WHEN WE GOT BACK to the apartment, I didn’t exactly sulk, but I wasn’t going to hang out with the guys like we were best buds and everything was cool either. Why the hell did the four of them have to be so determined to keep my ass around? Why’d they have to stumble on me right when I was about to beat some answers out of those losers who’d come after me in the mall?
And what was up with Garrison? I shouldn’t have cared, but I knew genuine pain when I saw it. Somewhere deep behind his snarky front, he was hiding a hell of a lot of it.
It resonated inside me more than I liked. Even the anger he’d displayed when defending his weakness had been familiar. He didn’t want me to see that side of him—the part of him that grieved for something he kept even more hidden.
Yeah, I knew a lot about hiding.
But I couldn’t spend all my time here hiding away. If the cops were going to insist on having me around, then I’d just have to continue working that to my advantage in any way I could. I had to get somewhere with them eventually.
I’d been on the verge of taking my chances and making a break for it when I’d seen the men from the mall hustling out from the entrance. If I’d made a commotion then, they’d have noticed me right away and I’d have lost any chance of surprising them; if I’d waited until they were out of sight, I’d have lost them completely. And as soon as the cops had screwed up my shot at getting answers there, I’d been left with no further leads.
I had nowhere to go and limited cash. Coming back here with them had been the best of my bad options.
Weirdly, when I’d stepped through the front door with them, I’d been hit by a waft of relief. Like it was good to be “home.” This place wasn’t my home, and I’d sure as hell better not start thinking of it that way. Maybe Stockholm Syndrome was starting to take hold.
Shut away from the rest of them and the comfort of the rest of the apartment, I dug the flip phone out of my bra. It was a good thing I’d tucked it in there, because Julius had done a quick pat down of my pockets and waistline in the elevator.
The screen still offered me nothing. I made sure it was set to vibrate, no chance of a ringtone giving it away, and wiggled it behind a small equipment trunk in the corner which didn’t look as if it’d been moved in years. There was less chance of the men finding it there than in my tote bag, which they’d already searched twice. I couldn’t keep it on me without risking one of them noticing the odd shape beneath my breasts if I raised my arms at the wrong angle.
With that taken care of, a little more of the tension in my chest eased. I took off my brace to test the soreness in my wrist and run through some mild stretching exercises designed to speed along recovery. In a few more days, I might be able to take on all four of the men out there, police and military training or not. Smiling to myself and feeling ready to face them again, I tugged the brace back on and stepped out into the main room.
The only ones around were Julius and Talon. Julius was sitting at the small wooden table, currently cleared of army figures, his brow furrowed. A few sketchy lines that I couldn’t decipher marked the whiteboard next to him. He had a notebook propped against the edge of the table, and even from across the room, I could see it held a neatly written list. I couldn’t read it from so far away, and I knew better now than to try to get him to show it to me willingly. I might be able to take a peek later.
Talon was poised at one end of the leather sofa… with a pair of knitting needles bobbing and weaving between his muscular hands.
I blinked, making sure I wasn’t seeing things. But no, the brutal, skin-headed undercover cop with combat skills that rivaled my own was definitely sitting there, knitting away. From the looks of things, he’d been at his current project for a while. About three feet of mottled red-and-orange scarf dangled beneath the needles and fell across his knees.
He caught my startled gaze and raised his eyebrows at me as if daring me to say something. “Is there a problem?” he asked in his usual cool tone.
I laughed and walked over to the other side of the sofa. “I thought that maybe it was Steffie who left the knitting bag here. If not her, possibly Blaze. Garrison would have been my third guess. You’d have been last.”
I expected Talon to brush off the comment or outright ignore it, but the vibe between us had shifted since we’d sparred the other day. I’d earned a little respect somewhere in there… or else he’d decided I was more harmless than he’d thought, so he didn’t have to be quite as defensive. I wasn’t sure which worked in my favor better, but I’d definitely prefer the former.
