26. Eli
TWENTY-SIX
ELI
The club looks different when it’s empty.
During operating hours, Unholy Desires is a curated dream—soft lamplight in amber and rose, velvet booths arranged at angles that make every conversation feel private.
The long mahogany bar stretches the full length of a wall, its surface polished to a mirror finish.
It’s the kind of room where the obscenely wealthy come to be seen by each other, while the performers move between them like rumors—dancers and escorts and the silk-draped specialists this clientele pays a fortune for, fabric whispering against skin.
Lilith, the woman behind Unholy Desires, understands her clientele. The crystal in the chandeliers is real, the leather chairs are hand-stitched, the back rooms are paneled in dark walnut, oil-rubbed to the depth of a piano lid.
At seven-thirty on a Tuesday morning, chandeliers dimmed to a low gold and the floor emptied, it’s just a beautiful box that smells like beeswax and the ghost of last night.
The others are already at the bar. Knox against the wall, arms folded.
Holden sprawled across a high-backed stool, one ankle hooked on the rung—he looks like he hasn’t slept since the Salinas call turned into eight hours of paperwork and one very dead accountant.
Micah is restocking the fridges, getting a jump on prep for his shift tonight.
He doesn’t look at me when I walk in.
Good.
It’s been eight days since I walked into Sage’s bedroom and found his hand between her thighs, her face flushed, her mouth shaped around his name.
Long enough that the image should have faded.
It hasn’t. Every night since, I run the same math and get the same answer: stay back.
Hold the line. Keep the wall where it is.
People think distance is the easy choice. It isn’t. Distance is a thing you build by hand, every morning, against everything in you that wants to close it. I’ve spent a week and a bit building it. I’m good at building it. It’s the only thing I’ve ever been reliably good at.
And it’s working. The wall is doing its job. Sage is safe from the worst of me, Micah has what he needs, and I get to keep being the man who holds it all together instead of the one who pulls it down. Everybody wins.
The stone in my chest disagrees. It always does. I’ve learned to ignore it.
“You look like shit,” Holden says as I drop onto the stool beside him.
“Thanks.”
“You sleeping?”
“Some.” A lie. I can’t close my eyes without seeing the two of them together, limbs tangled, arms outstretched, voices taunting me. Stay.
I don’t want to be that guy. The one who pines. But every time I remind myself they’re not mine, that I should want nothing, the wanting gets worse.
“You wanna talk about it?” Micah asks, not looking up from his crates of mixers and tonic bottles.
I hate how much I want to. How badly I’d like to set the whole ugly tangle on the bar and ask if anyone knows how to cut it loose. But saying it out loud means admitting he was right—that I want more than I’ll ever let myself take—and that’s a door I’m not opening in a room with witnesses.
“Not particularly,” I say, staring at the grain of the bar. “Let’s just get this over with.”
As if hearing me, the door at the back of the room opens and Odin walks in.
The first thing you recalibrate when you meet him is the age.
He carries the presence of a much older man, but he can’t be far past thirty-five—dark hair cut precise, a thread of gray at one temple, a face built to give nothing away.
One eye is pale gray, almost colorless. The other tracks a half-second behind; a glass piece, good enough that most people never clock it.
He’s never told me how he lost the original. I’ve never asked.
Odin isn’t his name. I don’t know what his real name is.
None of us do. What I do know is that he funds the operation, that his money has the bottomless quality you only get from sources you’re not allowed to ask about.
He’s the reason we have resources. Protection.
He’s the reason we are all sitting in this room right now, waiting to explain how a routine operation turned into a bloodbath after we let a girl get a knife in her hand.
“Gentlemen.” He settles into one of the stools at the bar and Micah immediately sets a drink in front of him. “I understand we have a situation.”
Milo slides in last, coffee in one hand, tablet under his arm, grinning like the building isn’t on fire.
“Present and accounted for,” he says. “Did I miss the lecture, Big Daddy?”
Odin doesn’t smile. “Sit down. You’re about to get one.” His fingers tap once on the bar. “Walk me through how it got fucked up.”
I take a breath. This is my responsibility. I plan the operations, I run the team, I keep it clean. When it isn’t clean, that’s mine too.
“Target was confirmed. Surveillance solid. We had his patterns, his schedule, his—”
“I’ve read the briefing.” Odin doesn’t raise his voice; he never has to. “I want to know what happened on the ground. Why is there a civilian?”
The word civilian drops into the quiet and sits there. That’s all Sage is to him. Not a person. Not a survivor. A variable that wasn’t supposed to be in the equation.
“She was collateral,” Holden says, leaning forward. “Wrong place, wrong time. Davis lured her to the beach and started his routine. We were already in position.”
“And instead of extracting her and proceeding as planned?”
Silence. I feel it settle on my shoulders where it belongs.
“There wasn’t time,” Knox says. Quiet. “She moved before we could pull her out.”
Odin’s eyebrow rises a fraction of an inch. “Explain.”
“She took my knife.” Knox’s voice is flat. Factual. “Stabbed him. Repeatedly. There wasn’t time to intervene.”
