44. Cyrus
Cyrus
Todd has been on the run for three fucking weeks, and I still haven't caught so much as a blip of him on a single feed.
And I own a lot of feeds.
I have tapped all his accounts and everything he's so much as given his email address for. I have flags on flags on fucking flags and built a net so fine the man couldn't buy a coffee without me knowing about it.
And yet he hasn't moved a single dollar. No flights, no rentals. He hasn't even breathed near anything with a fucking censor.
Which means he had a clean exit prepped long before any of us forced his hand. Or he didn't leave at all and someone is hiding him.
He's good either way, I'll give the bastard that much. He may have lived his whole life as a monster preening in the spotlight, but he's fucking incredible at being a rat hiding in the shadows.
I pull up the other window I have a habit of checking obsessively, the encrypted county and state police channels I've been quietly riding ever since this started.
The cops want Todd almost as much as I do. They've got nearly a dozen charges against him, thanks to the files my "anonymous" source dropped into their laps. A fucking law student could nail this one to the wall, but they're no closer to finding him than I am.
I read their internal notes, the frustrated little memos and dead-end interviews with staffers who knew nothing and donors who suddenly can't remember the man's name even though they were all up his ass a month ago.
It should comfort me that the professionals are flailing but it doesn't. I don't measure myself against them, I measure myself against my ability to solve the fucking problem, and right now, it's coming up short.
Marney comes home from rehab in six days.
The hospital discharged her into a very cushy facility we paid for on the condition that they tell us everything. It's still no guarantee she'll stay clean once she's out, but it's the best start we can give her. For Ellie's sake. And for now, she's safe in there.
But safe is a relative term while Todd is a variable I can't locate, and I do not fucking enjoy unaccounted for variables.
I kill the screens and tell myself the problem isn't going to solve itself tonight.
I hear them before I'm even through the side door. Every night, it's the same, but it never stops feeling like a dream. This house used to be a place where four broken men passed each other in hallways and communicated in the occasional grunt. A shove on our worse days.
Now I come home to the sound of Ellie cackling like nothing has changed since the RV.
I stop in the kitchen doorway and just look at her, because I once didn't think I'd get the chance again and now I never pass it up.
Tank's at the head of the table with Ellie folded sideways into his lap, swallowed up in one of his flannel shirts, her bare feet hooked over the arm of his chair.
He's got his cards fanned in one massive hand.
His mask is still on, even though Ellie has been working on that, but his eyes above it are soft.
Jinx sits across from them with his hair clipped up off his face, sleeves shoved up to his elbows. There's a tower of poker chips in front of him. We use those in lieu of cash because Kade is too fucking competitive for his own good or anyone else's.
At the moment, he's sitting on a backwards kitchen chair, gesturing wildly as if he doesn't have more broken ribs than intact ones.
"She's cheating," he says the second he notices me. Guess he decided I'm the referee. "Look at them. She's clearly feeding him intel."
"I just got here."
"She's signaling him," he continues, ignoring me. "And she was in my lap a minute ago, the little slut," he says with the utmost affection. "Every time he's got a good hand, she signals him somehow."
"I do not!" Ellie huffs, but her lips quiver the way they always do when she's lying through her teeth.
"What is it?" Kade demands, leaning forward. "You grind on his ass every time I start to call his bluff or something?"
Ellie throws her head back and cackles evilly. "You're insane."
Tank sets his cards face-down and signs.
I would never cheat.
"Oh yes you fucking would," Kade says. "You cheated all the fucking time in juvie."
Tank shakes his head in denial. I'm a man of honor.
"You're a six-foot-ten con artist."
"He has a point," Jinx grumbles, throwing his cards down on the table. "I haven't won a single hand."
Ellie loses it. She tips back against Tank's chest. "Do you believe this? They think I'm playing favorites."
Tank's arm comes around her reflexively, anchoring her so she doesn't slide off his lap. He makes that low rough sound that means he's laughing.
