by Finn, Emilia
The bell from the kitchen dings, but used to the routine and swinging by as though it was as natural as breathing, my son snags the hot plate after dropping pastries in his bag and makes his way to where I stand. With a sly grin and trouble in his eyes, he slides a burger and fries in front of Eric. “I think this is yours, Cap.”
I shoot an angry glare to the kitchen and find my giggling cook peering through the doorway. I purse my lips. “I cancelled the burger.”
Stefan shrugs and wipes his hands on a towel. “I figured it was a heat of the moment cancellation. I knew you’d regret it when you realized you’d be sending the man away while he was still hungry.”
Eric leans forward in his booth to peer around me and tosses a fry into his mouth. “I was starving. Thanks for the grub.”
“Welcome, Cap. Katrina, honey, you can take five if you want. Sit your butt down, put your feet up, relax. Everyone is fed right now, so you can take a minute and accept the dude’s offer when he asks you out for dinner.”
I turn with a gasp and glare. My face burns hot, and my stomach rolls when Eric’s hand remains on my apron, and through it all, my big, bad protector son does nothing to avenge my honor. He snickers and shoves the paper bag into his backpack. Scowling at Stefan, I ignore the man who makes my heart race, grit my teeth and mouth I’ll kill you!
My threat is real and my humiliation hot, but Stefan is one of very few men on this planet not scared of me.
Chuckling, Eric pulls me back around as soon as Mac swings out of the diner with a hollered “See ya!” and Stefan disappears back into the kitchen.
“I mean,” he clears his throat, “would you like to grab dinner with me? We could have a picnic at the lake, or something fancy at Pinocchio’s.” He flashes a sexy grin. “Your choice, my treat.”
“Umm…”
11
Eric
I walk through Jo’s double-story home and take note of everywhere we need to set up a security feed. I make marks in my notebook, mentally calculate distances just to get a rough idea, and in my peripherals, Kane and Jay move through the home ahead of me.
“What’s her budget?” Kane stops in the large kitchen and turns. “How much are we looking at?”
I shrug. “Reasonable, but she’s not rich. She wants it done for around two grand if we can manage it.”
Nodding, he walks across the tiled room and peeks into the walk-in pantry. “Why’s she getting set up? Ex-boyfriend troubles, or just precaution?”
“Precaution.” I mark distances in my notes and make a plan to come back through with the laser measurer. “She didn’t mention man trouble, but she’s a single mom. Her kid is getting on and looking at colleges, so she wants to be set up before he goes.”
“Set her up with the Griffin Gladiator package.” Jay opens the back door and peeks out into the yard. “Inside and out, and a double-locked panic room, just in case.”
“That’s a thirty-k system, Bish. You forget to turn your listening ears on? She’s working with a budget.”
“And she’s also a single mom trying to prepare for being all alone.” His dark eyes meet mine. “Set it up. Bill her for the Secure80, but we install the Gladiator system and lie to her. I’ll spot the rest, and I’ll watch her feed myself, so it’s not coming out of company budget.”
“You can’t save all the girls.” Kane closes the pantry and turns back to us with a smile. “You don’t get to be everyone’s hero, ya know? You gotta save some of the spotlight for the rest of us.”
“I wanna help the chick out,” Jay replies. “She’s asking for help; she told us what she could afford. Now I’m saying I’ll spot the rest, and we won’t tell her about it. Everybody is happy.”
“Except your bank account.”
He makes an eh noise. “I’ll get more. There are bad fuckers everywhere, and Soph isn’t done draining them dry, so that well won’t ever empty. For as long as there are bad motherfuckers in this world, we’re gonna keep stealing from them and pissing them off.”
“You think your name is Robin Hood?” I keep walking through the three-bedroom home and readjust my thoughts to make room for a Gladiator package. More cameras. More locks. More everything. “You steal from the dirty, give to the victims. Does it help you sleep at night?”
“Nope, I still only get two hours. It’s been almost a year now, and I’m not getting tired.” He turns to his brother. “You’re gonna wish someone popped you in the head and rewarded you with two hours a night when your kid arrives.”
