6. Chapter 6
6
R ebecca moved from door to door, waiting for the telltale glow while Titus lumbered around the room, inspecting the modern decor and the plain doors and even lifting a corner of the heaviest couch in the central sitting area to look underneath—as if the guy had shown up with the intention of buying the place.
“Damn,” he muttered and whistled again. “Swanky kinda place here.”
“If you’re into that kinda thing,” she replied absently before moving on to the next door.
“Bet it cost a fortune to get one of these here rooms.”
Rebecca grinned when her key and the next door in front of her both glowed the same bright, electric blue. Then she stepped forward to slide the key into the lock. “No one’s sending me a bill…”
Titus let out a rumbling guffaw as he turned toward her. “You mean like monthly rent?”
“Something tells me having a vault in this place exempts us from the normal rules.”
“Yeah, no kidding. I’d love to know how the hell Aldous paid for this.”
“Well, he definitely wasn’t short on funds,” she said. “We just didn’t know it.”
The door swung easily open in her hand, and she held it open for a moment, waiting for Titus to join her so he could get a good look at what existed on the other side.
Shade’s infinite wellspring.
When he stopped just inside the open doorway, his jaw dropped. Titus’s already enormous eyes bulged in his bald, scarred face. “Well chop me up and roll me in the mud…”
Rebecca snorted as she walked past him into the storage vault. “Couldn’t have said it better myself. Hey, close the door behind you, yeah?”
A jingle of loose gold coins and other semi-spelled treasure clanged and clinked around when he shuffled inside. Then the vault door whispered shut. “Why? You afraid some of this stuff’s gonna get up and walk out?”
“No,” she said, navigating her way through the scattered piles of random treasure Aldous had been storing away in here on his own since far before her time. “It’s who might be out there that I’m more worried about.”
“Oh, yeah?” Titus looked over his shoulder at the door before seemingly remembering he’d already shut it. “You see anyone? Oh, wait. That’s right. The whole orc attack on you and Blackmoon. I remember now.”
“Yeah, that,” she muttered and crouched in front of a stack of plastic totes with lockable lids on hinges to peer into the one on top. “Though I don’t specifically remember calling it the orc attack.”
“You didn’t.” A pile of something else heavy and metallic in multiple pieces clattered to the floor in a cascade of tinkling chimes nearly every time Titus took another step through the vault. “That’s just what we started calling it after you told everyone. You know how it goes. If it ain’t already got an op name, we gotta call it something .”
“But the orc attack ?” Rebecca smirked when the glitter of a few dozen gold chains strung through pristine settings around priceless gemstones greeted her in that first crate. “That makes it sound like some kinda epic battle Blackmoon and I were lucky to survive, and that just wasn’t the case.”
“Fine. What would you call it?”
“More like the orc slaughter ,” she said. “I mean, if we’re going for historical accuracy.”
“Nah… A slaughter is way more than just two. Wait, that’s all there was, right? I didn’t screw up all the details?”
The jewelry-filled tote thumped down onto the floor at her feet, and Rebecca turned back to look at the giant vuulbor as she unlatched the lid of the next tote on the stack. “No, you had it right. Just two. Though if you added their brain cells together, they probably wouldn’t have even equaled one… What are you doing?”
Titus looked up across the vault, then grinned before turning sideways to bat his lashes at her over one shoulder.
The shoulder he’d covered in thick, dark-brown fur. “What d’ya think, boss? You like it? I think it kinda goes with my eyes.”
Rebecca barked out a laugh before her gaze settled on an obviously bare patch of the otherwise randomly decorated wall space beside him. “Did you just take that bear pelt off the wall?”
“Oh, my bad.” Titus stroked the pelt covering his enormous shoulder. “Did you have your eye on this one?”
With another laugh, she shook her head and returned her attention to the next tote and its hidden contents she was about to discover. “Here I was, picking the scariest guy around, thinking that was the best way to get Hannigan off my back. But now I’m pretty sure if we got attacked, anyone who saw you like that would just take you in your pretty fur coat as a reason to keep going.”
