Dusk Six. (AU-Draft)

Blood rust
Bullet talks wine cries and the floor's on fire
Pero me llama cariño como si fuera un cuchillo
y lo dejo
Lo dejo

--------

1.

In truth, it was not the first time I had laid eyes on the man.

He had walked into my bar once before. A Tuesday night, of all the goddamn nights, and a savagely busy one at that.

The place was packed to the rafters. Bodies came flooding in the moment the sun went down, a tide that didn’t know how to stop, and within minutes the clink of glass on glass was spiking through the air, table after table swallowed whole. My staff cracked open all eight bottles of Opus One that night—bottles that had done nothing for months but sit on the top shelf and gather dust with a certain faded dignity, because a bar tucked away on the quietest street in this city does not, as a rule, have the privilege of welcoming men with pockets that deep often. What passed for music on most nights was the hiss and gurgle of the taps, draught pulled by the pint: the cheapest thing we poured, the thing we kept the most of, stocked precisely for the crowd this joint was built to serve.

However, seven of those eight bottles went to the same table. And the men at that table were not our crowd. 

They weren’t the usual wannabe hard cases either, the sort who drift in just to be seen being dangerous; these were another breed altogether. They wore crisp tailored shirts, and Italian leather on their feet. Just the right glint of silver at wrist and throat, and not a gram more than necessary. Their lips barely moved when they spoke, if they spoke at all. The real deal, the quiet kind, and every inch of those well-kept bodies and better-kept suits was screaming bank figures loud enough to drown out the whole room. Five of them on the couch, each keeping a careful, territorial distance from the next. The air around them carried that particular static that tells you, before a single word is spoken, that some heavyweight of the Underground is about to grace you with his presence.

I was working the shaker when they arrived, the ice biting clean through to my knuckles. They’d even had the courtesy to nod at my bouncers on the way in, dropping word, polite as you please, that their boss would be along later. Then they claimed the prime corner booth, ordered both bottles of thirty-year Glenfiddich we had to our name, sparked up their smokes, and wore the Opus One as though it were just one more accessory to the outfit. After that they simply sat, and let the pulse of my bar and the dark creeping in at its edges work its way under their skin, while their cigarettes burned down to nothing between their fingers. 

That same dark was working its way under mine.

This city has no shortage of true predators. But they don’t trouble themselves (Normally. Anywhere but here.) to stretch their claws all the way down from uptown to some nothing street nobody’s ever heard of. And when they do, the only thing a man like me can do is keep his head level and his hands steady, and pray to whatever might still be listening that the mask he wears is thick enough not to give away the one thing that’ll get him killed.

So I reminded myself, while the shaker sang in my hands: they are nothing to me. I am nothing to them. I am dead. I am buried. They don’t know me. No one in the Underground knows me now.

But the silent mantra did preciously little for my racing heart. Not once the smell of those expensive cigars came drifting across the room. Not with the dark crowding near, too near, after I’d spent thirteen years skirting the very edge of it. (Living in the Underground, there was no keeping clear of the shadows entirely; I’d made my peace with that a long time ago. But the big sharks from uptown were another matter. And that man most of all. The one who knew me. The one who, odds were, hadn’t forgotten the old me either.)

Pure coincidence, I told myself, that he’d show up tonight. And if he did, I prayed that he wouldn’t see past the mask. If he did show up, well, maybe he was just bored shitless of the swill they served in his hundred-plus bars. Maybe he only wanted to slum it at Dusk Six for a night, handle some business on neutral ground.

They’d claimed the two finest whiskeys on my shelves, so I sent two of my girls over to stir the dead air around that table. The ones with the prettiest faces and the sharpest heads, girls who could handle that stinging kind of dark and didn’t mind wading into tension strung tight enough to snap them in half. Whether their heads would end up on their bed or sprawled as gore on the floor was outside my jurisdiction; the time they spent sucking tips off men's dicks was usually outside my scheduled work hours anyway. 

The men welcomed them smoothly enough, though even with a woman at their elbow, that careful pack distance never quite closed. Within minutes the air eased by half a degree, and the girls took their places beside the Opus One as one more piece of décor. Or were they being set aside as later’s offering? I never did learn the finer points of mafia etiquette.

That man (the very one I’d called dead to rights in my own little guessing game, fuck me) strolled in around ten, and the air in my bar went a few degrees stiller. The tables nearest the door fell into a silence that had never been so loud, and it announced him better than any herald could: the darkest silhouette this city has to offer.

The rumours were right: that mane of black hair scraped back into a topknot, the rest spilling wild down his shoulders. The bull’s chest and the heavy arms kept civilised under his shirt, though anyone with eyes could tell what was waiting underneath. And the eyes. Those eyes that never miss. I remember the mantra died on the spot when they swept toward my bar and blew straight through my mind, for no longer than the flicker of a second. Then the ancient clock on the wall slammed out ten o’clock, clean through the thud of the EDM and straight onto my nerves.

The moment the last chime died, I yanked my gaze away and melted back into the shadows, where the bar’s sleazy mood lighting couldn’t find me, and I prayed to my late mother. There were at least a dozen others in that room doing exactly what I was, watching him from the corner of an eye or with an ear turned his way, because every one of us knew a single stare held a heartbeat too long on that one face could be sharp enough to take our heads off. And I told myself, too, that under the new face I wore, he couldn’t possibly recognise the man beneath it as having anything to do with his oldest feud.

