53. Rowan
FIFTY-THREE
ROWAN
Surgeon was not pleased that he had to restitch Harper’s wound. He was even less pleased when he found out who was responsible. He left in a tizzy, swearing he wouldn’t put our ‘broken little doll’ back together for us if we screwed up his handiwork again.
That meant Nash was on his best behavior—for now.
Lilly came over every day to check on our girl, which kept him from going too wild in the interim.
Speaking of . . .
Lilly and Harper had been shut up in the office for an hour alone. I was beginning to think perhaps my boss was planning to off my girl while we sat in the next room, oblivious.
She wouldn’t make it far if she did, not with the three men currently half-psychotic for Harper in the next room.
Nash, who for some unknown reason had taken to bringing a bouquet of flowers home with him every day, was currently flipping through the pages of a book he’d scratched the title out on. I suspected it was because he didn’t want us to know he was reading it, but it only served to make me more curious.
Because at heart, we were still boys.
"Whatchya reading, bro?" When he didn’t respond, I tossed a throw pillow in his direction, nailing him in the forehead.
"What the fuck, Ro?" he spat, setting the book on the couch. "Don’t you have something to do?"
The grin splitting my face was comical. "Bothering you is my life’s purpose."
Angel, leaning over the counter in the kitchen, knife in hand, didn’t miss the chance to get one in. "He was born last, Nash, so he has the fewest brains. Forgive him. He knows not what he’s missing."
"Oh, stuff it, kitchen bitch," I taunted, my eyes straying to the door of the office as a loud thud echoed behind the barrier. "The fuck are they doing in there?"
Nash had picked his book back up and was currently reading it . . . upside down. "Fuck if I know. Lilly said she wouldn’t let Harper overwork herself." He licked his finger to turn the page, and I had to stifle the laughter bubbling up in my throat. "I still wanna know what the hell is up with this newfound obsession of hers with our—with the—with Harper."
I knew exactly how he felt. I couldn’t think about her without stuttering in my head about what to call her.
Technically, she was our sister in the legal sense. Our step-sister, but still related nonetheless. Or did it make that null and void because her mother had died? And to that matter, could what we all had with her be called a relationship? Or were we just roommates fucking on occasion now?
Not that any of us had gotten anywhere near sex with her after the Nash debacle.
Angel still walked on eggshells around her, like she was poisonous. Nash treated her like a wilting flower. Every night, he put those flowers in a vase and turned to her for approval, but he never actually said they were for her or gave them to her directly.
He’d found a way to give her gifts without it feeling like a gift. I had to applaud his ingenuity. Man would do mental gymnastics that made an Olympic athlete jealous just to convince himself he wasn’t melting from the inside out.
I was just existing. Every day, I left the house with the hopes that Lilly would return us to the roster, that we could pick up a job. I didn’t like feeling stagnant. Twiddling our thumbs wasn’t our style, and the involuntary unemployment worried us all.
Only Harper seemed unfazed, even going so far as to reassure me that Lilly was understanding and wouldn’t keep us out much longer.
I had yet to see the promise be fulfilled. Better yet, I wanted to know why the hell Harper seemed so confident in her reassurances .
I hated not knowing what was going on. But Harper insisted she had it covered.
What that meant, I didn’t know, and I was afraid to find out.
As if on cue, another loud thump came from the other side of the wall, and now all three of us swiveled to stare pointedly at the locked office door with malicious intent.
"If they don’t come out of there soon, I’m picking the lock and telling Lilly to get fucked." Nash cracked his knuckles ominously, his teeth bared as he glared a hole into the door to the office. "She’d better not be hurting Harper." He sniffed, as if another option had just presented itself to him. "Or rearranging furniture."
Angel worked fast, dicing vegetables for dinner as Nash growled like a fucking feral dog. But in between chops, I could see him out of the corner of my eye, his head lifting to glance in her direction.
We were all goners for her. And man, did it show.
Just as I was about to crawl out of my skin from restlessness, the door finally opened and out walked—or, in Harper’s case, hobbled—the two ladies who’d been causing the ruckus in my office space.
