12. Leon
12
LEON
A tech-bro’s beachfront villa. Practically a glorified frat house.
That’s where my wife is going in denim short shorts and a backwards baseball cap. Both of which look entirely indecent on her.
The hat, because it pulls her hair from her face in a way that stops it from falling around her features with its usual heart-stopping softness. The shorts, because they are completely and utterly distracting and leave nothing to the imagination.
Not that I need to imagine , I try desperately to reassure myself. But there’s an angry possessiveness inside me that a week's worth of distance has done nothing to subdue.
“Just…be careful, all right?” I ask as she leaves.
She doesn’t look at me or bother responding as she steps out the door of the brownstone. That much I probably deserve after our previous spat about the pros and cons of heart rate monitors.
Mia wouldn’t wear one. I tagged her anyway. She found it and threw it at my face.
I run a hand through my hair, suddenly wondering if it would be entirely unprofessional to start drinking.
It was inevitable that I would see her again, of course. But somehow, I’d managed to delude myself into just not thinking about it.
My insane workload was entirely to blame for this. The breakthrough we had had to search private dockyards, thanks to the information Mia had obtained, led to the very successful extraction of the Cartel’s merchandise.
Now Teo and I were together on a near-daily basis to form plans to best utilize Amos Rubio’s sudden loss of revenue.
My phone rings and I answer it as I return to my office, which is already set up for total surveillance tonight.
“She’s arrived. Carmen Rubio just got in her car,” Max reports immediately.
It’s a reassurance to have him working on this with me. Unlike Dante, my second seems to inherently understand why I prefer to be constantly updated.
Despite not formally knowing who Mia is to me, he was quick to pick up on my anxiety around her involvement. I’d called her a mercenary for hire. Max hadn’t even blinked when he gave me the concealable heart rate monitor.
A nice gesture if it didn’t now lay broken on the floor.
“They’re just talking,” he continues.
I get a sickening sense of deja-vu as I watch Mia’s pulsing red dot pause for a moment at the location.
Ivan had contacted Carmen to negotiate a small deal with a few of their higher-paying clientele. If I had to put money on it, I’d say it was an initiation for the debutant.
Clearly, these Silicon Valley wannabes emphasized discretion, and Carmen just happened to be perfectly cast to show up at one of their parties.
This meant that, once again, Mia would be playing the role of ditzy-soap-making-business-college-buddy.
And I hated it more than I could really express.
“They’ve just set off,” Max interrupts my thoughts. “ETA forty-three minutes.”
He will follow them the entire way, park at the neighboring beach villa, and keep tabs on the entire evening, reporting back to me with any progress or mishaps. He was instructed to intervene the second I gave the order.
De-ja-fucking-vu.
All I can do is stand here and wait. Wait forty-three minutes for them to arrive. Wait an hour or so for the interaction to last. Wait another forty-three minutes back and then…and then wait for Mia to come home.
Come back to my home. Not ours. Where she will, undoubtedly, give me the cold shoulder for the heart rate monitor thing. Or for setting her up on a project with my sister thing. Or for the walking out after sex thing.
It’s just all one big fucking mess, really.
And all I can do is wait. Wait and wait, and go crazy waiting. Pacing and pacing and waiting and waiting and not being there to help if anything goes wrong because I’m too busy waiting.
I don’t know when I leave the brownstone. Don’t exactly know when I get into my car, a bag of surveillance gear and sniper rifle placed carefully in the trunk.
If it takes Mia forty-three minutes to get there, driving safely to keep her client safe, it takes me half that time.
“Max,” I say into my phone as I pull into the neighboring beach house. “Change of plan.”
I really, really, truly hate those shorts.
The problem with looking at them from a high vantage point through a scope, is that with a small nudge of my hand, I can see every bastard she passes turn around to do a double take.
And the thing is, I’ve never really had a problem with a twitchy trigger finger until now.
She’s standing outside by the goddamn infinity pool (did I mention how much I hate tech-bros) with an arm casually draped over Carmen’s shoulders. She sips a beer from the bottle and nods at something Ivan says.
The older man might have looked a little out of place, but the company of the two women offsets the intimidating set of his shoulders and gang tattoos. No one around them has even spared them a second glance.
Except the bastards looking at her shorts.
Eventually, a guy comes out to meet them. He’s tan, with reddish hair. Too young to be a millionaire—not that I can really talk, but at least I don’t wear my wealth like he does, by buying tacky designer clothes and flaunting the labels like some kind of walking billboard.
The new money big shot says a few words to Ivan and gestures for the group to follow him inside.
When Carmen trails after him happily, Ivan pauses to stop Mia. There’s a brief argument, a stalemate. He doesn’t want her to come along. Then Carmen reappears, loops her arm through Mia’s, and the three of them walk back inside as if that settles it.
For the time I don’t have eyes on them, I feel something akin to terror begin to seep into my bones.