“Don’t judge a book by its cover, boss. I can crack skulls and look fucking beautiful doing it.” The next eruption of his thunderous laughter felt far too big for the vault despite its otherwise sufficient space.
Rebecca crouched beside the stack of lockable totes and wiggled a finger around in her ear, which did nothing to stop the ringing.
“Hannigan was busy,” Titus began, “so you asked me to come with you instead? Is that for real?”
“Yep.” Rebecca opened the second tote and frowned.
Only Aldous Corriger would accept a box of expired caviar as payment for anything.
She slammed the lid shut, latched it, and dragged the tote to the floor so she could inspect the next one underneath.
“ My question is why do you need anyone to come with you at all, boss? I mean, you’re the boss.”
The next lid’s latches flipped open beneath her hand, but Rebecca turned to look at him again without a single glance inside first. “You’re right. I am the boss.”
Titus nodded, still stroking the bear pelt on his shoulder. “No doubt about it.”
“I could come here on my own whenever I wanted,” she added. “Without anyone knowing anything about it. No one could do shit to stop me.”
“Exactly. Perks of being the boss.”
“That’s exactly what Aldous thought, too. That’s exactly what he did .”
Titus froze, then lowered his hand to let it drop at his side against his thigh with a muffled slap as he met her gaze. “Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh.” The third tote’s lid opened with a creak beneath her fingers, but she still didn’t look inside. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s a little flattering, I guess, to hear you ask a question like that. Like it never even occurred to you I might abuse my authority or whatever and keep things from you all.”
“I’m not the only one,” Titus added, his voice settling into a rare gentleness she’d heard only a handful of times. “And for good reason.”
“Well, thanks. And I appreciate the vote of confidence from you and everyone else. But when I found this place, I promised myself I’d never show up on my own. That I’d always take someone with me and that someone else back at HQ would always know that’s exactly where we went. Anything I can do to be the exact opposite of what Aldous was, you better believe I’m gonna do it.”
Titus gazed back at her for a long time before dipping his head toward her, his scarred gray face reflecting nothing but purely genuine seriousness. “Trust me, boss. You’re nothing like that dick.”
She huffed out a laugh and finally looked into the tote, which was filled with pilfered Rolex watches—not the knockoff-kind. Nice. Definitely the kind of find she’d been hoping for.
“So, what?” he asked. “You just pick a name out of a hat to come with you on the next run to the fake bank?”
“Definitely not.” With a grunt, Rebecca hefted the third tote off the stack and dropped it with a thump onto the first to create her own take-back-to-Shade pile amidst the chaotic mess scattered across the vault. “No, I think I’m done picking new people to come with me on these little field trips. Besides me, there are only three others who know about this place. Blackmoon, because he helped me figure out what the key was to. Hannigan, because he’s… well, Hannigan.”
“Uh-huh.” Titus lifted a massive oil painting almost as tall as Rebecca off the floor where it had been propped against the wall, then held it out in front of him with both hands, slowly turning it clockwise as he scrutinized every facet from every angle. His frown darkened.
“And now you,” Rebecca finished.
“Right. Because I’m big and scary-looking.”
“No, because you look so good in a bear pelt.”
When he looked at her again in dumbfounded surprise, Rebecca wondered if she’d crossed a line she hadn’t thought existed with Titus.
But then he threw his head back and roared with laughter, practically tossing the oil painting off to the side so he could slap the antique mahogany desk in front of him with both hands instead of just one.
Watching that painting—which could have funded several fully outfitted missions—clatter onto the other piles of junk made Rebecca grimace. Fortunately, it somehow didn’t seem to have incurred much damage at all.
They spend a few more minutes rummaging through the vast and astoundingly valuable collection of payments and acquisitions technically stolen from Shade before Rebecca had re-inherited it all from Aldous. By default.
Eventually, she could no longer hold back the question floating around in her mind for the last several weeks. “Titus?”
