Reaper

by Lena North

  “Totally,” I replied, and couldn’t hold back a small giggle.

  She turned to Olly with a distinct smirk on her face.

  “You thought it was silly.”

  “Shit.”

  “You did,” she insisted. “Didn’t he, Dante?”

  “Congratulations, Annie. And yes, he did. Often, and in a way that was a little too verbose for my taste.”

  I turned slowly to Dante and stared at him.

  “Thank you, and you’re lying,” I stated.

  “No.”

  “Olly? Verbose?”

  “Maybe verbose is the wrong word.” He grinned and turned to Olly. “Happy for you. You realize this makes you –”

  I was clear that some kind of gleeful insult was coming, but Olly cut him off immediately.

  “So, you were arrested, huh?”

  There was a moment of silence, and I pressed my lips together.

  “How would you – Annie?”

  Dante was clever, I had to give him that. He figured out in a split second who would have found that tidbit on the net.

  “I didn’t tell him why,” I protested. “And for the record – I don’t think it was fair to charge you with indecent exposure.” I thought about it, and offered, “I can remove the records if you wish.”

  “Really?” Jinx asked.

  “Really,” I confirmed.

  “You got arrested for indecent exposure? What does that even mean?” Olly asked.

  “We were skinny dipping,” Dante sighed.

  “And got arrested for it?”

  “We might have, uh, played some Parcheesi too.”

  Olly burst out into loud laughter, but I couldn't get a sound over my lips. They'd been caught –

  “I can’t believe you told them that!” Jinx squealed.

  “Annie already knew.”

  “I actually didn’t,” I said a little hoarsely. “They only put the skinny dipping in the files.”

  “You must be one hell of a hackeroo to do something like that. Heard you created some computer games too,” Jamie cut in, which earned him a grateful look from Jinx.

  I could see that Olly wanted to inquire about the arrest, which in reality had been more of a stern lecture from an elderly officer who had been off duty and fishing with his even more elderly mother. I decided it would be better to talk about the games I’d created so I threw myself into a lengthy explanation about how I’d let my brothers beta test the games for me.

  “I heard you have interesting relatives,” Jinx said but added coolly when she saw the look on my face. “No way they beat my parents.”

  She seemed so together, and I knew her parents were travelers but had assumed they were mostly just like her.

  “My father makes erotic wood carvings.”

  “Say again?” I asked because I’d never even heard of that concept.

  She pulled out her phone and showed me a photo of a big slab of wood which twisted around itself somehow. It was uneven, and there were long scratches on one side.

  “Our engagement gift,” she shared. “A phallic interpretation of the eternal waves.”

  I stared at the picture and warmth spread inside my chest.

  “I guess weird is the new black?” Jamie snorted, and I chuckled.

  “Did you really hack into your relatives’ bank accounts?” he asked.

  “Totally,” I said. “It’s easy.”

  “And Olly’s?”

  “Everyone’s,” I stated calmly.

  Jamie looked uneasy, and it had been unethical of me so I could sympathize with his feelings about it. I would have been unhappy too.

  “Mine too?” Jinx asked, more curious than offended.

  “Totally,” I said again. “Your technical stuff makes more money than my games, but I’m better than you on the stock market.”

  “What?”

  “Beat your account balance,” I shared. “Just before I came to Double H.”

  “You have more money than Jinx?” Dante asked, sounding like he didn’t believe me, which wasn’t surprising considering the massive amounts of money his girl had in her accounts.

  “I should probably have told you?” I asked Olly, hoping that he wouldn’t mind.

  He didn’t.

  “You told me now,” he said calmly. “You want another beer?”

  “Yes, please,” I said and leaned into the hand he put gently on my cheek.

  “Anyone else?” he asked the room in general, and both Dante and Jamie raised their hands.

  Jinx was staring at me. Then she was glaring at me.

  “You beat me?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said and took a deep pull of beer from the bottle Olly handed me.

  “We’ll see about that,” she muttered.

  “That we will,” I agreed with a grin.

  “Oh, goody. Now the genius-girls are competing,” Jamie chuckled. “Can you let me in on your secrets?”

  “No!” we both snapped.

  Jamie started laughing and so did we, although I did it thinking that it would be fun to find out how I’d do against Jinx’ considerable intelligence.

  “Can I see your office?” she asked suddenly. “Heard you have tons of gadgets.”

  “Sure,” I agreed.

  On the landing above the stairs, there was a small table, and there were piles of clothes on it, sorted and folded neatly. I slowed down to stare at them.

  “What?” Jinx asked.

  “Olly washed,” I murmured.

  Her face softened, and I knew she understood.

  “I’m so happy for you,” she said. “Both of you.”

  “Me too,” I said, staring at the piles again. “Feels weird to have the Reaper folding my undies, though.”

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  “Yeah, although seriously? Who the heck folds underwear?”

  “I do,” she said calmly and moved toward my office.

  “Huh,” I said and moved with her, wondering if I’d have to fold Olly’s briefs when I did laundry or if I could just put them in his drawer however I wanted.

