You Get Full Credit For Being Alive

Chapter Thirteen

Preparing the couch consisted of me throwing a blanket and pillow down on it and calling it good enough. Using sheets when you were sleeping on a couch was just fussy. Besides, I really was something of an insomniac, so it wasn't like I expected to get much sleep there.

I heard the shower start up in Shawn's bedroom, and I spared a brief thought— or maybe not so brief— of him sitting in the tub, head tilted up into the spray, his long neck glistening with water as he closed his eyes. I could see my hands on that neck, gentle for once, worshipping instead of destroying. I could almost taste the water on his skin...

No, that was me drooling. I shook my head and got out my laptop, checking on the programs I'd installed earlier today that were connected to Janich's home. Nothing yet; he was probably working late. I decided to check twice a day, morning and night, to see what our detective was up to. More if I had the chance, but chance wasn't something that happened often around Margot.

It was both comforting and aggravating being near her again. I lay back on the couch and crossed my hands beneath my head, thinking about the last time I'd slept on a couch. It had been the night Dom had taken off; I'd been too wound up to sleep in our bed, pissed and worried and drunk all at the same time. I'd managed to catch an hour's worth of sleep around dawn, and when I woke up Margot had been sitting at my feet, in her silk dressing gown holding a tiny espresso cup. It had trembled in her so-steady hands. "Il est mort."

"No," I'd said, because Dom wasn't dead. He was an inconsiderate asshole who was going to be hearing about what a moron he was for months, but he wasn't dead.

"Oui," she'd replied. Her eyes were dry but red, and the look she'd given me was that of a wounded animal, accusatory and pained. "Je suis sûre."

And goddamn it, she'd been right. The job Dom and I had fought about, the job he'd taken on his own because I was too injured to go with him on it, had killed him. His body was found in the Rivière des Prairies two days later. His corpse had been missing numerous fingers and toes.

Margot had been the public face of mourning, the well-to-do doctor grieving the sibling who'd never managed to amount to as much as she had. I was the darker side of things. Margot didn't ask me not to seek revenge; she was as desperate for it as I was. I finished healing, used most of my money and burned almost all of my bridges getting the specific names of who had done the deed, and then... then I'd gone looking for them. And found them.

After that it gets a little hazy for a while. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt I did hideous things to those men. Three of them, Filipino cousins who felt they had something to prove, men who were wickedly good with knives but didn't know nearly enough about guns to save them from me. By the time I was done with them, at first glance it would have been impossible to tell how many bodies there were total, because the pieces were kind of spread around. I came back to myself covered in blood, holding a curved karambit blade in my right hand that I must have taken off of one of them, shivering and sick with horror at what had happened. I was a killer, but before that night I was professional about it. After that night...

After that night, I retired.

Things between Margot and I had been brittle ever since, but I was grateful she was here. Grateful she was helping Shawn, grateful she still cared about me enough to give a damn who I killed and why. But this situation was completely different. Shawn wasn't my lover; he was just someone I'd decided to help. Janich may or may not be behind beating him, but I wasn't willing to move on the guy until I had proof. And I hadn't hunted down the rest of the Red Scorpions in the area and done away with them despite my surety that they were in on it, which, I mean, pretty amazing, right? Just one death out of this debacle? I was a fucking boy scout.