Page 25 of Femme Fatale
I wanted to crack a joke, lower the stakes. Instead, I just shrugged. “Didn’t know there was another way to get raised in this town.”
Selene’s eyes bored into me, and I felt myself pulled to the surface of her gaze, not drowning but forced to tread water with everything exposed. “You’re not bad at lying,” she said. “But you’re worse at self-pity. That’ll get you killed faster than a fondness for whiskey.”
She reached over, grabbed my wrist. The sudden touch, all business, but hot, too. “Tell me you’re not going to freeze up on us.”
I watched her thumb, the way it pressed into the scar on the back of my hand. “You ever put a .22 to your own temple at thirteen, just to see if you had the guts?”
Her grip tightened; she waited.
“I didn’t. Couldn’t. He made me take it apart, clean it, reassemble it in the dark, then point it at Simone and dry-fire until my hand stopped shaking. Said that’s how you raise a real soldier. I wasn’t a soldier. Just a scared kid.”
“He did worse to you later,” she said, matter-of-fact, as if reading the logline of a movie she’d already seen and hated.
“Yeah,” I said. “But the first time is how you remember it.”
She let go, eyes on the table, then back at me. “We’re going to need you, Zeke. Not the one who’s a cautionary tale. The one who wants to see his old man eat shit on the evening news.”
I nodded. “Then you’ve got him.”
Something softened in her face, almost imperceptible, but it was there. She stood, walked to the window, backlit by the first slice of sunrise, and asked, “You ever love anyone?”
I could have lied. Instead, I said, “Simone. Maybe a girl in high school. She left town before we could fuck things up the way my parents did.”
Selene let out a sound that was half a laugh, half a curse. “You just described every woman I know. Maybe every man, too.”
I joined her at the window. We stood side by side, the Vegas valley stretching out below us, all light and broken promise. “What did your mother do?” I asked.
She didn’t answer at first, just watched the pink dawn burn away the darkness. Finally, she said, “She ran toward the drugs and away from me. She got my father killed.” She looked up at me. “Never let the world see you bleed, Zeke. Cause when you do, your life becomes infected with sharks.”
I let the silence spool between us. Selene’s posture never softened, but I felt the edges on her voice curl in, as if even she was getting tired of the fight.
She turned, pressing a knuckle to the glass and tracing a squiggle that only lasted a heartbeat before the sun washed it away. “Jack won’t just let this go,” she said. “You know that, right?”
I nodded. “He’ll think it’s a play. That I’m trying to get closer, set you up. He’ll burn a dozen people just to prove a point.”
She gave a dry, skeptical hmm. “He ever hit you hard enough to change the way you see him?”
“Every time I let him down.” I made a fist, thinking of the night he’d put Simone’s cat in a sack and run it over with the car, justto show me what happened when you loved anything too much. “He’s not afraid to break what he owns, because he thinks he can always buy another.”
“That’s a dangerous kind of power,” Selene said. “The kind that creates more enemies than it buries.”
And enemies, I thought, were the only family I had left.
“He’s going to hit back hard,” I said. “Taking his girls was like taking his teeth.”
“We should hit back,” Selene said, but I shook my head.
“We need to wait and see.”
Nines open the door, breathing heaving. “Two black SUVs approaching, flanked by four bikes.”
Chapter Six
Zeke
Nines was halfway through the sentence when every phone in the war room vibrated, one after another, with a chorus of incoming threats. “They’re here,” she said. Her face had drained of color. Not that it was ever full of it, but this was corpse-white. “ETA thirty seconds, maybe less. The SUVs are fast, bikes even faster.”
Selene looked at me. “You know who it is?”
