Her eyes went wide. “You found this?!” she gushed, taking it from my hands to open and rifle through it.
“Yeah, I went to talk to Blue after you and Nadiah left. Scoped things out, checked if anybody saw anything.”
“Did they?”
I shook my head. “Nah. It was a side street, in the morning. Nothing useful yet. I’ve got eyes and ears on it though.”
“Using people you know through Ches?” Aly asked, not bothering to hide the skepticism in her tone.
“Damn, you really don’t trust her, do you?”
“Not even a little.”
“Do you trust me?”
She pulled in a breath. “Maddox, don’t—”
“Just hear me out?” I asked, holding my hands up. “I’ve known Ches a long ass time, but I’m not blind, okay? No lie, in your shoes, I don’t know that I’d trust her either. But – she knows how I feel about you. Knows how Mos feels about Nadiah. If for no other reason than for our sake, she wouldn’t let anybody harm you. Mos and I are family to her, and despite her bullshit, that still means something to her. It makes the two of you family too.”
Aly let out the breath she’d pulled in and tilted her head. “Are you trying to convince me, or yourself?”
“You,” I told her, confidently.
Ches wasn’t that far gone, not yet.
I looked down as my pager buzzed, checking the screen before I held it up.
“Look,” I said. “This is her seeing if I’m with you. She wants you to come by – she feels bad about yesterday, wants to apologize.”
Aly laughed. “Does she really think I’d believe a single word of apology from her mouth?”
“You’d be crazy if you did,” I admitted. “It won’t be sincere. She’s not sorry. But she wants peace, which is what this is about, I guarantee you. It’s an olive branch – that you don’t have to accept, I won’t be mad or anything if you don’t. Ches was rude as fuck yesterday, honestly.”
“You’re right.”
I nodded. “But, if you want to accept, I can bring you back with me. You’ll be safe. And she might have new information about the kidnapping attempt, her scouts usually deliver first thing in the morning.”
“Do I have to go, to hear the update?”
“No,” I shook my head. “I’ll hit you with anything important. You do not have to do this. At all.”
“I need to think about it, so I’ll catch another ride. But thank you.”
“You’re welcome. I lied about there not being a present.”
Her eyebrow hiked up. “What?”
“You didn’t notice the gift I left? In your sketchbook? I hope you don’t mind.”
“You went through my sketchbook?!” she screeched, snatching it out of the bag she was still holding.
“Everything was spilled out on the ground,” I explained. “I took the notebook off some kid and had to flip through to make sure it was yours. You’re good. Like really fucking good.”
“I’m really fucking embarrassed,” she countered, clutching the sketchbook over her face.
“Nah, don’t be,” I told her, pulling the book down. “Let me show you this.” I took it from her hands, flipping to a certain page. “Look – you drew me, and I drew you. I mean, mine isn’t all detailed and shit like yours, but you get the picture.”
For a long moment, Aly just stared at the piece of paper I’d slipped into the book, instead of using one of her pages. After a while, she looked up, meeting my gaze. “You are such a damn fool,” she got out, before she burst out laughing at my stick-figure drawing with tits and an afro that was twice the size of the rest of the drawing.
“You don’t like my art?” I asked, making her laugh harder as she reached up to cup my face in her hands.
“I think you need practice.” She pushed up on her toes, pressing her lips to mine. “I can teach you.”
I used my free hand to catch her around the waist, keeping her close. “I’d like that.”
“I would too.”
We kissed again, slow and sweet, until I really needed to head back to Underground for a briefing. I watched her until she was tucked back into Ruby’s house before I pulled off to get to the other end of the Burrows.
Somebody better have something for me.
The vibe was off.
I felt it as soon as I walked into Underground, but I’d felt that so often in the last few months of dealing with Ches’ antics that I brushed it off and went on about my business, only stopping when my pager went off again.
“Need to talk to you. NOW. – Mos”
I frowned.
What the hell is this about?