For all that he looked every inch his name, his mood was nothing like the stories. (Where was Deadeye’s famous taste for blood? The psycho who got off on violence? That night, suspiciously, he beamed like a small sun.) Every one of us watched him glide in, dealing out friendly claps to my bouncer, who barely came up to his shoulder, wearing the kindest grin that could have lit up the whole street. 

He sweet-talked his way over to his crew with his arms flung wide, playing the long-lost friend, bumping fists and hauling bodies against his chest once he reached them, all five, making sure not a single one felt left out. Before long he’d sunk deep into their sofa to a round of raised glasses and ass-kissing, a woman claimed under each arm, his hands already giving their asses a satisfied squeeze.

I threw Ian a signal from behind the bar. The kid’s shoulders dropped like someone had cut his strings. 

We went back to what we did best: slinging drinks, running our little circus act with the bottles, keeping our eyes anywhere but that corner booth. I was fairly sure the bar lights were doing me a kindness, painting my mask more convincing than it had any right to be. I kept my face neutral, and now and then let my hands sink below the counter, moving slow, all grace, to hide the tremble.

Come dawn, Ian found a thousand terros wedged under the empties. Some tip.

That was months ago now. Seeing the puppet master of the night city in the flesh wasn’t exactly an everyday occurrence.

2.

In the Underground, military brass and crime bosses ate from the same trough, and between the two of them they somehow kept this fucked-up economy breathing. Laws were just wallpaper in the night city. That was the whole reason we called it that: daylight meant nothing here. It only stung the eyes of the predators, and the predators only came out to play after dusk. I learned that much the moment I found myself a hole to hide in, on this street, in this particular bar.

Years back, our old boss caught a bullet and never got up. His wife sold us the bar dirt cheap, scooped up whatever cash was left, and was gone by morning with another man. Bang, and then gone, without a word of warning. We never did find out who’d had the hard-on for him, or why, or whether his blood might come back one day to stain the windows of this place, should whoever it was decide the bar was worth flipping over for a few coins. The dead man was no angel. But a decade ago, when Ian and I were drowning and desperate for terros, he’d said yes when we came begging, and that counts for something.

We kept the same hours so the regulars would feel at home, stripped out the mouldy wallpaper and slapped on a coat of maroon, christened our new hole with a new name, and got on with it. Now that we had a real hiding place, far enough from uptown, we fitted a secret compartment into the floor under the bar counter, right where we stood to work, and started stocking it with safety hardware. Guns. Ammunition. And we didn’t stop taking contracts on the side, not while the street was still half-dead: a scattering of drinkers who couldn’t stretch past two mugs apiece, and fewer still once word of the old owner’s death got around, never mind that it happened outside our door.

Small-time sharks would name their target, and I’d deliver the head, with a little help from the accessories I picked up on the dark market. Ian taught himself some hacking along the way, mostly penny-ante shit like identity theft. Nothing grand, but it meant we never had to live on one meal a day again just to scrape through. Within a year of owning the bar, everything had settled into something that worked.

A year after that, we’d scraped together enough to lease a handful of shitholes nobody else would touch: nameless apartments, rented rooms, whatever came cheap. (Perfect, too, for our growing arsenal and for MORE backup plans.) Every night we crashed somewhere different, never the same place twice, and we kept that habit running. I made connections along the way, some of them nothing more than the strange courtesy that passes between people who’ve sunk to the same low places. Nobody’s hands were clean, of course. But they were straight shooters. If they liked you, you could pick your own dirty jobs and work them on your own terms.

By the time I almost crossed into my thirties and the bar had earned its reputation, I’d grown choosy about wet work, and eventually, I quit doing it all together. 

I bought myself a half-decent place nearby, a stone’s throw from the city barracks. No mould creeping up the walls, at least. No afternoon wake-up calls courtesy of gunfire. No more neighbours fucking and moaning through the wall at sunrise. It was a compact little place, and the sun came through the window at exactly three in the afternoon, which happened to be my usual waking hour, thanks to my hard-won freedom to sleep a full seven hours.

Ian got himself a new set of wheels but still preferred crashing in the bar’s VIP room. Said he liked being on the breakfast truck’s route. The kid had to feed his pancake obsession somehow.

As long as the people we used to be stayed buried, everything was copacetic. And for a long, safe, quiet stretch there, I’d managed to convince myself that the true man under my mask, Francis Faucher, was history. I told myself he was dead and gone for good, and that nobody here had ever known him. I was in the clear. New name, new life. I was safe, I was fed, and every dawn after closing, Ian fell asleep the moment his head hit the pillow and didn’t wake up screaming anymore.

3.

Little did I know one of those names from the shadows would walk straight back into my life on a slow Tuesday (a different Tuesday, just to be clear) and plant himself at my bar, right behind my fucking back. 

I never heard his footsteps come through the door, and whoever it was behind me, I took for a stranger or one of my staff. What I did catch was the chatter dying, and the scuff of feet shuffling toward the exits. And in the next second, at the far end of the counter, Ian went rigid as a corpse, the jigger nearly sliding from his fingers before it froze dead in his palm.

“Bartender, whatever’s good.”

