Chapter 21 Malice
MALICE
It takes a second when I wake up in the morning to remember where the fuck I am. I know it’s not my room, and a spike of adrenaline shoots through me before the shit that went down last night comes flooding back through my mind.
I feel like shit, my side aching where I got hurt. I’m alone in the bed—Willow’s bed—and it’s already late in the morning, judging from the way the sunlight looks as it slants through the blinds into the room.
My mouth tastes like ass from slugging down whiskey before I fell asleep, and even though I’m not really hungover, my head is throbbing and my wound aches.
Now that I’m not as out of it as I was last night, I can think more clearly about what happened. In the harsh light of day, everything that went down last night seems even worse. Shit is fucked with X, and that’s very fucking bad.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed, not even bothering to try to put my bloody and ripped up shirt back on.
Leaving Willow’s room, I can hear the others in the kitchen, so I follow the sounds to find them.
Willow is sitting on the island in the center of the kitchen, and Ransom is leaning against the counter. Vic’s at the table, eyes on his phone, but I know he’s listening to everything that’s going on.
“So let me get this straight,” Ransom says, cocking his head to one side, his eyes bright. “You’ll spring for the name brand snacks, but not name brand orange juice?”
“The store brand stuff is just as good!” Willow insists. She doesn’t even sound annoyed with him. Her eyes are just as bright, and there’s a smile tugging at her lips.
“And you don’t even get the kind with pulp!” Ransom continues, swishing the bottle of juice in his hand. “You’re just drinking… off brand orange water now. This is a tragedy.”
She giggles at his melodramatic expression, and the sound of it makes something twist in my chest.
When Willow walked out on us, she was treating us all the same.
Keeping us all at a distance. But something has clearly shifted between her and Ransom in the last couple of weeks.
It’s the same thing that happened when she was staying with us.
There’s just something there. This easy lightness that they have that I feel like I’ll never have with her.
Willow isn’t as on edge around him. She leans toward him, lets him in. She seems to trust him. To like him.
I clench my jaw, shoving those feelings down before they can twist my heart even more.
Vic looks up from his phone, his gaze landing on me, and I wonder if he can see it on my face. If he can, he doesn’t say anything about it. Instead he just says my name, matter of fact as always.
“Malice. You’re up.”
That gets Ransom’s and Willow’s attention, and they both turn to look at me. Willow slips off the counter and comes over, her eyes raking over my body.
“How are you feeling?” she asks.
“Fine,” I grunt out. It’s a defense mechanism, I guess, closing her out the way she seems to have closed me out. I feel like shit, and I don’t want to deal with this right now.
I look past Willow to Vic and Ransom. “We need to go. You should have woken me up earlier so we could get out of here.”
“It’s fine,” Ransom says, the same way he did last night. “It’s better for you to get enough rest so you can start your healing off right. Plus, Willow was nice enough to let us stay. Can’t shrug off that kind of hospitality.”
I roll my eyes at that, but he has a point. Willow could have told us to get fucked when we showed up last night, me covered in blood and invading her space. But she didn’t.
“Thanks,” I tell her, nodding. “For letting us in.”
“Sure.” She nods, something I can’t read passing through her expression.
I jerk my head at the others. “Let’s go.”
Without waiting to see if they’re going to follow me, I turn and start heading for the front door.
Willow pads quietly after me, and my brothers fall in behind her.
“What will you do now?” she asks.
I shrug a shoulder, hiding my wince as the movement tugs at my stitches. “What we always do. Figure it out.”
She sucks in a breath and furrows her brow, and I know she’s annoyed by that non-answer. But she’ll have to fucking live with it. I’m not giving her anything else.
“Don’t worry,” I add bluntly. “We’ll be out of your hair now.”
She starts to say something, then snaps her mouth shut. Her eyes, so warm when she was looking at Ransom earlier, glint with something harder when she looks at me. I turn away, pressing my lips together as I yank her apartment door open.
The three of us head out into the hallway, and Victor glances back over his shoulder once before closing the door behind us.
“Oh shit. Here,” Ransom says, stopping in his tracks. He takes off his jacket and dress shirt and passes the white shirt over to me before buttoning up his jacket over his undershirt. “So you don’t look like some kind of jacked up stripper when we get a car.”
