Page 117 of Double Down
“Doing it now. Also, Conrad?”
“Mm?”
“Don’t give her another cookie. Seriously, don’t comp another motherfucking thing. She’s just looking for shit to pile on.”
I almost laugh and lean down to give Zeus a piece of cheese I grabbed from the fridge. He snarfs it down so fast I blink, wondering if I imagined giving it to him in the first place, and give him another. “She’s already got the whole jar.”
I hang up, text the others to meet me in the living room, then ping housekeeping for fresh coffee—pot after pot—and pastries, including those apple fritters Phoenix loves. After listening to her and Maverick all night, I need sleep. Instead, it’s time to wake the house.
Storm arrives first—hair still damp from the shower, T-shirt inside-out—and pours himself a cup of coffee, black. He reads my face and skips hello, dropping into a chair to wait.
Maverick slides in next wearing sunglasses like it’s noon instead of a corpse-gray six a.m. He lifts the shades and squints at me. “You look terrible.”
“And you look like you lost a cage fight with a tiger.” The angry red crescents on his forearms say Phoenix enjoyed herself.
Maverick flips me off with a smirk and collapses on the couch.
Atticus drifts in last, his headset crooked around his neck and his eyes bloodshot. “If this meeting isn’t about the ghost in my system, I’m flipping a table and setting it on fire for the hell of it.”
Phoenix pads out in one of Maverick’s shirts, the sleeves dangling past her fingers, legs bare, and face puffy with sleep.
My chest does something stupid. So far I’ve seen her wearing Storm’s shirt, Atticus’s shirt, Mav’s shirt…when the fuck is she going to wear one of mine? I shove the thought down. I open my mouth to tell her to leave, but Mav tilts his sunglasses and glares.
I hold my hands up, palms out. Message received.
“We’ve got a problem,” I say, ignoring her entirely as she pours herself a cup of coffee.
“We’ve got ninety-nine problems,” Atticus mutters. “Which one are we going with first?”
“The senator’s wife. She’s escalated. Says someone came to her suite to ‘fix the botched Botox.’ Dissolved, re-injected, added lips, the works. Now she has headaches, swelling, nausea, and a bullhorn pressed to both our lawyers and the press.”
Phoenix drops onto the arm of the sofa, her expression sharpens as the fog burns off. “The spa doesn’t have an MD on staff, so none of that is available.”
“Exactly.” I glance at Atticus. “I want every camera’s footage near her floor for seventy-two hours. If a fruit basket crossed her threshold, I want the bellhop’s shoe size.”
Atticus rubs his eyes. “Put it in the pile. The pile is on fire.”
“Pile’s about to get a friend,” I say. “Three more overdoses. Fentanyl.”
The room freezes.
“Neat,” Storm says, voice flat. “So we’re juggling fake bitches with fake faces and asses, and real chemical death.”
Maverick peels the sunglasses off and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Is this the part of the movie where the casino catches fire and sinks into the river while someone plays a violin?”
“Not a movie,” Atticus says. “We don’t get a soundtrack.”
“We do get a list, though,” I say, holding up a hand. “One: find the drugs. Two: cut the supply and whoever’s dealing. Three: decide if this is the Blackvine shipment and determine what ‘making it right’ looks like. Four: deliver the thief to them. Five: keep the resort alive while we do it.”
“Six,” Atticus says without inflection. “Get me four uninterrupted hours of sleep before I kill someone.”
“Seven,” Maverick adds. “Prevent me from committing public-relations suicide.”
“Eight,” Storm says mildly. “Kill the senator’s wife.”
Phoenix rolls her eyes at him. “Really?”
“Kidding,” he lies. I know he’s lying. “Mostly. I’m saying we have a senator’s wife setting bonfires with our name on them. Remove the match, remove the fire. Or at least make her stop lighting new ones while we put out the rest.”
