Zeus handed me a clear garment bag with something sparkly inside—a sexy magician’s assistant outfit. “Just carry it,” he said.
I tried to think of a joke to make to lighten the mood, like, magician role-play was a kink I couldn’t go for, or, if they started with the magic tricks I might have to safeword out.
I didn’t have it in me. So I just I grabbed the bag. “Thanks.”
“You and Thor,” Zeus said, “you’re here for tryouts down at the Ritz. It’s booked, but they’re using this as an overflow hotel. Odin and I are helpful friends.” He handed me new ID.
“Wow.” I took it and examined it, memorizing my new name. “You got ahold of a go bag while I was sleeping, too? Fuck, did you also cure cancer?”
Odin grinned and messed up my hair.
I smoothed it down. “So…what? We’re just here?”
“Until we leave,” Zeus said, handing me a dark curly wig. “We survive.”
Survival. Was that all that was left of our beautiful love? Survival? “We need to talk about this,” I said.
“Women,” Zeus growled.
None of them took the bait. At least they had something to agree on. I used the reflection of the windows to fix my wig. We’d wait out the danger and then what? Go our separate ways? Splitting up would be safer, but that had always been the case, and it was never what we did. We stayed together. We were all about the fuck you. You WISH we were dead, motherfuckers, like our tattoos said.
I put on a coat of red lipstick. And sure, I’d enjoyed hearing Zeus’s dream, but it was just a fairy tale. I’d never want to leave my guys, and I knew Zeus wouldn’t want that either—couldn’t they see that? And we’d never betray Zeus in our hearts by bringing in a fourth guy in any meaningful way.
Why were they being so stubborn?
I tucked in some stray blonde hairs. Odin nodded. He always did like me as a brunette.
We headed down to ground level to the street, which was awash with lights and crazy grandeur. I’d never seen anything like it. “It’s like…” I was going to say a carnival funhouse nightmare, but that wasn’t it. “It’s like….”
“Poor little sheep farmer,” Odin said. “I always forget that’s what you were.”
“What it’s like is Vegas,” Zeus said. “Only Vegas is like Vegas.”
Thor took my hand and pulled me across the busy, noisy traffic jam. We made our way down the sidewalk packed with people in all kinds of clothes, from red carpet stuff to Les Miserables beggarwear to your classic “I’m a freak on stilts” look.
Every hotel casino had a theme—there was a Roman decadence place, a cowboy place, a circus place. Thor kept hold of my hand, which was good, because I couldn’t stop gaping at it all. At one point, I thought Zeus might haul off and hit one of the guys handing out fliers.
We finally found our hotel, which had a fancy Italian theme, all marble and Michelangelo, though the soundtrack was dings and doot-doot-doots and cha-chings coming from the slot machines, a weirdly agitating noise that didn’t do much to calm me.
Thor and I checked in. He told the clerk we were from Nebraska and waved a hand at Zeus and Odin, suggesting they were our assistants, not really with us, nothing to see. Zeus and Odin stood obediently by, having changed their demeanors to make themselves seem small and unremarkable, a truly amazing feat, considering. She wished us luck on the act and gave us our key cards.
Zeus and Odin rolled the box into the ginormous elevator. Thor hit the button for our floor. We didn’t talk all the way up to the twenty-seventh floor and down the hall to our suite.
The place was way more over the top than our usual spots, with everything overstuffed and megafancy and ultraposh, all marble and gold and silk with a hot tub fit for a prince, but fake somehow. It was all very full, yet all very empty.
They set the magician’s box in the corner, like it was just some stupid piece of luggage.
“Why do we have to keep him?” I asked. “You think they’re close?”
Thor shrugged. “You always want insurance.” An understatement. They would’ve ditched him if they had felt safe.
They set about exploring the room, stashing weapons, looking at potential escape routes. I waited in the lounge area at the center of the overly decorated suite.
“What the fuck,” I said when Zeus strolled back in.
“Welcome to Vegas,” he said, knowing exactly what the fuck my what the fuck was about.
