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“Where did she approach you?” I asked anyway.
“Just around the corner from the place where I picked you up,” the guy said. “Outside the shoe store.”
“Okay.” I shoved the phone into my pocket just in case the tech genius could determine something from it. Sitting back in my seat, I debated my next steps for a moment, but the guy already had the address I’d been going to, which meant the Hunter would have it too. There was no point in trying to hide my current location now. “Take me home. As fast as you can.”
The drive passed in what felt like seconds as I stewed in my thoughts. The moment the driver pulled up outside, I leapt out and burst into the house.
All four of my men were in the living room, Blaze alternating between watching his computer’s screen and tossing darts at a makeshift board he’d put together. Julius and Garrison were handling the dishes from their own dinner in the open-concept kitchen. Talon looked like he’d just come out of a shower.
They all went still and silent when I barged in. I held up the Hunter’s phone and tossed it to Blaze, who caught it easily.
“I had an interesting conversation on my way here,” I said. “The Hunter wanted to check in on me.”
Julius stepped toward me, his expression darkening. “Are you okay? He obviously upset you.”
“Oh, I’m pissed off all right. Mostly he just wanted to needle me about not listening to his vague bullshit as much as he liked.” I marched into the kitchen and grabbed the milk and chocolate syrup. I needed a hit of cocoa to finish processing everything that’d just happened. “He’s still insisting that there’s some dirt on the Maliks that I haven’t found. Actually, he mentioned the literal dirt. The soil in their garden. Like I’d find something there if I ‘read’ it.”
Garrison knit his brow. “Like a soil analysis?”
“I guess. Hard to know with him.” I paused, stirring the syrup into a glass of milk. The thought of poking around in my birth family’s affairs, trying to find some reason to distrust them, brought an ache into my stomach that had nothing to do with hunger.
But what if the Hunter really did know something? He watched them closely enough to know how they felt about their garden. Wouldn’t it be better to check and know for sure than have his insinuations hanging over me?
If I could prove to myself that he didn’t have a case at all, maybe I could let go of that niggling worry completely.
“None of you have found out anything concerning so far, right?” I said.
The men all shook their heads. “Damien Malik runs a tight ship—and a clean one,” Julius said. “But that doesn’t mean he couldn’t have secrets.”
Garrison grimaced. “On the other hand, this Hunter prick is shady as fuck.”
Talon gazed at me steadily. “What do you want to do, Dess?”
I groaned and flopped onto the sofa, pressing the heel of my hand to my forehead. “I mean, it wouldn’t be hard to take a little soil from the garden. And it wouldn’t hurt anything to check it even if it turns out he’s just jerking me around. But if the dirt turns up nothing, then I’m done talking to that weirdo.” I opened my eyes to glance at Blaze. “Could you do this soil analysis thing?”
He made an apologetic gesture. “That’s outside my domain—all of our domains.”
I thought of the way we’d obtained this house, how we’d gotten my DNA sequenced back home to connect me to Malik in the first place. “Then we need to find someone else who can. Someone who won’t ask questions about it… I don’t have much in the way of money, but maybe I could set up an exchange of favors like you have before?”
Garrison nodded slowly. “I’ve heard of a woman out in New York who handles a lot of things along that line—chemicals and environmental hazards. I’ve never dealt with her directly before, but from what the people who’ve mentioned her have said, she seems to understand discretion and to stick to her word.”
I nodded. “Great, reach out to her as soon as you can. And find out what she’d want from me in return.”
“From us,” Julius put in. “Whatever she wants, between the five of us, I’m sure we can manage it.”
A rush of affection filled my chest at his automatic offer of support, not that it should have surprised me after everything else he’d done and said before. But I found myself shaking my head, resolve wrapping around my heart.
“No.” I caught Garrison’s gaze. “Make sure it’s something I can handle on my own. The Maliks are my family, and the Hunter came to me. I should be the one ‘paying’ to fix that problem.”
“We really don’t mind,” Blaze started.
I cut him off with another jerk of my head. The Hunter’s words from our first conversation came back to me, echoing up from my memory. You still need to be ready in case someone else turns out to be better.
“I might have been respected as the Ghost, but no one except the four of you knows that the Ghost is me—no one has any reason to respect me as Decima. I need to be able to stand on my own two feet in this world, and that means I have to prove myself on my own. If I want respect, I have to earn it.”
Garrison gave me a small smile that I thought was approving. It sent a tingle of heat between my legs more intense than anything his usual smirks could have provoked.
“You’ve got it, sweetheart,” he said. “One return favor, catered just to you. It’s not like you can’t blow them away without any help from us.”
