Chapter 16
Shaw/Spade
When I knocked, my handprint stayed on the wood, damp from the air outside or maybe from the Lake, hard to say.
The corridor was cheap hotel beige, the kind of rental that didn’t care if you passed out in the stairwell as long as you didn’t bleed on the fire doors.
My cuffs were still wet, my left shoe tracked with a diagonal stripe of dried mud that I’d noticed in the truck and decided to let ride.
I knocked once more—one of those knocks that pretends to be casual and is anything but—and heard the chain unfasten from the other side.
Spade opened the door in a tank top and the same jeans she’d had on at the clubhouse, no sign she’d bothered to change for the day or for me.
Her hair was down and still damp, and it caught the light in a way that made her look both younger and more dangerous, though I doubted either was intentional.
She didn’t scan me so much as take inventory, eyes pausing on my shoes, then the cuffs, then my face.
There was a slice of fresh tape on her knuckle; the blood underneath had already turned the bandage dark.
“You going to let me in or stand there staring?” I asked.
“Well, you came all this way.”
“We need to talk, Spade.” I leaned against the door jamb. “The more you share, the less trouble you’re in.”
“That really makes me want to invite you inside.” She crossed her arms. “I think you owe a resounding thank you.”
“What the fuck for? I could have sent you away for life.”
“That before or after the club dropped your dead-ass body in the desert?”
“I’ll make it quick.”
She stepped aside, giving me just enough room to enter without brushing against her. She closed the door behind me.
Inside, the apartment was surgical in its emptiness.
Bare counter, half-empty bottle of whiskey, and a single glass, the old-fashioned kind, squat and thick as a fist. A bed through an open doorway, mattress on a slatted frame, black sheets with the corners sharp.
There was a lamp on the floor because there were no tables, and its light made the laminate kitchen tile look jaundiced and tired.
Spade leaned against the sink with her arms folded, the tattoos in full display on her forearms: the snake wrapping up the left, the two hands holding a stylized heart on the right. She didn’t speak.
I stayed by the closed door, jacket still on, dripping half-dried water onto the entryway rug. For about thirty seconds, we said nothing, and those thirty seconds were the whole conversation.
“You always case your own place before you let people in?” I finally asked.
“Sometimes. Depends on who’s knocking. What do you want, Shaw?”
I took off my jacket and hung it over the nearest chair back. The holster was still empty, but I left the shoulder rig on, a piece of costume that fit too well to be completely comfortable.
“I didn’t think you’d answer,” I said.
She gave a one-sided shrug. “I get a lot of unannounced visits. Not all of them are as persistent as you.”
I tried a smile, but it didn’t land. “You called me. Or you called the department and asked for me. That’s a step.”
“Yeah.” Spade looked away, running her tongue along the inside of her scar. “I thought I owed you that.”
The silence after that was different—soaked through with the day’s residue, all the pieces we hadn’t named but both knew were on the table. I walked further in, palms out, letting her see my hands. She didn’t react.
“Whiskey?” I asked.
She lifted her chin at the bottle. “Help yourself. I stopped tasting it about three pours ago.”
I poured two fingers into the glass and drank half. It burned the same way every bar pour in this city did, which meant it was neither cheap nor memorable. Spade watched the liquid level as I set the glass down.
“You really here for a statement, Detective?” she asked.
I could have lied. I could have asked her again about Lake Mead and the access road, about what the Royal Harlots knew that the department didn’t. I could have played the role. But the suit was stained, my hands were shaking, and I was running out of ways to pretend I wasn’t here for her.
“I’m not here to arrest you,” I said, watching her reaction. “I meant what I said the night I had my gun pointed at you.”
She didn’t blink. “I know.”
“I don’t know what I am here for,” I said. “I don’t have a line for this in the manual.”
Spade unfolded her arms, crossed the space between us in a way that looked unhurried but was already over before I could decide how to react. She took the glass from my hand and set it on the counter, then reached up and traced her thumb along my jaw, just enough pressure to register.
“You’re here because you get a boner thinking about what I’ve done,” she said and smiled.
“And how do you know that?”
She leaned in, close enough that I could see the different layers in the tattoo ink, the old and the retouched. “Does it matter?”
“It does to me.”
Spade smiled, small and flat. “You came all this way for a confession, but you don’t want to call it that.”
