Page 39 of Make Them Bleed (Pretty Deadly Things #1)

Juno

I shut the door, my nerves getting the better of me.

Bagels and truth. That’s what he promised. I’ve been repeating it like a spell since midnight: bagels and truth, bagels and truth. I want the second half so badly my teeth ache, and the first half because sesame is the only religion I practice.

Three knocks. Our code. My spine turns into a tuning fork.

I open the door.

Arrow’s on the mat with a paper bag, two coffees in a carrier, hair still damp from a shower he must’ve sprinted through.

He is all clean clothes and warm eyes and the kind of tired that looks better on him than it has any right to.

For two seconds he just… looks at me. Not past me.

Not at the houseplants or the crime wall or the way my hoodie is half-zipped and doing nothing to hide the fact that I slept maybe three hours.

Then, simply, like he’s saying his name for the first time, he whispers, “I love you.”

My throat goes tight so fast I make a tiny, embarrassing sound. It’s not a surprise-love. It's a finally love. Heat breaks behind my eyes. I grip the door and breathe around it.

“Say it again,” I whisper, greedily.

“I love you,” he says, with that earnest, infuriating steadiness that makes me want to kiss him and yell at him and hand him my future to hold all at once. “I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to say it.”

The tears tip over. I let them. “I love you too,” I say, because I do, because I’m not doing the casual deflection version of this anymore, because if we’re in a horror movie we’re in the scene where the final girl picks up the axe and tells the truth. “You ridiculous, careful man.”

He exhales like I handed him oxygen. The coffees and the bagel bag hit the entry table with a thunk. His hands find my face—warm palms, careful thumbs at my jaw—and I’m already rising on my toes before he’s even halfway to me.

The first kiss is relief. The second is hunger. The third—God, the third—is the sound your heart makes when it sees home and runs.

He presses me gently back into the door, not trapping, just guiding, like the world is a big dangerous room and he’s making us a corner.

He kisses like he did the first time—meticulous, a little bossy, entirely focused.

His mouth is warm and sure. His thumbs tilt my chin, micro-adjusting, finding the angle that makes me gasp.

He swallows the sound, and the apartment narrows to the square of space where his body is pressed to mine and the door is pressed to my back and I feel held on both sides.

“Don’t stop,” I say, wanting so much more of him. All of him. The truth can wait.

“Demand noted,” he says, and obeys—kissing me deeper, then slower, then deeper again, that maddening rhythm he uses when he’s trying to make me forget words.

It works. The world blurs. The paper bag rustles as one of my hands flails for balance and lands in nothing.

He steadies me with a palm at the small of my back.

He goes very still for a second, like a man being careful with a live wire, and then— oh —then he moves.

He’s demanding without being a jerk, guiding without grabbing, the kind of hungry that asks before it takes.

He lifts me just enough that my boots squeak against the door and my laugh hits his mouth and gets turned into something softer, deeper. His hands roam over my body.

Somewhere between this is unfair and never stop , I drag him toward the bedroom by the hem of his sweatshirt, because the door is fun but my spine would like to keep its cartilage. He lets me lead. He always lets me lead when I pick a direction.

We fall onto the bed in a tangle that somehow doesn’t feel clumsy at all. It’s a blur and it isn’t. He doesn’t rush. He layers patience and want until my breathing is a metronome for something that doesn’t exist outside of this room.

We remove all our clothing in a flash, and he climbs back onto me.

“I love you,” he whispers as he slides into me. “I love you so fucking much.”

I cup his face. “I love you too.”

He slams into me harder, pinning my wrists above my head. “I’ll never tire of owning this pussy.”

“It’s yours,” I sing in a chorus of heartbeats. “All yours.”

This makes him smile. Not in a cheesy, goofy grin-type of way, but in a possession-type of grin, like he finally knows he’s got me.

We find a rhythm, and my orgasm hits me like a ton of bricks. It’s relentless. It’s all-consuming. His tumbles us to the floor.

When we finally break, my room looks like a tornado ripped through it. My hair is a crime. His sweatshirt is halfway to the floor. The coffee’s sitting on the entry table out there getting cold.

I roll onto my side and nest myself into his chest, one leg slung over his hips, his palm at the small of my back like it belongs there. His heartbeat is ridiculous, rabbit-fast, and mine answers like an echo.

He kisses my hair once, not strategic, just because. “Truth?” he says, voice low.

“Truth,” I say, and prop my chin on his sternum so I can watch his face.

“We went to see Paul last night,” he says with no preamble. “Me, Ozzy, Gage.”

I go still for a second, not because I’m shocked—because I’m not, not really—but because I need a moment to process the information.

“We didn’t tell you,” he continues, steady, “because I knew you’d want to come. And I didn’t want you to get made by a man who has seen you at Bob’s barbecues and is three degrees from the Five. I also didn’t want you arrested if it went sideways. You asked for truth. This is all of it.”

“How sideways?” I ask.

“Oh, you know, typical sideways,” he says with a cute smile. “We grabbed him at the door. Sat him in his own dining chair. Tied him off with nylon that won’t leave marks. We wore the idiot presidents.”

