Patchwork

by Karsten Knight

  Just a half life.

  It’s not fair to him. It’s not fair to me. I can’t relive a year with Troy when he doesn’t even remember the first time. That’s not a relationship.

  I take a step away from him. I’m so nervous that I trip over the sand. “I … I think we should go home.”

  “Go home?” Troy echoes. “You’re the one who texted me and told me to meet you here.”

  “I know, I …” I can’t find the words, and it has nothing to do with the cold. Before I know it, the tears that have been pooling in my eyes escape. I can’t believe I’m about to walk away from the best year of my life, but I don’t know what else to do.

  “Hey.” Troy puts his hands back on my shoulders. “What’s going on, Nata?”

  I shrug out of his grasp. “I’m just cold. I think I should warm up back at the cottage.” I turn and start to head toward the bluff.

  Troy catches my hand and holds tight. I stop. He slowly saunters over in front of me, and his other hand finds my own, so that I have to face him. The blanket drops from my shoulders and coils in the sand.

  Then Troy kisses me.

  It’s an explosion of tingling and shuddering breaths—from both of us—and a new rhythm, a new kiss, a new feeling I don’t think I ever experienced this past year with him.

  Eventually, it’s Troy who manages to pull away first. He leans his forehead against mine, our noses side-by-side. “You can warm up with me,” he says. “I promise I’ll be hotter than a bonfire.”

  My cheeks are still slick with tears, but I can’t withhold the wet, relieved laughter that comes out of me. “You’re a very convincing negotiator, Troy Bridges.” I press my body against his, to find contact points every place that I can.

  Our lips reunite again, and with every kiss, I feel new hope. If in this reality, Troy can be the one to kiss me first, maybe other things will be different this time around, too. Maybe we’ll break up after a month. Maybe we’ll grow apart. Maybe we’ll stay together but Troy will never propose on the harbor cruise.

  Maybe he still will. Maybe I’ll say yes.

  When I pull away this time, Troy cups his hands on either side of my face. His eyes glisten with anticipation, with hope. “You have no idea,” he says, “how long I’ve been waiting to do this, my friend.”

  I smile, bring my mouth right up to his ear, and whisper:

  “Not half as long as I have.”

  Thank you so much for reading PATCHWORK. I hope you will consider taking a moment to provide a brief and honest review of this book on Amazon. Every review—even a single sentence!—goes a long way toward increasing a novel’s visibility to new readers and is critical to the continued success of any author.

  Turn to the next page for an extended free preview of my novel NIGHTINGALE, SING.

  I remain deeply grateful for the support of loyal readers like you.

  Karsten Knight

  ALSO AVAILABLE BY KARSTEN KNIGHT

  To cure her dying sister, Sabra Tides must race across Boston to solve a web of riddles and find a mythical flower, while a ruthless gangster will stop at nothing to get there first. Read the powerful historical mystery perfect for fans of Six of Crows, The Raven Boys, and The Da Vinci Code.

  Please enjoy this free preview of NIGHTINGALE, SING, available now from Karsten Knight.

  Within the hallowed green walls of Fenway Park, forty thousand Red Sox fans rose to their feet. They held their collective breath as a monstrous hit from Gabriel Carrera climbed higher, higher, until the tiny white meteor began its descent toward the right-field fence. When the baseball sailed just clear of the foul pole, the explosive cheers from the stadium could be heard as far away as the Charles River.

  Three blocks east, Jack Tides fled through the dark community gardens. With a postcard clutched in one hand and a knife in the other, he was trying to get to a mailbox before the men in the black van found him.

  Nox’s boys were coming to kill him tonight.

  In the darkness, Jack blindly smashed into a lawn chair and nearly skewered himself on his own blade as he fell. He landed hard in a zucchini patch and briefly lay there dazed, listening to the sounds of the Boston night, searching for any traces of his pursuers. For now, he could only hear the distant commotion from Fenway and the occasional car rushing down Park Drive.

  That didn’t mean they weren’t still out there.

  If it were anyone else after him, Jack might make a run for the stadium. After all, who would dare execute him in front of thousands of witnesses?

