AFTER WE’D MARCHED out of hearing range of the car, parked at the other end of the alley with Dess locked inside, Garrison cleared his throat. His voice came out taut. “It was the Cutthroats.”
“What?” I’d already been angry about the attack, but it was nothing compared to the surge of rage that hit me at those words. I’d assumed someone associated with one or another past hit must have been out for revenge and managed to locate us. For it to have been a fellow crew…
Garrison nodded, leaning back against the brick wall on one side of the alley and crossing his arms, moving the right one a little stiffly. His eyes flashed. Knowing how cynical he could be, he probably wasn’t as surprised as I was, but I doubted he was any less pissed off.
“I managed to get one of the guys who came at me in a particularly painful position,” he said, a mix of triumph and revulsion playing across his features. “He spilled the beans while begging me not to make the pain worse. The Cutthroats hired the bunch of them to take us out. A little less competition for the prime jobs, I guess?”
Blaze snorted, but he was scowling too. “Maybe if they got their acts together, they’d be able to earn those jobs instead of having to slaughter the competition.”
“Then they’d actually have to put the work in,” Talon muttered.
I dragged in a breath, glancing toward the car where Dess was perched in the back seat. I’d set the locks so they wouldn’t open from the inside, but I half-expected her to burst through the glass. The woman was full of surprises.
For now, she was sitting there in the middle of the back seat, apparently calm. She’d have had a hard time smashing through those windows anyway. We had all our vehicles specially outfitted.
I turned back to my crew, shifting my weight and suppressing a wince at the lingering pain in my lower leg. One of those hired punks had lucked out and clipped my calf with a bullet in the initial turmoil of the attack. Blaze had taken a knife jab that’d come just shy of piercing his stomach. Our wounds were patched up now, but that didn’t mean they were forgiven.
No one messed with my crew and lived to tell the tale.
We’d certainly left no one living in the safe house. That would make a powerful statement. It’d been easy enough to vacate, since we didn’t keep anything there that could be traced back to us and the ownership of the place was through a shell company, but I didn’t like that we were down a useable property on top of everything else.
“We’ll wipe them out,” I said firmly. “After we’re done dealing with our current client and the loose ends he seems to think we left. Divided attention gets you killed. But we also have to make sure the Cutthroats can’t get at us if they’re stupid enough to try again.” I turned to Blaze. “How do you figure they found the first place?”
“There’s no way to connect us to it through the data trail,” Blaze said. “There is no data trail that connects all the dots.”
“We’ve been coming and going from that particular spot a lot in the past few days,” Talon pointed out grimly. “The safe houses are set up for laying low, not regular activity. All it’d take is the wrong person spotting one of us in the area.”
I nodded. “And that means we’d have the exact same problem if we tried to take Dess to one of our other safe houses. The only place that’s totally secure is the penthouse.”
Garrison bristled. “The only reason it’s secure is because no one except us and Steffie has any idea it exists. We can’t bring her there.”
Garrison spat the word her as if it burned through his mouth. As if the idea of Dess was acidic and dangerous.
She was definitely dangerous. I’d only caught a few glimpses of her in the attack, the smoke hiding most of the fighting around me, but what I had seen—it’d been even more impressive than the way she’d tried to escape. She’d moved with ruthless efficiency, doing what needed to be done to take down the intruders and doing it fast and well.
And she hadn’t needed to do it at all. The door had been slammed right off its hinges, the path to freedom wide open.
“I’ve said it before and I’m saying it again,” Garrison said. “We’ve got to get rid of her, make her the client’s problem. As long as she’s with us, she’s just going to be trouble.”
I’d let myself assume that the whole crew would be unanimous on this question after what we’d just been through. I should have remembered never to take anything for granted.
“She fought with us,” I said, hardening my voice. “She could have run for it, but instead she stayed and defended us. She took down at least a couple of the mercenaries. Early on, the fight was closer than I’d like. I don’t know for sure that we’d all have even survived if she hadn’t stepped in. She might have saved your life. We might not be clear on how she fits into this mess, but the one thing she’s proven is that she isn’t out to screw us over.”
“Yeah,” Blaze said. “I saw you get knocked on the ground, and then she jumped in. If she hadn’t tackled that guy, you’d be lying there with the rest of the collection of corpses right now. And you really want to repay her by throwing her to the wolves?”
“The client goes by the name Viper, so technically it’d be throwing her to the snakes,” Garrison muttered, as if that was what mattered.
“And that’s much better?” Talon asked.
Garrison just glowered at him. I studied his expression and saw nothing but his usual dissociated prickliness. Now more than ever I’d have liked to know what lay behind those walls. Why did he have such a problem with this woman?
“Just because she knocked the knives from our enemies’ hands doesn’t mean she won’t plunge one into our backs given the opportunity,” Garrison said finally.
“Nobody said that we’re going to trust her fully,” I reminded him. “But it couldn’t be more obvious that if she wanted us dead, she wouldn’t have helped us. She risked her own life to fight with us, even though we’ve been holding her against her will.”