“Yeah?” He whirled away from the open antique armoire through which he’d spent most of that time rifling, though for what, she couldn’t guess. Nothing that fit inside a normal human armoire could ever possibly have fit him .
When he moved, another cascade of what sounded like tiny, fragile bells tumbled either out of the armoire or from something else he’d knocked over, and the vuulbor froze, as if any further movement on his part would automatically place all the blame squarely on his shoulders.
Rebecca couldn’t have cared less about spilled stolen treasure.
She waited for the tinkling chime of those bells to stop before she asked her question. “How’s everybody doing these days?”
With a snort, he bent over to pick something up off the floor and inadvertently knocked over a pile of books in the process. No doubt rare and valuable books, or they wouldn’t have been in here.
Rebecca was pretty sure Aldous could barely read.
“Right,” he said as he made a half-hearted attempt to pick up the mess. “Fine. But you already knew that. It’s not like you’re never around.”
“Oh sure, I’m around,” she said. “Enough to see what everyone else wants me to see. But I mean how’s everyone really ? New recruits settling in? Everybody have what they need? Maybe at least a little of what they want?”
Titus straightened abruptly as if she’d asked a surprising and rude question instead, then shot her a crooked smile. “Still fine. You were in the common room earlier, boss. You saw for yourself.”
“Again, I only see what everyone else wants me to see. That’s not the same. I mean, I get it. Things change when one of us gets voted into command—”
“As Roth - Da’al ,” he corrected, thrusting a fat forefinger in the air, onto which he’d somehow managed to jam several over-large silver rings.
Those wouldn’t be fun trying to get off later.
“Same thing,” Rebecca muttered. “I know you know what I mean. Doesn’t surprise me that no one else openly talks to me very much these days, but I figured, out of anyone who still would, it’d be you.”
He chuckled again and finally stopped fiddling with whatever new prize he’d found in the jumble of random valuables. “You want me to shoot straight with you, boss. Copy that.”
Rebecca straightened from where she crouched beside the totes and folded her arms. “Exactly. So let me hear it. Don’t hold back.”
The gentle, knowing smile he fixed on her next suddenly made her feel like a child trying to keep up with adult conversation during a dinner party—most of which had been hosted in her own home, despite no one expecting her to sit through the whole thing.
Blue Hells, that was such a long time ago.
“Truth is,” Titus began, “everybody’s just fine. No bullshit, Knox, I swear. The new guys’re fitting in better than most of us expected. Honestly, the witch sisters… They might come across as innocently clueless from time to time, but they know what they’re doing. Adam’s really taken a shine to Rick and the whole Intel team. Not quite sure what Braxus and Theo are all that skilled at, if anything, but they’re settling in like they ought to. I’ve heard no complaints.”
“That’s good. No complaints isn’t exactly everyone doing well, though…”
“After all Aldous’s fuckery? You bet your ass it’s the same.”
“I think you meant that as a compliment,” she said, barely containing a smile, “but it doesn’t quite feel like one.”
“Bullshit. You know exactly what I mean by it.”
She couldn’t argue with him there. “I guess I should just take that as a win and keep going, huh?”
“Best damn strategy around, if you ask me.” Titus returned to absently pawing his way through various piles, but she knew he was still listening. Mostly.
“And if you had any issues with anything,” she added, “or you heard someone else might, you know you can talk to me about it, right?”
“Of course I do, Knox. You moved upstairs into an office. Not through the Gateway.”
She barked out another laugh.
No, she’d moved through the Gateway to escape unwanted responsibility once already, but she wasn’t about to say that out loud.
If only he knew…
Titus grumbled and cleared his throat. “If you ask me—”
“Good, ’cause I am.” She flashed him a quick smile when he looked sharply up at her before his booming laugh filled the storage vault again.
“Right. Nah, everyone might act like they don’t wanna say anything in front of you, or step out of line or nothing, but it ain’t ’cause they’re scared of you, Knox.”
Shit.
That kind of answer felt loaded with all sorts of possibilities. The vast majority of them were not good.
Had Titus , before anyone else, figured out who she really was?