I turned toward the voice. It was rougher than I remembered, with a disgruntled edge to it; nothing like the man who’d beamed his way through my bar on a Tuesday a month ago. The dark came creeping across the counter and onto my skin, danger seeping out through the crack of the fuck-you smile playing at his lips, an unlit cigar clamped between his teeth. I stood there without moving, strangely, unexpectedly calm, and watched his thumb work the lighter until it caught. He drew once, deep, and let the smoke curl out slow, until it bled into the bar lights.

Behind him, every stranger in my bar was making for the door, damn near on tiptoe. My bouncer at the entrance looked about ready to piss himself. I caught his eye, faintly peeved, and signalled him to let them all go. Him included.

“Sure,” I said.

My hands were steady—maybe it was calm before the storm. Maybe it was the bottle fresh out of the fridge, held long enough to numb any sense of death. Either way, they slipped into autopilot: a pour from this bottle, a pour from that, the spring dropped into the shaker, and I was working. The zest blooming off the juice drifted across the counter to the reaper himself, and that grin sparked up, just a touch, just a harmless stretch before the slaughter.

The shaker did its dance in my palm. Two spins. I let my face sink behind the shadow of my own elbow and turned on Ian the one face that was still truly mine, the face of a dying big brother. 

LEAVE. NOW. 

The kid knew my eyes. He’d been reading them, and every smallest signal I made, for as long as we’d survived here. I’LL COME LATER. There was always one more coaxing, one more lie, to get those stubborn legs of his moving. At last he set the jigger down on the rack we’d bought together last summer and slipped away across the bar to the storeroom (and its secret exit, known to no one but us).

The door clicked shut just as I lifted the lid off the shaker. After that, the only sound in the dead room was liquid glugging into glass, and that garbage EDM still bleeding out of the speakers while I garnished what might well be my final drink. Every beat landed like a sledgehammer on my wire-tight nerves, the crack of the ice keeping time with my pulse, all of it rushing back to life the moment I knew for certain my brother was out.

I’d been in this game too long. Too fucking long. Long enough to fool myself into thinking I’d ever left it. The proof was right there at the ends of my arms: neither the cold nor the booze could put a tremor in them, not that night, not even as an orange slice slid onto the rim of the glass like a sleight of hand. They were steady as they’d ever been. Summer hit my nose first. Then that desperate citrus bite. And way down beneath it, the phantom cordite of wars I’d never truly left behind.

Ian had better have listened and run, I thought, and pulled what was probably the ugliest smile of my life as I lifted my gaze to meet that pair of eyes.

And just like that, the fear stopped mattering.

I let the black dread roll off my fingers and watched it crawl onto that stupid little umbrella pinched between my thumb and finger. Stabbed it into the cocktail. Set the whole thing on a coaster. Slid it his way.

“So what’s this, an invitation?” He had his face propped on one hand, the other draped lazy across the edge of the bar, cigarette still dangling from it. 

In the shit lighting I caught the bags under his eyes, the shadow-play of his lashes. That plastic playfulness from before had melted off. In its place, the truest bloodlust bled out with his smoke through the smirk and sank back into the dark where it belonged. He breathed out slowly, eyes barely slitted, and couldn’t be bothered to spare so much as a glance for the Sex on the Beach sitting alone on the counter where I’d served it.

“Beach is a long way off, sir.” I broke the gaze and braced both arms on the underbar, resting.

He chuckled. The wicked slit of his mouth cracked wider.

There was no chance in hell I could reach the gun under the bar fast enough, not with those eyes still fixed on me. He was close enough that I could smell the tobacco on him, close enough to taste the faint trace of his cologne, close enough for him to put his fist through me before I’d moved an inch. My reflexes had gone soft for playing it stealthy on most of my wet work and abandoned them completely for years; they couldn’t touch a killer like him. The man had been cutting throats since he was old enough to hold a blade. His hands were the biggest boneyard in the night city. (I thought of my crew as well. That bouncer…hired a year back, a good man. I hoped he’d behaved, too, read my signal, and left the way he should have; nobody ought to bleed for a boss they barely knew, not against Deadeye.) 

All I could do was pick up the bar rag I’d tossed aside minutes ago, find a glass that needed attention, and start polishing. I had all night. No rush to the grave, not with the reaper himself already here. Might as well make them shine before the lights went out. I didn’t need a second glance to know his eyes had already marked my throat. Old instinct was wailing at me: he was probably working out the perfect angle, blade or bullet. With only the two of us left in the bar, I figured one prey meant he could take his sweet time and milk every second of the screaming.

He tapped off his ash, reached for the drink with his other hand, and took a sip. Then he pulled a funny face.

Not a bad one, though.

“Shit, that’s bright. Like your eyes. How long you been doin’ this?”

“Nine years.” It wasn’t a lie. (I couldn’t say I loved it. The job turned beautifully boring once you’d held enough bottles for the street crowd, obnoxious for the most part and skipping out on the tab every so often. Predictable chaos every night after hours, the noise a blanket of peace for two brothers. If I punched out as a bartender tonight… that was mercy enough for a life as compromised as mine. There were worse endings.)

“Yeah? Got a name, bartender?”

“John.” I hooked the clean glass onto the stemware rack and reached for a second.

“Oh…” That smile. All predator teeth, victory and amusement. “C’mon, pretty boy. You don’t look like a John.”

