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NINE
Decima
When I walkedout of my room the next morning, everything seemed completely normal, like we hadn’t just blasted away a dozen or so gangsters the night before. Garrison stood in the kitchen over the stove, sipping hot cocoa from a mug and flipping bacon in a frying pan, both sending delicious smells into the air in a mix of sweet and salty. Julius and Talon were sitting at the table polishing off the last bits of what looked like pancakes, and Blaze was cross-legged on the sofa with a typical plate of pasta on one knee and his laptop on the other in an impressive balancing act.
But in a weird way, the fact that it felt normal was the most abnormal thing. I walked over to the kitchen without a single quiver of apprehension running through my nerves. Blaze gave me a little wave of welcome, Julius nodded to me, and Garrison—well, Garrison flicked a brief glance my way and tensed his jaw, which was par for the course. No one made a big deal of my presence.
It was like I belonged here. Like I’d always lived here with them, as much a part of the crew as they were. Was the change in them or in me—or both?
As I grabbed my usual box of cereal out of the cupboard, wondering if I could get Garrison to spare any of that bacon for me and suspecting the chances were nil, Julius motioned to Talon. “They’ve just gotten a new model of dagger in at our favorite shop. I think you’d like it. The balance is impressive. You should take a look.”
Talon grunted. “I’m pretty happy with the one I have.”
“You can never have too many weapons,” Blaze piped up from the sofa. “Always carry at least two backups, I always say.”
“You always say since when—this morning?” Garrison teased.
“I’m sure I’ve said it at least once before. I’ve definitely thought it.” Blaze glanced at me. “Did you sleep okay after the flight?”
“Yeah,” I said automatically. “It was good to be ho—”
I cut myself off in mid-word with a sudden, startling realization. I’d been going to say home, and… the crew’s apartment did feel like home now. I knew where everything important was. I knew what to expect from the guys, at least well enough to relax around them. They were treating me like a standard inhabitant and not an interloper.
It was hard to imagine that the apartment I’d lived in for not much more than a week had so quickly replaced the house where I’d spent more than twenty years of my life, but maybe that said more about how homey the household hadn’t been than it did about this place.
While my thoughts drifted back to that past period of my life, Blaze checked his laptop and let out an uncharacteristically disheartened sigh. It wasn’t hard to figure out why.
“Still no useful results from all those searches?” I asked. The other men looked over as well in anticipation of the hacker’s answer.
Blaze frowned. “Nothing that sends us down a longer trail. I keep finding more people to check out but none of them turn up anything suspicious or concerning. I have no idea whether the people I’m looking at now are even remotely connected to your household.” He shook himself and shot me a rejuvenated smile. “But don’t worry. I’ll keep at it. There’s got to be a solid lead in here somewhere.”
“And if there isn’t, we have other avenues we can pursue,” Julius put in.
Did we, or was he just saying that to reassure me? I popped a spoonful of cereal into my mouth and chewed pensively.
There’d been so much I hadn’t known about my old home and the people living there. But that home could tell stories of its own, couldn’t it?
My heart leapt, and my head jerked toward Garrison. “You collect all the wallets and phones and similar things from the scenes of the jobs. Do you still have all that from the household?”
Garrison might not have wanted to make super friendly, but he did meet my eyes and offer an apologetic grimace in response. “We dispose of them within twenty-four hours of finishing the job. It’s too risky carrying evidence like that around when it doesn’t seem needed. And that early on, we had no idea it would be relevant.”
I let out a huff of breath. “Understandable.”
But there’d been a lot they’d left behind. Maybe no obvious identifying information, but there could have been mail in a drawer, notebooks on shelves, even a reminder scrawled on a post-it note might point us in a useful direction to finding the larger organization the household had been a part of. The people Noelle had obviously still been working with, since she hadn’t come for me alone.
The thought of walking back into the space that I’d last—and only—seen splattered with blood made my gut knot, but with every passing second, my certainty grew that it was my best course of action, if I was going to take any action at all. And damn, did I want to.
“I need to go back to the mansion,” I said. “They were working out of that building for decades. There’s got to be some kind of evidence left behind.”
Talon’s attention shifted to me. He didn’t speak, but his somber gaze emanated concern.
Julius expressed what all the others might have been thinking. “That’d be pretty dangerous. Our client has been hassling Garrison about the missing ‘item’ from that job, which we have to assume means you. He probably has eyes on the place.”
I shrugged. “You should know by now that I’m aware of how to stay under the radar. I can avoid whatever and whoever I need to.”
“We don’t know exactly who we’re dealing with here or what kind of resources they have,” the crew’s leader reminded me. “And you might not find anything to make it worth the risk. His people have clearly been through the house since we left for them to have figured out that you’re gone. There’s a strong possibility they’ll have grabbed anything tied to the household’s criminal operations already.”
I shifted restlessly on my feet. “I know that too. But I need to try. Even a small possibility that I’ll turn up the start of a trail makes it worth it.”
