Epilogue

I DRAINED THE last of my Firefly and ice and set the glass down on the coffee table. Pleasantly tipsy after half a dozen drinks, I looked down the sofa at Sabrina and said, “And that’s how we became the Brady Bunch.”

“So what now?” she asked. “You’re here with William and Abby. Greg, his sister, and her friends are living underground with the Morlocks.”

“Under what used to be Eastland Mall, since the Mallrats place is bigger and less smelly,” I added.

“I guess the Panthers are looking for a new Alpha, or are they looking for revenge?”

“They’re fighting amongst themselves over who will be the new Alpha, but after I delivered Terry’s head to their chapter house in a cake box, they decided that revenge was probably not on the menu. At least not this week.”

Sabrina took a drink from her glass of wine and stretched out her legs, wriggling her toes under the edge of my thighs. “You know as a foot warmer you are absolutely useless.”

“Downside to dating a dead guy,” I said.

“Are you going to make them pay the back tribute Terry owed?” she asked.

“No. I’m just going to make them pay the tribute they were light this month. I’ll let them slide on the old stuff, but I can’t let them off completely scot-free. They have the money, since they have all of Terry’s accounts now. Turns out he was skimming from the pack’s tribute money into a private account in the Caymans. I guess Terry was building himself a little golden parachute, in case things went sideways for him here.”

“His parachute failed,” Sabrina said.

“Idiot never even reached for the ripcord,” I said with a nod.

“So why aren’t you happier?” she asked. One of the drawbacks to dating a detective, especially one as gorgeous and out of my league as Sabrina, is that they are damned perceptive. She’d been giving me the side eye all night while I told the story of the last day or so when she’d been trapped at Fitzpatrick’s bedside filling out a mountain of paperwork.

I stared at the ice slowly melting in my glass. After a moment, I spoke. “I can’t help but wonder how much I’m screwing up as Master. A lot of this crap would never have happened if I hadn’t been the boss.”

“Yeah, because Lilith would have destroyed the whole city months ago. Hard to run a sex trafficking ring in an apocalypse. You know you’re doing good. What’s the real problem?”

“I don’t know if the good I do outweighs the bad I’m doing, I guess.”

She laughed. “That’s easy, idiot. Stop doing the bad stuff.”

My head whipped around so fast I almost gave myself whiplash. “What?”

“Quit. Doing. Criminal. Shit. It’s not rocket science, Jimmy. Good guys don’t do bad stuff. You want to walk on the side of the angels, stop selling drugs and renting girls.”

“I don’t—”

She cut me off with an upraised hand. “Stop taking a cut of the weed and prostitution trade. You want to be a good guy? Then stop being a crime lord. It’s not rocket science, you just got used to having a pile of money, and now you’re scared to do without it. But it’s tearing you up whenever you see the dark side of your business, and it sure makes my life complicated as hell.”

I hadn’t thought about that. Well, I tried not to think about that, anyway. I knew Sabrina was walking a tightrope between me and her job on our best day, and me playing around in a criminal enterprise sandbox didn’t make it any easier. I thought back to a conversation I had a few days ago with Fitzpatrick, when he asked if I was one of the good guys.

I stood up from the couch, walked over to the bar, and poured myself another drink. As I stood there, sipping sweet tea-flavored vodka, a glint of metal caught my eye. I looked down, and at some point in my moving around and getting up, the cross around my neck had fallen out of my shirt and now lay in plain view against my chest. It winked at me, like a beacon from afar. I sighed, tucked the cross back inside of my shirt, and walked back to stand behind Sabrina where she sat sideways on the couch, her legs running the length of the sofa.

She leaned her head back and smiled at me. “That was your ‘I made a decision and it’s going to be hard so I don’t want to do it’ sigh.”

“Yeah, it was.”

“What was the decision?”

I put on a horrible 20s gangster voice and said, “Well, look here, sweets. I guess it’s time. After all these years, and all this money, I guess I’m finally going straight.”

She raised an eyebrow. “This time without the funny voice.”

“I’m going straight. I’ll get William to start shutting down any of my holdings that even touch on illegal activity, and I’ll stop taking tribute from criminals.” I paused for a moment. “Come to think of it, I have a pile of money, and a bunch of real estate with legit tenants. I think I’m going to stop taking tribute, period. Just because I took Tiram’s gig doesn’t mean I have to do the job his way. I can be Master of the City without people having to pay me for the privilege of living here. I’m supposed to work for them, and take care of them, not feed off them like some kind of parasite.”

Sabrina smiled up at me. “Now you’re talking like a superhero.”

“A superhero?”

“You’ve got superpowers, a secret identity, an underground lair, and a super-hot girlfriend. You’re totally a superhero.”

“As long as I don’t have to wear spandex.”

“Sweetie, I love you, but you’re too skinny for spandex. It would just look like pajamas.”

I laughed, then I bent down to kiss my girlfriend, and for the first time in a long time, I felt like I really was one of the good guys.

The End

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