A laugh escapes me, sharp as a hiccup. “You interrogated Paul Felder as Hoover? I miss him.”

“Hoover now knows where the mints are in Paul’s foyer,” he says, deadpan.

I bark another laugh that turns into tears at the edges, because everything does. He sees it and cups my jaw gently with that big, careful hand. “He sang, Juno,” he says softly. “We didn’t lay a hand on him. He just… spilled. And now, we have names.”

My pulse ticks up. “Say them.”

“Stanley Coleman,” he says first, and the room goes a shade darker. “The onyx ring. Gracewood’s fixer-in-chief.”

I nod once, jaw tight.

“Rook Salazar,” he continues. “Ex-something. Anchor ink under the collar.”

“Rook,” I repeat, tasting the weight of it. “Of course.”

“Beau Latham,” he says, and I can hear the contempt. “Hedge fund. Pinky ring with a B—or a thirteen.”

“Tassel loafers,” I say, and Arrow’s mouth curves in a humorless little line.

“Merritt Voss,” he adds. “Fixer with a smile like a paper cut.”

“And the last one?” I ask.

“Devin Pike,” Arrow confirms. “Old money, new problems. Wants to be Coleman when he grows up.” Arrow pauses, and then says, “He’s got a YouTube channel.”

I let the names march through my head and sit down in a row. Coleman. Rook. Beau. Merritt. Devin. The Five. I shiver at the thought of how close we’re getting.

“And Gray’s orbiting,” he says, because the sun exists even when it hides. “Julian Gray is above it, which is worse. Nico is the ferry. I’m not sure if anyone else is involved.”

I close my eyes. The matchbooks. The marina slip. The ring in all our pictures, compass rose over waves. “I want to see them again,” I say, opening my eyes. “In person. Tonight.”

He doesn’t flinch. He never flinches when I aim at something. He thinks for a beat. I can see him running through the map. “Stonehouse,” he says. “Or there’s also a warehouse we could go.”

“I think we need witnesses.” I smile. “So, it’s Stonehouse.”

“Stonehouse,” he agrees. “I’ll have Gage get a reservation. Render will sit on the alley cams. Knight will nurse a drink at the bar and pretend to watch soccer. Ozzy will fall in love with a bartender and extract the POS system with charm alone.”

“And me?” I ask, even though I already know.

“You’ll sit with me at a table,” he says. “And when one of them does the stupid little check with his finger, I’ll put my hand over yours and we’ll handle him.”

I breathe. My face does that thing where it betrays gratitude by softening despite my best efforts. “I trust you,” I say, and mean it like a vow I’m not willing to break. “I don’t love that you went to Paul without me. But I understand why. Don’t make a habit of it.”

“I won’t,” he says. “Unless the habit is living long enough to tell you first next time.”

“Good habit,” I say, and crawl up his chest just enough to kiss him slow and certain.

We lie there for another minute, pretending time isn’t a thing, and then the coffee in the other room guilt-shouts in my brain and I roll away with a groan.

“Our bagels and coffee are getting cold,” I announce, standing up from the floor and grabbing his sweatshirt on my way, because I am a thief with priorities.

He follows me to the kitchen in socks and sweats, hair a little worse for the best reasons. I plate sesame and cinnamon-raisin like it’s a sacrament and give him the fancy cream cheese because he will scowl if I don’t and I enjoy the scowl but not at breakfast.

We eat at the counter like it’s a normal morning and not the fork in a road. He tells me more details about Paul—how he cried, how he looked like a man trying to feel something on purpose at a place designed for it.

He pulls a folded sheet from his back pocket and slides it over: his tidy block letters with the five names, underlined, boxed, arrows to Stonehouse / Cicely’s / Unit 14 .

“Can I?” I ask, nodding at the crime wall.

“It’s your wall,” he says. “Write them as big as you need.”

I cross the room, uncap a thick black marker, and add the names to the center column, the one that used to say FIND THE FIVE and now says each of their names in bold ink. I feel like a certain piece is missing, but can’t figure it out.

Arrow steps up behind me—close enough that I can feel his heat, not so close that he corners me. His hand finds the back of my arm. “We’ll get them,” he says.

“We’ll get them,” I echo, and cap the marker like an exclamation point.

He threads our fingers together, squeezing once. I squeeze back. The clock over the sink clicks into a new minute.

“Tonight,” I say.

“Tonight,” he agrees.

We clean up the kitchen because my therapist says you should do small normal things after big abnormal ones, and I’m not about to argue with science.

He puts my coffee in the mandala mug like he’s baiting fate.

I roll my eyes and drink anyway. When he goes to leave to check in with Maddox, he pauses at the door and kisses me so softly I almost miss it.

After he’s gone, I stand in the quiet apartment and stare at the names until they feel less like myth and more like kindling. Fear hums in my bones. It’s low and constant. But I’ll stop at nothing to find the men responsible.

I pick up the mandala book and color one petal purple, one petal black. I breathe through my nose, trying for peace.

Tonight, we’ll watch them in the wild.