“I see.” Emory gestured to Jack’s empty hands. “For someone so well-connected to my sister, it seems strange you didn’t know where she was today, had no idea she’d slipped out.”
Jack huffed an offended breath, but his eyes teemed with hurt. It was the most emotion Emory had seen from him all night.
“You think I had something to do with this?”
Emory shrugged but stopped short of voicing accusations. He could take back allusions, which were often filled with weasel words and double talk. An accusation of treachery couldn’t be laughed off later as a misunderstanding. It had to be proven and dealt with or debunked without a doubt.
Liam pointed to the picked-at muffin on Emory’s plate. “Shut the fuck up and eat.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“You will be, and you’ll need your strength.”
Emory almost rebuked the assumption—there’d be a fight he might not handle—but couldn’t marshal the wherewithal to argue. He shoved the plate aside and slid down the booth.
“I’ll be out front if anyone needs me.”
Outside, he walked the building’s perimeter and perched against a sun-bleached mural painted on the side. Once upon a time, it exalted Nevada’s flora with prickly pear and cholla brightlyframing an electric sun. Beneath the light of a full moon, it looked lusterless.
Across an empty expanse of sand and rock, headlights flickered in the distance, and black mountains silhouetted the night sky. After a few minutes, Liam’s familiar cadence manifested on a crunch of gravel. With it came the peppery scent of his cologne as he rounded the corner.
“Can’t smoke anywhere these days,” he quipped with a flick of his lighter and a drag off his cigar. Fragrant wisps of smoke curled from his lips as he squinted at the horizon. “Remember what I told you about the desert?”
Emory nodded. “You said it was like a woman. Beautiful but deadly.”
His early days in the organization were a blur of memories that often bled together, but that conversation dog-eared a page in his past. It was one of the first heart-to-hearts he’d had with Liam, a man who, back then, Emory swore was trying to replace his father. He’d been a teenager, capricious and difficult with a hair-trigger temper.
“Beautiful but deadly,” Liam said. “I told you not to get sucked in. That’s the problem. People are so infatuated by the allure, they set off. Before they know it, they’re lost and dying amongst the beauty they so desperately sought.”
Emory folded his arms and soured on the reverie. “Is this meant to be an analogy? One about Amelia? If so, save it.”
Liam’s brows lifted, and he dropped his smoking hand before the cigar reached his mouth.
“No, just reminiscing on our first meaningful conversation.” Liam shook his head with a laugh. “God, you were a little asshole then and filled with so much anger. Like a hurricane, I watched you destroy everything in your path—relationships, friendships, yourself. I knew the rage would blow over, and it did, but I still see glimpses of it sometimes.”
Liam jutted his thumb at the diner where Jack probably sat alone with his hurt. “You shouldn’t have said that.”
“I know,” Emory conceded with a sigh. “I’m coming unstitched.”
“That’s fair.” Liam quieted and seemed to stew on his thoughts. “It’s interesting you assumed you were getting a lecture about Amelia. What criticism were you expecting from me?”
“You saw what happened last night. How did Sal put it—the on-the-fence shit will end in tragedy for everyone?” Emory gestured to the desert around them. “Lo and behold.”
“Whose tragedy is this? To most the men, Amelia’s life is a rounding error in our business and nothing more.”
Liam took a long pull on his cigar and sent rings of smoke to the silver-dollar moon. Emory watched them disband as they drifted away.
“Let me tell you a story,” Liam said. “I swear it has a point. It won’t seem like it, but it does. I used to have this fountain pen. I saw it somewhere and coveted it long enough that Francisca told me to shit or get off the pot, so I bought it, used it a few times, then lost it. I looked for that thing in the obvious places—pockets, desk drawers, couch cushions. Eventually, I called it a loss and moved on. Francisca loved pens, though. You remember that?”
Emory shook his head. Francisca died only a year after he arrived in her life, not long enough to learn her quirks.
“Well, she did. For Francisca, pens had to feela certain way. The right tip and grip, ink like silk on the page. We went to our lawyer one day to draw up her living will. When we left, she got in the car giggling like a little girl and pulled a pen from her purse. It was our lawyer’s pen. She’d signed something and walked off with it. She claimed it was perfect in every way. The thing was hideous. A glittery, plastic abomination.
“From that point on, though, it was herpen, the pen to end all pens. I’d tease her about it, and it became an inside joke. Whenever the pen was out, I’d give her a hard time about finding perfection in something so mundane. When she passed and I was handling her things, I came across it. I couldn’t get rid of it, so I kept it on my desk. Whenever I saw that pen, I thought of howmuch I loved her, the things that made her happy, our life together.”
Liam glanced at Emory. Heartache burdened his gaze.
“I lost the pen. I used it one day, and it was gone the next. I didn’t cry much after she died but broke down when I lost that fucking pen. It was ridiculous to everyone else. It was just a pen. I had pens, more pens than I needed and much nicer ones too. Hell, I even had a fancy fountain pen once. They didn’t get it. No one did. It didn’t have to make sense to others, though. The pen meant something to me, and I lost it. Whether or not they understood didn’t change how I felt.”