The ravenous undertone alone woke something old and animal at the base of my spine, the prey’s reflex, and it took all I had to keep my body from obeying it. I pinned my eyes on the glass and let them settle on the faint, warped reflection of my own perfect poker face. Mask intact. John was holding up just fine. When I raised my eyes again, I noticed a pack of abandoned cigarettes at the far end of the counter. No brand I knew. Probably some runner’s last vice.

“Never liked it much either.” I sighed. I held the glass up to the light, turning it slowly, hunting for smudges that weren’t there. Through it, I pretended he was nothing but a warped smear of black.

A lazy laugh rolled out of him with the smoke. 

He was plainly savouring this back-and-forth mindfuck like aged whiskey, waiting to get the mask drunk enough to shatter. I kept working the glass. I never thought the soundtrack to my death could be some EDM trash I’d always hated, still blasting around us. Shit taste in funeral songs. But at least it spared me the indignity of drowning in what might otherwise have been a suffocating silence; the man didn’t say another word after that.

And over the next hour, I polished every last glass and hung each one in its place. Deadeye lit a second cigar that night. That made twice he’d made a liar of his own famous rumour, the one about the flick of a lighter coming right before the carnage. I checked his free arm. It didn’t move toward his waist, or his back, or anywhere at all. It stayed draped over the edge of the counter, nothing stirring but the subtle silver gleam of a decorative chain, breathing under the bar lights.

The drink still sat unfinished when I was done wiping down the countertop, polished until it mirrored the glasses hanging above. I had to find something to fill the space; ever since that second cigar, the air had shifted into a different kind of awkward. I stopped keeping myself in his line of sight and set about putting the wines back on their shelves (it had almost been a busy night, and my staff and Ian had pulled them down for convenience).

Things only got weirder from there. 

He torched a third cigar after the second and went back to playing statue, his back slumped a little, sunk deep in some thought or other, and God only knew when he planned to end my night. I glanced at the old clock—already pushing midnight. The glass was emptied.

Fuck it, I thought, and came around the bar to clean up the mess the panicked customers had left in the back. A few name cards lay scattered across the floor, probably slipped from someone’s pocket, but I couldn’t make them out in the dimmer light away from the counter.

Glasses collected. Bottles off to the recycling bin. And with every table I cleared, my head cleared a little more too.

Because none of it made a damn bit of sense. A man as busy as Deadeye, sitting here playing footsie with death, when he had a dozen deadlier deals waiting for him uptown. We’d traded fewer than ten lines in all of two minutes, every one of them costing me a small fortune in luck (or in omens; I couldn’t tell which, for all that strange peace in me), and yet his ass had owned a stool in this cheapass bar for ninety minutes at least, doing nothing productive whatsoever. One bullet could have settled whatever grudge he had with me. There was no point wasting time he could have spent balls-deep in his women.

By then I’d drifted away from the counter and was going about the most nonchalant business imaginable behind his back. I was far enough off that I could have eased my way toward the main door, slow and quiet (I could have!). Instead, I went to a familiar dark corner and fetched the mop and rag. The splattered mess across the tables and floor had started to get on my nerves, honestly. And running would hardly have been the wiser move, not when I had to make damn sure every ounce of blame landed on me and none of it on my innocent brother.

He did move, eventually. The little umbrella from his glass got a quick, bored inspection before he set it down just so, its baby shadow stretching across the counter. And then his hand finally, finally went to his belt to pull something out.

His phone. I rolled my eyes.

I’d checked his belt, if only briefly, and I was sure the gun on it was loaded. He hadn’t made the slightest effort to hide it. Of course he hadn’t. He was Deadeye. Even with me lurking freely in his blind spot, I was no threat to him. 

He shifted, unhurried, until he was angled toward the far corner of the bar, one arm propped on his outstretched thigh, the cigar resting between his knuckles and burning away into the night while he scrolled. Like any ordinary drinker.

The midnight chime came two hours in. It jolted me, just a little, and I went back to mopping. Behind me, I heard him uncoil from that lazy sprawl and stub the third burnt-out head into the ashtray.

“Why bartending?”

I glanced at him. The last coil of smoke slid out between his lips.

“Needed the terros. We were all circling the drain back then, sir. I got lucky.”

“Right.”

And then, finally, finally, he stood and stretched. He made for the door with a lazy wave, leaving nothing behind but the smell of smoke and his shadow sliding briefly across my freshly mopped floor.

“Nighty night, Johnny boy. Make me a real drink next time.”

I was still standing, the mop was still in my hands. I watched his silhouette blending with the night.

The twelfth chime died away, and with it the Underground’s nightly meat market officially opened for business. The same old blood ballet of sharks, the same performance of fear and greed. The city sang its usual song of lead and explosions, a distant thunder rolling in from uptown, and no longer so far removed from this street as I’d once believed. And I, a dead man by all rights, had somehow, miraculously, stayed off that deadly stage tonight.

Then Ian burst out of the storeroom, and I knew it—I fucking KNEW it. That little shit had never actually run. He had this stupid, stubborn fortitude that refused to leave me behind, every single fucking time I begged him to go. He crashed straight into my arms, shaking.

The mop hit the floor with a clatter.

4.

We cleaned out the underbar together.

I locked the door only once I was sure the street was empty: none of Deadeye’s people, no cops, and certainly no drinker oblivious enough to wander in on a night strung this tight. Only the half-moon, and the breeze funnelling down from the far end of the street. No eyes. For now.

