Chapter 4 - The River Ghost
Falcon didn't hesitate. Instead of jumping into the boat, he threw his weight against the stern, shoving the skiff out into the surging main current of the river, sending Beatrice and the child spinning safely into the darkness beyond the flashlight beams.
A high-caliber round cracked through the rain, striking the waterline right where the boat had been an instant before. Falcon dove under the icy surface of the river.
The shock of the frigid water knocked the air from his lungs, the open wound in his flank flaring with blinding, white-hot agony. The current grabbed him, smashing his shoulder against a submerged boulder. He let the river take him, tumbling through the pitch blackness until his chest burned so fiercely he thought his heart would burst. When he surfaced fifty yards downstream, he was behind a dense thicket of weeping willows dipping their branches into the roiling foam.
Above on the concrete ridge, flashlights swept the water. "Lost him!" a voice shouted through a radio. "Check the downriver weir! He couldn't have survived the rapids with that puncture!"
Falcon stayed submerged up to his nose, his eyes fixed on the distant silhouette of the wooden skiff drifting into the shadow of the marshlands on the opposite shore. Beatrice had made it across. Rosie was alive.
Clawing his way out of the mud, Falcon dragged his battered frame onto the marsh bank. Every inch of his body trembled with hypothermia. His knees buckled under the weight of his own exhaustion, but he forced himself up, ripping a strip of cloth from his soaked shirt to bind tightly around his bleeding side. He knotted it with his teeth, pulling until stars exploded behind his eyelids.
He trudged through two miles of swamp, following the hidden landmarks he had mapped out years ago when he had worked as the syndicate's chief enforcer. In those days, he had built safe houses to store weapons and dirty money. Now, he needed them to hide a ghost.
An hour before dawn, Falcon arrived at a derelict salt mill rotting on the edge of the abandoned coastal marsh. The tin roof groaned under the dying storm. He pushed open the heavy wooden door, the hinges screaming.
Inside, sitting beside a kerosene stove with an old nursing bottle warmed in a tin mug of water, sat Sister Beatrice. The baby was asleep in a wooden crate lined with clean mechanic’s rags.
"You're late," Beatrice whispered without looking up, stirring the milk.
May you like
Falcon collapsed onto an overturned wooden crate, his breathing shallow and ragged. He leaned over the infant, watching the faint rise and fall of her tiny ribs. "They think I drowned in the weir."
"They won't think it for long," Beatrice warned, handing him a threaded needle and an amber bottle of iodine. "Lucian Vane does not stop until he sees teeth and bones. Stitch yourself up, Jax. By sunrise, this city becomes a hunting ground."
