Chapter 34 Victor
VICTOR
A few more days go by, and Willow is still staying with us.
I’ve been working on incorporating her into my daily routines and habits, which is… strange. I’m not used to change, and I don’t like it. I prefer when things run the way they always have, and I don’t have to even think about the maintenance of them because the routine is so locked into place.
But with Willow here, I’ve been having to make adjustments to the things I’ve always done because of her.
On top of that, Ethan and his gang are taking out their anger on us by telling their allies not to bring us any stolen cars and to find another chop shop to take them to.
It’s a mess, and I knew it would be, but I’m leaving the fallout of that incident for my brothers to deal with.
I’m too busy trying to track down information about the man who was questioning Carl. I’m still searching for some facial recognition match for this guy, and every day that passes without a match, my irritation grows.
I don’t like when problems are hard to solve, and I especially don’t like when people aren’t easy to track down when I need them to be. Everything going on has just left me feeling off balance and out of sorts.
Walking through our home one afternoon, I pass by Ransom and Willow in the garage. He’s been teaching her stuff about cars, and she seems interested in it. More interested than I would have expected for someone like her, and I have to wonder if it’s the cars she likes or just being around Ransom.
Seeing them like this doesn’t do anything to really answer the question one way or another.
The two of them talk easily, their heads bent over a car with the hood pulled up, their shoulders touching.
Ransom points to something under the hood, launching into an explanation, and Willow seems hungry for the information, nodding and asking a follow up question that makes my brother grin.
He nudges her shoulder with his and then takes her hand, guiding it to the part of the car in question.
Willow doesn’t flinch away or put distance between them. She leans in closer, nodding seriously and seeming completely at ease. There’s something comfortable and intimate about it, both of them taking pleasure in each other’s company, talking like old friends.
What is that like?
I’ve never been good with people, and I guard my personal space intensely. It’s different with my brothers, since I feel comfortable with them and they know me well enough to read my moods. But I don’t spend time with outsiders, and I’ve never wanted to before.
But now, I can’t get that thought out of my head. What would it be like?
Willow and I barely talk to each other, so of course she doesn’t have the kind of easy conversation with me that she has with Ransom. But that doesn’t stop me from being fascinated by her, my thoughts always drawn to her.
It was bad before, when I was just watching her through the cameras in her apartment.
Now she’s here, almost larger than life, taking up space in our home and in my head.
She doesn’t come into my room, but I know she’s in the warehouse somewhere at all times.
Using our bathroom, leaving strands of soft blonde hair in the drain.
Sitting in the living room, watching her home improvement shows on our TV.
Spending time with Ransom in the garage, learning about the work we do, integrating herself into our lives in a way that never should have been allowed to happen in the first place.
But it’s too late now.
Throwing her out would put her and us in danger from whoever is looking for information about what happened at that brothel. There’s no getting rid of her, so the only thing I can do is try to regulate my own reactions to her.
I close my eyes for a second, counting out my breaths, my fingers tapping against my thighs.
Inhale, one, two, three, four. Hold, one, two, three, four. Exhale, one, two, three, four.
And then again.
And once more for good measure.
I tap out each count on my thigh, feeling it physically, reassuring myself as I wrestle my emotions back under control.
Once my head is more clear, I take my laptop into the kitchen so I can keep working while I eat lunch. Whenever I feel uncomfortable, I always go back to my computers. They’re easy to understand, they do what I tell them to do, and they always follow logic.
While I eat, I bring up the picture of the unknown man again, cross referencing it with databases from the US and a few other countries too, trying to draw any kind of connection between this face and who it could belong to.
I keep my food away from my computer, not wanting to get crumbs on the keyboard, and focus on the screen. One of my scans finishes running, and I let out a frustrated noise when it comes up with nothing.
“Dammit.”
Willow walks into the kitchen, glancing my way as she hears me curse under my breath. None of that comfortable camaraderie she shows with Ransom is present when she’s around me, and there’s none of that combative fire that comes out around Malice either.
But there is… something.
She seems as aware of me as I am of her. When I dart furtive glances in her direction, I often find her already looking at me, as if she likes to study me when I’m not watching.
I can relate to that feeling.
As I focus on getting a new scan set up on my computer, she opens and closes a few cabinets, probably searching for a snack.
“Do you have any peanut butter?” she asks after a moment, her voice soft.
“Top shelf. On the left,” I answer, not looking up. Since I keep the kitchen organized, I know exactly where everything is.
“Oh. I saw that, but—” She cuts herself off, and I look up in time to see her make a face. “It’s crunchy.”
Malice and Ransom are both fans of crunchy peanut butter, which I honestly don’t understand. Regular butter doesn’t come in a crunchy variety, so why should peanut butter? Butter is supposed to be smooth.
From the look on her face, Willow feels the same.
“Not a fan?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “No. I mean, it’s fine, I just don’t like crunchy bits in my sandwich.”
My lips twitch into an almost smile at that. “Exactly. Peanut butter should be smooth. If I wanted something crunchy, I would eat a whole peanut.”