He thinks joking of his near-fatal injuries is funny, when the rest of us practically cross our hearts and thank the universe for giving him back.
“You’ll wish you could live like me,” he continues. “Your mini-monster will make you cry within the first week, I guarantee it.” Tugging a protein bar from his back pocket, he tears the wrapper open and shoves half in. “But also, I’m not sorry for stealing from bad fuckers. They had it coming the second they hurt an innocent.”
“Speaking of,” Kane says more quietly, his eyes darkening as he speaks. “Did you hear anything on that girl? Nora. Where is she?”
“Sorta.” I shrug. “I don’t hear anything, but I check in every now and then. Soph’s helping me keep watch, but now that Colum’s gone, Nora’s not being protected anymore.” I continue through Jo’s home, peeking behind closed doors and scouting out spaces for installation. “The clubs are shut down, and the only people who’d be interested in keeping her quiet are already dead. So she’s basically just holed up at home with her folks while she processes how fucked up her life is now.”
“Is…” Kane’s voice cracks. “Is she okay?”
Not really. “I’m keeping tabs, but she isn’t doing much. She’s inside her house most of the time, leaves only for therapy. She has a home tutor now, so I guess it’s a good sign that she’s trying to finish high school, at least. That’s about as social as she gets. She’s really fucked up about it.”
“I feel bad,” he murmurs. “I’m part of her nightmares, Cap. I scared the fuck out of her that night.”
“Bullshit.” I close the spare bedroom door and turn back to my friend. “You were fed a bad batch of cocaine, thrust into a party room with a pretty girl, and told to fuck her out of your system. You were pinging off the walls, stoned out of your head and basically dying, but you still got her out. You fought the system and saved her life. Maybe you did it with rough hands, maybe you swore a lot and got a little sloppy, but she still got out alive. You didn’t hurt her, Bish, so you need to acknowledge your part in that. She’s still breathing, when many others aren’t.”
“But breathing when it feels like you’re suffocating with fear isn’t really breathing at all,” he argues. “She’s only sixteen. She’s just a baby, and traumatized beyond anything I could comprehend. I know I didn’t purposely hurt her, but I guarantee I’m still part of her nightmares. I bet if we ran into each other at the store, she’d probably fall apart.”
“You can’t change it.” Together, we move through the hall and work our way to the bedroom that clearly belongs to the teen boy. We don’t step in. We just poke our heads in, then keep moving. “Maybe we’ll approach her folks and integrate you into her healing at some point. Let her face her demons, realize you’re her savior. That sorta shit.”
He brushes my suggestion off with a dissatisfied grunt. “How’s Soph doing on the current stuff? She’s not really a sharer, is she?”
Jay lets himself into Jo’s bedroom and walks through to the master bathroom. “I was sleeping with Soph, and she still didn’t tell me her job. You give her a mission, she’ll work it until her fingers bleed, but she isn’t going to gossip with you about it over donuts.”
“So…?”
He shrugs. “So she’s working it. There are a lot of layers to work through, and since Colum has been put down, word’s spreading, and the soldiers are scrambling. Nobody knows who Soph is, but they feel her breathing on the backs of their necks. We just gotta bide our
time for now while she works her thing. When it’s time to jump, she’ll give us our mission. But until then…” He shrugs.
“On another note.” Kane’s mood flips like a switch as he turns to me with a wide grin. “Ask that pretty girl out to dinner yet? We’re all kinda tired of you pussyfooting about.”
“I asked her.” I make myself busy and walk away. “She’s kinda prickly, so it’s hard to find the moment to ask that shit.”
“Moment?” Jay laughs and yanks the notebook from my hands. “We don’t wait for moments! We stop in front of them, hold them still – ‘cause they’re gonna give you excuses why it’s not a good idea – then we tell them what time they gotta be where they gotta be. Have we taught you nothing?”
I roll my eyes. “Not everyone is an obnoxious Bishop, ya know?”
“And yet, Kane and I are getting laid on the regular. It’s anecdotal, of course, but that leads me to believe you’re a pussy, and we get pussy, so… maybe you should just show her your dick.”
