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“Maybe we can try it again with the Taken franchise,” I offered.
“I think I can find some space in my schedule.”
“Sounds good. Goodnight, Aven.”
“Good morning, Quin.”
Around three in the afternoon Russia time, my phone dinged, and I found an invite to join UrGwnDwn in a game of Monopoly.
And right there, in the middle of a strategy meeting, I joined her game.
She wiped the floor with me on round one.
Then two.
But I finally got my revenge on the third try.
She had been the one to text me that night, telling me the story about how Mackey handled his first trip to the dog park, seeming to do anything in his power to piss off the other dogs. Namely, tipping over the water bowls, and snatching the tennis balls that didn’t belong to him.
Two days later, two nights of random talking later about everything from her old Christmas traditions when her father was alive to how I spent holidays while I was in the service, Miller and Kai finally came to an agreement with the Korols.
Four-point-five.
Yes, million.
Fenway could spare it; the Korols were willing to settle for it. All that was left was to wire the money.
And me and my team were ‘leaving.’
“Stop touching shit,” Finn growled as I threw a few final things into my bag that had been laying around.
He’d been flown in a few days earlier, and with no work to do just yet, he was being a royal pain in the ass day and night about what we did and did not touch. Never mind that we had been here a few weeks already, and had each touched just about everything there was to touch in each room. And forget that no matter what we did or did not touch, Finn was going to clean every inch as though we had committed high treason in this room and needed not to hang for it.
“In just a couple minutes, I’ll be out of your hair, and you can go hog wild in here.”
He needed it too. You could always tell when he was in need of a job, when the obsessive focus was something he was craving. The cleaning wasn’t just a job for him, just something he happened to excel in. The reason he was as good as he was came from years of doing it in his own life, driving himself half-crazy with the ritual of it all. Working for me, he got to harness the compulsions into something useful, and let go a little bit in his personal life. His place still tended to have the minty chemical smell that you would learn to equate with him in general, but he could sit and have a cup of coffee with you now without needing to get up and scrub the windows suddenly anymore.
But something was clearly going on with him. In his life. In his head. That was why he was so antsy, so ready to get his scrub on.
He would have plenty of time to get his head back on right while he did a full clean-up on seven hotel rooms, including his own, excluding Ranger since he must have been lost in his woods somewhere because no one could get in touch with him.
“You got the directions for the cabin?” I asked, meaning the hunting one in the woods up a long, steep hill that we would have to get to on-foot since we didn’t want any drivers in the city knowing where we were. He gave me a tight nod, unpacking the cleaners he had needed to buy in the market, so they weren’t his usual sort, and it was clear this was a problem for him. “Try to get there by late tonight. Check-out is before noon.”
With that, I headed out, walking past Smith in the lobby since we were doing our best to pretend none of us knew one another, Miller and Kai excluded.
“Did you just pick up a cathedral music box?” Miller asked a few minutes after we moved through town, packing as much food as we could into the spaces left in our bags.
“Yeah,” I agreed, seeing no point in lying since the thing would be sitting in the cabin with us until it was time to bug out.
“You never pick up souvenirs.”
This was true. I had been just about everywhere in the world that someone might have needed my help. But if you looked at my place, you would never know I had been outside of Navesink Bank.
Miller’s place, however, was a map of all the places she had been, and even how many times she had been there. That This was her third trip to Russia that I knew of, but still she picked up a set of Matryoshka – nesting – dolls. I would bet good money that she had a set of Imperial porcelain and a scarf from Pavlovo Posad at home as well.
