NINETEEN
Decima
When we got backto the apartment, I didn’t exactly sulk, but I wasn’t going to hang out with the guys like we were best buds and everything was cool either. Why the hell did the four of them have to be so determined to keep my ass around? Why’d they have to stumble on me right when I was about to beat some answers out of those losers who’d come after me in the mall?
And what was up with Garrison? I shouldn’t have cared, but I knew genuine pain when I saw it. Somewhere deep behind his snarky front, he was hiding a hell of a lot of it.
It resonated inside me more than I liked. Even the anger he’d displayed when defending his weakness had been familiar. He didn’t want me to see that side of him—the part of him that grieved for something he kept even more hidden.
Yeah, I knew a lot about hiding.
But I couldn’t spend all my time here hiding away. If the cops were going to insist on having me around, then I’d just have to continue working that to my advantage in any way I could. I had to get somewhere with them eventually.
I’d been on the verge of taking my chances and making a break for it when I’d seen the men from the mall hustling out from the entrance. If I’d made a commotion then, they’d have noticed me right away and I’d have lost any chance of surprising them; if I’d waited until they were out of sight, I’d have lost them completely. And as soon as the cops had screwed up my shot at getting answers there, I’d been left with no further leads.
I had nowhere to go and limited cash. Coming back here with them had been the best of my bad options.
Weirdly, when I’d stepped through the front door with them, I’d been hit by a waft of relief. Like it was good to be “home.” This place wasn’t my home, and I’d sure as hell better not start thinking of it that way. Maybe Stockholm Syndrome was starting to take hold.
Shut away from the rest of them and the comfort of the rest of the apartment, I dug the flip phone out of my bra. It was a good thing I’d tucked it in there, because Julius had done a quick pat down of my pockets and waistline in the elevator.
The screen still offered me nothing. I made sure it was set to vibrate, no chance of a ringtone giving it away, and wiggled it behind a small equipment trunk in the corner which didn’t look as if it’d been moved in years. There was less chance of the men finding it there than in my tote bag, which they’d already searched twice. I couldn’t keep it on me without risking one of them noticing the odd shape beneath my breasts if I raised my arms at the wrong angle.
With that taken care of, a little more of the tension in my chest eased. I took off my brace to test the soreness in my wrist and run through some mild stretching exercises designed to speed along recovery. In a few more days, I might be able to take on all four of the men out there, police and military training or not. Smiling to myself and feeling ready to face them again, I tugged the brace back on and stepped out into the main room.
The only ones around were Julius and Talon. Julius was sitting at the small wooden table, currently cleared of army figures, his brow furrowed. A few sketchy lines that I couldn’t decipher marked the whiteboard next to him. He had a notebook propped against the edge of the table, and even from across the room, I could see it held a neatly written list. I couldn’t read it from so far away, and I knew better now than to try to get him to show it to me willingly. I might be able to take a peek later.
Talon was poised at one end of the leather sofa… with a pair of knitting needles bobbing and weaving between his muscular hands.
I blinked, making sure I wasn’t seeing things. But no, the brutal, skin-headed undercover cop with combat skills that rivaled my own was definitely sitting there, knitting away. From the looks of things, he’d been at his current project for a while. About three feet of mottled red-and-orange scarf dangled beneath the needles and fell across his knees.
He caught my startled gaze and raised his eyebrows at me as if daring me to say something. “Is there a problem?” he asked in his usual cool tone.
I laughed and walked over to the other side of the sofa. “I thought that maybe it was Steffie who left the knitting bag here. If not her, possibly Blaze. Garrison would have been my third guess. You’d have been last.”
I expected Talon to brush off the comment or outright ignore it, but the vibe between us had shifted since we’d sparred the other day. I’d earned a little respect somewhere in there… or else he’d decided I was more harmless than he’d thought, so he didn’t have to be quite as defensive. I wasn’t sure which worked in my favor better, but I’d definitely prefer the former.
“Any particular reason you’d assume that?” he asked, looping the yarn around the right needle before tipping it and sliding a stitch from the left needle. He continued the repetitive motions so smoothly and quickly I could tell this was far from his first project.
I sat down on the arm of the sofa, feeling safer there than on the cushion a foot or more closer to him. “Somehow I don’t think it’s going to shock you if I point out that you don’t look like a knitter.”
He chuckled under his breath as he finished a row. Stopping, he plucked a spare needle out of the bag and held it out to me. I eyed it warily before gripping the hard, thin rod.
“Tell me what you feel,” he said.
Would we break out the tambourines after and sing “Kumbaya”? I gave him a skeptical look. “It’s a knitting needle.”
The corner of his mouth twitched slightly upward. I thought that was a smile. What exactly he was amused by was harder to tell.
He nodded toward me. “Describe the knitting needle.”
I rolled my eyes. “Metal, smooth, pointy.” I waggled it in the air.
“And what other things are metal, smooth, and pointy?”
Oh, all right, I saw where he was going with this. “Knives,” I said, leaning back on the sofa and spinning the needle between my fingers. “Razors. Swords. But you’re not stabbing anyone with these. You’re literally knitting a scarf. Or a very skinny sweater.”
“True,” he said, taking up his stitches again. “But I could stab someone with them if I wanted to. If there’s me and a knitting needle standing between you and someone who wants to kill you, you’d be a lot more likely to live than if I were holding a paintbrush or a lump of clay. So I’d say it’s a very macho craft.”