The sun was bleeding out over the Atlantic, dragging the last of the light down with it like a body into the surf, and Sal Ferrante hadn't noticed a goddamned thing because he was busy losing an argument he didn't even know he was having.

"—and you smiled at her, Sal. You smiled at her with your whole MOUTH—"

"Oh my God. Oh my God. Are you serious right now?" Sal's hands were up, palms out, the universal gesture of a man who thought he was being reasonable while his jugular vein pulsed with stress. "That was two years ago, Tina. TWO. YEARS."

"A year and ten months," Tina corrected, because precision mattered when you were prosecuting a case. She had her stiletto acrylics—this week a French tip with tiny evil eyes on the ring fingers—protection against exactly this kinda bullshit—pointed at his sternum like she was considering puncturing a lung. "July Fourth. Jessica Montoya. The rooftop at Vinnie's. You had your hand on her, Sal."

"I was guiding her to the bathroom!"

"She KNOWS where a bathroom IS. She's a GROWN WOMAN. What, her GPS broke?!"

The beach was mostly empty now—Seaside Heights in the shoulder hours between the families packing up their umbrellas and the drunks stumbling down from the bars. A seagull stood feet away, watching them with the flat black disinterest of something that had seen this bullshit before.

"You know what your problem is?" Sal jabbed a finger at nothing, at the air, at the concept of Tina in general. "You keep a scoreboard. You got like a little notebook in your head—"

"Oh, I got MORE than a notebook, baby. I got volumes. I got the Library of fuckin' Congress in here." She tapped her temple with one lethal acrylic. "You want me to pull up Chapter Three? Chapter Three is the time you told your mother I couldn't cook."

"You CAN'T cook!"

"THAT'S NOT THE POINT AND YOU KNOW IT!"

Sal spun away from her, his Nikes sinking into the sand. It had been two days since he'd hit chest and he could already feel himself deflating, his pump fading like a metaphor he didn't have the vocabulary to complete. He pressed both hands to the top of his head—the blowout compressed and sprang back, engineered for exactly this kind of duress—and made a sound that was somewhere between a groan and a foghorn.

"I can't do this no more," he said, which he said approximately every seventy-two hours. "I'm done. You hear me? I'm fuckin' DONE, Tina."

"You're not done." She wasn't even looking at him. She was digging through her oversized Michael Kors bag for her phone, because she was going to find the screenshot. She had the screenshot.

The one from the night in question where a friend of a friend had posted an Instagram story and Sal's thick stupid arm was visible in the background, and his thick stupid hand was on Jessica's stupid lower back, and Tina had screenshotted it within seconds of it going live because she had the reflexes of a mongoose when it came to emotional surveillance.

"I'm tellin' you right now, I'm walkin' away. I'm walkin'!"

"So WALK. Walk, Sal! You won't. You NEVAH do!"

She was right, of course. This was the dance—the Ferrante-DiNapoli two-step, perfected over three years and God knows how many parking lot screaming matches, the cycle as reliable as the tides pulling back behind them.

Fight, threaten, escalate, one of them storms off for eleven minutes, comes back, they scream some more, and then somehow end up making out against his Camaro like two people trying to eat each other alive.

"You know what Jessica Montoya told Gina?" Tina found the screenshot. She held the phone up like evidence in a courtroom drama, screen cracked in the corner from the last time she'd thrown it. "She told Gina you were cute. She used that word. Cute. Like you're available. Like I don't even EXIST."

"I can't control what people say about me, Tina! What am I supposed to do, be UGLY?!"

"IT WOULD HELP!"

The seagull left.

Neither of them registered the shift from dusk to dark because the argument had its own internal clock. Tina's mascara was starting to run—not from sadness, but from the sheer caloric output of being this furious in this humidity.

Angry tears. The worst kind.

The kind that made her more pissed because now she looked like she was crying and she was NOT crying, she was ENRAGED, and there was a difference, Sal, there was a fucking DIFFERENCE.

Sal turned back toward the water because looking at the ocean was easier than looking at her when she was like this. When her liner was smudging and her lip was doing that thing where it trembled just slightly before she really let loose. And somewhere in the deep stupid center of his chest, he felt something that might have been love if he had the language for it.

Which he definitely didn't.

So it just came out as:

"You look like a raccoon."

"I WILL END YOU, SAL. I WILL END YOU."

She threw the phone at him. Hard enough for it to arc through the salt air and bounce off his massive left deltoid, which was, if nothing else, good for absorbing projectiles.

"Real mature, Tina. Real mature. You know who throws things? Children. Children throw things."

