JULIUS CAUGHT the woman before she’d quite hit the ground. She lolled in his arms, obviously dead to the world. I pocketed the syringe I’d used to knock her unconscious and glanced at the crashed car, swiping the raindrops that were finally starting to let up off my smooth scalp. “Do we want to do anything about the vehicle?”
Julius considered it. “I don’t think going to that kind of trouble is necessary. It wasn’t hers to begin with, so there’s nothing to tie it to her or us. Check inside for blood or anything she might have left behind, though.”
She’d never gotten around to closing the driver’s side door. As Julius carried her back to our car, I peered into the darkened interior. I couldn’t see any bodily fluids on the seats, even after I flicked on my phone’s flashlight to be sure. I plucked one dark hair off the leather surface.
There was a coffee cup that must have belonged to the car’s owner, since this woman hadn’t had a chance to stop for a drink. A shard of glass and a dinner knife lay on the passenger seat. None of the windows had shattered, so the glass hadn’t come from there. Odd but not really useful. I tucked them into my pocket alongside the syringe anyway.
I made it to our car just as Julius lowered the woman into the trunk. My gaze lingered on the smooth planes of her face. She was young, no more than her early twenties, but she didn’t look scruffy or like any kind of punk.
What had driven her to steal that car? What had she been doing by the mansion?
Garrison had grabbed the bag she’d been carrying. He tossed it into the trunk with her and stalked to the door to get out of the rain. Julius closed the lid of the trunk, and the rest of us piled into the car afterward. I took the driver’s seat again, but I didn’t start the engine, waiting for Julius’s cue.
“What the fuck are we going to do with her now?” Garrison asked. He’d put on a softer front briefly with the woman when he’d been trying to cajole a little information out of her, but now he was back to his usual snarky self. “Not take her home like a stray puppy, I assume.”
“If she’s from the mansion, we should probably kill her,” I said. I didn’t relish the thought—killing in the middle of a job, where everything was orchestrated and certain, felt very different from murdering a random woman we’d picked off the street—but I wouldn’t balk either. If that was what needed to happen, then so be it. She was nothing to us.
Julius had gotten in beside me. He rubbed the bridge of his nose, more pensive than decisive at the moment. That didn’t seem like a good sign. Pensive was for planning a job. Once it was underway, Julius kept everything running with brutal efficiency. It was one of the reasons I trusted him with my life.
“We still don’t know if she has anything to do with the job,” he said. “We don’t know anything about her.”
Blaze spoke up from behind me. “She was pretty cagey. Most people wouldn’t argue about getting help after a crash like that. But she might have been nervous about the whole stolen car thing or whatever made her steal the car.”
He glanced at Garrison. The two might squabble in their bantering way a lot, but Blaze knew as well as the rest of us that the youngest member of our crew was the best at reading people. That was one of the reasons we’d brought him on.
“She definitely didn’t want anything to do with us,” Garrison said, slouching back in his seat and shaking some of the rain off his pale shaggy hair. “She was nervous, avoiding questions, and more worried about getting away from us than her injuries. But none of that tells us anything for sure.” He paused. “Why don’t we turn her over to the client and let him sort out this shit?”
“If it turns out we missed something important regarding her, dropping her in the client’s lap isn’t going to look good for our reputation,” Julius pointed out. “We need to understand exactly how she fits into this situation before we can handle her properly. And she wasn’t on the manifest. Whatever else she’s gotten mixed up in, we wouldn’t want to turn her over to the kind of people who’d hire us if she’s got no connection to the mansion after all.”
He frowned, lapsing into silence for another moment, and then said, “We’ll take her to one of the safe houses and question her when she wakes up. She doesn’t look like she’d pose much of a threat. Garrison, you can get just about anything out of anyone, and she’ll be shaken up anyway. It shouldn’t take long to drag the story out of her. Then we decide whether we need to end her or cut her loose.”