“Any particular reason you’d assume that?” he asked, looping the yarn around the right needle before tipping it and sliding a stitch from the left needle. He continued the repetitive motions so smoothly and quickly I could tell this was far from his first project.
I sat down on the arm of the sofa, feeling safer there than on the cushion a foot or more closer to him. “Somehow I don’t think it’s going to shock you if I point out that you don’t look like a knitter.”
He chuckled under his breath as he finished a row. Stopping, he plucked a spare needle out of the bag and held it out to me. I eyed it warily before gripping the hard, thin rod.
“Tell me what you feel,” he said.
Would we break out the tambourines after and sing “Kumbaya”? I gave him a skeptical look. “It’s a knitting needle.”
The corner of his mouth twitched slightly upward. I thought that was a smile. What exactly he was amused by was harder to tell.
He nodded toward me. “Describe the knitting needle.”
I rolled my eyes. “Metal, smooth, pointy.” I waggled it in the air.
“And what other things are metal, smooth, and pointy?”
Oh, all right, I saw where he was going with this. “Knives,” I said, leaning back on the sofa and spinning the needle between my fingers. “Razors. Swords. But you’re not stabbing anyone with these. You’re literally knitting a scarf. Or a very skinny sweater.”
“True,” he said, taking up his stitches again. “But I could stab someone with them if I wanted to. If there’s me and a knitting needle standing between you and someone who wants to kill you, you’d be a lot more likely to live than if I were holding a paintbrush or a lump of clay. So I’d say it’s a very macho craft.”
I could think of about a dozen ways to kill someone with both a paintbrush and some clay, but it seemed wisest not to mention that. Besides, he had a point.
“All right, grandma,” I teased. “In that scenario, I’d still feel better if you had a gun.”
He shrugged, eyeing the stretch of woven yarn before him wordlessly. I wasn’t oblivious to the fact that each of the men did actually have a gun at their hip at all times. I’d bet Talon could do a good amount of damage with that needle too, though.
Curiosity itched at me. I swiveled so that I was facing him, planting my feet on the sofa cushion. “How’d you pick up the hobby? Were you drawn in by the pointy stabbiness and just decided to stick around for the wool accessories?”
I hadn’t known if Julius was listening to our conversation, he’d seemed so deep in thought, but he snorted at that remark. Talon shot him a narrow glance over the top of the sofa and then returned his gaze to me. “Why do you want to know?”
“Because it’s a mystery and I have a thing for unraveling them.”
He tipped his head to the side in consideration and appeared to decide that my answer was acceptable. “It helps me decompress. When we’re on the job, we spend a lot of time on edge, ready to act in an instant, needing to be ready for unexpected developments that could put us all in danger. The patterns I work through with the needles are predictable and straightforward. I want to make a scarf, and I get a scarf. It’s a welcome change.”
That made a fair bit of sense. Hearing him explain it kind of made me want to take up knitting. I watched him for another minute, unable to stop myself from admiring how those powerful muscles could move in such small but still incredibly skillful ways to create a product that had nothing to do with broken bones or blood.
Then he added, in case he thought I might forget what he was capable of, “It doesn’t hurt to have a few additional weapons around the place either.”
I had to grin. “Of course not.”
Talon was the complete opposite of Garrison, wasn’t he? Garrison held all kinds of fire in tight while putting on a blasé, disaffected front. Talon appeared unaffected… because he really was that way. I didn’t sense that he was holding anything back in his answer. When he didn’t want to tell you something, he simply didn’t say anything rather than making something up.
I could appreciate that kind of straightforwardness too.
But that didn’t mean the guy didn’t have any emotions. He obviously got comfort out of this hobby. He liked to feel prepared, liked the reassurance of knowing the outcome in advance.
And I’d definitely seen sparks of something more heated in him when we’d gotten close during our sparring session.
It wouldn’t do me any good to dwell on that. Watching his hands work was already making my skin tingle in odd ways. I latched onto an appropriate change of subject, what a normal person who hadn’t focused their whole life on learning to kill might have said. At least, I thought so.
