Page 128 of The Kingpin's Call Girl

A calming hand holds my arm. Orton. “He wants you to kill him fast.”Don’t take the bait,he means.

“Right.” I leave him there, bleeding and broken, and grab a Dr. Pepper from the machine.

“What’s up?” Orton asks, strolling over.

“I’m not feeling it.”

“We could keep him on ice for you.”

“It’s not that.” I take a sip and stroll over to the guy. “A young girl suffered because of you. She was just a kid.”

The man eyes me, panting. Bleeding.

Orton comes up beside me. “Still not feeling it?”

“I don’t know.”

“What does your intuition say?”

Orton’s a big believer in intuition, especially with me. He buys into the idea that thekyrehas divine prescience.

The guy squirms and whines.

“Shut up,” I say to him.

“You know what I think? I think you’re not ready to be done with this whole thing.” Orton makes a hand motion meaningthe whole Ghost Hound Clan thing.“Once you complete your vengeance, the mission is complete. We’ve always waited for the next mission to come up. What if we say we’re done with missions? We could choose this. Permanently.”

“Yeah, I know your feelings on the matter.”

“But do you know your feelings? You like it. It suits you.”

“You sound like Edie.”

“You’ve discussed this with Edie?” he asks, shocked.

I nod. If you had told me that night in the hotel bar that I’d be discussing this sort of thing with her, I would have been shocked, too.

Orton and Storm have always been my inner circle. Women were always just transactions.

“So you’re just... all the way in with her,” Orton says.

“I’m all the way in. And that’s not up for debate.”

“You need to think long and hard before you let a girl influence you,” Orton warns. “You have power. You have wealth. People are fucking scared of us. We’re at the top of our game. Once you walk away, you can’t come back. This is your destiny.”

“You’re not listening,” I say. “She’s good with all this.”

Orton straightens. “That little girl?”

“Don’t let the pastels fool you. She’s one of us.”

I tell him about Bender threatening her family and fucking her up. How she gave him nothing he could use, and what she did give, it was to protect us. A fucking civilian and she ran that cookie op. I tell him about her impulse to go down to Tucumayo and make them answer for what they did to me. Bloodthirsty. Loyal.

“In the world of fight or flight, she fights,” I say. “Right in there with me.”

“You have seemed more focused since she’s been around,” he observes. “And she’s really down with this life?”

“She’s down with this. Down with me.”