  But this was Horace Nox, the nightclub owner, the gangster, the one man in Boston you did not fuck with.

  And Jack had stolen from him the one thing he treasured most.

  Jack gazed off in the direction of Back Bay, where the imposing fifty-two-story Prudential Tower loomed over the tree line. If he made a run for a populated area, like downtown or the stadium, they’d gun him down just the same. If he went to the police, Nox had men on his payroll there, too. And if he tried to hide in the gardens until morning …

  He heard the hounds.

  There were two of them, barking with feral delight. He could imagine them straining at their leashes, snouts low to the ground as they dragged one of Nox’s men ever closer. They must have picked up his trail where he’d escaped from the museum.

  From the sound of it, they’d converge on him in less than a minute.

  It was now or never. Jack picked himself up off the dirt and sprinted through the gardens, jumping over makeshift wooden fences, ducking under trellises, and trampling any crops in his way. He clambered up the hillside, and when he stumbled out from between the trees onto Park Drive, that’s when he saw it:

  A mailbox. A beacon of hope, its blue paint flaking off in chips, in front of an aging brick apartment building.

  Jack took off across the street. A car blared its horn as it swerved to avoid him, but he thundered on, until at last, with a trembling hand, he dropped the crumpled postcard down the mailbox’s gullet.

  The metal mouth snapped shut with a resounding clang as it swallowed his little sister’s last chance for survival.

  Jack turned back to the road as a taxi came around the bend. He tucked his knife into the waistband of his jeans and waved frantically from the curbside, but the cab was already full with passengers and never even slowed.

  Tires screeched behind Jack, as the familiar black van barreled down the street. He prayed that they’d mistake him for an innocent pedestrian, but it was too late—the van accelerated toward him. Jack turned on his heel and sprinted for the bridge.

  As he took the corner, his lungs burned and he knew that even though he was giving it everything he had left, the van would catch up in seconds. The decisions he made now, during this short window while he was obscured from view by a cluster of trees, could mean the difference between life and death. So as he reached the crest of the stone bridge that passed over the marshy water of the Fens, he did the only thing he could think of.

  He jumped off the bridge.

  The fall was quick. One moment he was hurdling over the railing, barely clearing the stone lip. The next he flopped face-first into the murky river below.

  As Jack resurfaced, he resisted the urge to gag on the foul-smelling waters, which reeked like a compost pile. He sought refuge beneath the bridge’s arch as quietly as he could, keeping all but his head submerged in the cold, slimy stream. It wasn’t a second too soon. The van came to an abrupt stop directly overhead. Not long after that, the barking of the dogs rose to a crescendo. Their handler silenced them with a gruff “Heel!” Jack could hear the click of their nails on the pavement as they milled about.

  The van door slammed with unnecessary force. “How the hell did we lose Tides again?” the driver raved. Jack recognized his voice as belonging to Drumm, the former NFL-linebacker-turned-enforcer.

  “He’s a slippery bastard, for sure,” said a man with a Southern drawl and a voice that sounded like the croak of a bullfrog—Pearce, the d
og-handler. “The hounds’ll pick up his scent soon enough. Where’d our gal Aries wander off to?”

  “The hell if I know,” Drumm replied. “That junkie creeps me out.” He must have flicked his cigarette off the bridge, because the smoldering butt of it landed in the water a few feet from where Jack was concealed. It hissed before the embers died in the murk.

  “All right, you circle around the Fens with the van until you spot Tides. I’ll sweep toward Berklee to see if the boys pick up his stink again.”

  Moments later, the vehicle peeled away. The hounds resumed their barking, searching in frustration for the fugitive’s scent.

  Pressed against the bridge’s stone underbelly, Jack waited until he judged that Nox’s men must be far enough away. Then he cautiously edged out from his hiding place and scrambled up the embankment.

  He never saw the wooden croquet mallet coming until it smashed into his knee.

  With a sharp cry, he reached for his battered leg, but the mallet whipped around again. This time it collided with his cheekbone.

  Jack dropped limply into the marsh waters. As he lay there, half-floating, he was momentarily confused as to which way was up and which way was down.

