CHAPTER SEVEN
Valen
The next few days sort of melded together. Thanks mostly to the grueling days of work Brooks was putting us through because Louana was showing us up.
I hadn’t exactly known Lulu at school per se, but it seemed like she and Vi were on the same sort of level. They pulled decent grades, but were never anyone’s teacher’s pet or valedictorian.
I think not knowing what she was going to do with her future made her not really apply herself as hard as everyone else who was going off to college for sure did.
The only thing I remembered her working her ass off on was going to the gym with her friends.
That said, she had always been busy. Always on the go. Never really the type to sit around and binge TV or anything like that. She liked doing shit.
I guess that was the work ethic she was applying to prospecting. She was always up first, always doing shit first, always showing us up.
Which, in turn, made Brooks harder on us, because she was doing so much.
I really rarely even got time to talk to her, thanks to the differing schedules.
When I did, though, I kept fucking up that whole apologizing to her thing that I’d been planning to do.
She was quick to anger, as she’d always been.
But what had changed—at least with regard to me—was that the anger that I’d always known to be hot and burning was now cold and frigid. I swear to shit, I felt frostbit when she walked away at times.
“Keep looking for her,” Voss said, snapping me out of my swirling thoughts.
“What?”
“Keep looking for her,” he repeated.
He wasn’t wrong, as much as I hated to admit that.
We’d finished our work a good hour before.
But Louana still hadn’t rolled back in from whatever babysitting job she was doing for Carey and Carey’s girl, Abigail, who was in some sort of trouble with some cartel or something.
She was over at Abigail’s new apartment with Seth and Finn, doing some sort of painting or some other decorating shit like that, but mostly just hanging out with Abigail while Cary and Dezi—her usual guards—were at the club, doing some shit with the other guys, the kind of shit we weren’t allowed to do because it was actual business. Like gun business. We weren’t in on that yet. It had to be earned. And Brooks was making us earn it for sure.
Though, luckily for us, he was off with Dezi and Cary as well, so no one was seeing us sitting around, not doing shit for five minutes.
“Talk to her yet?” Voss asked.
“Anytime we get two seconds alone to talk, she starts an argument,” I told him. Though, admittedly, the arguing was a two-way street.
“She does?”
“We both do,” I admitted.
“Did you always?” he asked.
“Always fight? No. I mean we both always had a temper, but not toward each other. Usually. And it was different back then. She was all fire. Now she’s all ice.”
“She grew up,” Voss said, shrugging. “We all do it.”
That was fair. And if her life was as violent as I was imagining it to be, then it made sense that she needed to tamp down her anger, to not be so explosive because it wasn’t as safe for her to be like that outside of the relative safety of Navesink Bank.
Coldness was likely more of an asset than the heat.