“SHE HASN’T LEFT THE MALL,” Blaze said from the front passenger seat, eyeing the computer that was never far from his fingertips. “There are street cams that cover any way she’d leave, and my app hasn’t pinged.”
He’d developed the software a few years ago—a facial recognition program he claimed was more advanced than the ones even the FBI used to catch criminals. Combined with the city-operated security cameras, Blaze could find anyone from anywhere.
I leaned back in my seat, tipping my head against the headrest. “And does anyone find it interesting that the first place she went after ditching us is a hotbed of criminal activity?”
Blaze grunted in reluctant acknowledgment. “At least three of the stores in that place are money-laundering fronts.”
“And the neighborhood’s got more robberies per capita than anywhere else in the city,” Julius said from his spot behind the steering wheel. “We know. We still don’t know what she’s doing in there.”
Talon stirred on the other side of the back seat from me. “It’s a good thing we gave her some rope so we can find out.”
I had to admit Julius wasn’t being as soft on the woman as I’d been worried about. He’d come up with this idea to get a better sense of her motives and connections. Allowing her to escape had been the most practical way to discover exactly where she aimed to go and what she wanted to do when we were no longer on her tail.
But we’d never really been far away. She’d taken the bait the first second she could, and we’d been tracking her using Blaze’s software ever since.
“There.” Blaze tapped his laptop’s screen. “She just came out the main entrance.”
Julius put the car into drive and cruised around the corner toward the shabby mall. “We’ll let her get a little more distance so she doesn’t know we were following her the whole time, and then we’ll pick her up and see what she has to say for herself.”
I couldn’t stop my gaze from lingering on the lithe figure on Blaze’s screen. The way Dess carried herself was unlike anything I’d seen from her yet. As she strode along the sidewalk and across the street, she looked as if she’d just conquered the world. When she joined a small cluster of pedestrians, I narrowed my eyes, impressed by how well her entire demeanor changed. She became her surroundings, mimicking the mannerisms of the bodies around her.
It’d taken me years to cultivate the subtle art of merging with a crowd like that. You didn’t develop it out of the blue. You had to learn it—either because you wanted to, or because it was the only way you could survive.
And we’d let this puzzle of a woman whose fighting skills could rival Talon’s and who wore a façade as impenetrable as mine into our home.
“We’re not going to bring her back to the penthouse, are we?” I asked.
“It depends on what she says,” Julius said smoothly.
Why wasn’t he more concerned about what’d just gone down? “You really think she’ll tell us anything remotely true?”
“I think we’ll learn something—and a lot of that is your job, isn’t it? If she’s part of something larger to do with the job that we weren’t aware of, we need to know that. If this is about something totally unrelated, we need to know that so we can finally drop her and get on with our lives.”
I snorted. As if there was much chance of that. Julius ignored me.
“She stopped,” Blaze announced. “Not too far from the mall. She’s just standing there by a tree… Is she waiting for someone?”
Julius parked, still a few blocks away, and frowned at the computer. “You can’t tell?”
Blaze shook his head.
My skin crawled with apprehension. I hadn’t liked how much uncertainty Dess had brought into our lives and our work from the first moment we’d spotted her outside the mansion.
I leaned forward and gripped Julius’s shoulder from behind. “We should cut her loose now. Pretend we never saw her. It’d be easier—”
Julius’s head snapped around, giving me a clear view of his right ear with its ravaged earlobe—a gift from a bullet or a piece of shrapnel sometime during his military career. He’d never given the details.
“No,” he said, low and firm with a hint of menace that dared me to challenge him.
I pulled back, my mouth twisting. Julius was the boss for a reason, and questioning him was something that few people dared to do. And when he said no… well, that was final.
I nodded, though all of my distrust for Dess whirled through my mind in a frenzy. This was my crew. My brothers in arms, even if we weren’t exactly fighting in any war. I’d kill or die for any of them, and no woman would change that. Dess shouldn’t have me second-guessing myself and the leadership roles long-established within the Chaos Crew. She wasn’t worth it.
