DEAL WITH THE DEVIL
NICO
“Say it back to me,” Evie said.
“Evie.”
“Say it back to me, Nico. I'm not joking.”
The Q was loud, loud enough that I had the phone pressed hard against one ear and a finger jammed into the other, and I was the last person in the second to last car, alone under lights that buzzed at a frequency built for headaches.
The train screamed around the curve into Lex, and I waited for the noise to drop before I answered her, because there was no version of this conversation that survived being shouted over a subway car.
“I'll text you when I get there,” I said. “And if I don't text you, you start committing crimes. You call Tomas, you call Bell, you go to the shop, you feed Drake. And you do not, under any circumstances, call my mother.”
“Good.” I could hear her moving around her kitchen on the other end, a cabinet door, the click of the kettle switch. “Keep going.”
“That's the whole list.”
“Add one.”
“Evie.”
“Nico. Listen to me for one second.” The sounds on her end stopped.
“I love you, and loving someone does not mean you have to follow them into whatever mess they've made for themselves. Are you hearing me? You can love your brother and still not do this. People manage it every single day. Whole estranged families exist, and some of them are even happy, and there is a real, actual, clinically recommended thing called no contact, Nico, and it is genuinely a valid life choice for functional adults.”
“They have my brother, Evie.”
“I know they do, baby. I know it. And I am telling you that some of the worst people in this city have been telling Venns to climb into holes for them since before either of us was born, and you do not have to be the one who finally does it.”
The train screamed into another curve, and I closed my eyes against the tile flickering past the window, waiting for the sound to drop back down to a level I could hear my own thoughts over.
“I know,” I said, once I could hear myself again. “I hear you. I do.”
“Then turn around.”
“I can't.”
“You can. Right now. Get off at the next stop, cross the platform, come to mine instead, and we figure this out together over a bottle of wine and Tomas's lawyer cousin, who I am fairly sure owes me a favor.”
“I can't, Evie.”
She didn't say anything for a moment, long enough that I pulled the phone away from my ear to check the screen and make sure the call hadn't dropped. The doors opened on a platform with nobody on it, which was wrong for the hour, and then closed again, and the train kept moving.
“Okay. Then promise me you'll be smart in there. Don't be a hero. Don't sign anything you don't read, and don't sign anything you do read either, if you can help it. Don't drink anything they give you. Don't eat anything they give you. Not even a mint. I mean it, Nico. Not even a mint.”
“You think they're going to poison me with a Tic Tac?”
“I think rich people do insane things and call it hospitality, and I would like you to survive tonight with your organs in the configuration you currently have them in.”
“Noted. No mints.”
“I'm serious.”
“I know you are. I love you. I'll text you when I get there.”
“Nico, wait. Are you even scared? You don't sound scared. You sound like you're annoyed there's traffic.”
I thought about that for a second longer than I meant to. “I'm scared for Remy. I don't know if I'm scared for me.”
“That's not actually reassuring.”
“It wasn't supposed to be.”
The train pulled into the station I wasn't getting off at, and the platforms kept being too empty for ten thirty on a Thursday, more of them than felt like coincidence by the third one.
Somewhere around the fourth stop I lost service, and her voice broke into static and then nothing, and I held the phone in my lap and looked at my own reflection in the dark glass across from me.
The man looking back, I had to admit, looked like a haunted Victorian orphan who had made several bad decisions in a row and was about to make one more.
The doors opened on my stop, and I got off.
The platform was empty. My own footsteps were the loudest thing on the tile.
The express track on the far side had nobody waiting on it, and the wall ads had gone unreplaced long enough that they were still advertising a phone model two generations old, for a city that apparently needed reminding the trains even came through here anymore. I walked toward the stairs.
My phone rang. Evie, calling again. I didn't pick up. I sent her a text instead, shoved the phone into my pocket, and went up.
The street looked the same as always, which felt like it shouldn't have still been possible.
The bodega on the corner was lit, but there was nobody behind the counter.
A black car sat at the curb with its engine off, and a man leaned against the front quarter panel with his arms crossed, watching the street the way someone watches a room they have already decided they can handle.
“Nico Venn?”
“Yeah?”
