“I’m sure they’ll cook up something for you to do, if the deal goes through.” He was bored with us already, and I understood we were taking up his time. Vienna stood when I did.
“Keep me in the loop,” I murmured as we left. His short nod told me he would. Always a man of few words, my boss, and it drove me crazy sometimes. Would it be too much to get a “good job” or “thanks for going the extra mile”? Not that I craved approval or anything, but it would’ve been nice just once to know where I stood with him. Playing guessing games was never my favorite thing to do.
“Downstairs is where we have our surveillance equipment feeds set up.”
“Ooh, I would love to see that,” she whispered, eyes bright.
“I don’t know…I mean, that’s personal stuff on those cameras.”
“Oh, please?” She folded her hands. “I’m super into tech stuff like that. Do you know how many security systems I can disable with my eyes closed? I would love to see the sort of stuff you guys are working with.” How could I say no to something like that? Maybe I wanted to impress her a little, since I knew our technology was top-of-the-line. Pax would never settle for anything less.
“Okay, I guess. Come on. Just don’t touch anything.” I led her downstairs, to where our three full-time surveillance geeks sat at the monitors. Marcus had his back to us, headphones on as always, while Danny and Jenna were quietly laughing about something as they shared a late breakfast. Those two. After years of flirting, they were finally serious about each other. Their drama had been like something out of one of the soaps my mom used to watch when I was a kid.
“Wow!” Vienna didn’t bother introducing herself. “You’re using Securtron 5000! I didn’t know that model was out of beta testing yet!”
“Who is this?” Jenna’s distrust was obvious. Maybe she didn’t like having another woman in her territory.
“This is one of our clients, Vienna Worth.”
“Oh…” Danny smirked knowingly. I shot him a warning look.
“Yeah, well, we only use the best.” Jenna glared at me behind Vienna’s back. I wanted to tell her to mind her own business or maybe even get back to work instead of flirting with her boyfriend. She wasn’t the only one who could be irritated.
“This is too cool.” I watched as Vienna took it all in with her wide, disbelieving eyes. “How many locations are you monitoring right now?”
“We try to keep that confidential,” Jenna muttered.
“She can count, Jen.”
She scowled at me. “We have eight active cases right now—well, eight people who don’t think they’re too good for our equipment in their homes.”
Vienna turned slowly to face her, and I stopped myself just short of throwing myself between them when I saw the way her eyes flashed. “There wasn’t enough room for the two of us in my apartment,” she muttered through clenched teeth.
“And it’s just better for us to be at the safe house, anyway.” By this time, Marcus had taken off his headphones and was looking at us with a mixture of surprise and bemusement.
“Hey, it’s one less set of monitors for me to watch,” he pointed out, trying to be helpful. He was failing.
“We have to get back to work.” Jenna turned her back on us.
Danny looked confused. “I thought we were eating.” She shot her boyfriend a dirty look, and he shot me an apologetic look before joining Jenna at the bank of monitors. Marcus shrugged and went back to what he was doing once his headphones were firmly in place.
I had never been so disgusted with my coworkers, or felt so disappointed in them. It was mainly Jenna—I couldn’t understand what her issue was. She seemed to take it personally that Vienna didn’t want our cameras in her place. That wasn’t like her.
Vienna stalked up the basement stairs and I followed close behind her. I wasn’t sure what to say. It was my idea to stop by, of course, but I didn’t know Jenna would be so nasty. Then again, wasn’t I nasty toward her before I knew anything about her? I assumed she was nothing but a common criminal and I had loved feeling superior to her.
We made the drive back to the house in silence, and when we got there, she went to her room and closed the door. That was the last I saw of her for hours.
Chapter Thirteen – Vienna
I wasn’t used to being treated like that. Probably because I didn’t usually let people know what I did. That was the first time somebody had ever looked at me like I was worthless. Well, not the first time, exactly—Dylan had, at first. It wasn’t clear how far we had come with each other until little miss perfect looked at me that way. I realized that he was actually treating me like a person, maybe even like a friend.
I knew I couldn’t mope around in my room forever, so I went out to the living room around dinner time. He was on the couch, playing a video game. “What do you want tonight?” I asked.
He looked at me, his eyes traveling over the tank top and leggings I had thrown on. It was a far cry from what I had worn to the police station, but I just wasn’t in the mood.
“Spaghetti?” he asked. “I saw some in the pantry, and there’s meatballs in the fridge. Hell, I can make that happen—why don’t you just chill out tonight?”
I had to smile. “You don’t have to baby me.”
“I’m not trying to baby you,” he scowled. “But you’ve been cooking every night. I can boil spaghetti.”
I wasn’t about to keep fighting—in fact, I was getting tired of being the one to cook all the time. “Okay. I’m stupid enough to keep arguing about it.”
“Here.” He handed me his controller, and I sat in his spot on the couch.
“What the hell game is this?” There were zombies on the screen, paused in the act of coming at me with their mouths gaping wide open. They wanted my brains, obviously.
“It’s pretty easy. You just have to keep yourself alive.” He showed me how to access my weapons. “I have a lot of stuff collected, so you should be fine. Just kick the shit out of them.”
