Chapter 1 #3
My own gun is already in my hand. I don’t remember drawing it.
It’s a muscle that never sleeps, the one I can barely control these days.
“I would have spared you, Dani. You should know that. Those mobsters you’re running from, I would have fought them to the death for you.
It didn’t have to end like this. But now I can’t trust you. ”
The tears come faster now. She knows. She knew the second the hammer fell on nothing.
“I know you would’ve. That’s the worst part. I know you would’ve.”
“Yeah,” I say. And it seems like enough to end on.
I shoot her once, clean, through the forehead so she doesn’t feel a damn thing.
The crack of gunfire slaps off the concrete and dies in the sound-dampening.
She goes back against the onyx leather and stays there.
The bullet buries itself somewhere in the seat behind her, in the expensive stitching of a car some happy stranger uses to feel free.
Her blonde hair stains red.
The garage is suddenly very quiet.
I look away for a moment. Then I make myself look, because not looking is how you start letting them not be real, and she was real, she was the realest thing I had. Four years. I look at her until I’m sure I register the lesson: trust no one. Believe in nothing.
“Lethal,” I tell her, as I reach back to close her eyes and smooth her hair away from her face. “I told you.”
THE FOOTSTEPS START before I’ve finished wiping my eyes—and I’m not wiping my eyes, I want to be clear, I have something in my eye, the air in here is very dry. I can’t control the tears.
Then, I notice the sound is off. Click, click, clicks, where boots or flat soles would thud.
Heels. Unhurried. Coming up the row of covered cars with too much confidence for someone clearly approaching an armed woman, and body cooling in a back seat.
She comes around the Mustang and stops, and she looks at the roadster, and at Dani slumped in the back of it, and she tilts her head like she’s reading a label.
She’s older than we are. Sixties, maybe, wearing her sharp heels like a threat.
Silver hair cut, blunt and severe, a long black coat that screams money, worn like armor, posture you only get from a few decades of people standing up when you enter a room.
She looks at the dead woman and her expression doesn’t change at all, and I understand, all at once, several things I should have understood an hour ago.
There’s no blueprint buyer coming.
There never was.
“Well, I’m not surprised.” Her voice is dry and half amused. “I had my money on you.”
I stay in the driver’s seat with my gun in my lap, and I roll my eyes, because I’m tired and I’ve just shot my best friend and the woman responsible wants me to be impressed.
It’s obvious now. The whole fucking thing—the garage, the cars, the hundred-grand payout that was never going to materialize, Dani’s gun, my gun, all of it—it was a test.
Run a knife between two friends and see which one walks out.
“You bitch,” I say. “A loyalty test, paid in blood?”
“It’s the only kind of payment I accept these days.
” She smiles and somehow makes cruelty look like candor.
“Money lies. Words lie. People will tell you anything. But what someone does when you offer them double to betray the one person they love”—she nods at the car, at Dani, almost fond—“that’s data you can trust.”
I narrow my eyes so tight the world briefly goes black before my lids reluctantly stretch back open.
“There’s no payout,” I say slowly. “Is there?”
“Oh, there’s a payout. But this isn’t the job.”
I lift my gun.
She doesn’t flinch. She raises both hands, pouts her bottom lip, her palms out, the gesture of a woman humoring a child. There’s not an ounce of fear on her face, even with a pistol aimed at that stupid, sinister smile of hers.
“Come now,” she coos, “don’t kill me over pennies when I could hand you millions.”
“What?” I lower the weapon, mostly out of confusion. I’d like her to solve her own riddle before I put her in the ground. “Who the hell are you? And what do you want with me?”
“Kezia Silver, it’s nice to meet you. My name is Bridget Salisbrie.” She says it like her name is supposed to mean something to me. “Until very recently I was Admiral Salisbrie, United States Navy.”
“Did your bloodthirst get you kicked out of the service?”
She smirks. “I retired so it wasn’t a conflict of interest. I’m currently on the shortlist for the position of Secretary of Defense.” She lowers her hands, slow, watching me let her.
Politics. Yeah, that tracks.
“Okay. Good for you. What do you want? How do you know my name?”
“You mean your alias, Say-OR-see?”
“What the hell?” My face pinches with confusion. “What is a ‘say-OR-see?’”
She squints one eye. “Your given name. Say-OR-see O’Leary. I know who you are.”
Dumb fuck. Learn the pronunciation. “SEER-shuh,” I sound out in the native Irish accent that I’ve trained out of myself. “It’s pronounced ‘SEER-shuh.’”
“You’re kidding. How do you get SEER-shuh from s-a-i-o—”
I raise my gun again. “Get to the point faster, ma’am.”
“I like you.” Salisbrie is still unbothered by my gun, so I lower it once more, ashamed. Because I hate that I’m interested in that pesky little word she mentioned a few beats ago. Millions is rattling in my brain like an extra screw loose.
“Go on.”
“A woman as the next Secretary of Defense. Our country needs this. The world needs this. Don’t you agree?”
“A woman perhaps. I’m not sure what you are.”
She chuckles. “Sassy. Anyway, the vote is close. The vetting is thorough. There is a small blemish on an otherwise spotless record that I would like removed before anyone in a confirmation hearing thinks to go looking for it.”
“You want me to get rid of your competition.”
She laughs—a real one this time, an unguarded cackle, genuinely delighted, like I’ve said something charming.
“Competition? God, no. There’s no competition, dear, that’s not how any of this works.
No. I need you to clean up a loose end. Something I should have had the spine to finish ten years ago.
” The smile thins. “There are whispers of an old story, from a place most people couldn’t find on a map.
Kesara. A decade ago, I did what I had to do to secure some assets.
But the manner in which everything went down might be considered… unsavory to some folks.”
“Some folks?”
“Widows…and fatherless children.”
Kesara sounds vaguely familiar. I know there was a terrorist organization that attacked U.S. service members. There was a war over that, however brief. But the entire region was unified and is governed peacefully now. Or, that’s the story the media fed, anyway.
“What the fuck did you do?”
“It doesn’t matter. All you need to know is there are surviving witnesses, threatening to speak on something they have no business speaking on. My appointment to office would be the perfect opportunity. So, I need you to help with those few loose ends, off the record of course.”
“Ah, you want me to quietly silence a snitch.”