CHAPTER 43
Quinn
“Luna?” I croak. I pry my eyes open and reach for the water I set on the side table. There’s only a sip left in it but it’s enough to revive me. I sit up. I don’t hear anything. Tink stirs near my feet. No Marlon.
Uh oh.
I pull out my phone and dial Robbie’s number. I wait the annoyingly long time it takes for the encrypted signal to ping around.
“You are so cooked,” my younger brother says when I answer.
“She left?”
“She did,” O answers. I sit up straighter in my chair.
“Fuck!”
“Indeed,” his calm tone is comforting and terrifying at the same time.
“Alright, well, where did she go? To who?”
“Your wife might be smarter than all of you,” Allie’s smooth voice comes on the line.
We don’t hear from her often on calls like this.
She’s O’s wife and the only true motherly figure any of us have had.
She’s also a trained spy and fighter in her own right.
But she’s not involved directly in the missions. Usually.
“I could’ve told you that, Al. Good to hear you,” I reply.
“And you, Van. Your little mafiosa sat at your desk and studied our satellite patterns.”
I sit back in the chair, “She what?”
“Didn’t figure her as that patient,” Mark says, cold and prickly as ever.
“Or methodical.” That was Zander.
“Quiet,” O commands. “Go on, love.”
“Once she’d timed the pattern, during the small window where we were not watching your shack, she took off.”
“No,” I whisper.
“Yes,” O says.
“Okay, so where is she now?”
“That’s the truly amazing part,” Allie is smiling, I can hear it in her voice.
It’s like she’s oddly proud of Luna. Like a daughter, even though in actuality my wife would probably throat punch my adopted mother if given the chance.
I understand when she finishes her thought and admits the impossible, “We don’t know. ”
·····
“My bicycle. Two cars, a tank and a motorcycle, and she took the mountain bike?!”
“Probably figured out we’d have tracers on everything,” Robbie responds.
“Do you have a tracer on your bike?” O asks.
“Of course not, it’s a fucking bicycle!”
“I think I’m in love with your wife,” Allie sighs.
“This is getting weird now,” Zander says.
Mark ignores anything off-mission, as usual, and says, “If she’s on a bike she couldn’t be far.”
“Right, which is why it’s strange we haven’t found her,” Allie agrees. “She must’ve seen her window and flew out of there like a bat out of hell, but then she’d be on a road somewhere, right?”
“I can’t believe I didn’t think to put a tracking chip on the mountain bike,” Robbie mutters.
“Again, it’s a bicycle!”
“Gang’s all here now!” Gailo chimes in as he joins comms, loud and obnoxious as always. “What’d I miss?”
“Van’s wife broke him and now he won’t stop repeating the word bicycle,” Robbie says.
“Stop, all of you. Van, look and see what else she took with her. Maybe some other gear we can locate.”
“Roger,” I grunt as I get up from the chair.
“How’s the wound?” Allie asks.
“How’s my whole damn house? Who was that?” I grouse back.
“Yeah, was that us?” Mark asks.
“Focus!” O whisper shouts. “One mission at a time. A woman who was not read in, who happens to know classified locations, read a shit-ton of classified files, knows Van’s true nature and Mark’s true identity is currently missing!”
“She did rummage through your closets and take a backpack but I can’t see what’s inside it. She clocked where most of the cameras are in there,” Robbie says.
“Of course she did,” I mutter.
“Honestly, if you don’t bring her in so I can have her running missions yesterday,” Allie cuts in, “I’m going to be thoroughly disappointed in all of you.”
“Running missions?” I freeze. “I thought the plan was just for me to cozy up to Mancini Senior. I haven’t even had a chance to do that!”
“The plan changed when you fell for each other,” O states plainly.
Zander almost laughs, “Not sure she fell since she is currently AWOL with all his secrets and half his shit.”
Fuck. That hurts.
I knew it might not be enough. I know she has feelings for me but I knew we, I might not be enough. I am a big ugly fucker with a horrific past and an even worse present, according to a loyal mafia princes.
Which she might still be. She might not love me more than her goals, her plans. She was raised in this. She wants power and control. She’s fucking great at it, too, clearly.
I study my storage lockers. I give Robbie a report of what’s missing, “Two knives, two Glock 43s, go bag with protein bars and water, and wait, a grenade? The fuck? A first aid kit, and huh,” I stop, seeing an empty space.
“I can’t remember what was here, something I must never use.
Robbie do we have a paper trail on what was in here? ”
“Looking…looking…”
We all wait. It’s like I can feel O staring at each of us with that air of disappointment he used to get when we messed up as boys. Feels the exact same right now.
“Persona Kit.”
“Shit.”
“Fuck!”
More curses fill the line and I can’t tell who says what.
“Brilliant,” Allie is practically swooning.
“Oh, no, uh, not that,” Gailo says, clearly having forgotten some of his training.
“It contains dye, wigs, prosthetics, glasses, makeup, not just physical disguises, but ID, credit cards, additional props for a fake identity.” Robbie reads off the contents to help Gialo out.
“It’ll take me a minute to track down the exact list of individual items and which persona.
I’ll start checking pings on our credit cards. ”
I slump, discouraged as I point out, “She’s too smart to use them.”
“Did she take her dog?” O asks.
“Yes,” I say. The word is like acid on my tongue.
“Stop everything else and start looking for where she ditched the bike. We find it, maybe we catch a glimpse of her right now with dyed hair or—”
“She has black hair she can’t dye that. Hoodie, I bet,” Allie says.
I go to the closet. “Yes. She did take a hoodie and,” I look back at the armory wall. I gulp, “She took a Kevlar vest too.”
More curses ring out on the line. If she was coming back, she would have left the dog.
She’s taken everything she needs to sneak, or blast, into enemy territory.
Or enough to start her journey home and shoot any one of us who gets in her way.
Every second that passes cements the reality for all of us.
The weight of it settles deep in my gut. I swallow down bile.
My wife is going to betray me.