AllFreeNovel
Share Us
In the week I’d been watching her, Rory had behaved like a reverse vampire: she locked herself in her apartment once the sun set and remained there until the sun rose the next morning. It made my job easier, allowing me some leeway to get at least a few hours of sleep, though I often woke up in the middle of the night, worried she’d go out for a late-night snack and get hurt.
She was a freelance editor, mostly working with romance books and contemporary fiction, a job she likely chose because of her ability to work from home. It would’ve been hard to explain away needing a security detail if she worked in an office. Her schedule allowed her to work her own hours, which meant I could never relax, unsure if she would leave the safety of her apartment at any moment. Even though I never saw her leave after dark, shecould, and that was enough to make me nervous.
I found myself staying outside her apartment longer than necessary, checking the cameras while I got ready for bed, leaving early in the morning to be close to the girl I’d chosen to protect. It was one of the first times I was protecting someone, our expertise usually dealing with monitoring the moves of whoever we were paid to watch. It was a heady feeling, being the person responsible for protecting someone’s life, and despite never meeting her, I felt like I knew the girl I kept track of. Felt like I knew not only her movements but the reasons behind them, and I had grown used to her schedule after only a handful of days.
Which was why seeing her old bodyguard, Sean, dressed in a suit as he popped his head into her bedroom caught me off guard one afternoon. I’d sat up straighter in the seat of my car, lookingcloser at the camera as Rory passed out of her bathroom fully dressed.
She wore a pair of jeans with an oversized sweater, the forest green the same color as her eyes. Her hair was still in a bun, small wisps of hair escaping to frame her face as the wind blew down the street. She looked the same as she usually did, except there was a lightness I had never seen before. She was smiling, teeth bright as she hurried to the car waiting at the sidewalk, excitement clear in the eagerness of her steps.
“Let’s go, tweedles!” I heard her call with a laugh to the bodyguards lumbering slowly behind her. I couldn’t help but chuckle to myself at theThrough the Looking Glassreference, especially now that the two wide-chested men, now dressed in identical black suits, looked even more like a set of twins.
It was the loudest - and happiest - she’d ever been since I’d started watching her. It was the first I’d ever heard her speak, really, since I usually couldn’t hear her quiet murmurs to her bodyguards during the day.
And seeing her excitement on her way to dinner at her father’s house - not realizing that was where she was going until later, as I watched from the cab of my truck as her car disappeared behind the familiar gates - I realized that her personality wasn’t plain, or bland. She acted boring for the same reasons I had been for weeks: to blend in, to not draw attention to herself.
I sat in my car a mile away from Cillian’s compound, spending the hours reframing every thought I’d ever had against my redheaded charge.
She’d always been beautiful, from the moment I saw her in person the first time, her porcelain skin and green eyes striking. But she acted ordinary, her personality so subdued whenever I’d watched her. I realized then, replaying the small glimpsesof her personality I’d just seen, how each act I’d considered unassuming was for a purpose.
How her long hair was usually bundled into a bun or a ponytail, keeping people’s attention off the distinctive color. How she wore plain clothes that were always slightly too baggy on her frame, to not draw attention to herself. How she always kept her face blank, her eyes cast toward the ground to look uninterested and not draw any attention.
How she likely hid every part of her personality in order to come across as bland and unmemorable as possible, to protect her identity. She was used to it, either trained by her father or as a form of self-preservation, and I understood why. While I wanted to blend in so others didn’t see me as a predator, she wanted to keep others from seeing her as prey. Her plainness had afforded her safety until now. Because if there was one thing I’d learned in my line of work, the last thing you wanted was to draw attention from the wrong kind of people.
Since that moment,I’d spent months catching and examining each piece of her personality she allowed to slip through. The little smiles on her face when she perused the stacks of books at the bookstore. The way she’d occasionally pop out behind corners to scare her bodyguards, laughing so hard she had to bend over to catch her breath afterward. The way she’d bite her lip when she concentrated, her eyebrows forming a crease in the center. How I’d occasionally catch her dancing along to the music in her headphones as she worked, hips swaying, head bobbing as she closed her eyes. The way she tipped her head to the sky after she’d escaped from her bodyguards, as if soaking inthe silence even as people continued to mill around her on the street.