The bar was no longer a rabbit hole, not now that Deadeye had shown himself in front of me. He knew exactly, precisely who I was. He knew what I’d done to him, too: an old debt I’d hung around his neck, when by rights it should have been branded onto an ugly old name. I’d always known this day would come. I’d known he would come for me, and all the while I’d clung to the wishful thinking that none of them ever would.

Ian burned through the rest of the night glued to his secondhand laptops (after glancing at the door lock a few dozen times, just to be sure), fingers flying over the keys as he combed the news. We didn’t have to spend a single terro reaching out to our anonymous contacts; the media itself handed us the hottest story running beneath all the darker, invisible headlines. The fleshpots in the southwest of uptown had been hit. Men with bats and guns had flipped the places over like burnt pancakes, all to flush out one man in hiding, and those places just happened to be Deadeye’s biggest cash cow. The news was everywhere now. Snapshots. Shaky video, frame after frame of screaming. Clueless people fleeing their red little heaven.

It had all started a week ago, and we’d been so busy, so distracted, that we hadn’t bothered to care about uptown gossip.

“It’s Sylvain. He broke the pact.” Ian’s eyes were blown wide and fixed on the monitor, his lips still trembling from the sheer terror of it. “He… he came!” His head snapped toward me. “He came for us, frérot…”

I sank deeper into the worn leather couch, past caring about the stale, musty air. “Hmm…?” I murmured back, distant, my nerves so wrung out they’d gone slack, fighting the weight dragging my eyelids down. Ian had to put a hand on me and give me one light push to shake me awake; I hadn’t even noticed I was nodding off to the lullaby of his keyboard. “I know,” I sighed.

“What’s our next move?” he asked, scrolling restlessly through his burner phone.

“Open as usual.”

“What?? The BAR?? Fu—They’re coming!! The Fauchers!! And Deadeye! He found you, frérot!!”

“I know. Ian, I know.”

And then I told him the scripted lie, perhaps for the last time. I’d built an escape hatch months ago, I said, and I said it was for the two of us: a smooth international route to a brand-new life, brand-new papers, brand-new names, a cleaner job and a blank slate. And now was the perfect time to finally board that ship, the one I’d spent half my savings making sure no one could ever trace back to us. Plus a few terros more for one last, perfect polish, a detail I’d keep locked in my head for good.

It was half a lie.

Only Ian would board that future. The kid was young enough to start over. My loyal brother… he deserved that much. And I had to make sure every last barrel was trained on me, and me alone.

I’d always known this day would come. Sylvain or Deadeye, sooner or later, it made no difference. When we found our first shelter near this street a decade ago, we’d dropped a piece of false intel meant specifically for my old family: that I, their lifelong target, had run straight under Deadeye’s wing. The Fauchers swallowed it whole. Of course they did. It made the bloody feud between the two houses that much uglier.

I knew, too, that I had nowhere left to run. I was out of options; the Fauchers already had eyes on every border beyond this night city. The moment I showed my face past the city limits, I was finished. Leaving was impossible, for me at least. All I could do was keep melting into the city’s shadows, or bend the knee to whoever wore the crown here. (Who happened, as luck would have it, to be the Fauchers’ sworn enemy. Still, I’d never expected them to go so damn far as to kick down his door.)

I had used his name as a shield, an ex-Faucher myself, and that was what had led me here, to tonight. Of course Deadeye had been measuring me for a coffin. Perhaps not even recently. All he’d needed was to find the man beneath the mask I’d spent more than a decade painting: tattoos, piercings, a fake name and a fake life carved deep enough into my bones to pass. But down here in the Underground, a whole parade of rats would race each other to sell out anyone who’d made him look stupid for half a second. One crook of his finger, and the magic would deliver me right to him. 

Even so, it had cost him a decade. He had every right to put that bullet in my skull just now. And yet he hadn’t. That part, I couldn’t begin to guess.

Nonetheless, I was still vermin, living on borrowed time.

Ian listened to the escape plan as I recited it. He believed us. My boy always believes in us. But this night city didn’t, and it couldn’t keep happy endings in stock for a man like me.

I tried. There weren’t any.

Even after he’d heard the escape plan, Ian’s fingers kept dancing across the keys, his eyes a little brighter now, hopeful enough to sting my tired conscience. I watched his profile through heavy eyelids. It was a face straight out of a painting, a seascape: ocean, shoreline, sand. Smooth pale skin on one side, burn scars twisting across the other, and still as beautiful as the little boy who used to laugh into the wind. Ice-blue eyes stained by the sea, clear as heaven. A face carved by angels, had my cursed blood not ruined it. 

He could have been golden, if only he weren’t with me. He could be making art. Chasing sunlight, chasing waves, doing whatever made him smile the way he was always meant to, if only he hadn’t been home with me that day.

The exhaustion won in the end, once I’d given up fighting the guilt. The glare of the screen was too harsh in that dark room, my eyes too dry and too raw to stay open any longer, and at last they gave out. I was gone. Maybe that was my kind of miracle: stealing one more dreamless sleep after Death himself had come calling ahead of schedule, at the very moment I least expected him.

The next few days played out like reruns. Somehow the drinkers multiplied like roaches, starved for a taste of any place Deadeye himself had once touched; I half thought Dusk Six had turned into a tourist spot. More gossip hounds. Vultures circling to see whether anyone had died that night, or whether I, the bar owner Deadeye had laid eyes on, had stopped breathing. None of them came from uptown. Mostly dead-eyed local wage slaves, medicating with whiskey.