I can see the room they’re going to arrive in. It’s perfectly adjacent to the one I’m currently sitting in. The floorplans of the two beach houses mirror each other exactly.
Inside are three men sitting around an office. I’ve clocked them all already and sent their pictures to Max, but they’re not affiliated with anyone we know. Just a bunch of kids playing at drug lords who got in a bit too deep with an actual kingpin.
They shouldn’t be a threat.
Yet, when the door opens, and Mia, Carmen, Ivan, and the walking billboard walk in, my heart still stammers in my chest.
I absently grab at the headphone dangling from my neck and tune in.
“...you could make it!” One of the men, presumably the one with his back to me, is saying.
“Let’s skip the preamble,” the one by the door with a neck tattoo says. Who is…for fuck’s sake, also staring at Mia’s ass.
“If you were in such a rush, why did you make us wait downstairs for half an hour?” Ivan replies.
“It’s such a gorgeous house,” Carmen speaks over him, cheerful and light. “Maybe we could come back sometime when we don’t need to talk business.”
Neck Tattoo softens a bit, tearing his eyes from Mia for a full ten seconds to appreciate the other woman. “You and your friend are welcome whenever you like.”
“Good! Everything has been so dreary since we lost the last shipment,” she continues in (what I’m suddenly realizing is) a very fake Valley Girl voice. “This place seems so much more fun.”
“What shipment?”
“We’ll get another in a few days.” She rolls her eyes as if this is just a minor inconvenience, and they’re all being dramatic. “There’s nothing to worry about.”
“You don’t have the merch?” the guy with his back to me says.
Ivan takes a step forward. Mia subtly moves closer to Carmen. “This time next week, you’ll all be out of freaking minds you’re so high. What’s the problem?”
“The problem is we already paid for it,” Billboard Guy says, pushing past him to stand with his friends.
“And you’ll get it,” Carmen insists. “Jesus, calm down a little. I thought you guys were cool.”
Her indignation, surprisingly, seems to placate them. If I’d known conflicts could be solved by a scolding from a pretty young woman, I would have hired Carmen years ago.
“When will it get here?” Billboard Guy asks.
“We’ll be in contact before Wednesday,” Ivan confirms.
“And until then?” Neck Tattoo says, leering at Carmen. “How am I supposed to entertain myself?”
His arm reaches out to touch the debutant, but Mia is on him like a flash.
“You want to try that again?” she says pleasantly as she twists his arm around in her hand.
He smirks back at her and pulls her in close. My skin is burning hot as my trigger finger itches and itches. “You jealous, sweetheart? Don’t worry, you can entertain me too.”
Slap.
Carmen Rubio shakes out her stinging hand—the imprint of which is now on Neck Tatoo’s face.
I’d be impressed, except…
“What the actual fuck? You crazy bitch!”
…she just entirely blew her Valley Girl act. Whatever little bubble of calm Carmen had managed to wrangle out of the situation bursts in an instant.
Billboard Guy’s hand disappears into his jacket. The quiet guy in the corner straightens up. The guy with his back to me reaches beneath the desk.
Ivan doesn’t give them a chance to do anything.
Bang, bang, smash.
Three bullets: one for the quiet guy in the corner, one for Billboard Guy. One that was intended for the guy at the desk, but instead smashes through the window behind him.
I don’t bother watching how that plays out.
Mia shoves Neck Tattoo against the wall.
“Back down, Carmen,” Mia barks at her client, who obediently moves into the corner of the room and out of the fray. “St-..t…-right?”
She says something else, but the comms line crackles before sputtering out completely. Shit.
I watch as she pins him down with one hand, and a knife materializes in her other. The blade is at his neck in an instant, but not quick enough to keep him from wrangling an arm free.
You would think, in a life-or-death situation, the bastard would use the opportunity to his advantage. Shove the lethal woman away from him, pry the blade from her hand, anything but…
Reach down and squeeze her ass through her very, very short shorts.
Though I suppose every man has his weaknesses.
Mine is, apparently, my trigger discipline.
The shot streaks through the broken window and embeds itself into his forehead.
Shit.
Carmen is crouched in the corner, and Ivan is dealing with tech-bro number three. The only person to see is…
Mia slams the hilt of her knife into the dead man’s forehead, effectively covering the cause of death, before letting him slump to the floor.
She spins on the spot. Turns to look toward the broken window. Her jaw is set and downright furious as she glares.
I’m not even sure if she can see me, but I know from that look that she knows exactly who pulled the trigger.
Before she can do anything else, her attention is snatched by Carmen and she goes running to her side. Gathering the woman up in her arms and hoisting her trembling figure over her shoulder.
Ivan is with them a second later, having dispatched the rest of the men. I can’t make out the flurry of words he seems to be yelling at Mia, so I draw back.
The house was by no means empty, and now people are running out the back and spilling onto the front yard in various states of distress.
It won’t be long now until the cops arrive.
Ivan shoves Mia and Carmen through the door, and I take the opportunity to pack up my things and make a swift exit of my own.