“WHAT GOOD IS your fucking facial recognition if it can’t find who we’re looking for?” Garrison groused at Blaze, who was typing on his laptop frantically in the back seat next to me.
“I’m working on it.”
Julius turned in the driver’s seat, his eyes smoldering with tension in the darkness. Only a faint glow reached the inside of the car from distant streetlamps at the edge of the vacant lot we’d parked in.
“Work faster,” he demanded. “That’s your job, isn’t it?”
Our leader always kept a controlled front, but I knew Julius well enough to tell he was struggling as much as any of us, maybe more. He expected perfection. He took pride in our missions, worked out every minute detail of the operation, and they always went according to plan. We made sure of it.
Then Dess had come into the picture, and nothing had gone completely according to plan since.
Blaze stopped and looked at Julius with a cold expression that rarely came over his face. “If you can get the job done better, do it yourself.”
I’d never seen Blaze talk to anyone—let alone Julius—that way. Maybe we were all unhinged by Dess’s intrusion tonight. She must have been distressed by the bloodbath that she’d seen, but when she’d spoken her final words to us, she hadn’t been staring at the corpses that littered the floor. She’d stared right into Julius’s eyes, and we’d all seen the fury there.
She knew it’d been us who killed her friend and everyone else in the mansion. She knew that we’d been lying to her from the start.
It wasn’t a total surprise that Blaze’s nerves were frayed. He’d seemed to be forming some kind of friendship with her—and he’d spoken up for her from the beginning. I’d almost have said his eyes had been brighter and his steps a little lighter after they’d spent time together yesterday morning.
What did surprise me were the shifting tides inside me. I hadn’t said a word since Dess had run off, and I wasn’t sure I could even if I wanted to. The strange pang inside me wasn’t anywhere near crippling, but… I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt even that much about anything.
Julius inhaled slowly as if gathering his cool. He spoke more evenly than before. “Why isn’t it working?”
Blaze didn’t bother looking up. “The same reason it wasn’t working an hour ago and three hours before that. I can’t scan faces in the dark, so unless she walks right below a streetlamp and looks toward the camera at the same time, we’re not going to find her until dawn. Which is… about a half hour off still.”
“We’ll find her,” Julius said. “We have to. We don’t leave loose ends.”
“Assuming she’s even still in the city, let alone the state,” Garrison muttered.
There it came again—the slight discomfort in my chest that grew each time I thought about Dess hating us. Leaving us. As if I’d lost something.
But that didn’t make sense. As close as we’d gotten during our heated encounter in the exercise room, as much as I’d enjoyed it, it’d been purely physical. We’d barely talked, and she hadn’t seemed to mind that.
Blaze jerked his head toward Garrison. “If she isn’t, then I’ll find her wherever she went. But there’s no reason to assume she’s gone that far.”
Garrison raised his hands. “I’m just saying, no one would stick around here knowing that we’re going to come after them, having seen what we can do. Even I can admit she’s smarter than that.”
“She’s obviously smarter than any of us gave her credit for,” Julius said, raking his hand through his hair. “How the hell did she even manage to follow us? Did you see anything out of the ordinary during the drive?”
Blaze shook his head. “I saw you lock the penthouse behind us. She couldn’t get into the passages without us noticing, let alone the garage. I’ve already checked the cameras down there—no sign of her.”
“Then she went out the main entrance. But how the hell did she get there, and how did she know where to go afterward?”
“What does it matter?” Garrison asked. “She did find us, she’s seen what we can do, and now we’re screwed.”
“She only knows our aliases,” I pointed out. “Not our real names or anything that would identify us to the actual cops.” Talking eased the discomfort inside me just a little, as if it helped that I was contributing. But a small ache remained. Exactly as if a hole had been carved out of my chest, one only she could fill.
No, it didn’t make sense at all. It would probably fade in a matter of hours anyway.
“If she got out of the building, then she knows where the penthouse is,” Blaze pointed out. “So much for that being our secure base.”
“And she can pass on physical descriptions to the police.” Julius scowled. “Or whoever else she might want to tell about this. I’m even more sure now that we never got the full story about who she is and how she’s involved. Which is why we need to track her down, fast.”
“I’m trying,” Blaze grumbled.
Watching them debate our situation and Dess’s part in it brought the pang back into sharper clarity. I couldn’t decide if it bothered me or if it was kind of a relief to know I was capable of that kind of emotion.
I didn’t need to feel things. I got by just fine in my usual unaffected state. A lot of guys would have scoffed at the idea of feelings and acted as if they were a weakness anyway.
