“Even if—hypothetically—I had feelings for her, it wouldn’t matter.” I sink back into the chair, suddenly exhausted. “She’s Peter’s daughter. He trusted me to protect her, not to...” I trail off, unwilling to finish the thought.
“Not to what? Care about her? Connect with her? Potentially find happiness with her?” He’s being gentle, which somehow makes it worse. “Peter is dead. He’d want his daughter to be happy. He’d want you to be happy.”
“You don’t understand.” I grip the arms of the chair hard enough that the leather creaks. “We... before I knew who she was, we...”
“Had sex.”
“Christ, Jay. And no, we didn’t have sex.” I look away. “I may or may not have gone down on her. And yes... I had every intention of fucking her the next night, but then all this shit went down and—” I take a deep breath. “But no, we didn’t have sex.”
“Oral sex counts as sex, Blue. You’re allowed to acknowledge it.” Jay sets down his pen and gives me his full attention. “So you two were intimate before you knew about her connection to Peter. That complicates things emotionally, but it doesn’t make you a monster.”
“Doesn’t it?” The question comes out quiet. “What kind of man sleeps with his best friend’s daughter? What kind of man then kidnaps her and holds her prisoner in his house?”
“The kind who’s trying his best to navigate an impossible situation.” Jay reaches for his stress ball, which is apparently hiding under a stack of medical journals. “You had no way of knowing who she was when you met her. And everything you’ve done since then—questionable methods aside—has been to keep her alive.”
“That doesn’t make it right.”
“It makes it human.” Jay squeezes the stress ball with both hands. “You know what’s not human? Deciding that the only way to deal with this situation is to break your murder sobriety and go on a killing spree.”
“It would be effective.”
“It would be temporary. You kill the Crow, another organization takes their place. You become the monster again, and you know you won’t be able to stop once you start.” Jay hurls the stress ball at the wall with surprising force. “Or have you not thought that far ahead?”
“That’s not what I’m worried about,” I say. “Saylor isn’t going to run from what I am. If anything, she wants me to embrace it.”
“What do you mean?”
“She wants me to teach her how to kill people, Jay. Hands-on instruction in the fine art of making problems disappear permanently.” I lean forward. “So technically, I wouldn’t be breaking my murder sobriety. I’d just be... consulting.”
Jay blinks slowly. “I’m sorry, come again?”
“She wants to hunt down her father’s murderers and make them pay. And she’s asked me to train her.” I lean forward. “So technically, I wouldn’t be breaking my sobriety. She’d be doing the killing.”
Jay stares at me for a long moment, then reaches for his flask again. He takes a much longer pull this time, then sets it down and looks at me like I’ve just told him I’m opening a lemonade stand. “Let me get this straight. You’re planning to become a homicide instructor for Peter’s daughter so she can personally redecorate Grimlock with Crow entrails?”
“When you put it like that, it sounds—”
“Completely fucking insane?” Jay interrupts. “Because that’s what it sounds like, Blue.”
“She’s going to do it with or without my help,” I say defensively. “At least this way, she’ll do it right. She’ll survive.”
Jay sets down his flask and looks at me with the expression of a man who’s just realized his patient has found the most elaborate loophole in recovery history. “And you think this is... healthy?”
“I think it’s what she needs. She’s been carrying this rage for years. It’s eating her alive.”
“So you’re going to teach her to be you.”
“I’m going to teach her to be better than me.” I lean forward. “She won’t become what I became because she has something I never had.”
“Which is?”
“A reason to stop.”
Jay considers this, his fingers drumming against his desk. “You know what? This is actually... not the worst idea you’ve ever had.”
I blink. “It’s not?”
“Think about it. You stay clean. She gets her agency back. And when this is all over and the Crow are dead...” Jay’s expressionshifts into something that might be professional interest. “Well, I’ll have a new client to work on her post-homicide adjustment issues.”
