Page 20 of Spade

“Everyone except me,” I said. “Which means, of course, it’s about me.” I took a deep breath and prepared for the worse. “Any ideas?”

Marley lit another cigarette. The vape craze had never become part of the club. “There was a detective snooping around yesterday, asking questions about you.”

Yeah, I was trying to avoid the conversation as much as I could. The only people who could understand people like me were people like me. “Thanks, Marley.”

They were convened under a single bulb in the back room, the air fogged with old cigarettes and sharp with the bite of disinfectant. The Royal Harlots didn’t do boardrooms, but this was the closest thing: a circle of battered leather chairs, the table pushed out of the way to clear space for a confrontation. Selene sat at the apex, flanked by Joker and Aces, with Glitz and Nines on the right and Tempest on the left, arms crossed and eyes flat as rifle scopes. The walls vibrated with the faint whine of slot machines from the main floor, but the real noise was the hum of the club van idling in the lot outside, waiting to see if anyone needed a ride to the ER or the desert.

“This doesn’t look good,” I said, trying to break the chill in the room. Fuck yeah, it was about me.

“Have a seat,” Selene said.

I didn’t sit. I kept my jacket on, my hands free. There were four exits from the room. I watched all of them without turning my head.

Selene didn’t bother with a greeting. She cut straight through, her voice all wire and weight.

“You want to tell us why a Las Vegas detective walked into our house asking for you by name?”

I nodded. “I saw him.”

She let it hang there. Tempest was up before the echo faded, boots planted and jaw locked, veins straining against her neck. “You brought a cop to our door.” Every syllable landed like a punch to the sternum. “You fucking the club over?”

Joker, perched with feline ease, tapped her fingers against the arm of his chair and said, “Charming. Really. Nothing says ‘low profile’ like a detective with a shitty notepad.” She spat ‘notepad’ like it was a disease.

Aces didn’t rise or even shift her posture. She just looked at me the way you look at a slow leak under your truck, voice steady as a torque wrench. “You compromised the club. You wanna tell us what the fuck you’ve been doing?”

Glitz didn’t raise her volume, but she stretched every word until it could cut glass. “This is a liability we can’t absorb. You understand that. We all know when one shows up that eventually the entire force will be at our door.”

Nines opened a little black notebook, licked a finger, and flipped to a fresh page without looking up. “For the record, this is the first time law enforcement has made direct contact at this location.” She tapped the page with the pen. “That’s a precedent.”

I listened. I let them unload, let the rhythm find its own violence. My heart didn’t accelerate, but I felt the blood pressure in my wrists, a slow hydraulic hiss just under the skin.

“Boss,” I said, filling the quiet room with one powerful word. Yeah, I was terrified. The club was the one thing I had in life that kept me whole.

Selene let the others play their parts before she spoke again. “The van is still running, in case you’re wondering.” She leveled her gaze at me, the barest smile at one corner of her mouth. “You can leave now. Or you can explain.”

“We all prefer that you explain,” Aces said.

I flexed my hand. The scab on my knuckle popped open, and I tasted iron in my mouth.

“Talk,” Selene said. It was not a request.

I fixed my eyes on her. Not the rest. I didn’t owe them anything more than what they already had.

“I’ve killed twenty-four men.”

Nobody moved.

Tempest’s jaw went slack and then snapped shut again. Joker’s hands stilled and folded, neat and deliberate, in her lap. Aces set her palms flat on her knees, the kind of move you make right before a fight starts. Glitz just blinked, once, as if she’d lost a contact lens and was trying to focus. Nines wrote it down, the ink sounded loud as a scream.

I said, “Every one of them was a predator. Rapists. Traffickers. Men the system let walk.” I let the words come out flat, no inflection, because dressing it up wouldn’t change the fact.

Glitz found her voice first. “You used this club as your cover.”

I met her eyes. “Yes.”

Nines scribbled, never looking up. Tempest said, “You put every one of us in a cell with you.” The accusation was almost tender. I could have laughed if I didn’t already know how right she was.

Joker’s smile was gone. Her voice was stripped of humor. “And you didn’t think we deserved to know.”