by Finn, Emilia
I take out two iced donuts and set them on the paper bag they came in. Clapping my hands together as though to brush flour off them, I look up and smile. “Now, eat up and tell me what’s going on.”
Marcie’s left wrist is bruised and swollen from the billion times they’ve pricked it with needles, but she reaches out with deft movements and picks up her treat. “Not much happening here. I have chemo this afternoon.”
“You ready for it?”
She scoffs and waves me off, but it’s fake. It’s all fake. “I’m always ready. Mom and Dad will be here around midday, then they’ll come sit with me for the afternoon.”
“Good thing you get a donut then, huh?”
“Right?” Snickering, she takes a hefty bite and grins with pink teeth. “If you brought this tomorrow, I might have hated you. How’s life on the outside?”
I take a much smaller bite and laugh. “Things are good for me. The guys are still being annoying, but they’re the guys, so it’s expected.”
“But Mitch is a cutie, huh? I see him sometimes when he transports someone up here.”
“Mitchell is twice your age, Marcie! Quit that.”
The girl giggles until it turns to piggy snorts. “But he’s so dreamy.” She stops laughing, and gives a pathetic, dramatic sigh. “So dreamy. Only seven more months until I’m an adult.”
“Marcie…”
“Do you think he’ll marry me when I turn eighteen?”
“Marcie!” I smack her blanket-covered knee, but that only makes her fall into piggy snorts all over again. “No, he will not marry you when you’re eighteen. He is a grown man, and I’ll kill him if he’s looking at you that way. What about that boy from school? He likes you. And he’s your age.”
She sobers up much too fast. “He doesn’t come up here anymore. He stopped liking me when this round of chemo began.”
“Oh, honey.” My chest aches as I lean forward. “I’m sorry.”
“Guess he likes girls with hair and no expiration date.”
“Baby…”
I take her donut and set it on the paper bag beside mine. Leaning forward, I pull her into a gentle hug and hold onto the hurt that wants to break out of my body when my hands stop on her bony shoulder blades. She’s taller than me by several inches, but lighter. She’s too skinny. Too sick.
“He’s a stinky boy, and he’ll always regret blowing you off. He’ll always look at his future wife and wonder about you.”
“He won’t have to wonder,” she mumbles. “I’ll be sure to haunt him.”
“No you won’t,” I snap. “This is just another crappy speedbump. But we’re gonna ride it together, right? You’re not allowed to haunt anyone.”
Sitting back with a thoughtful pause, she picks up her donut and picks at the rainbow sprinkles on top. “Ya know, I always wonder why you keep coming back here.” She pulls back and studies my eyes. “If I was you, if I got my walking papers and tests that said I’d beat it, I’d run far, far away. I wouldn’t keep coming back here and risking the cancer germ.”
I reach out and take her hand, frowning as I go. “Cancer isn’t a cold that I can catch because I touch you, honey. It’s a journey that only the elite navigate. We need to fight together. I know with all my heart that when you’re my age, you’ll be doing the exact same thing, coming in here, bringing donuts, and talking about all your post-hospital plans.”
“You’re always so optimistic,” she grumbles. “It’s annoying.”
I laugh and pick my donut up again. “Sometimes we’re saddled with the most annoying friends, huh?”
12
Spence
Mitchell Rosa is a twenty-eight-year-old local EMT. He’s the fourth son of Filipe and Chloe Rosa, the fourth of six Rosa children in total. Nixon Rosa is his twenty-seven-year-old brother, the youngest of all the boys, and works for the fire department. He’s on shift right now while I sit at my laptop and clumsily try to dig into his family.
I just want to make sure it’s all as Abigail says, because that’s two brothers I’ve met now, and though I admit to stepping up too, most brothers aren’t quite that triggered or in a guy’s face just because he wants to talk to their sister.
I don’t get what’s going on with that family, and the not knowing bothers me.
After finding what I already knew on the younger brothers, I’ve started looking into the others, but I don’t have the skills Sophia does, and she refuses to help me.
