Chapter 16
chapter sixteen
LUCKY
Vale Tarot smells like incense, lavender dust, and just the faintest hint of bleach.
The neon OPEN sign is dark and silent. But the lights inside are still on, and through the windows, I see Willow.
She’s perched at her desk with her laptop open, boots kicked off, hair falling loose around her shoulders, and I swear if there’s a God, She put Willow on this earth just to undo me.
I walk in, the bell dinging above my head, and everything in the world feels right when she looks up at me and smiles.
“Come here,” she says, waving me over. “You need to see what I did.”
And it all comes out.
She tells me everything—about the parking garage, about how she almost bagged him right then and there, plastic suffocation special.
My girl, going full Dexter with a CVS bag.
And part of me wanted to scream at her for being reckless.
The other part of me wanted to grab her face and kiss her senseless because hot damn, who does that?
Who looks a monster in the eye and says, “Not today”?
Willow does. My Willow.
Now? Now there’s a little green blip on her screen that shows us an exact location on a map.
According to its history today, Phoenix drove it to this location straight after leaving the gym.
It’s been there ever since, but that’s no surprise since Phoenix is driven by a personal driver most of the time.
The sports car he drove to the gym has most likely been parked in a garage all day.
But that’s okay. This is exactly what Willow was trying to get: his home address.
I lean against the counter, arms crossed, watching Willow double-check the movement history on the tracker. “You think Phoenix has any idea how fucked he is? I’m sure he’s been smug all day, thinking he got the upper hand on you.”
She doesn’t even glance up. “I’d prefer he underestimate me. Makes everything so much more fun.”
Damn, I love her. No hesitation. No flinch. Just fire.
And yeah, I said it, even if it was only in my head. Love. I’ve tried to play it cool, keep the word locked behind my teeth, but after the mirror room? After her looking me dead in the eye and saying it first? That word isn’t a secret anymore. I’ll let it flow like the wind from now on.
I close my eyes, and I’m right back there.
The mirrors glowing with that moody lighting, her skin against mine, her voice breaking when she told me she was ready.
The way she looked at herself when I told her to—that she wasn’t shame, she wasn’t ruined, she was beautiful.
I thought my chest might split open watching her finally see herself the way I do.
I’ve pulled off plenty of illusions in my life, but that? That was real magic.
Now I can’t stop picturing it. Her hands gripping me like I’m the only solid thing in the world. The way she said my name... I’ll never hear it the same again.
“Are you even paying attention?” Willow’s voice cuts through, snapping me back. “I’m finishing his routine here. You know, so I can kill him without dying in the process.”
“I’m paying attention,” I say, though my eyes are on her, not the laptop. “Just thinking how you’re the hottest hitwoman I’ve ever met.”
Her mouth twitches, trying not to smile. “You’ve only met one.”
“Exactly. You’re one of one.”
She rolls her eyes, but I see the corner of her lip curl, the way she softens just a fraction. That’s enough.
But she’s focused right now. She takes the address her tracker gives away and plugs it into Google Earth.
In just two seconds, we’ve got a detailed overview of the property.
There’s a gated drive, sculpted hedges, stone columns that look like they belong on a Grecian nightmare.
There’s a garage big enough to hide a freight truck, and a fountain that probably cost more than a decent apartment.
“I’m sure there are security cameras around these areas.
Main entrance from the south. Service gate on the west—less camera coverage, looks like there could be a blind spot by the AC units.
” Her voice is razor-calm. This is the part I love and fear: how quickly her brain turns obsession into an operational plan.
I lean over her shoulder, my brows furrowing at the screen. “You sure you don’t want to torch the whole place and be done?” I joke because humor keeps my edges dull enough to pass for normal.
“Tempting,” she says as she arches one brow. “But he doesn’t face justice that way. And a fire draws direct attention. Better if he just goes ‘missing,’ like all my other targets. And now that I have his address, we can get this party started.”
I look at the satellite view again, tracing routes, finding lines of approach.
“We scope it. Tonight. Quiet. We make a plan. Phones off so we don’t get caught via incoming text.
” My voice is shallow with adrenaline and an absurd kind of excitement.
I feel it all coming back. This was my old element, where I thrived—planning, angles, timing.
