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“You’re keeping your potential wife locked up in your unfinished basement?” Granny has this habit of clicking her dentures when she gets super pissed. She’s doing it now. They look like they’re going to hurtle out of her mouth and gobsmack someone right in the face.
Weaponized dentures. Ha. Only my granny could manage that.
Granny’s real name is Scarlet Von Rippenstein. I’m not kidding. She married into the name, and she kept it after her husband met an untimely end, thanks to a maniacal crime boss. He might have fallen in with the wrong people, and they did him down. Granny wasn’t going to stand for that. She vowed revenge, and at sixty-one, with no family of her own, no children or grandchildren, and newly widowed, she enrolled herself—with her husband’s meager life insurance money—back into college. She took computer science. My god, did she take the shit out of computer science. Granted that the internet was just in its infancy, but computers had been around for a long time, and learning the basics meant something.
Long story short, she met some really talented people there who knew other talented people, and it wasn’t too many years before Granny became an expert hacker. I know there aren’t too many expert hacker seniors out there, but what can I say? Granny is badass with a capital BAD, a capital ASS, and a side of incredibly fucking cool, charitable, and loving with a heart of gold.
She has long white hair and always wears black. She dresses like a twenty-year-old professional who works in an office every single day. Right now, she’s wearing a black power suit and five-inch heels while her stark white hair is done up in a messy bun on top of her head, and she is giving me one powerfully disappointed expression.
It’s the kind of look that says I’m really fucking stupid, even though I can also be really fucking smart.
Yeah, my granny also drops F-bombs when the need arises, and right now, that look she gives me definitely includes some major F-bombing.
I let out the mother of all sighs and dig in for a fight. I’m not the one that Granny is supposed to be ripping into. “She’s not my potential wife.”
This conversation is only made worse by the fact that Johnny, Binksky, Deano, and Pink are staring at me. Yes, those really are their real names—first or last, depending on what they like to go by. Some people would call them my thugs since they like to wear black. It’s not something I coordinate or command. We don’t have a bloody dress code. They’re not my lackeys, and they don’t do my bidding. Rather, they’re my employees, and I pay them. They all have unique jobs, and they’re also incredibly loyal. I’ll leave it at that.
“He told her the truth,” Binksky insists. It’s good to know he’s on my side in this one.
All my—officially not—goons kind of look like…well, goons. They’re all big, beastly guys. We have a physical requirement that is part of the job. They can’t be afraid of danger, and yes, they might carry Glocks for their own safety. They all need to sign NDAs, and when they come to work for me—as of right now, at any rate—it’s a live-in position, so if they’re not single, they can’t accept the job. It’s slightly against my code of honor and everything I stand for, and by slightly, I mean majorly, to make widows out of women and to take fathers away from their children. So, yes. Anyone who works for me must be single. I don’t ask anything of my men that I’m not prepared to do myself. I never planned on getting married or having a family, and I still don’t plan on those things. The marriage part, yes, but not a real one. And as for children, definitely not. That’s a hard pass for me. Raising a family in this lifestyle wouldn’t jive.
“And what truth is that?” Granny’s brow arches. She’s still click-clacking with her dentures, moving them around her mouth at odd angles.
“About the will,” Pink fills in helpfully. He’s the one who ordered the anchovy pizza when we got back up from the basement twenty minutes ago. He obviously has questionable—disgustingly terrible—taste. “He told her everything. All about her parents.”
I grunt. That’s my code for: I wish my guys would shut the fuck up and stop eagerly tattling like they’re going to get a bloody prize. I already ordered pizza. They don’t have to earn it.
“She didn’t know who her parents were.” Deano’s normally the strong, silent type. I wish he’d stay strong and silent right now.
Binksky can’t be outdone. He leans his meaty fists on the counter in the kitchen, where we’re all standing around waiting for pizza. The plates were already set out on the island, along with a pile of napkins and all sorts of condiments and dips for the sides, plus jars of olives and jalapenos. “We nabbed her on her way to work. Chloroformed her right good. Uh, we thought it would wear off faster than it did, but she’s having trouble believing that any of this is real. She thinks it’s a dream. She refuses to pinch herself.”