She laughs, and I feel a strange flush of pride at having been the one to elicit that sound from her, even if it was about something as mundane as peanut butter.
“I have a secret stash of the creamy kind,” I tell her. “If you want some.”
“Really?” Her elfin face lights up. “Thanks.”
I get up and close the cabinet she was looking in before going to a smaller one off to the side.
It’s where I keep all the things that my brothers aren’t allowed to touch, organized and tidy.
Malice and Ransom will scoop peanut butter or anything else out of jars with no regard for whether the knife has already touched something else.
I’ve even come downstairs a few times to find Ransom eating it right out of the jar on a spoon.
That thought makes me shudder. When I open my personal jar, the top of the peanut butter is as smooth and neat as it was when I bought it.
“I’ll spread it for you,” I tell her.
“Okay.”
I feel more like a freak than I have in a long time, admitting out loud that I need to be the one to do it, but Willow doesn’t seem to judge me. She just brings the bread and a plate over, and I set about making her a sandwich, scraping the knife over the top of the peanut butter just so.
“I feel like a kid again, watching you do that,” she says, resting her elbows on the counter nearby as she watches me.
“Having someone else make me a pb&j.” Then she grimaces.
“Well, I guess that’s not really true. My mom never made me peanut butter and jelly sandwiches when I was little.
She never made me lunch at all. Or even breakfast. If I wanted something, I had to learn how to make it for myself. ”
“I’ve seen how you eat,” I tell her flatly. “I guess it makes sense.”
She huffs, rolling her eyes. “I was sick that day you came over, okay? It’s not like I had the energy to make something healthy. I don’t always eat cup-o-noodles.”
I think about pointing out that I’ve been watching her and taking note of what she eats since the night we met her, through the cameras I put in her apartment, but I keep that thought to myself.
“And it’s not like anyone taught me how to cook anyway,” she adds. “My mom can barely boil water on a good day.”
I’ve done extensive research on Willow, so I know she’s adopted, although I was never able to track down information about her earlier origins. All I know is that she entered the foster care system when she was twenty months old, and that a woman named Misty Hayes adopted her not long after that.
“Get me the jelly,” I tell her. “Top shelf of that cabinet. And another knife.” She does what I ask, and when she comes back and hands them to me, I glance over at her, my curiosity spilling over. “Why do you call your adoptive mother ‘mom’?”
Willow blinks at me, her eyebrows darting up toward her hairline.
Then she shrugs. “I ended up in the system when I was really little. My parents died, and the only one willing to take me in was Misty. She’s the only mother I’ve ever known, so that has to count for something, right?
If I didn’t have her, I’d just be… alone in the world. ”
Her voice sounds wistful and a little sad, and I can’t help but think of my father.
I think of him standing over me, a hammer in his hand and that smug fucking look on his face.
I think of the way he kept saying it would make me stronger, make me better, as he brought the hammer down and broke each of my fingers in turn.
He always said that. Said that it was for my own good, that he was molding me into someone who would be unbreakable one day.
Each break he inflicted back then, each time he put me through something terrible…
it was supposed to make it that much harder for anything else to break me in the future.
My hands ache, as if remembering the pain has called it back from so long ago, and I set down the knife carefully, then tap my fingers one by one on the counter.
“Sometimes it’s better to be alone,” I tell her. “When you’re alone, no one can hurt you.”
I can feel her watching me, feel the curiosity in her gaze.
Maybe she’s hoping I’ll explain what I mean by that, but I can’t.
Talking about what my father did to me feels like re-opening old wounds with a razor blade, so I take a step away from Willow, screwing the lid back on the peanut butter and gesturing to the sandwich.
“There you go. It’s done.”
Turning away from her, I put away the peanut butter and jelly and quickly wash the two knives I used. After returning them to the drawer, I pluck my laptop off the counter and escape back to the sanctuary of my room.
But my thoughts are still on Willow as I go upstairs. She’s everything that’s on my mind, and I replay our interaction in my head as if I’m going through camera footage—focusing on every expression on her face, wishing I could zoom in to get even more detail.
She makes me want things I’ve never allowed myself to have, never even thought about having before.
When I’m around her, I wonder what it would feel like to touch her hair, to feel the softness of it, like spun gold between my fingers.
To touch her face, to kiss her. To have her lean into me with careless touches and easy affection the way she does with Ransom.
It seems impossible, unobtainable. Laughable, even. But still, I want it.
Setting my laptop on my bed, I take a seat at my bank of monitors, eager to lose myself in the one thing that always soothes me. I’m about to get back to work running facial recognition scans, but then a soft ping alerts me to an incoming encrypted message.
Dammit. This is bad timing.
It’s from X, and with everything else we’ve got going on, we’ll be stretching ourselves thin trying to complete a job for him too. But telling him we’re too busy isn’t an option, so I get to work decrypting the message to find out what he wants.
It takes several minutes, and by the time I’m done, the unsettled feeling from earlier has vanished—at least until I start to read the message.
My shoulders tense as my gaze tracks over the words on the screen, my brows pinching together.
What the fuck?