by Martha Carr
Peyton headed toward the passenger side door. “I was looking around online, and I found a place that does Chicago-style nearby. I wanted to maybe explore the Californian interpretation of Chicago-style pizza.”
Shay halted at her door and shot him a death glare. “What did I say about pizza if you want to roll with me?”
Peyton groaned. “NYC thin crust only.”
Shay grinned. “Good boy.”
Shay folded up a slice of pepperoni and all but devoured it in one bite, savoring the flavor over the long seconds of chewing.
“It’s good,” Peyton admitted, swallowing a bite of his pizza. “I can see why you’re so into this.”
“Quality speaks for itself and all that.”
“How did you find this place?”
“I hit Prime Pizza pretty early since the warehouse is nearby. They are known around L.A. for their NYC-style pizza. It’s nice to have a place close so I don’t have to worry about traffic.”
Peyton took another bite before speaking. “Traffic? Come on, I know I haven’t been out of my new address, but I figure it can’t be as bad as New York.”
Shay shook her head. “Nope. This place is terrible. One of the worst in the world.” She laughed. “It makes me miss the mild-by-comparison congestion of New York. It’s why a lot of people like to stick to their neighborhoods.”
“Isn’t that a problem for you, then? It’s not like all your… stuff is in one neighborhood.”
Shay winked. “Well, normal people like to stick their neighborhoods. I just so happen to have a lot of neighborhoods.”
Peyton lapsed into silence. At first, Shay thought it was just the seductive power of the tasty pizza keeping him quiet, but the haunted look in his eyes suggested something deeper. If the man was going to work with her, then he needed to get out of the funk.
“Problem?” Shay lowered her voice, leaning across the shiny wooden table, rustling the red and white paper placemats. “Or is it something we can’t talk about here?”
Peyton looked up at her and shook his head. “No… I was just thinking about how I ended up here. About what you said about my family maybe being responsible. I don’t want to believe it, but it’s hard to just shake it off and say it’s ridiculous.”
“Finally coming around, then?”
Peyton shrugged. “I know it sounds lame to bitch about growing up in a wealthy family, but I kind of feel like it screwed me.”
“Oh?” Shay folded another slice of pepperoni.
“If you’re poor, you know, you have to look out for each other, because you don’t have the money and influence to get out of trouble, or not starve or whatever.”
“Yeah, that’s why poor families always look so close and loving on reality shows.”
Peyton ignored the comment, wiping the grease off his hands. “But when you’re rich, money and power can get in the way. At least it did in my family. It wasn’t lack of money that drove everyone nuts. It was the proximity to so much of it.” Peyton shook his head. “We never got along, my brother, my sister, and me. Not like our dad really gave a shit about any of us, either.” He let out a long sigh. “Mom cares, she does. I think she loves us, but she let it all happen, always making excuses.”
“Then why get so torn up about being separated from all of them? Even if I’m wrong, a low likelihood, you didn’t like each other anyway.” Shay frowned and realized she was out of pizza. “Family is a blessing and curse and all that shit.”
“I never… cared like my brother and sister did. About the money. The power. Any of that shit. I just wanted…”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Freedom? Control?”
“That is power.”
“That’s why I didn’t walk the path my parents wanted for me. Not sure how I was still in line to inherit anything. Well, I was before you killed me.”
“Or maybe dear old Dad was still fucking with you and wanted to make you a target to see which of your siblings could take you out first. A little test of ruthlessness.”
Peyton’s face scrunched up in disgust. “Sometimes I forget your old profession. Not everyone wants to settle something with a tidy death.”
Shay gave a shrug and eyed another slice of pizza. “Some people call it cold cynicism. A necessary part of my old profession. Somewhat in the new one too. I call it realism. In the end though, you walked away from the empire and showed them all you have some balls. Even I can respect that.”
Peyton gave a tired laugh. “I figured if I was doing my own thing I could seize my destiny. Crap like that. I guess you seized it for me.”
“I made sure you still had one. You regret not becoming an active part of the family dynasty?” Shay scanned the restaurant while listening to Peyton. It was habit as well as a practical function. Size up each person, determine their ability to fight back, consider their most likely moves.
“Leaving them? Becoming an information broker? Not becoming some wind-up doll for my father?” He ticked each one off on his fingers.
“Yeah, all of those.” Shay looked over Peyton’s shoulder. Mother with two small children and nice set of muscles on her. She’d be willing to kill if she had to, no problem. Group of teenage boys scarfing down pizza. They’d run at the first sign of trouble. Same with the overly-muscled man picking up a pie. Show muscles but not meant for anything practical except lifting a car.
“To be honest, I don’t know.” Peyton ran a hand through his hair, looking even younger than his 24 years. Shay swung her attention back just long enough to look him in the eyes, make him feel heard. Best way ever invented to draw someone in, get them to put down their guard.
Peyton looked down at his pizza and Shay went back to scanning the room, while still listening to his story.
