Page 60 of Silent Schemes
“Depends,” she says. “Do I get to choose the game next time?”
I nod, once. “As long as you play to win.”
She closes her fist around the tooth, and for the first time tonight, she looks happy.
We leave Petrov slumped against the radiator, the wet click of blood dripping into a bowl of old ramen echoing behind us.
Outside, the world is clean and silent.
I offer her a cigarette.
She takes it, lights up, and watches the smoke curl into the stars.
We don’t say anything else on the way home.
There’s nothing left to say.
We get back to the penthouse just before dawn.
The city is emptying out, the bars closing, the janitors reclaiming the blocks.
I park the Vic under the building, wipe down the handles, then ride the elevator up with Sienna.
She’s quiet, but it’s a loaded silence. Not passive.
She’s processing.
No one notices the blood, and if they did, no one dares to say anything.
Inside, I go straight to the kitchen.
The space is intensely blank: poured concrete, exposed vents, a butcher block scarred by a thousand cuts.
The island is long enough to prep a corpse on.
I sit, flexing my hand.
My knuckles are split open, blood dripping onto the counter.
Sienna appears with the first aid kit, not asking, just acting.
She sets the kit down, clicks it open, and lines up the tools in a perfect row—iodine, gauze, suture tape, a pair of old trauma scissors.
She stands over me, plucks the first alcohol pad, and presses it to the wound.
It stings and she presses harder, but I don’t flinch.
Her eyes are unfocused, lost somewhere past my shoulder.
“You ever think about what you’d be if you weren’t this?” she asks, voice soft.
“This?”
She snorts. “A fucking animal. A machine built for breaking bones.”
I roll my wrist, letting her clean the blood. “Probably would’ve become a priest. Or a mortician.”
She laughs, lips curling around the sound.
