Chapter 3 - ROOM NUMBER SIX
The Pine Crest Motor Lodge was the kind of place that rented rooms by the week to men fleeing child support and women hiding from bad marriages. Its neon sign buzzed with a dying pink flicker, the letter R sputtering out every three seconds into the howling gale. Snow was already drifting knee-deep across the unplowed gravel lot.
Constantine didn’t wait for his men to clear the walkway. He strode through the drifts, his long coat snapping against the wind, his breath trailing behind him in jagged white plumes. Behind him, eight men moved in tactical dispersion—four cutting around the back toward the wooded ravine, four flanking the door.
Room six sat at the far corner, tucked beneath an overhang where dirty icicles hung like rows of yellowed teeth. The curtains were drawn completely shut. A strip of cheap plastic weather-stripping was taped along the bottom of the door, an amateur attempt to keep out the draft.
Lev stood by the middle SUV fifty yards back, where Maya sat strapped into the heated leather rear seat, clutching the white diner bowl with both hands and eating as fast as her shivering fingers could manage.
Constantine reached the door of room six. There was no sound from within. No television, no heater fan humming. Just the dead weight of an empty freeze.
He didn’t knock. He placed his boot precisely against the brass latch plate and kicked once, hard.
The cheap pine door frame splintered with a sharp crack, swinging inward and banging against the wood-paneled wall. A wall of rancid, stagnant cold air rushed out to meet them—smelling of damp mattress foam, sour rubbing alcohol, and the faint metallic tang of old blood.
“Clear,” two men called out as they swept inside, their sidearms lowered along their thighs, flashlights mounted on their weapons cutting through the gloom.
Constantine stepped over the threshold.
The room was tiny. A single double bed with a sagging mattress, a stained beige comforter pulled up to the pillows. On the nightstand sat three empty bottles of generic water, an unopened box of crackers, and an empty prescription bottle with the label carefully scratched off with a knife.
Underneath the blanket, curled into a tight knot against the headboard, was a woman.
Constantine walked to the bed, his boots heavy on the thin carpet. He knelt beside the mattress. The woman’s skin was the color of skim milk, her lips slightly blue, her long auburn hair matted with sweat that had dried cold. She was breathing, but each inhalation was shallow, a dry, rattling hiss in her chest.
Six years.
Six years since Clara Vane had walked out of a private clinic in Geneva under an assumed identity, taking with her the one ledger that could have destroyed three international syndicates—and taking Constantine’s child.
The world thought Clara was dead. Constantine had spent four million dollars to let the Russian and Italian councils believe she had drowned when a charter boat burned off the coast of Marseille. He had covered her tracks even while hunting her across two continents, protecting her from his enemies while cursing her name every night he stared at the ceiling of his penthouse in Manhattan.
Now she was lying in a thirty-dollar-a-night dive outside of Syracuse, freezing to death.
Constantine reached out, his bare hand trembling slightly as he brushed the matted auburn hair away from her forehead. Her skin was burning, contradictory to the room’s chill. Deep fever.
“Clara,” he said.
Her eyelids twitched. The dry, cracked lips parted, but no sound came out. Slowly, with agonized effort, her brown eyes cracked open. For a second, they were clouded with delirium, drifting across the unfamiliar ceiling, the cracked plaster, the peeling wood-grain wallpaper. Then they settled on his face.
Recognition hit her like an electric shock. Her body tensed, her weak hands instinctively clawing at the comforter to pull it to her chin, terror flaring in her sunken eyes.
“You…” she rasped, her voice a dry rasp. “You found… us.”
“The girl walked into the diner across the street,” Constantine said quietly, not moving an inch. “She offered me one dollar and forty-three cents for chicken soup.”
Clara let out a ragged, sob-like breath that turned into a coughing fit, racking her frail frame. Blood-tinged foam appeared at the corner of her mouth. Constantine pulled a clean linen handkerchief from his breast pocket and gently wiped it away. He didn't look angry; he looked like a man who had walked through hell only to find the gates were locked from the inside.
“She was… so hungry, Constantine,” Clara whispered, tears cutting clean lines through the dirt on her cheeks. “I couldn't… I couldn't get out of bed. Three days. My chest…”
“Pneumonia,” Constantine diagnosed, touching the burning skin of her neck, feeling the rapid, thready pulse beneath her jaw. “At least. Maybe a collapsed lung.”
“Don’t hurt her,” Clara wheezed, her trembling fingers catching the sleeve of his heavy coat, her grip pathetic, like a bird caught in a trap. “She doesn't know anything. She doesn't know… who you are. She thinks her father died in an accident. She thinks—”
“I don’t care what she thinks right now,” Constantine cut her off, his tone sharp enough to stop her panicked ramblings. He stood up, turning to Lev, who had just appeared in the splintered doorway. “Call Dr. Miller. Tell him to prep the surgical suite at the private clinic in White Plains. Have the helicopter meet us at the county airstrip in twenty minutes.”
“Boss, the storm,” Lev warned. “Visibility is under a mile. The chopper might not get clearance.”
Constantine’s eyes bored into Lev’s with the intensity of an executioner. “Pay the pilot double. If he refuses, tell him I’ll buy his company and ground him for life. Move.”
Lev nodded instantly, spinning on his heel and pulling out his satellite phone.
Constantine turned back to the bed. He bent down, scooped Clara Vane up in his arms along with the blanket, and lifted her as easily as if she were a bundle of dry branches. Her head lolled against his chest, her forehead burning through his crisp white shirt.
As he carried her through the shattered door into the biting wind, she whispered into his neck, her words barely louder than the falling snow:
“They’re behind us, Constantine. They never stopped looking. They found the bus ticket in Cleveland.”
May you like
Constantine paused on the gravel path. Across the white expanse, two sets of distant headlights had just appeared at the crest of Route 9, cutting through the blizzard with high-beam urgency, moving far too fast for ordinary traffic.
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