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Oh. Right in front of her.
“Thanks again,” she called out.
On the far side, the training center’s parking area was multi-leveled and largely empty, just a couple of blacked-out vans angled butt-first in their spaces—oh, and a blacked-out school bus that looked like it was delivering pupils to an academy for pool sharks and loan enforcers. As she walked over to the reinforced entrance into the training center proper, her footfalls echoed around in a way that would have creeped her out if she hadn’t been in a Brotherhood’s facility.
But she was super safe here. Nobody got this far unless they were allowed.
At the fortified steel door, she had to wait again, and then she was permitted to pass into the concrete corridor that ran the length of the training center.
Now the nerves hit, and to distract herself, she got walking and glanced into the classrooms that were dormant. Waves of trainees had gone through the Brothers’ program and received all kinds of instruction, but the classes were staggered, sometimes by whole calendar years, and she didn’t know when the next one started. There would be a new crew coming in at some point, though.
The war with the Lessening Society demanded it.
The clinic was about halfway down, right before the weight and locker rooms, and as she reached the series of closed doors, she wasn’t sure what to do.
Or really even why she was here.
Well, she’d overheard her father talking about how much fun he’d had posing as a cop downtown—and then he’d mentioned his “precious cargo” as he’d called it.
So now she was here—
“Hey, stranger. Twice in one week, what’re the chances.”
Swinging around, she smiled. “Hi, Shuli—oh, wow.”
The guy was in a set of red silk PJs and coordinating silk robe, a pair of monogrammed velvet slippers peeking out under the hemmed bottoms. He also had a medical supply cane braced against the floor, and as he came closer, his limp was such that he probably shouldn’t have been out of whatever bed he’d been assigned. His hair, which was usually styled with a swoop, had been combed back wet, straight from his aristocratic face, as if he was fresh out of the shower.
He certainly smelled that way, some kind of expensive cologne or shaving cream wafting toward her.
“Like my hospital duds?” He went to do a little turn, but then winced and seemed to rethink the effort. “Mydoggenbrought them in.”
“Very spiffy.”
His handsome face tightened. “You’re not here to see me, are you.”
“Oh, of course I am. I heard my father—”
“Got me and L.W. out of the field.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
Shuli took a deep breath. “He’s right in there. The door you’re standing in front of.”
Before Bitty could say anything to make it look less like she’d come uninvited to see a male she really had no business visiting, Shuli smiled.
“I’m going to get back in bed. The break room’s enticements are not as enticing as I thought they’d be. Fucking Percocet. Always messes my stomach up.”
The fighter continued muttering about how he’d prefer a bottle of bourbon as he headed into the patient room next door.
And then she was by herself.
Before anybody else came along—although it wasn’t like this whole thing wasn’t being recorded anyway—she knocked on the door.
“Yeah?” came the deep voice on the other side.
“It’s… um, me. Bitty?”
There was a pause, and yup, it was entirely possible L.W. was going to send her packing. Except then she heard something that sounded a lot like—
