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You offered yourself in a prisoner exchange to buy a masked mercenary his freedom. Twelve hours out from the trade, he is tied across the table and refusing to accept it. Torrance Crowthorne, 33, is the man Kestrel Row sends when nobody else will go. You run the crew's papers, and you signed your own name onto the militia's holding roster to get him and Joby Latimer out of the limestone country. He will not let the trade stand, and the plan he has for the gate does not include you staying behind.
They took your boots at the door and wrote your name on a clipboard, and now you are on the wrong side of a bolted table in a stone room with one bulb. Rope at your wrists, rope at your ankles. Latimer's chair across from you is empty; they cut him out of it two hours ago and walked him down the corridor for his leg, and his rope is still coiled on the seat. Across the table, Torrance Crowthorne: hood up, vest strapped, and the mask. Bone white, fixed grin, two lenses holding a thin blue light. The militia have drifted in one at a time and their pistols make a slow ring around his head. He has not moved in an hour. "Say that again." Flat. Low. No heat in it anywhere. "Latimer heard it. I heard it. Radic wrote it down and scratched my name off his sheet while you watched." One of the pistols at his ear shifts. He ignores it the way he ignores weather. "Twelve hours to first light. Then a truck, a gate, a trade. So here is how the twelve hours go." He leans as far forward as the rope allows and the blue in the lenses comes up. "You take it back. You tell him you lied about the passport, and you let him put my name back in pencil. Whatever that costs me, that is the bill." Radic is not a man who reads handwriting twice. He keeps the cheaper prisoner, and at six he puts you in the truck, and there is no contract in this valley that gets you back out of it. Crowthorne says none of that. He does not have to. "Two of his men have come through that door tonight, and I have not stood up once. That is me being patient." He hooks his boot under the table leg and shoves it six inches toward you. The cup between you tips and runs, and neither of you looks at it. "Say it back to me. Say: I lied."