REVOLUTION: The Juice Chronicles Book 2

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Las Vegas glittered under the night sky, loud enough to make darkness feel like bad planning. Doral “Dak” Kent sat at a poker table in the Golden Nugget, brown hair trimmed close, button-down crisp at the collar, jeans newer than anything he used to own. Two years with Kya Michaels had done that. The scruffy version of him still showed up in the mirror sometimes, but not at this table.

Across from him, a man in mirrored sunglasses leaned forward and pushed a small stack of chips into the pot. Dak read the bluff before the chips settled. He didn’t need eye contact. Kya was already feeding it to him.

She moved through the room the way she always did, like the rest of the crowd had been poorly placed. Petite. Wavy blond. Light on her feet and no makeup to speak of. Men looked anyway.

Dak knew she wasn’t normal. That ship had sailed and taken half the dock with it. What he didn’t know was the world she’d come from. Not really. Two years, and most of it still sat behind her teeth.

Two hearts. Her voice settled inside his head, quiet as a thumb on glass. He’s got nothing.

Dak kept his face flat and tossed his chips in. The cards turned. The man with the sunglasses cursed under his breath and threw his hand down. Dak raked the pot in, stacking neat and slow, while his thoughts wandered sideways to her.

Two years ago, his life had come apart in the span of a few weeks he still didn’t like looking at too closely. His business partner had packed up his family and left town, taking most of the answers with him. Dangerous answers, if the bodies and blood and quiet cleanup crews meant anything. Kya had walked away from her own family to live with Dak in Murphy, which sounded romantic until the cost started showing.

Since then, she’d been his only line into the strange, old-world mess they’d left behind. Her silence had been a kindness. It had also been a problem.

Watch the guy on your left. Amusement now, just under the words. He’s trying too hard.

Dak flicked his eyes that way. The man was eating his cards. Kya’s edge in his head had become second nature, and he’d stopped asking himself whether it counted as cheating.

Evening the odds, he told himself. Most nights he meant it.

The room got brighter than it should have. The slot bells across the floor sharpened in his ears until they had edges. His frequent headaches had been more intense the past few months and now the pressure behind his eyes threatened to ruin the evening. Even worse, the roof of his mouth—that small, stupid, specific pain—went hot and tight again, like a splinter trying to surface.

He stood, scooped his winnings, and offered the table a smile that didn’t ask anything back. “Time to cash out.”

Kya was at his shoulder by the time he turned.

* * *

The desert air outside was cool, dry and clean of cigarettes. He took a breath of it and let the noise behind him stop being his problem. Kya’s hand found his without comment. She had a way of doing that. After two years, the warmth of her palm still landed.

“Let’s take the back way,” she said. The line was easy. Her eyes weren’t.

Dak didn’t argue with her instincts. They cut through the lot, past the long shadows between cars, away from the soft sodium of the Strip.

It hit him somewhere between two pickups. A dry electric snap at the back of his neck — the one he called Trigger — wasn’t his own thought. He’d had it his whole life. Never learned what it meant, only what it meant to ignore it. He felt the men before he saw them. Five. Maybe more. Peeling out from behind a row of parked cars and forming up the way men form up when they’ve decided ahead of time how the situation would go.

“Hand over the cash.” The lead figure had a bat resting easy on his shoulder.

Dak didn’t move. He’d learned, with Kya, that movement wasn’t the question. Beside him she looked smaller than the smallest of them. It wouldn’t matter. Her trick was more than deceptive size. He’d seen what was inside that frame. He didn’t like remembering.

“Don’t do this, guys.” His voice came out level. The adrenaline was somewhere lower, in his hands. He could feel her energy beside him slide into something he had no good word for. “Trust me. You don’t wanna make her mad.”

The poker player from inside still wore his mirrored sunglasses. Outside, at night, which seemed odd. He laughed. An ugly little sound bouncing off concrete. “You think she’s gonna save you, old man?”

“What? Forty-one ain’t old.” Dak almost laughed. He glanced at Kya. She gave him back a look he’d seen before. He knew what it meant and wished he didn’t.

The first punch landed like a swung pipe and put Dak into a concrete pillar. Pain lit up his ribs in a sheet. He got under the next swing, came up under the swinger’s chin, and felt the jaw give with a wet crunch. A sick sensation that registered more in his arm than his ears. Blood went somewhere in the dim. He didn’t have time to look.

