Chapter 18
James
They call while I’m cleaning blood off my bone saw. Rude, that.
Unknown number, same as always. Same nothing-voice, same clipped mission-speak. “New timetable. You’re wheels-up in forty-eight hours. Overseas. Duration is classified.”
“Forty-eight?” I say. “Aye. Here’s my new timetable. I quit.”
Silence.
Then the tone hardens. “You signed the fucking contract—”
“Eat it,” I say. “Boil it first for tenderness.”
“You’re making a mistake.”
“Maybe,” I say, smiling at Sera’s kitchen window where the plastic’s gone and the plywood’s gone and the night breathes through the curtains. “Or maybe freedom is catching.”
They start on consequences. Access revoked. Numbers dead. Assets frozen. I hang up on them mid-word, then slide the phone back into my pocket. I dinnae care about access or numbers, and my assets cannae be frozen because I’ve made doubly sure.
The house exhales, and cold shadows lick my neck. Approval, that.
I go find her.
Prayer’s on the floor in the living room with her murder face on, legs crossed, hoodie slouched, hair like midnight, a spread of sticky notes and half a bag of jelly beans sorted by color like she’s planning a war with candy.
She looks up when I step in, and those eyes… Och, they’ll unmake a lad if he’s not built of wire and worship.
“Hey, beautiful,” she says. “Who called?”
“The past rang,” I say. “I told it to get in the sea.”
She blinks. “Meaning?”
“Meaning they want me out of Wichita.” I let the boyish grin show, all teeth and church steps. “So I’m nae leaving.”
A twitch at the corner of her mouth. A flare at the throat.
“James.”
“Aye.”
“Your…job.”
“Was an excuse for stalking and killing I mistook for a calling.” I step nearer, kneel in the paper mess, careful of her jellybean piles. I take her hand like I’m swearing on scripture and a switchblade both. “You’re the calling. Daft I took this long to say it out loud. I’m staying. With you.”
The quiet goes deep. House-hush, a graveyard between bells.
She studies me, and I let her, wrists open, leash offered. She could shove me away with a word, and we both ken I’d fold myself into the shape of that word smiling.
“What will you do,” she asks, “with all that ruin inside you if you’re not renting it out to governments?”
I laugh. “Build a chapel.”
“Explain,” she says, but her eyes glitter like razors catching candlelight.
“I met ye on the dark web,” I say, and my voice goes warm remembering it, her posts like a hymn and a dare, how she smelled like trouble and absolution.
“A place where folk whisper the truth because all the lights are out. I want to make a door there. For the women nobody listen to. For the wee ones who are growing in nightmares. They post. We answer. No cops, no committees, no forms. Just…happy solutions.”
Her smile isn’t pretty. It’s holy. “What kind of happy solutions?”
“Ye already know the happy solutions. The kind that make graves busy,” I say. “We’ll take prayers and turn them into outcomes. Quiet. Clean. No strays left behind. We charge per dead man.”
She leans in, the soft-sweet part of her nobody else gets bleeding through the bone-saw hardness.
“We’ll need proof,” she says. “We don’t kill on stories. We verify. We protect our own. No splatter for sport.”
“Maybe a wee bit of splatter for sport,” I say. “Maybe I should embroider that on a tea towel.”
She laughs, a short black sound, then nods like a queen bestowing knighthood with the flat of her blade. “Okay. What do you need?”
“Ye.” I take her hand and kiss the heel of her palm. “To say aye again even if this gets ugly. And Eddie to scowl the edges straight. Daddy to haunt wires the way he haunts walls.”
The temperature dips, and the light dims a shade. The vent above us sighs like winter leaned down to hear better. Daddy approves in wavelengths, and it rumbles through my bones like a low organ note.
Eddie appears in the doorway like we summoned him with blasphemy. He’s all clean lines and shadowy ruin at the seams, shirt sleeves rolled like he’s ready to get to work.
He looks at Sera’s jellybean and sticky note spread. “Is this our world domination plan?”
“Close,” she says, popping a jellybean into her sweet mouth. “I’m figuring out my next creative display for Monster energy drinks and Crown Royal. A huge throne out of both, maybe.”
“And we’re opening a shop,” I add.
“Please don’t call it a shop,” Sera says with a chuckle.
“A ministry?” I offer. “St. Bridget’s Unlicensed Problem Solving?”
Sera shakes her head. “Absolutely not.”
“Fine,” I say. “Saints With Dirty Hands. The Choir Invisible. The Night Confessional. The Velvet Rope. The—”
“No, no, no, and no.” Sera pops another jellybean into her mouth, her eyes shining with her laughter.
“Fine, we’ll think of names later,” I say. “We make a door on the dark web, and maybe even the light one, that only the right kind of desperate can find, and when they knock, we ask three questions. Are ye in danger? Do ye want out? Will ye help us make sure no one else bleeds the way ye did?”
Sera nods. “And if the answers are yes—”
“We come,” I say. “With bells on.”
Eddie rubs his jaw. “You’re serious?”
“Aye, I can fix a man who breaks a woman or a child,” I say, and the smile drops off my face. “That I’m very, very good at.”
Sera tilts my chin up with two fingers, reclaiming the smile for her private use. “You really quit to do this.”
“I really quit to do this,” I echo.
“What did they say?”
“That I’d regret it. And I will, a wee bit. Every day I don’t get to watch some minister of state fall face-first into a stairwell.” I shrug while I devour my Prayer with my gaze. “But then I’ll look at ye and forget…everything.”
She huffs a breath that’s not a laugh but touches the same bones. “You’re ridiculous.”
“Malicious,” I correct solemnly. “Similar letters, though.”
The vent sighs again, which I take as Daddy’s amen.
“I’ll help with logistics. Quiet ones,” Eddie says, cutting me a look. “No names. No branding. We don’t need them.”
“Aye aye,” I say, sketching a wee cross on my chest with two fingers and a grin. “Cross my heart and hope to…well, not that.”
Sera stands, dragging me with her by the front of my shirt. She kisses my knuckles brutal-soft.
“Find me a name who needs our help,” she says.
“Aye,” I say, and my throat goes tight at the messages, the cries for help, that I’ve already seen on the dark web, the ones that live under my tongue like thorns. “I’ll fetch ye a name.”
We stand like that—Queen, Mind, Fist, and the Shadows that learned to love us—while the night leans its ear against the siding to hear us plot mercy. The old job peels off me like a scab I finally stopped picking. Underneath is pink new skin.
I lean in to kiss her, my Prayer, and I make a private vow in the church of her mouth.
Send us your monsters, world. We’ve got sharper teeth.