Page 42 of Make Them Bleed (Pretty Deadly Things #1)

Juno

The kettle clicks off like a polite throat clear and I jump hard enough to slosh coffee onto the counter.

That’s where I am, these days—nerves tuned to dog-whistle frequencies, jumping at appliances and my own reflection in the microwave door.

It’s been three days since Merritt Voss found out what gravity does to men who think a house will always be a safe place, and the city is still sleeping like it expects a different ending.

I wipe the coffee with the heel of my hand and stare at the paper towels until they blur. I’m not crying. I am, however, negotiating with a quiet, ugly relief that keeps padding into the room like a cat I didn’t invite.

I don’t tell Arrow this. I don’t know how.

I don’t know how to tell the man I love that, for one reckless, blazing second in Merritt’s living room, I wanted to be the one to do it.

To end it. To put an ending on the page with my hands, not just my marker.

I didn’t push him. I didn’t plan that corner or that slick edge or that dull, terrible sound.

But when it happened—when the air snapped and the house went very bright and very wrong—something in me stood up and whispered there.

And now I am walking around with there in my chest and it feels like a dirty coin under my tongue.

The crime wall watches me from the far side of the room: COLEMAN / ROOK / BEAU / DEVIN in thick black marker, NICO and GRAY circled like twin suns that refuse to share light.

MERRITT is there, too, a line through his name that isn’t how I wanted to keep score and yet here we are.

The red twine connecting corners looks like veins.

The photos look like witnesses who are not enjoying their day.

Gage’s updates pinged all night:

Remaining Four radio silent.

Coleman’s calendar ghosted—private flag on two entries.

Rook’s gym at 5 a.m., same as always; he switched cars on the way out.

Beau canceled a haircut (sign of the apocalypse).

Devin posted about “grind mode” and then deleted it.

Someone, somewhere, hired them .

“Who hired you,” I say to the wall, the way you talk to TVs during playoff games. “Why Arby?”

No one answers. Of course they don’t. Arby’s looking out at me from a dozen angles—pink hair in some, blonde in others, each smile a slightly different lie about how fine she was.

She hated symphonies and loved horror movies and once stopped speaking to me for two days because I watched The Shining without her.

She would have had a field day with Club Greed.

She would have rolled her eyes at tassel loafers.

She would have stuck her fingers in my bagel cream cheese and made a noise that Arrow would later try to describe and get flustered and give up.

Bagels. God. I am supposed to eat. My stomach informs me of this by doing a little dance I could charitably call hunger and less charitably call a raccoon in a dryer .

I make myself a cinnamon-raisin and stand at the counter chewing in the reflective way people in sad indie movies do.

The first bite tastes like nothing. The second tastes like tonight.

I don’t know what that means yet. My brain keeps circling the same options: Go back to Club Greed.

Poke Stonehouse. Sit in a car outside Unit 14 and try to listen through the walls.

Call my mother and ask her to tell me I’m not a terrible person.

And listen to her tell me to go to the police and stop trying to be the police.

I do none of those things. Instead I pull the mandala book toward me and color three petals purple and two black and set the pencil down when the lines start to look like a target.

The Ring camera sits like a dead eye on the entry table.

I turn it back on. We’re in the thick of it now, and better safe than sorry.

Three knocks makes me breathe again. Arrow fills the doorway like he knows how to stand there.

He’s in jeans and a black jacket and the careful, unflappable face he wears when he’s about to say something ordinary that is also a plan.

His eyes slide over me like a check-in and land on my hands.

I tuck the purple pencil behind my ear and pretend I look like someone who slept.

“Coffee,” he says, offering peace in a paper cup.

“Bribery,” I say, taking it.

He steps in, and the door clicks shut. He sets the bag on the table and doesn’t touch me until I lean and then he does—the softest press of lips to my temple, which is sometimes better than a kiss and sometimes worse. My body can’t decide which today.

“How are you?” he asks, the way people ask what time is it when they’re scared of clocks.

“I’m fine,” I lie, then amend, “I’m not fine. I’m… upright.”

He nods. “Upright is an achievement.”

We do the ritual of normal for five minutes—he complains about Ozzy’s new obsession with inventing the perfect martini algorithm.

I tell him my neighbor appears to be fostering a small herd of feral scooters, and we act like the timer will go off if we don’t talk about Merritt by minute six. The timer goes off anyway.

