17. Jezebel

CHAPTER 17

JEZEBEL

“ R osa sent raspberry panna cotta.”

Thursday morning, and I dumped the bag on the counter while Marcel did his best to rupture my eardrums.

“Ohmigosh! You went out with him again ?”

“I had to eat. It was no big deal.”

Cole and I had been to Carlo’s twice now, but tonight, Rosa had made a comment about bambinos, so now we could never go back there. We’d also eaten at the Venetian as part of his check-out-the-competition project, plus he’d cooked at home once. His home, not mine, obviously.

And through all that, there had been zero sign of Jimmy or anyone else dubious. I was beginning to think the hit squad had gone to the wrong house.

“Hush your lying mouth. This is a huge deal. Dusk,” Marcel called. “Dusk!”

“What?” she said from the breakfast table.

“Did you know Jez went on another date with the hot casino guy?”

“Of course.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me? ”

“Because I figured you’d overreact, and I lost my good earplugs.”

“Your good earplugs are in the armoury, exactly where you left them. And how can I overreact when this is momentous ? Bella hasn’t dated since she suicided he-whose-name-shall-not-be-spoken, and now she’s done it twice.”

“Three times,” Dice said from the doorway. “And I don’t think you can use ‘suicide’ as a verb.”

For fuck’s sake. Marcel was a stiletto blade in my damn side. “That’s it, I’m taking back the panna cotta.”

He snatched up the bag before I could grab it and ran out of the room. “You can’t! It’s mine.”

Fuck these crutches. On any other day, I’d have caught up and dumped him in the pool, and he was taking advantage. I sank onto a stool at the counter, and the crutches hit the floor.

“You okay?” Dice asked. “He should know better than to mention Bastian.”

“Want me to talk to him?” Dusk offered. “Or gag him?”

“I don’t know.”

Dusk squeezed my hand. “Think about it—the offer’s there.”

“I meant I don’t know if I’m okay.”

“That’s a trickier problem, and if you can’t answer the question, you’re definitely not okay. This is about Cole?”

It was supposed to be a one-night stand. Emotion should never have entered the equation. Now I had to pack all those feelings away again, but they kept popping up at inopportune moments, like hiccups or Middle Eastern terrorists.

Never lose your heart to a man, Mom had always told me—they messed with your sanity. Yes, she’d loved Dad, but her life would have been easier if he hadn’t walked into it, no doubt about that. Okay, so I wouldn’t exist, but right now, I was thinking that might not be such a terrible thing .

After all, I’d screwed up twice. First Bastian, and now Cole. Although only four people had died this time around, so maybe my judgment was improving?

“This is about men being bad news,” I said.

Dusk raised an eyebrow. “Such bad news that you haven’t slept here for the past nine nights?”

“I’m concerned for his safety.”

“We have cameras covering the perimeter of his property, and Ari found a great surveillance spot nearby. If it was just a matter of safety, you’d stay there at night instead of in Cole’s bed. Or hang out in the surveillance van.”

Why did she have to be so logical? “I hate sleeping in the surveillance van.”

“And you clearly like sleeping with Cole.”

“He’s nice,” I admitted. “Too nice, which is concerning. But Echo background-checked him, and if someone sent him in as the male equivalent of a honey trap, then he deserves an Oscar.”

Looking back, there had been red flags with Bastian. He’d pursued me—flowers, chocolates, the whole nine yards. We’d fallen into a relationship, and I hadn’t worried about background checks because he worked at the fucking Pentagon. I mean, weren’t they supposed to take care of that stuff? As our relationship progressed, we’d had the inevitable disagreements, and he’d always been the one to capitulate. Always. To the point that it got frustrating, and I’d start stupid fights just to see if he’d find a backbone. But on the whole, life with Bastian had been easy, and that was probably why I’d said yes when he got down on one knee in front of his whole family. Because having a partner in life took some of the weight off my shoulders.

Now I understood why he’d been so easy to live with. His handlers had told him to keep me onside at all costs .

“Isn’t Cole moving back to San Gallicano in like, three days?” Dice asked.

“The trip in three days is a temporary work thing, but he’s planning to move back permanently once the situation at the Galaxy is resolved.”

“So won’t the ‘he’s too nice’ issue go away?”

Logic dictated that it should. If this were a regular fling, we’d have a clean break when Cole took his trip to the Caribbean. By the time he returned, my cast would be a distant memory, and I’d be back to gallivanting around the world, quietly solving small problems before they became big ones.

But this wasn’t a regular fling. There were still four dead guys in the morgue, Lucy McCall’s arm was in a cast as she dealt with an injury much worse than mine, and Jimmy was waiting in the wings with his Bitcoin demand.

If we didn’t wrap up the mystery before Cole hopped on a plane, I wouldn’t be able to extricate myself cleanly from the mess.

And there were only seventy-two hours left.

“I wish I’d never gone to Brax’s wedding.”

Dice rolled her eyes. “Because you hate hot men and obviously great sex?”

“Because I hate complications.” I leaned on the counter and cradled my head in my folded arms. “When I joined this team, it was meant to make that part of my life easier, not harder.”

“Sometimes a little hardness can be a good thing,” Tulsa said, meandering in and helping herself to an apple from the fruit bowl. “Why do you look as if your favourite rifle fell into a crusher?”

“Cole,” Dusk supplied.

Tulsa took a seat next to me. “C’mon, tell Auntie Alys all about it.”

“Do I have to? ”

“Spill.”

A groan escaped my lips. “He’s ruined me for all other one-night stands.”

“One night? It’s been ten nights and counting,” Dice put in, and I glared at her.