Instead of continuing on to Ches’ office, I detoured to the computer room where I could usually find Mos. When I got there, I found the door locked and the lights off, neither of which was a typical state. I moved on to his room, which was locked too.
“Mos,” I called through the door as I knocked. “You in there? Open up!”
After a few seconds, I heard the bolt disengage, and the door opened just enough for me to slip in before Mos locked it behind me, looking jittery and stressed as fuck.
“You want to tell me what the hell is going on? Why is your door locked? Why is the computer room locked?”
“To keep me out,” Mos answered, scrubbing a hand over his head. “Ches, man. I knew something was off, but I didn’t want to believe…”
I grabbed him by the shoulders. “Believe what? You’re not telling me anything right now.”
“I don’t know where to fucking start.”
“Just pick a place and talk,” I demanded. “You’ve got me on edge and shit already doesn’t feel right.”
“Because it isn’t. You know I got into the Apex internet yesterday, right? All the shit happens with Nadiah and Aly, they pack up, leave, all that. You go out investigating, I stay here trying to dig into as much as I can, until Ches pulls me off – claims she doesn’t want me to trigger any security measures and get caught – as if I would get caught. But whatever, she seems scared, so fine – I’ll go back to working on things for the Burrows.”
I nodded. “Okay… that doesn’t sound off.”
“It didn’t seem like it to me either, until she pulls me from the computer room too this morning. Worried about power surges and detection, brushing off my assurances that none of that is a concern. She locks me out of there and then has her goons check my room for other devices – takes all that too.”
My eyes narrowed. “But you had shit that didn’t get taken, right?”
“You know me Mad,” Mos laughed. “Of course I had shit that didn’t get taken. But I knew there was something she must not have wanted me to find, so I didn’t put up a fuss – I went with it. As soon as they left me alone, I locked the door, and hit Nadiah up.”
“You paged her?”
He smirked and shook his head. “Nah.” He pulled a cell phone – not one of the really old school ones that could only pull a cellular signal, like the ones he was trying to get working on a network for Ches. A sleek, glossy smartphone, like the ones they used in the Apex – phones we had in abundance, but couldn’t do shit with here. Unless…
“You figured out how to make it work?”
“Been figured out how to make it work – just had to make sure it was consistent, and had some reach on the signal. Nadiah was the one to help me pull the last of it together, and the first one to test it from a distance with me. We rigged it to use the cellular signal.”
My eyes went wide. “So both of you are damn geniuses?”
“Nah – Nadiah is the genius. Ruby has Apex internet access, and computers too. Perks of being the queen I guess. Nadiah hacked the APF warrant database, found out exactly what crimes they were accused of. Treason, dereliction of duty, kidnapping for their grandmother.”
“That’s fucked up…”
Mos shook his head. “It’s not the most fucked up part though.”
I frowned. “Okay, then what is?
”
“The APF has like a database, I’ll call it, where all their tips and information, case files, all that, is digitally logged – backups. This includes transcripts of phone calls related to the cases too.”
“Mos… where are you going with this?”
He sighed. “Aly was right, Mad.”
“Right about what?”
“About not trusting Ches. She did this. Nadiah found it all – the intake report from one of the scouts, the phone calls between officers about it. She told them Aly and Nadiah were ‘her sons’ girlfriends’, and that she had access. She negotiated a reward amount, which is what gave them the idea of doing a bounty. And she got them to suppress the news coming into the Burrows, which is why it was so delayed for it to get back to us. They were supposed to be delivered to the gate tomorrow.”
Stunned wasn’t quite the right word for what went through me. I slipped my fingers under my hat, digging my nails into my scalp as if scratching would make this shit make sense.
“She called us her sons, but she did this shit. When?”
“The correspondence started about a week ago. The day after she told us about those weapons she was trying to get.”
