I pulled an earplug from my pocket to blunt the sensation from creeping into my head.
“Yeah. She’s okay,” I mumbled, tasting my breath.
“She sent me a joke yesterday,” Nathem said, gripping the wheel.
“I’m sorry,” I choked on the air, grinning under the mask.
Daphne was witty, clever, but intentionally funny? No. Her jokes were the worst, and everyone knew it.
“What did she say?” Wolfe asked, leaning forward to check the time. We always ran contracts eleven minutes past the hour. Superstitious, maybe. But no one questioned it.
“What happens when an Irishman walks into a bar?”
We all turned.
“Everyone walks out pregnant.”
“Fuck’s sake,” I groaned, rolling my eyes while Blade and Jessie snorted. “I told her to give up, but she doesn’t listen.”
“I don’t know,” Nathem answered under his breath. “I was proud of our princess for taking an interest in my heritage. Because facts.”
“Fuck,” Wolfe huffed, pinging a folded piece of paper off his shoulder. “You’re who she learned it from.”
That might actually be true.
There was something about those two giggling in the corner of the common room over nonsensical shit that warmed my chest. He was her person in a way Wolfe and I could never be, and I’d always appreciated that. She didn’t lean into others easily, especially women, but something about Nathem clicked. Out of all of us, he was the most human.
“It’s time,” Jessie said, and we fell silent, the car doors opening without so much as a whisper when we stepped into the black streets of forgotten Seattle.
The building was jagged, with boarded-up rusty nails, warped wood, and moss that came pretty standard for drug runs. The city knew the Underworld controlled most of the dilapidated architecture and looked the other way. Some were paid off by Karsten, others by Marianne, but all of them sat in Cross’s pocket, which, strangely enough, held most of the Reapers these days too. Suffice to say, we wouldn’t go to jail for what we were about to do. Only hell. Always hell.
Jessie gave a slow nod, and I brought my weapon up.
Blade and Jess would take the center room, while Wolfe had the kitchen and the basement beneath it. Nathem and I would handle the back of the house. We were the biggest, and in close quarters, you had to be able to absorb a hit and keep fighting. Plus, the noise always gave them time to either break through a window or put on their hero pants and fire off some assholeshots that never struck a goddamn thing. Either way, it was messy.
Wolfe nodded, his glassy eyes every bit as controlled as the man behind them, and we crept to the door.
“What the fuck?” was the last sound I heard before screaming and gunfire swallowed the room.
In situations like this, you’re aware of everything: the pattern on a sofa dragged in from some backshit alley, or the way your boots move across a broken floor. And yet you hold on to none of it. You don’t look. Don’t think. You simply aim, pull the trigger, and go the fuck home.
Nathem nodded at me and vanished down the hallway when we entered. Half the shouting had already faded, but for real? There was no way to know. You got good at not paying attention to it.
I stepped into the cramped space. While the drugs were in the front, the sex was in the back, and everyone knew this was Marianne’s favorite part. She liked to trade sex for drugs, funneling people with an addiction into houses like this to get high before they turned tricks was job security at its finest.
She received a cut off the sex and then got paid when they needed their medicine.
But fuck Marianne. Nathem and I always let them go. Wolfe knew, and he never said shit. Traitors were one thing, but sad girls with needles in their arms? No fucking way.
I moved forward, pushing past the scent of piss and rot, and didn’t pay attention to it. Not to the way the drab flowers peeled off the old wallpaper, or the crumpled yellow sheets lining the floor. I dimmed my eyes and kept moving, opening one door at a time.
Empty.
Then another.
Empty again.
Fuck. God must’ve been on my side tonight, because I did not have the headspace for this. With Daphne so far away, I might as well have been bathing in gasoline for how raw and unregulated I felt.