AllFreeNovel
Share Us
ChapterSix
Teddy De Ver
I will not let him get the best of me.
He would not ruin this for me. I finally had a break—a real mission out there in the world, and I would not let the likes of Dominic Dane intimidate me into giving it up. No way.
When I stopped by Mathews’s office, I was still shaking. Maybe it was a good thing he wasn’t there because that was not the kind of first impression I wanted to give to him. I’d be his partner in whatever we were going to do—he needed to trust me.
The walk back to my studio apartment helped. It was early September still, and the air was a bit cold going down my throat. It cleared my mind and gave me a much-needed boost of confidence. I picked up a Subway on my way back, so I didn’t need to waste time fixing something at the apartment.
Sorry, Mom, I said as I bit into it, thankful that my mother couldn’t see me. She could never know that I rarely cooked meals and instead ate out most of the time, or she would hop on a plane and come all the way here just to give me a piece of her mind.
If you don’t respect your own body, Teddy, how can you expect to rely on it? she’d say. We are what we eat, and that is why we eat well.
But my mom was not here, and I could eat whatever I wanted. As guilty as it made me feel, that sandwich tasted like freedom, and I’d lie if I said I didn’t enjoy every bite.
My apartment wasn’t big or fancy by any means, but the entire wall across from the entrance was made of windows overlooking the busy street. That alone had been the reason why I’d decided to rent it the second I’d walked in. When I first moved to Manhattan, I stayed with a cousin of mine, who wasn’t really my cousin. But he was a pixie from a Canadian clan, and his mom and my mom somehow knew each other, and so they thought it would be best for us to stick together out there in the big scary world. And Jake had been nice, but…wait.
No, he hadn’t. He stayed up all night partying and brought girls back almost every single morning, and he didn’t care one bit that I slept in the room right next to his, divided by a paper-thin wall. He was always high or drunk—or both—and he never did the dishes or anything at all around the apartment for that matter. I’d lasted three whole months before I decided to go off on my own. Yeah, he was a pixie, but he couldn’t care less about me, and honestly, I couldn’t care less about him, either.
Every single day since, I was thankful I’d made the move and proved to myself that I needed to follow my intuition more often. I knew what was best for me. And I loved my mom—God, I loved her so much—but she and I didn’t see eye to eye, and that was okay.
The studio apartment was completely open, except for the walled-in bathroom. The kitchen was to the left of the door, my bed on the other side, and the living room was on the right. The neon lights flashing on the buildings across the street bathed the entire room in a nice blue glow on the right and a hot pink on the left. I was still saving for some new furniture, but it was perfect. It was mine, and I put everything where I wanted without having to ask anyone, without a single plant in sight. This, too, was freedom.
I put my purse down and quickly changed the white shirt and black trousers I usually wore to work for a pair of jeans and a purple shirt that toned down the pink of my hair a little bit. I was out the door again within ten minutes and on my way to Mathews’s place. It wasn’t far—I’d checked his address in the employee database at work—and I’d get there within ten minutes if I hurried. And I always hurried.
I murmured under my breath the whole way there, even though this was Manhattan, and nobody even looked at you twice if you talked to yourself in the middle of the street (speaking from experience here). Still, I was trying to drop the habit, so I kept my thoughts inside my head. For the most part.
By the time I made it to Mathews’s apartment building, I was feeling like myself again. I wasn’t afraid, only excited. I would complete this mission, whatever it was, even if it was the last thing I ever did, just to spite Dominic Dane.
How did he even know that I washed the cups for my colleagues after coffee break? And so what if I did? I didn’t mind helping people out. It’s just a few cups, for God’s sake. And where had he even seen me writing in my journal? Not that it was a secret, but still. There was nothing wrong with writing things down, was there? It helped keep my mind clear, my thoughts in order.
“She’s tiny,” I mumbled to myself, going up the stairs. Yeah, well, I might have been tiny, but I was fast. And contrary to his belief, I did know how to hold a gun. I had great aim, too—he could check my scores from the acceptance test in the database. All that information was only a few clicks away on his computer. If he ever bothered to turn his computer on in the first place.
Mathews’s apartment was on the fifth floor, so it took me a while to get there, and I didn’t hear anything unusual until I was only a flight of stairs away.
And then I heard his voice.
“You’re going to call in and you’re going to turn down the mission,” Dominic Dane said. He sounded pretty damn serious, too.
I froze with my foot halfway to the next stair. What the hell was he doing here?
“Are you insane?” A voice I assumed belonged to Aaron Mathews said. “I will do no such thing. It’s my mission. The Chief gave it to me.”
“It wasn’t a request, Mathews. You’re going to call Randall right now and tell him you won’t do it.” Dominic’s voice deepened, and he even growled at the end of that sentence.
My heart slammed against my chest, and I rushed the few steps to the fifth floor. The hallway was long and wide, and the men were in the very middle of it, the door to Mathews’s apartment standing wide open.
They turned their heads my way for only a second, before they locked gazes again, like I was that unimportant.
“You’ve lost your fucking mind,” Mathews said and stepped back.
“Don’t make this harder for yourself, man. Just make the call,” Dominic said through gritted teeth.
“And if I don’t?” Mathews grinned, hands fisted by his side.
Dominic held his breath for a long moment, then sighed. “Fine. We’ll do it your way.” And he pulled something from the inside of his leather jacket. Something that looked suspiciously like a baseball bat, only with metal accessories—like spikes—wrapped around the wood.
