Odin stood in the doorway holding the ice bucket, looking devastated. “I did this to you.”
“No.”
“You wanted to help me. You wanted to love me, and I lashed out.”
“I did it to me. You warned me not to try and sleep with you, and I went ahead and tried it.”
“How about both of you stop apologizing. Shit happens.” Thor twisted the ice into a towel and gave it to Odin. “Hold this to her lip.”
Odin held it to my lip. “You trusted me, and I hurt you.”
“It’s so nothing,” I said.
“Everyone’s fine,” Thor growled. “Isis isn’t made of glass.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You can ask the unicorns, hippos, and sperm whales about that.” I snorted at my own joke, then winced again.
“Goddess!” Odin said.
“I’m fine! Sheesh!”
Odin wasn’t buying my sheesh. “Oh, Isis!” he said. I’d never seen him so upset, and we’d been through some big things together.
Thor seemed worried. “You’re flipping out over nothing, Odin.”
“She’s not breathing right,” Odin said. “You made her drink whiskey.”
“Yeah, and it tasted great. And I might have Zeus’s half of the almond croissant, now, too,” I said.
Odin frowned.
“Get over it. She startled you, and she has a hurt rib,” Thor said. “A minor injury that she’ll have the best care for. Because who is the best doctor in the world?”
Odin grumbled.
“That’s right, brother. I am.”
“Except this is getting a little too cold.” I took the makeshift ice pack from him and shifted it. “Um…the croissant, please?”
Odin studied my face for a second and then went off to the porch to get it.
I forced myself to eat it, even though it didn’t go that well with the whiskey. But Odin was upset. Like, really upset. And I’d noticed that my guys liked it when I ate. It seemed to comfort them. Like eating was a sign of well-being. Like with a dog. “Yum.” I took over the ice-holding after that. “I don’t know how much more of this ice I need.”
Odin stood and paced. He still wore the boxers he’d worn to bed and nothing else. His beautiful hair was askew. “I’ll never forgive myself, goddess.”
“Wait, did you go down to the lobby and fill the ice bucket just wearing those underpants? Because Odin, that kind of makes up for it.”
Odin wasn’t fooled. He paced back and forth some more.
“That’s it,” Thor said. “You’re putting on your clothes and going out for aspirin.”
As soon as Odin left, Thor made me take off my shirt. He inspected the area. “This is going to be a massive bruise.” He pressed his fingers on it, palpating the area, making me rate the sharpness of the pain on a scale from one to ten. “It doesn’t seem broken. Probably a bruise, or maybe a hairline fracture,” he decided. “Still. No coughing. No sudden movements.”
“Acrobatic sex?” I joked.
“Not for a week or two.”
I nodded over at our hot tub. “A relaxing soak?”
“Not for at least seventy-two hours.”
“You sound so doctory when you say seventy-two hours. It’s kind of hot.”
He kissed me on the cheek. “I’m going to prescribe oral sex only. And you receive it only. I know that’s going to be hard for you.”
“But you can still jerk off and come on my breasts,” I said.
He shook his head. “No way, we can’t have any kind of massive weight landing on your chest.”
I snorted. “Ow!” Laughing was my enemy. “Fuck. Don’t make me laugh.”
“Sorry.”
“Should I lie down?”
“A chair is best. Come on.” He led me out to the porch and put my iPad in my hands.
Twenty minutes later, Odin returned with three different kinds of pain relievers.
“Have a seat,” Thor said. “The patient is going to live.”
“More than live.” I smiled up at him, but I could see he didn’t quite believe it—he thought I was faking that I was perfectly fine. Well, I was faking it a little. My chest hurt, but most of all, I felt hugely shitty for doing precisely what he’d asked me not to do. “I’m doomed to oral sex only, though. I don’t know how I’ll get through that.” I kind of laughed, and then I winced, because fuck, it hurt when I laughed.
This sent Odin to his knees beside me. “Goddess.”
“Seriously? Please!” I said. “You warned me not to try and sleep with you, and what did I do?”