Ian worked his network hard, even knowing he’d be gone in a matter of days, every active snitch and source tracking Sylvain and Deadeye’s crew both. I let him. Stopping him would only wind him tighter, or worse: that too-excited face of his would sell us out to every watching eye all on its own. Better to let him burn off the thrill by giving him something to do. Anything. Just a distraction from the lie beneath our feet.

My routine stayed as it had always been, programmed, carved in stone: order booze, stock booze, pour booze, then scrub shit out of the toilets every night as usual. Even that one Saturday night, when I had to fish several cum-filled condoms out of a bowl of piss, I stayed oddly zen. Only my mind wouldn’t keep still. Every night, lying on my rented bed before I closed my eyes, it played that night on loop, going back and back and back to those sun-baked knuckles stroking the lighter. 

That single flick, over and over behind my eyes. And that particular winning grin of Deadeye’s, haunting my sleep.

Good, I thought, whenever the nightmares circled back to our conversation. He was, after all, a clean killer, famous for ages, with an accuracy every shark in the Underground knew by heart. I’d probably only hurt for a few seconds. So I prayed…I prayed to whatever gods still ran things above this place: let him earn that name. Put one bullet clean through my skull. Please, make it quick. 

I trusted him to give me a better send-off than Sylvain ever would. Because if my bastard half-brother got his hands on me first, there’d be no express lane to hell. I’d be taking the scenic route, and every mile of it torment.

5.

The next Tuesday came. 

When I woke at noon, there was a faint smokiness in the air. The neighbours burning rubbish out in the open again, maybe. Or maybe something else entirely, my own instinct tugging at my senses, warning me of something darker, something amber-edged, hovering closer.

I dragged my corpse out of bed a little quicker than I had the day before and slipped into the burgundy V-neck. (It’s branded. I ordered it from their official website. The only decent thing I’d bought myself in years. Long, soft, silky sleeves, and machine washable.) I’d been saving it for some special occasion: a big day, or a small celebration somewhere down the line. For two years it had sat untouched in my drawer.

I parted the blinds just enough to peek out. The wind was patient that day.

I wandered downstairs and over to the next street in my usual leather pants and shoes. A perfect twenty-two degrees, the autumn midday sun kissing my skin, and the breeze grew sweeter the closer I got to the bakery. Thirty minutes standing in line among the housewives, watching my own shoes, and I walked away with a box of durian egg tarts, neatly wrapped. They didn’t lift my mood one bit. I hate durian; it reeks like rotting garbage. But Ian loved the stuff.

The burgundy shirt was comfortable. Which made it a waste, really, such a waste. It made me pensive, thinking about this shirt’s first outing, which might well be its last.

I took another lazy stroll to Dusk Six under honest-to-God sunshine, instead of riding my bike. (The lie had to look real. I’d told Ian we’d go out on separate shipments, on separate days, and meet on the other side. Spreading the risk, same as the rented rooms.) One in the morning was Ian’s boarding time. Which made it, in all likelihood, the last time I would ever see him.

He couldn’t know that.

Ian, though, was thrilled. He smelled the tarts on my hands the second I stepped into the bar. I still can’t fathom why anyone would love something that smells like a fart. But that smile bloomed across his face, and it was worth every bit of it.

Opening brought a flood. Weirdly packed again, on some random weeknight. My staff dove in, popping bottles, pouring drinks, fetching frosted mugs, working the crowd through the stools while the whole joint drowned in drunken static. The counter still had a few open spots, perched on only now and then by prowling dicks hunting for tonight’s woman, ordering whatever neon garbage would impress the easiest. A pack of underage kids had commandeered a table and were ordering enough mixed drinks to float a boat. Ian and I surrendered to another shift’s worth of shaker workout; he didn’t get a single chance to sneak a tart or two from the bakery box.

I’d just sent one of my staff to clear the mess in the far corner when Ian’s telltale gasp hit my radar. I was still holding a box of cherries fresh out of the fridge when the air dropped a few degrees colder than the box in my hands, and behind me came the familiar click of boot heels, unhurried, drawing closer.

“Dear, dear John. Miss me?”

The voice from my nightmares. The voice that had haunted me for a full week; it was back, and it was real. The clock struck just as I turned to face him, clear as a judge’s gavel coming down on my unforgettable sin. He was back, at precisely the same hour as last time.

Deadeye threw me a wink. He’d claimed the same stool, one arm draped over the bar, shoulders loose, with far fewer thorns about him tonight. The room froze for a beat before stuttering back to life around him. That easy grin from his very first visit was plastered back on, the long curls tossed into a messier bun than before, like some working stiff on his way to a late movie. A pack of cigars hit my counter; one was already burning between his fingers.

I smiled. Whether it was convincing, I couldn’t say. “No one here could forget you, sir. What can I get you?”

The cherries. Fuck, the cherries. I set the frozen box down on the underbar, snapped my eyes back to the waiting glasses, crowned two of them with a cherry each, and sent them sailing off to my staff. My fingertips were close to numb; the cold had teeth.

A single glimpse of his face told me he was wearing a different invisible mask tonight, though it brought me no ease. His eyes had already found my fingertips, rubbing at the cold. (I swore I’d done it as inconspicuously as possible, hiding it in the bar lights and the noise.) Just for the space of a blink, something in that mask eased. It could just as easily have been Deadeye’s countdown to carnage; the cigar was already burned halfway down. 