  I decided that if he needed them folded, then he could do it himself, and followed Jinx into my office. Her gasp, followed by a dreamy sigh, felt like a caress against my soul. I’d had someone who got it in my life, and here was another one. Someone who would see beyond the multiple huge screens and computers, and understand what this meant to me.

  “Look at this one,” I said. “Got it a while back. Modified the software to fit what I needed. Had ideas about the hardware too but I'm not good with that, so I reverted to the original design.”

  I picked up a small pencil-looking piece of plastic and started writing on the whiteboard at the same time as I called out the command to start it all up. I wrote a few sentences of code, included a simple algorithm, and the computer screens flashed immediately, putting it in one of my programs and waiting for me to tell it what to do with the logic. I added another line and said, “By. Compile. Run.”

  The result showed on the screen, and a soft voice said, “Inconsistent.”

  Jinx started laughing.

  “Your computer is called By?”

  “I loved him.”

  Her face softened, and I handed her another plastic pen with my brows raised. She looked at the screen and added a few things. I turned my own pen around to erase part or my original statements, and built on her logic instead.

  “Yeah,” she sighed, and leaned forward.

  Just as we had at Double H, we worked seamlessly together; filling in each other's sentences, working the details on the whiteboard faster and faster. I opened up my brain until I didn't hide a thing and it felt like every cell in my body vibrated.

  “Jesus, it’s good to work with someone like you. Haven’t had that since Byron. Miss him.”

  The words rushed out of me, but unlike when we were at Double H, there was no pain. My voice was calm, but th
ere was a jubilant undertone in it, and I smiled.

  “I never had this. Never felt this rush,” she murmured and frowned as she erased parts of her own statements. “Of course, you miss him. Heck, I never met him and just feeling like this makes me miss him too.” She took a step back and smiled at me. “He must have been amazing.”

  “He was,” I said and added, “By. Compile. Run.”

  “Beautiful,” the soft voice said from the loudspeakers. “Result; 46 33 25.35 12 50 4.58”

  “What the heck are you doing?”

  Jamie stood in the door, staring at the scribbles on the whiteboard and then at us. We started laughing, at his stunned face, although probably mostly from adrenaline. That had been an unexpected rush for both of us.

  “Uh, Annie,” he said. “You look different.”

  I was about to explain about my eye when Dante shouted from downstairs that it was getting late and they were leaving, so we walked downstairs instead.

  Then Olly and I stood on the porch again, waving as our friends left.

  “I’m putting a gate up,” he murmured.

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” I said, and I meant it.

  I'd lived a large part of my life behind gates and fences, and I didn't want to do that again.

  “We could live closer to Marshes, Annie,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “You change around Jinx,” he said softly. “It’s as if you become more… alive somehow. So, if you want to work with her, we could –”

  “It would exhaust me, and I have a driving license,” I said calmly. “I also have a faster connection to the net than what government intelligence use. Pretty sure Jinx does too so we can connect that way.”

  His eyes searched mine and whatever he found in them made him smile.

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  “Are you really richer than Jinx?”

  “Probably not for long,” I muttered. “Do you mind?”

  “What would you do if I did?”

  “Give it to my brothers,” I said immediately. “They don't know about it, so I'm guessing that'd be a fun Christmas.”

  He barked out startled laughter.

  “You’d do that?”

  “Sure,” I said and walked inside. “I don’t know what to do with it anyway. I give chunks of it to charity already. Might spend some at the spa Bo took us to, though. Oh, and I want a dog.”

  “You want a dog.”

  “A big one,” I clarified. “Maybe even two.”

  “You have millions and millions, and you want a dog?”

  “Maybe two,” I repeated because the thought appealed to me.

  Two huge dogs would be fantastic.

  “I love you.”

  I blinked because I’d expected him to say that he’d love to have a dog too.

  “Olly?”

  “Let’s eat something, and then we’ll play Parcheesi.”

  Wow. I wasn’t as if I minded, but his stamina was surprising.

  “Um,” I mumbled.

  “No, babe, I mean it. Parcheesi. We have a box somewhere, used to play it when I was a kid.”

  “What?”

  “Your family comes tomorrow.”

  “I know.”

  “That way, if they ask what we’ve done while Da was gone we can say we’ve played Parcheesi, and it won't be a lie.”

  I started laughing as he pulled out leftovers from our lunch with Wilder and Mac.

  “This okay?” he asked and wiggled the boxes he was holding.

  “Absolutely,” I agreed.

  He turned toward the fridge to pull out some more, and then he straightened.

  “What?”

  The grin on his face slowly turned wicked in a way I recognized.

  “We’ll have dessert after Parcheesi,” he murmured, and put a can of whipped cream on the table with a soft thud.

  Oh.

  Chapter Twenty

  Omissions

  We walked out on the front porch to greet my family and his father when they rolled up in front of the house the next day. I held Olly's hand and tried to smile calmly but I was slightly nervous, and didn't know why. He'd met almost everyone already, although my mother admittedly only over a couple of phone calls.