She flat out refuses to so much as type their names for me.
I can find general identification records for four of the five brothers. They all have this Portuguese look, with the olive skin and dark hair. Not one of them looks like Abigail, and they don’t entirely look like each other besides the coloring and eyes, but Abigail looks like her mother, so I’ve checked that off in my head and decided she wasn’t adopted. Abigail is a Rosa; she just got her mother’s genes.
But that’s all the information I can find, and no matter how many times I want to smash my fist on my laptop, I’m not skilled enough to go deeper.
Something niggles in the back of my brain. That same something that started niggling the very moment I saw Nixon Rosa. It refuses to stop, and that annoys the shit out of me.
What is it about them that raises my hackles? Why do I feel this deep hunger to know something about a girl I’m actively not getting attached to?
Oh, I know! Because I already feel a sense of responsibility, despite the big fat ‘Fuck No!’ I continue to shout in my brain.
We don’t develop connections. We don’t create a weakness that could end with a dead wife and kid, the way Eric’s life turned out. People want to hurt us. Always. The folks I’ve run up against over the years have long memories, and they have us in their targets. My friends might have forgotten about our enemies, but I haven’t, so I’ve lived fifteen years of meaningless hookups just so I never end up with a dead loved one.
I’m not ready to change that, but here I am, sitting at the spare desk in Kane’s Checkmate office while I bang at this useless laptop, and Sophia sits ten feet away with a piece of gum in her mouth.
She watches me, stretches her gum out on her finger, then slurps it back up and mocks me. “Let it go, Spence.” She taps her boots on the side of her desk. “Fuck her, don’t fuck her. Do whatever you wanna do with her body, but stay away from her private data without her permission.”
“Shut up, ballerina. You’re the queen of data breach. Don’t come at me with your shit about privacy now.”
She shrugs and flashes a grin when Jay walks through the office. He takes her smile as invitation, drops to one knee and pleads with his eyes, but she only shakes her head and sends him away again.
“I hack data that needs to be hacked in order to do something important. Ya know, have people killed, save people, steal money. That sorta shit. But I don’t hack civilian lives just because you asked me to.”
“They’re not just civilians, Soph! They’re… I don’t know what they are. But they make my hair stand up, and I don’t like that one bit. It would take you two fucking minutes to help me, and then you’d be free again.”
“Nope. Not okay. I’m not hacking into her shit just because you said so.”
Soph’s phone rings in her pocket. Fuck knows how she gets things into her pockets, since the denim is nothing more than a second skin, but I guess phones are thin now too to keep up.
She pulls it out with a frown, then accepts the call. “Romeo? Yeah.”
I watch her while she listens for a long minute. If I looked close enough, I could almost see how her brain clicks over and processes everything the person on the other end is saying.
“Yeah, we had a meet with them last week. I dunno if I trust his word, but– right. That’s what Jay said.” She listens some more. “Okay, keep watching. I might need you to move soon. We take him out if we need to, but don’t jump the gun. We’re close, so…” She stops to listen, but her gum-smacking has stopped. “Yep. Find him. He�
�s watching us, but I’d rather not die today… Okay. Check in again when you move.”
Soph hangs up and goes back to tapping her feet on the desk like the phone call was nothing. When I say nothing, but continue to stare, she freezes and lifts a brow. “What?”
“You just ordered a hit on a man. Wanna talk about it?”
She snorts and drops her feet to the floor so she can sit up tall. “I didn’t order a hit. In fact, I told him to hold. I’m not ready for termination yet, so he’s been ordered to watch and wait.”
“Who is he? And does Jay know you’re ordering hits without him?”
She laughs again, but we all know Jay was her assassin not so long ago. We also know he can be petty and juvenile, so to know he’s been replaced would hurt him.
“Jay knows about my guy.”
“They’ve met?”
She shrugs. “Not technically. Romeo is my muscle, so he pulled Jay out of that club when it was burning to the ground. I used to keep him a little closer, but now Jay’s here, so I push my other guy back.”