Snorting under my breath, I put the shirt on, and we head downstairs and walk several blocks away from Willow’s place before calling a cab to take us to our warehouse.
The whole ride back, I feel on edge. Victor has his computer out again, probably wiping any additional security footage from around Willow’s place that caught us this morning.
Wearing Ransom’s shirt feels weird, like a skin that doesn’t fit right, and the driver keeps glancing at us in the rearview mirror, like he’s expecting some trouble or something.
I clench my hands into fists, letting my nails bite into my palms, trying to breathe through the waves of irritation that keep surging under my skin.
Finally, we get back to our place and go inside. Once the door is closed behind us, I feel like I can breathe a little easier, but then Ransom has to go and open his damn mouth again.
“We didn’t have to rush out of Willow’s place, you know. We could have hung around a little longer.”
It feels like my skin is prickling, and I let out a slow breath through my nose. “She didn’t want us there,” I say, and it comes out sounding bitter as fuck. “Or at least, she didn’t want me there. She’s made that perfectly fucking clear multiple times. She doesn’t want shit to do with me anymore.”
Ransom chuckles, shaking his head. “Yeah, that’s definitely why she spent the whole night sleeping by your side. Because she didn’t want you there.”
That makes me pause. Fuck, I really must have been out of it, because I didn’t know that.
When I passed out, she was leaning against the doorway, still in the room but as far away from me as she could get, watching me with wary, closed off eyes.
I didn’t even realize she came back. That she slept beside me.
Something about that thought affects me, lingering in my chest, but I try to brush it off. It doesn’t matter one way or another. She probably just wanted to make sure I didn’t die in her bed or some shit.
It doesn’t mean anything.
“Since we did leave Willow’s place,” Vic puts in, setting his laptop down on the table as we enter the kitchen. “There are more important things we need to talk about. Namely, the job last night.”
That gets us back on track, and even Ransom sobers up real quick at the reminder. He shakes his head with a groan. “Yeah. What the hell happened?”
“Let’s run down the timeline.” Vic says. “We planted the device on Galvin at the museum. He mingled, we… mingled. Then we followed him out and onto that empty road. At some point, something sparked in his car, and it all caught fire.”
“Yeah, then we crashed into them,” Ransom mutters. “It wasn’t supposed to go down like that. We were supposed to just record him and report back.”
“Something got fucked up,” I say, pacing back and forth.
This is how we’ve always operated. Sometimes things go sideways, that’s just the nature of the jobs that we do, but then we hash it out together.
Having three of us makes it easier to turn over each piece of information we have, coming at it from different angles until we can piece together the whole puzzle.
And this is one hell of a goddamned puzzle.
“The question,” Vic murmurs thoughtfully, “is whether this is what X meant to happen, or if there was some kind of malfunction. Or if someone else was targeting Galvin at the same time we were. Maybe someone else took him out while we were tailing him.”
“It’s possible, I guess.” Ransom frowns, tugging at his bottom lip. “He was pretty wealthy and connected, which means he could’ve had enemies. Other people could have been waiting for him to come out into the open to get him, the same as we were. But it just seems too…”
“Neat?” Vic asks. He taps his fingers against the table and nods. “That’s what I’m thinking.”
“Let’s say X wanted Galvin dead,” I throw out, pressing a hand to my side as my stitches ache. “Why wouldn’t he just tell us that? It’s not like we could say no to the job either way. And it’s not like we haven’t killed people before—something X is well aware of.”
“Maybe he didn’t want it traced back to him?” Ransom suggests.
Vic shakes his head. “That doesn’t make sense, though.
We would know that it was X who wanted Galvin dead because he’s the one who gave us the job.
Either way, we’re the ones who carried it out.
I think we have to go with the most obvious answer here.
The recording device we planted on Galvin was more than just for recording.
It was also some kind of small explosive. ”
Ransom and I share a look, and the atmosphere in the kitchen grows heavier. Vic has to be right. Any other answer is just too coincidental to make sense.
“Fuck,” I say, scrubbing a hand over my face. “Okay, so X wanted Galvin dead, but there would have been neater ways to do that. Ways that didn’t fucking involve us plowing into his car like that.”
“Unless…” Ransom grimaces, glancing between us. “Unless that was a part of the plan all along.”
“What?”