“I miss her every day. I was with her from conception. We grew together in the womb, two parts of one whole. It’s like missing a limb—no, like missing half of my body.” His smile showed off the uneven edge of the broken teeth. “I hope to teach you what that feels like. Missing half of your body and being alive to know it.”

He rose unsteadily.

Xalbador had to assist him on his way out.

*   *   *

The Widow Lakshminarayanan did not bother to sit on the provided chair. Thin and birdlike, she circled the Lexan vault, taking in Evan from every angle. Her sari, a luscious orange trimmed with gold and money green, swept the floor around her invisible feet. She seemed more an apparition than a human. Wiry gray hair framed her small, wrinkled face; though she was in her forties, she looked like a great-grandmother.

She’d aged preternaturally after Evan had dispatched her husband with a cell phone packed with C4. He’d been a counterfeiter and launderer of epic proportion, an equal-opportunity provider who’d cleaned for everyone from Punjabi cartel leaders to Muslim extremists. Despite being a financial and technological genius, Shankar Lakshminarayanan had been a gentle soul who eschewed violence. He left personnel and business disputes to his wife, who displayed no such reservations.

She was said to prefer straight razors.

In the background now, two of René’s guards arranged folding chairs in rows on the stretch of hardwood before the Lexan vault, opening them and setting them down briskly. Snap. Clang. Snap. Clang.

The widow took another turn around the box, and Evan turned with her, keeping her in view. As she circled, he spun, like they were doing some bizarre mating dance.

The guards continued to set up for the coming auction. Snap. Clang. Snap. Clang. The quality of light had changed in the ballroom, afternoon fading into evening. With the exception of a single midday bathroom break, Evan had been inside these four Lexan walls since waking, breathing his own stale air. René had placed no restrictions on the buyers, and most of them had wanted to take their time with him.

It had been a parade of prior missions, a Dickensian haunting, a This Is Your Life tour of Evan’s past. The Nowhere Man, dragged from the shadows and placed on display inside a transparent box—it was his worst nightmare stretched along an exponential curve that grew steeper with every visitor. He’d seen foes from all around the globe. The daughter of a Serbian war criminal. The Fortune 500 father of a serial rapist he’d erased in an early pro bono mission as the Nowhere Man. A Hong Kongese gangster looking to preempt a future visit.

Everyone, it seemed, but the contingent that Evan feared most. Van Sciver and his happy band of repurposed Orphans.