“Your sessions have completely destroyed my relationship with normal business hours.” He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “So let me get this straight. You’re telling me that retirement lasted exactly... what, forty-eight hours?”
“Retirement is overrated.”
“Blue, we spent three years building your exit strategy. Three years of anger management, meditation techniques, finding healthy outlets for violent urges.” Jay gestures wildly with the flask. “And you threw it all away for gift giving?”
“I prefer to think of it as targeted problem solving.”
“With axes.”
“Hans’s axes,” I correct. “There’s a difference.”
“Oh, there’s a difference?” Jay’s eyebrow arches dangerously. “You can’t just have your staff handle all the killing and think that makes you murder sober, Blue. There are loopholes, and then there’s... whatever the hell this is.”
“It’s called delegation.”
“Delegation.” Jay takes another swig from his flask. “Right. Because being murder sober doesn’t mean you stop orchestrating deaths, it just means you outsource the actual stabbing.”
“Hans’s axe is just a tool, Jay. Like your pen, or your little stress ball that you keep hurling at the wall.”
Jay retrieves said stress ball from behind the filing cabinet where it’s apparently taken up permanent residence. “My stress ball doesn’t decapitate people.”
“Your stress ball is also significantly less effective at eliminating threats to the people I care about.”
“And there it is.” Jay stops mid-squeeze, his attention sharpening. “The people you care about. Singular person, really.”
“Peter was my friend—”
“We’re not talking about Peter anymore, and you know it.” Jay leans forward in his chair. “We’re talking about the fact that you came out of retirement not because someone killed your friend, but because someone threatened his daughter.”
The distinction shouldn’t matter, but somehow it does. Peter’s death was a tragedy, a failure on my part to protect someone I cared about. But the thought of anyone hurting Saylor? That’s something else.
“Fine. Yes. Saylor matters to me.”
“How much?”
“Enough that I’d rather not see her tortured to death by criminals.”
“Blue.” Jay’s voice takes on that patient tone that means he’s about to make me say something I don’t want to say. “How much does she matter to you?”
I stare at the chaos of his office, buying time while my brain tries to formulate an answer that doesn’t sound completely insane.Books scattered across every surface, coffee rings on important documents, that motivational poster about change that’s hanging crooked behind his desk.
“She’s different,” I say finally.
“Different how?”
“She’s not afraid of what I am. She should be, but she’s not.” I think about the way she looked at the Crow’s corpse, the hunger in her eyes when she asked me to teach her violence. “She sees the monster and asks for more instead of running.”
“That’s concerning from a mental health perspective, but continue.”
“Most people either want to fix me or use me. Saylor just wants to understand me.” I pause as I realize the strength of my words. “She doesn’t try to make me into something I’m not.”
Jay makes a note in his pad. “And how does that make you feel?”
“Like I might actually deserve to be understood.”
The admission hangs between us, and I immediately regret saying it. This is what happens when Jay gets me talking. Somehow he always manages to excavate thoughts I didn’t even know I was having.
Jay clears his throat. “So how are those murder lessons going? Last session you mentioned she wanted to learn how to kill her father’s murderers herself.”