He pushed off the car and put his hand out. “Mateo Cruz. I'm with Mr. Reed. He sent me to come get you.”
I looked at the hand before I took it. He had a good face, which felt like the unfair part of the whole night so far, big through the chest and shoulders, dark curls, a shadow of stubble he clearly hadn't bothered shaving off before his shift, and brown eyes that were already looking at me like he had decided he liked me before we had technically met.
I took the hand, shook it once, and let go.
“You wanna get in the car? It's cold, the city being this empty weirds me out even though I do this for a living, and frankly I would like to be somewhere warm before you change your mind and make a run for it.”
“Why is it empty?”
He gave me a sideways look and didn't answer right away, just walked around to the back door, opened it, and held it for me.
“Ain't my story to tell, man. Sorry. Above my pay grade, and also technically not my secret.”
It was a stupid car, low and long and black, built for exactly the kind of photograph where a watch costs more than a year of my rent.
The leather inside was a deep cognac brown, the dashboard had more inlaid wood on it than my entire workshop did, and the seat, when I sat down in it, was the single most comfortable thing I had been on in three years, possibly longer.
I hated that, on principle, immediately.
Mateo got into the front seat and looked at me in the rearview mirror. “Seatbelt, please.”
“Are you serious?”
“Mr. Reed doesn't like it when people don't wear their seatbelts. I don't ask why anymore, I just say it and move on with my life.”
“Okay.” I put the seatbelt on. Arguing about a seatbelt felt like the wrong battle to pick on a night that already had bigger ones waiting for me.
He pulled out into the empty street, driving a half step faster than the speed limit probably allowed, one wrist resting on top of the wheel, easy and unbothered, the way a person drives when they have done the same route a thousand times and stopped being nervous about any of it a long time ago.
“You good?” he said, after a block.
“No.”
“Yeah. Fair. Sorry I asked.”
“Are you? Good, I mean. At this. Whatever this is.”
“I do my job,” he said. “I'm good at it.
That's honestly all I've got for you tonight, hermano.
You wanna ride in silence, we ride in silence.
You wanna talk shit about football, I am extremely available for that conversation.
I'm flexible. Low maintenance. My therapist says it's actually a problem, but not tonight's problem.”
I almost laughed. What came out was closer to a breath than an actual laugh, but Mateo seemed to take it as a win anyway, because his shoulders dropped half an inch, like he had been bracing for a worse reaction and hadn't gotten one.
“How far?”
“Twelve minutes, give or take, depending on lights.”
“Where are we actually going? Like, for real. A house? An office? A cult compound with really good landscaping?”
Mateo laughed properly at that, an actual laugh instead of a polite one. “A manor. Upper East Side. He'll show you the rest himself when we get there. Not really my job to spoil it.”
“There's a manor?”
“Yeah, man. There's a manor.”
I watched the city slide by through the tinted glass, and it never quite filled back in the way a city usually does once you are moving through it instead of standing still in it. We turned uptown, then east, and then through a gate I hadn't seen coming until we were already past it.
“Holy shit,” I said.
“Yeah,” Mateo said, like he had said that exact thing himself the first time, a long time ago, and had never quite stopped agreeing with it.
He pulled around a long curve through a stand of old trees, and the house came into view slowly, the way large things do when you are moving toward them instead of the other way around.
Black stone rose four stories, the top floor built up into what could only be called a tower even in the dark, and every window was tall and narrow and lit warm gold from somewhere deep inside.
I had spent my entire working life around old houses, restoring pieces that had come out of buildings exactly like this one, and I had never once stood in front of a house and felt this specifically, physically small.
“Out, please,” he said, gently, like he already knew what was coming. “Don't make me come around and open it for you. He hates it when I have to come around.”
The air outside the car was colder than it had been back at the station, in a way that had nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with where I now was standing, and I followed Mateo up the front steps without letting myself look back at the car.
The door opened before he touched it.
“They don't staff someone at the door,” Mateo said, like this was a perfectly reasonable thing to be explaining to a stranger at eleven at night. “It's a house thing.”
I walked into the foyer and stopped walking entirely, because my legs seemed to have opinions about the room that my brain hadn't caught up to yet.