“You’re part animal,” I’d told her, which was supposed to be a joke, but she only shrugged and said, “I do my best work with my teeth.”
And, god, she did.
For a while, we kept it as a game, the secrecy, the fucking after midnight, and then pretending not to make eye contact on the courthouse plaza. There was safety in the cliché of it, as though admitting we liked the hunt meant we’d never have to worry about getting caught. But like all stories, the edge dulled, and soon what was forbidden became necessary just to feel anything at all.
It was Jenna who wanted to stop. She’d fallen for a girl in the AG’s office, a trust-fund feminist who’d never lost a case and also never gotten her hands dirty. For a few months, I’d see her only at committee meetings, her eyes glazed over with arguments not meant for me, her laugh a little more brittle each time she glanced my way. I learned to live for the scraps. Sometimes it was an after-hours text, or a hand on my thigh under the bartable, or a wordless elevator ride when neither of us could stand being decent for another minute.
When the AG girl finally left for a better job in Santa Fe, Jenna showed up at my door at one in the morning, hair plastered to her face, lipstick smeared, and eyes like she’d come out of a cave. She didn’t say a word before kissing me. It was that hard kind of kiss, teeth and tongue, desperation, and the muscle memory of two people accustomed to finding each other in the dark. She shoved me back into my own hallway, locked the door, and undressed us as if we were both racing something unspoken.
That night, I let myself hope.
I never told Jenna I loved her. That word was radioactive between us, something you only pulled out in emergencies. But I knew it was visible in the way I touched her, or in the way I always kept an extra Marlboro in my purse just in case she showed up. I could see it, too, in the way she’d linger in my kitchen after, poking through the fridge like she owned the place, humming as if domesticity didn’t scare her shitless.
I guess we both knew it was temporary. She was too good for Los Alamos in the end, and when her contract was up, she went back to the East Coast, to some white-shoe firm in DC that paid three times what she earned here. For a while, we texted. Then we didn’t. I found other lovers, mostly bad ones, all with bruises and no heart. I told myself the job was enough. I let years pass.
But then she came back, back for good, and already I could see the patterns re-emerging. The endless watching, the need to be right, the way she couldn’t just sit still and drink wine without cross-examining the glass. And me, always ready to let her.
Sometimes I wondered what it would be like to have a happy ending with someone who didn’t make me want to tear off my own skin. But I’d never been good at easy, or soft, or safe. I think it had a lot to do with my childhood and growing up with the mafia lifestyle. You either became hard or you became dead.
After her car vanished, I tried to focus on the paperwork. I did. But every word blurred, every number twisted, and by the time I forced myself to shower and crawl into bed, the pages had begun to scar my vision like afterimages. I lay there, staring at the ceiling, reliving every minute of the argument, every touch, every fault line in our story.
Somewhere around 1 a.m., I found myself thinking of Seneca Wallace. Not the man in the courtroom, or the biker in the mugshot, but something rougher, more elemental. I thought of the way he’d watched me, no games, no trembling, just an unblinking honesty that, if I was being honest with myself, scared me more than Jenna ever had. I wondered what it would be like to let go, to be the reckless one for once, to fuck someone who didn’t care about the rules or the angles.
I rolled over, flipped the pillow, and closed my eyes, hoping for dreamless sleep. But the dream that came was worse. In it, I was running through the courthouse halls, not with purpose, but like a child playing at being powerful, every corridor longer and emptier than the last. I kept opening doors, but found only reflections of myself in each one; my hair was a little messier, my eyes a little wilder. Sometimes there was a shadow at my heels, sometimes a wolf, sometimes a man with a scar I recognized but couldn’t—wouldn’t—turn to face. At the end, I locked myself in the judge’s chambers and, as the door shook with the force of fists or of thunder, I curled up beneath the bench and waited for it to pass.
When I woke, the pillowcase was damp, and my hands were cramped into fists, with nails digging half-moons deep into my own skin. It was 4:13 a.m. The city was silent, its lights gone dead except for the sodium pools at every corner, emptying yellow across pavement and the wolf-thin strays that owned these hours.
I stood, wrapped in a too-large robe, and padded to the kitchen on bare feet. I counted the seconds it took for the coffee maker to grind, for the first hot drip to land and splatter. Seventy-three. That’s how you survived, in a family like mine. Keep the numbers ticking, let the ritual eat the dread before it grows teeth. I poured, sipped, and didn’t taste a thing. My phone was next to the mug, notification light winking.
A text from Jenna, timestamped 2:22 a.m.: Don’t let him get inside your head. See you tomorrow at the arraignment.
She was right and wrong. It wasn’t Seneca Wallace getting inside; it was me, remembering what it felt like to be seen. I’d spent so long outmaneuvering, outlasting, out-thinking everyone, I’d almost forgotten what it was like to be easy to read. I hated it. I craved it. Perhaps I just wanted someone who looked beyond the polished, power-mongering Bellini exterior and saw the animal within.
I sipped more coffee, burned my tongue, and forced myself to scan the overnight crime reports. Domestic assault (two blocks east), a bar fight on the highway strip, a Jeep set on fire over by the old train yard. And then, near the bottom of the report, a flagged item. I read the line three times, each time a little slower:
“Probationer Wallace, S., cited as a witness in a disturbance at 4505 County Road 40. No arrest made. The firearm recovered at the scene did not belong to Wallace. Under investigation.”
The sick thrill I felt reading his name, I told myself, was concern for public order. But I knew better. I texted the probation unit to hold Wallace for a check-in, then found myself rehearsing what I’d say if he came in.
I finished my coffee, then another, and waited until the hour was almost respectable before dressing for work. Navy suit, pale shirt, short-heeled shoes that could still anchor me if I needed to kick someone under the table. No jewelry. No perfume. Hair in a knot so tight it stung.
At eight, I signed in at the courthouse, the metal detector chirring as though greeting an old friend. My last thought before heading to my chamber was simple. I wanted Seneca Wallace, no matter how wrong it was .
Chapter six
Seneca
The sign on her frosted glass door read “J. Smart, Attorney-at-Law,” but the A and T had peeled off, leaving her with nothing but a half-baked “orney” to sell to the desperate and damned.
I didn’t bother knocking. I just walked in, let the door slam behind me, and waited for her to look up from her desk. She didn’t, at least not at first. She just shuffled a stack of manila folders, double-tapped her pen against the legal pad, and then reached for her coffee. I counted three full seconds before she said anything.
“You’re early,” she said, voice crisp but a half-octave tighter than usual. “I was expecting you tomorrow.”
“Paid the fine,” I said, dropping the receipt on the desk. “Thought I’d skip the parade and come straight to the source.”
She scanned the paper, eyes flicking too fast, then set it aside like it was nothing. “Good. That’ll make things easier.”
I took the seat across from her, making it creak like a warning shot. “Saw you at the courthouse,” I said.
