Page 40 of Make Them Bleed (Pretty Deadly Things #1)

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Stonehouse hides behind a florist like a rumor.

You step through a doorway of peonies and apology cards and the air changes—cooler, darker, lit like a secret.

The main room is all walnut and low brass, bottles backlit like stained glass.

The ceiling is pressed tin, and the servers glide like they’re on rails.

A muted soccer match drifts from the corner TV, the sound replaced by a vinyl crackle of something old and classic.

We take a two-top with sightlines—the door in my left peripheral, the service hallway in my right.

Render posts in the alley with a camera rig inside a messenger bag that reads CITY MAPS.

Ozzy claims a stool dead-center at the bar, rotating a coaster with anxious precision.

Knight nurses a beer near the kitchen like a man who has never once in his life actually watched a soccer match, eyes half-lidded, taking in everything.

Gage is at home with three laptops open, bending membership metadata hard enough to talk.

Juno sits across from me in black, hair up, lips a shade that would get men in novels into preventable duels. Red lipstick that makes me want to smudge it up. She’s got her hand on her water glass, knuckles white just enough that anyone else would miss it.

I don’t.

“Breathe,” I whisper.

“I am,” she says, a hair too quick. “Your definition of breathing includes oxygen. Mine includes spite.”

“Both are gases,” I say, and she huffs, tension breaking for a beat.

He arrives on the late side of ten. Merritt Voss walks into Cicely’s like he owns equity in the concept of dim light.

He’s smaller than he wanted to be when he grew up—compact, curated, wearing a navy suit with the kind of lapels you can only buy if you use the word bespoke without choking.

He smells like expensive wood and litigation.

He sits at the bar, perches, and signals for something neat the bartender pours without asking. People look. Not everyone. Enough.

“On him,” Ozzy breathes into my ear, the bone-conduction earpiece tickling my jaw. “No date. He’s peacocking solo.”

“Copy,” Render murmurs. “Alley clear. Back door propped by a bucket that says ice even though there’s definitely no ice in it.”

Knight takes a long drink and sets the glass down like punctuation. “He’s waiting.”

He is. Every line of him hums appointment. He checks his watch twice in two minutes. His leg bounces once—a controlled flick, like he regrets having a body. He doesn’t notice me at all. He doesn’t notice Knight. He doesn’t notice anything until he notices Juno.

It happens between blinks. His head turns in idle scan, and then his gaze snags like he’s been hooked by his lip.

Recognition smacks him. It isn’t the excited kind, not the oh hey, I love your podcast buzz Juno still occasionally gets at grocery stores when she dares to buy apples like a human.

This recognition tastes like a problem .

He recognizes her like oh hey, I killed your sister.

His face doesn’t change much. Men like Merritt train for this. But the pupils blow, the mouth tightens, the hand slides off the bar an inch like it wishes it knew how to run. He picks up his glass anyway, swallows something that burns, puts it down with careful fingers, and stands.

“Eyes,” I say, and everyone moves a millimeter closer in their heads.

Merritt doesn’t go for the front door. He slices through the room, tight smile for a man he recognizes from maybe a luncheon that raised money for something you’d never google, and finds the service hallway without asking for directions.

Juno’s chair scrapes softly. I catch her hand under the table and squeeze one beat: We go. We don’t sprint. She squeezes back: Not sprinting, just hunting.

I toss some bills on the table. Knight slides from his stool. Ozzy loses two dollars on a coaster trick and abandons it like a ship at sea. I rise, and Juno is already in motion.

The back door clicks. The alley air tastes like wet stone and secrets. Merritt’s shadow cuts across brick.

“South,” Render whispers. “Left at the dumpster, straight for the lot.”

We fan without looking like we planned it. Knight peels wide, parallel on the street. Ozzy drops behind a parked SUV and gives us a thumbs-up nobody sees. Juno and I move like two pieces of fabric in the same wind.

Merritt doesn’t run. Men like Merritt don’t run unless someone tells them it’ll look good on a security camera.

He brisk-walks to a black sedan and tosses a look over his shoulder that lands a foot to my left.

He gets in. The taillights flare. He pulls out like a person who wants to believe he’s not being followed.

We follow. Not glued to his bumper. Not sloppy. Knight slides in behind him two cars back, and we drift one lane over like we’re going somewhere less important. Ozzy calls out green lights like a baseball announcer trying to be subtle. Render ghosts us on side streets.

“Pinecrest,” Knight says after eight minutes of nothing. “He’s boring himself home.”