Garrison opened his mouth and shut it again. I could tell he was both pleased with the praise, which Julius doled out sparingly, and annoyed at the diversion from our plan. “Fine,” he said finally. “I’ll get her talking, no problem.”
Blaze had perked up. “When we’ve got proper lighting, I can take a picture of her face and send it through my app. Run any IDs she’s got on her too.” He never shied away from the opportunity to put his skills to use.
A prickle of uneasiness ran through my gut. This woman was an unknown variable—who knew how she might disrupt our carefully constructed operations? But that was the only emotion I felt about the situation—about as much emotion as I ever felt. I didn’t react to things with the same energy other people seemed to, which meant I never totally trusted my own judgment when it came to dealing with other people, unless I was simply judging the most ideal way to kill those people.
Julius and I had been in this since the beginning, but there was a reason he was in charge and I was his right-hand man. Following his orders had never led me astray.
“Sounds like a plan,” I said, starting the engine. “The nearest safe house is over on Grant St.”
Julius shook his head. “That’s not quite soundproofed. We don’t want anyone hearing her if she starts making a racket. Let’s go with the one on Carmichael Blvd.”
I pulled away from the curb without another word. He was right about that too. The Carmichael safe house was a basement apartment beneath a house we periodically used for short-term rentals to make it look inhabited. There was no one in it now, and the basement was outfitted with plenty of insulation. Not even a scream would make its way outside.
When we reached the apartment, Julius carried the woman straight to the smallest of the three bedrooms. I understood immediately. As a basement, all of the windows were narrow, but our captive was pretty slim. None of us would have stood a hope in hell of squeezing through any of them except the main one in the living room, but she might have managed the slightly larger ones in the bigger bedrooms. This one was too small even for her.
The air in the place smelled stale, unused—which made sense, since we hadn’t come by in a while. I was pretty sure I had a change of clothes stashed here somewhere, though. I could get out of the damp shirt and jeans when we were done with our initial inspection.
Julius flicked on the light and laid the woman on the twin bed, which was made up with sheets and a thin blanket on the off-chance that we needed to crash here some night. If we were sticking around until she woke up, I guessed one of us was taking the sofa.
Garrison patted down her wet clothes quickly, which was his usual role in the middle of a job, since he didn’t generally get involved in the killing part. He let out a hum and pulled a few jewel-laden necklaces from one pocket, which looked expensive even to my inexperienced eyes. From her other pants pocket, he produced a wad of cash. He unfurled it and fanned it out. “There’s at least three grand here. And those necklaces are worth maybe twice that much.”
“Could be stolen like the car,” Blaze suggested, shifting his weight eagerly on his feet. “No wallet or anything?”
Garrison grimaced. “This is it. Unless there’s something in her bag.”
Julius upended the tote bag onto the chair in the corner. Several more pieces of jewelry tumbled out, along with a small heap of clothing… and a worn stuffed tiger that looked as if it’d seen better days.
Garrison raised an eyebrow at that. “Cash, stuff that can be pawned for more cash, clothes, and a personal belonging. That paints a pretty clear picture. She was running away—from someone or something.”
“Without any ID on her?” Blaze said, obviously frustrated that he couldn’t work his computer magic on it.
“Could be whoever she was running from had it under lock and key,” Julius said. “Take your photo of her face. You can still use that.”
As Blaze got out his phone, Julius turned the woman so she faced the ceiling, her black hair fanning out across the thin pillow. Her face had come out of the crash relatively undamaged, only a faint bruise forming at one corner of her jaw.
Blaze tipped his head to the side with a skeptical look. “Not sure how much we’ll get with this. People’s faces take on a different shape when they’re slack like that, and without her eyes open—but I’ll see what I can turn up.”
When he’d snapped his picture and started tapping away on his phone to set up whatever he needed to do in that app of his, Julius bent over the woman and started to ease aside her outer clothes with an analytical precision. “Let’s see if anything else about her appearance can tell us a story.”
