20. Sage
TWENTY
SAGE
Milo orders coffee. I bring him chamomile tea. He arches his brow at me then doctors it with three sugars and two creamers in a way that makes me physically uncomfortable.
When Frank pays his tab and slides off his stool to leave, Milo slides a five-dollar bill across the counter to him with a wink. Frank accepts this development without comment, pockets it, nods once at me on his way out, and is gone.
“Did you just tip Frank?” I ask, when the bell stops jingling.
“Of course.” He sticks his fork in his fifth piece of pie—a feat I truly am amazed to watch. “Frank’s ex-Mob. You gotta pay the price when he’s around.”
My eyebrows go up. “He’s what?”
“He hasn’t told you yet?” He shakes his head. “You mustn’t be in the inner circle. Shame. His stories are cray-cray.”
I chuckle. “Frank is not ex-Mob. I don’t think he’s Italian.”
Milo waggles a finger in my face. “But I didn’t say which Mob.”
“There’s more than one?”
“There are several, Sage.” He throws up his arms in exasperation. “There are mobs we don’t even know about. The Latvian fish mob. The Belgian chocolate mob. The retired-postmen mob. Frank could be any of them.”
I’m giggling once again. “Milo.”
“I’m just saying. The man has had a life. You don’t get a face like that eating cornflakes.”
I chuckle and slide his next plate in front of him—cherry pie this time. “You are full of shit.”
The kitchen door swings open and Danny emerges with his apron untied and his keys in his hand. He’s been in there for forty minutes yelling on the phone to someone about a botched delivery.
“Need a smoke.” He looks at Rosa who’s been cleaning tables. “Wanna join?”
“Sure do.” She tosses the rag into the bus bin and glances my way. “You good for fifteen?”
“Diner’s empty. I’m fine.”
She heads toward the alley without a backward glance, but Danny’s eyes track to Milo, take him in, take in the pie plates at his elbow, and seem to decide that this is none of his problem.
He lets go of the door and follows Rosa out back, the door swooshing back and forth on its hinge behind him.
Then it’s just me and Milo and an empty diner. I glance around, noting the late hour and marveling at how fast the last of my shift flew by with this pie-eating gremlin sitting at my counter talking incessantly. The streetlights have even turned on, bleeding orange through the front windows.
“Alone at last,” he says, wagging his eyebrows. “We have maybe fifteen minutes. Ask me anything. What do you want to know?”
I open my mouth. Close it. There are a thousand questions I have been building up, all of them stacked behind a closed door in my head, and Milo has just kicked the door open.
“Anything?”
“Within reason. If you ask me where the bodies are buried, I’ll lie to you, but it’s for your own protection.”
I nod slowly. “I’m not sure where to start.”
“Start anywhere. I’m sure the others are being vague as fuck with you. So consider me your orientation video.”
I pick up a tray of silverware and begin to polish it, needing something to do with my hands. “Eli told me about his sister and about Knox showing up and then Holden helping cover it all up.”
“Good. That’s the origin story. So you got the big one out of the way.”
“And Micah told me some guy called Odin is your boss.”
He nods, as if expecting that. “The Norse Gods. They’re the bosses.”
“There’s more than one?”
He picks up his tea. “Four men. Odin, Loki, Thor, Fenrir. Not their real names, obviously, but that’s what we get to call them.
They’ve known each other since they were boys.
They’re ex-special forces who built one of the world’s best private security corporations—cyber, physical, operational, whatever a rich prick will pay for.
” He takes a sip of his tea, makes a face, and begins to dump another six sugars and two creamers into the mug.
“Somehow,” he continues, happily tearing open the packets, “they’ve managed to acquire the kind of money that small countries would kill to have.
Odin runs intelligence, Loki handles media and coordination.
Thor is in charge of the private security, and Fenrir is the hacker.
His people guard half the boardrooms in the country.
They see everything.” He stiffens, glancing around.
“Shit, I shouldn’t have said that. He’s probably listening. ”
He lifts his head, calling out loudly. “Sorry, Fen! But she needs to be read in.”
I laugh. “The diner doesn’t even have cameras.”
“Fenrir has his ways.” He glances around one last time before leaning closer and lowering his voice slightly.
