3. Cassius
three
“Motherfucker!” I yell. “That better be some damn fine pussy.” My heavy footsteps echo down the expansive hallway of my best friend’s house. The storm of anger brewing in the pit of my gut intensifies with every stride. The volume of the moans increases as I grow closer. “I’ve been calling your phone for the last hour.”
The door to his bedroom is open when I approach. I lean on the door frame and clear my throat to get his attention, my large body casting a shadow across the room. The asshole actually has the audacity to look up at me from between the legs of a busty blonde.
With a shit-eating grin plastered on his face, he says, “It is, Cass. You should have a taste.” Then he places the woman’s legs on his shoulders and drags his tongue through her wet pussy.
“Garrett,” I roar, my voice bouncing off the walls.
Fuck my life right now.
I have Ruby’s kiss of death hanging over my head and more pent-up energy than I can handle, and he offers this woman up like she’s a Thanksgiving turkey. I need to fucking hit something, and if Garrett doesn’t move his ass, it’s going to be him.
The blonde looks up at me, her eyes hooded. “It’s okay sugar, I’ve got room for two.” Honey coats her Southern accent, thick and sweet.
“Garrett,” I growl through gritted teeth. “Now.”
He doesn’t move from his position, only holds up a finger to give him a minute. If this were anyone else, he would already have a bullet between his eyes. But instead, I watch as seconds later the Southern belle on the bed writhes with pleasure and screams every name in the book except his. Laughter escapes me. I can’t help it, even as angry as I am. Garrett uses the back of his hand to wipe his mouth and picks his boxers up off the floor. With one leg in, he stumbles toward me. I catch him by the arm, and he uses me to stabilize himself so he can get his other leg in.
He takes a deep breath and pats me on the arm. “Thanks, big guy.”
I follow him downstairs to his office. Well, we call it an office, but it’s more like a lair. There is no natural light, no windows. There’s only one entrance, and Garrett and I are the only ones with access. He uses his thumb and forefinger to spread out one of his eyelids far enough for the retina scanner to do its thing. The door opens and a computerized British accent welcomes us. “Hello sir, I’ve been a bad girl.”
“Got sick of hello masterfucker ?” I raise an eyebrow at Garrett's back.
“Eh, the chick before the one upstairs kept telling me she was a bad girl, so I would punish her by refusing to let her come until I told her she could.” He shrugs his shoulders. “Sometimes I would force her to come just so I could spank her after.”
“What’s it going to be next week.” I give a high-pitched voice my best shot. “ Hi ya, sugar, let’s rodeo? ”
“Or maybe, Hey, y’all, let’s go fishin’ in the dark ,” he quips. The fact that he came up with that one so fast makes me think he’d actually been thinking about it.
“What’s the 911?” he asks. His fingers hover over his keyboard, preparing for battle. Computer screens cover every inch of the wall behind him. Video feeds roll on some, and code appears and disappears on the rest. The video feeds are the only thing of interest to me, the bar staff is breaking down the bar for the night, the parking lot is nearly empty. The code is complete nonsense to me, but it’s Garrett’s language.
“Ruby.” I groan, my voice is gruff with indignation and laced with embarrassment.
“Fuck.” His breath hitches. “When?”
“A few hours ago.”
“And you’re just telling me now?”
“Well, if you had picked up your fucking phone an hour ago, you would have known.” I slam my palms on his desk. The alarms going off had fucking done it for me. I need to find this bitch now.
Garrett looks at me, eyebrows raised. “Why not a few hours ago when it fucking happened, jackass?”
“Why didn’t you pick up your fucking phone?”
“I was exploring the south, my dear sir,” he says with a smirk.
It takes all my self-control to not pound the smirk off his face and go make the Southern belle scream my name. I’ve never once hit Garrett though, and he knows I never will. A friendship like ours is forged on broken homes and fucked up families. We are all we have. Even if I don’t deserve him.
“You’re supposed to be the best tech guy there is. You didn’t spend all that time sneaking into college classes so that you could dedicate your life to hunting and eating pussy. Get your head out of your ass and find out how she got into my cameras at the bar. Then find out how the fuck she got into my alarm system at home. And I swear to fucking God, Garrett, if I don’t have answers before that girl in there comes again, I will kill her while you watch.”
His fingers are typing a mile a minute before I even finish my threat. He knows he’s safe, but he can’t say the same for her. I’m not one to hurt or kill without reason, but if she gets in the way of him doing his job, I will not hesitate. The Ruby situation is washing away my good guy camouflage.
“I want her real face and her real name. I want to know what she ate for breakfast and where she lays her head. Find out everything you can about her.” I bark the orders at him and after a moment's pause, I add, “And I want to know exactly how her marks die.”
“I’m on it, Cass.”
I sink into the leather sofa and watch my friend work. His fingers fly over the keys, the noise drowning out the sound of my blood pumping through my veins. Watching him in his element always amazes me, especially when I consider all we’ve been through. We spent our youth scamming people for food and clothes more often than I like to think about. We’re both smart and calculating. Garrett’s gift is tech, he can hack his way into anything. Honestly, if it’s got wires, he can figure it out.
