29. Milo
TWENTY-NINE
MILO
“So,” I say, twirling pasta around my fork. Knox left about ten minutes ago. Sage changed out of her uniform while I plated up and uncorked the wine. “Scale of one to ten, how freaked out are you right now?”
Sage looks up from her plate, a strand of spaghetti hanging from her lips. She slurps it in and considers.
“Honestly? Like a four.”
“A four.” I press a hand to my chest. “I’m wounded. I worked very hard on this ambush. I expected at least a seven.”
“The pasta’s too good for a seven. Hard to be terrified when you’re carb-loading.”
“See, this is why I led with food. Nobody commits murder on a full stomach.”
She snorts, and something in my chest does a little flip. She’s like a cat pretending to nap while it watches a bird through the window.
I like cats. Their claws are like tiny built-in knives.
“So.” She points her fork at me. “What’s your deal, exactly?”
“In general?”
“In general, and specifically. You work at a hardware store, you know how to break into apartments, and you’re involved in—” she drops her voice to a stage whisper, “—vigilante murder.”
“I like to keep my options open.”
“Are you dangerous?”
“Defined how?”
She looks me up and down, spinning her fork. “Like, if you decided I was a problem, would I end up in a trunk somewhere?”
“Kitten.” I drop the act so she knows I mean it.
“I will never hurt you. Couldn’t. You could drop a grand piano on my head and I’d just let you.
You are one hundred percent safe around me, unless you’re”—and here I widen my eyes for emphasis—“a corrupt senator, a serial sexual predator, or a squirrel attempting to unionize under my roof.”
She laughs. Bright, raw-edged. I tuck it away like a jewel.
“Thank god I told that squirrel union rep to fuck off,” she says, picking up her wine.
I lean back, putting comfortable distance between us, like I’ve done this a hundred times and will do it a hundred more. The trick is to act like there are no stakes, so she doesn’t see how high they are. So she doesn’t see how my heart goes ballistic every time she looks at me.
“Your turn,” I say. “What’s your deal? Why does almost being murdered only rate a four on your personal panic index?”
She twirls more pasta, eyes on the plate. “I think my panic meter got a little recalibrated after I killed a man on a beach.”
Fair.
I lift my glass. “To personal growth.”
She clinks hers against mine with a snort.
“What were you like before?” I ask. “Before beach homicide and your parade of emotionally unavailable weirdos.”
She lets out a breath. “Quieter. Smaller.”
“Hard to imagine.”
“It shouldn’t be. I worked. I came home. I watched trash TV with Amy. I kept my head down.”
“And now?”
She looks down into her wine. “Now I think about things I never used to think about.”
“Like crime?”
“Sex.”
I nearly inhale a noodle.
It lodges halfway down wrong and I cough so hard I have to set my fork down and thump my chest. Sage watches me with flat amusement over her glass.
“Did I break you?”
“No.” I point at her while I wheeze. “You just—fuck—went zero to sixty with no indicator.”
“You asked.”
Once my airway stops trying to kill me, I retrieve my fork and give her a deeply offended look. “I did. And I love that for us. Continue.”
Color rises along her cheekbones, but she doesn’t retreat. Interesting. Our girl’s learning how to stand in the discomfort instead of backpedaling out of it. That matters.
“I just—” She twists her wineglass stem so tightly I wonder if it’s offended her personally. “I spent a long time not being in my body. Or only being in it enough to get through the day. And now it’s like every nerve ending woke up pissed off.”
My insides still. I keep my face in the light, teasing register. Inside, everything I am is tuned directly to her.
“Pissed off horny?” I ask.
Her laugh is mortified and helpless all at once. “Is that a medical term?”
“In some circles.”
She drops her face into a hand for half a second, smiling into her palm, then looks back at me. “Oh my god. I need to change the subject.”
“You don’t get to open that door and gently close it in my face like we’re civilized people.”
She lifts her wine, eyes dancing. “I can and I will.”
I groan. “Fine. Lead the way, kitten.”
“Tell me more about your role in the Hangmen.”
I sigh dramatically. “Subject change noted.” I swirl pasta.
“I’m the mutt. Little of everything. Forgery, recon, digital cleanup.
I do the suicide notes, I keep the dead boys posting on Instagram.
Brock’s currently in Santa Cruz on a bender with a girl named Jessica.
In a few months he’ll post from Bali, announce a detox, and disappear forever. ”
“Forging the notes—that has to be hard. Learning someone’s handwriting.”
“A lot of practice. A bunch of digging through garbage. Sometimes a little break and enter.” I take a sip of the good stuff I sprung for, because if you’re going to ambush a woman with dinner you should at least try to impress her.
“You can tell a lot from someone’s handwriting, though.
Brock’s signature was twice the size of the rest of his writing.
