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“We’ve either royally fucked up their world or they’re biding their time until they can figure out how to hurt us in return,” Gabriel grunts out.
“No chance they’ve taken their toys and gone home?” Uriel asks.
“I doubt it,” I say. “We’ve bloodied their noses at every turn. We’ve destroyed every foothold they held in the city. Their slave ring has been shut down in this part of the country, at the very least. Her using a black market rifle speaks to the difficulty she’s had in procuring good weapons. If the Russians still had a large presence here, I don’t think she would have resorted to what she did.”
“That’s not to say they’re not here or at least working through intermediaries,” Simon says.
I want to groan in frustration. What he just said without actually saying it is that we’re still sitting in a holding pattern.
We’re waiting and not doing anything fun.
Like stabbing an eye out with a spork, a little voice whispers in my head.
I feel like I’m being edged and there’s no fucking end in sight.
I’m the one who does the edging, dammit, and I fucking loathe being on the sideline like this.
My hands itch to reach down and grab the Glock off my hip. I can feel the cool metal of the gun. Feel how it would soothe my mind as the cold steel rests in my palm.
Anya Petrov, former FSB, and proud Bratva murderess.
She’s keeping me from working right now, and I want her fucking head.
She’s got a lady boner for me because I killed her twin sister, Tanya, and I’m going to castrate her as soon as I get the chance.
If I could, I’d kill her right now.
Oddly, I’ve never killed identical twins before.
I’d like to do it sometime soon.
“Now onto the next business… Uriel, we need you to head to Cloud 69…” Simon says while looking down at his laptop, his fingers moving quickly over the keyboard.
The guys in the room start to chuckle as Uriel groans loudly.
“Is this a punishment?” he asks with growl. “Hazing? Let’s put the new guy in a strip club and watch his skin crawl?”
The laughter continues as Lucifer smirks at Simon. “Passing the buck to the newest man on the totem pole?”
“Is it bad that I want to call my union rep about this?” Uriel laughs.
“If only.” Lucifer smiles.
“I’ll go,” I say during a lull. “I need to get out in the world again.”
“You’re still a target—” Simon starts to say.
Cutting him off, I shake my head in frustration. “I’ll always be a target, the same as any of us. Except, maybe, Nathaniel over there.”
Nathaniel leans against one of the tables, his tall, lanky frame relaxed as he looks from me to the rest of us.
Shrugging his shoulders, he says, “I’m the new guy, as well, I suppose. I doubt the world even remembers my face.”
He’s right. Going to prison under not the best of terms has a way of making the world forget you. Simon’s rigorous efforts to scrub his entire identity from the internet also helps.
We’ve all been scrubbed from the world by Simon.
“Jude has a point,” Lucifer says, and I see in his calculating eyes he’s judging me in some way.
