Page 21 of Spade

I didn’t answer. Sometimes silence is the only honest thing.

Selene hadn’t moved, not even to blink. She drummed a finger once against the armrest. The room calibrated to her, even the air getting thinner. She stood—slowly—and the rest of the inner circle followed, some up, some tense, but all eyes on her. She crossed to where I stood. She was shorter than me, but she made it irrelevant. There was a gravity around her that bent everyone in.

“I suspected something was up with you, Spade. Even before that detective showed up.” Her poker face would make any pit boss shudder. “We’ve talked.” She nodded at the others. “It didn’t take long for us to put the pieces together.”

“Now what?” I asked. “You want me to give up the cut? Go nomad?”

Joker chuckled, her lips parting in a devilish smile. “It’s not going to be that easy, Spade.” She looked at the other women. “It wouldn’t be for any of us.”

Selene nodded. She said, “The next one. I’m with you.”

It wasn’t a question.

I looked at her and saw the dare. I didn’t flinch.

Around us, nobody spoke. The others circled in, hungry for blood or for answers, I couldn’t say. The hum of the slot machines seemed to fade, and the only sound was the tight, wet draw of breath from every set of lungs in that room.

Selene waited. I waited.

The rest would come later—punishments, bargains, someone exiled or maybe dead. But right then, it was just us. A queen and her executioner. The line between was a hair’s breadth and already red with what I’d done.

I said, “Okay.”

She nodded. “Okay.”

It wasn’t forgiveness, but it was enough to keep the air in my lungs another day.

Tempest slumped back into her seat, arms limp. Joker watched me with something new in her eyes—respect, or maybe just calculation. Glitz chewed her cheek, thinking about the money, the optics, the insurance premiums. Nines underlined something three times and closed the book.

Selene turned and walked away, the room breaking orbit as she moved. She didn’t need to look back to know I’d follow.

I heard the van kill its engine outside. Nobody was leaving. Not yet. Nobody was dying. Not yet.

The circle closed again, tighter this time, but it didn’t feel like a cage. It felt like a family, waiting to see what kind of daughter I’d turn out to be.

“What’s it feel like?” Nines asked when the others were gone. “To take justice into your own hands.”

She was fucking with me. It was a real question. So, I gave her a real answer. “There’s an unequaled power in it,” I said. “Something I’ve never been able to find anywhere else.”

“I’m sure they got what they deserved,” she said. “And don’t let everyone get to you. Deep down, we’ve all wanted to rid Vegas of the scum.”

She joined the others out in the casino. I stood there, and for a brief moment, I thought maybe others could understand.

9

Shaw

The overhead light in my kitchen needed to be replaced, just like everything else in my life. It showed every stain on the table, highlighted the grain from the fake wood veneer, and magnified every fingerprint on the cheap Formica. The surface was covered edge to edge. Not with my own junk mail or receipts, but with the faces and fragments of dead men, each spread across eight-by-eleven glossies, each rendered in the kind of detail that only forensic cameras or sociopaths appreciated.

In the middle of it all, Spade stared up at me from multiple angles.

I’d started with the basics, building my own timeline because the ones in the official report were so full of holes they might as well have been used for target practice. Security cam frames, grainy and in black and white, her body language clipped out against a backlit parking lot. Full-body in some, partial in others, always that same infuriating composure: a stillness that was more provocative than any gesture, a way of holding herself that implied she’d spent a lot of time being watched and hadn’t yet found a reason to give a fuck.

Next to them, the professional stuff. The PR headshots she’d used for a local tattoo parlor, chin up and shoulders back, a smile that was so practiced it could have been painted on, except she never let it reach her eyes. More candid shots from the Goth lifestyle blog that I’d forked out $20 to see more of the woman I was fixating on in an unhealthy way. I looked at Spade in a circle of other women, black lipstick being reapplied, her expression so blank she made the others look like circus performers.

Her body. Her eyes. Her violence. It was a dangerous combination that made me want her more than I wanted this fucking job.

I’d been at the table for hours, sifting. I’d started with bourbon, switched to water, then nothing at all. There was a rhythm to it—my thumb dragging down the corners of each photograph, tracing the thread of a scar along her jaw, mentally overlaying it onto her face in every subsequent shot. In the beginning, I told myself it was just a case. By the third hour, I’d stopped pretending.