Chapter Thirty-Two
Lindon
If you had told me there would ever be a day I was happy to be carrying a load of laundry to the washer, I’d have told you, you were delusional. Because how could I be? Laundry was the task that never ended. There was nothing good about it.
But today, when I looked down at the basket, I saw shirts that were mine, True’s, and Shiloh’s, along with a pair of Hazel’s jeans, and the whole thing scented like our pack. At this moment, I couldn’t think of something I liked more.
I was in our home that I shared with our pack, doing our laundry.
It was ridiculously domestic and fabulous.
And maybe I needed to get a hobby because, at the end of the day, it was still laundry, and laundry still sucked.
It was a fact. But also…maybe not so much, not when it reminded you of how amazing your life had become.
I grabbed the towels still warm from the dryer, put the clothes that were in the washer into the dryer, and then put the next load into the washer.
Four people made a lot of laundry. Once again, I was taken aback by how happy I was about having it.
At least the ones I had to fold next were towels.
Towels were easy, no weird sleeves or collars to try and figure out.
I brought them upstairs to fold and put them away.
Hazel’s nest was empty. It wasn’t a surprise, but it did catch me off guard for a second. She’d left for her shop over an hour ago, kissing each of us goodbye and making sure we knew that there were enough leftovers in the refrigerator for lunch.
We’d been doing that now with family meals, making enough so it could do double duty.
It was nice not eating instant noodles, sandwiches, or takeaway every day.
Bonus was that a lot of the foods tasted better the second day, especially anything that was a pasta bake or in the slow cooker.
She told us it was embarrassing how three people as successful as we were couldn’t be trusted to feed ourselves decently. She wasn’t wrong about that.
The house was quiet but not empty. True was upstairs working on his computer, and Shiloh was outside chopping wood, the odd echo coming in through the house.
We were still settling in here. But despite that, it felt like we’d lived here forever.
The random boxes that still needed to be unpacked were probably going to still be there in another month and maybe migrate to storage.
If we hadn’t needed them yet, odds were, we didn’t need them at all.
The to-do list got added to every day. As we crossed something off, it still didn’t shrink because two new items were tacked on.
Hazel wanted a bigger greenhouse to grow flowers.
I’d been doing some research on how best to do that.
We could buy a prefab one, but they either had dimensions too small for what Hazel wanted to accomplish or were designed for large commercial farms. We needed something in the middle. It was better if we made our own.
I put the towels away and brought the basket back downstairs. Soon enough, it would be filled with the laundry from the dryer—an endless freaking cycle.
This was so flipping normal. I loved it.
My life had never been like this, where I just wanted it to stay exactly the way it was.
I was always looking for expanding our business or new revenue streams, or where should go next.
This was a thousand times better but not perfect. Decisions still needed to be made.
I poured a cup of coffee.
“Hey.” True came downstairs, his laptop in hand. “Is there any of that left?”
“Yeah. I’ll get you a cup.”
I poured a mug and handed it to him.
“Have you checked the business account?” I asked. My brain knew it was fine. My nerves, not so much.
“Not today.”
He just stared at me for a few seconds before answering. “We’re fine. We’re not going to suddenly be overdrawn because we bought too many groceries. Do you want me to pull it up for you?”
“Is it coffee break time?” Shiloh asked, his shirt covered in sweat. When did he come in?
“I guess so.” I grabbed him a mug.
“What are you guys talking about?”
“Lindon’s worried we’re running out of money.” True rolled his eyes.
“Are we?”
“No,” I assured him. “But it’s not gonna last forever. We need to figure out what we’re doing next.”
“You mean as far as bounty hunting goes?”
I nodded.
They looked at each other then at me. We’d talked about getting out of this business before.
The reason we had our own company and didn’t work for other people was because there were sides of the business we didn’t want to be part of.
We’d never been ones to randomly take jobs or hand people over without questioning.
We’d helped more than one get away. Hazel wasn’t our first, just our most important.
“I don’t want to leave Belladonna Woods for long periods of time chasing people for money.” Shiloh said what I was thinking.
“Not only that,” True added, “I don’t want to say yes to a contract and then find out too late it was one we shouldn’t have touched it. But also, I don’t want to not take a contract and have somebody worse than us take it.”
I understood that so deeply. If we had turned down Hazel’s contract, I couldn’t bear to think about what that would have meant for her.
“Agreed. But we can’t keep doing what we’re doing.”
And that was an easy thing to say, but then what? This was what we knew, what we were good at. Shit. I was born into it. It was Shiloh’s only real adult job. And True had spent all that time building systems around what we did and making it easier and better.
Leaving wasn’t as easy as all that.
Hazel had her shop. But it wasn’t enough to keep us going financially forever. And we couldn’t just be domestic gods for her. If she wanted us to, we would, but she’d never so much as hinted that she did.
But even contemplating that life, I kept getting flashes of those two omegas and how thin and frail they were, those freaking shock collars on them, how terrified they must’ve been. They were free, but they were two of how many?
“What about those contracts?” I asked True.
“The ones you brought back?”
I nodded. He’d managed to find people to help us with the information because it was too much for us to handle alone. There were too many, and the contracts were written in partial code. The ones that weren’t redacted were the ones we would be able to use. The others, I wasn’t sure.
“We know how this shit works. We understand the dark system people are working in,” I said.
“Wait.” Shiloh leaned forward. “Are you saying we keep bounty hunting?”
“No. I absolutely don’t mean that. I mean, maybe we’re looking at our skills wrong.”
“Explain.” True was leaning forward now too.
“We know how to find people. We know how the different agencies work. We know how to track people. We understand contracts. We are able to get into places other people can’t.
We find information other people don’t know exists.
We can anticipate hunters’ next moves. We’re not afraid to use force when needed. ”
“Basically we’re awesome,” Shiloh teased and all three of us chuckled.
By the end of the conversation, we didn’t have a plan. But we were on the same page, and had direction. That was a start.
“Before we go any further, we need to talk to Hazel,” True said.
“Let’s table this till after lunch. There are some leftovers. And it’s a lot to wrap my head around,” Shiloh said.
We ate the food Hazel had made for us, despite our offer to help. She said she wanted to do it herself, but I suspected it was more because the recipe required a counter full of ingredients and she, rightfully, didn’t trust us.
I, for one, was feeling like we finally had a sense of direction. Could I describe that direction? No. But we all wanted the same thing—to work within the system to make lives better for those who were fucked by it. And that was a start.