  The only one he hadn’t met was my father, but I wouldn’t have anything to worry about when it came to Da. Rhys Morgan was a sweet, laid back man with no interest whatsoever to get into any kind of argument. He liked clever people, light chit-chat, jokes, and listening to clever people chit-chatting lightly, and joking. If Gramps and Ma were okay with Olly, and they seemed to be, then Da would embrace the whole situation. Olly wasn’t great with chit-chat, but he was clever and funny, so they'd get along well, I suspected.

  My brothers could have been an issue because they were fiercely protective of me, to the point where it had been a nuisance as I grew up. They had called Olly repeatedly, though, to laugh about their drunken contest and make what I supposed were crude jokes about anything under the sun.

  Still, I was fidgety in a way I couldn’t explain. My brain kept pushing at me to walk away and sit down to sort through everything bouncing around in my head, and I wanted to.

  “I can deal with them,” Olly murmured. “Say hi, and then take Toby for a walk, babe.”

  Some of the tension seeped out of me immediately. I couldn't leave my family like that, but the fact that he tried to give me the option felt sweet. I had someone at my back.

  “How did you know?”

  He started laughing.

  “Babe.”

  Then they descended upon us, and I had no chance to ask what he meant. Everything became a flurry of greetings, hugs, and kisses. The scent of my father's cologne was familiar and Gramps' gruff, “Hey, Annie-girl,” reassuring. Ma held me, rocking from side to side and my brothers were alternating between thumping my back and Olly's.

  I took a step back from my mother and looked around. Sven stood a couple of steps away, and Toby sat next to him, thumping his tail against the planks on the porch, overjoyed to be home again, or perhaps just enjoying the light and happy mood that swirled around us.

  “Sven,” I said and walked into his embrace. “We missed you.”

  “Bet you didn’t,” he said calmly.

  “Okay, no,” I conceded. “You were only gone a few days, so maybe we didn't miss you exactly. It's good to have you back, though.”

  His arms twitched a little, squeezing me to his chest, and I felt him exhale on a chuckle.

  “Olly didn’t waste any time, I see,” he murmured. “Good to know I didn’t raise an idiot after all.”

  I stepped back and raised my brows. He took hold of my hand and held it up, wiggling the ring slightly.

  Ma saw what Sven had spotted immediately, and squealed so loudly I took a step away from her. Then another flurry of hugs and kisses erupted, and I thought Keigh’s back thumps would surely break a couple of Olly’s ribs.

  “Good that we moved all your shit already,” Mal snorted.

  The way he spoke caught my attention, and I looked around at the group surrounding me. Snippets of conversations suddenly filtered through my brain, and I analyzed them one by one but also in their overall context. Ma had annoyed me when she implied that I was a child. Sven asked me to come to Norton and left a sweet note in the kitchen which made me stay in his home. No one in the village told Olly I was there. Hawker called for an emergency summit with a sleepover so Olly couldn’t stay with his father. Gramps dropped my things off, talking vaguely about fumigating my apartment. Sven told me it was less lonely with me in the house. My family didn’t share that Olly kept going to Gramps’ home. Carson asked for urgent assistance, so Olly had to leave again. Gramps and Sven suddenly acting like best buds.

  They’d all conspired to keep me in Norton until Olly had calmed down and thought things through. They had also kept Olly away from Norton until I’d had time to th
ink about things.

  It felt as if my brain would explode, but I kept my cool and turned toward Sven. Then I looked at Ma, and finally at my grandfather.

  “There aren’t any lice in my home,” I stated.

  His face softened.

  “No,” he said.

  “You’ve played us,” I said to Sven.

  “You were leaving for places where no one would find you. Had to,” he muttered.

  “Hawker too?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Sven said.

  “All of Norton!?”

  “Yeah,” Sven repeated.

  “Ma?”

  I didn't even know what to say, and she didn't reply, but her face was blank in a way I knew meant she held back amusement.

  “You all lied to me?” I asked the group in front of me.

  “We might have omitted a few things,” Gramps muttered.

  “You LIED to me!” I yelled.

  I felt Olly move beside me and wondered how angry he was, having been deceived again. I also wondered if I could ask him to kill my family, and a few in his too while he was at it.

  “I thought you said omission wasn’t a lie,” he said quietly in my ear.

  He tried to keep his voice neutral, but I heard traces of laughter in it and turned to find him grinning crookedly at me.

  “You think this is funny?” I gasped.

  “Hilarious,” he said, and his grin widened when he saw my reaction.

  “But they –”

  “Karma just kicked you in the behind, Annie,” he said with an annoyingly smug smile on his face. Then he lowered his voice to murmur quietly, “It took us to where we’ve just spent two days playing Parcheesi, babe.” He raised his head and said in a louder voice, “Hell, yeah, I think this is funny.”

  I wanted to be mad, I really did, but he had a point. His eyes were soft and the happy smile so beautiful that I also got sidetracked and just stared at him.

  “Smartass,” I mumbled, and he burst out in loud laughter, threw an arm around my shoulder and pulled me to him.

  I hid my grin in his shirt.

  “Annie,” Sven said and put a hand on my shoulder. “I couldn't let you run off to unknown places while my boy was getting his head together so I might have skipped mentioning a few facts, but I wasn’t lying to you. Absolutely not. I love having you here.”

  He looked so sweet, and I knew he meant what he said.