“I think if I stayed in that environment, I would have died a different way. Even if my brother and sister aren’t behind what happened, it’s not like we got along, and the less time we spent together, the happier they all were.”
“Not gonna say I had a stunning relationship with my parents,” Shay said. “I can relate, a little. Not to the growing up wealthy and all that crap…” She shrugged, watching the middle aged man approach the counter, doing the same scan of the room. Short hair, straight back, not even trying to hide that he’s checking out the room. Off duty cop. “Look, I had to do the same thing, seize my destiny if that’s what you want to call it.”
“By…” Peyton glanced around. “By going into that profession?”
Shay snickered, glancing up at the man as he curtly thanked the cashier and picked up the pizza box. If anyone overheard Peyton’s coded conversation, they’d assume an attractive woman like her had become a call girl, not a brutal professional killer.
“That profession saved your ass. There was some other shit going on, but yeah, that was my destiny, for a while. When I started making my own money, I took control. I made my own decisions. I could live the life I wanted without having to rely on anyone.”
Shay’s face tightened as dark memories filtered into her mind. Don’t press further. That was about as deep as she wanted to go into her past.
Peyton picked up his glass of Mountain Dew. “Here’s a toast then. To all of us who got fucked over by our families, may we control our destinies from here on out.”
Shay picked up her orange Fanta. “Here, here.”
They clinked their glasses together.
9
The next morning, Shay sat at her oak desk in the office in her condo. She frowned as she scrolled through her financial records on the computer.
“Shit, shit, shit. Really? Shit.”
She let out a pained groan.
Shay should have been ecstatic. The recovery of the diamonds had further confirmed her skills, and she’d taken a step closer to moving Peyton from a spoiled rich boy playing at being a criminal to a useful potential team member, but the financial review sucked out her happiness.
Her new business was still barely profitable.
She rubbed her temples, still wondering if she’d done the right thing saving Man-Boy. She knew she would need the kind of backup Peyton could provide if she wanted to succeed in her new career. But she’d spent her previous career working alone – killing people made office help nervous — and even the thought of depending on another person made her stomach tighten. A man like Peyton was potentially unreliable, an unwarranted risk she would have never taken in the old days. He liked to play around in dangerous waters but ignored the sharks around him like they weren’t a big deal.
That wasn’t confidence. That was arrogant stupidity or naivete. Neither one was good on a resume for what she needed.
Fuck me. I’ll chase after a hitman because I’m curious, and I’ll swim under falling logs, but force me to trust someone for a few minutes, and suddenly I’m ready to throw up.
Then again, I’ve had friends try to kill me on more than one occasion.
Shay looked at the financial records on her computer screen. This is the larger problem right now. The tomb raider business wasn’t building like she wanted.
When she’d come up with the idea, she was convinced it’d make her a pile of money that would leave her hit contracts looking like the pay of a shitty job that involved wearing your name on your shirt.
That wasn’t how things were working out. She broke even on her first job and after expenses and the fence’s cut for the diamonds, only made a small profit on the lake raid.
If only I’d got my hands on that damned pin.
Maintaining five different warehouses and all her equipment wasn’t cheap. The various casual bribes she had to throw around for everything from keeping her warehouses secure from local scum to ensuring certain powerful people didn’t look her way, even accidentally were eating into the profits, too.
Life was expensive when you were already supposed to be dead. Funny how that worked.
Running out of money wasn’t an immediate concern, but that didn’t mean Shay could continue to ignore the issue either. For now, her previous career had left her with a generous savings. Some of it was hidden in various accounts throughout the world, while enough to start all over again was in a vault in the most secure warehouse. The way the world was unwinding, though, left her wondering how much of it could really be secure anywhere.
Huh… Maybe I should look into some of that Trollcoin after all.
Shay wasn’t overly fond of her finances being dependent on technologies or governments she didn’t have personal control over. But the balance between safety and accessibility was a constant magic trick of its own kind.
In the end, if it wasn’t her own vault, the tomb raider preferred a bank she could enter, even if it might be in a different country. A physical bank meant there would be a physical banker, and she could always threaten to kill him for better service. It was a lot harder to intimidate an algorithm or blockchain.
Shay narrowed her eyes, leaning toward the screen as she clicked around on her spreadsheet, reviewing the expenses and revenue from the most recent job one more time. The sale of the diamonds covered the costs of her lake raid, but her profit margin was pathetic. She wasn’t supposed to be depending on savings at all. “There is nothing lucrative about this if I don’t change things up.”
Her great list of seven items could turn out to be artifacts she didn’t recover for decades into the future, if at all. The more she considered them, the less she believed they would be a reliable method for building her reputation.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
Shay sighed and leaned back in her chair, thinking about her last conversation with Natalie. Retirement for a 27-year-old woman technically on the run wasn’t a possibility. She still had her whole life ahead of her and at this rate would run out of money eventually. Sooner if she kept buying equipment. She lacked contacts to back her up in the event of trouble. “No couch surfing for me.” Peyton was the closest thing she had to an actual friend in Los Angeles. “That is pathetic.”