“Worked for me.” Kane distractedly scrolls his cell. “I pulled my dick out the first day I met Jess, and now look at us. She’s gonna marry me and give me babies.”
“I don’t wanna get married or have babies.” I snatch my book back and walk away. “Been there, done that, don’t need to repeat the process.”
“So ask for a good time, then.” Jay falls into step with me as we move back into the hall. “She’s feisty as fuck, pretty as hell, and word on the street is she’s got a mean right hook. You know she’s gonna be fun when you get her alone. Power struggles in bed are fun,” he groans. “When they wanna be top dog, and they fight you for it. It’s hot, man. You oughtta give it a go.”
“She said no.” I hum under my breath and pretend her rejection doesn’t sting. Of course it does! I was so sure I would get a shy yes this morning, so when her rejection was delivered with pity in her eyes and a squeeze of my shoulder, what she intended to be the kindest rejection of all stung like a bitch.
“Wait. She said no?” Jay grabs my sore arm and tugs me around. “So you countered with yes, right?”
“No, I left her alone.”
“Dude! If she says no, you smile all charming and shit and say yes. A billion times. Over and over and over and over and over and over.” He smacks my forehead repeatedly. “And over and over again. Eventually they smile back, then you fuck like rabbits, and the world is all better again.”
I smack his hand away and turn into the next room. “In my world, if I ask and she says she’d rather I didn’t exist, I step away and stop bothering her. I guess it’s the gentleman in me.”
“Gentleman.” Kane scoffs. “They don’t want a gentleman. They want someone who knows how to fuck them just right. They want to be sure you know what you’re doing. She’s probably hesitant because the dudes she’s fucked before didn’t know how to get her off, so now she’s worried you’ll be a wasted fuck too. Chicks care about their numbers, so if you wanna be one of them, you gotta work for it. That means you gotta show her you got it under control. Show her you know how to rock her world, then rock that fuckin’ world. She’ll come back for more, I promise. Then the only number you’ll be is number one.”
“No. I’m not gonna force myself on her more than I already have. I sit at the diner all the damn time hoping she’ll throw me a bone, but all she does is ask to be left alone, so… I’m not into non-consensual.”
“Nobody is saying non-consensual,” Jay scoffs. “Nobody is saying do something she doesn’t want. We’re saying she does want it, she’s just too scared to ask for it. So your job, dumbass, is to provide her with the opportunity to say yes. She’s proud, so you gotta take away the fear of rejection or whatever.”
“Yeah…” I want them to be right. I want to taste Katrina more than I’ve ever wanted to taste anyone else in my life, but I have a fear of rejection, too. And what’s more, I have a fear of hurting her. I hardly even know her, but the thought of being the reason she gets hurt is too much for me to take. So I back my shit up and rebuild those walls I’ve been sitting behind for so long. Every time I get close, I back away again, because what if?
“Anyway.” I meet Kane’s eyes. “Did you and Jess break the news to her family about the baby?”
“Next week.” Stopping at the top of the hall, he turns to me with a mixture of pride and terror shining in his eyes. “We have a scan booked in, since she’s already kinda far along. So we’re doing that, then dinner Monday night. I have from now until then to find the perfect ring and words that’ll talk her into staying mine forever, then I’m sealing this up and changing her name.”
“Just like that?” I smack the back of his head with my notebook as I pass. “You’re just gonna knock her up, marry her, and call it a day? I can see how she’s so in love with the romance.”
“You think she wants something more than that?” Stopping back in the kitchen, he turns to me with concern in his eyes. “I want it done before the baby arrives, so it’s not like I have a bunch of time. She won’t want to be nine months pregnant and saying her I do’s, so I kinda have a month or two here, then we lose our window.”
“You’re, what? Twelve weeks, maybe fourteen or so?”
He nods. Then he shrugs.
“Second trimester will be kinder to her. She’s still feeling a little green right now; her hormones are going whack, and her, well…” I point at my crotch. “Lots of shit happening in there right now. Second trimester is when things start to calm a little, so plan now, then get ready to jump maybe around eighteen weeks or so.”
