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SEVENTEEN
Julius
Dess had been workingout for the better part of an hour. Even though the house didn’t come with our typical exercise equipment, she’d gone through her usual circuit of floor exercises twice, jogged in place as if she had a treadmill whipping away beneath her feet, and worked through several sequences of combat moves.
None of that was particularly out of the ordinary, but the pace she’d set struck me as closer to frantic than focused. Sweat shone on her forehead and arms, but she didn’t stop to so much as gulp water before throwing herself into the next set of exercises. Her eyes were glazed, focused on thoughts that had nothing to do with the house around us.
Seeing her like this sent a quiver of apprehension through me. Dess was usually nothing if not controlled. She could rival the best of us with her discipline.
When she started pushing herself this hard, it meant there was something she was trying to escape. Something she couldn’t outrun by any normal means. I could take a few guesses at what that might be. The number of catastrophes in her life had been adding up for a while.
I got up from the sofa. “Dess,” I said, but her head didn’t so much as twitch in my direction. She just kept bobbing up and down in her whirlwind of stomach crunches.
“Dess,” I repeated, a little louder, walking over as I spoke.
That time, her name sank in. She spun around and onto her feet in one smooth movement, then stayed crouched there, panting as she stared up at me.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
I folded my arms over my chest. “That’s what I was going to ask you. You look like you’re trying to tackle a monster ten times your size.”
She bit her lip, the gesture sending a flash of heat through me at the thought of taking that lip between my own teeth. I shook myself out of the memories of last night’s epic encounter between the five of us.
She didn’t need me lusting over her right now. She needed a confidante.
“It’s nothing really new,” she said.
I wasn’t going to let her dodge the subject this time. “It’s bothering you enough that you’re going to dehydrate yourself with all that sweat. Why don’t you grab a glass of water and then tell me what’s bothering you? Even if it can’t be fixed right now, there are other ways of letting it out than working yourself into exhaustion.”
Dess let out a huff, but she got up and walked over to the kitchen, lifting the bottom of her shirt to wipe her damp face. I couldn’t say I minded the brief view of her taut stomach. I had plenty of control too, but I wasn’t any kind of saint.
She threw back the glass of water in a few long chugs, filled it again, and drank the second one more slowly. Then she set down the glass with a rap against the granite countertop. Her shoulders slouched just slightly.
“You know I had brunch with my dad this morning,” she said. “There was a purse thief at the restaurant, just a teenager—I saw how Damien treated the kid, how he talked to him… I know this was obvious all along, but it really drove it home that I can never be who I really am with him.”
“You can’t tell him about the Decima part of your life,” I filled in.
She nodded. “Even though I’m his daughter… I mean, he broke a kid’s bones for trying to snatch a purse. Even if I switched over to the straight and narrow right now and stayed there from this day forward, if he ever got a whiff of the jobs I carried out before, he’d never look at me the same way again. He’d see me as a monster—the kind of monster he thinks he’s fighting.”
I hadn’t thought that Dess would ever consider going entirely straight, but now that she brought it up, I realized it was an obvious option. It would certainly give her a better chance of integrating into the life she’d been meant to have. But imagining her walking away from us, saying good-bye to not just our company but all the skills that had made her famous among the most hardened of hitmen, wrenched at my gut.
She wasn’t ordinary, not at all. She deserved to have that part of herself celebrated, not crushed.
And, damn it, I wanted to be there celebrating it with her.
“Would you want to go straight?” I asked, trying to keep my tone even and impartial. As much as I hated the thought of her leaving, it was her decision, and I needed to give her full rein to make the choice herself.
If I pushed her in one direction or another, she might end up resenting me later. After all the ways she’d had her life decided for her in the past, I didn’t want to manipulate her now.
She sighed and clenched her jaw. “I don’t want to, now. I’m not even sure I could if I decided it was worth trying to so that I could have a more open relationship with my birth family. I’m good at this. It feels good, pulling off a job, knowing I took one more prick out of commission who can’t do any more harm…” She paused. “Now that I get to pick my jobs, I’m going to stick to the same code as you do—no one who doesn’t deserve it. I can’t quite believe that’s wrong.”
“There are a lot of those people,” I muttered.
“Yeah. But there are also a lot of people like my father who can’t imagine that anyone stepping outside the law could be anything other than a horrible villain.”
Something about those words struck a chord in me. Maybe there was something I could say that would help after all—not fix the struggle she was going through, but give her a perspective she hadn’t had before.
I’d never talked with Blaze and Garrison about my history. I never even discussed it with Talon—he only knew because he’d been there. But the past existed for a reason: to inform the present. If I could use it to give Dess more tools to figure out the right path for her, then it was worth dredging up those terrible memories.
