Chapter 13 Schloss #4
In the following months, she’d learned—mostly from Josh’s subtle hints—that they got that way from practice, all the time practice, and that’s when the ultracompetitive dance practices with Josh and Grace had started.
And she’d never been tempted, not once, to do drugs like she’d done as a teenager, but she still remembered cocaine.
She didn’t want a grain of it up her nose.
She didn’t want it thundering through her bloodstream.
She’d taken her adulthood and made it hers, and yes, there’d been a few romantic decisions she wished she hadn’t made—nobody ever found true love on a club floor, or if they had, she’d never met that person—but drugs hadn’t been part of any of it.
She wanted to keep it that way.
Unbidden, Robert Craig’s earnest face passed behind her eyes. She’d had some time to talk to Liam’s younger brother, and she’d been struck by the decency in him, the quiet strength of his family, gathering together, the support they gave Liam in spite of how far from his roots he’d gone.
The night Liam and Josh had arrived in England, she and Grace and Liam’s siblings had stayed up talking, exchanging stories and such, and she realized how much of Liam’s time with the Salingers had made it home to the East End.
She’d been asked everything, from how many bad guys she could beat up (from Liam’s youngest brother) to whether she really did make her own clothes (from Liam’s older sister) to a wistful request to see her and Grace dance (Liam’s youngest sister).
That last request they’d agreed to, putting on an impromptu exhibition to Grace’s favorite classic rock song—“Come Out and Play” by Offspring.
Grace had gotten his own fair share of questions, and the whole time they’d answered, bantering back and forth like the siblings they’d become, Robert had sat there, eyes on her face, large and blue like Liam’s, and a thoughtful expression, as though life had somehow surprised him.
That night Robert offered to show her to her room in his mother’s big house, which was partially paid for by her children, who had moved her out of the tiny flat they’d grown up in.
She now watched her grandchildren, and her youngest two grown children still lived at home, but they had “guest rooms enow,” Robert said broadly and then smiled.
Molly was pretty sure his accent wasn’t that deep, and he’d been being playful.
When they’d gotten to the doorway, he’d done the most unexpected thing.
While Molly was looking for that often-elusive way to untangle from an awkward social situation, the kind where you get to know somebody too well over too short a time and you didn’t want that magic to end, Robert had kissed her.
It was a simple kiss, gentle, a little bit of tongue, but her mouth had fallen open in surprise. He’d gone a little further then, and before he could get too forward (and oh, it had been so long, and she’d been so willing), he’d stepped back.
“We okay, then?” he asked.
She’d nodded, still speechless.
“Good,” Robert said, kissing her forehead this time. “When you and my brother are all finished with this super-secret mission of yours, I sure would love to see you again.”
She’d stared at him, suddenly seeing the appeal of Liam, whom she’d almost thought too plain for their Josh, and blurted, “You know my hair is really red. It’s wild. I have no idea how long this pressed straight blond thing is going to last. My brother will kill me if I don’t dye it back.”
Robert grinned. “I can’t wait to see it, Molly girl.” And in spite of the fact that Chuck and Carl called her this all the time, this was the first time it had ever sent a thrill down her spine, and she’d almost wept with the awesomeness.
The next day during brunch, before they’d run off for the train station, he’d caught her hand and told her, “I meant it, last night. You come back. We’ll see London right.”
And even though, like Josh, she’d had a lot of chances to explore Europe, she couldn’t imagine having seen London like she’d see it through this man’s eyes.
So here she was—she and Stirling had avenged their foster parents, her little brother had found the quiet artist geek of his dreams—and she adored them both—and Grace and Josh, whom she loved almost as much, looked like they were going to live, and that hadn’t been a given for either of them at different times over the last five years.
She had so many amazing uncles and a big sister in Julia and best friends, and now, after whining about it for two years, she had a prospect, a really lovely prospect, to date, and she was surrounded by the one truly stupid thing she’d ever done in her life.
Cocaine.
She felt like this was some sort of test. And it wasn’t even like she was tempted, but just to have this shit all around her was terrifying.
Chuck spoke in her ear. “How we doing, Molly girl?”
Not Robert, but, well, Chuck was pretty solid as a big brother/uncle, so it did have some warmth in it. “Almost done,” she whispered. “I’ve got one more charge to set—”
Lucius’s panicked voice intruded. “We’ve got a swamp glider coming in. It’s going to pass me right up, but someone must have sounded the alarm—”
“Shit!” Hunter swore. “We’ve got soldiers coming in this way. Chuck, grab a gun and get out front.”
“Me and Grace will blow the warehouses,” Molly said hurriedly, “and Chuck said something about getting the processing center too.”
“I’ll get it,” Grace said. “Molly, ten minutes—go!”
“Everyone off comms!” Hunter ordered.
And the next eight minutes were a blur.
Molly knew it was eight minutes because she’d set her watch the minute Grace said ten.
Her body was prime and muscular and fleet; she managed to scramble around her warehouse and then finish Chuck’s while Grace finished his structure and went to the processing center too.
