Page 112 of Make Them Bleed
“Now I sit next to you,” I say. “And when you want silence, I give you silence. When you want noise, I put on Hold The Peppers and let you yell. And when you want to go back out into rooms with rules, we go. And we stop knocking on doors that teach us the same lesson.”
She looks at me a long time, then leans forward and rests her forehead against mine, our noses almost touching, breathmingled. “I wanted him to hurt,” she says, so quiet I can feel the confession more than hear it. “I wanted him to say it and then I wanted him to hurt.”
“I know,” I say, and the part of me that will always want to be better for her says,me too.
We stay there until the timer on Devin’s channel hits zero and keeps counting, streaming a scheduled victory lap into a city that just learned what it costs. We don’t watch it. We sit with our own bad tape, the one made of adrenaline and yes and stop and the sound a knife makes when the world doesn’t want it.
Outside, sirens quiet. Somewhere, Gray pours a drink. Somewhere, Coleman’s onyx ring taps a glass. Somewhere, Rook checks his anchor in the mirror. Somewhere, Beau picks a shirt that won’t solve the hole in his chest. The map just lost another shape, and if there’s any meaning in this, it’s that each line we draw now has to be straighter, cleaner, longer.
We’ll take them to daylight. We’ll get there by not lying to ourselves about who we became tonight.
I rest my palm on Juno’s knee and let it be heavy. She puts her hand over mine, squeezes once like a seal on a document neither of us wanted to sign and both of us will honor.
And then I kiss the ever loving fuck out of her.
37
Juno
Morning tastes like pennies and toothpaste. I pad out to the living room, making my way to the couch. I lie on my side watching the way the new boom arm hovers over my desk like a helpful crane and pretend that’s why my heart’s racing. It isn’t. Behind my eyes there’s stainless steel, an empty hand, a knife I never meant to hold like a future.
Arrow pads in from the kitchen, hair damp, mug in each hand. He sets one by my knee and doesn’t sayhow are youbecause I can’t afford to answer it honestly and he knows it.
“Bagels and truth,” he says, which is our newest church and also an agenda.
“Make it a double,” I mutter, pushing upright, hoodie cocooning me like a thief from his closet. He sits on the edge of the couch. We do the slow, careful lean until foreheads touch and breathing syncs. I say the thing I’ve been repeating in my head every twelve heartbeats since last night.
“I told him to stop.”
“You did,” Arrow says, steadily. “And you defended yourself.”
The words land and stick and also don’t. Somewhere in my chest, a cat kneads claws into soft fabric and purrs a mean little purr. I hate it. Also, if I’m not honest, I understand it.
We eat in silence, then pack the silence up and take it to Chloe Huxley.
She meets us in a conference room that looks like a high school tried to cosplaycop. There’s a laminate table, styrofoam cups, and a whiteboard with a leftover EXTRADITE? in fading marker. She wears a navy blazer over a T-shirt that saysPAY YOUR INTERNSand an expression that translates toI like you, but don’t make me like you and lie for you in the same hour.
“Water?” she offers, already unscrewing a bottle like she can see the tremor in my hands through my pockets.
“Please,” I say. My voice comes out fine. Gold star, larynx.
Arrow lays down our paperwork like a dealer: printouts from Render (Nereus → agency → HOLO-BURST), the public DMs Gage scraped before they were memory-holed, Devereaux’s “shadow map” anonymized into “this is a cluster; look harder here.” Nothing illegal. Everything pointed.
Chloe reads in that flat cop way that keeps her face from becoming anyone’s mirror. “Nereus,” she says under her breath. “And Etta Hoy. I don’t love that name. I’ve actually met her before.”
“Gray-adjacent,” Arrow says. “Hires herself out as a funnel. Money goes in wearing a tux, comes out in athleisure.”
Chloe lifts a brow. “Colorful. Accurate.” She flicks her gaze up at me. “Do you want to talk about last night?”
“I held the knife up,” I say. “He ran into it.”
“Arrow called,” she says, like it’s a neutral weather report. “Paramedics worked. Devin Pike was pronounced DOA at 9:17. You arenotin my report, because you weren’t there when uniforms arrived and because an anonymous caller mentioned ‘a man hurt a woman’ and the woman wasn’t present. Which, if you ever decide you’d like to give a statement, will make my job easier.”
“Will I be arrested if I give a statement?” I ask, because I was raised by a woman who told me to ask for the saleandthe policy.
“Not today,” she says. “Maybe not ever. The facts support self-defense.” She rubs her thumbnail along the edge of the printout. “The universe does not love two accidents in a week. Your enemies will write stories about it. Don’t help them write better ones.”
“Understood,” I say, because I do. My body does too. It tightens like a rope tied to a post that’s seen floods.
