EIGHTEEN
Garrison
“She hasn’t left the mall,”Blaze said from the front passenger seat, eyeing the computer that was never far from his fingertips. “There are street cams that cover any way she’d leave, and my app hasn’t pinged.”
He’d developed the software a few years ago—a facial recognition program he claimed was more advanced than the ones even the FBI used to catch criminals. Combined with the city-operated security cameras, Blaze could find anyone from anywhere.
I leaned back in my seat, tipping my head against the headrest. “And does anyone find it interesting that the first place she went after ditching us is a hotbed of criminal activity?”
Blaze grunted in reluctant acknowledgment. “At least three of the stores in that place are money-laundering fronts.”
“And the neighborhood’s got more robberies per capita than anywhere else in the city,” Julius said from his spot behind the steering wheel. “We know. We still don’t know what she’s doing in there.”
Talon stirred on the other side of the back seat from me. “It’s a good thing we gave her some rope so we can find out.”
I had to admit Julius wasn’t being as soft on the woman as I’d been worried about. He’d come up with this idea to get a better sense of her motives and connections. Allowing her to escape had been the most practical way to discover exactly where she aimed to go and what she wanted to do when we were no longer on her tail.
But we’d never really been far away. She’d taken the bait the first second she could, and we’d been tracking her using Blaze’s software ever since.
“There.” Blaze tapped his laptop’s screen. “She just came out the main entrance.”
Julius put the car into drive and cruised around the corner toward the shabby mall. “We’ll let her get a little more distance so she doesn’t know we were following her the whole time, and then we’ll pick her up and see what she has to say for herself.”
I couldn’t stop my gaze from lingering on the lithe figure on Blaze’s screen. The way Dess carried herself was unlike anything I’d seen from her yet. As she strode along the sidewalk and across the street, she looked as if she’d just conquered the world. When she joined a small cluster of pedestrians, I narrowed my eyes, impressed by how well her entire demeanor changed. She became her surroundings, mimicking the mannerisms of the bodies around her.
It’d taken me years to cultivate the subtle art of merging with a crowd like that. You didn’t develop it out of the blue. You had to learn it—either because you wanted to, or because it was the only way you could survive.
And we’d let this puzzle of a woman whose fighting skills could rival Talon’s and who wore a façade as impenetrable as mine into our home.
“We’re not going to bring her back to the penthouse, are we?” I asked.
“It depends on what she says,” Julius said smoothly.
Why wasn’t he more concerned about what’d just gone down? “You really think she’ll tell us anything remotely true?”
“I think we’ll learn something—and a lot of that is your job, isn’t it? If she’s part of something larger to do with the job that we weren’t aware of, we need to know that. If this is about something totally unrelated, we need to know that so we can finally drop her and get on with our lives.”
I snorted. As if there was much chance of that. Julius ignored me.
“She stopped,” Blaze announced. “Not too far from the mall. She’s just standing there by a tree… Is she waiting for someone?”
Julius parked, still a few blocks away, and frowned at the computer. “You can’t tell?”
Blaze shook his head.
My skin crawled with apprehension. I hadn’t liked how much uncertainty Dess had brought into our lives and our work from the first moment we’d spotted her outside the mansion.
I leaned forward and gripped Julius’s shoulder from behind. “We should cut her loose now. Pretend we never saw her. It’d be easier—”
Julius’s head snapped around, giving me a clear view of his right ear with its ravaged earlobe—a gift from a bullet or a piece of shrapnel sometime during his military career. He’d never given the details.
“No,” he said, low and firm with a hint of menace that dared me to challenge him.
I pulled back, my mouth twisting. Julius was the boss for a reason, and questioning him was something that few people dared to do. And when he said no… well, that was final.
I nodded, though all of my distrust for Dess whirled through my mind in a frenzy. This was my crew. My brothers in arms, even if we weren’t exactly fighting in any war. I’d kill or die for any of them, and no woman would change that. Dess shouldn’t have me second-guessing myself and the leadership roles long-established within the Chaos Crew. She wasn’t worth it.
We waited a few minutes, and Dess didn’t budge. Blaze glanced at Julius. Our leader sighed and then stepped on the gas again. “Let’s go get her.”