24. Cyrus
Cyrus
My fucking bowtie is crooked again.
I fix it in the rearview while Jinx watches me from the passenger seat with that wry look he gets when he's about to say something he thinks is funny.
He's wearing all black, a knit cap pulled low over his blond hair, and the leather gloves I made him put on at the gate are already creased at the knuckles from how much he fidgets. And picks at them.
He never stops moving.
"You got tea and crumpets to go with your costume?" Jinx asks me, smirking.
"Jinx. Not now."
He grins, but he shuts up as I pull the car around to the service entrance. The keypad takes the code I lifted from the housekeeper's app weeks ago. The little green light blinks twice, the gate slides, and we're through.
The staff entrance is completely dark, as expected. Todd keeps a skeleton crew on event nights because he doesn't like witnesses to whatever he comes home to do, and the head maid is supposed to be off until midnight.
Jinx falls in behind me, light on his feet as I lead him through the back corridor toward the security closet.
I take the cameras first. Seventy-second loop, clean handoff, my own laptop piggybacking on the in-house system through the port behind the DVR.
The technician who installed this rig deserves to be fucking fired.
There's a hardline I can sit on without anyone in the monitoring service noticing the difference.
"Clear," I say.
"Clear," Jinx echoes, for no reason other than because he likes to play spy.
Todd's office is on the second floor, east wing. I pull my picks out of the breast pocket of my jacket, because even the head of staff doesn't have the key to this door, and I have it open in under thirty seconds.
The office is as over-the-top as I expected.
Heavy patterned curtains. A giant fucking desk I'm shocked they even got through the door.
A wall of bound legal volumes. The whole room is staged for photographs.
A dressed set, really. I refuse to believe for a second this man actually reads anything but his own headlines.
"Don't drink anything. Don't pour anything, and for fuck's sake, don't touch anything that isn't already disturbed," I warn him, stepping inside.
"Yes, Daddy."
"I will leave you here," I warn him.
"Liar."
I take the desktop first. It's a custom build, surprisingly decent, and somebody half-competent set up the encryption, but Todd has a sticky note under the keyboard tray with a six-character password.
Dumbass.
I'm in within the minute.
I clone the drive to the brick in my pocket and start a directory walk while it copies, eyes flicking through the file tree for anything that might matter.
"Jesus," Jinx breathes from somewhere to my left. "He has a globe. An actual globe, on some kind of wine cart."
"Don't touch the globe," I mutter, glancing over tax returns and donor lists. A folder of speeches. Photos from events I recognize and a few I don't.
"I'm gonna touch the globe."
He's already fucking with it. I hear ice tinkling in crystal and I close my eyes for a second before going back to my shit and trying to tune him out.
There's nothing here that says kill me, please.
Nothing that connects him to Southside on a surface scan, either. He's careful enough at this level. Which means the good shit is hiding somewhere else.
Jinx is going through the bookshelf, tipping out volumes one at a time and checking the back of each one before he slides it home. He's faster at that than people give him credit for, and quieter. The performative version of him is always the loudest version. The working version is catlike.
"Hurry," I mutter.
"I'm hurrying."
"Yeah, well. Hurry faster."
The drive's at sixty percent. I push back from the desk and pull a thin keyring from Todd's top tray, a clutch of them on a brass loop, and I recognize the general shape of an office building lock and a gym key and… the small, square-headed brass that opens his Senate office door.
I pull the kit out of my back pocket. Wax blanks, the little file, the press. It takes me ninety seconds per impression, and I take every key here just in case. The original keys go back onto the brass loop, in the same orientation they were in when I lifted them.
"Cy."
Jinx's voice has changed.
I look up. He's got the bottom drawer of the desk open, the little brass lock picked and lying on the carpet, and he's holding a stack of envelopes in his gloved hand. His face is paler.
"Cyyyyy."
"What?" I ask impatiently.
"Look."
I glance back at the screen. The drive is at eighty percent. I push back from the keyboard and bend down to look at whatever Jinx has in his hands.
He's holding maybe a dozen envelopes, banded with a rubber band that's gone brittle. The return address written on them is one I haven't thought about in years because there was nothing to think about.
