Tell Them This When I Die

Pawn vs. Pawn vs. Queen

Eris rolls over, the morning sun hot on her bare skin. There's an arm over her stomach, skin against her shoulder.

"Nikolas?" Eris' voice is slightly grating from sleep.

"Who else would it be?" comes his reply, mumbled against her neck.

According to the dream Eris just woke from, it should be Adam. But her head is a little dazed, so she wasn't sure if it was Peter or Nikolas.

Sitting up, Eris realizes she's hungover. She brings her hand to her forehead, then pushes through her hair. She knows the feeling, but she hasn't been hungover in a long time.

"Martini girl," Nikolas mumbles into the pillow, his hand shuffling around for her. "Come back."

"How much did I drink?" Eris asks, reaching over him for her phone.

"A lot," Nikolas replies. "Like, forty."

"I'd be dead if I drank forty martinis, Nikolas." Eris unlocks her phone. "How did we get home?"

Nikolas makes a muffled noise into the pillow. "I drove."

Oh, so she'd been drunk drunk. She scrolls, unsure of what she's looking for. Maybe a text or a call from a man who doesn't have her number and never asked for it. Someone who couldn't care less who she's waking up with.

I think I just wanted to know what it would be like. The moment Eris spoke those words, everything shattered. She's not cunning Eris that outsmarts the cops anymore, she's a kid who falls for them. That's what he'd said. That she was just a kid.

Eris tosses aside the covers, refusing to succumb to this headache. Nikolas mumbles something behind her and Eris ignores it. She gets into the shower and scrubs every pore free of the alcohol in anger. Her skin turns red.

If Adam wanted to play the vicious game, if he wasn't going to get down on his knees and thank Eris for the years of kindness—for the risks she took last night for Daphne, then she'd play it too. And nobody plays the vicious game like Eris.

She sends Peter out to slash his tires first. Two of them, so a spare won't fix it. Peter comes back, saying his car isn't at his apartment. He says it's at Sarah's.

Eris has to stop clenching her fingers because she's afraid her nails might draw blood. Sarah, the idiot. Sarah, the touchy, gentle little girl that shouldn't be with Adam. Her house. At eight in the morning. She tells Peter to slash them anyway.

It makes her feel slightly better, but it's not enough. Since she has almost all of Adam's banking information, she has Nikolas call pretending to be him and cancel both his credit cards. She's crossing lines right left and center and couldn't care less.

Adam knows the tires are her doing the moment he walks out of the house. She might as well have carved her name into his car.

He takes Sarah's car to his apartment to get his things. His lease is monthly, so he won't lose too much. He calls a tow truck for the car so they can replace the tires, and he drives the SUV to work for the night shift. Wilkes is still frigid after the candy-heart incident, leaving Adam to piece together the morale of the officers on the Diakos case while juggling his other cases. They received an anonymous tip of a dealing happening outside a liquor store, and Adam has enough evidence on the owner of the store, Leonardo Tucci, to suspect that he's selling. He orders a stakeout on the back entrance and does cruiser work for most of the night. Through the long hours of driving, Eris' comments about Daphne bounce around in his head. On the conditional that Eris was telling the truth...

Adam stops for coffee at three-fifteen in the morning. The city is almost entirely asleep since the clubs and bars have all just closed, leaving the city lights as Adam's only comfort.