12
Spence
Mitchell Rosa is a twenty-eight-year-old local EMT. He’s the fourth son of Filipe and Chloe Rosa, the fourth of six Rosa children in total. Nixon Rosa is his twenty-seven-year-old brother, the youngest of all the boys, and works for the fire department. He’s on shift right now while I sit at my laptop and clumsily try to dig into his family.
I just want to make sure it’s all as Abigail says, because that’s two brothers I’ve met now, and though I admit to stepping up too, most brothers aren’t quitethattriggered or in a guy’s face just because he wants to talk to their sister.
I don’t get what’s going on with that family, and the not knowing bothers me.
After finding what I already knew on the younger brothers, I’ve started looking into the others, but I don’t have the skills Sophia does, and she refuses to help me.
She flat out refuses to so much as type their names for me.
I can find general identification records for four of the five brothers. They all have this Portuguese look, with the olive skin and dark hair. Not one of them looks like Abigail, and they don’t entirely look like each other besides the coloring and eyes, but Abigail looks like her mother, so I’ve checked that off in my head and decided she wasn’t adopted. Abigail is a Rosa; she just got her mother’s genes.
But that’s all the information I can find, and no matter how many times I want to smash my fist on my laptop, I’m not skilled enough to go deeper.
Something niggles in the back of my brain. That same something that started niggling the very moment I saw Nixon Rosa. It refuses to stop, and that annoys the shit out of me.
What is it about them that raises my hackles? Why do I feel this deep hunger to know something about a girl I’m actively not getting attached to?
Oh, I know!Because I already feel a sense of responsibility, despite the big fat ‘Fuck No!’ I continue to shout in my brain.
We don’t develop connections. We don’t create a weakness that could end with a dead wife and kid, the way Eric’s life turned out. People want to hurt us. Always. The folks I’ve run up against over the years have long memories, and they have us in their targets. My friends might have forgotten about our enemies, but I haven’t, so I’ve lived fifteen years of meaningless hookups just so I never end up with a dead loved one.
I’m not ready to change that, but here I am, sitting at the spare desk in Kane’s Checkmate office while I bang at this useless laptop, and Sophia sits ten feet away with a piece of gum in her mouth.
She watches me, stretches her gum out on her finger, then slurps it back up and mocks me. “Let it go, Spence.” She taps her boots on the side of her desk. “Fuck her, don’t fuck her. Do whatever you wanna do with her body, but stay away from her private data without her permission.”
“Shut up, ballerina. You’re the queen of data breach. Don’t come at me with your shit about privacy now.”
She shrugs and flashes a grin when Jay walks through the office. He takes her smile as invitation, drops to one knee and pleads with his eyes, but she only shakes her head and sends him away again.
“I hack data that needs to be hacked in order to do something important. Ya know, have people killed, save people, steal money. That sorta shit. But I don’t hack civilian lives just because you asked me to.”
“They’re not just civilians, Soph! They’re… I don’t know what they are. But they make my hair stand up, and I don’t like that one bit. It would take you two fucking minutes to help me, and then you’d be free again.”
“Nope. Not okay. I’m not hacking into her shit just because you said so.”
Soph’s phone rings in her pocket. Fuck knows how she gets things into her pockets, since the denim is nothing more than a second skin, but I guess phones are thin now too to keep up.
She pulls it out with a frown, then accepts the call. “Romeo? Yeah.”
I watch her while she listens for a long minute. If I looked close enough, I could almost see how her brain clicks over and processes everything the person on the other end is saying.
“Yeah, we had a meet with them last week. I dunno if I trust his word, but– right. That’s what Jay said.” She listens some more. “Okay, keep watching. I might need you to move soon. We take him out if we need to, but don’t jump the gun. We’re close, so…” She stops to listen, but her gum-smacking has stopped. “Yep. Find him. He’s watching us, but I’d rather not die today… Okay. Check in again when you move.”
Soph hangs up and goes back to tapping her feet on the desk like the phone call was nothing. When I say nothing, but continue to stare, she freezes and lifts a brow. “What?”
“You just ordered a hit on a man. Wanna talk about it?”
She snorts and drops her feet to the floor so she can sit up tall. “I didn’t order a hit. In fact, I told him to hold. I’m not ready for termination yet, so he’s been ordered to watch and wait.”
“Who ishe? And does Jay know you’re ordering hits without him?”
She laughs again, but we all know Jay was her assassin not so long ago. We also know he can be petty and juvenile, so to know he’s been replaced would hurt him.
“Jay knows about my guy.”