touch of the velvet hand
Title: touch of the velvet hand
Pairing: mentions of Michael/Fiona
Rating: R
Warnings: References to violence and non-con
Summary: Any job carries a risk. Fiona knows that as well as anyone.
She knows the risk when she goes in--of course she does. You can't even wade into the kiddie pool in this line of work without getting wise to some of its less savory aspects. She knows she's good, but she also knows that any job that relies on her looking good enough to eat can end up with her getting eaten if her backup can't get her out in time.
When your backup is one blacklisted ex-spy and one retired soldier instead of an entire squad of IRA operatives, that happens sometimes. It's a bargain she's learned to live with. She's done worse in her time.
The mark's name is Jacob Bayton. He likes to play rough, and he doesn't mind if his bodyguards watch. He slapped her face in the elevator, and now she's sitting on the bed, assessing her options. Two guards by the door. The French doors that should open onto a balcony are hermetically sealed; Bayton is more cautious than they gave him credit for. She doesn't have a gun, and the bodyguards do; they move like ex-military. She isn't going to be able to take both of them and Bayton out with the stiletto she has in the ruched seam of her bodice.
On the other end of the line she hears Sam say, "Okay, uh, Fi? I think it's high time you got yourself out of there."
Fiona purses her lips, and doesn't answer. Bayton is a big, dark man with shoulders like a bear and wings of silver in his hair. He wears heavy rings on his hands; one of them split her lower lip at the corner, and she can taste the blood. The sharp tang of it steadies her.
Sam's voice again. "Okay, just sit tight, we're coming in there after--"
"No," she murmurs, head down so the guards don't see her lips move. "Too well-fortified. You come in, we all die. Stay where you are, I'll meet you at the loft in two hours."
"Damn it, Fiona, don't--" That's Michael, and there's a desperate note in his voice that she's fairly sure no one but her or Sam would be able to hear. She doesn't wait for the end of the sentence before plucking the earbud out and dropping it behind the headboard. Those things aren't big, but they're not hard to spot if you're in close enough and it's looking like Bayton will be getting in close enough after all.
She just hopes Sam has the common decency to drag Michael away from the radio before the festivities get started.
Bayton is turning around, undoing his cufflinks with a deliberate sort of care that puts a shiver down her spine. There's champagne in a bucket on the table, two crystal glasses, all the trappings of civility.
"You are not the woman from the agency," Bayton says. His voice is deep and flat, emotionless, and Fiona shakes her head. "That is no problem for me, if you're inclined to be cooperative."
She licks her lips. "And if not?"
He slaps her again, hard enough to snap her head to one side. Her vision fades to black spots for a moment, and she shakes her head to clear it. Bayton is talking again. "If not, there is a tragic accident and the police find your body in some dark alley. It's up to you."
"I see," she says, and she does. The bodyguards are still watching indifferently as she tosses her hair over her shoulder and pulls her bloody lips into a smile. "Well, then."
Bayton pours champagne into a glass, deliberately slow. Just as slowly, just as deliberately, he cups her chin and tilts her head up to press the glass against her mouth. She can feel the bubbles breaking against the underside of her nose, smell the sweet fizzy tang of it.
"Drink with me," Bayton says in a tone that brooks no argument.
Fiona drinks.
***
She steps out the front door two and a half hours later, weaving slightly as she walks. The champagne was spiked with something and it's made her motor control go all wonky; the four inch heels she's wearing don't help. The strap of her dress is torn off and flapping against her left shoulder. There are bruises, and they hurt, but it's a distant thing.
She stumbles on the curb and warm hands catch her; for a moment her fingers fumble numbly for the stiletto before she hears, "Fi, it's just me. It's Michael."
Michael, of course. Of course he wouldn't do what she asked. "I told you to meet me at the loft," Fiona says, more or less without slurring her words.
Michael cups her cheek with one hand, thumb just brushing the split edge of her lip. It stings, but she doesn't try to pull away. His face is expressionless, drawn back behind a familiar, guileless mask, but his fingers are trembling. "Are you okay?"
She scoffs. "Of course I am."
This is a touchy operation they have on the wire. She can't afford to lose focus now. More to the point, she can't afford to let Michael lose focus. "I told you," she says again, jabbing him in the chest, "to meet me at the loft."
"I'm sorry," Michael says quietly. "Fi, I'm sorry."