  A figure stepped into view overhead. Jack’s vision was still swimming from the blow to his face, but he could make out the silhouette:

  A woman with ram’s horns spiraling out of either side of her head.

  The horned woman crouched closer, until Jack could see that she was no demon—in fact, she couldn’t be much older than her early twenties. Her ram’s horns were actually metal prostheses fastened to her skull somewhere beneath the nest of her spiked hair.

  “You’ve been a bad boy, Jack Tides,” Aries said in a husky Latin accent. She pressed the shaft of her croquet mallet into Jack’s windpipe. He let out a hollow wheeze and grabbed ahold of the stick, trying to keep his head from being forced under the water. Was this it? Was he going to drown in the Fens, his last minute on earth spent choking on putrid water while his brain died from oxygen deprivation?

  “Enough,” Drumm growled from somewhere behind Aries. “Boss wants him alive … for now.”

  Grudgingly, she relented and the two mercenaries hauled Jack up by his shoulders. He bellowed as his weight came down on his mangled knee. Next thing he knew, he was tossed like a dishrag into the back of a van. The Boston night disappeared behind the sliding door.

  The Seaport

  It wasn’t that Jack didn’t fight back. But with his injured leg struggling to support his weight and his knife lost in the Fenway marsh, he proved a less than formidable opponent as Drumm and Aries forcibly removed him from the van. With each of them securing one of his elbows, they carried him down the dimly lit alley.

  A second vehicle arrived behind the brick building—it was Pearce, whose Rhodesian ridgebacks barked feverishly in the cab of his pickup, smelling that their prey was near. Pearce’s comb-over glistened with sweat, which he wiped off with two fingers and flicked contemptuously at Jack’s face. Then he cast open the building’s two massive cellar doors and Jack’s captors dragged him down into a dank basement.

  Aries slammed him onto a wooden table, holding him down while Drumm used a length of rope to tie him in place. Jack tried to wriggle free, but the taut cords had him pinned at the shoulders. He hadn’t been sure where they were taking him while he was in the windowless van, but between the briny smell of the harbor and the muffled melody of a big band orchestra playing one story above them, he now realized exactly where he was.

  He was beneath the Nightingale.

  On the other side of the basement, the elevator droned an ominous “ding” and the doors parted.

  Horace Nox had arrived.

  Horror-struck, Jack picked his aching head as far off the table as he could to get a good look at the man. Jack had worked at the Nightingale for over a month before he’d even met Nox, at first only observing the gangster from afar as he walked around the nightclub like a god amongst men. But when word of Jack’s bottomless knowledge of local New England history had gotten around—a seed that Jack had intentionally sowed himself—Nox had offered him a new job. “A promotion,” he had called it. He needed Jack’s historical expertise in solving a 150-year-old trail of riddles, scribbled on the pages of an antique Civil War journal. Riddles that, according to myth, would lead to an object of immeasurable value.

  So Jack had helped him unearth the second riddle. Then the third, and the fourth, and the fifth.

  The last time Jack had seen Nox was a week ago, when they’d followed the clues in the sixth riddle to Block Island. There, they’d excavated a chest from a bluff overlooking the ocean, only to find it completely empty.

  Because twenty-four hours prior, unbeknownst to Nox, Jack had dug up the seventh riddle for himself.

  Nox walked unhurriedly across the cellar floor, a half-empty glass of scotch in one hand. When he reached Jack, he noisily dragged a stool up beside the table and peered quietly down at his captive. Nox was the kind of man who, from a distance, seemed to be well-preserved for his age. His long, luxuriant hair had prematurely turned pewter, but his face was smooth, his blue eyes shrewd and arrogant in the way he took in the room. He wore an expensive three-piece suit, crisply pressed and tailored to his muscular contours. Yes, from a distance he looked closer to eighteen than thirty.

  But up this close, Jack could see where the illusion ended. Somewhere beneath the youthful, energetic veneer, there was a deep and penetrating sickness. Not just of the mind, but of the body as well. His vulpine face was pulled too tight, too thin, the angles of it harsh and exact, like the woodcut features of a ventriloquist dummy.

