Page 44 of Make Them Bleed (Pretty Deadly Things #1)

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Club Greed always feels like the inside of a held breath. Tonight it feels like two.

The G glows against the facade like a conspirator’s wink, and the foyer smells like money and a conditional welcome.

Juno slides in at my side, red dress and red band on her wrist like a dare. Her hand finds my sleeve for one second then drops, the touch like a spark against a fuse that insists on being lit.

We move through the bar and into Pride, and the room swallows us the way water swallows a pebble—silent on the surface, ripples everywhere else.

Mirrors glitter like indifferent constellations.

The frames in the center show nothing and everything depending on angle.

The corner banquette we like is open, and I slide in first so I can see both doors.

Juno takes the outside seat and then turns toward me, knees brushing, eyes dark with the gravity that’s been between us since a door and a morning and the word love .

Her mouth is a soft problem I can solve in ten thousand careful ways and exactly one reckless one.

We’re fifteen minutes early. The plan says talk .

The part of me that’s been vibrating since I knocked on her door says don’t waste the room .

She must see it, because her smile cuts sideways, wicked and shy all at once. “We have eleven minutes,” she says. “Ten if you insist on punctuality.”

“Seven if I count transitions like a project manager,” I murmur, and her almost-laugh is my favorite sound the band has never sampled.

We lean. It’s not rushed. It’s not polite.

It’s the slow kind, the kind that says we’re choosing this even when the world is a five-alarm problem.

Her mouth meets mine and the room falls away in a soft, grateful hush.

I kiss her like I promised I would—meticulous, a little bossy, hand at her jaw guiding the angle, the other warm on her thigh where the dress ends and my restraint begins.

She answers with a hum I feel under my ribs.

The first pass is relief, the second a reminder, the third a small declaration.

“Okay?” I whisper against her smile.

“Unfair,” she breathes, which in our new dictionary is a full-body yes. Her fingers slide up into my hair and tug just enough to make my breath catch.

Footsteps approach. We separate with the kind of reluctance that makes me want to file a grievance with time. Juno smooths her mouth with the barest touch of her thumb. I sit back and become the man who looks like he belongs anywhere.

“Mr. Huxley will see you now,” Adele says, somehow not smirking despite catching our oxygen theft. She leads us through the discreet corridor to a side salon: low light, a pair of leather chairs angled toward a small table, a credenza with nothing on it but water and rules framed like art.

Devereaux Huxley is already there. He has the posture of a man who signs checks without asking for pens. Crisp suit, open collar, a wedding band that would read as ostentatious on anyone else and looks like minimalism here. His eyes are the kind that learn rooms and don’t forget.

“Ms. Kate. Mr. Finn,” he says, offering the sort of hand that doesn’t insist. His voice is a quiet instrument. “I’m Devereaux. Thank you for meeting me as guests, not vigilantes.”

“We do both,” Juno says, and I’m proud of her for the way she says it.

A corner of his mouth lifts. “As do I, depending on the board.” He gestures us to sit. “My house is very fond of its house rules. I understand you are fond of your sister.”

He says are , not were . I like him better for it.

“I’m not here to ask you to betray your members,” Juno says. “I’m here to ask you to value your house more than you value their illusions of privacy.”

“Good,” he says. “Because betraying members is how a house like mine dies. And because privacy without consent is simply camouflage.”

He steeples his fingers in a way that would be a cliché on a lesser man. “Detective Huxley is my wife. We keep our jurisdictions separate. She doesn’t ask me for tapes, and I don’t ask her for warrants. We both prefer to wake without ethics hangovers.” His eyes flicker, amused.

“Chloe’s good,” I say. “She’ll find them.”

“She is,” he agrees. “But your clock and hers are not synced. So here is what I will do, and what I will not. I will not hand you names. I will not show you faces unredacted without a lawful request. I will not undermine the premise of a room designed to keep people safe from other people’s cameras.

I will—” He tips his head. “—pull transaction adjacency, seating adjacency, and entry adjacency for the men you’ve mentioned.

Who sat with them. Who followed them into a hallway and came out adjusting a tie.

Who consistently arrived thirty minutes before and left four songs after.

We call it shadow-mapping . It’s a genealogy of bad decisions. ”

“Patterns,” Juno says, leaning forward. The word is a soft prayer.