"Oh, please. I've been managing on my own quite well for a very long time. I know how to look after myself." To prove it, she shoves away from his steadying hands, but that proves to be a bad idea. The pavement tilts sickeningly beneath her and she can't seem to tell where her feet are; Michael catches her just in time.
"I know you do," he murmurs. "Sam has a car around the block. You think you can make it that far, or am I going to have to carry you?"
The goad is just what she needs. "The day I need you to carry me anywhere is the day they'll be planting me in the soil."
A ghost of a smile flickers across Michael's face, and he steps away, close enough to catch her if she starts to fall again, but far enough away that she can stand on her own.
Michael doesn't know how to coddle people. It's something Fiona finds charming about him, which is probably a pretty good measure of just how fucked up her head is.
They move slowly, in silence to the end of the block and around the corner. The car Sam boosted is dark and sleek, and he's sitting in the driver's seat in a loud Hawaiian shirt and dark sunglasses that don't quite disguise the worry on his face. He opens his mouth when he sees her, and Michael cuts him off with a minute gesture that Fiona decides to ignore. Her head is spinning and the dizziness is settling into her gut, becoming a sick knot that twists tighter as the car starts to move.
***
At the loft, Michael has to help her up the stairs. He drops two pills into her hand as Sam ducks inside the fridge to rummage around. The radio is still set up where she left it, a boxy gray shape that looms large in her vision.
"I had to throw away the earbud," she says. "I don't know how much you picked up."
"Everything," Michael says flatly.
Well, that's something, at least.
Sam comes back to the table with two beers and a bottle of no-brand water, which he slides across the table to her. She uses it to wash down the pills, grimaces. Just as she expected, there's the bitter chlorine taste that means it came straight out of the tap. Michael is such a cheapskate.
"Thank you," she says anyway.
Sam pops the tops off the beers, presses one into Michael's unresisting hand and seats himself across the table from her with the other one. There's a hard, strange sympathy in his face. "Hell of a shiner you got there."
Fiona lifts a hand tentatively to her eye; it does feel a bit tender. On the table between them, Michael's free hand is curling into a fist. Sam notices at almost the same time she does and gives his shoulder a little shake. "Focus, buddy."
For a moment, she isn't sure that Michael won't knock him down and take a gun to go deal with Bayton in the fast brutal way that's usually her purview. Michael's temper takes a long time to reach a boil, but once it does there's no telling what he might take it into his head to do.
Fiona can appreciate a bloody rampage of revenge as much as the next girl, but they're on a schedule here and she certainly didn't go through all that unpleasantness just to have Michael blow the whole thing out of the water in a fit of pique. Bloody rampages are more her style, anyway.
It would be easier without the drugs twisting her thoughts into slippery impossible things, but she manages to set them together in a coherent fashion, to find the words she needs. "Come on, then. Bayton's a talker, I know you got enough to work with. What's our next move?"
His jaw tightens for an instant, so hard she can almost imagine she hears his teeth grinding together, then relaxes. He lifts his beer to his lips, unclenches his free hand; there are bloody crescents in his palm where his fingernails bit in.
"Come on, Mikey," Sam echoes. "We go for the safe, you think?"
Michael shakes his head, and when he speaks his voice is perfectly calm. "No, the safe will be too well-guarded, I'm not going to make the same mistake twice. I think it's time Jacob Bayton made a new friend."
***
Fiona has a splitting headache, but the image her crosshairs is clear and sharp. Caffeine is humming down her nerves, along with the tightly controlled fury that's been riding her since the drugs cleared out of her system.
On the edge of the dock, Michael is looking predictably sleazy, hands flapping while he lays down his line of patter. His collar is popped and his shirt is pale silk; she can see it over Bayton's shoulder, can imagine it decorated with the red splatter of Bayton's blood.
"Easy, Fi," Sam murmurs in her ear, and his voice is low and soothing like he knows just what is going through her head. Like he's maybe thinking the same thing.
In the crosshairs, Michael is shaking hands with the man who drugged her and pushed her down and left bruises in the shape of his hands on her thighs and arms and breasts. She can't see his face but she can hear the sharp sound of his laugh, can imagine his teeth flashing whitely in the perfect mask of his face.
She sort of wants to shoot him, too, even though it's not his fault.
***
When Michael gets back to the loft, he's talking brightly into his cell. "...tomorrow at noon, then. I tell you, Jacob, you're not gonna regret this," he says, and hangs up. He tosses the phone onto a chair, then spins around and punches the wall hard enough to leave a smear of blood behind.