“What now?” I ask, catching his eyes.

“The remaining Four are spooked,” he says. “And I’m going to tell you something you already know. Spooked men leak.”

“You think we should go to Club Greed?” I ask.

“Maybe,” he says. “Or Stonehouse. Or the marina. Gage’s got three flags on Gray’s calendar—two ‘private’ lunch holds and a donor dinner at the South Conservatory. None scream Five, but Coleman never calendar-screams. He calendar-whispers.”

“What about Nico?” I ask. The name tastes like metal.

“Render has eyes on D4 ,” Arrow says. “Rook too. If Nico moves something larger than an apology, we’ll see the ripple. But today? Today we either go to Church”—Greed—“and watch, or we go to Stonehouse.”

“Stonehouse,” I repeat. I can picture the back room—leather, ice cubes the size of dice, laughter that always sounds a hair too loud. “I want to know who hired them.”

“I know,” he says. “Render can seed a false reservation: venture capital parasite meets ‘new friends’ at nine. If Beau Latham thinks someone wants to talk distribution or purpose or prestige, he’ll show.

He’s a peacock. Coleman may not. Rook won’t if he smells a camera. Devin will if Beau tells him to.”

“And Gray?” I say. “Do we poke the saint?”

His mouth twists. “We never poke the saint where he can paint himself persecuted. We invite him to say no comment somewhere we’re recording.”

I walk to the wall and stare at the name MERRITT until the line through his name stops swimming. My chest tightens on the inhale.

“I’ve changed my mind, I want to go back to Club Greed,” I say, turning. “I want Devereaux’s eyes. I want to sit in Pride and watch them not come. Or come and pretend they didn’t.”

Arrow doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t say Are you sure , because I am, and he knows I’ll only become more so if he challenges me. “Okay,” he says. “We go early. Not members’ night. We talk to Devereaux like adults who understand liability. We don’t ask for names. We ask for patterns.”

“What about asking for favors?” I ask. “Can we do that?”

“We can,” he says. “But we do it as people who can keep their side of a bargain. We don’t make him choose between his house and our war.”

“Fine,” I say, even though I want to keep wanting until someone gives me something illegal.

He reads my face and then looks away like he’s giving me privacy inside my own skin. “There’s another option,” he says. “It’s messy.”

“Sold,” I say, because of course it is.

“We use your voice,” he says. “The podcast. Ten-minute drop. Not names, not doxxing. Just… a story. A smart, sharp story that says ‘I’m closer than you think. I know what you call your jokes. I know where you drink.’ Beau will clench.

Devin will post and delete. Coleman will pretend to be bored and then show up somewhere to preen.

Gray will call a lawyer. Nico will…send a text. ”

“Bright girl,” I say, jaw tight.

“Yeah,” he says, his voice soft and smooth.

I picture hitting record. I picture my voice steady and terrible in a good way. I picture people listening with their phones on their chests, breath held, rooting for a girl who colors circles in the afternoon and hunts men at night.

“I can do that,” I say. “I can write something that rattles them all.”

He nods. “We combine. You drop the episode at six. We ask Devereaux for a conversation at seven. We sit in Club Greed at eight without masks or games. Stonehouse at nine as a backup. We put a net under the night that catches whatever wriggles.”

“Team?” I ask, because the we has to be larger than the us .

“Ozzy runs audio on your post—wires its push notifications through half the city without breaking terms,” he says.

“Render will plant himself in Pride’s corner with a jacket over his camera and a halo over his head.

Gage keeps the reservation plates spinning and becomes the fire marshal if the building tries to burn down.

Knight sits in the car and pretends he’s texting and actually memorizes every person who walks in for later. ”

“Detective Huxley?” I ask, because the word we sometimes have to include the people in actual suits.

“I’ll send her a packet at five-thirty that says ‘if you were me, you’d sit near Club Greed tonight,’” he says. “She won’t bring sirens. She’ll bring a coat and a notebook and a partner who thinks I’m annoying.”

He takes a sip of coffee, then reaches for me and pauses, asking without asking.

I fold into him because my bones want the word anchor written on them in permanent marker.

For a minute, we just breathe like we’re scaling a wall together.

His hand makes a warm line up my spine and I think about telling him the truth about my relief—about the cat that keeps stepping on my chest at 3 a.m. whispering there .

I don’t. Not yet. The confession claws at my throat and then curls up, purring and mean.