I eyed Harper’s limp with unconcealed curiosity, eyes narrowed suspiciously. "You look like someone beat your ass, Harper." My eyes drifted to Lilly, now on guard. "I thought you said you wouldn’t hurt her?"
"I didn’t," she grumbled, dusting her palms on her pants. "We might’ve gotten too excited over something and fell off the couch. That’s all."
Harper had always been a lousy liar, and it showed in the way she chewed at the corner of her mouth when she was trying to conceal something. Just like she was doing now.
"When are you gonna put us back on a job, Lilly?"
Nash blurted out what we were all wondering, and I had to appreciate his bluntness. I hadn’t worked around to broaching the subject again, but it burned in the back of my mind, like an itch you just couldn’t scratch. An annoying fly who came back no matter how many times you swatted him away.
Lilly’s eyes drifted lazily to me first, and I watched the beginnings of a smile curl her mouth. "I actually came here to see if you’d like to take a new one on tonight."
"Tonight?" Angel and Nash both stared in my direction, and we exchanged conversation with little more than a look.
Never in our career here had Lilly given such short notice, and certainly not without asking us if we wanted the job first.
Something was up.
"What kind of job?"
Harper wandered into the kitchen to pluck a slice of carrot from Angel’s pile, grinning at him when he growled a warning in her direction.
She really did turn us all into animals at our core.
"Well, if you want the details, you all can come down to my office to discuss it. Or just you. I’m not picky, Boss."
She shot Harper an air kiss and a wink as she slipped from our quarters, and just like that, all eyes were suddenly on the still-healing girl in our midst.
Who then suddenly adopted a very innocent stare that had exactly zero of us fooled.
"I don’t know why you’re all looking at me. I’m not in charge here." Those eyelashes of hers batted playfully, and she shot me a look that had me harder than a fucking steel beam. "Or am I, Ro?"
"I make the plans around here," I cut back, standing to grab my coat off the damn wall so I could follow Lilly to her office.
As I slipped from the room, the others chuckled under their breath, and a single sentence followed me out the door.
"Sure you do, bud."
Arguing with Lilly over the contract took almost an hour—a record for me. She’d been shortchanged for this job by the client, but he was a bad enough guy that she didn’t want to let him off the hook for nonpayment. So she was offering the job as an olive branch of sorts— you do this for me for free, and I’ll overlook the fact that you saved your last mark instead of killing her.
It was the only thing that made sense.
The target was an easy one—anyone in the Guild could have taken this job and completed it successfully. But she gave it to us instead.
It wasn’t the only thing that didn’t add up. And it was the first time in seven years that a job from Lilly didn’t make sense.
Angel was posted up on the roof of the adjacent building, binoculars in hand, watching for our target to leave the building. Nash was around the corner, knife in hand, ready to slit the guy’s throat in a quick, efficient move. It wasn’t his usual style, but this was what the job called for.
Precision knifework, quick moves, and a personal message sent with his dead body on his boss’s doorstep.
We’d be done with it by midnight and be home to Harper by one.
It was beginning to feel like things were settling down, evening themselves out.
And then it all went sideways.
I glanced at my phone as the vibrations started, worry creasing my brow.
There shouldn’t be any activity at the old man’s house this late.
Maybe a security guard tripped a planted signal.
After the near-death of Harper, ordered by my father, I’d been sneaking into his daily life with the help of an old friend. He’d hacked Father’s mainframes, planted a virus that fed data directly back to me at the Guild, and set up tracers on every transaction in his bank dating back to the day Nash was born.
He was hiding something. And if I could find out what it was, perhaps I could stop whatever plan he’d put in place from falling together in his favor.
I didn’t doubt that he’d try for Harper’s life again. When he didn’t win a hand of cards, he played until he came out on top. And when life threw him a curveball, he switched to a pinch hitter.
My plant was dead. I couldn’t trust that she’d be safe anywhere now without protection.
Nash radioed in my ear, his voice low and gravely. "You forget we’re on a job, bro? What’s so interesting on your phone?"