We waited a few minutes, and Dess didn’t budge. Blaze glanced at Julius. Our leader sighed and then stepped on the gas again. “Let’s go get her.”
He cruised down the street, and we all made a show of peering through the windows as if we were on the lookout rather than knowing exactly where our target was. When Dess came into view, Julius sped up. He veered up to the sidewalk right in front of her and fixed her with his best “you’ve got some explaining to do” expression.
Dess leapt backwards, her eyes flashing, but Talon and I had already hopped out and come up on either side of her. Julius got out too, letting his hand rest on the concealed holster at his hip in a subtle threat.
Dess halted in her tracks. “How…” she started, shaking her head. Her gaze darted toward the mall beyond me, and I wondered again about what she’d been waiting for.
“We’ve looked through half the city for you,” Julius said, putting on an impressive show of frustration. He gestured to the street around us. “Do you know the kinds of things that happen on this side of town? It’s even less safe than the last place we found you.”
I didn’t dare to glance away from her face as he spoke, but I found nothing of importance there. She looked calm, though the tightness in her shoulders suggested a hint of anger that she was caught.
If it weren’t for Blaze and his software, she wouldn’t have been, but we didn’t need to reveal all our tools to her.
“You don’t need to protect me anymore,” Dess said, backing up another step, but the Chinese restaurant behind her with a foreclosure sign in the dusty window didn’t offer any avenue for escape. “I survived the last couple of hours just fine on my own, didn’t I?” She placed her hands on her hips, as if she’d proved something with her little escape attempt.
I saw the flicker of mischief in her eyes that nobody else caught. I noticed the way she shifted her weight from her left foot to her right one as Julius spoke to her, and I knew that she was hiding something. I knew better than to believe anything she said.
“You have no idea what you’re dealing with,” Julius said. “Whoever blasted their way through that mansion would make most of the criminals around here piss their pants. You may think you don’t need us—you may even be right. But you’re connected to this case, and until we figure out exactly how you’re connected, you’re not going anywhere. Get in the car.”
Dess frowned at him. Then her eyes flicked to the side again, and an unexpected emotion touched her face—disappointment? Regret?
I risked glancing over my shoulder, but I couldn’t tell what she’d seen that’d provoked the strange response. When I looked at her again, it was gone anyway. Her shoulders came down a smidge with what I’d have said was resignation, except she still didn’t budge.
Julius moved forward with the full heft of his massive frame and grasped her upper arm. Dess tried to jerk away. “I’m not your property.”
“That depends on your definition of property,” I muttered.
The look she shot me should have killed me on the spot. “I’m pretty sure cops aren’t allowed to take people into custody without—what—a warrant or something? Especially if you’ve got nothing to charge me with.”
I let my lip curl into a sneer. “Did you forget so soon? We’re not like other cops, sweetheart.”
Julius tugged, and finally Dess came without more of a fight. Maybe she could tell that’d only end up worse for her.
Talon slid into the back seat, and Julius propelled Dess after him. I got in by her other side, more amused than I probably should have been by her irritated huff.
Some part of me kind of wanted to know what would happen if she really stepped out of line with Julius. He was ruthless and organized, and if something didn’t go his way, his temper would ensure that it got back on track quickly. How would Dess react to that military-honed authority?
It’d be something to see, that was for sure.
“Let me guess,” Dess muttered as Julius started the engine. “When you got your jobs, they added an extra line to your swearing-in.” She raised a hand as if pledging allegiance to the police academy that I’d never attended. “I swear to serve, protect, and only illegally hold a civilian if I think it’s absolutely necessary.”
“Now you’re getting the picture.” I glanced over at her, doing my best not to pay attention to her lean frame tucked next to mine or how gorgeous her face was amid its frame of dark waves. Trouble shouldn’t look that hot.
But as Julius had pointed out, my main job was figuring out the people we encountered on the job. Time to get that over with.
I folded my arms over my chest. “So, what were you up to out here? Just checking in with some friends? Or, wait, your boyfriend never let you have friends, did he?”