Shay shot to her feet and started pacing, trying to get out her nervous energy.
More than the money, Shay’s modest success grated on her ego. She had no delusions about that and felt no shame over the realization. She didn’t just want to be a tomb raider; she wanted to be the tomb raider, the one spoken of in quiet, hushed voices when people thought about asking for artifact recovery help. Can’t get Shay, settle for sloppy seconds.
Shay had been at the top of her game as a professional killer. People who weren’t the best didn’t last very long in a vocation where death was the desired outcome for someone. But in her new career, she had only a few modest successes under her belt and no reputation, yet.
Not only was she not the best, but she was barely better than a novice, no matter what she told Peyton. Field archaeologist or tomb raider, it didn’t matter what she called herself if she couldn’t bring home the artifacts.
The ex-killer gritted her teeth.
Fuck. I’m stumbling as a tomb raider. What am I missing? Is there some way to make this business better? I need to clear my head.
It took an hour for Shay to drive the Spider to Warehouse Four, her personal favorite. She chuckled to herself as she ran her hands along the spines of the books filling one of the many bookshelves lining the twenty-foot walls of the warehouse. Peyton would probably be shocked that her personal library rated more concern than her weapons and specialty equipment. Only Warehouse Five, where she stored extremely high-value goods, her personal money vault, and the occasional magical artifact was more important.
Wall-to-wall floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled the main warehouse space, along with several rolling library ladders. The collection ran into the thousands of volumes and represented a multi-million-dollar investment.
The vast majority of the books concerned history and the occult, with a smaller number focused on related subjects such as archaeology, anthropology, and even a few newer books on extra-dimensional engineering, the fancy university term for magic.
Scientists kept trying to make it catch on with the public, but almost everyone preferred to use the simpler and more familiar term.
There were even two books on magic bionics – a frowned upon topic even in the dark underworld.
A tech nerd like Peyton would have questioned why Shay maintained such a laughably old-fashioned library in an age of ebooks and the internet. The answer was simple.
Shay preferred the heft of a book in her hands and a physical book wasn’t something that could be hacked or disrupted with an EMP. They didn’t leave a trail of what she was studying, either. As a hired killer, she’d succeeded on more than a few assignments because some idiot was relying on some enhanced gun with too many electronics.
It wasn’t that Shay didn’t mind the use of technology, magic, or whatever tool would help her the get the job done. Simplicity wasn’t her focus, success was. But, when it came to owning knowledge, she made sure no EMP or lightning spell could wipe everything out.
Some of the books were so rare that she owned the last existing copy. Many had never been digitized.
Her finger stopped on a slim monograph detailing a Polish graduate student’s thesis on the magical beliefs of the aristocracy in ancient Japan. It was written over a hundred years ago and was the only copy.
But anyone looking into the past couldn’t be sure if they were reading about someone’s misinterpretation of nature or an actual eyewitness report of something magical.
Shay’s glance ticked up a few rows to the translated, Annals of the Joseon Dynasty, records from medieval Korea. Most of the records concerned the most banal of government functions, but there were hints of more mysterious events and potential contact with magic or Oriceran beings, including a report from September 1609 that spoke of a strange flying “washbasin” that made a thunderous sound despite appearing in cloudless skies and flying as “swiftly as an arrow” before “disappearing into sparks.”
Before everyone learned about Oriceran, many people thoug
ht the incident was proof of aliens from beyond the stars visiting ancient Korea. That might still turn out to be true, too. Shay had learned to stop guessing at what came next a long time ago.
How often can some asshole from Oriceran come over here to troll the local humans?
Shay let out a relaxed sigh and smiled warmly at the collection in front of her. Even before the hitman decided to become a tomb raider, she’d had an interest in history and had started collecting the books through rare dealers, even if she didn’t always take the time to read many of them. I’ll have the time in the future. If there is one.
Almost got my ass iced in my own house. Nice.
Maybe in another life Shay would have become a history professor instead of a killer. She amused herself with the thought far too often.
I like history, but I can’t change the past. Can only change the future.
Shay glanced to a side door with a black steel frame and glass inserts, connected to the main room of Warehouse Four. Although she kept the humidity and temperature in the main warehouse constant, the other room was for some of her centuries-old books that needed an even more controlled environment, including air filters to ensure a nearly dust-free room.
The tomb raider’s rare book library was superior to what was in many universities. Good thing no one but her knew of its existence.
I’ve got the skills. I’ve got the instincts. I’ve got the books and the resources. So why can’t I get this business going the way I want?
Shay let out a long sigh. “Maybe I should listen to Peyton’s ideas after all. If they are crap, I’ll just ignore him and threaten to kill him until he shuts up.”
Shay collapsed to her knees, sweat soaking her body. Her shorts and tank top stuck to her body.
She looked back at the tall wall marking the end of her obstacle course. Her heart thundered, and she couldn’t even move for a moment as she took in deep gulps of air in a desperate attempt to pull some precious oxygen into her strained lungs.