by Robin Hale
If anyone asked, I could tell them that I was making sure that the Captain had all of the information he needed. They’d arrested five people at Core Labs, five new faces that needed to go on the board. There were five new connections that might paint a larger picture of what was happening in Opal City, of who was behind the recent spate of seemingly motive-less crime.
I would bury myself in my work at the office and hope that it would bring me enough focus to find my way out of the hole I’d dug for myself.
I had to find a way out.
24
LANA
The problem with having had a lover in my apartment — especially one that had stayed for days to patch up my injuries, feed me takeout, and laugh over the most ridiculous films of all time — was that it now felt empty. Fawn had been there for the smallest handful of days. It would probably be better to organize that time in hours rather than sunsets, but I still felt her absence like a hole in my side.
How had my home stopped feeling like my home without her in it? I’d lived there for ages. I shouldn’t look at my couch and think it had too much space. I shouldn’t look at the end table and think it was empty without Fawn’s mug of tea.
I scowled down at the table spread with my notes and plans. It was fucking ridiculous. It was my place. Mine. I didn’t need her in it, and god, I’d hardly known the trouble I was saving myself by never bringing lovers home. I always went to theirs. Always. Evidently, it was the only way to keep my damned subconscious from deciding that they had moved in with me.
Focus, Blake. Focus.
But it was nearly impossible. As I stalked around the apartment, I kept getting whiffs of the scent of Fawn’s skin. That warm, inviting smell that had led my lips to her neck and had me burying my nose in her hair. I kept moving things around, trying not to keep them where she’d last put them in some idiotic defiance that only served to remind me she wasn’t there.
My hand flexed and I spared a moment to regret having left the necklace with Fawn. Of course, if I had taken it with me I’d have been brooding over it for hours by then. I’d carry it around, a talisman of my ill-fated romance of a hero’s pet. I’d stare at it, trying to remember how its delicate rose gold shade had looked when it was soft flesh rather than corundum.
Focus!
I forced my eyes to settle on the blueprint spread across my table. That was the important matter I needed to see to, the blueprint outlining the private vault of the Winbourne estate. It held the sorts of pieces that I would have salivated over when I had first gotten started as a thief. It was a prize. A challenge. A deeply paranoid man held an estate that had long been owned by deeply paranoid men. As such, it was a veritable fortress.
It would take careful planning, exquisite timing, and all of my considerable skill to get in and out of the vault without finding myself a guest of the OCPD or worse.
And every thirty seconds, my attention was dragged away by memories of Dr. Molly Fawn in my apartment like she’d belonged there. An unfamiliar ache gathered along my shoulders and settled in the base of my skull, and I took a pull of the whiskey that had been more prop than drink in the past few minutes. I felt the liquor swirl its cloying heat into my gut to join the better half of the bottle I’d already downed.
“Jesus, Blake. Hitting the bottle kind of hard, don’t you think?” Izzy’s voice broke through the red haze of my preoccupation like a mallet shattering plate glass.
I whirled around on my heels, whiskey sloshing over the rim of my glass onto the wooden floor of my living room, and I saw Izzy framed in the doorway, six-pack of beer in one hand, large pizza box in the other. What in the hell…?
“Why are you here?” I asked, eyes narrowing as through bringing the other woman into focus would explain everything. The world roiled and swept in my vision like the pitching deck of a boat. It was possible that I’d had a little too much to drink all at once. It was possible.
Izzy raised a single, unimpressed brow at me. “You’re kidding.” She hefted the beer and pizza into the air as though it would clarify things. “Lana — you texted me yesterday, telling me that you’d had a magnificent breakthrough and that I should come over with pizza and beer, and you’d tell me about it.” A frown drew her brows together in a concerned furrow and ruined the soft line of her mouth. “How much of that have you had, anyway?”
With a sigh, I let the heavy-bottomed glass thunk onto the nearest table. “Enough, probably.” I scrubbed a hand down my face and tried to rearrange my expression into something like ‘friendly’. “Thanks, Izz. Sorry I forgot.”
