by Wasp, A. E.
The party in the front room was winding down, and the special, private party in the back rooms where ramping up when the moment I had been dreading arrived.
“Steele,” Wesley whispered just as Harlan checked a text on his phone. “Danny and Breck are headed your way.”
Shit. I wasn’t ready. My ears rang with the rush of blood as my body started pumping adrenaline as quickly as it could.
“Steele?”
I made an affirmative noise to let Wes know I’d heard him without alerting the senator.
“Mr. Gonzales,” Harlan said, “Our special guests will be arriving any moment.”
I almost didn’t respond to my cover name, I was so focused on the door.
The door opened, and Danny and Breck walked in like they owned the place, smiling and flirting with everyone they could. They were a fucking matched pair, and easily the two hottest men in the room. They both wore grey suits, Breck’s a shade lighter than Danny’s, along with light-blue silk dress shirts that were open at the collar and sported button-cams just like mine.
I wanted to pounce on Breck, and not just because he was sex on two legs. I wanted to shield him from what was about to happen with my own body.
But I knew he wouldn’t appreciate that shit in the slightest. It had taken balls for him and Danny to show up here in the first place, knowing what awaited them, and even more for them to defy the senator by insisting on showing up at the front door like invited guests, rather than sneaking in the back like Cisco’s other guys and girls had. Just went to show how fucking invincible the senator thought he was that he’d agreed to their demand.
Be careful, Breck, I whispered. Breck made no indication that he had heard me as he worked the party like the pro he was. Heads turned as he and Danny walked through the room. How could they not? Both of them were good looking in different ways, together they were impossible to look away from. I don’t know why I’d expected them to be scared and intimidated by the assembled crowd. I’d forgotten that they’d done this before, that they’d been in this very house before.
Two hookers, I reminded myself. Two street kids who’d had sex for money. There was no one to report them missing, no one to care. If Charlie hadn’t put us on the case, Breck could have been dead for weeks before even Ridge knew about it.
I wished I had worn my sunglasses to hide the fear I was sure was visible in my eyes.
Harlan greeted them by wrapping an arm around each of their shoulders, and with a jerk of his head, he motioned for me to follow them as they headed not to the back room but to the door I knew led to the downstairs wine cellar.
Bingo. But knowing I’d been right about what the senator had in mind didn’t make me any less nervous for Breck.
I straightened my tie and followed the senator down the hall, keeping my expression blank.
“Go time,” Wesley said.
“Eyes on the door downstairs,” Leo confirmed. “We’ve got your six if needed, boys.”
“Ridge?” Wesley asked. “How’s it going? Final countdown here, man. Don’t make me start singing it.”
“I got to Harlan’s computer and uploaded your virus thingy.”
“Virus thingy. That’s the technical term for it,” Wes agreed. “The hard copies?”
“Negative. I can’t find the damn safe. I’ve checked everywhere. He’s gonna wanna keep it close, he’s gonna take it with him when he travels, so it should be here somewhere.” Ridge sounded beyond frustrated. “But it’s not in his bedroom, not in his office… I need fucking schematics, man. I cannot just do this shit on the fly!”
“Stop complaining and find the damn thing, Pfeiffer. I’m having a hard time not arresting, punching or just shooting some of these people. And I think Mr. Waters is feeling the pull of temptation. His ‘special friend’ from the other party is here tonight.”
“Don’t hate, Shook,” Carson said airily, “just because you can’t get laid in a party full of paid companionship.”
Jesus Christ. “Focus,” I snapped loud enough to make Harlan turn his head toward me. I stared him down until he turned back.
Steele, Breck said as the senator unlocked the door. We’d all practiced subvocalizing, speaking without letting actual sound past our lips. It was strange, leeched all the emotion from the words, and it was difficult to remember that we didn’t have to speak out loud to be heard, but at that moment, I thanked every little strange brain cell in Wesley’s head for giving it to us.
Right here, babe. I said. Our footstep echoed on the polished wood stairs. The sounds of the party faded as the door shut behind us.
I’m sorry, he said. For earlier.