Big sharp angles, no curves. Classic narcissist-with-a-control-problem.
The man was a walking red flag in cursive form. ”
She blinks. “You can actually read that off a signature?”
“You forge enough notes, you start to see the person behind the letters. It’s basically my superpower. That and pasta.”
“World-class forger who’s deeply committed to the craft.”
“Artisan liar,” I correct, grinning.
We eat in comfortable silence for a beat. The pasta is excellent, if I do say so myself. My mom taught me the secret to good cooking is giving a shit, and I give many shits. Especially when it comes to Sage.
“Can I ask you something?” She sets her glass down.
“You can ask me anything, kitten. I’m an open book. A weird, poorly organized book with some pages stuck together—likely with jizz—but open.”
She bites her lip. “Are you trying to get me to talk about my sex fantasies again?”
I grin. “Caught me. I’m a simple man. I make pasta, ask invasive questions, hope for filth.”
“At least you’re self-aware.”
“It’s one of my better qualities.” I tip my head. “But no. I’m actually asking. Are you okay? Not the I-tell-people-I’m-fine version. The ugly one.”
Her mouth does that tiny tell again—presses flat, then softens. She’s deciding whether to duck or trust me. I keep my face loose. No pressure. Pressure makes people bolt.
“The ugly truth?” she says finally. “I keep waiting for it to hit me harder. The guilt, the horror, the whatever. And it just . . . hasn’t. I don’t know if that means I’m handling it or if I’m just broken.”
“Option C: you’re neither. You’re someone who did something and hasn’t figured out how to file it yet.” I shrug. “Filing takes time.”
“Voice of experience?”
“Something like that.”
I don’t elaborate. She doesn’t push. I like that about her too.
She picks at a garlic knot. “Can I ask something else?”
“You can ask me anything.”
“This.” She gestures at the table, the dinner, me. “Is it normal for all of you to be into the same girl? Or is this—” she waves the bread, “—some kind of polyamorous murder club?”
I nearly inhale my wine, which would make two attempted food-and-beverage homicides in one meal.
“Sage.”
“Sorry!”
“No, no—I just—” I dab at my mouth, grinning. “Every time you slip sex into the conversation I have something in my mouth. You’re going to kill me, kitten.”
“Whoops.”
“It’s fine. But—no. Not a thing. Definitely not a thing.” I set the fork down. “I think it’s new to all of us. We’re close—closer than most. But there’s never been an object of mutual obsession before.”
“I’m an obsession.”
“Yep.” I flash my teeth. “You went from the girl we have to protect to the girl we want to follow home. It’s a whole vibe.”
She snorts. “That’s culty as hell.”
“Absolutely. Kool-Aid vibes. Waiting on the matching tracksuits.”
“And the others are all . . . okay with this?”
“Best to ask each of them yourself. I’m only an expert on me.” I pick my fork back up. “But for what it’s worth—we don’t share, we never have, and at the end of the day we’re linked by the blood we spill. Whatever shape this becomes, the rest will sort itself out.”
She pushes pasta around her plate. “I like Micah. I like Knox. I like—” she gestures vaguely at me, “—even Holden, in a weird scary way. But I’m worried about Eli.”
I frown. Eli was wound tight at the meeting this morning—refused the jacket Sage sent back, then disappeared into the alley with Micah.
“Did something happen?”
“He saw me with Micah. It didn’t end well.”
“When?”
“Last Monday. Early in the morning. I was having a nightmare and . . .” She shakes her head. “Just—Eli saw, and it seemed like he was into it. But when I reached for him, he left. He seemed hurt.”
Motherfucker. He’s upset our girl and now I’m probably going to have to pull his fingernails out.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t be lumping this on you. You made me dinner and here I am moaning about other guys.”
She bows her head, strands of hair falling over her eyes. I want to slide my chair over and pull her into my lap, squeeze her until the sadness leaks out. But I don’t. That’d be presumptuous. More so than breaking into her apartment, the pasta, the wine, and the extra keys.
So I snag a garlic knot from the bowl.
“It’s not moaning if it matters, kitten.” I gesture with it. “And don’t worry about Eli. He feels everything so much he has to barricade it behind ten feet of simmering angst. Letting you see any of it was probably catastrophic for him.”
She nods but bites her lip. “I just don’t understand what’s happening to me. Eleven days ago I was a normal person with normal feelings, and now I’m sitting here having dinner with a man I watched hang someone—who watched me kill someone—and all I can think about is . . .”
She stops. Shakes her head.
“All you can think about is what?” I ask, soft.
She doesn’t answer. Just looks at me across the table, color climbing her throat, and I have the distinct, dizzying sense of a door starting to open that neither of us is ready to walk through yet.
So I don’t push. I nudge the bowl of garlic knots a little closer.
“Whenever you’re ready, kitten.”