fatale.

"Well! Quelle charmante surprise."

Elsa licked her lips and dropped her eyelids just low enough to level Dodge a proper smoky glare. She did not alter the exaggerated pose with which she'd entered the otherwise empty tavern.

She barely moved at all, in fact, which she had long since learned was the ideal course of action when staring down a barrel, any barrel, which definitely included the glittering cobalt barrel of Dodge's custom semi.

"What do you want?" she asked.

They both knew it was rhetorical. Gunpoint conversation was a game of formalities.

Dodge was ice in all the precise ways Elsa was fire. He said:

"'Dull Sphinx, Jove keep thy five wits; thy sight is growing blear.'"

Despite his taut alertness, his cool baritone spilled through the tense, dusty air like a chilled, well-vented wine.

Elsa smiled and shifted her weight, a cautious, calculated motion. Her eyes stayed fixed on the weapon, the magnet that immobilized and held them together.

"I am afraid you have come to the wrong place," she said. "Or, at the very least, the wrong time. An unfortunate coincidence. You see, it was stolen last night."

Dodge made no sound or movement in reply. There was something in her voice that rang deeper than her lilting accent, something that slithered over the bar counter and threatened to ignite his skin beneath the tailored suit.

She began to move a hand upward and marveled at the ever-so-slight tightening of Dodge's tensed knuckles. She laughed.

"You are good, very good to have come this far," Elsa offered. "But think. Why would I lie to you right now? You have every capacity to tear this place to its foundations, and I have no power to stop you." Her mouth slid into a mock frown. "It is gone, M. Dodge. That is the truth. You are only wasting your time here."

As the final word drifted from her lips, Elsa took a single step forward, sending a rigid shock through Dodge's arm.

"Unless," she breathed, "you had some other business in mind."

"Not another step," Dodge said. His gaze and aim never wavered, but there was a thawing in his eyes.

"Why?" Elsa cooed. She tilted her head and looked incredibly concerned. "Does it bother you?"

"I'm warning you, sweetheart."

"Pardieu," Elsa sighed. "A warning from M. Dodge, the Lone Ranger himself!"

Her words sidled up to his cheek from five meters away, stroking the lines of his clenched jaw. "I have heard of him-- always so lonely, so angry, so cold. He comes looking for the treasure. It is not here, I have told him so. He loses time; ah! Even now it flies further away. Yet here still he stands, still so angry, waving his little toy. I think, he must not have come for the treasure; he does not care for it. So what does he really want?" Her eyelids lowered by fractions of seconds as her voice slipped into a velvet stage whisper. "What does a big, lonely man ever want from a poor, lonely girl?"

One stilettoed foot inched itself forward.

A bullet screeched millimeters past her ear and detonated in a shower of decaying wood panels behind her. Elsa was suddenly gripping the floor, a fireball of nerves, screaming with eyes circled wide with terror.

"Strike two," Dodge said. "Let me know when you're ready to start actually saying something, hon, or I'll let my 'little toy' here speak for the both of us."