Doesn’t matter, not one bit. We’ll talk when we get home. My heart pounded with each step we took.
“Where are we going?” Danny asked loudly. “Is the VIP party down here?”
When we’d reached the bottom of the steps. Danny and Breck hesitated, not willing to go further into the dark space.
“Yeah, sure,” Harland snorted. “Mickey, why don’t you give our guests a little encouragement to join the party?”
I was on. Taking a deep breath, I pulled my gun – my own weapon, which I’d insisted on carrying despite Harlan’s protests -- and waved the boys towards the vaulted wine cellar. “Move it along, kids.”
“No,” Breck said, digging his heels in. Taking advantage of the situation, I pushed up next to him, grabbing him by the arm.
Danny looked terrified, way more than the script called for. He’d frozen like a deer in the headlights. And after what he’d suffered at the senator’s hands, who could blame him?
“Danny,” Wesley said crisply in our ears. “Pull it together. Don’t fuck this up.”
Fuck you, Danny said, his lips barely moving. The comms leeched the emotion from his voice but not his face. You’re not the one playing bait.
“You wanted to be part of this,” Wes taunted mercilessly. “Are you punking out now?”
Danny stood straighter. His eyes shone with defiant anger. Fuck no.
“Good,” Wes said, and I’d swear he sounded just a little bit proud. “You’ve got this, Dan.”
“Saying your prayers, Danny-boy?” Harlan asked. “I doubt the Lord listens to slutty, thieving whores like you.” Quick as the snake he was, Harlan’s hand flashed out and smacked Danny across the face. Tears of anger filled the kid’s eyes, but he didn’t cower again. “I want my goddamn ring.”
“No!” Breck yelled. By the way he grabbed my arm, the warning was meant for me, not Harlan.
I will fucking kill him, I said, and I almost didn’t care if Harlan had read my lips.
Harlan pulled out a ridiculously large key to open the wrought iron grille that separated the rest of the lavish basement from the wine cellar. Pretentious asshole.
He grabbed Danny and practically threw him on the stone floor inside the cellar. I man-handled Breck though the door, and it banged closed behind us.
“My ring,” Harlan said again, holding out his hand greedily. “Now.”
Danny shoved his hand in his suit pocket and extracted the gold circlet with its enormous high-set blue stone. Wes had called it a fucking gaudy piece of shit when he’d worked on it last night, and he wasn’t wrong. He dropped the ring into Harlan’s hand without touching him.
“Ah, there now.” Harlan grabbed the silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and used it to pick up the ring from his palm and put it in his pocket. “Sadly, I know where this has been,” he said disgustedly.
“Kill them,” Harlan instructed me, with a gleam in his eyes I’d seen before in murders and psychopaths.
Danny and Breck exchanged a panicked look that was probably only half-staged. “N-no!” he said. “I thought you said if we gave it back, you’d let us go? I thought you said we’d be even?”
“And you believed me?” Harlan laughed like he was truly amused. “God. Some people truly are too stupid to live.”
“Kill? Do you really think that’s necessary?” I fro
wned at him, giving it a good show, and hoped he wouldn’t notice that my voice was a little higher-pitched than usual, per Wesley’s instructions. That’s right, Harlan, look right into my little button cam and repeat your instructions.
“Little whore stole my ring while he was sucking my dick. He deserves to die.” Harlan’s smile turned vicious. “And remember, Gonzalez, your fortune is tied to mine now, so you do what I say. Kill them both, dump the bodies. River out back, hiking trails a few minutes away, I don’t give a shit where, and the less I know, the better. Use your imagination. But I don’t want them found.”
I nodded slowly. “I’ll need help with that if you want it done quickly.”
“Hire whoever you need. Make sure they’re discreet, since it’s your ass on the line if they fuck up.”
I nodded again, as if this were to be expected. “If you’d given me warning, I could have had a couple guys on standby.”
“Things move fast around here, handsome. You need to keep up.” He stepped toward me with a come-hither smile that turned my stomach and reached down to trail his fingers over my fucking crotch. “But you seem like a man who’ll have no problem keeping up.”
