by Maria Luis
“Odd,” she murmured.
I leaned in, chair creaking beneath me, and stole a glance at the card half-hidden under her hand. Red fiery flames peaked out from behind what looked like arrows. “How so?”
“Oppression.” With a slight shake of her head, she smoothed her fingers over the card. “It’s the Ten of Wands, and—”
“What?”
“Nothing, it’s just that I get this card frequently. Always in this exact spot, too.”
“Coincidence.” Dropping my elbows to the table, I nodded to the cards laid out before us. “It’s like Murphy’s Law. If you really think that everything that can go wrong will go wrong, it probably will. You’re looking for those idiosyncrasies that indicate you’ve called it all out correctly—that your life is in the shitter.” I tapped the card, just to the side of her hand. “Same goes here. If you’re looking for similarities, they’ll appear.”
Hazel eyes blinked up at me, and in that moment, I could have sworn she’d taken a read on my rotten soul.
“In the cards, oppression represents a separation from the spirit.” Again, she drew the jacket tighter, like the bite of the night wind sank deep into her bones. “It’s as though your moral compass has disappeared in favor of cruel force. You don’t recognize yourself anymore, your needs or your desires—you’re blinded to whatever drives you, a slave to an ulterior motive that destroys everything else in its path.”
Jesus.
This time it was my turn to tug on the sleeves of my jacket—for a different reason entirely. She hid from the cold, and I hid from the chance that she might notice the blood stains on the cuffs of my shirt.
The familiar grip of guilt weighted my limbs. All of it—every death, every fight—all led to one goal. So I guess she was right; I had become oppressed by my own motives, no matter how dirty and vengeful they were.
My phone vibrated in my pocket, and with a raised finger to ask her to wait, I slipped it out from my pants and checked the incoming message from an unknown 504 area code number: Is it done?
The blood had been washed from my hands, if not from my clothes, so yeah, it’d been finished. 10-4, I typed back and then hit SEND.
A second later, a single word greeted me on the screen: Good.
My dead heart gave a rare, pitiful thump, which I ignored. Emotion could get you killed in my line of work. It could end you in a heartbeat, strip away your life in a second.
“Something important?” she asked, drawing my attention back to her face.
I shook my head. “Just work.”
Her hazel eyes never left my face. “You like working for the NOPD, then?”
My life would be easier if I’d only ever clocked in for the police department. But the NOPD wasn’t responsible for the scars on my face, the split in my lip, the blood on my clothes. I cleared my throat. “I like putting the bad guys in jail.”
The look she leveled on me spoke volumes. “I’ll be honest, and I might be wrong here, but crime seems just as rampant as it’s always been.”
Her words only piqued my curiosity. “How old are you?”
“Do you want me to read your cards or not?”
I didn’t give a damn about the cards, especially when her selection seemed to only reflect gloom and doom. Ruin. Death. Oppression. Not a hint of rainbows or unicorns in sight. “Do you get a kick out of telling tourists that their lives are about to take a morbid turn?”
Her shoulders lifted with a casual shrug. “It’s life. I’m not telling anyone anything they don’t already know.”
“Tell me your name.”
At my abrupt switch in topic, her eyes narrowed and her teeth sank into her bottom lip with a sharp indrawn breath. “Why do you want to know it?”
Because I . . . well, fuck, what could I say? That from the moment I’d walked up to her, I’d felt some sort of unexplainable pull, like we were tethered to the same string . . . just at opposite ends? That beyond the random need I had to strip her of her clothes and to see her eyes darken with lust, I recognized a little of myself in her?
I’d made a life out of lying and thieving.
I’d dug myself out of hell only to realize that I’d never be able to shake off the embers.
That the darkness which ran through my blood, as cliché as the saying goes, never calmed or fled, but for a reason I couldn’t pinpoint, I felt as though this girl could take it. She could handle my shadows, if not the pure darkness.
Never had I craved someone more.