“I hurt you,” he said. “Don’t minimize it.”
“Don’t you maximize it!” I said.
I want back to my online surfing, losing myself in some bullshit top ten list, just to give things a sheen of normalcy so Odin would see it wasn’t a huge deal. He was taking it so hard!
Odin stood up and walked out.
“Let him be,” Thor said.
Twenty minutes later, the porch door opened again. I assumed it was Odin, but it was Zeus, back from the run.
“What the fuck? Why’s there a bloody towel on the floor?”
We explained what happened. Zeus had to inspect my ribs for himself. He’d been through a lot of fights and thought of himself as quite the rib-palpating expert. After a few painful pushes, he, too, decided it was a bruise.
“Thanks, Doctor Feelgood,” I said, pulling my shirt down.
Zeus showered and changed. We drank more coffee. Still Odin didn’t show.
He’d been gone almost two hours. The guys were getting worried, I could tell.
“He needs to be in control,” Thor said. “It really fucks him up to not be in control, and add to that the fact that he hurt you—”
“I’m feeling a lot better,” I said.
Thor decided to take a walk around the neighborhood and check a few cafés and a scenic overlook that Odin enjoyed. Zeus and I stayed back and played Scrabble.
I was trying to psychically dissuade Zeus from using a triple-point square I had plans for when a new mail alert flashed across my iPhone screen. I grabbed my phone and punched in my code. “Finally!” I said.
“Sisters’ newsletter?”
“Yeah!”
I opened it up to the Sunny Sisters header, settling in to read about artisan cheeses, barn repairs, and maybe even the foibles of lambs, stuff I’d found crushingly boring once upon a time. These days I hung on every word, every little detail, and my sisters would never know. How could they? They thought I was dead, or at least my two youngest sisters did. I figured Vanessa, the second eldest of us four, had to suspect.
As much as I loved my life with my guys—my husbands now—I missed my sisters something fierce.
My guys and I had had to fake my death over a year back. It was the only way to keep my sisters safe. We had powerful enemies, not just the police, but the spy agency ZOX. If ZOX ever figured out that I was Melinda Prescott from Baylortown, Wisconsin, they could smoke me out by threatening my sisters.
And then they’d have my guys by the balls. Nobody could ever know.
The header showed an old picture of the four of us as girls. I loved that picture so much. Back then it was a shearing operation, but after my parents died, we’d gotten entrepreneurial and started to make cheese, too, and products like pillows and comforters.
Usually Vanessa opened the newsletter with a greeting like, Friends! I have so much good news! She was positive like that. Today the newsletter was set off by a quietly stark sentence, standing all by itself: The news isn’t good.
I sat up. “Shit.”
“You okay?” Zeus said.
“I’m okay, but…” I read on. There’d been a salmonella outbreak. A group of people had gotten seriously ill from one of their artisan sheep cheeses. One person had died. “No!”
“What?”
“My sisters…shit. A man died, and they say it’s our cheese. They’re being sued.”
“What?”
; “There was a salmonella outbreak originating at their farm, and a man died. They don’t name him. Oh my god.” I read on. A farmhand had accused the sisters of knowingly selling tainted cheese. “My sisters would never do that! Who the hell is this farmhand?”
I read parts out loud to Zeus:
Our hearts are broken for the family of the man who passed away, for the people who got so sick. Our customers mean everything to us. We would never sell cheese we knew to be contaminated or instruct an employee to ignore health codes. We’re truly bewildered about these accusations, and we’re working with health authorities to uncover the truth.
There was a GoFundMe site for their legal defense.
“You think it’s foul play?” Zeus asked.
“I know it’s foul play. My sisters are nerds about food safety and cleanliness.” I clicked over to the Baylortown Reporter and read more about it there. The man who died was Tim Zietlow. A really nice man. He was older than me, but I remembered him playing the accordion. Finally I got the name of the farmhand—Andy Miller. “What the fuck!” I said.
“What?” Zeus asked.
