Page 101 of Make Them Bleed
“Red,” I say, holding up my wrist.
“And a chat with Mr. Huxley,” Arrow adds.
Adele’s eyes flick to the little sphinx emoji in Arrow’s text and back. “He’s expecting you. Pride, corner seat.”
I don’t plan to fight. I do plan to watch. I do plan to listen. I do plan to peel back whatever quiet the Five (well, now the Four) have wrapped themselves in and find the shape of the person who wrote the check.
The room opens. The mirrors know how to lie and tell the truth at once. Pride hums. My pulse hums. Arrow’s hand at my back is a line on a map that saysyou are here.
I am. And if the Four are radio silent, we’ll be the static that makes them adjust their dial and, in doing so, finally make a mistake.
34
Arrow
Club Greed always feels like the inside of a held breath. Tonight it feels like two.
TheGglows against the facade like a conspirator’s wink, and the foyer smells like money and a conditional welcome.
Juno slides in at my side, red dress and red band on her wrist like a dare. Her hand finds my sleeve for one second then drops, the touch like a spark against a fuse that insists on being lit.
We move through the bar and into Pride, and the room swallows us the way water swallows a pebble—silent on the surface, ripples everywhere else. Mirrors glitter like indifferent constellations. The frames in the center show nothing and everything depending on angle. The corner banquette we like is open, and I slide in first so I can see both doors.
Juno takes the outside seat and then turns toward me, knees brushing, eyes dark with the gravity that’s been between us since a door and a morning and the wordlove. Her mouth is a soft problem I can solve in ten thousand careful ways and exactly onereckless one. We’re fifteen minutes early. The plan saystalk. The part of me that’s been vibrating since I knocked on her door saysdon’t waste the room.
She must see it, because her smile cuts sideways, wicked and shy all at once. “We have eleven minutes,” she says. “Ten if you insist on punctuality.”
“Seven if I count transitions like a project manager,” I murmur, and her almost-laugh is my favorite sound the band has never sampled.
We lean. It’s not rushed. It’s not polite. It’s the slow kind, the kind that sayswe’re choosing this even when the world is a five-alarm problem.Her mouth meets mine and the room falls away in a soft, grateful hush. I kiss her like I promised I would—meticulous, a little bossy, hand at her jaw guiding the angle, the other warm on her thigh where the dress ends and my restraint begins. She answers with a hum I feel under my ribs. The first pass is relief, the second a reminder, the third a small declaration.
“Okay?” I whisper against her smile.
“Unfair,” she breathes, which in our new dictionary is a full-body yes. Her fingers slide up into my hair and tug just enough to make my breath catch.
Footsteps approach. We separate with the kind of reluctance that makes me want to file a grievance with time. Juno smooths her mouth with the barest touch of her thumb. I sit back and become the man who looks like he belongs anywhere.
“Mr. Huxley will see you now,” Adele says, somehow not smirking despite catching our oxygen theft. She leads us through the discreet corridor to a side salon: low light, a pair of leatherchairs angled toward a small table, a credenza with nothing on it but water and rules framed like art.
Devereaux Huxley is already there. He has the posture of a man who signs checks without asking for pens. Crisp suit, open collar, a wedding band that would read as ostentatious on anyone else and looks like minimalism here. His eyes are the kind that learn rooms and don’t forget.
“Ms. Kate. Mr. Finn,” he says, offering the sort of hand that doesn’t insist. His voice is a quiet instrument. “I’m Devereaux. Thank you for meeting me as guests, not vigilantes.”
“We do both,” Juno says, and I’m proud of her for the way she says it.
A corner of his mouth lifts. “As do I, depending on the board.” He gestures us to sit. “My house is very fond of its house rules. I understand you are fond of your sister.”
He saysare, notwere. I like him better for it.
“I’m not here to ask you to betray your members,” Juno says. “I’m here to ask you to value your house more than you value their illusions of privacy.”
“Good,” he says. “Because betraying members is how a house like mine dies. And because privacy without consent is simply camouflage.”
He steeples his fingers in a way that would be a cliché on a lesser man. “Detective Huxley is my wife. We keep our jurisdictions separate. She doesn’t ask me for tapes, and I don’t ask her for warrants. We both prefer to wake without ethics hangovers.” His eyes flicker, amused.
“Chloe’s good,” I say. “She’ll find them.”
“She is,” he agrees. “But your clock and hers are not synced. So here is what I will do, and what I will not. I will not hand you names. I will not show you faces unredacted without a lawful request. I will not undermine the premise of a room designed to keep people safe from other people’s cameras. I will—” He tips his head. “—pull transaction adjacency, seating adjacency, and entry adjacency for the men you’ve mentioned. Who sat with them. Who followed them into a hallway and came out adjusting a tie. Who consistently arrived thirty minutes before and left four songs after. We call itshadow-mapping. It’s a genealogy of bad decisions.”