“What do you do with the things you knit?” I glanced around the room, not seeing any vast quantities of hats or mittens or blankets on display—not even one.
“I knit a new scarf for the guys every winter, because Blaze especially is always misplacing them, and the rest I donate to a clothing drive around Christmastime. What else am I going to do with twenty scarves a year?”
Just like that, my perception of him shifted yet again. There was something so… kindhearted about making clothes to keep his partners warm that didn’t fit his icy demeanor at all. And donating the rest to charity? I guessed it’d have been a hassle to sell them or something, but still.
Maybe I should throw out the entire idea of categorizing Talon. It didn’t matter how big the box was—he would never fit.
Annoyingly, that made him even more appealing.
Before I could figure out how to extricate myself from the conversation that had drawn me in more than I’d intended, the front door banged open. As Garrison and Blaze strode inside, I sat a little straighter.
Garrison smiled with a cool confidence that gnawed at my nerves, his gaze skimming right over me. Apparently I didn’t even exist to him now. Fine.
Julius spoke before anyone else had the chance. “We need to talk,” he said in that low commanding voice that his colleagues responded to immediately. Talon put away his knitting and got up. Julius walked over to the kitchen area, even farther from me than he already was, and the other three met him there.
I watched as they gathered on the other side of the island. Their conference began with voices too quiet for me to make out. I got up and ambled over as if I thought Julius’s order might have applied to me too, even though I was sure it hadn’t.
Julius noticed me before I was even halfway there. “This doesn’t involve you,” he said firmly, which made me even more certain their conversation had something to do with the household murders. If it had nothing to do with me, why would it matter if I heard a stray word or two?
I had the urge to demand they let me in on the discussion, but I’d seen how well that’d gone in the past—or rather, how badly. So I meandered across the room, not getting closer to them but not veering too far away, watching for alternative sources of information from the corners of my eyes as they fell back into their hushed exchange.
Ah ha. Garrison had left the kettle sitting on the dining table after his last mug of cocoa, and its stainless-steel surface reflected the kitchen interior like a slightly warped mirror. I sank down into one of the chairs at the table with my back to the men and reached for an apple out of the fruit bowl, just to give me a reason to be sitting there. As I ran my fingers over the smooth skin, I let my gaze linger on the kettle’s shiny surface.
I couldn’t see a whole lot more from here than from the sofa, but I could see it without them knowing I was watching. Their voices stayed low, but their body language relaxed incrementally.
Julius held his notebook up for the others to see. His small, delicate scrawl was indecipherable from here, but the gesture confirmed that he’d written down something important if I could ever get my hands on it. Blaze moved around the group in his usual energetic way, blocking my view of the others every few seconds. I gritted my teeth. If he would stay fucking still for five seconds…
He began murmuring to Garrison, likely heckling him in the way they always did with one another. When he stepped to the side, Talon said something with a wave toward Blaze and then his computers. Blaze grinned—and jerked his flattened fingers past his throat in a vicious gesture I only knew to mean one thing.
Death.
It was Blaze making the gesture, though, so maybe it was his over-dramatic way of indicating something less bloody that he was going to do with his computer system? Seeing it unsettled me all the same. Should a cop really look that eager about the idea of killing, even metaphorically?
Of course, as Garrison had gleefully pointed out earlier today, these men weren’t typical cops.
Julius said a few more things with brisk motions of his hands. Then Garrison jerked out his phone. He was standing at an angle where the screen, which he was holding away from the other guys, showed up almost perfectly on the kettle’s reflection. I restrained a satisfied smile as I noted the four-digit passcode he quickly typed in.
Jackpot. I filed the number away in my mind, tying each digit to an image to make sure it’d stick and I’d recall it when necessary later.
There’d been some development in the case that they didn’t want me to know about, but that didn’t matter. I crossed my feet beneath the table and brought the apple to my mouth. When I sank my teeth in the crisp flesh, its tart juice seeped down my throat, and then I let myself smile.
I didn’t need their permission to learn whatever they knew about the case. I only needed to not get caught.
