"Oh, how a woman gets around." Turnus stood at end length of the wide table, speaking to Luanne, who standing from her position opposite of him seemed like a small, blond thing, perhaps the last section of a Russian doll piece. The outer layers; courage, pride, self-respect, left elsewhere and far away.

"But I must ask, why am I here?" Turnus twirled a glass of wine. She chewed on her inner mouth, her eye shift and posture low-bound. "I hope this isn’t some ploy to kill me."

He rubbed his arm, it ached, and he extended his fingers to stretch them out.

She scooted inwards towards the table, the wooden legs scratching against the floor.

"Naw, of course not. You wouldn’t hurt a fly.” Turnus said. “You were the gentle one, always. The one I trust the most, too. It’s unfortunate that you’d had to be the one to pay the moral tab for our degenerate kin.”

"You're included in that too - you’re degenerate kin." She said. It sounded like hissing. Though, she did not seem too threatening, especially with the baby sleeping on her bosom. The blanket wrapped around her, a white blanket carried the small child, and that tied itself behind her neck. Her hands were flat against the table. On one, Turnus could clearly see the tattooed brand.

He stared and she retracted her arms.

"I'm here to make a deal."

"A plea bargain? For what? For who?"

"Don't play stupid," She scratched the tablecloth. "I want the safety and security of my family."

"We all want safety and security. None of us are guaranteed it, though,"

"I want you and your brother to stop,"

“Stop what?” He drank half the glass of wine.

"You know what. Killing that security guard, making sure my sister died.” Her nails dug deep. The chipped red nail polish on them gave them the appearance of bleeding. “You played foul against her. You turned off the generations and moved the elevators every which way you wanted, didn’t you? Admit it.”

“Did that crow tell you this? Your bitch-mother, Salome.” He took a sip. “You know, plea bargains usually don’t begin with accusations. It’s bad for rapport.”

Her eye twitched, and she receded back into her seat. Below her, the baby yawned. She rubbed his forehead, Flint was warm.

“I’m willing to forgive this,” She took a deep breath, as if in labor. “I’m willing to forgive everything. I’ll give you the inheritance. The casino. Everything. If you just promise to stop attacking me and my brother and my son.”

“You left Salome out of that?” He smiled. “As a matter of fact, you didn’t even defend her when I called her a bitch. Strange, considering you’re her daughter.”

She sucked in his lips.

He sat in contemplation and perhaps that was the first moment in the thirty minutes she had been waiting there, in that dim room with the long table, that she had an opportunity to finally breathe. So she did just that, take the slow, careful breaths as if each could be her last and considering the tone and the speed of which she spoke, they might as well have been. At least, Turnus figured from the way he looked at her, like a mouse running around an endless maze. Her eyes passed across the room to the few doors that opened now and then and the servers who came through with plates of food. Stuffed mushroom, a refill of wine, some soups, bowls of water with lemon in them. The tablecloth dragged below, she pulled it and ran her fingernail through it until she felt a hole being made. Turnus had not said a word yet, only looked in contemplation with his hands locked below his chest and his piercing eyes directed at her and her child.

It was neutral ground, this restaurant. Le Pierre, a French bistro that had hosted her family for years and out of that repetitiveness, had created a custom of giving them exclusive seatings in the back of the room with a wide view of the city off the lip of a balcony. She almost admired the little lights, like stars across the horizon. Almost.

A revolving door moved. She jumped.

“You didn’t consort with Salome before you came to me, did you?”

A candle went out. Her shaky hands went to it and lit it with another candle. Hot wax drizzled on her arm as she held onto the stick. It didn’t burn, not as much as she believed. Nothing really felt terrible anymore, nothing physical at least.

Mentally, however, …she had been stabbed and burned and forced to imagine the countless deaths of her infant son and lover, Floyd.

Or at least Turnus thought. This is was his specialty, if he had any talent. He called it divination, which was really just a reading of another person. He speculated all this from her posture, from the shakiness of her body. This is what he loved to do, most of all, imagine himself as others. A kind of cold-handed empathy.

She doesn’t want to be scared right now, because now is the most important time in her life. Because now decides whether she lives or dies or even whether her child gets the chance to mourn her. He fixed his posture. She doesn’t want to let me smell her fear, but she’s done a terrible job, and now she’s just hoping to skip over the grave that’s already been made for her.