“As I was saying, the four of them got together one night, the story goes, and decided that the legal system was, in their assessment, shithouse. Odin had a personal experience with what the system does and doesn’t punish.
Fenrir did too. So they decided they’d stop letting the system have the last word. ”
“And they came up with the kill squad?”
“Eventually. They tried the legal route first—funding politicians, tougher legislation, pro-bono cases. None of it stuck, because the men they were going after had the same kind of money. So they built a different mechanism.”
My hand stills on the silverware. “Murder?”
“Suicide, Sage, please respect the work.”
I stare at him. “Suicide?”
“Always. A murder gets investigated. A suicide gets filed and forgotten. By the time the body is found, every man on the list has, by all available evidence, taken his own life. Pills. Hanging. Carbon monoxide in the garage. Jumping off a cliff. Whatever the file calls for. By the time we arrive, the note’s already written, their phone has the appropriate texts going back weeks, if not months. ”
“Seriously, you can do all that?”
“Eighteen men. Most classed as suicides. Even with the handful we had to adjust for, we haven’t created a single open file. We are, statistically speaking, very good at our jobs.”
“And Brock?”
“He was number eighteen—we’re counting your contribution to the arts.
Was supposed to be a suicide. You saw the rope, we were planning to frame it as a hanging from the jetty crossbeam.
The note was already written—recent job stresses, complicated financial situations.
The story would have closed itself out by the end of the month. ”
My heart thumps loudly as I realize exactly what I did. “But I—”
“Improvised. Yep.” He nods, grinning. “Surprised the shit out of us. But that’s okay, that’s why we had plan B.” He leans forward, halfway over the counter. “You should always have a plan B.”
“Which was?”
“Disappearing him entirely. Loki’s people are very good. I am extremely good. The two of us together are honestly a public health concern.”
I press my fingers against my forehead, feeling a headache coming on. “But how did they find you?”
“They needed people who could do the work. Knox was first. He has a military background, did a bunch of high-profile security work until he landed at Unholy Desires doing security.”
“Unholy Desires?”
“It’s a sex club for the rich and famous. Super exclusive, and very fancy.”
“Is that the same club Micah works at?”
“It is. Good catch, kitten.” He grins. “Only the Elite get an invite. It’s owned by this old broad, Lilith, but the Norse Gods provide security.
Odin recruited Knox for the role, but I guess he saw something else in him—I don’t know what, I don’t ask.
They vetted him for six months before bringing him into the dark side of the family, so to speak.
” He perks up. “You know, I never asked how they did the offer, but I assume it was like, ‘Welcome to the family. You kill bad guys for us now.’” He says it in a mock Italian accent that is like a horrendous Mario impression and absolutely, definitely racist.
I wince. “Please never do that again.”
“No worries.” He shrugs. “Anyway, he said yes—because who doesn’t like killing bad guys for money. He also worked solo for a while.”
“He did this alone?”
“Yep. He could execute a clean kill, but his technique was more missing person than the suicide cover we build now.”
I nod slowly. “That started after Eli took his sister’s attacker out?”
“Sort of. Knox saw it coming. He made the call after the kill, and Loki had a cleanup crew on-site within the hour—Holden among them. A cop on the books makes the narrative easy. Body shifted by morning, framed as a mugging gone wrong. By the time Eli came down off the adrenaline, Knox and Holden had already gotten the Norse Gods’ blessing to start their own squad.
Just the three of them. Eli didn’t hesitate. ”
“Then Micah joined later? Holden recruited him, right?”
He hesitates. “He told you his story?”
I nod. “He took out the guy who hurt him. Like I did with Brock.”
“Okay. That wasn’t my story to tell. So I’m glad he opened up to you already.”
Of all the things I expected from Milo tonight—the squirrel question, the pie pageantry, the casual disclosure of a billionaire-funded murder operation—the thing I did not expect was restraint.
Milo, who has spent the last hour saying every thought that has entered his head approximately four seconds after it entered, would have kept that information to himself had I asked.
How strange.
“So, what about you?”
He grins. “I crashed their party. Recruited myself. Eli’s still mad about it, I think.”
“What? How?”