My head dropped back, and I closed my eyes, digging my teeth into my lip to keep from letting out a roar. “Money. That’s why she was being skittish about telling me how she planned to pay for that shit, cause she knew… fuck!” I put a thumb to my temple, trying to ease the tension building in my head. “She stood and lied right in my goddamn face. Called me her motherfucking family, and then… how the hell did she pull this off? How was she communicating with them?”
“Her pager, and scouts. If Aly and Nadiah hadn’t been able to dodge this shit, she would’ve gotten away with it. There was a place where they flat out asked her, won’t your ‘sons’ be mad at you?” Mos stopped speaking, shook his head. “She was going to pin it on your cage fighting. Try to say it was somebody you fucked up, getting back at you.”
I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t get shit to come out.
What the fuck could I say, faced with all this?
Even with everything going on, I’d wanted to believe she did still share the same deep-seated loyalty we’d developed early on. Our history should have demanded that shit. And now she was willing to betray Mos, betray me, for… I didn’t understand what she was looking for.
“She wants to be on the same level as Ruby,” Mos spoke up, as if he’d read my mind. “That’s something I’ve always seen – something we’ve talked about, but she tried to make a play for some power here with the APF. They laughed behind her back – called her primitive and shit, since she had to communicate with the pager, since we don’t have a landline phone established here at the compound. She got a promise that if she delivered Aly and Nadiah, something could be arranged.”
I blew out a sigh.
There it was – not just money, but power, that thing made Ches ruthless and blind in her pursuit. I wanted to blame it on the abuse we’d suffered in the Apex, all those years ago, but she’d come out of that with some kindness left. She met Ruby, we got Mos. Ruby had been the one who got us out of the Apex and into the Burrows in the first place, where Ches had flourished, even before she betrayed her friend.
She’d clawed her way to a position that should’ve been everything she wanted, and somehow… it still wasn’t enough. Didn’t seem like it would ever be enough, until she was alone.
She and I needed to have a fucking conversation.
“How long ago did you find all this out?” I asked, my brain working overtime to make sense of it all.
“I hit your pager while I was talking to Nadiah, she just found all this, within the last thirty minutes. All the stuff about Ches is just one file, and she hasn’t gone through everything yet.”
I nodded. “Okay. I need you to get in touch with Nadiah, tell her and Aly to stay put. Ches used me this morning, to get Aly back in here.”
Fuck.
I was glad Aly had enough sense not to come with me, to want to take a moment to think about it. She’d seen this situation much more clearly than I had.
“Actually…”
I looked up at Mos, alarmed by his tone. “What is it?”
“Aly had already left for that meeting with Ches, before Nadiah found everything. She said Aly left maybe twenty minutes after you did, and she’s not responding to any of Nadiah’s messages.”
“Shit… twenty minutes after I left? And we’ve been talking for… goddamnit, she’s probably already here.” I flexed my fingers, pacing the room for a moment as I tried to think. “Okay, you’ve gotta get out of here. Take the phone, and anything else you can throw into a little bag – act normal. Get down to the garage, get a bike, go straight to Ruby’s.”
He frowned. “What about me helping you here though?”
“The best thing you can do to help me is getting out of here before hell breaks loose – so I only have one person to worry about, instead of two. Tell me you’ve got me on that, Mos.”
I knew he wasn’t happy about it, but he nodded. “Yeah bro. I got you.”
“Good.” I slapped hands with him, pulling him into a quick, tight hug before I bounded out of the room, heading for my original destination – Ches’ office. Mos wasn’t a fighter, but I’d taught him enough that he could hold his own if he needed to. Not to mention, he carried a blade just like the one I kept tucked at my belt, even inside the compound where weapons weren’t technically allowed.
I hated that I felt like I might need it. Any beef with Ches aside, I cared about the people she referred to as her soldiers – I’d fought beside these folks, protected their lives like they’d protected mine. I chilled with them, drank with them – liked them, when they weren’t tapdancing on my nerves. I hoped I could let my knife stay where it was.
