WHEN I WALKED out of my room the next morning, everything seemed completely normal, like we hadn’t just blasted away a dozen or so gangsters the night before. Garrison stood in the kitchen over the stove, sipping hot cocoa from a mug and flipping bacon in a frying pan, both sending delicious smells into the air in a mix of sweet and salty. Julius and Talon were sitting at the table polishing off the last bits of what looked like pancakes, and Blaze was cross-legged on the sofa with a typical plate of pasta on one knee and his laptop on the other in an impressive balancing act.
But in a weird way, the fact that it felt normal was the most abnormal thing. I walked over to the kitchen without a single quiver of apprehension running through my nerves. Blaze gave me a little wave of welcome, Julius nodded to me, and Garrison—well, Garrison flicked a brief glance my way and tensed his jaw, which was par for the course. No one made a big deal of my presence.
It was like I belonged here. Like I’d always lived here with them, as much a part of the crew as they were. Was the change in them or in me—or both?
As I grabbed my usual box of cereal out of the cupboard, wondering if I could get Garrison to spare any of that bacon for me and suspecting the chances were nil, Julius motioned to Talon. “They’ve just gotten a new model of dagger in at our favorite shop. I think you’d like it. The balance is impressive. You should take a look.”
Talon grunted. “I’m pretty happy with the one I have.”
“You can never have too many weapons,” Blaze piped up from the sofa. “Always carry at least two backups, I always say.”
“You always say since when—this morning?” Garrison teased.
“I’m sure I’ve said it at least once before. I’ve definitely thought it.” Blaze glanced at me. “Did you sleep okay after the flight?”
“Yeah,” I said automatically. “It was good to be ho—”
I cut myself off in mid-word with a sudden, startling realization. I’d been going to say home, and… the crew’s apartment did feel like home now. I knew where everything important was. I knew what to expect from the guys, at least well enough to relax around them. They were treating me like a standard inhabitant and not an interloper.
It was hard to imagine that the apartment I’d lived in for not much more than a week had so quickly replaced the house where I’d spent more than twenty years of my life, but maybe that said more about how homey the household hadn’t been than it did about this place.
While my thoughts drifted back to that past period of my life, Blaze checked his laptop and let out an uncharacteristically disheartened sigh. It wasn’t hard to figure out why.
“Still no useful results from all those searches?” I asked. The other men looked over as well in anticipation of the hacker’s answer.
Blaze frowned. “Nothing that sends us down a longer trail. I keep finding more people to check out but none of them turn up anything suspicious or concerning. I have no idea whether the people I’m looking at now are even remotely connected to your household.” He shook himself and shot me a rejuvenated smile. “But don’t worry. I’ll keep at it. There’s got to be a solid lead in here somewhere.”
“And if there isn’t, we have other avenues we can pursue,” Julius put in.
Did we, or was he just saying that to reassure me? I popped a spoonful of cereal into my mouth and chewed pensively.
There’d been so much I hadn’t known about my old home and the people living there. But that home could tell stories of its own, couldn’t it?
My heart leapt, and my head jerked toward Garrison. “You collect all the wallets and phones and similar things from the scenes of the jobs. Do you still have all that from the household?”
Garrison might not have wanted to make super friendly, but he did meet my eyes and offer an apologetic grimace in response. “We dispose of them within twenty-four hours of finishing the job. It’s too risky carrying evidence like that around when it doesn’t seem needed. And that early on, we had no idea it would be relevant.”
I let out a huff of breath. “Understandable.”
But there’d been a lot they’d left behind. Maybe no obvious identifying information, but there could have been mail in a drawer, notebooks on shelves, even a reminder scrawled on a post-it note might point us in a useful direction to finding the larger organization the household had been a part of. The people Noelle had obviously still been working with, since she hadn’t come for me alone.
The thought of walking back into the space that I’d last—and only—seen splattered with blood made my gut knot, but with every passing second, my certainty grew that it was my best course of action, if I was going to take any action at all. And damn, did I want to.
“I need to go back to the mansion,” I said. “They were working out of that building for decades. There’s got to be some kind of evidence left behind.”
Talon’s attention shifted to me. He didn’t speak, but his somber gaze emanated concern.