Breck was still pressed against my side where I was ‘restraining’ him, and he gave a furious gasp when Harlan’s hand made contact with my pants. It was my turn to restrain him from tearing Harlan’s arm off.
“Come find me later,” Harlan whispered.
I gave him a genuine, heart-felt smile. “Oh, I will,” I promised. “I definitely will.”
Harlan tossed me a wink. “Do it,” he instructed, moving to stand near the wrought-iron grille. No doubt blood was tricky to get out of his custom-made tuxedo.
I pushed Breck away from me, and he sprawled on the floor next to Danny.
Ready? I asked of everyone, my eyes glued to Breck’s blue ones.
Ready, he said.
Danny blinked, which was as good as a nod.
“On three,” Wesley said. “One.”
I can’t do this. My hand was shaking.
“Two.”
“Do it,” Harlan shouted.
It’s okay, baby, Breck said. I love you. Do it.
“Three.”
My finger jerked, and I shot the man I loved.
16 Breck
God damn, those blood packs hurt when they went off.
Wesley had purchased some kind of rig online from a special effects store, and whatever it was, it was seriously convincing. The snazzy suits Miranda had gotten for us were destroyed.
While Harlan gloated, I stayed in my sprawled position on the floor, fighting the need to twitch as the fake blood spread across the front of my chest and spilled down behind me. In the movies, they never explained how fucking cold the ground could feel underneath you, or how, as soon as you ‘died,’ your nose would start to itch violently, like it needed to prove to you that it was alive by sneezing right then.
Annoying, but highly preferable to actually being shot.
The senator gave a low chuckle. “Well done, Mickey.” My eyes were open beneath my lashes, and I watched him move a step closer to Steele and place his wrinkly goddamn fucking Crypt-Keeper paw on my man’s hard stomach. A shade better than caressing his dick, but barely. It was bad enough that the asshole had laid hands on me; I wanted to douse acid on every part of Harlan that had touched Steele and erase the feel of Steele’s body from his memory banks.
Jealousy was a new emotion for me; I wasn’t sure if I liked it, but it seemed I was fucking good at it.
“I think there might just be a bonus in this for you,” Harlan was saying.
Wes snorted over the comms. “Yeah, right. A bonus in his pants.”
God. Gross. I couldn’t say a damn word, not even over these sub-vocal comms, because I wouldn’t risk Harlan seeing my lips move. If looks could kill, though, Snow White would be exploding in five, four, three…
No such luck.
“Steele, you’d better move this along, man,” Danny said. He’d had the forethought to land face-down when he was ‘shot,’ and he was better at the whole sub-vocalizing thing anyway. “Rocky’s about to lose his shit.”
Danny’s use of my old alias somehow brought me back to myself. Taking down Harlan, making sure he could never hurt another working guy, was way more important than my need to piss in a circle around Steele.
“Thanks, Senator,” Steele said. “But I, uh… I think it’d be better for everyone if I take a rain check on the bonus right now. I’m gonna call my guys and get them to clean up the mess.” He waved a hand at Danny and me.
Harlan nodded. “Good man. Later.”
“Oh, you know it,” Steele said, repeating his words from earlier. I wondered how Harlan couldn’t hear the threat in them. “It’s a date.”
The metal door clanged open as the senator walked out into the basement, and Steele made a show of taking his phone from his pocket and dialing a number that I was pretty sure connected to a burner phone Wes had set up. “Yeah, I’m gonna need a couple cleaners,” Steele said, loud enough to carry.
The senator’s footsteps echoed up the stairs, and the sounds of laughter and tinkling china floated down when he opened the door at the top.
“We clear?” Steele demanded.
“We have eyes-on,” Leo confirmed from above, and I allowed myself to move for the first time. “Old man’s making a beeline for his secretary by the front door.”
Danny stood up and took stock of his ruined outfit while I ran a hand over my face, scratching my nose.
“His secretary,” Wes said. “Did we do a background on her?”
“Yep. Jenny Guinn. She’s inner-circle but likely not by choice,” Leo said. “Single mom, no priors, worked on his rival’s campaign before defecting to work for Harlan.”
