“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
-William Shakespeare, The Tempest
previous: about | chapter one | chapter two | chapter three | chapter four | chapter five | chapter six | chapter seven | chapter eight | chapter nine | chapter ten | chapter eleven | chapter twelve
Eze got back at five. I didn’t see him until six.
The light was going by then, the fog holding a mile offshore in a long gray wall like it was waiting to be invited in.
I came down the path from the lighthouse, and Eze was waiting by the car, in black again, no jacket. He heard me approach and turned around. The expression was fleeting, but I saw his eyes dip, widen, and I felt a bit of wickedness as I stopped before him and slowly did a 360-degree turn, showing off the drama of the green weapon in the shape of a dress.
For once, Eze was speechless.
“Like it?” I asked, finally.
“This is Kira’s doing,” he said, shaking his head as if trying to refocus.
“How can you tell?”
“Because I’d never have gotten away with buying you that.”
He held out his arm. “Ready?”
“Yes,” I said, and he led me to the car.
“Where were you all day?” I asked.
“Working.”
“All day.”
“All day,” he agreed, and opened my door, and neither of us went anywhere near what he’d shouted in a concrete garage on Thursday night, which was still down there in the dark waiting for somebody to come back for it.
…
Conrad threw Eze a birthday party in a prison. But not just any prison.
Alcatraz rose out of the black water strung with Edison bulbs, the old cellhouse glowing like a jack-o’-lantern, a band playing in the exercise yard while a fleet of chartered boats ferried Silicon Valley’s royalty across the chop. The city glittered behind us, indifferent.
Eze stood at the bow of our boat and watched the island come at him, and I sensed a bit of unease as I approached. The car ride had been quiet, and I had trouble getting a read on Eze.
“You could have said no,” I said.
“I said no four times, for the record. Conrad booked it on the fifth.” The wind pulled at his hair, and beneath the polish he looked tired in a way no amount of money has ever fixed. “He thinks I’ve been hiding. Months in the fog with a dead father and a book project, and my best friend has decided what I need is three hundred people and a cake shaped like the company logo.” A muscle ticked in his jaw. “He means it kindly. That’s the unbearable part.”
“And the part you’re not saying?”
He was quiet for a second, spray hitting the hull below us.
“Nineteen days,” he said. “This is the week we’d be at the lake. Him and me and the bad fishing.” He didn’t look at me. “Instead I get Alcatraz and a band. My father would have chartered a boat straight home.”
The island’s dock lights slid across his face, and I did something unprofessional. I put my hand over his on the railing. Just for a moment. His hand turned under mine, and for three seconds in the middle of the bay we held on, and neither of us said a word about it.
“There’s one more problem,” Eze said, as the dock came up. “Tonight you’re a story with no cover. Three hundred people, forty of them press-adjacent, all of whom will want to know what a beautiful unknown woman is doing at my birthday. And they’re not going to buy just the ghostwriter thing—the valley has already been talking. And Ashcroft RSVP’d yes to a party he wasn’t invited to.” His thumb moved once over my knuckles, deliberate, and my pulse went off like spilled marbles. “The safest thing you can be tonight is mine. On my arm, my hand where everyone can see it, boring and claimed and not worth a single question. Can you act that?”
Act. “I have range,” I said.
“I know,” said Eze, with a half-smile that meant more than one thing, and the boat touched the dock, and he took my hand like it had always been his, and we went up into the prison together.