Blaze twitched with what might have been a wince, but he couldn’t tell me to play nice. Nice hadn’t gotten me anywhere with Dess before, and she wouldn’t have bought that act now. I needed a reaction, whether because I hit her in the right emotional tender spot or because she got her story tangled trying to keep up with me. Either would work fine.
Dess simply rolled her eyes. “Maybe I was just trying to get as far as I could from the bunch of you. I used to live in this neighborhood. I know it pretty well—including how to avoid the wrong kinds of people.” She gave me a pointed look as if to indicate I was one of the wrong kind.
“I guess that didn’t work out so well for you, since here you are back with us. And nothing to show for it either.”
I’d hoped for some indication that I was wrong, that she had accomplished something in her trek across the city, but I didn’t get so much as a twitch of a muscle. “Yep,” she said. “Right back where I started. Who should be more upset about that, you or me?”
I would have been annoyed, but some perverse part of me enjoyed how easily she could give back the snark I threw at her. There wasn’t anything wrong with enjoying it, was there, as long as I cut to the meat of the matter before too long?
I shot her a smirk. “What makes you think I don’t enjoy your luminous company?”
Dess guffawed. “Oh, only the fact that you’ve been pointing out how little you want me around for about two days now. Too bad your colleagues don’t listen to you more.”
Her jab cut me a little deeper than I liked. Well, if she wanted to play hardball, I could match her hit for hit. “At least I have a job. You’ve been scrounging off Daddy and then the boyfriend for years. Is that why you came out here—looking for someone new to leach off of?”
“How do you know I didn’t already have someone lined up?”
Was she serious about that? I eyed her face and found the same analytical expression I knew that I’d find on my own.
As I opened my mouth with a retort, the car skidded to a halt so sudden it jolted all of us forward. My chest slammed into the seatbelt—
—the image of a shadowy highway flashed behind my eyes, the screech of tires and a shrill scream echoing in my ears—
—and I blinked, my hand clammy where I’d snatched at the seat in front of me, my pulse thudding at double speed. I stared through the windshield, absorbing the view of the guy who’d swerved into our lane, the daylight streaming over his truck and the street around us.
“…the drivers who don’t know how to fucking drive,” Julius was grumbling, pressing the horn.
I pushed myself back into my seat, willing myself to breathe steadily, to even out the thump of my heart.
It was nothing. Some jackass was in too much of a hurry to notice he’d almost caused a pile-up. No one had died. No one was going to die.
This time.
My involuntary panic reaction couldn’t have lasted more than five seconds. I sealed the holes that had cracked in my walls, setting everything back to normal. But when I looked at Dess, she was watching me, and something had softened in her expression.
She’d seen it. She’d caught a glimpse of me that I’d never have wanted anyone to see, not even the men I’d worked alongside through life-and-death jobs for five years now. And in her reaction to seeing it, she was revealing something gentle behind the hardened, jaded front she put on too.
I wanted to destroy that softness. It wasn’t what I needed from her. I needed to prove that she was a monster who didn’t deserve our trust, not an empathetic girl who’d earned it.
“What?” I spat at her with more venom in my tone than I’d intended. Good. Let her hear the venom. Let her hate me. It would make my job a hell of a lot easier.
“You were in a car accident before, weren’t you?” she said, not judging or prodding, just stating it as a fact. As if it was so obvious anyone could have seen it.
Anger flooded me. I’d worked for years so that nothing like this would happen, so that no one would ever dig down into the parts of my life I kept locked away even from myself, and I’d slipped up in front of the worst possible person.
I narrowed my eyes at her. “Maybe you should be worrying about your own troubles, not imaginary ones. You’re in a car with four men who you hardly know, and we could do whatever the fuck we want with you. So keep your nose in your own damn business if you don’t want to end up like all of your friends.”
A flash of surprise crossed her expression, but there was no fear there. If she felt any, she hid it well enough that I couldn’t detect even a hint of it. How the fuck could she be so good at seeing through masks and holding up her own?
And why the fuck did I find that talent so intriguing even as it infuriated me?
