Page 31 of Make Them Bleed (Pretty Deadly Things #1)

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I wake with Juno tucked under my arm, her hair a dark spill on my chest and her breath warm against my skin. For a selfish beat, the world is small. Just us. Just the soft weight of her and the lazy thump of my heart saying stay.

“Morning,” she mumbles without opening her eyes.

“Stay put,” I whisper. “Bribery incoming.”

In the kitchen I move quietly, muscle memory taking over.

Coffee, skillet, the hiss of butter. Blueberries tumble like marbles across the counter.

I fold them into the batter and watch the first pancake bubble, flip it, and feel absurdly proud when it lands golden.

Juno pads in wearing my shirt, steals a blueberry from the bowl, and points it at me like a loaded secret.

“These better be legendary,” she says.

“Prepare to be serenaded by carbohydrates.”

We eat at the island—her knee knocking mine, my hand finding her thigh—coffee warming the edges of a morning I want to stretch forever. She licks syrup from her thumb, and I swear to keep this safe, whatever it takes.

Then the crime board on the wall looks back at us: red string, names, times. The air shifts.

“After breakfast,” she says, voice steady. “What’s the plan?”

I squeeze her hand. “We finish this, Juno. For her. For us.”

By late afternoon the plan is less a whiteboard fantasy and more a checklist with blood pressure. I lay our kit out on the kitchen table like a surgeon lining up instruments.

Bone-conduction earpieces, paired and tested.

Two push-to-talk clips disguised as jacket buttons.

A Bluetooth scanner running on a Raspberry Pi in a cigarette pack — Ozzy calls it the Smoker .

A narrow-beam mic that looks like a pen (My favorite item).

Two tiny beacons preloaded with innocuous names in case we need to mark an exit or a car ( Lamp A , Plant B ).

Gage’s Franken-rig: pocket camera + low-light lens + matte hood so it drinks neon and doesn’t reflect it back.

We brief in my living room. Juno sits cross-legged on the couch in a dark navy dress that looks like trouble wrapped in restraint, her leather jacket tossed over the arm like a dare.

Ozzy sprawls on the rug, stringing gaffer tape around a compact battery pack like he’s crafting friendship bracelets.

Knight leans near the window, rolling his shoulders like a nightclub bouncer in witness protection.

Render perches on the arm of a chair in a blazer that can talk its way through any door.

Gage hovers in the doorway, already tuned to the frequency of the night.

“Atlas Room first,” I say, flipping the TV to a floor-plan I built from emergency egress filings and Yelp photos. “Two entrances. Host stand here. Bar here. Mirrors behind the top shelf. That’s both a gift and a curse.”

“Gift: reflections,” Gage says, already in the loop.

“Curse: reflections,” Render echoes. “If we don’t control angles, we record ourselves recording ourselves.”

“Table picks,” I continue, “A3 and A4. A3 for Juno and me—we play polite strangers who collided at the bar if we need a cover. A4 for Gage and Knight. Megan’s expecting us. She’ll pour nothing we haven’t watched poured.”

“Street team,” Ozzy says, saluting with tape. “I’m in the hatchback with the Smoker. If Nico brings a device named like a bored rich guy, I’ll see it. Also scanning for BLE beacons. Bad guys love off-the-shelf toys.”

“Marina follow?” Knight asks.

“Gage and I split,” I say. “Knight, you take the bike and bowline the tail if he runs lights. Ozzy stays planted. Render, if we get a good look at the signet crest again, I want the high-res.”

“Copy.” Render taps a sticky note on his phone screen DON’T GET ARRESTED —the joke that’s not a joke.

I turn to Juno last. She meets my eyes, steady. We’ve done the hard talk already; this part is logistics. “Signals,” I say. “If you say cinnamon , that’s ‘come to the table now.’ If you say check please , we extract. If you touch the back of your left wrist, I move you, no questions.”

“And if I say more ,” she adds, flicker of a smile despite the tension, “you keep pace.”

