“Shut up,” he said. To drive home the point, he pressed the pistol against my lips. He pushed hard, but I would not part them. Let him kill me if he wished, but I would not tolerate humiliation. “Open your bitch mouth!”

I shook my head, and he pulled back to bash me across the face. I turned my head to the side and said, “Afraid I’ll talk you out of it?”

“Nobody talks me into nothing,” he said, with a drunk’s dizzy confidence. “Not anymore.”

“Juliette will have you as her puppet.”

“I’m not nobody’s—”

“But you are.” He did not like being interrupted. He bore down with his knees, and the pain screamed nearly as loud as the ache in my head. But he let me keep talking. “Does she listen to you? Does she heed your advice? Does she respect you any more than Barbie ever did?”

“Barbie is dead.”

“We both know she’s not. She was a demon, and you weren’t strong enough to kill her, which means that someday, she’ll be back.”

“I’ll be waiting. I stopped her once, and . . . and . . .”

He trailed off. A great glistening stream of snot hung from his nose. He wiped it on his shoulder. The stain shone in the ship’s hazy light.

“I never considered,” I said, “how trying these last weeks must have been for you.”

“Yeah?”

“All this scheming. What focus it must have required. What industry. What guile.”

“It was tough, yeah. Tougher than it looked.”

“And now you’re in charge.”

“That’s what I keep saying!”

“And you see a lifetime of hard work stretching out ahead of you. You’re a hero of the NYPD, and heroes don’t get to soak themselves in bootleg gin. They are sober. They work hard.”

“I can do that too.”

“But how hungry you must be for a reason to quit.”

He scratched his ear with the sight of his revolver and considered my offer for a time. I was right, and we both knew it. But there are some men who hate a woman far more when she’s telling the truth. He chuckled, and grabbed me by the cheeks, and forced my mouth open with his hand.

“This ain’t even for you,” he said. “It’s for your dad. God, I wish I’d had the chance to kill him.”

He pressed the pistol against my mouth. The taste burned my lips. I tried to kick, to free my legs. He was too heavy. I let the barrel into my mouth and spat out one final, garbled offer.

“Eyel kih huh.”

“What?” he said, pulling out the gun.

“I’ll kill her,” I said.

“Juliette? She’d shoot you down like a rat.”

“Barbie,” I said, and he set the gun aside. “I’ll find her, and I’ll kill her. I’m good at finding people—you know I am.”