That hope was short lived.
As I ascended the first of the two levels of stairs to Ches’ office, three figures came into view, like they were there to guard the landing, which wasn’t that unusual.
Juju, Bandz, Jab.
I was all set to give my usual greeting, since I hadn’t seen them in a few days, when I noticed something.
Juju didn’t look any different from usual, except for the fact that her eyes wouldn’t stop moving, a nervous flittering from me, to her crew, to the door of Ches’ office.
Bandz was standing a little funny.
Jab had a big ass knot, right in the middle of his forehead.
“… you motherfuckers…,” I growled, more to myself than them, because they knew what the fuck they’d done. I didn’t question or second-guess it – I pulled my knife and aimed, sinking the wide, jagged blade into one of Jab’s thighs and then the other before I turned to Bandz, armed with just my fists.
Jab didn’t have enough heart to pull that blade out of his leg.
Juju’s defensive fists didn’t mean shit as I hammered my fists into Bandz, thinking about him daring to go after Aly, knowing who she was. I had no plans of stopping until I’d rearranged his face to my satisfaction, and then it would be Jab’s turn. Juju could try all she wanted to pull me off her partner, but they were paying for this shit. Didn’t take much to deduce that she’d been the driver, and was as guilty as the other two as far as I was concerned. I didn’t hit women, but once I was done with the others, chances were low I’d feel any guilt about tossing her over the stair rail or something.
Or maybe I’d let Aly do it.
Suddenly, I realized Juju wasn’t hitting me anymore. Before I could process where she might have gone, hot electricity surged through me, overloading my nerves and leaving behind the distinct sensation that my skin was on fire.
I slumped backward as the connection between my limbs and my brain broke, leaving me unable to move. Bandz was out, but the animalistic scream that burst from Jab let me know I should’ve been paying a little more attention to Juju.
He may not have been willing to pull that blade out of his leg, but she was.
She stood over me with it now, her face pulled into a snarl. “Well, well, well. Look at Prince Maddox now,” she said, her usual bubbliness twisted into a mocking tone. “You were always in the way. She didn’t need us because of you.” I noticed the taser in her other hand just before she pressed it again, sending another wave of hot, paralyzing electricity through my body. “But then you got distracted. By some irrelevant bitch from the Mids! You wouldn’t look my way, but you fall all over her?!” Juju’s lips curled into a snarl. “Oh Mad, I’m going to enjoy this.”
She held the knife high, like she was getting ready to plunge it into my chest. Before she could, her head rocked to the side, the knife and taser clattering to the floor just before she hit it herself, crumpling into a heap at my feet.
“Wow, sis. You like totally rocked that bitch.”
“Completely rocked that bitch. Like, wow. I feel powerful right now.”
“Like super powerful, it’s totally how you should feel.”
A relieved sigh blew from my lips as the feeling came back to my limbs. I’d never been so glad to be subjected to the twins and their back and forth – never been happier to see them than when they stood over me, peering down.
“Are you okay, Mad?”
“Yeah Mad, are you okay?”
They were both wearing rose-gold brass knuckles, dotted with lethal-looking studs. Dee was the one rubbing her hand though, so I assumed she was the one who’d thrown the punch.
“Yeah,” I groaned, dragging myself into a seated position, though my head was still swimming. “Are you?”
“I feel great,” Dee said. “Like, totally amazing.”
“You should feel amazing, totally,” Dem encouraged. “You got that bitch out of here.”
“All the way out of here – I got her.”
“Where did y’all come from?” I asked, interrupting their loop as I looked around. Juju was still knocked out, Bandz was a mess, groaning through something that still kinda resembled his mouth, and Jab had dragged himself, bleeding, halfway down the stairs.
“We ran into Mos, on the way up from the garage,” Dee said, her eyes on her sister as Dem sashayed down to where Jab was, put her foot against his back and shoved, sending him rolling down the rest of the stairs.
Wonder Page 23