It’s the part of me that learned to be careful. The part that kept me alive.
She reaches over and squeezes my hand, brief and fierce. “You do know we’re both lunatics, right?”
“And the world is lucky to have us,” I say with a smirk. “Let’s go.”
We drive in my car because it blends in better. It might be expensive, but it’s black and looks like little more than an unremarkable shadow on the road at night. We don’t say much as I drive, Willow’s eyes flick from the blip on her laptop to the street before us. Phoenix hasn’t moved.
When we pull up, I park across the street and down three houses.
There are half a dozen other cars parked at the curb along this stretch.
I just pray we blend in. The properties aren’t huge; none of them are in Las Vegas.
But they’re meticulously kept, and the houses are more McMansions than cozy family homes.
We kill the phones without ceremony. No buzzing, no accidental glow. I pocket mine, and there’s a strange thrill in the silence that follows, like we’re thieves who just put the world on mute.
Then we’re on the move. We slip along the hedges, using the nighttime shadows to our advantage.
Willow is lithe and small beside me; she fits into the dark the way I fit into a performance.
We communicate in quiet nudges and the angled motion of our heads.
I point out the first two cameras. They’re set on two pillars at the entry of the driveway.
But as we round the desert landscaping, I don’t see any signs of others.
Willow nods at my signals, and the choreography of surveillance makes my skin hum.
The place is huge. It has two wings, a north and a south, and obviously, the main heart of the house. Out back, we find a huge swimming pool with a fucking waterfall worked into the landscaping. Nothing screams money like wasting massive amounts of water in the desert.
“Camera at the back door,” Willow observes.
“How about the garage side door?” I ask as I slink through the shadows. We’re silent, which is an accomplishment considering the gravel at our feet. My lips curl with devilish intent when the door comes into view, and there is no camera.
“That’s our entry point,” Willow says, and damn, I love her all the harder when her smile is even more wicked than mine. “He’s alone in there. No kids. No significant others. From the windows, it looked like the garage might let into a mudroom that’s just off the dining room.”
“So we get in, knock him out, and drag him back to your shop,” I say as I note the windows, take in the layout of the house. “Got your daggers sharpened?”
“Always,” she answers with a plotting smile. “You’re always so calm about the violent bits.”
“I call it focus.” I can’t help but tease her. “Besides, you make me brave. Or stupid. One of the two.”
She punches my shoulder with a smirk. “Either way, don’t die. Not tonight. I’m not ready to be a widow.”
While making a widow is the very last thing I want, the implication widow has to wife makes my entire nervous system light up. Instead of teasing her about it though, I go with honesty. “I’m not going anywhere without you.”
We find a spot in the bushes with a sliver of a view and settle in. The mansion glows like a beast tamed only by electricity.
We watch. We whisper. We wait. We’re not doing this tonight.
That’s been said and repeated between us—out loud, in the car, like a spell—because going in blind is how people die or disappear.
Tonight is reconnaissance: find the seams, walk the edges, figure out the choreography.
Tonight, we learn where he sleeps, where he eats, and where he thinks he’s untouchable.
I feel something brush my hair, a soft, small disturbance.
For half a second, I think: leaf. Just a leaf.
But then it fucking moves.
A deliberate, diabolical, disgusting eight-legged crawl through my hair.
And just one second later, I see it out of the corner of my eye. A hairy leg, thick and twitching, right next to my temple.
Tarantula. The kind of nightmare that haunts people into therapy.
A sound I’ve never heard before rips out of me—like a squeaky balloon meeting a dying crow. The scream rips out of me before my heart even has the chance to spike.
It’s loud.
Too loud.
Willow slaps her hand over my mouth with enough force, I’m shocked she doesn’t knock my teeth out. “Lucky!” she whisper hisses. “Shut up!”
And then she proves she hates me. Truly hates me and wishes me dead. She slaps her other hand across my face as the sliding door swishes open and Phoenix steps onto the patio, scanning the darkness. She traps the tarantula against my fucking face.
The spider is trapped between her palm and my cheek, and I feel every single leg tap-dancing against my skin.
This. This is hell. Actual hell.
My brain is having a seizure. Don’t move. Don’t scream. Don’t die. Get this fucking thing off my face and smash it into oblivion!