“The farmhand, Andy Miller. It makes no sense.” Andy had grown up on the farm that abutted ours. He’d been a grade ahead of me in high school—we’d even dated briefly. “He was a man whore, but not devious.”
“We should give to the fund,” he suggested. “We send a crapload of small donations.” He pulled his own computer out and started researching on his own. “Look at this write-up,” he said after a while. “They have a lawyer, but he’s a real estate lawyer.”
“What?” I got up and looked over his shoulder, wincing at the pain in my rib, which I’d forgotten all about. “Oh, no, I went to school with that guy. He’s probably representing them free. He’s not very smart.”
“I’m no lawyer, but I know you need somebody specialized in a case like this,” Zeus said. “Maybe we could hire a better lawyer. Somebody who deals with food production. Make them pretend it’s pro bono.”
I pressed my palms to my eyes. “Fuck!” When I pulled them away, Zeus was eyeing me warily from his chair, as though he was deciding whether I could handle even more bad news.
“What?”
“Vanessa is up on manslaughter charges.”
“What?”
“According to the charges, she knew the cheese was bad, and she sold it anyway.”
“No!”
Zeus handed me the tablet. I read the words over and over until they started swimming in front of my eyes. “She can’t go to jail!”
He stood up and rubbed circles on my back. “She’s not going to jail.”
“How can you say that? You know as well as anyone the justice system doesn’t always work.” I could barely breathe. Tears pricked my eyes.
He made me sit back down. “You think this employee was going for a payday?”
“God, maybe. But no one can seriously think my sisters have any money. We’re the ones who pay everything.” Secretly, of course. “Uh, I need to call Vanessa. Don’t worry, I know I can’t.”
“We’ll figure it out. We’ll find a way to help.”
Thor returned soon after, not having found Odin. It was really bad that we couldn’t find him. Zeus filled him in on my sisters’ situation.
“You think it’s that banker?” Thor asked. “Does he still want your family’s farmland for mining fracking sand?”
“Maybe,” I said. “A lot of people want that land. My parents died fighting for us to keep it.” My eyes blurred again with tears. It was bad enough that a man had died. But my sister going to jail? They’d lose their entire livelihood, too. Probably sell our beloved farm.
Zeus made a six-figure donation to the Sunny Sisters GoFundMe from our Caribbean account, and Thor made me drink some more whiskey, even though it wasn’t even noon.
It was well past lunch by the time Odin came back. He took one look at my crying face and freaked. “Goddess!” He grabbed his own hair, like he wanted to tear it out.
Zeus went to him and shoved him up against the wall. “Chill the fuck out, she’s not crying about you! Her sisters’ farm is in trouble.”
“What?”
“Look.” I gave him the tablet. “They’re being sued. My sister could do time. And I know she’s not guilty. There’s no way she was negligent like they’re saying. No way!” The news was three hours old, and I still felt as panicked as when I’d first read it.
Odin scanned the article, holding the sides of the tablet tightly, knuckles white. His mood was getting more and more dangerous—I thought he might break the thing right over his knee. He handed it back to Thor with murder in his eyes.
“You’re sure your sister would never knowingly sell bad cheese?” Odin asked evenly.
“Sure of it,” I said.
Odin nodded. “This kid who’s telling lies? This Andy Miller? We go. We break him in half.”
“Wait, what?” I said.
“We go to Wisconsin. To Baylortown,” Odin said. “And we break this Andy Miller.”
“Are you out of your mind?” Zeus said. “We can’t go back there.”
“We have to go back there,” Odin growled.
“It’s madness. We agreed we couldn’t go back. If ZOX put it together—”
“Fuck ZOX,” Odin said. “Fuck rules.”
In a flash, Zeus had Odin back against the wall. “This isn’t prison. We’re not Mahfoud, making rules to keep you down. We’re family. We’re surviving. That’s what the rules are for.”
“They don’t know us there,” Odin growled. “We go in and out.”
“They know Isis,” Thor said. “She can’t show her face back in her hometown. Are you suggesting we leave her behind here? Because the God Pack doesn’t leave each other behind.”
