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Rafe uncrosses his arms. “He said me?”

“He said you’d get tired of losing games for me.”

“He said my fucking name?”

“He said Waleska.”

Rafe comes off the wall. He goes very quiet and stands in the middle of our room looking at nothing, and his jaw is working. “He’s been telling people I’m a problem. Since August. Mathers and those guys. Waleska line is going to get somebody killed. That’s not Mathers. Mathers doesn’t think. Somebody gave him that.”

Koda stops eating.

“Okay,” Rafe says. “So we get him.”

“No.”

“Nash.”

“No. You know what he wants,” I snap. “He wants us to do something.”

“Then we do something he can’t use.”

Koda sits up, smirking. “I have an idea. You’re not going to like it.”

I wait.

Koda says, “Give him Jules.”

I stare at him. Is he fucking serious?

“Hear me out. He thinks you’re into the blonde, right? That’s his whole play. He took her number to get at you and took her out on a few dates. So give him a different target. Jules is your dick sucker, right? Point her at him. Let him think he’s winning something.”

“Jules is a person, Koda,” I remind him.

“I know she’s a fucking person,” Koda scoffs. “Jules is a girl who’d love it. She loves hockey players. She’d barely notice the switch.”

I shake my head. “We’re not using her.”

Rafe hasn’t moved from the middle of the floor. “There’s another one,” he says.

“What?”

“You’re nice to him.”

I turn around in my chair. “What?”

“You’re nice to him. Starting Monday.” Rafe’s face is doing something I don’t like at all. “You sit at that table twice a week and say hello. You hold the door. You ask how his weekend was. You do it in front of everybody. In front of Dannebrog, in front of Berwyn, every fucking day, until Christmas.”

Koda grins at the ceiling. “Oh, that’s good.”

“He has one thing,” Rafe says. “Everybody thinks he’s the reasonable one and you’re the animal. So take it. Be the most reasonable guy in the building. He has to keep pushing, because it’s the only thing he does, and eventually he does it in front of somebody who matters.”

It’s a good plan. It’s exactly what Berwyn told me in his office, and it’s what my dad would tell me, and it’s the last thing on earth I want.

“And when he keeps going at her?” I say.

They both look at me.

“What?” I ask.