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But I had no idea at the time. So we all just sat down and got to work until a couple hours later, Lo walked in with a refill for L and Alex who was every bit the addict L was, though she picked on him about it.
"Mina, come take a walk with me," she suggested in a way that wasn't a suggestion, but an order.
"I am pretty much useless here anyway," I said, looking over at L and Alex as they click-click-clicked away on their respective laptops as they had been doing for hours, occasionally mumbling something to the other, but mostly leaving me out of the loop. Three people used to working by themselves being forced to work together was an interesting dynamic.
"You haven't been sleeping," she observed as we walked the halls that would eventually lead outside.
"I've been having bad dreams," I supplied, not letting her in on the fact that they were bad because they were so damn good. And Lo, having had her own nightmares, having dealt with Janie's downright crippling ones, and the ones of half the men and women in the barracks, didn't question it. We all saw some evil, awful stuff in our lines of work. It wouldn't be normal if we could always rest easily.
"And I've caught you on that Gameboy pretty much daily," she added. We all had our tells, our habits that pointed to times of distress. Malcolm paced. Lo sprang into furious action even if she didn't have a way to fix the problem. Ashley hummed a song from her childhood. Me, I played my Gameboy- a leftover habit from childhood that I never could shake. I had tried other ways of distracting myself- music, reading, meditating. Nothing worked half as well as my old video games.
"Lo, it's just a..."
"I know that you're not one who shares your feelings easily, Mina. I respect that. But you have to be able to confront them yourself, not distract yourself from them."
I had been successfully distracting myself from various feelings for my entire life. Healthy? No. But I had always gotten by.
"I'm fine, Lo."
"You're always fine," she agreed, nodding. "The thing is, I want more for you than fine. Fine sucks. No one wants to die knowing they lived a fine life."
She wasn't wrong. She rarely was. So, not having anything to say to that, I stayed silent.
"Alright," she sighed when we walked out onto the grounds, making two of the new dogs in training run over, wagging their tails happily, knowing who the boss was. She reached out and pet them then sent them off back to the other dogs protecting the perimeter. "I have a new job for you."
Thank God.
Really, I was losing my mind.
I found I actually kind of liked L, eccentricities not aside because I found them intriguing, but despite the fact that he resented my presence and made it clear I was unwelcome. But I was floundering. I wasn't bringing anything to the table. They would be better off with just L and Alex on it.
It would be good for me to move on, to pack a bag and head in a new direction, to be able to lose myself in a new profile. Maybe I would be able to sleep again with some distance between us.
See, I was underestimating Lo in that moment.
Again, I should have known better.
"Where are you sending me?"
"Not far," she hedged, refusing to make eye-contact as she looked around the grounds. "See, something came up last night. One of our allies needs profiles on three guys."
"Three?" I asked, getting excited. Talk about a good distraction.
"Mhmm," she said, tucking her hands into her back pockets as she finally stopped walking and turned to face me.
"Where am I heading?"
"Back to The Henchmen compound."
The words landed with impact, making me feel like my shoulders slumped under the weight. "What? No. Absolutely not, Lo."
"Mina, there have been some new developments and they need profiles."
"So send me the names. I will do them from here. Or, you know, they have their own profiler there too, you know."
Lo nodded. "They do. And Renny is good, but Reign wants you too. He thinks you're more objective in this situation and he thinks you both seem to catch different things about people. You profile differently and this is a really important job that he can't have fucking up. He wants you and he is willing to pay three times your usual salary for it."
Three times.
Three times?
Fact of the matter was, there weren't a whole hell of a lot of me and there definitely weren't many with as positive a track record as mine. So, because of that, I made a killing. Really, it was ostentatious. Granted, I worked for Hailstorm, so it was a sixty-forty deal with the larger chunk to me. But even with forty percent gone, it was more money than I needed. Especially seeing as I lived at Hailstorm. We could, and often did, move on and get our own places outside the compound. But since I traveled as much as I did, that was impractical. Instead, I spent too much money on nice hotels and first class flights, figuring there was no reason to not enjoy my income a bit.
