You Get Full Credit For Being Alive

Chapter Ten

Margot brought three enormous bags with her. Never mind weight restrictions, never mind that we probably wouldn't even be leaving this house; she always had to look her best. Even when she was stitching Dom or me up after a troublesome job, she did it wearing Prada beneath her plastic smock. It took me a while to get them all into the house and in my room— her room.

By the time I joined her in the kitchen there was coffee made, far stronger than I usually preferred it, but I was willing to defer to her tastes on that. "This place has no heart," she told me as I sat down across from her. "How long have you lived here?"

"About a year."

"So long and it still looks so bare. Where are the hints of your personality, Justin? What happened to the prints I gave you?"

"They're in the closet." I loved the early twentieth-century Japanese ink prints Margot had given me two birthdays ago, but I hadn't been able to look at them for a while now. Not since I'd moved, certainly.

"Quelle surprise," she quipped, sipping and making a face. "Now, tell me more about this man. You say you found him dying?"

"I did."

"And yet you say he has no connection to your business?"

"I'm not in the business anymore," I said, a little stiffly. "You know that."

"But that means nothing to those who remember you. Are you sure he's not part of one of your contemporaries' plans for revenge?"

"I'm sure." I had hid my tracks too well, and besides... "I'd never even met him before the night I found him out back. I think he found out something that he wasn't supposed to, something that had to do with the detective he was dating. I don't know the details and he doesn't remember the attack, but he ended up abandoned a few hundred feet out from my back porch with a head wound that almost killed him."

"Have you already killed the detective?"

God, it wasn't like I didn't have other responses to an emergency. "No. I've hardly killed anyone at all. Just a gang member who came to finish the job on Shawn."

Margot's eyes glittered, emerald cold. "Interesting. Before, you would have killed first and bothered to tend to the wounded later. Retirement has softened you."

"Maybe."

"Or maybe you like this young man better than you ever did Dom, to lavish such attention on him."

I sighed. "You of all people should know that Dom was... complicated. He didn't want me hovering over him when he was injured."

"You never tried."

"I tried once," I corrected her. "And I got bit for my trouble, so I didn't try again. Besides, he had you to patch him up, he didn't need me." Dom had emphatically not needed me, in the end.

Margot's fingers twitched, as though she were itching for a cigarette. "Well," she said with reluctant grace, "perhaps you've grown some as a person since those days. But let me assure you, I am not here to do all the healing while you slip off to kill the people you've got your eyes on, and I know you do, even if you've not acted on it yet. You and Dom, I swear, you worked less like a team and more like you were in competition with each other, trying to outdo the wrongs done to the other with even more bloodshed."

She leaned forward and caught my gaze with hers. "I am no one's convenience, Justin. Not anymore. You cannot give this man to me and run away. I won't let you. You say you are retired, then truly be retired. Let someone else deal with his assailants and betrayers, and you stay here and work with me to fix him."