Mission: Submission (Dangerous Devotion #14)

Chapter One

Jenna

THREE DEEP AT THE BAR and Huck was already giving me the look.

The look meant we were running low on Woodford, which meant I’d underestimated the Wednesday crowd again, which meant somebody was going to have to sweet-talk our distributor into an emergency Thursday delivery during Mardi Gras week.

That somebody was going to be me, because that somebody was always me.

I grabbed two rocks glasses with one hand and poured Buffalo Trace with the other while a guy in a purple-and-gold jersey leaned across the bar top and shouted his order directly into my cleavage.

I filled his Hurricane, charged him tourist prices, and smiled at him like he’d just made my whole night.

He tipped twelve dollars. There’s a reason I wear the V-necks.

Proof, my bar, was packed the way it only gets the week before Fat Tuesday: bodies shoulder to shoulder, noise so thick you felt it in your teeth, the brass section from some second line two blocks over punching through the walls every time someone opened the front door.

I loved it. Every sweating, shouting, bourbon-soaked minute of it.

This was my week. Four years I’d spent turning a failed dive bar into a place locals actually wanted to drink, and Carnival was the payoff: the week where the register didn’t stop and neither did I.

Huck shouldered past me to grab the well vodka and I ducked under his arm without either of us breaking stride.

We’d been doing this dance since year one, when I’d hired him because he was the only applicant who didn’t look at me like I was in over my head.

He was built like a commercial refrigerator and about as expressive, but he could pour four drinks simultaneously and his silence kept the creeps honest.

“Table nine wants to close out, Jenna,” he said, dry as concrete.

“I’ll get it.” I wiped my hands on the bar towel tucked into my belt, pushed my hair off my face, and wound through the crowd toward the courtyard.

The Edison lights I’d strung back there caught the breeze off the river and threw moving shadows across the tables.

A couple was making out in the corner. A group of women were taking photos with their hurricanes held high, the courtyard framed behind them: exposed brick, trailing jasmine, the stage I’d built with my own hands and a rented table saw.

I closed out table nine, bussed two empties on the way back, and checked my phone.

Eleven forty-seven. A Wednesday during Mardi Gras week, and we were still turning people away at the door.

I caught my reflection in the back mirror as I passed, red lipstick still holding after five hours.

I ran my thumb over the studded leather on my bracelet and headed back behind the rail.

The next two hours blurred. Pour, pour, close tab, pour.

Break up an argument between two guys who both claimed they’d been next.

Card a girl who looked fifteen and turned out to be twenty-three.

Wave off the door guy when he flagged me about a noise complaint on the sidewalk.

Swap a dead keg while Huck hauled the new one into place and I crouched down to hook up the line, heeled boots and all.

By one-thirty the crowd had thinned to the diehards. I sent the servers and the barback home, told Huck I’d close, and started the shutdown checklist I could do with my eyes shut. Register. Wipe-down. Trash.

Then the boxes.

We’d taken two big deliveries that afternoon and the flattened cardboard was stacked by the stockroom door waiting to go out. I propped the alley door open with my hip, grabbed the first armload, and stepped outside.

The air hit me first, cooler than inside, thick with the river and the grease from a dozen fryer vents that had been hanging over the Quarter all night.

The alley ran between Proof and the building next door, narrow, badly lit, and emptying into the side street.

I’d walked it a thousand times. I’d broken down boxes out here while jazz bled through the walls and rats ran the gutter and the city breathed around me like a living thing.

I was two steps past the dumpster when I heard the voice.

Low. Calm. The kind of calm that doesn’t belong in a back alley at one-thirty in the morning.

I stopped. The cardboard was still in my arms. My body understood before my brain did — everything went tight, went still, the way an animal freezes when it hears something wrong in the grass.

Two men. Ten feet past the dumpster, at the alley’s dead end where the brick wall met the neighboring building’s side door. One was on his knees. The other was standing over him with a gun pressed to the back of his skull.

The one on his knees was crying. Quiet, wet sounds that I felt in my chest.

The standing one spoke again. Same calm. I couldn’t make out the words. It didn’t matter. I knew what I was seeing.

The standing one looked up.

