Work Text:
It would have been easier if it it had been love. If he had fallen like any professional sap for her eyes as blue as a boating lake and her hair so thickly golden-syrup it always felt it would cling to his fingers to touch and tumbled himself head over heels into this unshaven bed of booze and blackmail with hearts and flowers instead of dollar signs in his eyes, he could have consoled himself it was no fault of his own that had unraveled a quick, clean, fail-safe chisel into a blind alley of costs as sunk as bodies and no end in sight except the worst, the one he saw in the pictures all the time: what happened when a smart guy met a siren, that was all. He had never been more than a short-con liar and he had known her too long, this small, steel-cut woman with a pistol in her hand like she was born for it and the husky crack in her voice of the girl next door, looking down at him just the once like she saw him clear through his sharp-draped armor of sarcasm and slaps, a second-string grifter with a salesman's smile and not even hating him for it, a TB X-ray, a cold-shakes sober-up, a calculation that could leave contempt out of it so long as it kept her on top where she and her C-notes were traveling light—no, love he could have blamed her for like a blow-off, but whatever it was, whenever it killed him, as sure as the broken swirl in the bottom of a glass he knew it would never have been anything so kindly, it could never have been easier even if he had known its name.