Page 75 of Make Them Bleed
Knight: “Bike ready. I hate cocktail bars.”
“Focus,” I whisper. “Armand’s talking.”
He is. To Juno.
“Forgive me,” he says, leaning just enough to suggest but not impose. “Do I know you?”
Juno doesn’t flinch. She turns like she’s been interrupted in a pleasant thought and grants him a half-smile that would make lesser men confess to tax fraud. “Saint Pierce makes everyone look familiar after a while.”
“True,” he says, chuckles like a man conditioned to being charming without appearing to try. “You have that—what do they say—photographic face.”
“That’s not a thing,” she says, and sips. She lets the pause stretch a half heartbeat too long, then tilts her head. “Nico?”
He blinks. The sort of blink a man perfect at lying allows himself when someone loads the correct password on the first try. He recovers with applause-level smoothness. “Do I owe you money?”
“Maybe,” she says, breezy. “Maybe you owe me a drink.”
Megan places hissmoked honeywith surgical neutrality. He doesn’t look at her. He looks at Juno’s mouth like it has inconvenient gravity. “Then I am in your debt.”
The pen mic catches his accent. He’s not French. He’s from the coast where vowels take their time and consonants turn to smoke—the kind of man who could talk his way past a guard and send a text to have the guard fired in the same breath.
A certified asshole.
And if he keeps looking at Juno like she’s his next snack I may just abort this whole mission and smash his face in.
“Juno, you okay?” Render breathes in my ear, only half joking.
“Hold,” I say. “Let him handle his rope.”
Nico glances down at Juno’s glass. “Megan’s call?”
“She knows where the bodies are buried,” Juno says, too casually. “Figuratively.”
“Figuratively,” he repeats, amused. “Good.”
He leans a fraction closer. “You were at the Delphine, weren’t you? I thought I saw you in passing. All the masks.” He smiles like a man who loves a theme. “And now we are here without them.”
I flex my hand on my thigh to avoid putting it through the table. He’s not guessing; he’s testing. The wordmasksmay as well be a flare.
Juno doesn’t rise to it. “Did you like the party?” she asks. “I heard it was a funeral with better lighting.”
He freezes again. Tiny. But it’s there.
“Funeral?” he echoes, buys time with a sip. “One must be careful with metaphors. They take on lives of their own.”
“I like mine dead,” she says.
His eyes sharpen. He raises his glass in a small salute. “A woman who knows what she likes.”
“And what she doesn’t,” she returns.
I text one word to our group thread:fishing. It’s enough. Nobody rushes the rail. We let it breathe.
“Tell me,” he says, turning the charm up half a click, “what do you do when you are not correcting strangers at bars?”
Juno looks past him to the mirror and meets her own eyes like she’s reminding herself who she is. “I tell stories,” she says. “Sometimes they have monsters in them.”
“And sometimes the monsters are metaphors,” he says, delighted at his own cleverness. “I am Nico, by the way. Nicolas.”
