Something Wicked 🏳️‍🌈 (bxb)

17: The Devil is in the details

TRIGGER WARNING: Mentions of non-consensual sex.

MARÍA POLICE DEPARTMENT, December 5

Almost midnight. Rainwater dripped into my eyes from the gutters above. Thunder rumbled as I threw myself over a slippery wall and shinned down a pipe. My shoes squelched as I burst outta the alleyway and into the shadow of the limestone eagle perched on the María PD building.

Flinging open the door of her office brought me nose-to-nose with a fast-pacing Sylvia. Her stiletto shoes lay abandoned under her desk. A trio of empty coffee cups sat atop it. Sylvia looked tiny and exhausted.

I wrung rainwater from my hair and collapsed onto a chair, soaking papers and furniture. "I wanna turn myself in."

Sylvia responded with a furrowed brow. She padded around the desk and sat blinking. "Excuse me?"

"I wanna confess."

"Oh." Instead of gloating with that I-told-you-so feline smile, she gazed up at me with such sadness that my retorts stopped dead in my throat.

"Why didn't you tell me what I'd done? Why didn't you keep me away from Dante?"

"I did." Like the flick of a switch, Sylvia's sadness amped up into indignant fury. Her voice dropped to a waspish hiss, bangles tinkling as she jabbed a finger in the air. "You were never supposed to meet Dante. Instead of completing your parole quietly as a Vogel security guard, you bullied your way onto fieldwork, got into fights, stole intel, and needed rescuing from stupid situations. You forced Dante into your life."

She was right, of course. Short of legit reasons to get close to Dante over the past months, I'd invented my own.

"Just put me in jail. For hurting Dante, and for...for killing Stephanie Grey."

Sylvia's voice softened. "Is that what you think? That you killed Steph?"

"How do you know I didn't?"

"It's obvious, Jason." Sylvia pulled a stack of napkins from a desk drawer and began blotting her papers, her desk, and me. "Steph's death was precise, calculated, meticulously planned. The shot was fired cleanly through a single vertebra. Could you do that during one of your blackouts?"

She had a point.

"Go on."

"More importantly, and I mean this in the kindest possible way, Alcor would never entrust a CIA officer's murder to their least cunning member."

For a brief moment the maelstrom of guilt and terror and rage stilled. Sylvia was right. I couldn't have killed Steph. Could I?

"I still hurt Dante. He almost died."

"How did you find out?"

"Saw it all in a blackout last night."

"How's Dante taking it?"

A quick glance at my face seemed to tell her exactly how Dante and me were taking things. Really fucking terribly.

Dante had left dozens of missed calls and texts begging me to talk to him. I'd blocked his number, terrified that I'd call in a moment of weakness and plead with him to come take care of me. More than the guilt of having hurt him, more than the shame at having wrecked the best thing in my life in the worst possible way, was the heart-wrenching thought of never seeing him again. I couldn't begin to imagine a universe where I didn't get to be close to Dante. But, that was the universe I'd made for myself.

"Vinnie and I followed Dante to Jeddah. I found him that night. I gave him CPR. There was so much blood. Yours and his. I'd lost Steph, and thought I'd lose Dante too." Sylvia began to blot my clothes absentmindedly, like I was one of her cats come in from the rain. "At first I wished you'd rot in jail for what you'd done. But when I started interviewing you..."