It would surprise her--Michael isn't normally the kind of man who goes around punching walls--but there's nothing normal about this situation.
"So?" Fiona asks. She's taken over the bed to clean her guns, the hard metal shapes and the heavy smell of oil grounding her, calming her. Michael's sheets are going to be ruined, but he's just going to have to live with that. "Can we go shoot that bastard sometime soon?"
Michael's shoulders rise, then fall. "You were the one who wanted to see the plan through."
There are thirteen girls missing, thirteen girls that are probably sleeping in some stinking hellhole while Bayton arranges to ship them out of the US. He's the only one who knows where they are, and that's the only reason Fiona hasn't solved his personality problems with a .12 gauge slug to the face. "Fine," she says. "When this is over, though..."
Michael turns, finally, to face her. His knuckles are split and bleeding. "When it's over," he says, and it sounds like a promise.
***
It takes them another three days to set up the sting, three days of edgy tension that all of them pretend steadfastly to ignore. They've got plenty of practice at that, anyway. The bruises fade from purple-black to an unpleasant shade of green. Michael strings Bayton along, and Sam tries to make her leave the room when they play back the tape for clues. She has to pull a gun on him to get them past that little hump, but it's smooth sailing from then on out.
The takedown is almost anticlimactic. Wailing sirens, careening helicopters, a minor explosion or two, and the girls are safe and all of Bayton's men are shuffled off neatly to jail.
"Bayton isn't with them," Fiona observes without moving the binoculars from her face. Her voice sounds normal to her ears, but her control is slipping; she has three guns on her person right now and Bayton can't get away. He just can't. "He isn't with them. Where is he?"
She hears Sam and Michael shift. They've been careful to stay a measured distance away from her for the past several days; they both know how this sort of thing screws with a person's sense of safety and control. Neither of them has come within arms reach of her without telegraphing it thoroughly, not since Michael all but carried her up to the loft that night.
Michael touches her hand, and she flinches but doesn't pull away.
"Fi," he says, and she looks up at him. "I want to show you something."
***
The storage container is one of Sam's, and he gives the guard a cheerful wave as they drive past the entrance. "Gary," he says. "Nice guy, and I tell you, the number of mojitos that man can put away before he--" He stops at Fiona'a glare. "Okay, I'll save the mojito stories for another time."
"Where are we going?" Fiona asks.
Michael is driving, bright sun reflecting off the impenetrable shield of his glasses. "Almost there."
"Well, that's lovely, but that's not what I asked."
Michael glances back toward Sam, then pulls over, cuts the engine, and pulls his glasses off. He holds them in his hands for a long moment before looking up at her. "We have Bayton," he says finally, quietly. His expression is as open as she's ever seen, but she still can't read it. "We can call the police. If you want."
"Or?"
Sam reaches over the backseat and slips a gun into her hand. Her fingers close automatically around the grip; it isn't one of hers, but that's the point, isn't it?
"Or," he says. "Gary's taking a long lunch break in five minutes. Bayton's all yours. We worked him over some, but he's still in one piece."
She almost smiles at that. "You worked him over?"
"He hurt you," Michael says flatly.
Sam shrugs, mild as can be. "I was all for tying an anchor to his feet and dropping him off the pier, but Michael said you'd want to handle it yourself."
"You said that?" she asks Michael.
He shrugs, but it's a tight small gesture that doesn't look nearly as nonchalant as he probably wants it to. "Or we could call the cops."
"No," she says, and neither of them looks surprised. They know her, she thinks, but they've also been in her shoes. They understand in a way that civilians just wouldn't. "Where is he?"
"Container thirty-five," Michael says, and hands her a small silver key.
***
The car is running when she comes back out. She slides in, slams the door, rests the gun on her lap while she rolls the window down. The metal is warm through the fabric of her skirt, and Michael pulls away from the curb without a word.
Fiona buckles her seat-belt. "We should call the police."
"Did you--" Sam starts, then breaks off.
She remembers the feel of the grips in her hands, the recoil and the smell of gun smoke, and smiles. "I just scared him." Pauses, reconsiders. "A lot."
Sam chuckles and pulls out his phone; in the driver's seat, Michael is still focused on the road. Fiona touches the back of his hand lightly, and he looks up at her. "Fi?"
A whole wide world of meaning in that single syllable, all the things he won't or can't say. It's so very like him. "Thank you," Fiona says.
She wraps her fingers around his and squeezes, and after a moment he squeezes back. "Anytime."
The sun is bright as they pull out onto the road. Fiona doesn't look back once.