Odin slid his gaze to me. “We don’t leave her behind; we take her with us.”
“To Baylortown?”
“Yes,” Odin said.
Something in my heart flipped upside down and right side up again. “It’s impossible,” I whispered.
“Odin—stop this,” Zeus growled.
“She wants to go,” Odin said, not taking his eyes from mine.
It was true—there was nothing I wanted more than to help my sisters, and to lay eyes on them again, even from afar. I straightened up. “I want biscotti for breakfast, too,” I said. “Doesn’t mean it should happen. If I go back, people will recognize me. They’ll know I’m not dead.”
“That’s why God gave us disguises,” Odin said.
“Think about what you’re doing, Odin,” Thor said. “You feel bad about hurting Isis, and now you’re filling her with false hope! You’re making her want things she can never have.”
“Why can’t she have this? True, she can’t come face to face with her sisters or people she knew well,” Odin said. “Yes, they’ll see through any disguise. But we can get her looking different enough that we can be in town long enough to handle this problem for her family. For our family. Somebody in that town is lying and framing her sisters. Isis knows the area and the players. We have the muscle and the skills. We could probably crack this thing open in a day.”
My heart pounded with excitement. “I could put on that prosthetic nose—remember how radically that changed my face? Contacts.” I turned to Zeus. “He’s right, if I stayed away from people who knew me really well, it would be fine.”
Zeus scowled at Odin.
“Dude!” Thor said. “What would happen if ZOX found out who she was? Think of the leverage they’d have. You think they wouldn’t hurt her sisters to get us to turn ourselves in? You think we wouldn’t turn ourselves in if it came to that?”
“Hold on—I would never want that,” I said in a small voice. “I would never want you to turn yourselves in—not for anything.”
“We’d turn ourselves in if we had to,” Zeus said. “If ZOX threatened your sisters’ lives, we’d turn ourselves in. ZOX can never know your connection to your sisters. We can’t let them figure
that out.”
“Then we don’t let them figure it out,” Odin said. “We’re fucking-g highly trained secret agents who have been living a fuck-you life of crime for years. If we can’t get to the bottom of a small-town mystery without blowing our cover, what good are we?”
Odin was making sense, or maybe I just really, really wanted to help my sisters. Either way, I was filled with hope.
Zeus shook his head. He was filled with something less fun than hope.
“We pay a visit to this kid who’s lying,” Odin said. “Like killing a mosquito with a hammer.”
Andy Miller would last exactly one minute being questioned by my guys. I still couldn’t believe he’d lied! “Seriously. If I wore the nose? The contacts? I stay out of sight? Nobody would recognize me. You guys wore masks the last time we were through. We could be completely incognito.”
“This is insane,” Zeus said.
“You hate the nose,” Thor said.
“I’ll wear it for this. I’ll let you smear that gluey makeup all over my face to hold it in place. Anything.”
“Do you not remember how it itches? How you hated it?” Thor said.
“I abandoned my sisters, and now they need me.”
“You didn’t abandon them,” Zeus growled.
“No, I kind of did. I wanted to be gone. They needed me, and I wanted to be gone…”
“You have to stop with the guilt,” Thor said. “It’s ZOX’s fault you can’t go back, not yours.”
“We could stay in the next town,” Odin added. “Two towns over. Three. We sweep in and out. Like fucking-g ghosts with the hammer of justice in our fucking-g fists.”
The hammer of justice. And lying Andy Miller was the mosquito. I was liking this plan more and more.
Zeus didn’t look happy, but Odin had a point. “You robbed the Prime Royale,” I said.
“We made the Prime Royale our bitch,” Odin said.
“The most heavily guarded bank on the West Coast,” I went on. “You snuck in past five kinds of alarm systems. How hard can Baylortown be to sneak into?”
“Us robbing the Prime nearly got you killed,” Zeus reminded me.
Hmm. Yeah, there was that.
The Hard Way: Taken Hostage by Kinky Bank Robbers 5 Page 4