“I think I can handle that.” He left me alone, and I dared get started. When he was in the kitchen, I called out, “This is scary! When did video games get so scary?” The zombies were gross, too. Way too realistic for my taste. Still, he was right. It was easy, and it felt nice to kick the shit out of something.
“I know, right? Remember Mario Brothers?”
“Wow, you’re old,” I laughed, as I cut the head off one, then two zombies who had shuffled up behind me.
“You’re not that much younger than me. Don’t tell me you never played Mario Brothers.”
“I did. Just not when it first came out, Grandpa.” Of course, I knew how old he was. I had already gone through his wallet while he was in the shower one morning. His thirty-second birthday had passed in April. That made my twenty-seven seem pretty young in comparison.
I imagined one of the zombies was that Jenna bitch, all snotty and looking down her nose at me like she was perfect. Just looking at her, I could tell so many things. The way she looked at her boyfriend, so possessive and scared at the same time. She dressed sort of sloppily—it made sense in a way. She sat in a basement all day. Still, her boyfriend was there with her. She could’ve given a little attention to her appearance instead of wearing an oversized tee and outdated flare-cut jeans. Her fingers and toes could’ve used a little attention, too. The girl hadn’t been to the manicurist in ages. She also needed work on her roots—she was no natural blonde. So maybe she felt a little jealous when she saw me walking in, looking as good as I did. That probably hadn’t helped.
I blew a hole through Zombie Jenna’s head and felt a deep sense of satisfaction. That would teach her to be a bitch.
Before I knew it, Dylan’s voice cut through the shrieks of zombies and my shrieks of delight as I cut them down. “Hey, killer. Dinner’s ready.” I paused the game and went to the kitchen, where he’d laid out spaghetti and meatballs, salad and bread. There was even a bottle of wine sitting on the table.
“Wow! This i
s a nice treat.” I opened the wine and poured a glass for myself. He waved it off. More for me. We had a nice dinner, talking like regular people. He told me about his family, how his parents had died in a car crash years earlier in San Francisco. He asked me about my parents.
“Honestly?” I poured myself another glass of wine. I would need it if that was the direction the conversation was going in. “I have no idea where they are.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just like I said. They went away and never came back.”
He looked so confused. I wondered what about what I had said was so confusing. “I don’t know if the cops were on their trail or what the situation was, but they cleaned out their bank account and went somewhere else.”
“How do you know they’re still alive?”
I winced. “Wow. Great question.”
“Sorry.” He at least looked sorry.
“Anyway, I don’t know. I just don’t. I guess I never will, unless they think things have cooled off enough that they can contact me.” I played with my napkin to avoid looking at him. “That’s why I’ve never moved. I stay in that little apartment because I don’t need anything big, but also because that’s where they can find me if they want to. Otherwise, I don’t think I’d ever hear from them again.”
He went back to eating, and I took that as a sign that we could switch topics. I hated talking about them. It reminded me how easy it was for them to forget about me.
***
“What’s your favorite city?” he asked after we finished eating and cleaning up. I was on the couch with my wine, the video game still paused where I had left it.
“New York. No question.”
“Really? I thought you traveled the world. You’ve probably seen so many places.” He cracked open a beer and settled in next to me. I told myself the sudden warmth in the room was only the effect of my wine. Red wine usually did that to me. Pretty soon, my cheeks would flush and my eyes would get too sparkly. And then I’d get sleepy. Why I kept drinking it when it did that to me was anybody’s guess. Maybe because I liked the way it tasted.
“I did. So what?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I thought that meant you were, you know. Worldly.”
I was nice enough to hide my smile. “That’s a misconception. Just because I’ve seen a lot of things doesn’t mean I’m any better than anybody else.” I sat back with a sigh and thought over all the ground I’d covered during my trips. “They’re just a bunch of old monuments. Seeing them in person is nice, but that was all my parents. Their idea of who their daughter should be. Especially my mom. Dad wanted me to enjoy the money they had earned, but Mom wanted a different life.”
“What did you want?”
His question took me by surprise. “Nobody ever asked me that,” I realized.
“You can’t be serious.”
“I am. But parents are like that, I guess. They want what they want for you. Dad wanted me to follow in his footsteps, even though he also wanted me to look like the kids I grew up around. So I had to have an education like theirs. Mom, well, she wanted a lot more. She wanted me to be them—not like them, but them. If that even makes any sense.”
“It’s funny that she wanted something different for you, but she stayed in the same profession.”
“Believe me. It’s easy to say you want to quit something. It’s a lot harder to go through with it. I mean, neither of them had college educations. There was no way they could keep up their lifestyle on the sort of straight work they were qualified for—I think Mom worked as a secretary back in the day, before desktop computers were even a thing. The thing about blending in with the upper-crust was having to maintain the image, you know? We couldn’t drop off the radar.”
“Were you well-known?”
“Oh, no. That would’ve been a mistake, being showy or flashy. They didn’t strut around. You never saw their photos in the society pages. We lived quietly, but well enough to know which of our friends had goodies for the taking.” I laughed bitterly as I looked down into my wine glass.