“It’s fine,” Izzy shrugged. A curious glint entered her expression. “Seems like you’ve had some things happen since then. Want to tell me about it?” She shuffled the pile of blueprints and hastily scrawled notes into a safer corner of the room and slid the pizza box onto the table in its place. “Eat that. Jesus, Lana, you’re not a kid anymore. At some point you have to stop acting like your liver is an infinite resource.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I grumbled but obediently lifted a slice of pizza to my mouth. “And it’s just…it’s just Fawn. Like always. Damn, I’ve gotten boring.”
Izzy laughed and nudged my shoulder with her own as she snagged her slice of pizza. “You’ve always been a little boring, babe.” The fond smile on her face stole whatever sting I might’ve found in her words. “For the greatest thief the city has ever seen, you’re sort of an old lady about other things.”
“Old lady?” I asked, eyes narrowed. “You know a lot of old ladies who ride motorcycles, free climb the sides of buildings, and steal priceless jewels?”
Izzy snorted. “Everything has a price. Besides, that’s all related to the thieving. In what way are you some reckless badass outside of that? Is it the sensible apartment you maintain in a safe neighborhood? The donations you send to the library where we grew up? Your tendency to manage your bar’s finances yourself, even though I know you can afford to pay someone to do it for you? Huh? Come on, Lana, which is it?” She beckoned to me with the fingers of her free hand, and I scowled at the gesture.
“So I’m responsible. That doesn’t make me an old lady. I’m pretty sure old ladies don’t have quite the number of notches in their belts that I do.” I took another bite of pizza.
“I wouldn’t count on that, Lana my love.” Izzy’s eyes twinkled. “Have you talked to any of those ladies who own your safe houses? They’d make a sailor blush.” She took another bite and swallowed while she made a conciliatory gesture with her free hand. “And I don’t mean it as a bad thing. But you’ve always been a romantic, and it’s been nice to see you let that side of yourself out. So tell me what you’ve done, and I’ll help you fix it.”
Irritation and affection wrestled for dominance. “What makes you think it was my fault?”
My best friend rolled her eyes. “Because about a week ago I got a phone call from your Dr. Fawn, sounding about out of her mind with guilt and worry and wanting to know where she could find you to apologize. If there’s something wrong since then? My money’s on you.”
“Your confidence is touching,” I groused. So that was how Fawn had known where to find me.
Izzy shrugged. “I’ve known you too long to think that you wouldn’t try to implode this somehow.” She perched on the edge of my counter, legs crossed daintily at the ankle as she shoved an enormous slice of pizza in her face. My Izzy, ever the contradiction. “So tell me how you’ve done it.”
“I got her a present.” I waited for Izzy’s brow to furrow again.
“That’s all?” She asked, head cocked.
“That’s all,” I confirmed. “She didn’t seem too keen on it. I left it with her anyway.” ‘Didn’t seem too keen on it.’ I nearly snorted at the thought. It was a powerful bit of understatement and managed not to be quite true in the bargain.
Izzy nodded like she understood how tempting a focus it would’ve been and frowned again. “What was the present? You didn’t, like, get her some god-awful self-improveme
nt gift, did you? No unsolicited solo cooking classes or whatever?”
I did snort at that. “Give me a little credit, Izz.” All of a sudden, I felt shy about telling Izzy what the gift had been. It was by far the most romantic thing I’d ever done for a woman and it had blown up in my face. Exposing that level of vulnerability, even to Izzy…it was off-putting. Fuck, I was hurt. I was annoyed, wrapping myself in irritation and anger, but mostly I was hurt and it was unsettling. I blinked back the stinging in my eyes and watched, horrified, as Izzy’s face softened.
“Hey,” she said gently, far too gently for my best friend. “If she’s done something to hurt you…I’m not going to give you shit about it, you know that.”
I swallowed hard and barreled past the wall in my head that told me not to expose weaknesses to other people. Izzy had never been on the far side of that wall, and there was no reason to put her there now.