The small glimpses weren’t enough to truly know her, even if it felt like I did. But after finally meeting face to face, she exceeded every expectation I had, even after months of acting as her shadow. Rory was even feistier than I’d expected, fighting off that man in the alleyway and trusting me enough to get in my truck so soon afterward. Willing to jump out of a moving car to escape me if needed, but smart enough to believe me when I told her how hurt she’d get if she tried. Walking into the lion’s den, scared enough to hold my hand but brave enough to complain about the nickname I’d given her.
Rory’s intake of breath jolted me from my musings, and I refocused my eyes on the screen above us. Her attacker stood on the street outside her apartment, timestamped an hour before I killed him. We watched as he made his way into her apartment building, emerging shortly afterward to stand halfway down the block, looking up and down the street every couple of minutes, clearly waiting.
At the bottom of the screen, we finally watched Rory emerge from the alleyway, stopping in her tracks as the man started making quick strides toward her. The slight smile that her run had brought on quickly turned to fear, the look on her face souring my gut despite knowing everything turned out okay. There was no one around. The street was dead so early on a Saturday morning, especially as cold as it had been the past few days.
No one was around to watch as Rory backed into the alleyway, smart enough not to turn her back even as her soon-to-be attacker continued his aggressive pursuit. The cameras weren’t aimed close enough to the alleyway, meaning the attack all happened off screen, though the images played in my mind easily enough as we watched the quiet street.
Then Rory and I popped back up on the screen. Blood spattered across the side of her face as I dragged her by the hand to my truck parked out of frame. I glanced over at her now, face bare. She’d wiped off the blood in the car, using a pack of baby wipes I kept around for that exact purpose.
Alex paused the video after we disappeared off the edge of the screen, rewinding until we were looking back at Rory’s attacker. Alex zoomed in on his face with a few clicks of his mouse, turning toward Rory with narrowed eyes. Not unkind, just watchful, looking for her reaction as he asked, “Do you know this man? Have you ever seen him before?”
Rory shook her head. “No. But that doesn’t mean much. My dad doesn’t introduce me to many of his coworkers.”
“That’s how you were able to stay under our radar for so long.”
Rory nodded at Alex’s statement, biting her lip as she looked harder at the man on the screen, as if a sudden memory might come to mind. I reached over and laid my hand on top of hers, holding it there until she was looking at me instead of her attacker.
“Don’t stress,” I told her, giving Alex a look until he turned off the camera feed. “You probably wouldn’t know him, anyway.”
“It’s more likely someone hired him to do their dirty work,” Bex said from her perch on Alex’s desk, shrugging when I shot her a look. “I’m not going to lie to the girl, especially if you all plan to keep her.” Bex shook her head at Rory’s alarmed look, saying, “The guys just have a habit of picking up strays, is all I mean. Either way, I won’t bother lying if she’s going to stick around.”
I rolled my eyes even as a small part of my brain stood at attention at Bex’s words. “You act like you weren’t our most recent stray,” I reminded her.
Bex shrugged in response. “Just proving my point.”
We both glanced over at Alex, waiting for his input. Even though we were a team and each had a say, Alex organized the entire business, and we knew it. He was the one who had slowly built a relationship with Cillian over the past five years, who knew him best. Knew how best to tiptoe around the mob boss’s moods, how he’d feel about the situation we’d placed ourselves firmly in the middle of.
“Xan?” I prompted, using the nickname I’d first known him by, back when he was just a lowly computer geek working for a financial start-up and I was an even more lowly security guard for the building.
“It’s your job, Dev. You call the shots.”
I groaned, hating that Bex had been right, and liking even less that I had to admit it. It was easier when Alex acted as the face of the business, when I got to spend my time breaking into houses or chasing down the enemies of our business partners for heaps of money.