"You know who touches Jessica Montoya's lower back? DEAD MEN."

They were squared up now, toe to toe—Tina's chin tilted all the way up because she was five-four in bare feet on sand, dressed in a pink cheetah print bikini, while he was five-eleven, dressed in designer LV swim trunks.

The height differential had never once stopped her from getting in his stupid juicehead face.

And behind them, past the dune grass, neither of them noticed the silhouette standing very, very still near the concrete pilings beneath the boardwalk.

"These ropes are too tight," Sal said. Not to anyone in particular. Just announcing it to the room like a Yelp review.

His wrists were lashed to the arms of the chair, tight enough that he couldn't move them much. "Like, unnecessarily tight. You ever hear of circulation, bro?"

Tina, tied to an identical chair about three feet to his left, twisted her neck to glare at him. Her blowout had lost some structural integrity during the chloroform-and-trunk portion of the evening, but the overall effect was still big. Still crunchy. Still armed.

"Oh, so NOW you got complaints? NOOOOW you wanna speak up?" Her voice bounced off the concrete walls. "Where was this energy when I said we shouldn't walk down that dark part of the beach, Sal?"

"Ohhh here we go, bro. Here we go..."

"No, no, HERE WE GO. You said, and I QUOTE, 'It's fine, Tina, stop bein' paranoid'—"

"I didn't say that."

"YOU DID. You said it EXACTLY like that, with your dumb face—"

"My face is dumb now? My FACE?"

Somewhere, a pipe dripped. Neither of them noticed.

Tina wrenched against the ropes. They didn't give. She made a sound of pure outrage—half scream, half espresso machine.

"These are too tight on ME, actually. I can't even feel my fingers. That's not normal. That's... that's against the Geneva Convention or somethin'." She didn't know what that was, but it sounded legit.

"Oh, so YOURS are too tight, but mine aren't? That's what you're sayin'?"

"I'm sayin' mine are TIGHTER, Sal. Obviously. Look at my wrists." She craned her neck down, huffing. "I got marks already. You seeing this? I'm gonna have marks."

"We're literally tied up in some serial killer's basement and you're worried about MARKS?!"

"I have a nail appointment Thursday! These cuticles are already compromised!"

Sal let his head drop back against the chair with a meaty thunk. Stared at the ceiling. Water stains up there, shaped like something he didn't wanna think about. A Rorschach test he was failing in real time.

He could feel his pump fading. Forty-eight hours without hitting shoulders. And now this.

This was his villain origin story, probably.

"You know what?" Tina's voice had that ascending pitch. The one that meant she was loading something big into the chamber. "This is YOUR fault."

"How." Flat. Dead. "HOW is this my fault."

"Because if you weren't checkin' out that girl at the taco stand—"

"I was ORDERIN' TACOS—"

"—we woulda left twenty minutes earlier and we wouldn't BE here, Sal. We'd be home. I'd be in my robe. Watchin' my shows. But NO. You had to make eyes at some teenager in a visor—"

"She was the CASHIER, Tina. I had to LOOK at her to ORDER!"

They were both talking over each other now.

Voices climbing, overlapping, dueling air horns in a concrete echo chamber.

Neither of them had really given a damn to look at the figure standing in the corner. Not for more than a glance. The argument had momentum, and momentum was everything.

Tina jerked her chin toward the figure.

"Okay. Okay, YOU." She was addressing their captor now. Like this was customer service. Like there was a manager she could escalate to. "Legit question. Who do you think is right here? Me or him? Be honest. I want your honest opinion."

Sal's head snapped up. "Oh, you're gonna ask the SERIAL KILLER to mediate? That's where we're at now?"

"I'm askin' for a third-party perspective, Sal. That's called objectivity."

"That's called INSANE."

"You're insane. Your whole face is insane."

"You already said my face was dumb, now it's insane? Pick one!"

"It's BOTH."

Sal twisted in his chair, as much as the ropes allowed, which was barely, and locked eyes on the person who abducted them both, tied them to chairs in some murder hideout, and was now being asked to weigh in on a couple's dispute like a fuckin' referendum.

"Okay. Real talk, bro." His tone was somehow both confrontational and genuinely curious. "You think I was checkin' that girl out? The one at the taco stand? Honest answer."

Tina's jaw dropped. "Are you SERIOUS right now?!"

"I'm PROVIN' A POINT."

"You're provin' you got BRAIN DAMAGE, Sal!"

The figure in the corner still hadn't even gotten a chance to get a word in otherwise yet.

.