“Wonder what he threatened her with,” I muttered. I pushed myself up to sitting and stared at the blood-spatter all over the wood floor. Fake-death was messy.
“Do we have ears on them?” Steele demanded. He held out a hand, and I grabbed it, letting him haul me to my feet.
“Negative. No listening devices near the door,” Wes said. “That’s where you were stationed earlier.”
Steele grunted. His dark eyes searched mine. I could feel his need to pull me into his arms, or maybe it was my own need to be held that I sensed. I wanted to forget our fight this morning, all the shit we’d just been through, and lose myself in his embrace.
But it was impossible for him to get any closer than he was, not when he had to go upstairs and look presentable in a few minutes, and I was standing here dripping with Carson’s patented corn starch-and-food-coloring concoction.
“The metal filings are the key,” Carson had told us earlier, stirring a giant pasta pot of bubbling blood in the kitchen next door, like the witch in some fucked-up kids’ story standing over a cauldron. “Makes it smell real.”
He wasn’t wrong. The shit smelled fucking foul; I could practically taste the tang in my mouth.
“He’s handing Guinn something from his pocket. Looks like a balled-up tissue,” Carson reported.
“His handkerchief, with the ring rolled up inside it,” Steele said, still staring at me. “So much for keeping track of Harlan that way. Ridge, you find the safe yet?”
“Oh yeah, half an hour ago,” Ridge snapped. “I just decided not to tell you ‘cause I’m crawling under beds for funsies now. All I’ve found is that the senator has a serious case of dry rot under his bathroom sink. Should I alert the authorities?”
“Wow. Who whacked you with the snark-stick?” Danny demanded. He stripped off his suit jacket and his shirt. “Some of us got shot tonight and still haven’t lost our optimistic attitudes.”
“If you’d seen the truly disturbing porn collection in this man’s nightstand drawer,” Ridge began.
“Been there, honey. Posed for some of it,” Danny said breezily, wiping at his chest with a clean part of his shirt. “Got the dislocated jaw to prove it.”
Ridge’s sigh nearly rattled my skull. “Fair enough.”
“Ms. Guinn is headed upstairs, Ridge,” Leo said urgently. “Look sharp.”
“I’m activating the tracker in the ring right now,” Wes said. “If she’s taking it upstairs, maybe she’s putting it with his other valuables.”
“In his bedroom?” Ridge breathed. “Where I am? Fuck.”
“Hang tight,” Wes instructed, sounding unperturbed. “Stay out of sight.”
“Little tricky when I have no idea where the woman’s gonna be putting the ring!”
My heart beat faster than it had all night, except for the brief moment when I’d stood inches away and watched Harlan touch Steele.
Steele cupped my jaw in his huge hand. “Calm, baby,” he insisted. “Ridge knows what he’s doing. He’s good at this shit.”
I nodded. I believed that. I did. But I was overwhelmed, and seriously out of my element. There was still another whole chapter to the plan tonight, and what if… what if…
Steele leaned forward and pressed his lips to mine. His tongue swept into my mouth, and all my thoughts flat-lined as I was caught up in the sensation. His kiss was Xanax and caffeine all at once.
“Alvarez,” Leo said, and Steele broke our kiss slowly. “Five-minute warning. The senator is heading toward Carson, and he’s looking way too pleased with himself. We need to start phase two before I kill this motherfucker.”
“Understood.” Steele looked at me with narrowed eyes, and whatever he saw seemed to satisfy him. “You good?” he mouthed to me.
“Good.” I nodded. “Let’s do this.”
“I’m ready for my costume change,” Danny said. He was standing against one of the wine racks near the door, naked from the waist up, grinning at Steele and me as Steele finally let go of my face. “Time to go haunt a bitch.”
Steele nodded. “I hid the bag in the downstairs bathroom, first door on the right,” he said. “With the duplicate clothing for both of you that Josie gave me.” He looked at me. “You need help getting dressed?”
Danny snorted and pushed off the wall to link his arm with mine. “Not from you, he doesn’t. Not unless we want to add another naughty sex tape to Harlan’s collection.”