When the inspection was complete, they opened up the box, and there was Denko slumped in the bottom, gagged, wrists and ankles bound in duct tape. Thor knelt in front of him and checked his pulse, then he pulled up his eyelids. “He’s good.” He pulled the tape off his mouth and slapped his cheeks. “Hey.”
The man mumbled. He and Odin carried him across the suite and propped him up on some cushions in the corner by the window, which had what I suppose was technically a great view of the Eiffel Tower except it wasn’t the Eiffel Tower.
“Did you put him by the window so we can watch him while we look at the view?” I asked.
“Of course,” Zeus said.
Professionals to the end.
“And you’re sure he’s okay?”
“Don’t be fooled,” Thor said. “He’s as alert and energetic as we are.”
Odin strolled off to a corner bar dripping with mirrored crystal. He grabbed what was no doubt a zillion-dollar bottle of scotch, twisted off the cap, and poured himself a drink. Thor went over and pulled a bottle of water from the small refrigerator. He brought it over to Denko, crouching, tipping the bottle into his mouth, taking care not to spill it all over him.
Denko drank pretty competently for a tied-up man. So maybe he was alert.
Zeus got on the phone and ordered a snack and sandwich cart to be left out in the hall. “Knock when it’s out there and we’ll grab it,” he said. Prudent, what with Denko like that. There were limits to hiding in plain sight, even here.
I strolled around the place. Two bedrooms with the usual spa-like bathroom. I returned to the main room and sunk into the couch. I didn’t like it. We were fake getting along, and now we were in this fake place. “I kind of wish we hadn’t come here,” I said.
Thor sunk down on one side of me; Zeus sat on my other side. Odin came over with a scotch and handed it down to Zeus.
A peace offering?
Zeus threw it back in a gulp.
“Just a matter of time,” Denko said from across the room. “We’re on your ass. You have to know it.”
Odin grinned at Denko. Odin usually had a beautiful smile, all dark tousled hair and gorgeous lashes and that glint in his golden eyes, but this smile wasn’t beautiful; it was a cold, harsh fuck you smile.
“Every fucking resource, pointing at you,” Denko said. “You think this hotel didn’t get a bulletin? You’ve been out of the agency all these years; you have no idea what we can do now. How close we can track.”
“Hasn’t done you much good so far,” Zeus said in his fake calm voice.
His fake calm voice.
Fuck.
How much trouble were we in?
“And when my men come for you—we’re talking minutes more than hours—this sea of civilians will not keep you safe.”
Thor crossed his legs. “Using civilians to keep safe isn’t our style anyway.”
“Have you thought about what I said, Nick?” Denko asked suddenly. “You could make her happy.”
“You want duct tape over your mouth for when the snacks come?” Zeus grumbled. “Is that what you want?”
“You could have a home, Nick. Children. A place in the community.”
Odin headed back for the bar. “Who’s gonna dig out the duct tape? I hope we packed it on top.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Denko doesn’t have any problems some duct tape can’t fix.”
Thor smiled at this.
Here was something we could agree on. Unite against Agent Denko! I thought. He’s a common enemy!
“Let
him say what he wants,” Zeus grumbled. “It doesn’t matter.”
Denko addressed Odin. “You know how Nick came to choose La Belle, Rashad? How he heard it was the best?”
“Don’t know, don’t care.” Odin poured himself another glass of scotch.
I frowned, hating that this guy knew things that we didn’t know about each other. Did it really not bother Odin?
“Tell them what day Valentine’s Day is, Nick. Tell them the significance of it.”
Zeus glared. “You think you know important things, but you don’t know shit.”
Thor stared at his own fingernails, but I could tell he was curious.
Zeus heaved himself up off the couch and joined Odin at the bar. Odin topped off his scotch. “Goddess? Want a drink?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Fine, I’ll tell them,” Denko continued. “Valentine’s Day was Nick’s parents’ anniversary. It’s an important day to him in a deep way.”