I felt the exhaustion collapse in my knees, the adrenaline of the day bleeding out. I almost sat, but there were no chairs except the one my jacket was on, and something told me sitting would be the wrong move.
“We both know what happened out there,” I said, quieter.
She picked up the glass, sipped from it, and put it down again. “Maybe you do. Maybe you’re just hoping I say it so you don’t have to.”
I let that hang. In another life, I would have pushed, cajoled, gotten her angry enough to slip. But this wasn’t a suspect, and I wasn’t working anymore.
She walked past me, to the lamp, and turned the dial so the light dimmed to a quarter-strength. The room went gold and uncertain, shadows deepening along the floor. She stood in the doorway to the bedroom, one hand on the frame, and watched me.
“This is the part,” she said, “where you either leave or you fuck me.”
I didn’t move.
“Which is it, Detective?”
She was giving me an out, but her eyes said she already knew. I closed the distance and stopped when I was half a foot from her. The heat off her skin, the scent of sweat and soap, the scar along her jaw like an underline.
“This is a terrible idea,” I said.
“I know.”
She kissed me first, hard and closed-mouth, the kind of kiss that is more about ending the conversation than starting anything else. I put my hands on her waist, feeling the muscle and the heat, the edge of a holster at the small of her back that I was fairly sure was empty.
She broke the kiss and pulled back, running her hands along my torso with clinical efficiency. Her left hand slipped inside my jacket, past the lapel, to the inner pocket where I kept the cuffs.
She palmed them, held them up between two fingers, the metal catching the light.
“There are a lot of kinks I’m into that you may not be built for,” she said, almost a laugh in it.
I didn’t blink. “I can handle anything you have.”
She let the cuffs dangle from her finger, then looked at me for a long time. Her eyes never left mine.
“Show me,” she said.
The second the word left her mouth—Show me—I felt my pulse hitch, a tiny unspooling at the base of my neck, half fear and half recognition. The metal of the cuffs still glinted in her hand, perfectly at home there.
She spun and walked to the bedroom, pausing only to flick the lamp switch on her way, plunging the rest of the apartment into a darkness that was deeper for how little it hid. I followed her, barely remembering to pick up the glass and drain it before setting it on the kitchen counter.
The bedroom was all straight lines and black fabric.
She stood by the headboard and looked at me, just looked, until I understood.
The cuffs were real police-issue, cold and heavy when I took them from her.
She rolled her wrists together, palms forward, and there was nothing performative about the way she held them out—like she’d done this a hundred times, maybe had.
I caught a shiver at the base of my spine.
“Careful,” she said, “I’m not as forgiving as the real thing.”
I hooked her wrists around the iron headboard and ratcheted the cuffs tight.
The skin pinched, but she didn’t flinch; her tattoos looked almost alive under the bedside lamp, the snake’s eye catching a yellow spark.
She lay back without waiting for instruction, feet flat, knees up, breathing slow and regular.
I took a second to look at her, really look.
The way the lamp drew gold out of her scars, the new and the old.
The muscles along her stomach, the angry little bandage on her hand.
Her shirt was ribbed cotton, thinned out from wear, collar was already half-stretched from being grabbed too many times.
“Take a picture,” she said, “it’ll last longer.”
I undid the first three buttons, then got impatient and ripped the rest. The sound was loud in the little room. Buttons skittered across the floor, two rolling under the bed. She arched her back into it, eyes wide and black. Her arms strained against the cuffs, not to escape but to test the bite.
I got my hand around her throat. Not tight, not yet, just enough to let her know what was coming. I held her there, thumb along her windpipe, fingers pressing into the muscle just below her jaw.
She made a small sound, somewhere between a gasp and a laugh, and then her eyes did something I didn’t have a name for. Hunger, maybe, but deeper, like a wire being stripped down to the copper and left raw.
“Do it,” she said.
I squeezed. Not hard enough to cut off air, just blood, just enough to see her skin go hot, then pale, then a quick flicker in her eyes as her head flooded with something chemical and bright.
Her legs kicked once, involuntary, then stilled.
I loosened my grip, and she sucked in air with a sound like relief.
I leaned down, forehead against hers, and stayed there until her breathing slowed. I could feel the heat from her skin, the sweat starting to gather at her hairline.