Page 51 of Femme Fatale
Selene
Isat on the porch outside the clubhouse, alone except for a half-empty bottle of Four Roses and the low croak of the neighbor’s swamp cooler. The old wooden steps creaked with memory; the kind of memory that bled into the soles of your boots and stayed there, stinking like gunpowder and sweat. My left leg throbbed with the dull, sullen ache of a wound that would not heal, but I liked the pain. It kept the world clear, and kept my mind from wandering to places I’d never see again.
There was no traffic at this hour, not even a cat slipping down the alley. Vegas was asleep or dead or both. I leaned back, let the chair tip onto two legs, and smoked a cheap cigarette. Every drag filled my lungs with bitterness. Every exhale painted the dark with little ghosts. I thought of all the girls who’d come and gone through these doors, some dead, some worse, and wondered if I’d made any of them better off. If they remembered me at all.
The sound came sudden—a single Harley engine, somewhere in the distance, climbing the gear and then coasting. I froze, ears sharp, heart stuttering. I didn’t need to see the lights to know who it was. I’d tuned my body to that pitch, Zeke’s pitch, and when he finally appeared at the end of the road, engine growling through the desert hush, I almost laughed. Instead, I flicked the cigarette and let it die in the sand.
He parked at the foot of the porch, not bothering with the kickstand, just letting the bike list against the steps. His jeans were black, bloodstained, and his shirt was open at the neck and splattered. He walked up slow, every third step hitching from where the bullets had chewed through his ribs, but he didn’t show pain. Only the dead learned how to hide it that well.
He looked up, met my eyes, and for a second the world was static, a freeze-frame, just two animals caught in the same trap. I was a fool for falling for a man so quickly, but he’d shown his true colors, colors I wanted to wear.
“You alive?” I said, voice rough.
He grinned, but it was more of a skull than a smile. “Barely. You look worse.”
I gestured with the bottle. “Sit,” I said. “Drink.”
He collapsed onto the steps, wincing. “You ready for all the shit coming your way?”
“Buck’s dead. You’re here. That means we’re fucked?”
He took the whiskey, drank deep, then stared at the horizon, letting the silence fill in all the things we’d never say out loud. His hair was slicked with sweat, flecked with dried blood at the temples. Up close, his wounds were bad, bleeding through the bandages.
“You see Simone?” I asked, voice soft.
He nodded, not looking at me. “Once she has the death certificates, she’s going to sell every last Jack Smalls item. There’ll be nothing left.”
I watched his hands. The knuckles were raw. I remembered the way they’d felt on my back, on my hips. I wanted them there again, wanted to be marked, but tonight the need was different. Deeper.
I leaned forward, caught his gaze. “What now?”
He set the bottle down and wiped his mouth. “Now I wait, but I had to see you again before they came.”
“The police?”
He nodded. “And everyone else. I left a mess. Even by Vegas standards, it’s a mess.”
I stared at the empty night, the way the sodium lights around the compound painted everything with a sickly yellow. “You want this to work?”
He looked at me, really looked. For a second, I saw the kid he must’ve been, before the scars, before the city hollowed him out. Then it was gone.
“You sure?” he said. “No second thoughts?”
I shook my head. “At least we know what we’re in for. No surprises.”
He breathed out, the kind of breath that hurt on the way up. “I killed him, Selene. I killed my father.” There was no apology in it. Just the truth, heavy as a cinder block.
I reached over, took his hand, and squeezed until the pain flashed in his eyes. “You had to,” I said. “Some things, you just have to do.”
We sat like that, hands knotted, the smell of old whiskey and new blood thick between us. I felt the cut on my leg start to ooze again, warm against the denim.
Zeke looked up, chin set. “We got maybe half an hour before the cops swarm this place. More if Simone worked her magic.”
“We should go inside,” I said.
He nodded, then pulled me to my feet. Our bodies touched, heat and salt and nothing else. We stood close, not kissing, not talking, just breathing the same air.
He smelled like leather, iron, and the inside of a hospital. I pressed my face into his neck, tasted the sweat, the blood. He flinched, then pulled me closer.