“I had this necklace made for her,” I began, voice quiet in a too-tight throat. “Went through that lapidary in Arizona I told you about. Remember the one? Doing the color-targeted pads in hydrothermal?” I paused while Izzy nodded. “Well, I had her make one for me in a particular shade.” I winced, looking away from Izzy’s placid, patient expression. “The color of Fawn’s lips, actually.” I aimed for a casual, ironic tone. A tone that said I knew that I was a ridiculous sot, and nobody needed to mock me for it because I was already mocking myself. “And I…gave it to her.”
I shrugged, waiting for Izzy’s reaction. I didn’t flatter myself that I could guess what it would be. She had a way of surprising me.
“Oh, Lana,” she breathed, sounding uncomfortably like the first words that Fawn had let out at the sight of the piece. “So this was, what, after a long, romantic dinner? You have this lovely date and give her this incredibly romantic gift and she just…didn’t want it?”
Heat raised, prickling along the back of my neck. “Not exactly. We didn’t, ah, we didn’t have a date. I just swung by.”
Izzy blinked at me. “You swung by. Did you let her know you were coming, at least?”
“Well, no.” I rubbed at the back of my neck. “I just, you know, climbed in through the living room window and…gave it to her. I thought she’d like it.” The defensiveness rose in my voice like the hackles of a dog sensing a storm. I didn’t quite understand how I’d stumbled into something dangerous, but I had.
“Lana.” The breathy quality was gone from her voice. Instead, that was the sharp rebuke I’d anticipated at the beginning of all of this. “When was the last time you’d talked to her before you just…showed up in her living room?”
The floor was too well-made to squeak when I shifted my weight awkwardly under Izzy’s penetrating stare, but I felt just as pinned down as if it had. “She showed up at the Dame a few days ago.”
“That’s been more than a week! And she told me she hadn’t talked to you in days before that!” Izzy sounded incredulous. “Lana, you’re doing that thing again.” Izzy pointed her slice of pizza at me in accusation.
“What thing?”
The pizza waved through the air in the general direction of the blueprints and plans Izzy had moved away from the table. “That thing. That thing where you get obsessed with a particular problem or plan and you ignore the entire world until you’ve worked through whatever the issue was.” Izzy was building steam. She’d lighted upon a theory she seemed happy with and she wasn’t about to let it go until she’d followed it to its conclusion. “You basically ghosted her for two weeks, you realize that?”
“What? I did not.” I hadn’t. I didn’t ghost people. It was a shitty way to treat someone I was dating, and I didn’t do it.
“You did.” She nodded insistently. “You did that hyperfocus thing — and I love it about you, Lana, I really do, but I’ve got decades of evidence that once you’ve cracked it, you’ll respond to my calls. Fawn has like a month and a half of your undivided attention and then crickets.” Izzy chewed a bite of pizza and nodded again like she was listening to her own argument and finding it compelling. “And then you just swing through her living room window — which is some weird Peter Pan shit, babe — and drop this intensely romantic gift in her lap? Of course she reacted weirdly! You caught her all the way off guard!”
I scowled down at the pizza box.
“You know I’m right,” Izzy continued. “You set this up in the way least likely to get a good response, Lana. You know you used to do this when we were kids, too?”
Sullen, sour-faced, and feeling needled by having a friend who knew me entirely too well, I didn’t try to interject in Izzy’s monologue. I just kept eating pizza. Pizza had never called me out like that. Pizza had never rejected me. Pizza was looking a lot better than most people, right then.
“You’d just…decide that someone was going to…to reject you, or treat you badly, so you’d push them away first. You’d go all weird and thick-skinned and Jesus, Lana, it was like trying to crack through armor to convince you that I wasn’t going to betray you.” Izzy had that misty look in her eyes that said she was reminiscing about our misspent youth, and the tension in my shoulders ratcheted higher and higher.
