1. Memphis

CHAPTER ONE

memphis

R ecoil , he called it.

The rearward thrust that was generated and felt by the shooter when a bullet was discharged from a gun.

Recoil .

Really, what he said was, “Fix your feet, angel. It’s going to kick like a bitch.”

And I had to ask for clarification. Just like I’d demanded a better explanation for why magazine was the correct word when everyone in the movies referred to it as a clip . I couldn’t begin to guess why I thought the terminology mattered so much; like he was going to test me on it later tonight. He didn’t care if I learned the words. He wouldn’t care if I memorized their meanings. He was about thirty seconds from asking if I was comfortable aiming at the target that sat in the middle of the field in front of us and firing the weapon that I held. That was his concern; not my comprehension of the vocabulary involved.

Utah tasked himself with teaching Indy and I how to defend ourselves once it was clear that Jersey hadn’t planned to come back anytime soon. That started with this alarming introduction to the proper handling of a firearm.

No was the unequivocal response to his question.

I was not ready to fire the gun. I would not reach the point where I was ready to fire it at any moment today, even if we stood out here for the remaining nine hours of sunlight. My experience with firearms was virtually nonexistent. Jersey shoved one into my hands the night that he swapped places with me in captivity in Tennessee. But just because I’d held it didn’t at all mean that I knew what I was doing with it. I’d looked into the barrel of one a handful of times when I was a child. I’d watched Jersey use them more times than I could count through various cameras. I’d even seen Trista use one. None of that made me comfortable with guns, though.

While I could appreciate what Utah intended to do for us with these lessons, I still had no desire to become comfortable with them.

“You ready?”

I shook my head and looked down at the gun in my hand. “No.”

“Want to watch me again?”

“It’s not that I don’t understand. It’s that I don’t want to do this.”

“You didn’t start out with violent video games like the rest of us who ended up working in backhanded web deals for messed up organizations?” Indy asked as he laughed. “This was the dream I thought we were all working toward back then.”

I shook my head again. “I used to read.”

“Nerd,” Indy snorted.

That one made me smile. Even the nerds had a hierarchy. Somehow the ones who played first person shooter games online with other nerds made them just a hint cooler than the nerds who preferred books.

I was in the category of nerd that the other nerds could call nerd and get away with it.

“Why don’t you want to do this?” Utah asked on a sigh, like his patience was wearing thin. I imagined I had annoyed him with all my questions and demands for explanations today. He still answered all those queries with a level of calm I simply was not used to experiencing from the men who held the Executioner positions. But seven thousand questions later, he was probably a little perturbed. I hadn’t known the man long, but the only time I ever saw him come anything close to rattled was when Jersey was still in the house with us. They had a special way of bringing out the worst in one another simply by being too close to each other.

“Learning to fire one is pointless. I won’t use it on somebody else,” I finally admitted when I realized Utah was still waiting for my answer.

“It’s not pointless if there’s a chance it’ll save your life.”

“Nobody knows we’re here. I’m not in danger of someone taking my life.”

His shoulders sagged when he sighed that time. He came to stand in front of me and took the gun from my hand. I watched in silence while his hands moved quickly to check the magazine and then the chamber before I looked back up to his face. Hands that size didn’t seem like they should have been able to move with that level of speed and accuracy. Though most of the things I’d learned about Utah up to this point further proved that everything about him made absolutely no sense from a logical standpoint.

“If you’re ever in a position where you need to know how to defend yourself with a gun, it’ll be because I’m not there to do it for you,” he said while grabbing my wrist to turn my palm up so he could place the grip of the gun back in it. “That means I also won’t be there to make you use it on someone, but I’m going to show you how, so you at least have the choice.”

“But you’re always around.”

He smirked. “I’ll be going to New Jersey next week, smarty pants.”

“Then Kyle is always around. He knows how to use these if our weird homestead is ever in need of defense,” I countered with an eye roll. “What’s in New Jersey?”

His hand went to the small of my back, which was the most certain way he’d ever had to get me to move in any direction that he wanted just so I could make sure his hand wasn’t on me for too long.

“Those detectives who worked the case with Jersey’s family,” he said while his hands moved to my shoulders to try to square my stance with the distant target. That didn’t do much good because as soon as he released my shoulders, I turned all the way around again just to face him.

“That’s not a good idea,” I protested.

“You’re probably not wrong.”

“You don’t even like Jersey.”

“And you’re really not wrong there,” Indy chimed in.

Utah chuckled. “It’s not about Jersey.”

“His entire family being murdered by our former boss and you seeking out the people involved feels like it’s at least a little about Jersey,” I countered.