“Nice to see the agency shrink’s been so ethical about patient-client confidentiality,” Zeus said.
“And where do you think they would celebrate?”
“Here comes Denko with the big reveal,” Zeus said. “Or should we wait for the studio audience to guess?”
Shivers went over me. “At La Belle?” I tried. “Zeus, why didn’t you say?”
Zeus shrugged.
I wanted more than a shrug. I wanted him to take it seriously. I needed us to be serious. “Zeus, that was your parents’ special anniversary place?”
“When they could manage it.” Zeus took his scotch with him to the window.
“Tell us,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me,” I said.
He gazed out with a faraway look. “It was important to them,” he said softly. We all waited. He went on, “They really couldn’t afford it—it was their splurge. And I’d ask them, why splurge on an anniversary meal at a fancy restaurant when, you know, when we didn’t have enough money to get the car fixed and Mom had to bus it to work and Dad had been doing without his medication, and they’d say, this is where you go when you’re happy and in love.“
It was so sweet. He’d wanted us to carry on the tradition. Happy and in love.
“Zeus,” I whispered.
He shrugged it off. “So that’s how I knew about La Belle. No big. And now we have the money.” He came and sat back down with us, avoiding our gazes.
“You had good parents,” Denko said. “You were a good boy with good, hard-working parents—the kind of family people dream of having. You three, that fierce closeness.”
Zeus glared into the distance. I was thankful Denko didn’t know my name, didn’t know about how desperately I missed my sisters so that he could taunt me with memories like this.
Denko went on, relentlessly filling in the details of a lost, happy life. Christmas. Little League. Bingo the dog with one black foot. The clockmaker father. Family game night.
Zeus would never have that. He’d always have to keep running. We’d all have to keep running. I stared at my shoes, thinking about what an awesome father Zeus could’ve made. He’d be the kind to coach a soccer team. Fix things.
Denko went on. Zeus’s father had a clock shop in the neighborhood that he could walk to. Zeus would hang out there after school with Bingo.
Nobody stopped Denko. Should somebody stop him?
But then I realized that it was up to Zeus to stop him.
Why wasn’t Zeus stopping him?
That’s when I got it—Zeus loved the respite of his past. He loved it the way when, after you’ve been driving for hours and you’re tired, you rest your eyes—and you love that quick rest. A dangerous, seductive kind of rest. He missed the regular world. A regular life. Is that why he’d wanted us at La Belle? To pretend for a while?
He looked so alone. I put my arm around him, but still he seemed alone.
“And the way you and your mother cared for your dad at the end—that togetherness you had,” Denko continued. “We pulled you off that case in Yemen and sent you back—we knew you would’ve gone AWOL if we hadn’t. Your little family against that devastating disease. Remember how you fought for him? And your mother…you lost them too soon.”
Zeus looked bereft. I glanced at Thor, whose ordinarily sunny, happy eyes had lost some brightness. Odin furrowed his brows.
“You probably thought you could never have it again, but you see that you can with Isis. You see it. Even I see it,” Denko continued. “Isis has a good heart like that. You and her. It’s within your grasp.”
“We all have good hearts like that,” Zeus spat.
“That house is for sale,” Denko said.
Zeus stiffened. “What?”
“You know—561 Oak Mill Terrace. It’s been on the market for a while. It needs a little repair, of course. Remember how you and your father brought one of your mother’s yellow roses to the paint store to match it? The house it still that color. South side needs a new coat, though. Overhang is still leaking. The roses could use some TLC.”
My heart pounded. Even I had this urge to rescue the house. Fix it.
“Liar.”
“You think I would lie about something so easy to check? Go see for yourself.”
Odin’s voice sounded distant. “Zeus.”
Zeus shrugged. “Don’t worry.”
“Don’t worry?” Odin barked. “You think I don’t know how much you loved them?”
Zeus shrugged.
“How much you miss them?” Odin said.
Another shrug.
“Don’t fucking shrug me off.” Odin pushed away from the bar and moved near. “Why didn’t you say what La Belle meant?”
