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The woman frowned. “I… well, yes. I do keep a spare, but I couldn’t possibly—”
“Please,” Becca pleaded. “We’ll be in and out.”
Becca paused.
“And maybe we could arrange for the payment of the rent she owed you in the meantime?”
This seemed to spark something in the woman’s eyes, and her pursed lips slackened.
“It’s twelve hundred,” she said. “And I’ll take next month’s too in case she doesn’t show.”
Becca turned to look at me for confirmation.
Greedy old cunt.
I nodded.
“We can do that,” Becca said.
The woman made a show of thinking it through before vanishing to find the key. She was back in less than five minutes, holding the key just out of Becca’s reach.
I strode up to them, reaching into the inside pocket of my leather jacket for the short stack of bills there.
I counted out twelve hundred, packing the other four or five hundred back into the pocket.
“That’s only one month,” the woman protested.
“And you’ll get the other month’s rent when it’s due,” I told her. “And only if our being here today stays between us.”
Her lips parted, perhaps finally recognizing me for who I was.
Maybe not my face or my name, but I needed neither to pull weight in Thorn Valley. My face screamed Saint, and if she knew what was good for her, she wouldn’t refuse me.
She was lucky I played along at all instead of turning over her entire house to find the key myself.
“A-all right. That seems fair.”
She backed away. “I’ll just be inside if there’s anything else you need. Just… just slip the key back through the mail slot when you’re finished, will you?”
She didn’t wait for a reply before taking off back the way she’d come.
“See,” Becca said, lifting the key to dangle it in my direction. “I can be useful.”
She dropped the key into my hand and took the blade back out from where she’d hidden it in her tits. How she’d managed to not slice one off was beyond me.
“Let’s go, Hart. I’m already late getting back.”
She hurried to keep up as I took the stairs two at a time, the feeling of unease only growing in the pit of my stomach the nearer we got to Julia’s door.
Something was definitely wrong.
Julia knew the risks when she agreed to take this job.
Even with her identity concealed from the kids who called in for help, there was a possibility someone could figure out who she was. All it would take was one guilty child admitting who they called for help. One angry parent with a cop friend to trace the call back to her.
These were violent, sadistic pieces of abusive trash.
But having been abused herself as a teen, Julia knew the risks and didn’t give two fucks about them. The way she saw it, if she could even help one of them out of a bad situation, it was worth it.