“Closer?” I lean forward and glance down the hall in search of Jay, then bring my eyes back to Soph. “You fuck all your muscle, Sophia? Doubt Jay would be thrilled with that.”
“No.” She huffs. “I meant closer geographically. Which, by the way, was the right move, considering I sent him into that club after Jay. We had minutes to move, so keeping my guy a hundred miles away wouldn’t have really cut the cheese in that scenario, would it? But now Jay is here, he’s part of the Checkmate army, so I push my guy back and use him to collect intel.”
“Speaking of…” I turn the laptop and push it to the edge of my desk. “Please?”
“No!” She stands and comes around her desk. Storming toward me in body-hugging clothes that show off her perfect ballerina form, she snaps my laptop closed and glares. “Leave her be. You can approach her the old-fashioned way like regular folks.”
“What the hell is the old-fashioned way?”
“No intel. No secrets. A girl wants to swoon, Spencer. Which is why I’ve sent Jay on his quest for the perfect proposal. Abby wants a prince; if you don’t know how to make a girl swoon, then you’re not her prince.”
“Swoon.” I pull the laptop toward me on a growl. “You’re dreaming if you think I’m gonna romance a chick. If she doesn’t wanna fuck, then that’s up to her. But I don’t care about any woman enough to want to romance her.”
Laughing, she walks toward the hall with a wave of her hand. “If you say so.”
“I say so!”
“Uh-huh.” She stops at the doorway and turns back with a grin. “That’s what I just said.”
I sit at my desk after she leaves and stare at the closed laptop. I don’t have the skills to do anything more than a general address, date of birth, phone number search. And I already know all of that stuff. So… old-fashioned?
“Fuck.”
I stand up fast and send the rolling chair back against the wall. I check my thigh holster out of habit, then dig a hand into my pocket and drag out my car keys. Because I’m a fuckin’ pussy who’s about to go old-school.
Swinging out of the office and past Kane’s robust – and by ‘robust,’ I mean three-hundred-pound – receptionist, I hurry along before she jumps up and tries to hump my leg and make ‘yeah baby’ noises.
That’s not my ego talking; Dolly dry humps everyone, and now that Kane is hitched, she has to turn her sights on the rest of us. While Kane is hanging at the hospital with Jess, the rest of us are getting his share.
And it’s a fuckin’ lot.
“Tell the guys I’ve gone out if they ask.”
“Sure thing, sugar. Did you hear Jessie got out of bed today?”
I stop at the front door and turn back. “Uh, no. Good for her.”
“Uh-huh. Now she’s just gotta take a crap, and everything will be all better.”
“Okay, thanks for putting that in my head.”
I see a woman who’s been chopped in half trying to take a shit and hoping it passes through her ass and not her incision. I see little Jessie becoming one of those play-doh toys, where the dough squeezes out of every orifice. Jessie’s dough is shit, and now it’s coming out of her head.
“Gross. I don’t need to know her private business, Dolly. Lemme know if they call here and need anything. Otherwise, I’ll head back up this afternoon and see them.”
“You got it. Sophia has dance this afternoon, so I’m gonna be over there with the kidlets.”
“Not my business. I don’t work here. I just hang out sometimes.”
The woman with F-cup tits and enough hair to smother a man firms her lips. “Whatever you say, sugar. Everybody comes here to see me. You don’t have to pretend. I’m single, you’re single…”
“I’m leaving.” I walk away and slide into my car parked on the street out front.
I drive a jacked-up, lifted, tricked out, almost bomb-proof, civilian stock Humvee. Because I can. Because the military wouldn’t let me keep the original Humvee that sustained the kind of blow that should have killed me. Now I’m brand loyal, and plan to always turn heads when I drive down Main Street; which I don’t do all that often.
The town we live in is small, so it only takes me ten minutes to get to Checkmate from my place outside town. And it only takes two minutes to get from Checkmate to Abigail’s shop. Three streets over and ample parking out front, I take up two spots, and climb out with an odd thrumming to my pulse.