My kind of smarts is different. I read people. I can spot their tells and weaknesses. It’s what makes us a good team. Which is exactly why I’m fucking kicking myself in the ass for not recognizing Ruby’s con from the beginning. My eyes were on her the entire time she was in my office, how the fuck did she get the envelope on my desk without me seeing? She certainly played her part well, the bitch.
Garrett’s face contorts, then slackens, and I know that face. It’s the one he makes when he hits a wall. It never lasts this long though, and I can’t bring myself to watch any longer. I lean back and try to get a little sleep, but the click-clacking of the keyboard keeps me awake.
“Cass,” he murmurs after a few minutes, his tone suspicious.
I sit up, alarmed by what he isn’t saying.
“She doesn’t exist,” he continues, cautiously.
“I assure you she does, her lips were wrapped around my dick.”
“Do I want to know how she ended up on her knees?”
“Same shit, different day.” I shrug. “Girl smiles at boy, boy dances with girl, girl sucks boy's dick.”
“When are you going to listen to me, Cass?” Garrett asks through clenched teeth.
I roll my eyes because he’s being ridiculous and paranoid.
He stands to his full height and presses into my chest. “You realize that this is exactly what I was trying to prevent,” he says pointedly.
He resumes his place at the keyboard. “Fucking idiot, Cass. All it takes is the right person,” he pauses and gestures to the screens, “to infiltrate our inner fucking circle and everything we’ve worked so hard for falls right the fuck apart.”
“Says the guy with the blonde belle in his bed.”
“Seriously? Do you really think I didn’t dig into every nook and cranny of that woman’s life? Fuck, I probably know more about her than she does.”
I drag my hands over my face, because he’s right. I know he is. That woman would have never walked into this house if he didn’t know every skeleton in her closet.
“Fuck!” My voice echoes in the enclosed space. My whole body feels tight, like my veins could pop like a fucking balloon. I’m almost afraid to move, but I need to hit something, for the anger to dissipate, so I can think straight. This isn’t just my life, it’s his too. It was my fault then, and it’s my fault now. I’m such a fucking idiot.
“So, I get that yes, she physically exists.” Garrett sighs like he’s talking to a toddler. “What I’m saying is that as a person, she does not. She has no real name, no address, no photos. In fact, everything I’m not finding makes her a ghost. Nobody knows who she is, only what she does.”
He brings up his findings on the large screen in the center of the wall. It’s nothing but altered photos, question marks where faces should be. It’s like a game of fucking Guess Who?
“It’s the twenty-first century, how does a person not exist?”
As pissed as he is at me, his cheeks lift in elation. “She has a Garrett.” He leans back in his chair and crosses his arms, clearly impressed with my nemesis’ tech guy.
“Is her Garrett as good as my Garrett?” I ask him, not sharing his excitement.
He scoffs at me like I’ve just asked the world’s stupidest question, and it's completely ludicrous that anyone could be as good or better than him. He replaces the not-Ruby photos with multiple new photos. Each photo contains a different face, and each face is accompanied by an obituary.
“Are these previous marks?” I ask. I recognize a few of them as players, but I can’t seem to remember anything I heard about their deaths. They didn’t owe me money, so I couldn’t be bothered. Does one of their family members blame me for their deaths?
“Dude, how do you not know this?”
“I never really paid attention. I kind of figured she was just an urban legend. And let’s be honest, I never thought that someone would be stupid enough to hire her to kill me.”
“She didn’t tell you anything? Not a single clue as to what she has on you?” Garrett asks, his brows creasing.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“That seems to be her thing—torturing people with information. Like, even if it’s not the reason she was hired to kill them, she tortures them with their secrets. This guy here.” He pulls a photo of a white man with balding brown hair to the forefront of the screen. “He was a teacher that was sleeping with a student, except nobody knew until after he died. His wife said she came home from work one day and there was a school uniform skirt on their bed. Another day she meets him at work for lunch and when they walk into his office there’s photocopies of his affair covering every inch with a lipstick mark over the girl's face.”
“So, she pulls pranks before she kills? Like a child? I thought this woman was supposed to be sophisticated?”
“She does and she is. It seems like she plays with her kills before she strikes, kind of like a cat does with a mouse. She wants them to know she’s been there, wants them to know she could’ve already killed them. She wants her mouse to be scared and jumpy. Then she slits their throats and kisses them on the cheek.”
“So that explains the letter, the kiss of death, the phone call, and then the alarms at my house tonight.”
“Wait, she called you?”
“Yeah, to gloat about killing me. I told her I would kill her first, then hung up.”
“Cass, you didn’t?” He shakes his head in disbelief.
“I did. G, how’d she get into my network? How’d she get into both my home and my club networks?”
He takes a deep breath, clearly concerned but not surprised with my reaction to this entire mess.
“Her Garrett is good, but I’m better. She hacked you, and for that I apologize. I’ll fix it so it can’t happen again. But Cass, I suggest we leave them be.”
“Just let them have access to my security systems? Are you out of your mind?”
“Listen man, this woman is a ghost. How are you going to find her and kill her before she kills you if you don’t know a thing about her? I suggest we piggyback on her hack and track her movements in your system. That way, you’ll know a little about what she’s up to. You know she’s got cameras that cover every inch of your house?”
Of course she fucking does. Which means I need to keep my poker face even at home.
Fucking hell.