Pairing: mentions of Michael/Fiona
Rating: R
Warnings: References to violence and non-con
Summary: Any job carries a risk. Fiona knows that as well as anyone.
She knows the risk when she goes in--of course she does. You can't even wade into the kiddie pool in this line of work without getting wise to some of its less savory aspects. She knows she's good, but she also knows that any job that relies on her looking good enough to eat can end up with her getting eaten if her backup can't get her out in time.
When your backup is one blacklisted ex-spy and one retired soldier instead of an entire squad of IRA operatives, that happens sometimes. It's a bargain she's learned to live with. She's done worse in her time.
The mark's name is Jacob Bayton. He likes to play rough, and he doesn't mind if his bodyguards watch. He slapped her face in the elevator, and now she's sitting on the bed, assessing her options. Two guards by the door. The French doors that should open onto a balcony are hermetically sealed; Bayton is more cautious than they gave him credit for. She doesn't have a gun, and the bodyguards do; they move like ex-military. She isn't going to be able to take both of them and Bayton out with the stiletto she has in the ruched seam of her bodice.
On the other end of the line she hears Sam say, "Okay, uh, Fi? I think it's high time you got yourself out of there."
Fiona purses her lips, and doesn't answer. Bayton is a big, dark man with shoulders like a bear and wings of silver in his hair. He wears heavy rings on his hands; one of them split her lower lip at the corner, and she can taste the blood. The sharp tang of it steadies her.
Sam's voice again. "Okay, just sit tight, we're coming in there after--"
"No," she murmurs, head down so the guards don't see her lips move. "Too well-fortified. You come in, we all die. Stay where you are, I'll meet you at the loft in two hours."
"Damn it, Fiona, don't--" That's Michael, and there's a desperate note in his voice that she's fairly sure no one but her or Sam would be able to hear. She doesn't wait for the end of the sentence before plucking the earbud out and dropping it behind the headboard. Those things aren't big, but they're not hard to spot if you're in close enough and it's looking like Bayton will be getting in close enough after all.
She just hopes Sam has the common decency to drag Michael away from the radio before the festivities get started.
Bayton is turning around, undoing his cufflinks with a deliberate sort of care that puts a shiver down her spine. There's champagne in a bucket on the table, two crystal glasses, all the trappings of civility.
"You are not the woman from the agency," Bayton says. His voice is deep and flat, emotionless, and Fiona shakes her head. "That is no problem for me, if you're inclined to be cooperative."
She licks her lips. "And if not?"
He slaps her again, hard enough to snap her head to one side. Her vision fades to black spots for a moment, and she shakes her head to clear it. Bayton is talking again. "If not, there is a tragic accident and the police find your body in some dark alley. It's up to you."
"I see," she says, and she does. The bodyguards are still watching indifferently as she tosses her hair over her shoulder and pulls her bloody lips into a smile. "Well, then."
Bayton pours champagne into a glass, deliberately slow. Just as slowly, just as deliberately, he cups her chin and tilts her head up to press the glass against her mouth. She can feel the bubbles breaking against the underside of her nose, smell the sweet fizzy tang of it.
"Drink with me," Bayton says in a tone that brooks no argument.
Fiona drinks.
***
She steps out the front door two and a half hours later, weaving slightly as she walks. The champagne was spiked with something and it's made her motor control go all wonky; the four inch heels she's wearing don't help. The strap of her dress is torn off and flapping against her left shoulder. There are bruises, and they hurt, but it's a distant thing.
She stumbles on the curb and warm hands catch her; for a moment her fingers fumble numbly for the stiletto before she hears, "Fi, it's just me. It's Michael."
Michael, of course. Of course he wouldn't do what she asked. "I told you to meet me at the loft," Fiona says, more or less without slurring her words.
Michael cups her cheek with one hand, thumb just brushing the split edge of her lip. It stings, but she doesn't try to pull away. His face is expressionless, drawn back behind a familiar, guileless mask, but his fingers are trembling. "Are you okay?"
She scoffs. "Of course I am."
This is a touchy operation they have on the wire. She can't afford to lose focus now. More to the point, she can't afford to let Michael lose focus. "I told you," she says again, jabbing him in the chest, "to meet me at the loft."
"I'm sorry," Michael says quietly. "Fi, I'm sorry."
"Oh, please. I've been managing on my own quite well for a very long time. I know how to look after myself." To prove it, she shoves away from his steadying hands, but that proves to be a bad idea. The pavement tilts sickeningly beneath her and she can't seem to tell where her feet are; Michael catches her just in time.