"They're sealed," Jinx croaks. "Cy, they're sealed. Ellie never got the letters we sent because this son of a bitch took them." He snaps off the rubber band and shuffles through the envelopes. I recognize several I addressed myself, and ones from the other guys. "He took them from the mail and he…"
Jinx's hands are shaking. He's gone through three more already, and his eyes have a wet shine that hasn't broken yet. "No wonder she said what she said in that fucking letter. She thought we just forgot about her. That we didn't even try."
"I know." I just don't know what to do with that information.
The drive on the desk beeps. It's done copying.
A door closes somewhere downstairs at the same instant.
"Pack it up," I say. "Now. The letters too, take them all."
"But he'll notice."
"Take them. He hasn't looked at this drawer since he locked it. He won't notice for weeks, maybe more. Now move."
Jinx scoops the stack into his jacket. I yank the brick out of the tower, drop the keyboard tray, slide Todd's chair back to the angle it was at, and put everything back the way I found it. The lockpick goes back in my pocket and Jinx has actually made himself useful wiping down the desk.
We're at the door when I hear footsteps at the foot of the main staircase.
I kill the office light, ease the door shut, lock it behind us, and we slip down the back hall in the opposite direction.
The footsteps climb, slowly.
Whoever it is isn't in a hurry, so we still have a window.
There's a linen closet, two doors down on the right. I shoulder Jinx into it ahead of me and pull the door behind us until it clicks.
Jinx is breathing too loud, his eyes are still wet, and the stack of letters presses a square shape into the front of his jacket that I feel against my chest because there is no fucking room for two people in here who aren't standing flush.
The footsteps reach the landing.
I make a decision in a tenth of a second.
I take Jinx's face in both hands and kiss him hard.
He makes a small startled noise against my mouth and I feel his whole body go what the fuck before his brain catches up to mine, and then his hand comes up to the back of my neck and he kisses me back like he's waited all night for it.
The closet door opens on us.
"What in the hell is going on in here?"
I pretend to fumble with my pants button and Jinx has the decency to look caught rather than amused.
The head maid stands in the doorway with her hand on the knob and her mouth in a thin line, hair pinned so tight it pulls at her whole face.
"Mr—" She squints at me. "You're the temp they sent over from the agency."
"Yes, ma'am. So sorry," I stammer, fixing my glasses and my hair. "I'm—I'm filling in again tonight, the agency called this afternoon. They said they were short because of the event and needed someone to cover the house."
She narrows her eyes. "Yes, it seems you're covering it quite enthusiastically, doesn't it?"
Jinx, behind my shoulder, has fixed his face into a perfect picture of mortified boyfriend.
"This is my…" I gesture vaguely. "I just wanted to show him the house. He's never seen anything like it. I shouldn't have. I know I shouldn't have, it was wildly inappropriate and I—"
"Get out."
"Yes, ma'am."
"The agency will hear about this by morning. Do not come back to this property." She looks past me at Jinx now, taking him in. "Out. Both of you. Through the service door, and don't touch a thing."
"Yes, ma'am."
I grab Jinx's wrist and I march us down the back stairs at an appropriately brisk clip, past the pantry, out the service door, and across the gravel to the car. My hand stays clamped around his wrist until I shove him into the passenger seat.
I'm in the driver's side and the engine is on before either of us speaks.
Jinx starts cackling about a quarter mile down the road.
"Boyfriend."
"Don't."
"You called me your boyfriend, Cyrus," he says in a singsong.
"By far the least absurd part of this entire outing," I mutter, gripping the wheel tighter.
He's suspiciously silent for long enough that I look over. When I do, the amusement is gone and he's staring out the window, his hair being blown wildly by the wind.
I assume he's thinking about the same thing I am.
The letters. She never even saw them. She thought we forgot her.
I take a left at the light and merge onto the highway, working to plan the next steps with the part of my brain that hasn't gone offline after the shock of a fucking lifetime.
The other part is fifteen years old, sitting on the floor of the RV, watching her draw birds in the margins of notebook paper.