  Horace Nox was dying.

  Nox drained the last remnants of his drink in one long gulp, then tapped the glass with his manicured fingernail—ting, ting, ting. “Get me another Blood and Sand, Drumm,” he said in his baritone rasp. Even his vocal cords seemed to be stretched to their limits, a victim of wartime shrapnel. A scar still bisected his Adam’s apple.

  His giant manservant obediently snatched the tumbler from Nox’s hand and disappeared.

  “You know,” Nox said, finally addressing Jack, “in my line of business, you have to be paranoid. It’s the only way to survive, really. Day in and day out, I find myself dealing with gamblers and gangsters and drug dealers”—He jerked his thumb back toward where Aries was polishing one of her ram’s horns in front of a dirty mirror—“and disreputable sorts of all varieties. Yet of all the creeps on my payroll, I would have never guessed that you would be the one to steal from me.” He let out an exasperated laugh. “You! My fucking busboy! The ungrateful history nerd who ripped me off after I gave him the opportunity of a lifetime. You’re the one who took what was rightfully mine?”

  “Opportunity of a lifetime?” Jack echoed. “Golly, Pop, thanks for the minimum wage job scrubbing your dishes and doing your homework.”

  Nox tsk-tsked. “We both know you didn’t do this for the money.”

  “You know nothing about me, Horace.”

  “Is that so?” Nox snapped his fingers and Pearce handed him a folder. He licked his thumb and leafed through the papers inside. “Jack Tides,” he read aloud. “Age: eighteen. Graduated valedictorian of Dorchester High School and is now a freshman at Boston University majoring in American studies.” Nox placed a hand over his heart. “How patriotic of you.”

  As Nox continued reading, he paced around the table. “Son of Calista and Jack Tides Senior, who goes by ‘Buck’ amongst his associates. Calista is an immigrant by way of Cyprus, who worked her way through nursing school and has been employed at Children’s Hospital for the last twenty years. Shortly after she came to America in the early nineties, she met and married your degenerate father. Buck is old-city Irish and was a subway car driver for many years, but is currently locked away at Cedar Junction Correctional, serving a fifteen-year sentence for armed robbery. Chance of early parole for good behavior: unlikely.” Nox raised his eyebrows. “I guess the apple
doesn’t fall far from the thieving tree.”

  “Enough,” Jack growled.

  Nox pursed his lips. “Oh, I haven’t even gotten to the juicy parts yet. You have two sisters. Sabra, seventeen, just started her senior year at Dorchester High.” He laughed lecherously and punched Jack on the arm. “Irish Twins, huh, only a year apart? I guess Mom and Old Buck couldn’t wait another minute to get back in the sack after you popped out.”

  In his mind, Jack pictured himself snapping free of his restraints and ripping Nox’s malformed larynx right out of his throat.

  “Sabra spends her evenings making a little extra cash as a pedicab driver in Boston, which means her report cards don’t tend to live up to those of her overachieving brother. And finally, there’s little Echo, age eight, who if I’m doing the math correctly, must have been conceived right before the Boston Police caught your father trying to roll over a warehouse—one of my warehouses, no less—with a semiautomatic. And according to my meticulous research …” Nox dropped the file and leaned over Jack. “… your eight-year-old sister is currently at Children’s Hospital in the oncology ward, being treated for stage-three Hodgkin’s lymphoma.”

  Jack’s eye brimmed with tears at the mention of Echo. “I said enough, you asshole.”

  Drumm returned with Nox’s cocktail. Nox swilled the sanguine liquid around, ruminating. “I’m not a heartless bastard like you probably think. Hell, I get it. Your little sister’s dying of cancer. So you worm your way into my organization. You give me the slip, you steal a page from the journal, and you take up the quest for yourself. You thought you could find the Serengeti Sapphire on your own and then use it to save Echo.” Nox broke off into a vile, wet cough. He plucked a white handkerchief from the pocket of his suit jacket and hacked explosively into it. When the convulsions finally ceased, he held the cloth up for Jack to see. It was speckled with blood. “But illness affects all of us, Jack. The Sapphire is destined to save me, not Echo.”