“Some friends,” he murmured.
“Tell me about it.”
“Did they ever tell you who to be friends with?”
“You mean, did they use me?” I shook my head. “No. They weren’t cruel.”
“I didn’t mean anything by that.”
“I know you didn’t.” Still, it stung. I swirled the wine in the glass. Funny how I didn’t feel like drinking it anymore.
“Did it ever bother you?”
“Knowing how my parents lied? And how I had to lie for them? Yeah. You could say it bothered me. I felt guilty all the time when I was old enough to understand what they did when they went to work. I used to wonder, did they rob this family? That family? Were they planning to? But I got older and it’s funny, the things you can justify to yourself when you get older. But I never learned how to keep from feeling guilty. That’s why I won’t pull jobs on anybody I know, even vaguely. I couldn’t stand it.”
“But it’s okay if you steal from people as long as you don’t know them?”
I heard the sarcasm in his voice, and I couldn’t blame him for it. He didn’t understand the way it was—he thought and acted like a normal person, from the normal world with their normal values. “Like I told you already, the people I take things from have the insurance to pay for it. They’re not really losing anything.”
“Except peace of mind.”
“So they spend more money on a more sophisticated security system to make themselves feel better.”
“If it was that easy, it wouldn’t bother you so much to take things from people you know.”
I opened my mouth to shoot off a reply, but nothing came out. Because he was right. I had been buying my own line of crap for way too long. Damned if I would admit that to him.
I left the wine on the coffee table when I stood. “You don’t know anything about me, or why I do what I do. I bet you did some things in your life that you don’t like remembering, right?” I touched my fingers to my chest, indicating his dog tags.
“Don’t you dare compare us.” His voice turned awfully cold all of a sudden. “I did what I felt was right. You did what felt good, and you hurt other people when you did it.” He stood, slowly, and towered over me. I didn’t think I had ever seen him really angry until just then. Everything about his stance and the way he clenched his jaw, nostrils flaring as he breathed, told me he would’ve laid me out flat if I wasn’t a girl.
That didn’t mean I would back down. I was never smart when it came to knowing when to give up. “Some people might say you hurt people for no good reason if they didn’t know the specifics of what you did or why you did it. See what I mean? You don’t know me, just like the people who would judge you don’t know you or why you did it.”
“You can rationalize all you want, if it makes you feel better, but don’t ever question my service.”
“I wasn’t trying to question your service. I was trying to make a point.”
“Smartass. You don’t know shit about the way real people live, and you’re right—you should feel guilty about the way you live, because you make money off things other people work for.”
“And you don’t know shit about those people. Do you think old man Florsheim worked for the jewels I stole?” I laughed, shaking my head. “He was a trust fund baby born of a trust fund baby and on and on, and that last baby was the son of a robber baron who ruined the lives of countless people in the name of greed. Don’t fucking presume to tell me anything about what I do. That man didn’t work for a single cent—he only shuffled money back and forth and sitting on Boards so his wife would have spending money.” I stared him down. “I do my homework before I get started on a job, you know.”
“I keep forgetting you think you have principles.”
“I know I have them, thank you. I don’t need you to remind me that I do.” I could hardly breathe. He was too close. The things he said were too hard to work
out in my head when he was that close. I had to get away to my room. I had to get away.
Only when I turned in that direction, he caught my wrist. “Stop running away every time somebody says something you don’t want to hear.”
“Stop telling me what to do.” I pulled hard, so hard it hurt a little, but his hand was like a steel band. “And don’t touch me, damn it.”
Instead of letting go, he pulled me to him. My body collided with his. The heat coming from him was staggering, and I was torn between wanting to push him from me and the soul-searing need to melt into him. What was happening? I didn’t even like him. He was my captor. The enemy. Just another man—and when I broke him down, I would do it on my terms. Not when he was holding onto me the way he was and looking at me with those eyes of his that took my breath away when they glowed the way they were just then.
“I said, let me go.” I jerked my arm again, but it was all for show. I couldn’t fight him. I didn’t want to, not when the sensation of his hard, unforgiving body against mine took my breath away.
He pressed his free hand against the small of my back, holding me in place. He didn’t say a word, but nothing needed to be said. I thought I was ready for his kiss, but nothing could’ve prepared me for the sensation of his mouth crushed against mine.
He ran his hand through my hair, pulling my face close while he kissed me with a passion that made me think he was trying to overtake me somehow. He wanted to possess me, and in that breathless, overheated moment, I was happy to hand myself over. I wrapped my arms around his neck as my body took over and responded to the need he was sparking in me. He lifted me off my feet and carried me to the bedroom, then set me on my feet beside the bed. That left his hands free to roam my body—my back, my butt, my thigh as I lifted my leg and wrapped it around his.
Suddenly, he pushed me away from him, onto the bed. I felt back with a gasp. Then he was on me, taking my wrists in his hands and pinning them over my head. I writhed against him, pulling and straining, trying to escape his grip even though I hoped he would never let go. All it seemed to do was excite him more, and his breath got ragged and uneven as our bodies rubbed together.
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