Page 79 of Hide From Me

“Do you all live here?”

I walked over to a well-worn couch next to him and sat down. Until this moment, I’d been far enough inside my head that I hadn’t regretted my footwear, but now I was regretting the heels. I unlaced the straps, ignoring the feeling that Xander was watching me until I could drop them to the side.

I moaned as I bent my toes.

“Short stuff, don’t moan like that.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Please. I’m not your type. I saw you have zero shame kissing on that girl in the ring. She had a lot of tattoos, and I would venture a guess she had some pretty well-placed piercings.”

He gave me a little smile but went back to sipping his soda.

“So, you all live here?”

He pointed to the back of the building where I noticed a box recessed into the wall, an elevator, I guessed.

“There are three floors above here. We each have our own spaces, but it just didn’t seem right to not be together. You don’t trauma bond with these assholes and then want space.”

He turned on the TV, and I guessed that was the end of the conversation for the moment.

Sitting here, my eyes started to feel heavy. I wasn’t going to give in though. This was a new me. One that took control of something. But maybe it was also a tired as hell me.

One minute we were watching something with a whole lot of shooting going on, and the next, the loud voices of Cas and Zeid had me startling awake.

“The fuck she does.”

Cas’s words had me sitting up and ready for something. It just hadn’t been for him.

THIRTY

cas

Why the hellhad she come back to my city? I was good with the illusion of her but shit if she wasn’t going to be the death of me.

“She needs to figure this out. She’s got to want to know where she came from,” Zeid said.

“The fuck she does,” was all I could say to Zeid. I didn’t need him to make sense. All I could fucking see was the red of anger as I thought about some amateur PI trying to blackmail her into marriage for money. We didn’t need fucking money. I’d made sure of that. We all had. The three of us had made sure we answered to no one, and I wouldn’t change that for her.

I hadn’t meant to startle her, but the way she sat up straight, blinking feverishly, said I’d just awoken her.

“Hey, boys, where you been?” Xander asked like the dipshit he was.

“Fuck off, Xander. We can talk in a few hours. We all need some sleep.”

I reached down and placed one arm under her legs and the other around her back and picked her up.

“What am I not doing?” she asked in a sleep soaked voice.

“Nothing to worry about, blossom. Let’s get some sleep.”

She rested her head on my shoulder as I headed for the stairs. I was on the second floor for no good fucking reason, but right now it was useful to get her in my bed faster.

“Cas, we need?—”

“No, we don’t. We will talk in a few hours. Shut up, Zeid, and go take a damn nap.”

I didn’t wait to hear what anyone else had to say. The doors on the inside apartments weren’t as secure as the outside doors, but still, they had biometric locks just for added security. Buying old factories for our own little fortress had made sense. They hadn’t been hard to convert into apartments, but they were solid structures only made more secure with little details here and there like bulletproof metal doors and excessively thick concrete. It was easy to watch for unwanted company here as well since most of the factories around here didn’t run twenty-four hours shifts. The outsides didn’t look impressive either, and that made hiding easier.