“This is different,” I interrupt, my heart now pounding inside my chest. “Everything before, there was an opportunity—there was a chance within the Shaws, and I seized that chance.” I hear my voice shaking. “Howie needed a buddy, I was that buddy. Win needed a runner, I was that runner. McEvoy needed a right-hand sorcerer for the street, and poof, there I was, seasoned and vetted. What you’re asking me to do? Go up to my boss, the most dangerous man in the city—a man who acts like I’m his own personal shine tap, no less—and ask him to let me go? Sir, it can’t happen.”
Frain attempts to speak, but I keep going. “Now, I’ve done everything, everything you’ve asked of me,” I say as I close my eyes. “Things I’m not proud of. Things I’d pay to take back. But I’ve kept my head down and stayed focused. I’ve done what I needed to do for our greater goal. This move is too dangerous. I deserve to say no, I’ve earned the right—this is over the line.”
“Alex, this is like the other times. You need to see that.” Frain rests his hand on my shoulder. “You need to get somewhere, and McEvoy needs you there more than he knows right now. You just need to convince him that he needs it.”
I falter. “I don’t understand.”
“You said it yourself, that deep down, McEvoy suspects that something isn’t right. That something has him paralyzed, otherwise he would have fully taken care of these mistakes, with no hesitation, no mercy.” He adds softly, “So you play to his insecurities. You take his seed of doubt, and you grow the seed into a weed, then show McEvoy you’re the only one who can pull the weed out for him.”
And now I think I do understand. But the understanding numbs me. “So . . . so you want me to be a mole for McEvoy, too.”
“Don’t you see?” Frain says slowly. “It’s perfect. You’d be able to keep tabs for him, as well as for us. But you only let him know what we want him to know.”
I stay silent, but my heart—it’s pounding, thrashing, beating a resounding NO.
“This is too good of an opportunity to waste, Alex, and it sounds from everything you’re gathering that whatever’s cooking could be coming to a boil soon.”
“Let’s say I can convince him,” I say slowly, softly. “McEvoy is a junkie, you understand that, right? Let’s pretend that in theory, he agrees to plant me as a sorcerer in the Den. Even if he saw the sense of it, he’d still come calling for the shine, day in and out, and risk jeopardizing the operation.”
At that, Frain turns to face the windshield. “Leave that part to me,” he says quietly. “I’ve got plenty of fae dust in evidence, from a local raid a week back. It’s a different high, I understand, more of a racing, paranoid trip. Hallucinations, jitters, confusion, that sort of thing. But highly addictive. I’ll get a bag to you, through safe channels, of course. Expect someone this afternoon. Get McEvoy to take it a few times, so that he’s hooked. The dust should work its own magic from there.”
I stare at Frain, but he keeps his gaze ahead.
And it’s at this moment when I finally understand that there are no limits to this game anymore. That I’m in as deep with him as I am with McEvoy. That even if I wanted to, I’m not walking away until this is done.
Frain finally looks at me, my silence the only affirmation I can manage to give, and the only one he needs. “Our contact should be kept to a minimum from now on. If you manage this, there will be eyes on you from all sides. You ever need me, you call my home number—but only in case of an absolute emergency.”
When I still don’t answer, because fear has me hostage, holds me by the throat, Frain starts his engine and pulls back onto the road. “It makes sense for Boss McEvoy to put someone he trusts inside that place. You’ll make it work, Alex, you always do. Just do it soon.”
*
I’m paralyzed with fear for most of the afternoon, turning my thoughts around and inside out, trying to analyze how to play this from every angle. Should tonight be the night I convince McEvoy that he needs me inside the Den, working for him in another way? I’m so deep in my own world that I barely mumble a hello to the street runner who delivers Agent Frain’s promised bag of fae dust to my door. By the time McEvoy’s car pulls up around seven p.m., I’m practically jumping out of my skin.
I slide into the new, almost sweet-smelling leather of his Duesenberg. I wonder if McEvoy can sense what I’m about to try and pull. If he can see anxiety pulsing its way through me like poison.
“Relax, Danfrey,” he says. “We’ve got a bit of a drive.”
McEvoy turns left around Iowa Circle.
“Where are we going, sir?”