“She didn’t want to wear something that might make her seem like mine, Izz,” I snapped at last. “You didn’t see her at Core Labs. She jumped away from me like I was…like I was fucking radioactive, okay?” The fact that she’d found me to apologize hadn’t really soothed the sting on that one, and maybe that was on me but I couldn’t help the way I felt about it. “She didn’t want her precious Captain Colossal to think she’d ever have anything to do with me. Good enough for a fuck, but not to acknowledge in public, I guess.” The words felt good, even as they dripped with venom that burned only me. It was validating to lay it out there, to remind myself that I had been right and I shouldn’t have expected anything from someone who spent their life playing hero.
“Lana,” Izzy’s voice had gone gentle again, and I hated it. “Babe, you don’t know any of that.” She spread her hands in between us. “Of course she jumped away at Core Labs! You surprised her! She was at work! If one of my employees was surprised by their girlfriend at the shop they’d probably try and sink through the floor before they’d let me see them cuddled up. It’s normal!” She took a swig of beer, wincing a little at the taste, and carried on. “And she even went to the Dame to apologize. I can’t even imagine the emotional whiplash of going from the ghosting to a gift like that.” Izzy shook her head.
“I wasn’t ghosting her,” I insisted. “There’s been these thefts, all of these different crews, and they seem to go through the Russians but it doesn’t make any sense, and I haven’t been able to get a line on what they’re actually after. Fawn would want to know about it, that’s all. They’ve hit the lab where she works and it scared her. They’re using — Izz, they’re using these amateur hour little operations, no one who is used to working together, they’re failing as often as they’re not, and the web of bank accounts they’re using to fund this shit? It’s been —”
Izzy held up a hand, shaking her head. “Lana! You don’t need to explain it to me. Explain it to her. She’s the one who needs to know. Then apologize for being a giant fucking weirdo and get your girl back.” Izzy had as tender a gaze as I’d ever seen on someone stuffing a slice of pizza into their mouth. “You seem to have real feelings for her, and I want that for you. You know? I want you to have someone who shows up on your doorstep with movies and a med kit when she thinks you’re hurt. I want you to have someone who’s so upset by the thought of losing you that she seeks out your fucking underworld connections to find you and apologize. You’ve looked so happy since you met her. You deserve someone amazing and you seem to think she’s amazing.”
I hesitated, breath catching in my throat again as tears gathered in the corners of my eyes. “She won’t…she won’t want me after this, Izzy. I’ve never been what she wants.”
“Maybe,” Izzy said gently. “You should let her be the one to decide that. Ap
ologize. And I love you, but you sound like a wet cat right now. So explain your brilliant discoveries to me, eat some pizza, sober up, and go be the charming rake I know you can be, okay?”
“Okay,” I said with a fond, soft smile. Izzy was the best friend I could’ve asked for. Relentlessly so. And even though walking back into Fawn’s life to ask her to forgive me sounded worse than leaping off the city hall dome without a rope, I knew that Izzy was right. It was what I needed to do.
25
MOLLY
The Dangerous Brains board, as Kevin had termed it, now spanned three cork boards and two whiteboards mounted on my walls. Interns had taken to avoiding my lab as much as they could, which was kind of neat. It was a novelty. I’d always been the most approachable member of the staff, judging by the sheer number of interns who dropped by to ask questions and to seek out some sympathy for their frustrations.
Not so much, anymore.
If anyone had asked, I would’ve said that I didn’t even know how to move my body in a prowl. Certainly not with the deadly grace that the Silhouette employed as naturally as breathing — damn it, I needed to stop thinking about her — but I was definitely prowling around my office. I flittered in front of the boards, idly picking at the strings, the connections before moving back to my desk. When I paused at my workstation, I ran batch analysis after batch analysis on the logs I’d gathered from every theft I’d connected to the sprawling web of faces, names, and incidents that spanned my workspace.
I hadn’t crafted another iteration of the Captain’s healing serum in ages…probably not since the day I’d shown up at the Shady Dame.
And there I went again. A sharp twist in my chest followed the thought of Lana — of the Silhouette — like thunder followed lightning. Blinking became hazardous. Every time I closed my eyes I saw Lana’s face, that brief expression before the icy wall had dropped into place behind her eyes. She’d looked…crushed.