Julius expressed what all the others might have been thinking. “That’d be pretty dangerous. Our client has been hassling Garrison about the missing ‘item’ from that job, which we have to assume means you. He probably has eyes on the place.”
I shrugged. “You should know by now that I’m aware of how to stay under the radar. I can avoid whatever and whoever I need to.”
“We don’t know exactly who we’re dealing with here or what kind of resources they have,” the crew’s leader reminded me. “And you might not find anything to make it worth the risk. His people have clearly been through the house since we left for them to have figured out that you’re gone. There’s a strong possibility they’ll have grabbed anything tied to the household’s criminal operations already.”
I shifted restlessly on my feet. “I know that too. But I need to try. Even a small possibility that I’ll turn up the start of a trail makes it worth it.”
Julius sighed, but he inclined his head at the same time. “I can understand. This is your life and your family we’re talking about, and I’ve already made it clear that we’re not your keepers. You’ve proven yourself more than capable by any measure.”
“Thank you.”
When he lifted his gaze to meet mine again, a tingle of heat raced through me. I’d earned his trust, but suddenly I wanted more than that. I wanted to peel back the layers of who he was and get at the beating heart beneath that fueled his commanding presence.
I reined in the impulse, but not before I thought I saw a matching spark of interest flash in his eyes—and vanish.
He sucked the last of the syrup off his fork in a gesture that made my panties dampen in an instant and stood up. “Finish your breakfast, and I’ll take you through the tunnels again. But once you’re out there, you’ll be on your own.”
“Until I get back,” I said, the corner of my lips quirking upward.
The slow smile I was appreciating more every time I saw it curved his own mouth. “Yes, until you get back.”
I did three circuits as I approached the mansion, first a few blocks away and then getting increasingly closer as I confirmed there were no watching eyes—living or digital—pointed my way. I’d put on a thin hoodie with the hood raised over the wig I’d bought earlier, sunglasses hiding my eyes.
But it seemed that precaution wasn’t totally necessary. The mansion was in a sprawling residential neighborhood, and there wasn’t a whole lot of activity in the middle of the day. It’d have been easy to spot any suspicious signs.
There were a few cameras mounted around the property’s walls, but I simply steered clear of them and scrambled over the same way I’d scrambled out a few weeks ago. On the ground in the yard, I stalked across the lawn even more cautiously. There was a new camera mounted over the front door, one that the average person wouldn’t have been able to pick out it was so well-disguised, and another at the back.
That was fine. Noelle wouldn’t have done her job right if I hadn’t learned how to get in by plenty of means that didn’t require doors.
I jimmied a ground floor window open, eased aside the curtain, and peered through the room to check for surveillance or human presence on the inside. The sitting room was totally empty other than the posh furniture. Looking at it gave me an unsettling feeling of déjà vu.
Hadn’t I walked through this room on my first prowl through the mansion after I’d left my section of it on the night of the massacre? Hadn’t there been a bloody body sprawled across that armchair?
If so, all trace of both the body and the blood had been washed away. You’d never have imagined anything even as violent as a papercut had happened in this room.
I slipped inside and took a quick inventory of the space. It held nothing but the furniture, the drawer on the side table and the surface of the coffee table totally bare. At the doorway, I peeked into the hall.
Ah ha. Someone had mounted another discreet camera at the far end, pointed down the length of the hallway. I pulled back, leapt out through the window, and moved to another farther down.
The dining room I climbed into next I’d definitely seen before—complete with bloody bodies slumped across the table. As with the first room, all evidence of them had been wiped clean. Could that even be the exact same table? I had to think the blood would have stained the pale wood beyond repair.
Who the hell had done this—and why had they bothered with this careful reconstruction? It was obvious the police had never been through. There was no caution tape or chalk markings of bodies. It was as if the household’s inhabitants had been utterly wiped from existence… except for me, of course.
My stomach knotted. I didn’t know whether to feel relieved that the crew’s job here had allowed my escape and freedom or horrified by the callous aftermath. I had no idea who any of these people had been. Sure, they’d all been criminals, but Anna hadn’t been all bad. There’d been at least a little real kindness in her treatment of me.
Of course, while treating me that way she’d also enabled me to kill who knew how many innocents. Their blood was on her hands too.