"I know you do," he murmurs. "Sam has a car around the block. You think you can make it that far, or am I going to have to carry you?"
The goad is just what she needs. "The day I need you to carry me anywhere is the day they'll be planting me in the soil."
A ghost of a smile flickers across Michael's face, and he steps away, close enough to catch her if she starts to fall again, but far enough away that she can stand on her own.
Michael doesn't know how to coddle people. It's something Fiona finds charming about him, which is probably a pretty good measure of just how fucked up her head is.
They move slowly, in silence to the end of the block and around the corner. The car Sam boosted is dark and sleek, and he's sitting in the driver's seat in a loud Hawaiian shirt and dark sunglasses that don't quite disguise the worry on his face. He opens his mouth when he sees her, and Michael cuts him off with a minute gesture that Fiona decides to ignore. Her head is spinning and the dizziness is settling into her gut, becoming a sick knot that twists tighter as the car starts to move.
***
At the loft, Michael has to help her up the stairs. He drops two pills into her hand as Sam ducks inside the fridge to rummage around. The radio is still set up where she left it, a boxy gray shape that looms large in her vision.
"I had to throw away the earbud," she says. "I don't know how much you picked up."
"Everything," Michael says flatly.
Well, that's something, at least.
Sam comes back to the table with two beers and a bottle of no-brand water, which he slides across the table to her. She uses it to wash down the pills, grimaces. Just as she expected, there's the bitter chlorine taste that means it came straight out of the tap. Michael is such a cheapskate.
"Thank you," she says anyway.
Sam pops the tops off the beers, presses one into Michael's unresisting hand and seats himself across the table from her with the other one. There's a hard, strange sympathy in his face. "Hell of a shiner you got there."
Fiona lifts a hand tentatively to her eye; it does feel a bit tender. On the table between them, Michael's free hand is curling into a fist. Sam notices at almost the same time she does and gives his shoulder a little shake. "Focus, buddy."
For a moment, she isn't sure that Michael won't knock him down and take a gun to go deal with Bayton in the fast brutal way that's usually her purview. Michael's temper takes a long time to reach a boil, but once it does there's no telling what he might take it into his head to do.
Fiona can appreciate a bloody rampage of revenge as much as the next girl, but they're on a schedule here and she certainly didn't go through all that unpleasantness just to have Michael blow the whole thing out of the water in a fit of pique. Bloody rampages are more her style, anyway.
It would be easier without the drugs twisting her thoughts into slippery impossible things, but she manages to set them together in a coherent fashion, to find the words she needs. "Come on, then. Bayton's a talker, I know you got enough to work with. What's our next move?"
His jaw tightens for an instant, so hard she can almost imagine she hears his teeth grinding together, then relaxes. He lifts his beer to his lips, unclenches his free hand; there are bloody crescents in his palm where his fingernails bit in.
"Come on, Mikey," Sam echoes. "We go for the safe, you think?"
Michael shakes his head, and when he speaks his voice is perfectly calm. "No, the safe will be too well-guarded, I'm not going to make the same mistake twice. I think it's time Jacob Bayton made a new friend."
***
Fiona has a splitting headache, but the image her crosshairs is clear and sharp. Caffeine is humming down her nerves, along with the tightly controlled fury that's been riding her since the drugs cleared out of her system.
On the edge of the dock, Michael is looking predictably sleazy, hands flapping while he lays down his line of patter. His collar is popped and his shirt is pale silk; she can see it over Bayton's shoulder, can imagine it decorated with the red splatter of Bayton's blood.
"Easy, Fi," Sam murmurs in her ear, and his voice is low and soothing like he knows just what is going through her head. Like he's maybe thinking the same thing.
In the crosshairs, Michael is shaking hands with the man who drugged her and pushed her down and left bruises in the shape of his hands on her thighs and arms and breasts. She can't see his face but she can hear the sharp sound of his laugh, can imagine his teeth flashing whitely in the perfect mask of his face.
She sort of wants to shoot him, too, even though it's not his fault.
***
When Michael gets back to the loft, he's talking brightly into his cell. "...tomorrow at noon, then. I tell you, Jacob, you're not gonna regret this," he says, and hangs up. He tosses the phone onto a chair, then spins around and punches the wall hard enough to leave a smear of blood behind.
It would surprise her--Michael isn't normally the kind of man who goes around punching walls--but there's nothing normal about this situation.