He puffs out his chest. “I’m the top-rated salesman in the state for Harden Hardware stores.” He unzips his jacket, peeling back the flap on one side to show an array of pins. “Top Sales Person fifty-four months in a row. And you know what’s crazy? I don’t even work there that much.”
I hide a smile. “Impressive. Do you always wear them?”
“Only when I’m trying to impress my new lady friend. Did it work?”
“Do you get commissions and bonuses?”
He nods. “Last one paid for my car.”
“Then yes.”
He beams, dropping the jacket flap closed.
“Anyways, back to story time. It’s my job to know what my customers want.
It’s what set me off. The same four men, every two or three months, came in to buy yards and yards of nylon and hemp rope.
I am, as established, a man who notices things.
I figured if they’re after that much rope, they were either running an Eagle Scout Brigade or killing people.
They didn’t look like scout leaders. So I followed them. ”
I shake my head. “Of course you did.”
“Well imagine how excited I got when I came around the corner of an alley, and they had a man hanging from a fire escape. Knox almost knifed me. Holden demanded to know who I was, and I said—and Sage,” he reaches across to grab my hand, holding it in both of his as he stares deep into my eyes.
“I’ll be honest, I do not know where this came from, I think God was speaking through me.
But I said, ‘Just your friendly hardware clerk with an eye for detail and a great staff discount.’”
I burst out laughing, shaking my head at the absurdity of this situation.
“They squabbled over it for a while, but by the end of the night I had a job. After all, I’m supremely useful.”
“For your staff discount?”
“That and forgery. Digital trails. Suicide notes. I write a note for all of them—fonts, handwriting, the works.”
“And the bosses—they all know all of you?”
“Officially yes. Operationally, we all report to Odin. Sometimes Loki. They’re our two main points of contact.
Thor I’ve seen twice, both times at the club, both times in passing.
Fenrir I have never seen and am told never to expect to.
Fenrir doesn’t do faces, but he did teach me remotely how to do the digital trails. ”
“How could he do that without seeing you face-to-face?”
He lets my hand go, returning to his pie. “He runs everything from screens, and through a voice processor. The guy could be anyone. Hell, he could be in this diner right now and I wouldn’t know it.”
“He’s not in this diner, Milo.” I gesture at the empty space. “We’re alone.”
“I am ninety-eight percent sure he’s not in this diner. But the fucker is slick. It’s entirely possible he’s hiding under a table or something, glued to a shadow, dressed in a onesie that perfectly camouflages him against the tiles.”
I press the heels of my hands against my eyes. The information is too much.
The kitchen door bangs open and Danny strides back in, smelling like cigarettes, and complaining loudly to no one about something his cousin said.
He waves at me, disappears into the kitchen, and starts banging pots.
The spell breaks. We’re back in a diner with a cook and a fridge and an ordinary Wednesday-night world.
Except for the man eating an obscene amount of pie.
Milo picks up his tea watching me over the rim. “Friday night was your origin story, kitten.”
The words land in the middle of me and spread outward.
Origin story.
Like this is a comic book and not my actual life. Like I didn’t spend the last five days trying not to flay my own skin off every time I remember the sound Brock made when the knife went in.
I set the spoon down beside the silverware tray because I don’t trust my hand not to slip.
“My origin story,” I repeat.
Milo nods, like we’re discussing weather patterns. “Yep. Tragic catalyst, inciting incident, latent darkness unlocked, costume pending.”
“I don’t have a costume.”
He looks me up and down. “Apron’s not bad. Needs more menace.”
I huff a laugh despite myself, then it dies quick. “And what, exactly, does that mean?”
His expression shifts. Not completely—Milo’s face seems physically incapable of staying solemn for long—but enough that I feel it. The joking peels back a layer. Underneath is something sharper. Smarter. Watching.
“It means,” he says, putting his fork down, “that there’s a before and there’s an after. And in the after, you become one of us.”
I stare at him. “What if I don’t want to become one of you?”
He laughs. “Sure. Like that’s ever going to happen.” Then he stabs another bite of pie, moaning at the taste. I continue staring at him, completely bamboozled by how he can be cute and amusing, and a complete sociopath at the same time.
“Can I get another slice?” he asks around a mouthful. “This is sooooo good.”
It takes me a minute, but slowly, I turn, moving automatically to the pie case. “Coming right up.”