I thought of the contact who’d be waiting for Ian at the border tonight. Then of Ian. Ian. He was still in the bar.

“Theo’s fine, honey.” 

Theo. A gift, handed over like a loaded gun. (Could it be a walking dead man’s privilege? I believe his own people wouldn’t dare speak his name.)

“I’m afraid we don’t carry that brand.” I met his eyes. Gold, and honey-thick with amusement.

“Aw, don’t be shy, Johnny. Go on, say it. I don’t bite.” He leaned back and propped both arms up on the bar. “Whatever’s good. Oh, but go easy on me, yeah? Rode here alone tonight.”

“A real drink, then.”

That grin cracked wider. He remembered that I remembered.

“Though I’m guessing you don’t go down easy, Theo.”

He leaned in again, just slightly, eyes narrowed to slits and settled on my throat. I’d thrown on a chain tonight. I wondered, distantly, whether it would get in his way.

I gave him something else to look at.

The cherries were fresh, imported, hand-picked by me at the grocer’s that very week; I knew my standards. I let a few fall into the tin and pressed them with the muddler until they gave, and gave up their colour with them. Then the jigger. The Scotch passed from bottle to steel to shaker in a single unbroken pour, three-quarters of an ounce exactly, and not one tremor in my fingers, though I could feel his gaze resting on them the whole while, restless, weighing. The vermouth I sent up into the air. It turned once, twice, beneath the dim bar light, and I caught it by the neck and let it meet the whisky in the waiting pool. I sealed the tin, raised it high over my shoulder, and let the ice and the spring sing together. 

Under the shadow of my own raised arms, I threw Ian the glance. 

RUN. NOW.

He was already sliding toward the side of the counter, just as one of my staff ducked in to fetch something from the underbar: a perfectly harmless little shuffle, smooth enough to swallow his disappearance whole. 

But then Deadeye suddenly turned his head toward the kids’ table and all that yelling. Maybe the noise had gotten under his skin. It was also exactly the way Ian had gone. I couldn’t let him register the pattern twice. A man like that would notice: the boy with the burn scar slipping out just as his target raised his arms with the shaker, like last Tuesday…

I set the coaster down on the counter with a crack, more force than it needed.

His attention came back to me at once. His eyes found my face first, and then they went lower, without the least hurry: down the open V of my collar, across the chain, my chest, all the way to my belt, where they rested. A second, no more. Taking inventory, I supposed. Searching for a holster, and finding none; I had not come prepared for this, and there was nothing on me to find. Then he tipped his head back, slow, and sighed, painting the ceiling with smoke, as though tasting something in the air. Like a bloodhound that had caught a victory it knew.

Bass bled through the speakers as I strained the drink into the glass, and beneath it, so faint I might have imagined it—came the smallest of sounds: a door, clicking shut. The storeroom.

I breathed out.

“Ooohhh. Is this… what’s it called. Blood and Sand?” He squinted at my offering. “Got a thing for beaches?”

“I do.” It wasn’t a lie. It was my childhood.

“Huh.” He tilted his head, sceptical. But it no longer pickled my nerves the way it had, not now that a great part of that childhood had just walked off to the storeroom and out of my life, perhaps for good.

“Enjoy,” I said, and turned my back on him toward the sink. Washing the used glasses seemed as good a task as any, now that I had no will left to keep the mask unbreakable. The same gun I’d seen last Tuesday sat on his belt, almost certainly loaded.

The moment I turned on the tap, I closed my eyes. For the first time in thirteen years, the EDM had become unbearable. My ears ached, my head burned, and I felt scraped raw. It had never grated on me like this. I reached for the secondhand stereo on the bar rack and killed the track. For a second the air went taut, full of shrieking, and then a jazz saxophone slid in to fill the gap. But the zoo only got louder. It didn’t stop; it got messier, and a nerve jumped at my temple and flared.

What a frail life, born of the darkest blood, I thought bitterly. It had spared me thirteen more years of surviving as a man, so long as I worked hard enough at shredding away everything that was mine. But it hadn’t spared me a proper goodbye. Never a fucking goodbye. Not to Ian. Not to my mother.

Those goddamn kids’ corroded shrieking. The clink of glass. The yelling. The man at my back. It all broke over me at once, a wave too great to stand against, and dragged me out of my numbed body and under. The noise went with it, all of it, until there was nothing left in my ears but the sea.

And there, beneath the water, was my mother. My beloved muse. The loveliest blessing that ever happened to me.

She was born to nobility in Inoasis, with a golden path carved out for her by the most royal people in that city. And she was compassion walking. She spoke gently, she ruled gently, and she was a poet, the finest writer I have known in this pathetic life of mine. My life was not entirely a tragedy, then, for she was in the first nine years of it. The parts of her I refused to bury were the parts I inherited: her bright eyes, and her endless longing for the sound of the ocean where I grew up.

Before I was ever born on that shore, my mother was lured in—deceived, I am certain of it, by my biological father’s obsession, or by something else just as wicked and sly. She learned the truth on her own, later: the man she had fallen for was the don of a crime house. The House of Faucher reached so deep that not even the strictest of laws could reach through its rot. It had eaten justice alive and gone about dressed in its skin, while black vines strangled every corner of Inoasis, every beating heart.