"I don’t want anything you have," Turnus said. "And the belief that you’ve already claimed ownership over your wealth is part of the reason why your family is dying like flies."

"I don’t care about any of it.” She blurted. “This - This is all mom. She’s the one who cares about it. I say take it, I don’t care for it.”

"And how do you expect to give your false-throne up if you don't even own it? I should be speaking to your mother for that! And I doubt she'd give it up, that old bitch will die hanging onto the throne, it's a curse really. Born poor, raised poor, dying rich. I think she's content with just that so long as it gets rid of the memory of being a peasant girl." He laughed. “So what are you offering, really? It's not like it'd be hard to kill you anyway, even if you did resist.”

She looked up, the last figments of rebellion still in her eyes. They had a green tint to them.

“I have Floyd.”

“Ahh, Floyd.” He said. “Yes, I’m sure he’d stop at nothing to kill me or Ritcher. But isn’t he pre-occupied with the Vicars though?”

He leaned in to reach for a fork and knife.

“But I’m sure he’d put everything down to avenge his love, isn’t that right, Luanne?”

The baby at her bosom began to shake in his little canopy.

“This is all your fault.” She said. “Everything. This whole mess.”

“My fault? You’re the one who killed dad. You and Floyd.”

“You know what you did. You lead us both into making that decision. You can’t even call it a decision. What you did - What!” She slammed the table. Anger was foreign to her, this feeling was foreign to her. Her naturally pink cheeks flushed red, her lips lost color. Her eyes swelled with tears, sadness and anger coming both at once at uneven intervals through her cycle of hormones. They felt like pulses, one a higher frequency and the other low, deep, moody.

“Really? Was I the one who strangled him?” He ate a mushroom and talked while he chewed. “What a nasty power, you removed the iron from his blood, didn’t you? Oxygen couldn’t move through him, and he eventually died from the deprivation. Why’d Floyd waste so much time stabbing him afterward though, I don’t understand?”

He clasped both hands.

“Not like it matters, it’s all the in the past , and we, are in the present. And here you are, my fathers' murderer, wanting protection from judgment from father’s sons. His first sons.”

“Wasn’t killing Jezebel even? Wasn’t she enough?”

“Me? Kill her?” He almost laughed with how high pitched his voice got. “All I did was turn off some lights. Move some buttons, nothing serious.”

She looked broken, turning and watching and thinking about walking away. But she couldn’t decide how and from what direction, so it just seemed like she was being tugged by horses, ripped from every side. Finally, she looked back at Turnus, her eyes now red, the tears now streaked down, her face contorted and peeled back and tightened like a lioness in the heat of anger.

"My son, Turnus." She said with exasperation. "My son, please. I just need him spared. Do whatever you want. However, you want. Play your game of chess, but please leave him alone, please."

She raised him a bit, the little infant who in the whole commotion hadn’t so much as moved. And who, as Turnus observed, judging by his pale color and his suckling noises and the difficulty of his breathing, was in the middle of distress.

Fever?

He ruffled a bit, then dozed off again.

"He's your nephew for God’s sake. Your nephew!”

“God isn’t here, you’d do best to not invoke his name,” Turnus put down his glass. His face returned to neutral which was less hostile, surprisingly, than his smile. At least it appeared that way as Luanne eased her shoulders.

"I can’t protect him. I can only promise you I, personally, won’t go after little Flint." He said. “I can’t speak for Ritcher - Actually, I can - I don’t think he cares. I don’t think he has a heart to care enough about little Flint.”

He tried to reach over to put his finger in front of the infant, to play with it as he had done in the past before. But she moved him away, pushed the finger and the boy opposite of each other like retracting magnets.

“I can tell you when Ritcher is going to strike. I can give you that much mercy, though,” He said.

It almost her comfortable. Almost. Until she asked, because she had to, because she couldn’t shake the feeling cold and dreary that started from the bottom of her back, upwards to her neck, like a knife dragged against every bump on her spine.

“What do you want for that kind of knowledge. Tell me,”

And he locked his hands once more and set them in front of him. One gloved, the other free. One tattooed, the other plain.

“Oh, you know. Just the same, really.” Turnus smiled. “Ritcher for Floyd, Floyd for Ritcher. I just want to know what my little brother is up to, is all.”