Griffin said, with a vicious growl and a glance of disgust over my shoulder at the body rapidly cooling behind us.
Shit had gotten so majorly messed up.
I said. To recover, is what I didn’t say.
Hunt said right away.
Only, we didn’t. Not really. Not at all, actually.
The enemy was circling us as rapaciously as a kettle of eager vultures zeroing in on the scent of decaying carcasses.
Brady was saying.
A knock I recognized from years of hearing it—tap, tap, tap, tap, in quick succession, always the four soft raps—rattled my bedroom door.
“Joss, honey?” It was my not-dad, Judas himself. “You awake, sleepyhead?”
When I didn’t answer, he swung open the door. With his hand still on the handle, his eyes boggled as they trailed along the naked body with its obvious stab wounds. His jaw waggled open, closed, open, then closed again.
“Oh shit,” he eventually muttered under his breath with a panicked look that skirted once more across the dead body of his boss, then the five of us.
“That about sums it up,” Layla said, a little too peppily.
“Let me…” Judas mumbled while he fumbled for his phone in his back pocket. His hair was damp from his postrun shower, a few wet strands tumbling onto his forehead.
His thumbs flew across his screen before he looked up at us again. “Uh, I’ll … I’ll be back.”
“I’ll just bet you will, Mr. Bryson,” Layla said with an unsettling smile that was part predatory, part jaunty.
Mr. Brysonscurried away like the seat of his pants was on fire and he was trying to stay ahead of the flames.
In less than ten minutes flat, as fast as my friends had responded to my SOS in the middle of the night, every single one of our traitorous lie-rents was crowded into my bedroom.
22
Jig’s Up, Mofos
Seeing our combined lie-rents flustered to the point of speechlessness had an oddly calming effect on me. Maybe it was simply nice not to be the only group of friends losing its shit. And the lie-rents were plainly losing their shit, even if some of them were working very hard to hide just how much of their shit they were losing.
Celia and Porter huddled together against the wall farthest from the body. Perhaps they actually liked each other beyond the facade, but really, who knew. Genuine, the ’rents were not. The two of them kept sliding their glasses up the bridges of their noses, when their glasses surely couldn’t be sliding that often. Porter was also shifting his weight from foot to foot a little too regularly.
My mom and dad stood separately, bookending their group. Monica’s face was eerily blank, and she scarcely blinked, while Reece, fresh from his shower, blotted with the back of a hand at a sheen of sweat rapidly beading along his brow and upper lip. He flicked jumpy glances at everyone else in the room, barely remaining on Magnum’s dead body for more than a second at a time.
Orson leaned against the closed door, looking between the body and his supposed son, who was pressed protectively to my side. My crew and I remained on the bed surrounding Bobo, all of us tense despite our seated positions.
The ’rents might not be the worst of our enemies. That didn’t make them, by extension, trustworthy chums. It didn’t even make them decent people.
Alexis, the self-proclaimed seductress who admitted to using her wiles to get her way, folded her arms tightly over her chest. Her posture was precise and perfect as ever, but the crease of her lips twitched to one side. I caught the slight movement three times before deciding that the normally stoic woman was as ruffled as the rest of them.
When they first rushed into my room after my dad’s summons, it was with what felt like rehearsed exclamations of shock and dismay at the dead body spread-eagled at their feet. There were lots of gasps, stuttered cries,ohmyGods, andwhat the hell happened heres. There were even a few belatedAre you all okays.
Orson, Porter, and my dad especially goggled at the spectacle of their dead naked boss, his deep wounds with relatively little blood, and the pallor quickly settling into what had been a healthy complexion. I caught my mom and Celia staring specifically at the man’s limp cock, almost as if they’d wondered what kind of heat the jillionaire was packing. His body was fit and toned, and my mom at least was definitely checking him out.
Gross.Something was seriously wrong with the woman.
My dad was the first to ask, specifically, why on earthUncle Magnumwas there, dead as a doorknob—and still not dead enough for me.
My response was a terse, “You tell me.”