No. I would never blame my mother. She found it all out herself, about my father, about my father’s wife and son, while a heart was already beating quietly inside her, and the child she carried was doomed before he ever drew breath. So she ran. The royal family would never have tolerated a scandal like that, of course. She had a few connections here and there, and she found somewhere to stay before she brought me into the world.

‘It was a lovely winter!’ she told me, once I was old enough to remember my own birthday. I can still see the candles on that wooden table with its striped, hand-painted cloth. Aunty Muli was there, the maid who had sworn to God she’d stay loyal and insisted on running with my mother; her best friend, who married a local on that beach. Her son Ian, still an infant in her arms. And a classy uncle who hovered at the edge of our warm little circle. I called him uncle then. I was too young to know him as anything more. ‘Take care of Ian, Francis! Take care of him like your own brother.’ My mother hooked my tiny finger in hers and lifted it toward the waves, and the promise was sworn. On poetry, on the sound of the waves and the sea breeze, with my deliriously happy little family, on our beach.

One day, Ian and I came home from wandering and found men in black suits crowding our house. Our mothers, our fathers, scattered. In flesh, in pieces, gutted and spilled across the wooden floor, and everything was red, and everything was broken. My mother’s maroon dress had been painted darker with her own blood, and her eyes were snapped horribly wide, and grey. Her arms were somewhere else.

The photograph on the wall—I still remember it: my mother and that kind uncle, fingers laced, walking the tide line together with Muli’s family. It was red. Red. All of it, red.

Click.

I rose out of the vision, though not yet out of the flood. That snap came clear as a shaft of light through deep water, cutting down through all of it. I had heard it before; I knew that sound. Pain was blooming somewhere on my skin, the cold biting into it, though I could not have said where. The jazz drifted down to me, faint, as though from beyond the surface. And someone, high above it all, was calling a stranger’s name.

Click.

John.

I flinched. And all the noise crashed back at once. And there was blood on my hands, and in the sink.

“Johnnnn? Taking a little nap? Wakie wakie.”

I spun toward the voice, toward the man behind me. Deadeye’s glass was already empty, and he lifted it, pointing past me at the sink. I followed his gaze. The water was still running. One of the glasses had slipped and shattered in the basin, and my hands were cut.

“Shit—no, sorry.” I swallowed. “Need something else?” I shoved my hands under the tap, and the cut on my palm stung sharper. A gash about the size of my thumb, and I couldn’t recall when it had happened. I must have spaced out; the numbness was still threaded through my spine. The red kept coming, thinning to pink as it swirled down the drain. “One moment, pl—”

Click.

Again. Crisper this time, sharper, slashing clean through the noise. It came from an antique lighter, obscenely expensive, whose single click anyone in the Underground with a shred of survival instinct would know in a heartbeat. The sound of a coming massacre: Deadeye’s calling card, for when his mood had turned truly foul.

The whole bar stopped. All that discordant racket from every corner of the room took a slap to the face, a reminder that the most dangerous predator in the city was still sitting among them. Any of them, any of us, could die at any second. 

Half-turned, the dry rag I’d snatched still pressed to the wound in my palm, I watched Deadeye draw long on a fresh cigar. The flame lit the line of his jaw, then the tip of the tobacco, and the smoke curled up, patient, as he pushed his empty glass leisurely back across the counter toward me.

“Another round. Anything.”

Only then did the cold sweat finally roll down my spine. It woke me to the hilt.

“Okay,” I breathed, careful, just once, lifting my head to hide whatever terror might have leaked into my eyes. “Right.” 

And as the sweat cooled, so did I. (I told myself Ian was gone. Whatever happened now would happen to me alone.) The first thing that came back to me, gently, was the Green Chartreuse on the rack. I had gin. I still had chilled glasses in the fridge. I could make him another drink. None of it mattered anymore. All I could do was this, bartending to the very last, while I prayed to my mother’s memory: make it quick. One second of agony and nothing more. (With all due respect, it would be the more merciful death, if Deadeye were the one to give it to me.)

He sat with his chin in his hand, no longer looking at me. I wondered whether he’d grown bored of prey that didn’t fight back. He didn’t push, either. His eyes sank to lazy slits, and he let the jazz drift through the space between us. After that click, the bar had fallen into a hush: no more screaming, no more yelling. I managed to mix the drink, even if it took me a quarter of an hour to stop my palm bleeding first.

He didn’t say a word when I slid the new drink over. His eyes passed over the Last Word once, and it drew a soft huff out of him. Nothing else moved but the cigar, burning between his knuckles.

As midnight crept closer, people began to slip out quietly, one by one. Some stumbled out drunk; some of the women were passed out and carried off by those hungry hunters, and I was quite sure my staff were cursing under their breath through their unwanted vomit duty. I prayed while I played busy: counting the till and the coins, stealing a second here and there to ease the dull throb in my palm while I wiped down the counter, stealing glances at the storeroom door—it stayed shut. The night was ending. I’d been waiting for a very different ending all week, and this one was turning out unexpectedly better.

From fear to a fluke in under an hour. And from a fluke straight into stunned bewilderment in a blink. My wide-eyed stare could have burned holes through Deadeye’s back as he strolled out a little past two, tossing a careless “later” over his shoulder into the night, and once again, walked out that door.

--TO BE CONTINUED--