“It’s Avery.” My gaze jerked up to her face, and she tilted her chin up defiantly, daring me to question her. “My name is Avery Washington.”
I rolled her name over my tongue silently; imagined whispering it against her neck as I plunged into her body; recited it two more times with the fantasy of her on her knees, her lips closing around my cock.
She was a shit liar.
To anyone else, her defiantly raised chin and the challenge in her eyes would have left them feeling as though she’d uttered the truth. But I read liars for a living—hell, I was a liar, and I recognized the twitches in her façade for what they were.
I settled back, observing the way she pressed her feminine fingers to the base of her neck and swallowed. “You from N’Orleans?” I asked, wondering if she’d lie about that too.
She met my gaze head-on. “Born and raised.”
“Same here.”
She didn’t roll her eyes but I had the feeling that she wanted to. “I figured.”
“Yeah?”
With a short nod, Avery flipped the cards over on the table. “You may meet a lot of different people, Sergeant, but so do I. Everything about you screams this city, starting with the jaded twinkle in your eye.”
I laughed hard at that, the sound entirely foreign and rusty to my ears. I never smiled. I never laughed. But, damn it if she didn’t make me want to start practicing. “A jaded twinkle?”
Shifting in her chair, Avery muttered something beneath her breath. Then, louder, “It’s the color blue of your eyes.”
Heat spiked south of my belt at her admission. When I spoke, there was no mistaking the husk in my voice. “Did you spend last night thinking about the color of my eyes, Avery?”
“What? Absolutely not.”
I stretched out one arm, making no effort to conceal the way I set my hand next to hers. Tan to pale, large against small. She was tiny compared to me, and even that was enticing. My thumb crossed over her pinky, and I stifled a satisfied purr when she flexed her hand . . . and kept her hand right next to mine. “I’d be all too happy—”
“Avery.” Jerking toward the sound of the unknown voice, I noticed that the reader one table over had stood up and crossed over to stand beside Avery. The stranger’s eyes zeroed in on me, unwavering. “I’m going to pack everything up for the night and I suggest that you do the same.”
Her hand slipped away.
“You’re right,” Avery said, her tone more tepid than I’d heard from her yet. She spared me a quick glance. “It’s late, Sergeant Asher, and it’s obvious that you haven’t come back tonight to learn about your future.”
Apparently, she’d sussed me out just as I’d done to her.
I rose from my chair and folded it. “It’s obvious,” I drawled, using her words, “that you don’t care for the bullshit.”
“I don’t.”
Succinct as her tone was, I spotted a blush crest her cheeks. “Then, no bullshit.” When she set her backpack on the table to unzip, I closed in, stepping up close so that she was forced to look up at me. Only when we locked eyes did I speak in a tone low enough that the words were clearly intended only for her and not for her friend. “I spent last night wondering about that smart mouth of yours—how you’ll taste or what noises you might make when I drive you to come on my tongue.”
I waited, not moving, for her to reply.
She didn’t disappoint.
Her tongue swiped out along her plush lower lip. “I don’t date.”
White teeth bit her lip, and those hazel eyes of hers flashed fire and unmistakable want. “I don’t fuck.”
That word coming off her lips was like a calling card to my dick. She might not fuck now but she would, dirty and raw and so damn good that she’d carve her territory into my back with her nails. “If you don’t,” I drawled, “that just means you haven’t done it right.”
Her jaw snapped shut, molars cracking together. Her cheeks burned red. “I wouldn’t . . .” She swallowed, then ducked her head to continue packing up. “You couldn’t handle someone like me, Sergeant—”
“Lincoln.”
“What?”
“Call me Lincoln,” I repeated, fully aware of the fact that I wanted Avery Washington like nothing I’d ever wanted in my life—outside of one thing. “Lincoln,” I said again, “not sergeant.”