"So?" Fiona asks. She's taken over the bed to clean her guns, the hard metal shapes and the heavy smell of oil grounding her, calming her. Michael's sheets are going to be ruined, but he's just going to have to live with that. "Can we go shoot that bastard sometime soon?"
Michael's shoulders rise, then fall. "You were the one who wanted to see the plan through."
There are thirteen girls missing, thirteen girls that are probably sleeping in some stinking hellhole while Bayton arranges to ship them out of the US. He's the only one who knows where they are, and that's the only reason Fiona hasn't solved his personality problems with a .12 gauge slug to the face. "Fine," she says. "When this is over, though..."
Michael turns, finally, to face her. His knuckles are split and bleeding. "When it's over," he says, and it sounds like a promise.
***
It takes them another three days to set up the sting, three days of edgy tension that all of them pretend steadfastly to ignore. They've got plenty of practice at that, anyway. The bruises fade from purple-black to an unpleasant shade of green. Michael strings Bayton along, and Sam tries to make her leave the room when they play back the tape for clues. She has to pull a gun on him to get them past that little hump, but it's smooth sailing from then on out.
The takedown is almost anticlimactic. Wailing sirens, careening helicopters, a minor explosion or two, and the girls are safe and all of Bayton's men are shuffled off neatly to jail.
"Bayton isn't with them," Fiona observes without moving the binoculars from her face. Her voice sounds normal to her ears, but her control is slipping; she has three guns on her person right now and Bayton can't get away. He just can't. "He isn't with them. Where is he?"
She hears Sam and Michael shift. They've been careful to stay a measured distance away from her for the past several days; they both know how this sort of thing screws with a person's sense of safety and control. Neither of them has come within arms reach of her without telegraphing it thoroughly, not since Michael all but carried her up to the loft that night.
Michael touches her hand, and she flinches but doesn't pull away.
"Fi," he says, and she looks up at him. "I want to show you something."
***
The storage container is one of Sam's, and he gives the guard a cheerful wave as they drive past the entrance. "Gary," he says. "Nice guy, and I tell you, the number of mojitos that man can put away before he--" He stops at Fiona'a glare. "Okay, I'll save the mojito stories for another time."
"Where are we going?" Fiona asks.
Michael is driving, bright sun reflecting off the impenetrable shield of his glasses. "Almost there."
"Well, that's lovely, but that's not what I asked."
Michael glances back toward Sam, then pulls over, cuts the engine, and pulls his glasses off. He holds them in his hands for a long moment before looking up at her. "We have Bayton," he says finally, quietly. His expression is as open as she's ever seen, but she still can't read it. "We can call the police. If you want."
"Or?"
Sam reaches over the backseat and slips a gun into her hand. Her fingers close automatically around the grip; it isn't one of hers, but that's the point, isn't it?
"Or," he says. "Gary's taking a long lunch break in five minutes. Bayton's all yours. We worked him over some, but he's still in one piece."
She almost smiles at that. "You worked him over?"
"He hurt you," Michael says flatly.
Sam shrugs, mild as can be. "I was all for tying an anchor to his feet and dropping him off the pier, but Michael said you'd want to handle it yourself."
"You said that?" she asks Michael.
He shrugs, but it's a tight small gesture that doesn't look nearly as nonchalant as he probably wants it to. "Or we could call the cops."
"No," she says, and neither of them looks surprised. They know her, she thinks, but they've also been in her shoes. They understand in a way that civilians just wouldn't. "Where is he?"
"Container thirty-five," Michael says, and hands her a small silver key.
***
The car is running when she comes back out. She slides in, slams the door, rests the gun on her lap while she rolls the window down. The metal is warm through the fabric of her skirt, and Michael pulls away from the curb without a word.
Fiona buckles her seat-belt. "We should call the police."
"Did you--" Sam starts, then breaks off.
She remembers the feel of the grips in her hands, the recoil and the smell of gun smoke, and smiles. "I just scared him." Pauses, reconsiders. "A lot."
Sam chuckles and pulls out his phone; in the driver's seat, Michael is still focused on the road. Fiona touches the back of his hand lightly, and he looks up at her. "Fi?"
A whole wide world of meaning in that single syllable, all the things he won't or can't say. It's so very like him. "Thank you," Fiona says.
She wraps her fingers around his and squeezes, and after a moment he squeezes back. "Anytime."
The sun is bright as they pull out onto the road. Fiona doesn't look back once.