“There wasn’t time?” Odin’s gaze sharpens on Knox. “Or you chose not to?”
The question hangs. Holden shifts. Milo’s grin fades.
“Both,” I admit. “We could have stopped her. We didn’t.”
“Why not?”
Because she needed to know what it tasted like. The revenge. The agency. The right to put a hand through her own monster instead of spending the rest of her life surviving him.
“She needed it,” I say instead. “More than we did.”
Odin studies me for a long moment, expression unchanged.
He turns to Milo. “Fenrir tells me she knows more than she should.”
Milo’s hand goes up halfway. “In my defense, she asked beautifully.”
Odin’s brow quirks. “I need to hear that she’s contained.”
“We have eyes on her at all times,” I say. “Rotating surveillance. She’s cooperating.”
“Cooperating.” He says the word like he’s tasting it, checking for poison. “Explain that.”
“She’s not a threat.” Micah’s voice is level, but I hear the wire under it. “She’s like us. The system failed her, broke her, and that rage doesn’t go anywhere until you put it into something. I say we bring her in. She’s one of us now, whether we planned it or not.”
Odin’s gaze shifts to Micah. Holds. Something passes between them that I can’t read.
“One of you,” he says slowly. “That’s a significant claim.”
“She earned it.” Holden this time, with that lazy drawl that means he’s more invested than he’ll admit. “You should have seen her, Odin. Girl’s got teeth.”
“I’m sure she does.” Odin leans back. “And who has her now, while you’re all here?”
“A friend of mine,” I say. “Someone I trust. He knows enough to watch the building and call me if she moves. Nothing else.”
“Which friend?”
I hesitate. This is the part I’ve been dreading—not because I’m ashamed of it, but because explaining it means showing him something I kept off the books. A thing that exists outside the Hangmen, outside this room, outside everything Odin controls.
“His name is Dean. I met him at a support group for people connected to victims.” I keep my voice even. “He runs the funeral home on the edge of town. There’s a crematorium. Licensed, clean. If you approve it, he could be useful to us. Easier disposal, if anything ever goes sideways.”
The room’s gone very quiet. Even Milo isn’t fidgeting.
Odin processes this with the same cool efficiency he applies to everything. “You’ve been cultivating an asset.”
The door to the lounge opens.
Loki walks in. He’s blond and shorter than Odin by an inch, his mouth set in a small, sarcastic smirk.
If Odin is the father you’re petrified to let down, Loki is your wine aunt—he swoops in wearing outrageous suits tailored within an inch of their life and is guaranteed to say something completely inappropriate.
Today it’s a plum suit with a black paisley satin pattern, a bright splash of red in the pocket square, a single pearl in one ear. I’ve seen Loki maybe two dozen times in four years, and the outfit’s been equally impressive every time.
“Apologies, darlings.” He glides—no other word for it—onto the stool to Odin’s right. “Did I miss anything delicious?”
Odin ignores his theatrics. “Eli was just telling us about Dean McMahon.”
Loki’s smile widens. Just a fraction. The fraction is enough.
“Was he.” He shuffles until he’s settled, blond curls bouncing. “Do go on. Little Dean’s quickly become a favorite of mine.”
I don’t speak as awareness punches me in the gut.
Odin knows all.
Loki takes pity on me, dropping the dramatics. “He’s been on our radar fourteen months, Eli. We’ve been watching him a long while.”
The room is very quiet as they watch me process.
I’ve spent years building the architecture that enables what we do.
I plan the operations. I assess the targets.
I’ve been working under the assumption that I sit at the head of a small, contained unit—that what I bring into the operation is mine, and what stays outside it is also mine.
That the line between the two is a line I draw.
It hits me that the Norse Gods might be pulling every string I thought was mine.
Fuck.
“Fourteen months?” I repeat. The words come out level but I don’t recognize the voice as mine.
“Mm.” Loki picks up Odin’s glass without asking and takes a sip.
“Sweet man. Seems to want what we all want—justice. We thought you might bring him to us eventually, and you did, and here we all are.” He smiles.
“Better late than never, as my mother used to say before she set fire to her second husband’s car. ”
Holden snorts. Covers it with a cough.
Knox is watching me. I can feel it without looking.
“Oh, don’t look so wounded, sweetheart.” Loki waves a hand.
“We’re not punishing you. Quite the opposite.
Dean checks a lot of our boxes and we’ve been thorough with our checks.
We’re simply being practical—doing our due diligence and preparing redundancies.
Brock was your catalyst. Mine was another murderous little band of merrymen who botched a job badly enough to make me reconsider how thin we’re stretched. ”
“I told you I didn’t like their leader,” Odin murmurs, taking his glass back.
Loki sighs, hand to his heart. “Alas. I’m a sucker for blue eyes and a need for revenge.” He lets it sit a beat. Then turns to me. “Which brings us to you. We’ve held off making a move on Dean because he was always going to be most useful coming in through someone he already trusts. That’s you.”
“You want me to be the one who reads him in?”