The Fall(14)

And why make my job harder than it had to be? Because I could tell if this shit had gone down any other way, she wouldn’t have come so easily. She might wear a badge, but it was still Jimmy’s DNA running through her veins.

“Bedrooms are upstairs. The bathroom is too.”

I didn’t bother with a tour. She had eyes and a decent sense of direction, and part of me was a SOB who liked keeping her on edge.

“Am I going to die?” Her feet stayed rooted in their place as I went to walk away. The complete lack of panic in her voice made me freeze in place.

Usually when I heard those words it was emotional. The person on the other end begging for their life, but as I looked into those large hazel eyes I didn’t see the anxiety I was expecting. She wasn’t falling apart, or if she was, she was smart enough to keep it locked down.

“We’re all going to die,” I answered more honestly than I usually would. “And you will be no different.”

Her eyes flickered, blinking as she looked at me. “Are you trying to scare me?”

The space between us wasn’t more than a couple of inches, and if my proximity to her was making her uncomfortable, she wasn’t showing it. But she wasn’t as solid as she was pretending to be. While she had talked a good game up until now, I could see the crack in the mask. It was small but undeniably there, its reveal giving me more pleasure than it probably should.

“You’re already scared.” My lips curled into a grin as I watched her eyes widen.

“Fuck you,” she spat out, irritated her face had betrayed her, her legs moving quickly toward the staircase as the bag slung over her shoulder bounced off the wall beside her.

I watched her go, taking the stairs two at a time until she disappeared around the corner and I heard a door slam. And I didn’t need to be a fortuneteller to know she was probably going to cry. At least she’d been smart enough to do it in private, save us both the indignation.

A breath slowly pushed out from between my lips, my head rolling from side to side as my neck relaxed. There would be no sleeping tonight. At least not until I had my own intel on what I was dealing with. I didn’t trust Jimmy’s sources, and if someone was coming for her I wanted to be prepared. Hearsay didn’t mean shit unless you had some fact to back it up, and those f*cktards who ran the city gossiped more than a bunch of old women.

A quick trip to the garage retrieved the overnight bag she’d left on my backseat. Obviously, clean panties weren’t as pressing as the need for the firepower she’d packed in the other. Either way, the last thing I needed was for her to go out exploring in a few hours if she got the urge to change her bra.

Before heading back inside, I pulled open the zip and did a quick search of the overnighter, my hand hitting the hard surface of what felt to be a cell phone just before I hit the bottom.

Great.

Let’s make it easier for the bastards to find us.

I shook my head as I pulled out the SIM card and snapped it between my fingers. The battery was also removed as I turned her cell into a glorified paperweight. I’d been sloppy in not searching the bag, the phone enough of a breadcrumb for whoever was out there to track her down.

Cursing under my breath, I went back inside. And with the bag in my hand, I climbed the stairs and dumped it in front of the only bedroom door that was closed.

Mine.

Not sure if it was defiance or purely to piss me off but, out of the three available beds, she’d picked that one. And as much as knowing she was in my personal space was giving me the scratch, I wasn’t giving her the satisfaction of a reaction. Besides, I’d already decided I wasn’t sleeping.

Ignoring the closed door—and the person behind it—I went back downstairs to my living room. The area I’d set up as my command center.

While my Brownstone looked like it was ready for demolition from the outside, I had gutted it and refurbished the entire place when I moved three years ago. Contracted out all the technical BS, but other than that had done a lot of the work myself. The less people who knew my address, the better.

Inside it was modest but modern, and although I had no need for lots of furniture, the computer system I had set up in my living room was a Steve Job’s wet dream. Amazing how quickly you can gather life skills when you need them, and computer programming in these times definitely classed as a life skill.

Sadly I wasn’t advanced enough to hack into main frames or snoop around in government websites, but I could bounce my IP around the globe a few hundred times so my activity was untraceable. I had also found a group of bored frat boys who could do all of the above and liked to balance their 4.2 GPA with a side of illegal online activity. No names, no questions—just a few payments to an offshore account and those kids could get me anything I needed. Who says customer service is dead?

There was no noise from upstairs as I made myself comfortable in my leather office chair, the two monitors in front of me lighting up as I hit the mouse. I needed to dig a little deeper.

Jimmy and his crew boasted they were anti-technology, with most of those bastards switching phones like they changed their underwear. But I doubted the tech-ban extended to email. And if there was any electronic chatter out there regarding my new houseguest, I wanted to know what was being said and by who.

A few keystrokes connected my ICQ window. The no-longer-popular chat system was the most reliable method of communication for people who liked to keep their identities under wraps, and I was all about keeping my name off the grid.