“And I don’t know why the fuck she did that, but the penthouse is our space. Crew only. She doesn’t belong there.”
“Steffie comes all the time,” Talon pointed out.
Garrison rolled his eyes. “Steffie’s practically crew too. You guys took her on before you even brought me in.”
There was more to his defiance, though, wasn’t there? I didn’t think he only objected to Dess over Steffie because Steffie had been with us longer.
Garrison might never admit it, but I doubted he hated Dess as much as he pretended. I saw the way they bickered, and I’d noticed the light that had danced in his eyes—a genuine enthusiasm that I so rarely saw in him.
Dess wasn’t a danger to our lives, but she was a danger to the steel walls he’d built to ensure nobody could get past them.
But then, I wasn’t being totally honest with the others about my reasons for wanting to keep her with us either.
There’d been a moment toward the end of the fighting when I’d glanced over and caught a glimpse of her face in the middle of grappling with the last man she’d killed. Something about the cool stillness of her expression and the intense focus in her gray eyes had triggered a jolt of recognition. One that had made me want to run over and tear the guy trying to hurt her limb from limb.
It didn’t make much sense. I couldn’t place her, couldn’t say where or when I might have encountered her before. There was no point in putting much stock in the impression. But even now, when I checked on her stance in the car again, that protective urge flickered up in my chest.
I planned my life and our careers according to hard data and strategic thinking, but I’d learned to trust my instincts too. And my instincts insisted that this woman was someone we should defend just as vehemently as she’d defended us.
I turned back to Garrison. “We already have an extra room, so no one’s getting put out on the sofa this time. We can set up a cot in the weight room. With Steffie coming by regularly, she’ll have an added layer of supervision. We’ll have all our equipment right there, everything we need to take care of our work in one place. You can’t get simpler than that.”
“We can’t hand her over to that Viper prick,” Blaze added. “And we can’t let her go when we still don’t know what her real story is. Julius’s approach is the only way that covers all the bases.”
Garrison turned his glower on the techie. “You just want another chance to put the moves on her. Nearly having your windpipe crushed once wasn’t enough?”
Blaze rubbed his throat. “She didn’t hit me that hard. And I provoked her. She hasn’t been remotely aggressive with any of us except in self-defense, has she?”
Talon hesitated as if he still had a few doubts, but then he dipped his head. “She hasn’t. There’s something more to her than she’s said, but I don’t think it makes her a threat to us.”
Garrison’s eyes became narrower. Then a switch flipped inside of him. He stood straighter, loosened his posture, and placed a cold expression on his face. “Fine, but if she kills us all in our sleep, I hope you die knowing that I was right.”
“If we die, you will too, so you won’t get much satisfaction out of it,” Blaze retorted.
Garrison ignored him and stalked back to the car. He whipped the door open and dropped into the front passenger seat without so much as a glance at Dess. She looked at him and then the rest of us approaching, her expression coolly quizzical.
“We’re taking you somewhere,” I said as I got in on the driver’s side.
She cocked her head, a glint of amusement coming into her pretty eyes. You wouldn’t have known looking at her that just an hour ago she’d stabbed at least one man to death. But then, who knew how much shit she’d seen before she fell in with us. We weren’t exactly broken up about the violence we’d dealt out either.
“Let me guess,” she said dryly. “You’re not going to tell me where.”
“You’re catching on,” Garrison muttered.
I gestured to Talon and gave Dess a mildly apologetic smile. “For this trip, you’re going to be blindfolded. I don’t want you even seeing where we’re going.”
Her body stiffened just slightly, the light in her eyes vanishing as if storm clouds had rolled in. “Blindfolded? What the hell—”
“You’ll be able to take it off as soon as we get inside,” I said, cutting her off. “It’s a precaution for both our security and yours.”
I watched as an array of emotions flashed through her gaze, each pushed away until cool indifference was the last thing that remained. “I feel like it should be illegal for cops to blindfold people and take them places.”
Blaze’s laugh filled the car, and I went on before he could say something stupid. “It’s also illegal to kill people, but on some occasions, it’s necessary.”
“You’re not going to arrest me for that, right? Isn’t self-defense allowed?”
“It is,” I said. “You were our responsibility, and we’re responsible for what happened in the safe house too.”
She nodded slowly and leaned into her seat. “Fine, but you’re going to take the blindfold off as soon as we get there.”
As Talon placed a strip of thick cloth over her eyes, a sense of appreciation rose up inside me. For the trust she’d just shown us that I wasn’t sure we’d earned, considering I was still lying through my teeth about who we were. For the way she’d fearlessly fought on behalf of four men she barely knew. Maybe she was some kind of kindred spirit, a piece we hadn’t known the crew was missing. She wasn’t an enemy—of that, I was completely sure.
But at the same time, I had no doubt that if she became a liability, I would kill her. The crew always came first.
I just couldn’t help hoping it wouldn’t come to that.