Knight coughs something that sounds like standing order into his fist. The room relaxes around the laugh it earns, the same way teams breathe in unison before kickoff.

I hold up the pen mic. “Voiceprint. If I get him talking long enough, we build a clean model. Later we match bar audio and Marina audio without needing a face.”

“Scary,” Ozzy says.

“Useful,” I correct.

We roll.

Atlas Room at eight is the same dim velvet cathedral it always is: a hush at the door, a hush at the bar, and a hum of conversation that acts like fog—muting, anonymizing, making secrets feel inevitable.

The neon ATLAS sign flickers a low gold, and mirrors double the bottles until it looks like the world is made entirely of glass and amber.

Megan’s behind the bar with her honeybee tattoo, eyes catching Juno’s first. She gives me a look that says play nice and Juno a look that says I’ve got you . She sets two coasters with the compass rose logo just off center—and it feels like the room splits along that axis.

Gage and Knight drift to A4 with the posture of colleagues who have already closed a deal.

Render dissolves toward the back wall where a velvet curtain hides a service corridor and—conveniently—gives him a dark frame to work from.

I take A3 but stand long enough to point the pen at a glass shelf; in the reflection, I can see the bar, the door, the mirror toward the restrooms that doubles as a periscope.

The pen hums once meaning the recorder is live.

Across from me, Juno orders in a clear, easy tone. “Smoked honey, please—Megan’s call.” The way Megan’s mouth tightens tells me we made the right kind of noise in the right kind of hive.

“Coming up,” Megan says. To me, under her breath as she moves, “North booth at ten o’clock has two guys who think they invented venture capital. Not him . Accent at the rail at eight o’clock—French? Not him either.”

“Merci,” I murmur.

Our comms chirp once as Ozzy’s voice slides into my ear. “Smoker live. I’m seeing fifteen devices within ten meters: three phones with random MACs, one tablet named Isabelle’s iPad , six wearables, two security cams broadcasting BLE, and an AirPods case named… NEREUS-NAV-PRO .”

“Say again?” I reply, heart rate quietly redlining.

“NEREUS-NAV-PRO. Could be a coincidence. Could be exactly our brand of terrifying.”

“Angle?” Render whispers.

“Northwest of the front door,” Ozzy says. “Signal strength says just came into range and paused.”

I don’t turn. I watch the mirror. A man steps in with the kind of posture that’s more habit than choice—upright, practiced.

He hands a coat to the hostess and takes the room’s temperature with a slow sweep that reads as bored if you don’t know what you’re looking at.

Tailored navy suit, white shirt, no tie.

The cuff—blue piping, an anchor embroidered near the button.

The ring: signet, compass rose over waves.

My pen mic picks up Megan’s exhale. “That’s him.”

Juno’s fingers find the bottom of her glass on the bar and skate, just once, around the perimeter—a minuscule circle only I would clock. She does not look at the door. She shifts so her profile faces the mirror, pretends to check her lipstick reflection, and lowers her chin half an inch.

“Juno,” I say.

“I’m okay,” she breathes before I can ask her.

The man’s accent lands before he does. Mediterranean edges filed smooth by money and time. He takes the rail at Juno’s ten o’clock. Megan slides him a napkin like a perfectly executed handoff. His fingers brush the napkin as his ring flashes and my stomach drops with it.

“What is it tonight?” he asks Megan, tone wry. “Do you still smoke the honey?”

“Still do,” she says, unruffled. “Stronger wood. Less pretense.”

A corner of his mouth lifts. “Pretense makes the world tolerable.”

“Disagree,” Megan says, and moves to the smoker, giving me a sliver of line-of-sight.

Ozzy again: “Same device name. Closer. RSSI minus forty. He’s parked.”

Gage: “Marina called back—membership confirms Nicolas Armand . Etta DM is read, no reply.”

Render: “I’ve got the crest: high-res, forty-five degree. I can match to Marina signage later.”

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 his smoked honey with 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.”