“Yes. Patterns. You can build names from patterns if you are careful. And when you bring Chloe something that looks like a pattern and smells like a plan, she can ask a judge for a warrant I can’t ignore.”

“What’s the cost?” I ask. Men like Devereaux do not offer this without a ledger.

He nods, pleased. “You keep my house intact while you hunt. You do not cause scenes on my floors. If you must cause a scene, you do it outside, where civility is only a suggestion. You share with me, within reason, when a predator thinks my rooms are their hunting ground. You trust that when I tell you no it’s because there are lines under this rug you do not want pulled. ”

“Done,” Juno says, and the word is blade-clean.

He studies her for the length of a heartbeat, recognizes the kind of woman who means what she says, and turns to a lacquered tablet on the table.

“I can pull three years of adjacency in under an hour,” he says.

“Longer if you want Marina cross-reference. Our docks have better cameras than the city, for obvious reasons. If your men have met here, or lured here, or hid here, they left a shadow.”

“Nico?” Juno asks, voice like a piano wire. “He’s the ferry. He moves between rooms like he owns the water.”

Devereaux’s gaze sharpens. “He has not paid us in years,” he says simply. “He prefers other lights. But men who like to be seen prefer men who like to steer. I’ll map adjacency between your Five and his known nights at other houses.”

He taps the tablet. I can almost see the graph bloom in his head—nodes and edges, weight and direction. “You will not get names from me tonight. You will get a map and I will place you on the right street.”

“Street is good,” I say. “We can walk from there.”

He nods once and then tilts his head, amused. “And now I will give you a gift that is not a gift. If you do not want to see something you cannot unsee, say so now and I will put you in Pride for fifteen minutes and bring you back when the sightline has cleared.”

Juno frowns. “What sightline?”

Devereaux turns his head just enough that the mirror behind him picks up an angle of the main room. “Your stepfather,” he says. “Entered seven minutes ago. Green band. He is currently at the north banquette with a woman who is not your mother.”

Time folds. Juno’s breath leaves in a small, personal collapse. My hand finds her knee without thinking. She doesn’t flinch. Her eyes burn—shock first, then insult, then a fast, airy grief that looks like the moment before glass breaks.

“No,” she says. It’s not denial. It’s a vow.

I stand already, because if she rises fast she’ll tip into act and we are not acting yet. Devereaux holds up a palm once— rules —and lowers it again. “Do not break my house,” he says gently. “If you want a closer look, come with me. If you want to breathe, stay and I’ll close the mirror.”

“I want to see,” Juno says, voice very calm, which is my least favorite tone on her because it lives three inches from the edge of a cliff.

Devereaux leads us to a sightline in Pride that might as well have been designed for interventions.

We look like people admiring a painting.

In the mirror’s angle, I see him: Bob. Khakis made fancy with a blazer he thinks hides the office badge in his blood.

Green band. An expression I recognize from Sunday dinners when he expected applause for remembering to bake pie.

The woman across from him is mid-thirties, sleek hair, a dress that says I belong here, or I know how to pretend convincingly.

She laughs at something he says. He touches her wrist in that automatic, territorial way some men think reads as charm.

It’s not lurid. That almost makes it worse. She looks familiar.

“Who is she?” I whisper.

“Etta Hoy,” Juno answers, voice breaking. Juno’s jaw tightens until I worry about her teeth. Her fingers crush the red band in her palm. “He took her? Here?” she says.

“The influencer? The one Arby knew?” That can’t be a coincidence.

“He brings people where he feels powerful,” Devereaux says, not unkindly. “This room is safer than most of the rooms he uses to impress. It is also not a place to confront a man if you want the confrontation to count.”

She breathes once, hard. I can feel the moment where she pictures walking across the room and setting everything on fire. I can feel the moment where she chooses to set something else on fire later.

“Is he… connected?” I ask Devereaux. “To the Five?” The question tastes like a dare. Paul worked under Bob. The finger gun. The donor dinners. The adjacency is right there like a wire we could pull.

“Your stepfather is not who you think he is,” Devereaux says. “He tips like a man who thinks tips buy silence.”

Juno swallows. She sets the band on the table very gently, like an egg she refuses to break. “We don’t confront him here,” she says. “We watch. We follow. We see who he sees. We learn why he came here. And we follow her too.”