Chapter 21
NORTH
Luca drops into the wave like he’s trying to prove something, and Ace is already on the inside of him, cutting across the face with that showboat grin that I’ve been watching him develop for two years.
They’re both going to be out of position for the section coming up, and I’m not going to tell them.
Instead, I’m going to sit on my board and watch them figure it out. Best way to learn.
Luca makes the section. Barely. Ace doesn’t, gets cleaned up by the whitewater, and I hear the whoop from Luca before I see either of them surface because Luca is incapable of shutting up when he’s won anything.
“HA!”
Ace’s head pops up thirty feet inside. “Lucky,” he yells across the water.
“Skill,” Luca yells back.
“Timing!”
“You were in my priority—”
“You had no priority—”
Together they paddle back out toward me, still arguing.
The afternoon sun is coming off the water, gold on the surface, the shadows of our boards long underneath us.
The swell is small and consistent, and the lineup has thinned since lunch.
Just the three of us out here now, past the main break, rising and falling on the sets coming in, and I’m thinking about Adelaide.
Been doing so since I woke up with her tucked against my chest in bed, and I lay there listening to her heavy sleeping for a full ten minutes before I got up.
Ace straddles his board and glances back at the house in the distance. “What do you think she’s doing?” he asks.
“Going through my drawers,” Luca says immediately.
“Again?” Ace barks a laugh.
“Well, she clearly can’t get enough of my titty magazines. I plan to swap out the girl photos with her head.” He’s laughing, and I’m shaking my head.
“Right, she’s gonna love that,” Ace says.
“She loves my sense of humor,” Luca states, tossing water at his face.
“What do you think?” Ace asks in my direction.
I watch a set roll through without committing to anything. “I think she’s watching us through the window.”
“Boring,” Luca snorts out.
“Realistic.”
Ace is lying back on his board with his hands behind his head, staring up at the sky. “She’s in my bedroom right now, pressing one of my pillows between her thighs while thinking of me. She wants me to find her scent tonight, to drive me crazy with it.”
“She did that yesterday,” Luca says with a shit-eating grin. “I saw her.”
Ace’s head pops up. “What?”
“I walked down the hall, and the door was open. I didn’t say anything.”
“You saw her humping my pillow?”
I burst out laughing at this stage, as these two never stop egging each other on. And Luca can’t even keep a straight face, just starts chuckling too.
“You bastard, getting my hopes up,” Ace states and lies back down.
I close my eyes for a moment and feel the board rocking under me, picturing her sleeping with me last night, how Luca and Ace snuck in and joined us, squished together, but fuck, I haven’t had a better night’s sleep.
She’s been taking turns in each of our beds, but in truth, we just all end up following her.
It’s fucking ridiculous, and I’m going to order us a huge Alpha-size bed.
“What do you actually think, North?” Ace asks again. “Not the avoidance version either.”
I take a slow breath, that nagging sensation in the pit of my gut, the one that’s been pestering me since I realized that Adelaide is ours. “We need to tell her about The Breakers and our time there.”
Luca glares at me. “Now?” he asks. “Right now? On this, the nicest week we’ve had in forever?”
“Not right now.”
“You just fucking said—”
“Tonight. Tomorrow. Soon.”
“That’s not fucking sexy, North.” Luca drops back onto his board. “Way to destroy a perfectly good thing.”
“She needs to know.”
“I agree with you. I just wish you’d picked a worse moment than the one where she is genuinely accepting us as her scent matches,” Ace adds.
“So, you finally slept with her, and now it’s all we should talk to her about our feelings and share our truth that might frighten her away—” Luca says.
“You both know I’m right.”
“Fuck!” Ace murmurs, while Luca pinches his lips, clearly displeased.
“I know North is right, but that doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it.”
A small wave comes in, and we let it pass beneath us.
“She’s our scent match,” I explain. “She’s going to be in this house, in our bed, in our lives.
And she has something in her past that wants to harm her, that scares her, and it took her a long time to finally come clean.
We owe her the same thing, and we owe it to her before, not after, she finds out from someone else. ”
Luca sits quietly and nods.
Ace pushes his wet hair off his face. “Yeah. I hate it, but you’re right.”
“So we tell her. And the other thing…” I say.
They both stare at me, brows furrowing.
“I’ve got someone looking into Daniel Nixon back in LA. Another one is going through his finances and background.”
Luca’s jaw tightens. “I fucking want him in a room with me for ten minutes.”
“I don’t need ten,” Ace says, quiet, watching the horizon. “I need four.”
“Nobody’s touching him yet,” I state. “First, let’s work out what we’re dealing with. Then, we make a decision with Adelaide because it’s her life we’re protecting, not ours.”
Luca groans as if protesting but then nods, as does Ace.
A swell rises under us and passes again, the boards tilting and settling.
“We tell her not who we are but who we were. That’s a different thing, and she needs to understand that before we tell her we were mercenaries. That we only took out the worst of the worst. Never innocents.”
“I prefer contracted specialists,” Luca explains with a grin on his face.
“Did you ever consider,” Ace starts, to nobody in particular, “that we’re basically the sexier version of Dexter.”
Luca rolls his eyes hard, and I let out a bark of a laugh.
“Think about it. We had a code—only ever hurt people who absolutely deserved it. We kept it separate from our day-to-day activities, where we had hobbies. I’m just saying that Dexter had a harder time of it than we did, and he’s considered a hero in certain circles.”
“We’re nobody’s hero,” I say.
“We could be,” Ace offers with a shrug. “The right marketing.”
“Highly doubtful,” I respond.
“Reframing might help,” Luca contributes.
“Nope. We’re not pitching this as Dexter when we tell her.”
Luca is laughing now, despite himself, and I let them wind down because this is what we do. We spiral into comedy when the subject is serious. We’ve always done it. It’s how we managed years of work that would have broken most people and still came out of it with most of our humanity intact.
“Okay,” Ace says, settling. “So how do we do this? Practically.”
“We sit down with her,” I explain. “Probably in the morning when she’s relaxed and fed. We give her the whole picture on how we got into it, why we stayed, why we left, what we’ve done since.”
“And if she walks?” Luca asks.
“She won’t,” I state. “know her. She’s steadier than we think she is, been through a lot.”
“Fuck,” Ace mutters. “I’m not going to sleep tonight.” He’s rubbing his jaw and staring at the water, frowning.
Nobody says anything for a moment, just a gull cutting across overhead.
“She should be good, I think,” Luca adds. “I told her that I’d done bad things and wasn’t proud of it or that man anymore.” He stares at me. “I preempted. In case.”
“So did I,” I say.
“Me too,” Ace offers.
“Then she’s been warned. We’re not dropping it cold but filling in a picture she already knows is there.”
A larger set starts rolling in from the outside. Ace eyes it, positions himself. “Last wave,” he says. “Then in.”
He takes the wave. Luca and I follow.
Adelaide is worth every difficult conversation we need to have, every uncomfortable truth.
She came to us on a surfboard out of a mess we didn’t cause, and she’s going to walk through worse with us because she chose us, and we’re going to earn it, every single day, for the rest of our lives.
Starting tomorrow, when we tell her the complete truth.