As he uncovered her torso from waist to collarbone, baring everything except her breasts in their modest sports bra, Garrison sucked in a breath. I went still, staring.
Her abdomen was lean and strong with an array of muscles I could tell came from regular, intense workouts. But more unusual were the scars marking it: dozens of them, long and short, some cuts and some burns, darker or fainter depending on how long it’d been since the wounds had been dealt.
The largest one covered a section of skin about as long and wide as my thumb next to her belly button. A thinner but longer line cut across her shoulder, disappearing beneath her bra and showing on the other side where it crossed her ribs. The others dappled her skin all across her torso, many no bigger than a tiny nick.
Garrison let out a low whistle. “I could come up with a few theories now about why she’d have needed to run away.”
Blaze glanced over, and his eyes widened. “Someone was messing with her on a regular basis.”
“Or maybe she was messing with other people,” I said, raising my chin toward her sculpted abs. “That kind of musculature would have taken years of hard, rigorous exercise to build. She isn’t any wimp.”
It took my body two years to become a mold of pure power and strength, with a lot of effort every day to maintain it. The girl before us could have been my smaller, feminine twin.
“She doesn’t have any fresh wounds,” Julius observed. “The blood on her shirt didn’t come from her.”
“Turn her over,” Garrison suggested.
Julius did, and we all noted the newly forming bruises that covered her right side where she’d taken the worst of the airbag impact. He was careful not to press on those and to move her injured wrist gently. Was he worried about her? It was hard to wrap my head around that kind of compassion when nothing like it stirred in me.
But then, you didn’t need to feel sympathy to know avoiding further injury of someone who wasn’t your enemy—yet—was the just thing to do. And if Julius followed any kind of code, it was for justice.
The woman’s back was mottled with the same sorts of scars. I spotted at least one that looked as if it’d been from a wound so deep it must have taken weeks to recover from it.
What the hell had she been doing to take a blow like that? Or had she not been doing anything, just enduring abuse from some other party while she trained to get ready for her escape?
The form in front of me looked like both an opponent and a victim. I didn’t know how to fit those clashing elements together in my understanding of her.
“Hey, look.” Garrison leaned forward and swept her hair to the side of her neck, revealing a tattoo on the base of her skull just above her hairline.
We all bent over, examining the small shape. It was hard to make out much with it embedded under her hair. Garrison’s attempt at uncovering it had still left it looking like little more than a blotch, vaguely circular with a couple of bumps protruding on either side at a diagonal. I didn’t recognize the shape as anything meaningful.
“That’s not any gang symbol I’m familiar with, as far as I can tell,” Blaze said, “but I’ll see if I can dig up anything on that too.”
Julius tugged her shirt back down and rolled her onto her back again. We gazed at her in silence for a long moment.
Blaze lowered his phone, a sly smile crossing his lips. “If nobody else is going to say it, I will. She’s fucking hot.”
Julius rolled his eyes. “Not exactly a productive observation. Get on with your computer work.”
Garrison stepped back too, but I thought I caught a glint of approval in his eyes when he looked her up and down one last time.
I hadn’t let myself think about it while she’d been exposed, since we’d been focused on the business of unraveling the mystery she presented, but now, studying her leanly muscled form with Blaze’s comment ringing in my ears, a twinge of arousal woke up in my groin. It would be something to fuck a woman that physically capable. To feel that strength moving against me in tandem with my own. Her face with its straight, sloping nose and high cheekbones was hardly difficult to look at either.
Not that I expected to have a chance to indulge that kind of urge with her. I only fucked women I didn’t have to see again, who were completely separate from every other part of my life. This one had already gotten more entangled with my work and my crew than seemed safe.
Hell, we might still have to kill her. Anyway, I doubted she’d be in the mood to be thinking about getting it on with anyone when she woke up and found out she was a prisoner here.
Julius motioned us all out of the room. “Go get some sleep while she does. I’ll check over her injuries more closely and then do the same. We’ll see what she can tell us when she wakes up to fill in all the blanks.”