“Eighteen?”
Like him, I nod, then shrug. “Or so. From then till about twenty-eight weeks, I figure she’ll be comfortable. But if you go longer than that, you’ll lose your window again.”
“Okay…” He rubs his hands together and nods as though that helps him think, then he repeats it over and over. “Okay. Okay. That gives us a ten-week window. I can make that work.” His eyes stop on mine. “She’ll say yes, right?”
“I suspect she will.” I head back toward the front door with a laugh and get ready to let ourselves out. Jo is at work but left a set of keys with us to get this done for her while she’s gone. She doesn’t want to see the system; she doesn’t want to manage the system. She just wants to know it’s there and operational. “I think you hooked your fish, Kane. I think you’re set. So I wouldn’t sweat the proposal. Jess is a sweetheart, and she’s kinda obsessed with you, so let it happen. Buy the pretty ring, get down on one knee, and promise a lifetime of protection.”
His eyes snap up when my voice changes tone. It was just the smallest change, something so subtle no one else would notice, but these guys aren’t regular people. They’re trained observers, and they observed the shit out of the way my voice just cracked. “How are you doing with all this?” Kane steps forward and drops a hand on my shoulder. “We joke about Katrina, then we talk about Jess and the baby, but… are you coping?”
“I’m doing fine.” I pull Jo’s front door closed and lock up. “But it’s not something I wanna sit around and chat about every day for the next nine months. This is about you, your baby, your wife, your world. So you have guys gotta stop dragging mine in and trying to slap it on top.”
“You’ll say something if you’re not coping, though, right?” Jay beeps his shiny new truck open, but he stops before climbing in. “I’m not exactly the best guy to give you advice about this stuff, seeing as I struggle to let shit go, but if you’re having a bad day, you’ll come talk to one of us, right?”
“Sure.” No.
I clap his shoulder and climb into the passenger seat. I’m not going to talk to these guys about my past. I’ve put it behind me for a reason, even if that reason is a coping mechanism and dredging Gemma up would hurt me more than I can spare. The past is the past, and chatting about it won’t change a thing.
But as I stare out the window and let the soft breeze wash over my face, it’s a stark reminder why I should leave the beautiful Ka
trina alone. Guys in my line of work aren’t compatible with nice girls with a family to protect. It’s too much for them, too scary, too hot, and showing interest is a stupid move I should know better about.
I’ve gotta lock my shit up and ignore her existence. It’s for the best.
But I really don’t wanna.
* * *
I work Jo’s security system, have it installed, tested, surveilled, and declared bug-free. Setting her up in Jay’s phone and laptop just as he requested, I pass her case over and walk away with a two-thousand-dollar check for Dolly to bank and a sense of satisfaction that the single mom is now safe in her own home.
On top of that, I spend time with Soph as we work through some of the rumblings that have come through her computer since Colum Bishop was executed and removed from the helm of his empire. These rumblings hint at ground-level drug dealers who still have product to move despite Colum’s disappearance. Girls like Nora and her sister, Lisa, were being led to filthy clubs where they end up dead or worse, and though Nora may be the case we’re most invested in, hers is far from the only.
These girls are just sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old, and when they thought they were going out for a night of dancing and flirting with boys, they were actually being led to their deaths in the most brutal way possible. Nora survived her brush with cocaine and bad people because of Kane’s protection, but not before watching her sister’s cold-blooded execution.
It’s no wonder she’s holed up at home with her mom and dad and not allowing even her friends in.
Jay, Kane, and I aren’t cops anymore, so technically this isn’t our business. The moment we handed our badges back in last March is the moment we should have walked away, but it all ties back to what we were doing while we worked undercover in this town, and not one of us can walk away from a job half done. So we take legitimate clients to make Checkmate Security look above board and give the IRS something real to audit, but when we’re not installing security systems in single moms’ homes, investigating cheating spouses, or protecting people from abusive fucks, we work with Sophia, our computer genius, with the intention to clear the streets of the dirty product these clubs were peddling.