Our eyes locked. Two seconds, maybe three, long enough for the streetlight at the alley mouth to catch his face. Broad forehead. Thick neck. A scar or a crease cutting through one eyebrow. He saw me and I saw him see me and the recognition was mutual and absolute.

The gun went off.

The sound wasn’t what I expected, wasn’t the sharp crack you hear in movies. A flat, hard pop that bounced off the brick walls and punched through my sternum. The man on his knees dropped sideways like his strings had been cut.

I ran.

I dropped the cardboard and it scattered across the alley and I didn’t care.

I was through the stockroom entrance and slamming it shut, fighting the lock — the deadbolt was stiff, it was always stiff, I’d been meaning to fix it for months — and then it caught and I was inside with my back against the steel and my hands shaking so hard I almost couldn’t get my phone out of my pocket.

I called 911. Gave the address. “Someone was shot in the alley behind my bar. He’s dead. The shooter is still out there and he saw my face.”

My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. Flat and clear and functioning while the rest of me vibrated like a struck bell. I slid down the door until I was sitting on the concrete floor between cases of bourbon and a mop bucket and I pressed my forehead to my knees and breathed.

I could hear the distant thump of music from Bourbon Street. The ice machine humming in the hall. My own pulse, too fast, filling up my ears.

I didn’t cry. I wanted to, but the tears weren’t there. Just the image, stuck on a loop behind my eyelids: the man on his knees, the sound, his body dropping sideways. And the shooter’s face, lit by the streetlight, looking right at me.

The police came in eleven minutes. Two uniforms first, then more. They cleared the alley and asked me to come out of the stockroom. I stood up, pulled back the bolt, and walked out on legs I couldn’t entirely feel.

The detective arrived an hour later, after the uniforms had taken my statement and the paramedics had confirmed what I already knew.

He introduced himself as Perry Hebert. Forties, rumpled, running on caffeine and Carnival-week adrenaline with a department stretched past breaking.

He shook my hand, sat down across from me at the bar — my bar, which was now a crime scene adjacent — and told me what I’d stumbled into.

The victim had ties to the Dixie Mafia’s gambling operations, and the shooter matched the description of a known enforcer. The DA was convening a grand jury. One week.

“And you’re the only eyewitness,” Hebert said, like he was apologizing for the weather.

“Are they going to come looking for me?”

He didn’t answer right away, which was an answer. He tapped the edge of the counter, and I watched him glance at the stockroom door, then the alley entrance, doing the same math I’d already done. One lock. One door. No camera.

“The enforcer knows you saw his face,” he said. “And he knows where you work.”

I poured myself two fingers of Blanton’s because nobody had told me I couldn’t and because I needed my hands busy, needed them doing what they knew how to do. The bourbon burned going down. Familiar. Steadying.

“So what does that mean for me?”

“It means you testify, and between now and then, you’re careful.” He gave me his card. “We’ll have units checking the block. But I’ll be straight with you, Ms. Darby. It’s Mardi Gras week. We’re stretched. I can’t put someone on your door twenty-four-seven.”

He was being straight with me. I respected it. I also understood exactly what he was saying underneath it all: you’re on your own.

I locked up Proof at four in the morning and made it the two blocks to my apartment.

The stairs were narrow and smelled like old wood and the Thai place on the corner.

I let myself in, threw the chain, and stood in my kitchen with the lights off while my eyes adjusted.

Small place. One bedroom, galley kitchen, a bathroom with a window that stuck.

My grandmother’s couch against the far wall, the velvet catching the streetlight through the curtains.

I’d made this apartment mine the same way I’d made the bar mine: slowly, stubbornly, with my own money and my own hands.

It wasn’t much. It was enough. It had always been enough.

I double-checked the door and didn’t sleep.

I tried. Got into bed, pulled the covers up, lay there watching the shadows on the ceiling while the last of the Bourbon Street crowd howled their way home beneath my windows.

Every time I closed my eyes I saw him. The forehead.

The neck. The crease through his eyebrow.

The casual way he’d held the gun, like it weighed nothing, like it was just another part of his hand.

At some point a siren screamed past on Chartres and I flinched so hard I bit my tongue. After that I stopped pretending.