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Dude does not miss a trick. “Yep.”
At the top, all club sounds are muted. I stop at the beginning of a hallway lined with steel doors, much like the one we’d just entered through. The cameras over these doors swing in our direction.
“What’s back there?” Sandesh asks.
Information systems, computers, and servers for the underground railroad and its operations, but I don’t tell him that. He’s in this enough; no reason to give him a point-by-point tutorial on family operations. “Gracie lives in an apartment at the end of the hall, but she’s probably up in her office by now.”
I head toward her office door. I knock, wait. Sandesh clears his throat. I can feel him watching me, like he wants to ask more about the club and Gracie.
I ignore him.
“Behind you, dork.”
I spin around to find my sister standing there, lips cocked in a smile.
A smile echoed by Sandesh.
“You’re all kinds of ninja, Gracie.” I say, bending to throw my arms around the petite redhead. She smells like watermelon Jolly Ranchers. Girl is obsessed with those candies. Has been since she was a kid. How she still has such a bright and beautiful smile is beyond me. I squeeze her extra tight, trying to see if she tightens or tenses, feeling less like a sister and more like a traitor.
She does stiffen, but I have to admit it doesn’t mean she’s a traitor. Truth is, since losing John and Tyler, she shies away from hugs.
Gracie pushes away. “Why are you here?”
I’ve got my reason, my lie—which technically isn’t a lie since I do care. “The kid. Cee. I’m here to check up on her.”
Frowning, she glances at Sandesh. “And you? Why are you here?”
Sandesh has an equally tense look on his face. What happened between these two? He says, “I’m a prisoner of love. And your crazy-ass family.”
Gracie raises an eyebrow at the wordlove. And, truth, it makes my heart skip like a kindergartener during recess.
I knock my shoulder into his arm. “He’s the Scully to my Mulder.”
“I think you have that backward,” Sandesh says.
I don’t. “I was going by personality. Not gender.”
With an I’ll-give-you-that-one frown, he steps back as Gracie moves to the door and opens it with a wave of her wrist on the small black pad. Sandesh and I follow her lead, waving our own wrists.
Gracie’s office is modern, white, and meticulously clean. White bookcases line the wall behind a bleached white desk. In the corner stands a white grandfather clock with a round, white face. And in front of the desk are two modern, white Belgian linen chairs.
Type A, party of one.
Gracie’s neatness makes me itchy. Loosen up already. I nearly laugh when Sandesh brushes at the coffee stain on his pants before sitting down, and Gracie eyes him like he’s carrying the plague. Okay, so this is a party.
I sit next to Sandesh, crossing my legs ranch-hand-style—right foot on left knee. “What’s the holdup with Cee? You haven’t even given her a psych eval yet.”
Sitting at her desk, posture straight as a board, she levels her all-business gaze at me. She isn’t that much older than I am, but she has an ancient attitude. Kind of a contradiction—a club owner whose hairstyle, usually a tight little bun to go with her tight little body, makes her look deadly serious.
Gracie puts a finger on the trackpad and clicks something open. “Who shot the sex-slaver in the distribution center?”
Whoops. I drop my eyes, watch my toes curl and uncurl, bowing the cheetah-print fabric of my flats, before deciding she probably already knows the truth. “The kid did.”
Sandesh’s head spins toward me like a rock from a slingshot. Of course, I filled him in on the way over about how I initially screwed up the Brothers Grim mission, but I hadn’t told him, or anyone really,thatlittle detail.
Gracie sits back as if vindicated. “And you ask me what the holdup is?”
I can’t help jumping into this. I, more than any of my siblings, knows how much the group can mean to those of us whose past included abuse at the hands of Walid and Aamir. “Big deal. She took matters into her own hands. Sounds perfect to me.”
