My phone buzzes, and I finagle the beignets so I can check the messages.
Asch
Do you like horror movies?
Pandora
Eww, no, I can’t stand gore.
I stare at the text for a few seconds, uncomprehending. Then I burst out laughing. I pass Asch his portion of beignets.
“She’s fucking with us,” I say in between chuckles.
“Of course she is,” Asch says, taking the small paper bag from me. “And of course I wore black.”
“You’re supposed to eat them, not get them all over the place. How long have you lived in NewVa, exactly, to where you don’t know how to eat a beignet properly?” I ask him.
Asch rolls his eyes at me. “Look, I can’t help it I’m a mess…” He trails off, the words obviously laden with more meaning than he’d intended. “Anyway, what kind of tourist do you think she’d be? The kind to want to see everything local, or just the tourist traps?”
“She would insist we take her to the good places.” I bite into one of my beignets, managing not to get powdered sugar all over myself. “Oh, she’d love Ghost House.”
Asch nods. “Yeah. If we can get an invite to one of their private events.”
I give him a look, because when hasgetting an inviteever been a problem for me? Even the exclusive, invite-only places like Ghost House aren’t a problem.
I think they call themselves that because it’s supposed to be hard to see them, or attend the place, or whatever, but for somebody with the right connections, it’s only a house that hosts regular kink parties.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Asch grumbles, taking a bite of oneof his beignets. He doesn’t get powdered sugar everywhere despite his complaints. “How much do we really know about her, anyway? We don’t know what she enjoys beyond snakes and violence. And that her family is big in the underworld, or used to be. Oh, and that they’re terrifying.”
“They aren’t that bad,” I grumble.
The more fear you show, the more people will try to take advantage of you. That’s true of Giulio Pavone, and it’s true of my father as well.
Fuck, I don’t want to think about him.
I lead us down to the riverfront. It’s early enough that people are still out with their families, and we have to avoid the tourists to find the more isolated sections of the riverfront.
I sit down on the steps leading down to the mini dock. Asch sits down beside me, and we eat the rest of our beignets in silence as we watch the boats move across the water.
“Blaze,” he begins, crumpling up his bag without looking at me. “We really need to figure out what we’re going to do. Things are bad. Really bad. And with your dad pissed and the frat pissed and everyone pissed, there has to besomething. We can’t keep going on like this and expect it all to go away.”
I want to say thatit’s fine. That nothing could possibly happen, that we’re untouchable.
But my dad and I haven’t exchanged a single word since I got home.
I’ve poked around the hard drive, but it’s an unsorted mess, and I haven’t found my dad’s secrets yet. Maybe they’re not even on that hard drive at all.
More importantly, I still don’t know what to do with it all. Blackmail more people, I guess, which is what my dad would do.
I’m more cynical than he is, though, because there’s some information on these drives that feels so minimal and boring now. One guy I’d recognized as a current representative talked about raping a girl in high school, and the statute of limitation on that is long over anyway.Never mind that I doubt it would hurt his political career at this stage.
People who have done worse are in office now.
I sigh. “I don’t know, Asch. We were both so sure the future was… this. We’d be part of NewVa’s underworld, riches and power handed to us on a plate. But Pandora threw a wrench in all of it.”
Asch sighs. “I don’t know what our future is anymore. Yours, mine… Hell, I don’t know what hers looks like either. Do we have a place in it? We’re burning down bridges, and honestly, some of them need to be burned down.”
He means the trafficking, I know.