“As I was saying, Asher”—the challenge in her eyes lit my own to see her flat on her back with that same damn fire goading me on—“you couldn’t handle me. You think you could, but you can’t. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have places to be.” She shrugged into her backpack and then bundled up the chairs under one arm. The table, she glared at, and then stepped away. “Don’t follow me tonight or I’ll call the cops on you.”
Her threat stole more rusty laughter from me. “I’m sure my guys will enjoy the chance to cuff me.”
“Someone has to,” she said, “and it will never be me.”
With that, she turned away and ducked down Pirate’s Alley. The shadows of St. Louis Cathedral enclosed her within their depths like a physical door being clamped shut behind her.
Locking me out.
“Stay away from her, Sergeant Asher.”
I glanced over at Avery’s friend, refusing to show her even an ounce of the desire Avery sparked within me. Inclining my head in a short nod, I stepped back. “Have a good night, ma’am.”
“I’ve heard about you, you know—we all have.”
“My condolences.”
She approached, and it was in that moment that I spotted the tattoo on her right temple. It was small and round, like a stamp made for deceit. She’d been marked by the devil himself. “You kill without guilt, destroy lives without impunity. You act”—she dropped her voice to a rough pitch—“like you are the executioner and the jury, all in the name of what? Money? Conceit?”
If money were a motivator, I would have moved far from New Orleans years ago. But I didn’t owe this woman a damn thing, and so I gave her a small salute and then turned on my heel.
She could hate me for what I’d done—I didn’t care one way or the other—but the tattoo on her face was a direct indication that she was no better than me—even if she’d left that life behind. She’d fucked; I’d killed. At the end of the day, when the result was exactly the same, we were equals.
I knew that for a fact; I’d been marked with that same tattoo the day I’d turned sixteen.
6
Avery
Between my legs, my core pulsed.
It sounded ridiculous, so ridiculous, and yet as I stepped up to the register at my local corner store, it was all I could think about.
Damn you, Asher.
The cash drawer clanged shut. “Just the bottle of wine tonight, Avery?”
When you went to the same corner store five days per week for odds and ends—for years—you tended to build up a camaraderie with the staff. “Just the wine, Pete.” Feeling my cheeks redden, I adjusted my backpack. I’d dropped everything else off at home before deciding that wine was in order because I couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried, pretend that Asher hadn’t flipped the script on me. “Just been a long day.”
Pete, one half of the duo who owned and operated Flambeaux, nodded and passed over my change. “Try running a twenty-four-hour convenience store, baby.” His tone was dry, but the smile on his face remained open and friendly. “You ever decide to quit with the cards, Salvatore and I could use an extra hand.”
Pete and his husband, Sal, had been trying to recruit me for years now. Back when I’d been a teenager, I’d considered it. Discounts on food, two bosses who were so damn kind it was almost unreal—and it didn’t hurt that they both knew I was a runner, and thus put up with the name changes without even a blink of the eye. But always the fear lingered that one of my stepfather’s cronies would wander in and I’d be screwed.
Or that Pete and his husband would discover my real identity.
Jackson Square lent me its shadows and tourists; Flambeaux could ruin everything with its fluorescent lights and steady stream of French Quarter residents.
“You push a hard bargain,” I murmured, dropping my wallet into my backpack and pressing the merlot bottle to my chest. “If I had any good sense . . .”
The bell over the front door chimed with a newcomer, and Pete called out a hello. To me, he said, “If you had any good sense you’d ditch the tarot gig or at least take up with one of the local fortune-reading businesses in the area. Sal and I worry about you out there. People are idiots.”
I offered the wine up in silent salute. “People are definitely idiots.”
Pete slowly shook his head, even as he let out a sigh in clear disappointment. “Stick to Bourbon on your walk home, baby girl. Text me when you get there.”
Twenty-five years old or not, I’d still be a kid in Pete’s eyes until I was wrinkled and gray. After a quick hug good-bye, I stepped outside with the wine in hand. I didn’t drink often because I hated losing control over my body, but tonight . . . I briefly squeezed my eyes shut.
