57. Sage
FIFTY-SEVEN
SAGE
Holden’s alarm goes off at six-thirty and I feel him reach for it in the dark, silencing it. The mattress shifts as he sits up, and I keep my eyes closed, listening to him move through the room, the soft rustle of clothes, the click of his belt, the quiet zip of his bag.
He’s stayed over enough now that I know the choreography of his mornings. He dresses in the dark so he won’t wake me. He makes the bed around me if I’m still in it. He leaves his phone charger plugged in by the couch because he knows he’ll be back.
I should be sleeping. Instead, I’m running the same thought loop I’ve been running since Saturday—Eli.
The last couple of days have been a blur.
Besides forcing myself to go to the café with Amy and perform “normal,” I’ve done a lot of wallowing.
The guys have held me through the worst of it, rotating in and out with soup, groceries, memes, and the kind of quiet watchfulness that doesn’t ask anything of me.
I appreciate them more than I can express.
Somewhere in there I thought about texting Eli—three versions, angry, needy, apologetic, all deleted before sending. He can reach me if he wants. There’s nothing left to say.
Yesterday, I worked a double, keeping my head down, counting hours.
When Jamie came in he took one look at my face and ordered an extra scoop of ice cream on his pie, which he then shared with me.
We sat, we ate, and he didn’t ask a single question, which is how I know he’s becoming the kind of best friend I always wanted.
But the whole time—through the soup and the memes and the pie—Eli’s voice has been looping in my head.
Teaching is the only thing that keeps me human.
I’m afraid of what I’ll become.
He’s wrong. Catastrophically wrong about himself.
He thinks the classroom is a cage he built for the monster, but I’ve met his violence and his gentleness, and neither one is fake.
The man who plants milkweed for butterflies is the same man who cleaned me up the night I murdered Brock.
He is not good in spite of the darkness. He is both, all the way down.
And I won’t let him punish himself for loving someone who carries darkness too.
“I know you’re awake,” Holden says from somewhere near the dresser.
I open my eyes. He’s silhouetted in the gray pre-dawn light, pulling a shirt over his head, and even in the dark he’s irresistible.
“Where are you going?” I ask, even though I already know.
“Meeting. Final briefing before the kill tomorrow.”
“At the club?”
He pauses. Something in my tone, probably. Holden doesn’t miss much. “Yeah. Why?”
I sit up, pulling the sheet around my chest. “Can I come with you?”
“No.” He doesn’t even think about it.
“Holden—”
“It’s an operational meeting, Sage. Odin will be there. We’re running through the final plan for tomorrow. You can’t be in the room.”
“I don’t want to be in the room. I want to talk to Eli.”
He stops moving. In the low light, I can see his jaw tighten. “It’s not a good idea.” He pulls his shirt down, careful and deliberate, all the extra tension running through his arms. “He’s not ready, and we need to be focused.”
“I’m not asking if he’s ready, I’m telling you I need to see him.” My voice is level, colder than I mean, but I roll with it. Sometimes you have to force people to see you as you are, not as they want you to be. Holden turns to look at me, arms folded.
“You’re not responsible for fixing his damage.”
I stare at him, feeling the wild, scratchy thrum start in my ribcage, the itch that won’t be scratched.
“You’re right,” I start. “But Holden, he’s not coming back to the surface unless someone goes down to get him.
And he’s not going to listen to any of you.
I have to at least try. Look at it from an operational standpoint—everyone works better with a clearer head, right? ”
His jaw tightens, but he nods.
“So let me help.”
“I said no.”
“Okay.” I throw the covers back and swing my legs out of bed. “Then I’ll just follow you after you leave. I’ll show up on my own, walk in through the front door, and ask whoever’s at the bar to point me toward the scary men having a secret meeting in the back room.”
Holden stares at me. “You wouldn’t.”
“You know I would.”
He exhales through his nose—a long, controlled breath that I’ve learned is Holden for I know you’re right and I hate it. He picks up his keys from the dresser. Weighs them in his palm.
“You stay in the main bar area. You don’t go near the back room. You don’t talk to Odin. And when the meeting’s over, you’ll have five minutes with Eli. Five.”
“Ten.”
“Seven.”
“Done.”
He shakes his head, but when he looks at me there’s something in his expression that isn’t quite annoyance. It might be respect. Or resignation. With Holden, they look the same.
He pulls his phone from his pocket and thumbs out a text. “I’ll tell Dean to stand down.”
“Who’s Dean?”
He doesn’t look up from the screen. “A friend. He fills in for us sometimes.”
I go still. “So there’s some guy watching me I haven’t even met?”
“Yes.” He pockets the phone and looks at me, and there’s not a trace of apology anywhere in it. “And don’t ask any of us to say sorry for it, because we won’t. We will always do the thing that keeps you safe, whether you agree with it or not. That’s just how life is now, wildcat.”
I should be furious. Part of me is. But a bigger, more inconvenient part hears we will always keep you safe and unlocks something low in my chest, warm and stupid.
He sees it. Of course he does. Holden doesn’t miss much.
He crosses the room in two steps, takes my jaw in one hand, and kisses me—slow, then not slow at all, his other hand splaying at the small of my back and pulling me flush until I’ve forgotten the meeting, the club, my five minutes, even Eli.
When he finally pulls back, I’m breathing like I ran here.
