Page 168 of The Next Lie

And just like that, the assassin becomes part of breakfast.

I sit through all of it wearing clothes I did not own a week ago, drinking coffee someone else poured for me, eating meals in a kitchen where Cal knows which cabinet has the flour and Shiloh knows which mug I prefer. It shouldn’t feel this permanent. This domestic.

This much like…everyday mornings.

It’s kind of…unacceptable. I try not to think about exactly why it’s so unacceptable. I know it has to do with my complicated feelings regarding family and loss and permanency and all of that bullshit that I don’t like to think about for very long.

I’m trying. I really am.

Noir helps a little. The bar gives me something to do with my hands for a few hours a day. I stock, count, wipe, carry, fold napkins, argue with Sonny about music, and pretend I am not being watched by at least one dangerous man at all times. Sometimes it is Ever. Sometimes Shiloh. Sometimes one of Nash’s men, trying and failing to look like he is there for the excellent ambience of a closed bar before noon.

Sonny is the closest thing I have to normal, which says terrible things about the current state of my life.

“You look less murdery today,” she says on Thursday, leaning against the bar with a clipboard tucked under one arm.

“I’m pacing myself.”

“Healthy.”

“So I’m told.”

She narrows her eyes. “Are you sleeping?”

“Enough.”

“Eating?”

“Cal is stress-cooking, so yes.”

“Having lots of morally questionable sex?”

I drop a stack of cocktail napkins.

“Subtle,” I say.

“I’m living vicariously.”

“You are a menace in eyeliner.”

She smiles. “And yet you love me.”

I pick up the napkins and put them on the shelf beneath the bar. “I tolerate you with concern.”

“That’s basically love in your dialect.”

The problem is, she isn’t wrong.

The bigger problem is that all of it—the kitten walks, the breakfasts, the bar, Sonny, the new clothes, the men moving around me like I have become part of their map—starts to blur the reason I came here.

I came for revenge. I came to find Deacon Cross and put fifteen years of nightmares back into his body with interest. Then Deacon stopped being the answer, and Mother Superior—the Syndicate—stepped into his place. That should have made things cleaner.

It didn’t.

A target moving is not the same thing as a target disappearing. I still have one. It is bigger now, older, better protected. It wears pearls instead of a rosary mark and lets everyone else do the dirty work while it hosts charity events and makes decisions from beautiful rooms.

The Syndicate killed my family.

The Syndicate took my sister from me.