already found her. And now she knew it had found the woman too.