The thing was, whoever had ordered their deaths clearly hadn’t had good intentions either. They wanted me for their own purposes, which I hardly thought were good, especially with how cagey they were being with the crew about what they were “missing.” They sure as hell hadn’t ordered the massacre for my benefit but for some gain of their own.
My jaw working with suppressed tension, I stalked around that room and then the next and the next. With the last, I was able to cross the hall on my belly, below the view of the camera, to reach the staircase and investigate the second floor.
I found no books on the shelves, no papers on any desk, no paraphernalia of any kind in the drawers and closets. The clothes still dangling from their hangers told only the story of people who’d had a lot of money. They were designer label but nothing particularly distinctive.
Once I’d returned downstairs, I crawled beneath the level of the camera into the first room on the opposite side of the ground floor. After determining that it held nothing useful and ducking out its window, I hit my first real problem.
The grand living room, the place where I’d encountered by far the most bodies, had windows that appeared to be jammed shut. No matter what I did or what tools I put to use from the kit Julius had lent me, I couldn’t get either of them to budge. Had someone gone out of their way to more tightly secure them?
Did that mean there was something worth finding on the other side?
I clambered back into a room I’d already investigated and studied the camera from a doorway. I couldn’t get to the living room without coming into view of it. I also wasn’t going to be able to make it to the side hall that led to my old rooms as long as I was avoiding it either—there were no windows into that part of the mansion.
I’d just have to take a gamble and bust my butt finishing my inspection.
Blaze had offered me a slim paintball gun specifically in case I needed it for this purpose. I aimed it at the camera’s lens and fired.
A blue blotch hit the lens, obscuring all view of me. If anyone was currently monitoring the feed, they’d know right away that an intruder was in the house, just not who it was. I had to hoof it.
I dashed into the living room. My pulse stuttered at the contrast between the sleek leather surfaces and polished floors now and the carnage that’d been strewn across the space before, but I didn’t let that uneasiness slow me down. I sprinted from table to cabinet, pawing through every nook. All I turned up were a few blank pieces of notepaper. For fuck’s sake!
As I whirled around, my gaze slid across the ceiling instinctively, even though I’d already checked for cameras. My eyes paused on an odd mark I hadn’t noticed carved into the old-fashioned trim in one corner of the room. Between the white paint and the position, it was almost invisible unless you happened to look straight at it from the right angle.
I stepped closer, squinting at it. It looked vaguely spherical, though narrower at the top than the bottom… almost pointed, like a teardrop. A straight line sliced through it on a diagonal. I couldn’t remember ever seeing that symbol before.
It wasn’t much, but it was something. I whipped out my phone and snapped a picture of it, zoomed in as far as I could go.
Then I whirled around and rushed across the hall to the passageway that led to the small study with the secret bookcase entrance to my old rooms.
Somehow, even after seeing the whole house in its current state, coming up on the spot where I’d left Anna’s crumpled body sent a fresh wave of queasiness through me. Even here in this remote corner of the house, whoever had swept the mansion clean had removed all indication that she’d existed too. There was only the desk, the filing cabinet—empty—and the bookshelves, which contained a scattering of not particularly impressive looking volumes.
I glanced over the titles on the spines, flipped open a few to check for inscriptions, and swept several aside to check the back of the bookcase for a way to access the door behind it. There, I came across the symbol from the living room for a second time. A tiny version of it was carved into the topmost portion of the bookcase that covered the secret entrance to my quarters. The etching was no larger than the pad of my thumb, just above the line of the shelf.
I knit my brow at it and took another photo. My heart was thumping faster. I was running out of time. I jabbed my fingers at the carving and then all across the rest of the bookcase, but nothing made it budge.
Right now, who knew how many enemy forces could be racing this way?
Cursing under my breath, I backed up and glared at the bookcase. But then, maybe it was silly to put myself in any more danger to try to get into the rooms where I’d spent years upon years already. The household people had never left anything in there that’d tipped me off to their true agenda before, so why would there be anything useful in that section of the building now?
My desire to see that space one more time was more nostalgia than anything else, and I didn’t have time for foolish emotions in the middle of a mission.
I spun on my feet and hustled to the nearest window. With a leap over the sill and a lope across the lawn, I put the mansion that’d been my home and my prison for far too long—and the ghostly emptiness inside it—far behind.