Another body slammed into him. Fists in his gut, a knee to the side of his head, the lot tilting sideways.

The knife came next. Quick, low, going for his throat.

Kya was faster.

She moved the way she moved. Too quick to track, the world editing around her. And the man with the knife was airborne before Dak’s brain caught up. His head snapped back at the wrong angle. He hit the concrete and stopped being a person.

A growl rippled up from her chest then, low and not quite human. A sound that made the temperature of Dak’s blood drop a notch.

She went through the rest of them in the time it took him to get off his knees and stand up straight.

He tried to keep up with his eyes. Pointless. One second she was across the row of cars, the next her heel was driving down through somebody’s skull with a sound he was going to carry. She was already past that one before the body knew to fall. A hand opened a man’s belly. He went down making a sound Dak had no category for. He winced and looked away.

“Grab her, Hank! Hold that bitch!”

“Fuck that—”

“I can’t find my arm—” A stocky man slumped against a Suburban, eyes wide and locked on the empty space at his shoulder, his other hand clamped over the stump like he could press it back on by squeezing. Blood pumped through his fingers in bright, hard bursts.

Dak braced himself against the pillar and tasted copper. Two tourists stood frozen at the far end of the row, mouths open. One was fumbling for a phone. The other was already dragging her toward the elevator.

“Shit! What is she? Holy fu—” The thug got most of the sentence out before Kya’s hand closed around his throat. The growl in her chest deepened into something with weight. She put his face into the concrete and the sentence ended.

The lot went quiet. In the distance, sirens.

Dak pushed off the pillar, spat blood, and made himself look. Bodies on the concrete, dark stains spreading wide and slow. Kya stood among them, chest rising and falling, eyes still wrong.

“Well,” he said. “That was fun.” He wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist. “Was that really necessary?”

“Yes, lover.”

“A little over the top, wasn’t it?”

She looked down at the bodies and back up at him. Her eyes narrowed a fraction. “They pissed me off.”

“No doubt.”

She stepped over the last one. “I must protect what is mine,” she said flat.

Sirens got closer. They traded a look. Kya tugged her dress straight where it had torn. A small crooked smile climbed onto her face. She took his hand and they turned to leave.

“Freeze, you weird-assed motherfuckers!”

The voice cracked on the last word. Dak turned and saw a casino security kid. Couldn’t have been twenty years old. Soft cheeks, eyes too white all the way around. The sidearm in his hand wobbled like a tuning fork.

A low gurgle started in Kya’s throat. Dak put a hand on her arm.

“Don’t, babe.”

“But—”

“He’s a kid. Enough’s enough.”

Tires barked behind them before she could push back. Brakes, sirens, slamming car doors. A half dozen patrol cars boxing the row. Uniforms with badges stepping out, weapons up and faces tight. Dak’s shoulders dropped a quarter inch.

“I guess the vacation’s over.”

* * *

The interrogation room was cold the way cinder block is cold. After the lot, the fluorescence felt almost gentle, except for what it was doing to his head. He sat at the metal table cuffed to a ring, bruised down one side, a pulse in the back of his skull keeping time with something he couldn’t name.

Kya was somewhere else in the building. He hoped somewhere else was a good idea for whoever was in the room with her.

The cop across from him had a name tag that read MERL and the kind of face that came pre-loaded with a decade of not believing what he was hearing.

“You’re in a boatload of trouble,” Merl said. His voice was tired and even. “We’ve got witnesses.”

“Yeah.” Dak tried to straighten his neck without making it worse. “That happens when a bunch of assholes jump you in a parking lot.”

Merl wasn’t buying any of it. “Witnesses say you and your girlfriend tore them apart. Literally.”

“She’s not my girlfriend.” It came out before he thought about it. He winced when he heard himself.

“Self-defense, huh.” Merl leaned forward, hands flat on the table. “You want to tell me how those guys ended up in pieces? How does a woman that size do that? Hell… how does any woman do that?”

Dak opened his mouth to reply when somebody knocked.

Merl’s partner was a younger one, Jake on his tag, pink at the ears. He cracked the door and his body covered the gap.

“Let me in.” A woman’s voice. Low. Not raised. Not negotiable.