Tonight, I’d discovered my first taste of lust and, honestly, I wasn’t a fan.
Once upon a time, in a far, far away land, when I’d first found myself alone and scared, I’d pictured my savior. Chalk it up to a youth spent devouring Disney films, but I’d absolutely imagined my Prince Charming as the requisite blond with the blue eyes and the tall physique—to say nothing of the fact that he’d be sweet and gentlemanly and oh-so-handsome.
If it was a test to see if he measured up to a girl’s youthful dreams, Lincoln Asher failed on every front—aside from his Haint blue eyes.
Maybe he’s the sort of man you crave now.
I wouldn’t know.
From the first time I’d awoken on my cot at the homeless shelter to find a strange man’s hand between my legs, I’d refused to entertain even the possibility of dating or fucking.
Until now. Until Lincoln Asher had given me a glimpse of what he could offer to ensure that I came screaming the way Katie had last night.
Kicking a stray glass bottle out of my way, I strolled down quiet St. Phillip Street toward Bourbon. On either side of me, nineteenth-century properties sprung up like vibrantly hued doll houses. At this time of day, their cheery vibe took a backseat for a more haunting quality. Sparse lights lined the street, and up ahead a group of teenagers formed a tight circle, their voices pitching loudly into the still night.
“Look how pretty she is,” one guy drawled, his voice a little garbled since his back was to me. “Her hair is so shiny.”
“So shiny,” his buddy echoed. He slung an arm around his friend’s shoulders, leaning forward as though to inspect something on the ground.
I waited for the bark of a dog or a mewl of a feral cat. On more than a few occasions, I’d taken strays in. While the Quarter’s stray cat population numbers in the hundreds, dogs weren’t that far behind in numbers. My apartment building allowed animals, and I’d registered Katie and myself with the local LSPCA as a foster home for animals.
Maybe it was a downfall of mine, but I couldn’t bear to see a living creature relegated to the streets. It just wasn’t in me.
My pace hastened as I approached the group, fingers tight around the wine bottle because you never really knew. But if they were messing with a stray, then there wasn’t a chance in hell I’d let them carry on and hurt the poor thing.
“Hey.”
No one turned
at my greeting.
“Hey!”
The two closest whipped around, their faces cast in shadows. Now that I was close, I noted that they were college-aged. Bigger bodies, broader shoulders. Worry pierced me, and I shoved it aside recklessly.
“What the fuck do you want?” the one with brown hair snapped.
Don’t be Laurel. Don’t cower. Don’t run.
“I thought I heard y’all messing with a dog. Came to see if maybe you’d like for me to take her off your hands.”
Good, that was good.
“You hear that?” He punched his red-headed friend in the arm. “This chick wants to take the dog off our hands.”
Red hitched a laugh that reminded me of dark alleyways and lost souls. “If only we had a collar for her.”
“Right? A collar and a leash”—he looked to me, chin dipping as his gaze no doubt skimmed down my body—“so we could let you take her home.”
Were all college boys idiots? These ones had clearly wandered down here from Uptown, near the universities. Their preppy clothes screamed privilege. If the street were more lit, I had no doubt that I’d spot red eyes and haggard features. Boys like them came down to the Quarter for their latest fix, which generally came in the form of little white lines of powder.
“Don’t need a leash or a collar.” Swinging my backpack to my front, I made sure to keep my eyes on the idiots as I unzipped the bag and searched for the spare leash I always kept on hand, just in case. The wine bottle I tucked under my left armpit. “Let me take the dog and you can go back to the bars.”
Red laughed again. “What do you say, boys? Should we give her the dog?”
He stepped to the side and my stomach bottomed out.
In the center of their circle was a girl on her knees. Jeans torn, shirt ripped, hair a tangled mess down the length of her back. She hugged herself around the middle as though she’d never know kindness from another human being again, and I didn’t have to look at her face to know that the whimper of sorrow echoing in my ears belonged to her.