Page 107 of Bonds of Shame, Bonds of Lust

She thought she'd shocked me, some scandalized aunt clutching pearls over her on the path. She had it backward. It wasn't the sex. It was the gate. Ricardo getting a locked hospital gate open like it was nothing, her back to the brick, and the boy calling it a thrill so she'd call it hers. A badge. A thing she was now. Her whole career hanging off a gate a kid had popped because popping it was part of what he was there to do. I didn't say any of it. There was no floor left under me to say it from. Fucking Ricardo. Son of a bitch had played us both.

"That's not a thing about you," I said, and my voice had gone to pieces now, I could hear it, "that's dangerous, that's genuinely dangerous, Lacey, do you hear me, that boy is going to—" The words were coming out ahead of my control. "He's working you. That's not you liking extreme, that's him working you—"

"Ricardo's manipulating me now too? Gentle, kind Ricardo?"

She said it very softly. I was breathing hard. I didn't lose control of situations like this. Not me. Not with the most important person in my life.

"Ricardo." She leaned back a fraction. Her cone had fallen over in its ring and neither of us moved to right it. "Tell me, Janice. Since you can see it all so clearly. Tell me all the people who are manipulating me. Make me a list."

And I understood, a half second before she said it, that I'd trapped myself.

"You want to talk to me about manipulation." Her eyes hadn't left my face. She wasn't crying. She was the calmest thing at that sorry little roadside. "You. Who took me apart on a boat. Who knew exactly where every wire in me was and put your hands on all of them and called it a gift. Who kept going. You want to sit at an ice cream stand and warn me about a man who might manipulate me someday, maybe, by reputation?"

"Lacey—"

"You manipulated me." Flat. Final. "You're the one who belongs on your own list."

No. I wanted to help you. The words were right there and they didn't come. My breath hitched. I didn't have it. She was right. Not about Derek, she was wrong about Derek, wrong the way a person is wrong when they can't see the drop, and it scared me that she was going to be wrong about him with her whole confident body.

And I started to cry.

I put the back of my hand against my mouth. I couldn't get the two of them apart, the fear and the guilt, they'd come up together and wouldn't separate, and under both was the plain animal fact that I was losing her and there was nothing I could do about it.

I kept waiting for her to break too. I waited for her face to soften, for the cold to crack, for her to reach across and take my hand off my mouth.

She didn't.

She let me cry the way you let weather happen.

She stood up after a while. Then she got on her bike and started leaving.

When she was twenty feet away, I heard myself screaming "LACEY, I LOVE YOU!" Her bike faltered, she slowed, and my heart soared. But then she started pedaling again. And then she was gone.

48 - THE JOB

Derek

"That's it, then. I think."

I went around the table one more time anyway. Saying it out loud is how I find the holes.

"Terry. Infil and exfil. Make doubly sure our contacts have exactly what you asked for. Not what they think you asked for."

Terry lifted two fingers off the table without looking up from his tablet.

"Karl, everything on their systems. You back it up with Styx, and the two of you work it separately before you compare. I don't want one set of hands on that." They growled at each other in mock aggression.

"Josie. Skies clear, as per usual."

"Sarge, you lead the four grunts in case it goes sideways, and I would like very much for you to be bored."

That got a small laugh from the far end.

"Aaron. Coordination."

I sat back. "I feel good about this one. Feels tight to me. Aaron?"

Nothing was tight until Aaron gave the nod, and Aaron hadn't given it. He had a pen he wasn't writing with, and he was turning it end over end against the table, and eleven other people in that room were watching him do it and pretending they weren't.