Page 103 of What We Burn

Me:

Fine.

Milo:

You’re never fine. But okay. You ordering a burger or pie?

I look at the slice Fury just set down in front of me. Cherry. Fork already on the plate.

Me:

Pie.

Milo:

She’s got you trained already. Respect.

TWENTY-EIGHT

MILO

“Okay. The mark.” I bite into my turkey club and talk around the mouthful. “I say we hang him in the school gym? Poetic justice and all that?”

We’re on a patio near Eli’s school, in one of those aggressively wholesome neighborhoods where the baristas are shocked if you ask for anything that isn’t oat milk. I’d have gone for tacos from the truck down the block, but Holden likes his meetings to look like casual hangs. Knox is across the street from Gull’s babysitting kitten through her shift, Micah’s running building access with a contact, so it’s three of us. Holden, me, and Eeyore—I mean, Eli.

Eli looks like shit. Bags under his eyes, shirt a little rumpled. Term doesn’t start till next week, but he’s been up at the school every day setting up his classroom—laminating name tags, stapling alphabet borders, whatever the hell kindergarten teachers do before the tiny humans arrive. I guess prepping a room for a gaggle of five-year-olds takes it out of you almost as much as the actual five-year-olds.

“Too public.” Holden shakes his head. “Don’t want one of the students to find him and be scarred for life.”

“Fair,” I say, nodding. “So we do it at his place then? Staged suicide. Note confessing everything. Classic us. Do we have handwriting samples?”

Holden already has the manila envelope out, passing it across the table. “Got a few full pages. But the clinic starts the day term opens, and Odin wants Webster in the ground before the first kid sets foot on that campus. That’s the end of this week. So if you can’t script this in time, we go with the Notes app on his phone.”

“I do my best work under pressure, Holden. You know that.” I open the folder and study the messy scrawl—this is what I’m here for, after all. My secret sauce. “I’ve already got his cadence down from the cloud backups. Give me these and a quiet night and you’ll have a note no graphologist could flag.”

Webster’s left notes in the margins of the pages, little reminders in all-caps:

CONFIRM ALLERGY FOR SOY MILK

COLLECT UNIFORMS MONDAY.

The pen leaves aggressive gouges in the paper—seems Webster’s got some rage bubbling in him. Good to know. It’ll show in the final product.

Eli rubs his temples. “How tight is this timeline?”

“Including today—six days max. We’ll need to take the window as soon as we have building access. Odin’s out of town so we won’t get his input on the plan before we execute.” Holden takes a calm sip of his Americano, but the vein in his temple says he hasn’t slept either. “I’m thinking three days to case the house, one to prep, two for execution and post-hole cleanup, and we beat the school year bell.”

I shrug and take another bite. “That’s plenty of time.”

Eli’s not on board. “How do you get inside a house with a wife, three kids, and what, a very large dog?”

“Bring dog treats,” I deadpan. “Or use the service entrance. Every one of these prep school freaks remodel their houses with catering staff in mind.”

“You say that like you’ve robbed a lot of rich people,” Eli says.

I tip my head at him. “I have robbed only rich people, thank you. Else it’s just petty burglary and I’m not about that life.”

Holden’s not even pretending to humor me this morning. He shuts his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose like he’s enduring a migraine named Milo.