"Well, you are," Jinx pouts half-heartedly, his arms folded as he sinks lower in his chair. "It's the puppy eyes. He's got you brainwashed into thinking he's the innocent one."
Tank makes a sound that's clearly the nonverbal equivalent of, "Et tu, Brute?"
"Well, it's certainly not you," Ellie says flatly. "Don't think I didn't notice my panties went missing the other night."
Jinx's face goes beet red. "Okay, in my defense, I stole them to smell them, not to wear them."
"TMI, TMI, TMIIIIII," Kade groans, covering his ears with his hands.
Tank and Ellie both lose it. He makes a choking sound from behind the mask that has me worried I'm going to have to do CPR for a second and I have absolutely no fucking idea how that would work, given his… situation.
Pretty sure Ellie's figured it out, though.
"We're not cheating," she insists again, wiping her eyes. "We're just better than you, deal with it."
Nobody warned me about this. Nobody warned me that getting her back would feel this good, or that it would make her absence hurt that much more in retrospect because I finally remember what it was like.
Our Ellie, back on our laps, in our arms, where no one can take her from us ever again.
And she actually wants to be here this time. That's the part that really has me fucked up.
I don't have the wiring for most of what normal people feel. I've known that since I was a kid taking apart computers in a trailer park, trying to understand a world that told me I was never going to be anybody.
But I have this.
Whatever this is.
I'm pretty sure what normal people call love doesn't make them stand in a doorway watching the most important people in their lives while thinking about all the terrible things they'd do in order to keep them there. But my version, fucked up as it is, runs deeper.
"Sit," Jinx says, kicking a chair out for me without looking up. "We ordered Thai. Yours is in the fridge because someone," he gives a pointed glare at Kade, "tried to eat your spring rolls."
"Spring rolls get soggy in two seconds," Kade says in his defense. "I was practically doing you a favor."
"You've never done me a favor in your life," I counter, sitting down because I'm too tired to be properly hungry. I just want to sit with them for a little while.
Ellie reaches across the table without leaving Tank's lap and pushes a glass of water toward me, which is admittedly the first thing I've drank all day that wasn't caffeinated.
It's a small thing she's started doing, and I let her.
She catches my eye and smiles when I drink, and I think, not for the first time, that I would commit any number of felonies to keep that smile on her face.
I've already committed several today. I'd do worse without blinking. I already knew I'd kill for her, but now I get to live for her and that feels a lot weightier.
Jinx deals me in and we play five more hands. Ellie ends up on Jinx's lap before the first one is up, and mine for the third. She is definitely cheating the way Kade thought she was. I'm not about to complain though, because I don't want her to stop.
Kade keeps insisting Tank's eyebrows are a tell, as if she hasn't moved on to cheating on my behalf. Jinx fleeces all of us regardless and rakes in the chips like they're actually worth more than plastic. He's probably going to try to cash them in for blowjobs later.
We play and we laugh and we pass Ellie around because none of us can keep our hands off her now that we're actually allowed to touch her, and we've always been surprisingly good at sharing. Gear, secrets, a shitty RV in the middle of the woods, alibis.
Figures we'd manage to share the most important person in our lives, too.
For a little while, it's like old times again in the fortress, but with better furniture. Just five kids who never got to be kids playing cards.
Then Ellie's phone buzzes against the table.
I see her glance at it the way she always does now, flinching slightly. The kind of trauma you've been through doesn't just leave your body because you left it behind.
I promise myself I will do whatever it takes to make sure that one day soon, she doesn't have to flinch anymore. We all will. I see it in Jinx's eyes when they meet mine across the table.
She picks the phone up and answers it in a careful, bracing tone.
"Mom?"
I watch the last of the light in her eyes die when she hears whatever it is coming through the phone.
I've spent my whole life studying faces, and Ellie's is the one I've studied longest. I know every expression her features arrange themselves into. I know her happy and I know her sad and I know her anything and everything in between.
This is none of those.
Her eyes come up and find mine across the table, and whatever's coming through that phone, I already know it's bad.