The humid darkness around them was filled with gunshots and swearing and the occasional scream, and Molly, while surprisingly experienced in things like this for someone who didn’t have a drop of military aspirations in her blood, worked hard to keep her thoughts focused and professional as she set Every. Fucking. Charge.
It felt like a hundred—in reality, it was only six.
But her watch said eight minutes, so since she couldn’t use comms to check on Grace, she used the shadows to hide her sprint toward the long narrow building that had the tables in it where the product had been boiled, condensed, processed, cut, and bagged.
Chuck had been going to do that one. He knew how to set the blasts so all the open powder on the tables didn’t get aerosolized, becoming a mist of stuff nobody wanted to breathe.
But Molly was thinking task. She wasn’t thinking consequence.
And there she was, thinking task-task-task and also two minutes, a minute fifty-nine, a minute fifty-eight, task-task-task, a minute fifty-seven—
When the processing building went kaboom, and Grace hollered, “Masks on, people!”
And Molly closed her eyes, pulled her hat down over her face and mask, and dropped to a crouch to avoid the rolling cloud of frosty death.
Most of her safeguards—her clothes, her posture—protected her from the bulk of it, but she still felt the tingling on the skin of her ears, the back of her neck, through the knees of her camouflage cargo pants.
She was alert enough that when Grace flew toward her, grabbed her arm, and practically dragged her through the forest until they had cover, she could stand and assist in her own defense.
“Goddammit, Grace,” she gasped through the double layers of cloth over her mouth, “You went early.”
“I am so fucking high right now,” Grace gasped back. “The tarps weren’t pulled tight on the other end. Gust of wind blew product in my face. Lucky time didn’t stop. I’m buzzing so hard.”
“Shit! Hold still!”
If somebody was overdosing on an opioid, they used Narcan to speed up their metabolism.
If they were overdosing on cocaine—which was really hard to do given how easily the drug was metabolized—their blood pressure was so high they risked stroking out.
So Molly—hell, all of them—were carrying small doses of lisinopril, which was designed to lower the blood pressure, just in case.
She had to grab Grace and force him to stand still to pop two tiny tabs in his mouth and make him dry swallow.
And then she watched him to make sure she hadn’t overdosed him on blood pressure medication, which would cause his heart rate to drop.
They didn’t have time to stare at each other long, because that’s when the other three warehouses went up, a roar like a C-4 lion and a chemical eruption of hell throwing a fireball into the dappled black night of the jungle.
Molly was high enough to scream when they went off, her self-control gone, and Chuck’s voice in her ear was panicked.
“Molly! Are you and Grace all right? Molly!”
“High as a fucking kite, Chuck, but breathing!”
“Grace?” Hunter said, his own voice strangled.
“Oh my God,” Grace said. “If this had happened when I was seventeen, I would have gone back for another face full!”
“Oh God,” Hunter muttered.
“Don’t worry,” Grace said. “It turns out, drugs suck!”
And then he bent over, ripped off his mask and his balaclava, and threw up in the bushes.
Molly held his head and pulled a bottle of water from her cargo pants, and together they went back to hiding in the bushes and listening while Chuck and Hunter did dangerous soldier things that they would ordinarily help with, but picking up a gun right now when their vision was swimming and the world had a fuzzy rainbow edge was a bad idea.
An hour later (or a year or a buzzenteen years later), Hunter’s command of “Everybody back to the exfil. Lucius, start her up!” was met by Lucius’s hearty, “Thank God!”
Molly and Grace untangled themselves from their huddle, as they’d come down from the dangerous high, both of them too fucked up to go grab a weapon and help.
Self-awareness was a wonderful thing, and they weren’t so cocky that they believed they were soldiers.
They were thieves, and they could use weapons, but not like this.
“God,” Grace muttered. “I’m fucking useless.”
Molly started to laugh.
“What?” he asked.
“When I was seventeen, I would have snorted that off your dick and told myself you were straight.”
It wasn’t funny—it barely made sense—but Grace started to laugh, and then she laughed some more, and together they dragged their sorry asses back to the plane.
Chuck held her as Hunter took off, and Lucius, as though very conscious that Hunter wanted so badly to hold Grace himself, was treating Grace with the tenderness of an older brother to a younger sibling with the flu.
Once they were in the air, Grace said, “So did we do it? Can we move on to phase three now?”
Hunter’s low, rather tortured groan was enough to tell Molly how badly they’d all been scared.
“A break,” Chuck murmured. “We’ve got two weeks to rest and plan in Prague.”
“I wonder if Robert would meet me in Prague,” she slurred, thinking that if she hadn’t been stoned she never would have said it.
“I’ll ask him to come myself,” Grace said. “After what we just did, we deserve all the things.”
Molly laughed a little and wondered how she’d make this sound not so scary to Stirling, who still couldn’t risk losing her.
And then she wondered how honest she’d be with Robert, who had told her he’d like to see her—red hair, curls, and all.
A man who could deal with her curls? Maybe that’s what she’d needed all along.