“There are two detectives in New Jersey who had no problem interfering with evidence to make sure it looked like a perfectly innocent woman killed four other perfectly innocent people, her own toddler included, before she killed herself,” Utah said and put his hands on my shoulders another time to force me to turn back toward the target. “You don’t feel like something should be done about that?”

I felt his chest against my shoulder blades in the next second, and I watched his arms move on either side of me to start to raise my arms for me.

“I feel like—” I started to say, but paused when I was fully engulfed by him. “I feel like I’d rather do this tomorrow,” I said, and my entire body shuddered involuntarily before I took a giant step forward to get out of his reach.

“Just so you can tell me again tomorrow that you’d rather do it the next day?” He teased.

I looked down at the gun. “What’s this called?”

Utah cocked his head to the side and smiled. “It’s a Model 3566.”

“That’s the name of it? Guns are weird. If I go back and look up Model 3566 , the Internet will show me this?” I asked.

He laughed that time. “You’re going to go research the gun?” He cleared his throat to stifle the second laugh when I only stared back at him. “Smith and Wesson Model 3566 TSW.”

“Thank you.”

“Tomorrow, angel,” he called after me as soon as I’d started to walk back toward the house. “Same time.”

Of course I was going to research the gun. I’d learned how to live my entire life from the lessons I sought out across the Internet. If there were gaps in the education that I’d obtained from a web search, I filled in the spaces with my extensive knowledge of over-the-top cheesy movies from the 80s and 90s, or books that were technically categorized as romance but were more realistically referred to as pure fucking smutty goodness. I probably didn’t qualify as a well-rounded adult by any regular person’s standard of measurement, but every adult-like thing I’d learned how to do came from my ability to dig up all the information that ever existed on a topic via a keyboard.

My phone vibrated in my pocket on the walk back to the house. It was the alarm that went off at the same time every day to remind me that I had three minutes to text Jersey and let him know that I was still alive before he flipped out and boarded a plane back to the States. For as much as it made me smile to reach this point in each day, it had also started to hurt my heart a little. I knew before they left that I’d miss the asshole. We spent nearly five years talking to one another all day every day, and sometimes all night when the job called for it. A significant amount of that was about the actual work, but it turned into a genuine friendship, too. I talked to him when I was bored and lonely. I talked to him when the quiet got too loud for my brain to handle. He was just there. He always answered those calls, even when they weren’t important. He didn’t always talk, but he didn’t seem to mind listening while I spoke.

Jersey needed to not be here for a good length of time, though. His own brain needed to recover from everything he’d experienced over the course of his entire adult life. I checked in with Trista pretty regularly when I wanted to know how his mental state was really doing. She made it sound like he was almost a different person these days. I was happy for that. Grateful, even. I’d never known anyone quite as angry as Jersey. Not that he ever really directed that anger at me, but he was very much out of control for a very long time. He was an asshole in the truest sense of the word, but he was my asshole. And I missed him.

While Indy and Utah never truly left me alone, it was still lonely in the house for me now. My deepest connection was hiding on an island these days. I lived alone before our jobs crashed and burned. I’d spent years living alone, but always with the option of Jersey’s crazy voice being just a phone call away. I was okay with being alone for a long time. Then, I had a tiny taste of everyone living together in Jersey’s house. It made for a house full of tension between Jersey and Utah simply existing in the same building, Jersey not knowing how to process what had been done to his family, and Trista trying to understand where she fit into the picture. But something inside me ended up really appreciating living in a space full of people. Then it was over again, just as quickly as it’d happened.

I texted Jersey.

Me

Tried teaching myself to drive today. Drove Seph right off a bridge. Sorry, Jersey Boy.

And I couldn’t help but smile to see those little bubbles pop up on my screen before I’d even had the chance to lock my phone again.

Jersey Boy

If you want me to come home and teach you to drive, all you have to do is tell me. Leave Seph out of this.

Me

You’re not welcome here anymore. This is my house now.

Me

It’s getting cold here already. Keep soaking up the warm weather.

Jersey Boy

Miss you too, Memphis.

Jersey Boy

Especially on those days where Triss manages to keep her mouth shut for more than a few minutes at a time and there aren’t any women around to continuously pelt me with an attitude problem.

I shoved my phone right back in my pocket. Missing them wasn’t enough of a reason to ask them to come back here. We still had work to do, and Jersey didn’t need the stress that would come with it. If he was in a better place mentally, I wanted him to stay there.

I couldn’t spend too much time being upset about them. I needed to watch every video ever made about how a gun worked.