He is. Merritt’s split-level is the kind I could diagram in my sleep—slate-gray siding, too-big potted shrubs, a porch light controlled by an app that pushes smug notifications.

He eases into the drive. We glide past like good citizens and find a spot a house down where no one will burn if anyone asks later.

Juno’s breath is steady, which is wild considering I can see the memory of a finger gun reflected in her eyes like a bad sky.

She doesn’t wait. She gets out. Ozzy tosses me the bag with the masks and a pair of thin gloves we pretend are not ridiculous.

Knight rolls his shoulders and exhales like he’s about to do something he’ll pretend not to be good at.

“Gage?” I murmur into the comm. “We’re at Voss.”

His voice arrives through my earpiece. “Phone lines quiet. No calls out from his number since Stonehouse.”

“Copy,” I say, because he’s on the hook for a thousand plausible deniabilities and I’ll thank him for it later.

We mask up. Ozzy hands Juno the Ghostface she ordered off Amazon in a moment of gallows humor. She lifts it, pauses. I can see her mouth—the mouth that just told me she loved me—set into a thin line.

“Ready?” I ask, Hoover’s rubber jaw stupid and grave.

“Not remotely,” she says, sliding the mask on.

Merritt’s front door opens, then closes. He moves through his house like a man on rails—hallway, kitchen light, bar cart. He thinks he made it. He thinks seeing Juno was a coincidence he can spend tomorrow forgetting. He doesn’t know that tonight is a different math problem.

We don’t break the door in; there’s a version of us that would, and we’ve decided not to meet them. Knight taps and then does the kind of not-waiting that reads as authority. The door swings back on the latch he didn’t set. We enter like fog, not force.

Merritt is halfway through a pour when he hears us. The bottle clinks glass, and he looks up. He sees four presidents from the discount bin and one ghost with a knife-mouth.

“What the—” He stumbles back, sloshing whiskey on hardwood that cost more than my first car. His eyes go wide. “Is this a… prank? Because I will— I will call?—”

“That’s a lot of I wills ,” Ozzy says, Arthur grinning idiotically.

Merritt’s gaze bounces from mask to mask and lands on Juno like he just recognized the monster under his bed is real and also arrived in a hoodie. “You,” he says, and the word contains a weather system.

Juno steps forward. No hesitation. Ghostface turns her into something half-mythic. Her voice is her own—steady, sharp. “You were there,” she says. “You killed my sister.”

“I— I don’t— that—that is—” He laughs, high and brittle. “Insane. This is insane.”

“Say her name,” Juno says, and somewhere the house decides it isn’t going to breathe for a second.

He blinks. He tries to be clever. “Which one?”

“Arby,” she says, and the name lands like a blade point-down into a map.

Something inside me strains at its leash. I keep still. Knight takes one step left and blocks the hallway. Render takes one step right and blocks the sliding glass door. Ozzy leans on the edge of the island like a man considering countertops.

Merritt swallows. He sets the tumbler down with a clink that’s fifty percent flourish, fifty percent stall. “You accuse, you break in, and you wear… Herbert Hoover?” He gestures, hands shaking. “What is this? Halloween for the under-informed?”

“Chester A. Arthur is hurt,” Ozzy says in a fake offended tone. It wrings a strangled laugh out of me that shouldn’t exist in this room and yet does.

“We can do banter or we can do names,” I say, voice low enough that Hoover might vibrate. “You choose.”

Merritt tries for dignity, settles for smug. “I choose my lawyer.”

“You can call him when we’re finished,” Knight says, friendly and incorrect.

Juno tilts her head, Ghostface a white oval that knows how to haunt. “Tell me about the Five,” she says. “Coleman. Rook. Beau. Devin. And you. Tell me what you did to my sister. Who hired you? Why?”

“I wasn’t there,” he says, fast enough that I know he came here prepared to say that sentence to himself in the mirror. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Too late for that,” I say. “You were there.”

He laughs again, softer this time. “Do you think you can scare me? Because you’re wearing masks? That’s precious.” His eyes flick to Juno. “And tragic.”

Something tilts. I see Juno’s shoulders tighten, her breathing shift three beats into a pattern I know means volcano . I step closer, still careful. “Don’t talk to her,” I tell him. “Talk to me.”

He does, because he’s the kind of man who thinks men make the rules even when women are writing the story. “You don’t know what you’re playing with,” he says. “You don’t know who you’re playing with.”

“We do,” Render says. “We have names now.”

Merritt’s smile flickers. “Then you know whose house you just?—”