The ache for Dess didn’t seem like a weakness, though. It felt like a sense of direction, propelling me forward.
Despite Julius’s determined words, Garrison’s snark, and Blaze’s frustration, I got the sense that this wasn’t just about loose ends for them either. No, we didn’t want to deal with the fallout if we couldn’t contain what she knew… but she’d intrigued all of us in different ways.
“We never should have brought her to the penthouse to begin with,” Garrison said, tipping his head back with a groan.
A growl came into Julius’s voice. “Don’t you dare say ‘I told you so.’”
Garrison glowered at him. “Fine, I won’t say it. I’ll just think it very loudly. We have a loose cannon running around—one who knows our address, our occupation, and the fact that we killed her friend. If she tells even one person, any person, our job just got a hundred times harder.” He paused, and his mouth twisted. “Also, I liked that apartment.”
“We might still get to keep it,” Blaze said, always the most optimistic of us.
A haze of pre-dawn sunlight was beginning to glaze the horizon beyond the windshield. Blaze stayed ready for his facial recognition program to kick in, not daring to look away from his laptop. “It didn’t seem like she had anyone to tell. Maybe we can…”
He trailed off, obviously knowing there weren’t many solutions that involved us finding her and ensuring she didn’t talk that wouldn’t involve her as dead as the drug dealers we’d just mowed down.
“I don’t think she’ll go to the police,” I said slowly. Julius and Garrison looked at me, seeming surprised that I’d jumped in. I continued, expanding on my reasoning so they knew I wasn’t just shooting my mouth off. “She stole a car when we first met her. She was running from something, and she was trying to avoid leaving a paper trail at a hospital. When she thought we were cops, she held herself back from telling us anything.”
Garrison grimaced. “Considering the stuff her boyfriend was mixed up in, if any of that was even true, she might tip off some other criminal crew instead. That’d be a whole different kind of headache. I think I’d rather deal with cops. At least they’re a little more predictable.”
“None of that matters until we find her and—and see what she has to say,” Blaze said, as if she was likely to say anything at all and not fight us tooth and nail.
We all fell silent, the others possibly thinking the exact same thing I just had. Julius sighed. “We can’t know for sure how it’ll play out until we get to that point. The one thing I’m sure of is that we definitely don’t know everything there is to know about Dess. I don’t think we’ve even scraped the surface.”
Nobody could argue that claim.
He looked down at his hands, the knuckles marked by a few small scars, and flexed his fingers before going on. “If she has ties to a criminal syndicate, we’ll use her as a message. She can’t be left alive if she’s with one of our enemies. If we decide she’s a risk in other ways, we’ll deal with it appropriately. I think we can all agree on that. But we have to wait and see.”
The ache inside me dug a little deeper at the thought of ending Dess’s life. An image flashed through my mind from one of the movies I’d watched—secretly in my room on the small TV I had in there, studying the actors’ faces and body language as they played out some heartbreak. Trying to understand the pain they were going through that was unconnected to any actual wound. My hand rose to my chest, putting the slightest pressure there, like I’d seen the characters do sometimes.
I couldn’t tell if it helped.
I thought back to sex with Dess—to how hungry she’d seemed for the physical connection once we’d collided. There’d been nothing artful or scheming about our coming together, just pure bodily lust, so much it’d seemed to unnerve her in brief moments when I’d caught a flicker of uneasiness in her eyes. And yet she’d kept going. She’d clung to me, urged me on. And when she’d come apart, it’d been like she’d ascended to the heavens.
She’d lost something too—and not just her friend. There’d been an emptiness inside her she’d been longing to heal. And for just a little while, I’d been able to fulfill that need.
I’d fucked bad people. I’d talked to them and worked with them my entire life. Dess was wounded in a way I couldn’t explain, but she wasn’t like those people at all.
“I don’t think she’d be out to hurt us vindictively,” I said. “She’s scared, and who wouldn’t be after what she saw?”
Julius looked at me, studying my expression. Maybe picking up on the fact that I had experiences with her I hadn’t shared. But he didn’t prod me about them.
“We can’t know that for sure,” he said, “but I hope you’re right.”
Blaze’s demeanor changed like the flick of a switch. He sat up straighter and pointed to his screen. “I’ve got her. She’s on the move.”
We all peered at the grainy image of a figure striding into what looked like a city park. There was no denying it. That was Dess, and she walked with purpose.
“Let’s go round her up,” Julius said, and slammed the car into drive.
