Page 41 of A Fine Line

We enter the room to find Lilith seated facing the door, appropriately shackled to a chair. She looks a little beat up but otherwise no worse for wear, and she doesn’t seem too bothered about having been shackled in this room, alone, overnight.

The lights come on, and she blinks against the glare, then her eyes settle on Nettie, and her face lights up, her smile bright as she breathlessly exclaims, “Toni! Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?”

Nettie walks across the room, and when she’s a few feet from Lilith, she crosses her arms over her chest and replies dryly, “Don’t fucking Toni me. You’ve got a lot of explaining to do.”

Lilith smiles almost sheepishly but bobs her head around frivolously. I walk through the doorway, Flora following close behind me, but when I turn to close the door, Flora continues further into the room, stopping in front of Lilith and patting her on the leg. Lilith turns her attention to the little girl and smiles at her fondly. “I see you found Tony like your mama said. Has he been taking good care of you?”

Flora nods, and then turns to us as she points at Lilith’s restrained hands and says, “Why she got those? She won’t hurt us.”

Lilith laughs boisterously, obviously tickled by the little girl’s words. “You never can be too careful, Flora. But I appreciate that.”

Aggie makes a disgusted sound from behind me, then walks over to Lilith with the keys to the cuffs jingling at her side. She leans over the older woman and unlocks her hands and ankles, then steps back, giving her a cool look. “Don’t fucking try anything.”

Lilith waves her hand and tsks. “Try what exactly? Regardless of where I’ve been or what I’ve been up to, I protect my family. That will never change.”

“You protect your family by literally destroying them by faking your own death?” I spit.

Lilith blanches slightly, a grimace dulling her otherwise bright expression. She recovers quickly and says, “That’s fair. I can see how you might be salty about that, but in my defense, for a little while there, I was dead. But then I didn’t die-die, if you know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t know what you fucking mean!” Nettie exclaims, her hands fisted by her side in frustration as she stomps her foot. “No sane person is ever dead, but then not dead-dead. Either you’re dead, or you’re not dead.”

“I can see that this is going to take you a moment to get over,” Lilith says with a sigh. “But it would be best if you could get over it while we try to figure out how we’re going to stop people from coming after Flora.”

“Over my dead body is the only way they’ll manage to get to her,” I snarl.

“You won’t stop them from trying,” Lilith replies. “With Carolina dead—“

“Carolina is not dead,” I interrupt angrily. “There’s no way they’d have let Flora go if they planned on killing Carolina. That doesn’t make sense.”

Lilith thinks over my words for a moment and then nods. “You may be right, but Flora’s the heir to an empire. If Carolina is out of the way, Flora is in line to inherit the entire enterprise, so we may as well plan for the worst-case scenario.”

“You left her behind,” I spit out, while looking down at her. “You let them fucking take her. Why?”

Lilith narrows her eyes at me. “I tried to get her to reconsider making a deal with those snakes. I tried to get her to come with me. She wouldn’t do anything to risk Flora.”

I give her an assessing look as Flora climbs up and sits in Lilith’s lap, playing with her hair familiarly. It’s obvious the little girl knows her, that she’s comfortable with her, so I ask, “What were you even doing there?”

“Looking for Flora,” she says. “I’d only been in there for a few days when you all showed up and fucked it all up.”

“Fucked it all up?” Nettie snarls. “You’re supposed to be fucking dead. We didn’t know we had any other options to get her. Do you think that if any of us had had one inkling of what was going on that we would’ve jeopardized your mission? That we would’ve jeopardized Carolina by sending her in there?”

Lilith expression becomes pinched, and she sighs. “Well, there wasn’t really a way for me to brief you on the situation,” she says, then chuckles as she says, “Kinda difficult for a dead woman to speak.”

“Maybe if you’d had the common courtesy to not fucking die, that wouldn’t have been an issue,” Aggie replies from behind me, her tone pained yet annoyed. “I’m still waiting for you to tell us why you thought that was necessary.”

“Because with me around, you would always have a target on your back. Since everyone thought I was dead, it was easier to stay that way. And I figured I could accomplish more being deep underground than I could walking around as normal.”

“Who knew about this?” I ask, “Surely, you didn’t manage to pull this off all on your own.”

She gives me a bored look, and then says dryly, “Don’t underestimate me, fuckface. You know I’m not gonna answer that.”

“Have you been pulling the strings behind the scenes with The Dead?” Nettie asks, concern showing on her face. “Was Mickey pretending he had everything under control, and it was you handling everything all along?”

Regret passes over Lilith’s face, and she looks at the floor briefly before meeting Nettie’s eyes. “Mickey doesn’t know. He can’t keep a secret for shit.”

Nettie and I look at each other, then we both say, “Fucking Matt.”

Lilith laughs cheerfully. “Oh, don’t be like that. Matt’s a doll.”

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