“Trying to look the opposite of me,” I whisper.
“Good job.”
“Ha,” I grumble as the sweet hostess seats us.
She flashes all of her beautifully white teeth at us in the best genuine smile I’ve seen. Maybe she’s just a friendly little perky thing.
“Your waiter will be with you momentarily. Enjoy your lunch,” she says, still not using names.
As she glides away, I turn my attention on Jake. His glasses have tinted sides that cover his eyes completely, allowing him to look wherever he wants without people noticing where his eyes are directed from the side.
“Clever,” I note in a mock, deep southern drawl, and he grins.
“Thought you’d appreciate it,” he says, adjusting his glasses for emphasis.
Our table is private enough to speak without anyone overhearing, but I look around for any cameras that might overhear.
“Two above us,” Jake says, not having to guess about why I’m looking around. “I can hear those birds like I can hear an alarm going off.”
So talk in code or type a text. Got it.
They must have audio if he’s hinting for me to be silent.
“You’re right. Two birds are up there. I’ll never understand how you do that,” I tell him, keeping with the southern accent I’ve accidentally committed to.
“I still love your accent,” he tells me, grinning.
Asshole.
I look over just as Tyler walks in, and my stomach hits my toes when I see Lawrence with him. They get seated two tables over, and Jake hands me something under the table. I feel it and know exactly what it is.
With subtlety, I pretend as though my earring is loose, and lift my hand to pretend to fix it under the long mane of blonde hair that hides my ears perfectly. Instead of touching the earring, I put in the small ear piece that Jake just gave me.
I pet Jake’s hand like an affectionate little hooker, and pretend to devote all my attention to him. “I assume you’ll tell me
all about your day after we eat?” he asks, sticking with code-speak.
“You know it, darlin’.”
He barely stops himself from laughing, but my smile falls away when I hear Tyler and Lawrence speaking quietly to each other.
The earpiece amplifies their words as long as it’s facing what I want to hear, so I keep my head angled toward Jake like I’m staring at him affectionately.
“It has to be Dev, man. There’s no one else who’d want to do something to us for that night,” Tyler is saying.
So they are meeting about me. I guess the cat’s out of the bag.
“There’s no way,” Lawrence scoffs dismissively.
“He had a breakdown two nights later and said we took it too far. He fucking cried, dude. Cried like a little bitch. Said we were sick for what we did to them. It’s him. That fucker has finally cracked and now he’s doing this. He thinks he’s innocent since he didn’t get his dick dirty that night, and now he’s picking us off one by one.”
From the corner of my eye, I notice Lawrence shaking his head. I run my hand up and down Jake’s arm, pretending to be lost in thought as I read the menu aloud to him, but really all my attention is caught up in the conversation across from us.
“No. It’s not him. I talked to his sister, and she said he’s been in Mexico for the past two months on a church mission thing.”
Dev is the only one I’m not sure what to do with, to be honest. He’s the only one who showed remorse, and they did essentially force him to be there that night. He wasn’t a victim, by any means. He could have spoken up and said something…anything.
Currently, he’s not on my kill list. But he is in the ten fingers column.