“Yes, ma’am.” Jake stepped aside before he’d finished saying it. His face had gone polite and empty in a way that made Dak’s skin try to crawl off his arms.

The woman who came in wasn’t much taller than Kya. Jet-black hair pulled back severely. Aristocratic face, the bones doing the work. A tailored two-tone suit that looked expensive enough to get away with being strange.

Wife of his absent business partner. Two years of nothing, and then she walked in like she owned the building. The sort of woman who made rich men check their posture and cops forget they had guns.

Dak’s brain, fogged on adrenaline and pain, took a half-second.

“Agnes?”

“Greetings, Pok.” The nod she gave him barely qualified as head movement.

He started to speak, and she’d already turned to Merl.

“Silence.” It wasn’t loud. It didn’t need to be.

Merl’s face went slack like somebody had pulled a plug. He took a half-step back as if the air had pushed him. The intelligence behind his eyes packed up and went somewhere Dak couldn’t follow. He walked out without speaking. Jake fell in behind him with the same glass-eyed evenness, the two of them moving in lockstep that had nothing to do with cop training.

The door clicked shut.

“Come,” Agnes said. “We must depart.”

She was already through the door.

Dak rattled his cuffs against the ring. “Agnes. Wait.”

She reappeared, patience visibly thinning.

“What is it, Pok? Must I carry you as well?”

“A little help here?” He lifted the cuffs.

She vanished and came back walking Merl in front of her like a piece of furniture. He fumbled the keys, found the right one on the second try, and unlocked the cuffs without ever quite focusing on the prisoner.

Dak rubbed his wrists.

Kya was in the hallway when he stepped out, leaning against the cinder block in what was left of her dress. She gave him a look that should have come with a citation. The look said she was fine.

She always was.

“Is it done?” Agnes asked her, not turning.

“The matron’s asleep in my cell,” Kya said, easy. “Desk sergeant and dispatcher are out. Files are pulled from the system. Did you get the paper file?”

“Of course.” Agnes glanced at the empty shredder by the door. “We are leaving. There is a car out back.”

Kya tipped her head at Dak and started walking. Agnes was already gone around the corner. They went out a side door into the loading lane behind the station, where a black Mercedes sat with its engine running and its headlights off.

* * *

The drive out of the city was quiet in the wrong way. Dawn was bruising the edge of the desert.

Dak and Kya were in the back. Agnes was at the wheel, eyes on the road, hands at ten and two like she’d been carved that way. The speedometer climbed past 120 and kept going. Dak put a hand on the door and told himself she’d been driving cars longer than he’d been alive.

His head was a full house. The fight kept replaying in pieces—the pillar, the knife, the sound of bone, Kya’s eyes—and the throb behind his eyes kept time with the road.

“What are you doing here?” he said. “Where are we going? Slow down. Geez, those cops…”

“Dak.”

“What? Are we going back to the hotel? Did you handle everything?”

“It’s all handled.”

“What about those dead guys?”

“Still dead.”

“My head is killing me. And why the hell did they take my belt?”

“Miss Michaels,” Agnes said, eyes on the road, voice unraised. “Silence him.”

Kya squeezed his knee. “Dak. Shhh. It’ll be okay. Nothing to worry about.”

“B-but how did… why is she here?”

“Easy.” She kept her hand where it was. “It’s under control.” Then, toward the rearview. “Room twelve-oh-five.”

Agnes already had the phone to her ear. Her voice was flat and procedural.

“Westland of North Carolina. Scrub the M.E. and the morgue. Affirmative. Five bodies and an ambulance responder. Correct. Track and map one injured human security agent at the Golden Nugget garage. Have ER wipe it. Surveillance also. Sweep room twelve-oh-five and discharge the registry. Yes. Agnes Westland. Forward the compensation vouchers through the House of Stark. Very well.”

She set the phone in the console.

Dak looked at Kya. “We didn’t go to the ER.”

“Evidence removal. What happens in Vegas,” she said, low and amused, “never happened in Vegas.”

The Mercedes ate another mile. The desert outside lightened by another shade. Dak shut his eyes against the dashboard glow and realized the headache wasn’t his biggest problem anymore. The pain in the roof of his mouth had sharpened into something with a point, and it was pressing.