“That’s not fair,” I manage. “You don’t get to distract me with your mouth every time I’m about to win an argument.”
“I do, actually.” He presses one more kiss to the corner of my mouth and steps back, barely winded, the bastard. “It’s extremely effective.”
He picks his keys up off the dresser and chuckles at whatever’s on my face. “Get dressed, wildcat. We need to go.”
Unholy Desires hides behind a nondescript door marked only by a gold UD worked into the knockers. Inside, the room opens into high ceilings, polished wood, a long bar, and empty booths that somehow feel more expensive than furniture should.
No seedy warehouse. No sticky floor. It’s a palace built for secrets.
Holden walks me to the bar, pulls out a stool, and gives me a look that says stay. “Don’t move.”
He has the audacity to tap me on the nose.
“I’m not a lap dog.”
“Debatable.” He leans down and kisses me, quick, firm, a stamp of ownership before he disappears through a door behind the stage.
It isn’t obedience. I chose this fight, and the fastest way to Eli runs straight through this bar.
I sit on the stool and fold my hands on the bar like a kid waiting outside the principal’s office. The club is empty. Or I think it is, until I hear ice clink in a glass and realize I’m not alone.
There’s a man at the far end of the bar.
He’s sitting with the easy, loose-limbed posture of someone who owns every room he walks into.
Mid-thirties, maybe. Blond hair, and a gorgeously tailored suit that whispers money.
He’s drinking what looks like sparkling water with lime, which at this time of the morning is either admirably healthy or deeply suspicious.
He catches me staring.
“They always leave the interesting ones at the bar,” he says, and his smile is the kind that makes me feel like I’ve already told him my biggest secret and he found it charming. “You must be the squad’s little murderess.”
My hand tightens around the edge of the bar. The men call me things—wildcat, kitten, Fury—but hearing a stranger reduce me to the worst thing I’ve done makes the room tilt cold.
I stiffen. “And you are?”
“Good girl. You’re right to be suspicious.” He lifts his glass in a small salute. “Call me Loki.”
“Loki. Like the god of mischief?”
His eyes crinkle with amusement. “Mischief is certainly involved in my line of work.”
I study him. He doesn’t have the physicality of the Hangmen—no tattoos peeking from his collar, no sense that he could break you in half if the mood struck. But there’s something behind the polish that’s just as dangerous.
“And what do you do, Loki?” I ask, because even though Milo gave me the rundown of who’s who in the Hangmen’s orbit, I only know the basics. I’m also not sure if I should know anything at all. Best to play it close. Let him tell me what he wants me to know himself.
“I make problems disappear.” He takes a sip.
“Not the kind your friends handle. The kind that live in headlines and group chats and leaked emails. The kind that can end a career, collapse a stock price, or destroy a reputation before breakfast.” He sets the glass down.
“People pay me very well to make sure their worst moments never see daylight.”
“Crisis management?”
“Of a sort. What I actually do is keep secrets.” He tilts his head, studying me with an open curiosity that doesn’t feel invasive, just thorough.
“Everyone has them. CEOs, politicians, hedge fund managers, social media darlings. They all come to me eventually, when the thing they’ve been hiding starts to grow teeth. And I bury it. Deep.”
“And when it can’t be buried?”
His smile shifts—still warm, but with an edge now, like a blade tucked inside silk. “Ah, to be so innocent. With enough time and money, anything can be buried, my dear. A better question would be what do I do when I don’t want to bury something.”
“Okay. I’ll bite. What do you do?”
“I call people like your friends in the back room.”
The pieces click into place.
“How long have you been doing this?” I ask.
“Long enough to know that the most dangerous people in any room are the ones who look like they belong there.” He glances at me with that knowing smile.
“You, for instance. Early morning, sitting at a bar in a sex club, talking to a man using a nom de plume who just admitted to hiring a kill squad. Most people would be terrified.”
“I’m not most people.”
“No,” he says, and there’s genuine appreciation in his voice. “You’re clearly not, little murderess.”
We sit in silence for a moment. He sips his drink. I fidget with a cocktail napkin. The muffled sounds of voices drift from behind the stage door—indistinct but intense.
“Can I give you some unsolicited advice?” he asks.
“Can I stop you?”
He laughs. “Probably not. Here it is: be certain that this is the world you want to get involved in. Because once you start, it becomes very hard to stop.”
Before I can respond, the door behind the stage opens. Loki drains his glass and sets it on the bar with a precise click.
“That’s my cue.”
I turn to say something, and when I look back, his stool is empty. The glass sits on the bar with a cocktail napkin tucked neatly beneath it. There’s no sign of him. It’s like he evaporated.
I blink. How does a man that size disappear that fast?
But I don’t have time to wonder, because the stage door has swung wide and Eli is the first one through.
He sees me and stops dead. Surprise, pain, want, fury—it all flits across his face before the mask slams back down.
“Eli,” I say, standing from the stool. “We need to talk.”
He stares at me for three long seconds. Behind him, I can see movement—Milo’s frame, Knox’s shadow, Holden leaning against the door frame with his arms crossed and an expression that says this was her idea, not mine.
Eli’s jaw works. His eyes drop to the floor, then come back to mine, and I can see the war playing out behind them.
“Five minutes,” he says.
He gestures for me to follow him toward one of the private rooms off the main floor. He holds the door open for me and I walk past him, the door closing behind us with a soft, final click.