I tapped the receiver to activate the mic and sighed. "Activity at Father’s house. Not normal for this late at night."
Nash and Angel both knew I was trying to find out what our sperm donor was hiding. They each had their reasons for keeping him alive, and I couldn’t argue with them. But we all agreed on one thing—he was too dangerous to Harper to let live for long.
The only question was, could we keep Harper out of danger long enough to get what we needed from the man?
Nash crackled in my ear again, his voice a bit more on edge. "What kind of activity?"
I glanced back down at my phone, almost missing the signal flash Angel sent up with his mirror reflection. "Shit, it’s go time. We’ll have to look into it later."
Our target exited the building and hailed a taxi through his little rideshare app, right on schedule. Of course, I accepted the job on the other side of our faked app profile and slipped into the throwaway car we swiped this morning off a quiet residential street.
We’d slip the lady who owned the car we stole the money to replace it. She could report it stolen, her insurance would pay for it when it turned up totaled under the bridge, and she’d get a lump sum settlement from silent partners.
Happened all the time. People in that neighborhood knew how things worked. So did the detective on the Guild’s payroll.
It was a good system.
I pulled up to the side of the building with ease, smiling in my suit and tie with skeleton makeup on my face, such a contrast within myself that it almost made me laugh. The interior of the car was dark enough that he couldn’t see the makeup, though, and the man was perpetually in a hurry, so he didn’t bother to look at me in the rearview mirror as he piled in and rattled off an address.
"And make it snappy, please. I wanted to be there twenty minutes ago."
This was going to be an easy job. Guys like this were usually oblivious to the world around them.
Sure enough, even when I pulled around the corner in the opposite direction from where he instructed, he didn’t bat an eyelash. When the door opened on his side, he only just barely glanced up from his phone in confusion.
Only when Nash jerked him from the car by his hair did I think it finally started to set in that something was not normal about his taxi fare.
"It’s not even fun this way," Nash complained an hour later as we splayed his body out on the doorstep of a rich man’s fancy house, ripping his clothes up to display the bloody mess according to the orders we’d been given for the hit.
My phone vibrated again, once, and then was still for a whole five seconds before it started vibrating off the hook.
Against my better judgment, I checked it as Angel left the provided calling card and prepared to take control of the borrowed rideshare car.
I glanced at my screen, my mind elsewhere, and a jolt of panic ran down my spine the likes of which I hadn’t felt since Harper’s near-brush with death.
"Shit." Shit, shit, SHIT.
Angel stopped halfway in and halfway out of the getaway car, his eyes suddenly intent and pinned to me. He knew from my voice something wasn’t right.
"Ro?"
I watched the video playback my phone sent me, and everything looked just as it should. But something about the feed had sparked a notification, so there had to be something wrong.
"Something’s off with the cameras and movement detectors I set up at Father’s estate," I muttered, checking the time. Well past the old man’s bedtime. "I?—"
I spotted it out of the corner of my eye just as I was about to close the app. The video feed jerked sideways, the pixels freezing for a split second before they reset and started over again.
Fuck. It was a loop.
"Someone’s in the system at Father’s house. The video is set to loop an old feed," I shared, dread filling my heart. I only knew a few people stupid or ballsy enough to dare to enter his compound, and three of them were standing here on the bridge. That left two people, one of which was supposed to be at the Guild safe and sound, posted up in our quarters while we were busy.
The other was dead.
Fuck.
"You don’t think . . . ?" Nash started, but I was way ahead of him, rushing to the stolen car with a quickness.
"This thing isn’t going to get us there fast enough to find out. So pile in and pray that she’s not that dumb, because if we don’t get there in time?—"
I didn’t want to finish that sentence. I didn’t need to.
We all knew what would happen if Harper, injured and anxious and fresh off the near-death boat, decided to go after him for revenge.
Speaking it aloud felt like a jinx.
I put my foot on the pedal and rushed to where we stashed the Torino, hoping for light traffic as we raced across town.
Hold on, Harper. We’re coming.