“I don’t know,” Zeus said.
“Let’s do some business, Nick,” Denko said. “It would be so easy—”
Zeus shot Denko a look so hard, so full of fury, it would stop a tornado in its tracks. I pulled my arm away. Denko stopped talking. It chilled the whole room—even the poshness frenzy seemed to calm.
I laid a hand on his arm. “Zeus.”
“It’s not just about the anniversary.” He looked at all of us—me, Thor, Odin. “I’m going to be honest, I’ve been freaking out.” He stood and took a few steps around, unsure, it seemed, where to go, what to do with himself. He gazed out at fake Paris.
None of us dared to speak.
“Since I was a kid, one of my greatest dreams has been to have a family just the one I grew up in. When ZOX recruited me, I never saw it as a career. I wanted to walk down to the same shop every day for thirty years. I wanted that stability and simplicity. Traditions. A simple, normal family. All throughout being in the agency, even through us knocking over banks, I still had that in my mind—that someday I would have that life for my own.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “My family was amazing, you guys. You wouldn’t believe. Growing up, all I wanted was to be like that—have this stupid, simple life. And yeah, that door’s been closed a long time. And I’ve been realizing that lately, and it’s been fucking me up.”
So that was the P.I. agency impulse. A shop we could walk to. A way to feel normal.
“And then Diego walked in with all of his talk about how important his family was to him, to hear him describe that life he dreamed of with Maria. Fucking Diego…” Zeus took a ragged breath.
“That door is open,” Denko said. “You just have to choose to walk through it.”
I cringed as Zeus strolled over to him. Would he put a foot through his face? Knock him out again? Throw him out the window? But he simply stopped. Stood over him. Towered over him.
Zeus seemed larger just then—badass and beautiful. Achingly vulnerable.
Odin went up behind Zeus. “We can never give you that.” His voice was full of emotion. “The same house for 30 years. The office down the corner.”
“I can,” Denko said.
My throat felt thick.
Zeus stared down at Denko. “I love these people
. I’d die for these people. I’m grieving a loss, that’s all. The loss of that dream. I never quite let go of that boyhood dream, that’s all. And when I realized that I could never have all that…” He turned to us then, green eyes burning. “I was scared.” He eyed each of us, connecting with each of us. “Scared of doors closing, scared of losing you guys, too. It made me want to clamp down and control you guys harder. And that whole watching thing? I wasn’t being honest, either. It wasn’t out of line, not for us—who gives a fuck about somebody watching? Even Denko. Making that rule, it was about controlling you and pulling you closer, because I was fucking insecure. But instead of pulling you closer to me, it pushed you away.”
Odin put his hand on Zeus’s shoulder. “Why didn’t you say?”
“That I mourn something impossible that I can never have? That I dream of walking down the aisle someday? It’s stupid. And I don’t even want it, really—not if it means not having us.”
“Don’t fool yourself, Nick—it’s only going to get worse,” Denko said. “The personality mix I’m seeing here is clearly not viable long term. These three live to break rules. Especially Rashad—there is no rule he won’t break, no boundary he won’t push. He can’t help it—it’s his patterning, and it will only get worse.”
Odin glared at Denko. “Fucking-g patterning—fuck you.”
“Say what you will, Rashad. You could barely control yourself once you saw Nick making rules.”
Odin sniffed.
“You were a bull seeing red. You couldn’t think straight. Ice knew he was in pain, but you, his oldest friend, did you have any clue of this? No.”
Odin was doing his best to look annoyed, but I could see the horror in his eyes.
“You were a bull charging at a red flag.” Denko had a point—Odin had been kind of knee-jerky about the whole thing. “You can’t help it. It’s how you survived prison.”
Odin’s stare turned murderous.
“It’s how you kept from breaking,” Denko continued. “That’s what’s in you.”
I held my breath. Did Denko have a death wish or what?
The Most Wanted (Taken Hostage by Kinky Bank Robbers #4) Page 18