“He’s great in bed and easy to be around the rest of the time. I mean, he pushes my boundaries, but never too far, and when I’m overly bitchy, he lets that roll off him and steers me back to being tolerable again. And now I’m supposed to go back to fucking men who think doggy style involves a literal dog and call another woman’s name when they come?”

All three of my friends winced.

“No way,” Dusk said, eyes wide.

“He was dumb as a congressman and it was probably his momma’s name, but he was pretty to look at.”

Plus I’d forgotten to recharge my vibrator, and I wasn’t ready to go to sleep that night. Insomnia was a regular companion of mine. Mentally, I might have had the shields in place to do the job I did, but that didn’t mean I could avoid the nightmares that came afterward. Whenever I got back from a particularly hellish operation, I struggled for a week or two until the bad memories took a back seat to new ones.

Tulsa put an arm around my shoulders. “The way I see it, you have two choices. Either you can make a clean break the way Dusk did with Marc and spend the remaining years of your life celibate and miserable, or you can find a way to keep seeing Cole.”

“I am not celibate,” Dusk snapped.

“Battery-operated boyfriends don’t count.”

Dusk threw an apple at Tulsa, then another, but Tulsa caught them and began juggling. At least it wasn’t knives.

“Easy,” Dice warned Tulsa. “We’re talking about Jez’s disastrous love life today, not Dusk’s. ”

“ Sex life,” I reminded her. “Not love life. Love doesn’t come into this.”

Tulsa shrugged. “So, either you stick to your guns and break up with the guy, or you admit you like him and make it work.”

“It can’t work. I kill people. Cole won’t even kill a spider.”

Last night, a critter had crawled out of a bottle rack in that nasty little wine cellar of his, and instead of squashing it, he’d found a glass and a piece of cardboard and carefully put the eight-legged freak outside. Then he’d opened a bottle of wine that was probably worth a thousand bucks, totally oblivious to the value, and I couldn’t inform him of the error of his ways because I wasn’t supposed to know.

“I won’t kill a spider, but I have no problem putting a bullet through a man’s head at five hundred yards,” Dice said, and that was true. She actually had a pet tarantula. “And you only kill bad people.”

“Oh, so I just wait until we’re eating breakfast and then say, ‘By the way, honey, I don’t really write obituaries for a living. I’m an assassin.’ He’d choke to death on his croissant.”

The three of them were staring at me.

“Wait.” Tulsa held up a hand. “Wait a second. You told him what? That you write obituaries ?”

She started snort-laughing, and I kicked her in the shin. Then regretted it because although the cast made a nice clonk , my leg wasn’t quite as far along in the healing process as I wanted it to be, and it hurt like hell.

“Shut up, it’s kinda sorta true. And it’s a good fake career. I can work from home, and client confidentiality is important so I don’t splash the details across LinkedIn. If I told him I worked at the Sunrise Diner, he’d swing by to get breakfast because that’s the kind of guy he is.”

Supportive. A good tipper. Not clingy, exactly, but he always asked if I was coming over, although that was probably because our relationship had an expiry date and he wanted to fit in as many orgasms as possible. Quite understandable.

“Awww,” Dusk said.

“I have to quit seeing him. That’s a given. Which means we need to get to the bottom of the hit squad mystery before he comes back to Vegas because disentangling myself from this situation will be ten times more difficult if we don’t.”

“Anything from Ari?” Dusk asked.

“Nothing that’s borne fruit yet. She has a contact with the Diamondback Devils, and they claim that the attack on Lucy McCall was nothing to do with them. What’s more, they seem to like her, and they’ve sent a guy to watch her hospital room.”

“Did she give a description of the driver who tried to run her down?”

“He was wearing a mask. Not a balaclava or a surgical mask—she said he looked like Michael Myers, if Michael Myers was made out of plastic. The car had stolen plates. There was a camera at the exit of the parking garage, and it recorded a silver Ford Escape, but the plates belonged to a red Honda Civic. The owner lives in Reno, and she didn’t even notice the plates were missing.”

Ari had warned me that not every case could be solved in a week or even a month, and I understood that, but reality didn’t make the circumstances any less frustrating. And it didn’t help that Erin had managed to get into an altercation with a trio of social media influencers while working surveillance in the Galaxy last week. Which part of “keep a low profile” did she not understand?

“Any other leads?”

“Nothing promising at the moment. Echo ferreted out the Galaxy’s accounting records, and if Mike genuinely borrowed a stack of money, the details should be in there somewhere.”

“Don’t you need a forensic accountant for that type of thing?”

“Ari’s part-time boss is a math genius, and he’s helping out.”

Ari said Digby Rennick was a bit strange, but he did run a successful sportsbook in Vegas and therefore knew something about both numbers and business, and more importantly, she trusted him.

“We’re all here for you,” Dice said, and Tulsa and Dusk echoed her. “You know we’ll do whatever we can to help.”

“You and Dusk can be miserable together,” Tulsa added, and it was my turn to throw fruit. She caught the satsuma and began peeling it.

At least my thing with Cole had lasted less than a month. When Dusk joined the Army, she’d gone long-distance with her teenage sweetheart, only to get headhunted for Point Team Bravo while Marc hit the big time in Hollywood. Their new lives were about as incompatible as they could get. Like me, she lived in the shadows, while he basked in the flash of cameras whenever he stepped out the front door.

But she still loved him.

No, she wasn’t celibate, but every time she slept with a man, she regretted it afterward.

She also turned off the TV whenever Marc appeared on-screen with yet another beautiful woman on his arm.

They’d been in love.

I was in lust.

That was totally different.

So why did my chest ache at the thought of never seeing Cole again?