8. Holden #2
She huffs. “This is bullshit. I don’t even know who you are. I don’t know who any of you are. What am I going to say to anyone? Who would believe me if I told them what I saw?”
“I’m Holden.” I offer her my hand. She ignores it, so I shrug, dropping it back to my side. “And you know plenty, wildcat. But that’s for later. Now it’s time to move.”
I gesture in the direction of her work, and she just stares at me. I can see her brain working, processing, hating every syllable that’s come out of my mouth, but unable to find a flaw in the logic.
“I don’t start work until twelve.”
I grin. “Amazing. We can talk first then. There’s a diner two blocks that way. Not yours—a different one. We’ll sit, we’ll eat, we’ll have a nice chat about ground rules, and then you can go to work, I’ll continue to hover, and you can pretend I’m not there. Sound fun?”
“Nothing about this sounds fun.”
“That’s the spirit.” I start walking. After three steps, I hear her follow. She’s not happy about it. Her footsteps have the cadence of a woman who’s considering pushing me into traffic. But she follows.
Good girl.
The diner is the kind of place built for hangovers and regrets: sticky vinyl booths, a dead ceiling fan, a waitress who calls everyone “hon”. I slide into a booth near the back. Sage sits across from me like she’s taking a seat in an interrogation room, which, to be fair, she kind of is.
The waitress drops two menus. I order coffee, black, and a stack of pancakes because I haven’t eaten since before the op and my blood sugar is being a bitch. Sage orders coffee and nothing else.
“You don’t want to eat?” I ask, tapping the menu. “Everyone loves bacon.”
“I already ate.”
“There’s always second breakfast.”
She gives me a droll stare.
I shrug, handing my menu to the waitress. “Just the coffee for her then.”
When the waitress leaves, the silence stretches. She comes back with our coffees and Sage wraps her hands around her mug, staring into it like she’s reading tea leaves. I take a sip of mine, watching her over the rim.
“So,” I say. “How you doing?”
The look she gives me could curdle an entire dairy. “How am I doing? How the fuck do you think I’m doing?”
“Well, let’s see. You got assaulted, got saved by a bunch of guys in skull masks, then rounded out the festivities by taking out a guy who, while he absolutely deserved it, also happens to be kind of a big deal around here. That’s a hell of a night even by my standards. So—how you doing?”
“I’m spectacular. Thank you for asking.”
“Sass under pressure.” I grin. “You know, you’re really doing it for me.”
She doesn’t smile. Just keeps staring at the coffee, turning the mug in slow quarter-rotations with her fingertips.
I think about those hands wrapped around a knife handle, knuckles white, tendons standing out.
I think about the sounds she made while she was swinging.
I think about a lot of things I shouldn’t be thinking about across a diner table this early in the morning.
“What do you want from me?” she asks.
“Right now? I want you to drink your coffee. Can you do that?”
She says nothing, which I take as assent.
“Here’s where things stand.” I lean forward, elbows on the table. “Your pincushion is gone.”
“Pincushion?”
I gesture at the mostly empty restaurant. “You really want to say his name here?”
She winces. “Go on.”
“As far as anyone will ever know, he left town of his own volition. His car is on its way to an airport, his phone has been texting, and by tomorrow there’ll be enough digital noise to make it look like he had a quarter-life crisis and ghosted his life here.
No body, no crime scene, no investigation. ”
Her eyes lift from the coffee. “How?”
“We’re very good at our jobs.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only answer you need.” I take another sip.
“The point is, nobody is looking for him because he isn’t missing.
He’s just . . . somewhere else. And as long as everyone buys that story—which they will, because people always believe the version that requires the least effort—then you and me and my friends will never have to think about last night again. ”
“You expect me to just . . . forget it?”
“I expect you to not talk about it. What you do inside your own skull is your business.” Just like the fantasy of fucking her on that bloody sand is mine.
“But out here—” I gesture at the diner, at the world beyond the window, at the whole sunlit, oblivious town going about its morning.
“Out here, last night never happened. You went to a party. A guy walked you home. You went to bed. End of story.”
She’s quiet for a long time. The ceiling fan whirs. The waitress refills coffees four booths over. Outside, a seagull screams at a trash can.
“And if I can’t do that? If I—if someone asks me something and I—”
“You won’t.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do, actually.” I set my mug down. “Here’s the thing about last night, wildcat.
We didn’t kill the guy. I mean—we helped, sure.
But you did the actual deed. You picked up a knife and you went to work on him, and I’m not judging—trust me, I’m the last person in this diner who’s going to judge you for that—but the fact remains.
If this ever comes to light, you’re not a witness.
You’re a participant. And we have the murder weapon. ”
I watch the words hit her. Watch her flinch, then recover, then file it away behind whatever wall she’s been building inside herself since long before last night.
She presses her palms flat against the table. “So this is blackmail.”
I give her a slow nod. “If it makes you feel better to call it that, yeah. But nobody’s asking you for money, and I’m not the one who needs leverage here.”
She doesn’t blink. “You want insurance.”
“Bingo.” I smile, because it’s the truth and because most people recoil from honesty when it’s sharper than the lie they expected.
“We’re in this together now, remember? I can’t risk you blowing our cover, and you can’t risk us ratting you out.
Mutually assured destruction. It’s a classic for a reason. ”
The ghost of something—not a smile but close to one—twitches at the corner of her mouth. It’s gone before it fully forms, but I see it. I want to see it again. I want to be the one who put it there.
My pancakes arrive and I begin to eat. She watches me with vague disgust, as if appetite after violence is its own kind of crime.
Fair enough. But I’ve been doing this long enough that the violence and the hunger exist in separate rooms in my head. I can close the door between them whenever I need to.
She’ll learn. Or she won’t. Either way, the pancakes here are decent.
“So, last night—your friends,” she starts while I’m mid-bite. “Is that something you do a lot?”
“Hang rapists?” I say with my mouth full. She nods, eyes big as she waits for my answer.
I chew. Swallow. Take a sip of my coffee. Then I meet her gaze.
“Every chance we get.”