I don’t get nervous. Ever.
But I’m here to see Abigail, and because of my conspicuous ride, she’ll already know I’m here. She’s had twenty seconds to run away, or to prepare a speech about crass pricks.
Both options suck, but I’d prefer the second. Watching her sputter her way through an angry speech is legions better than not seeing her at all.
I climb out and drop the keys into my pocket. I’m walking in wearing work attire today – camo pants, thigh holsters, dark shirt, and combat boots. She’s seen me in a suit, and she’s seen me in jeans. Now she’ll see me the way my friends see me, but I know my firearms probably won’t go over well.
“I’m not leaving them in my glovebox. Fuck that shit.”
I step through the front door and scowl when the bell above announces my arrival. The chick I spoke to yesterday looks up and grins. She’s working with a potted plant at the front counter, but then Abigail steps through from the back and stops on a skid when our eyes meet. Hers widen, and the blue and green send me off kilter, just like they have every other time I’ve seen her.
I mean, who the fuck has two different colored eyes?
I want it to be annoying, I want to make out that it’s a vanity choice and stupid, which in itself is stupid, but all I can do now and every time I see her is stare for a moment and let myself adjust.
She wears her matronly blouse again, and blue jeans that at least fit her a little better today – though nothing will ever fit her as well as that gown did at the wedding. She carries a heavy stack of flowers. They look ready for a bouquet. No thorns, no dangling leaves, no browned petals. They’re long-stemmed, the stems are straight, and the flowers at the end are perfectly rounded and neat.
“Spencer?” Her voice quivers. It’s barely there, but my body is so fucking attuned to her every move, I’d know if she sprouted a new freckle overnight.
She didn’t.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m just gonna go out the back and…” Nadia looks between me and Abigail. “Well, mind my own business and all that. You know where to find me.”
“Nadia, no–” Abigail reaches out for her friend, but the other woman slips out of the room and leaves us standing in silence but for the radio that plays from the speakers in the corners.
“Um…”
She turns back and places the stack of flowers on the counter. Folding her arms, she shields herself from me. She always covers up. But not the way other women do; Abigail covers herself with bad p
osture and folded arms, where other women cake on makeup and bad attitudes. Abigail’s face is bare today, back to the innocent I met two weeks ago. But she’s not innocent. I’ve already touched her. I’ve already tasted her.
“Can I help you?” she finally asks.
“I’m looking for flowers.” I clear my throat and take a step forward. Romance. You gotta romance her. Why? I have no fuckin’ idea. “I need something new for Jessie.”
“You brought flowers to her just yesterday. That bunch will still be fresh.”
“I know.” I continue forward, though slowly, to give her a chance to back up.
Ever since she stared into my eyes at the hospital and begged me to walk away, I’ve found myself wanting to grant her wishes. All of them. For as long as she stares at me like that and begs.
“But she had two babies, and still needs to shi–” I pause. “Uh… poop. I was gonna head up there later, so I thought a new bouquet would cheer her up.”
“Um… okay. If you’re being extra generous, maybe get her a candy bar too. Two of them, since her sister will take one.”
“Mm,” I grunt. “Laine’s got an attitude problem.”
“Really?” She studies me as I come closer. “She seemed nice. Quiet, but kind.”
“She is kind.” I stop when my toes touch the front of the counter. I’ll let her keep that space for now, but I lean onto my elbows and encroach as much as I can. “She’s actually a sweetheart. But she’s got attitude.”
“You don’t like women with attitude?” Her eyes dart over my face, watching me as though I’m a wild animal in the forest. She’s not sure if I’m friend or foe.
“I actually kinda love women with attitude. I guess it just depends on how and where they use it.”
“Are you and Laine… uh… did you ever…”
“Hook up?” I scoff. “No. Never. She’s with Angelo. I mean, it’s not like the idea of blonde twins never crossed my mind, but they’re taken, so–”
Those bicolored eyes narrow to angry slits. “You admitted to taking that other girl. You took her from that guy in the bar.”
