5. Rhaim

5

RHAIM

I walked away from Lia in a daze, feeling like I'd signed a warrant for my own death.

Probably because I had.

She'd go back to her actual Daddy's skyscraper, crawl into his lap crying, and tell him all about Friday night and I—I stood stock still in the middle of the sidewalk, shouting "Fuck me!" at the top of my lungs.

And the city being the city, some other dude shouted "Yeah! Fuck you!" right back.

"What the fuck have you done?" I asked myself, like some part of me was going to answer. My common sense, perhaps, that had apparently left the club that evening after looking at Lia's ass—or my dick, which I'd rubbed raw the rest of that weekend, dreaming of her pussy?

"Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!" I yelled at myself, in increasing volume. I raked a hand through my hair, as other passers-by parted around me like a school of fish.

If I'd been considering all the possible piss-poor times and all the worst women to ever be a pervert with, accidentally finger- banging my rich boss's little girl at a sex club— in public, no less!— wouldn't even have made my top twenty.

Because it didn't matter that there'd been three millimeters of cheap spandex in the way—not when I'd been able to feel her cunt grabbing as it came.

"Fuck," I hissed.

And Nero was going to murder me.

He knew people who knew people—hell, I was one of his people—the only question was should I own up to it immediately? Just walk right up to him and say, "You know, my only regret is that I didn't taste her," and then pretend to be surprised when I got shoved out of a high window a month later, Russian-style?

Fuck.

Me .

My phone buzzed, and I looked down at it without answering—somehow half an hour had passed—me just walking around in the city like another one of its undermedicated denizens, muttering to myself about what a fucking idiot I'd been—it was Mrs. Armstrong.

Probably to tell me that there were already men in my office, sizing me for my coffin.

"What is it, Char?" I said abruptly, as I picked up.

"Ruiz from janitorial says he needs to talk to you."

I groaned. "Tell him I'm busy."

"He said to mention Guatemala?" she pressed.

I took a long, pained inhale. Certain of Ruiz's people spied for me—mostly so casually they didn't even know they were doing it, but it was why we kept our janitorial in-house instead of outsourced. If someone started shredding too much, I wanted to know about it.

I protected Corvo Enterprises from threats both without and within.

Maybe the building was on fire, I thought darkly. "Put him through," I said, and heard her do so. "Now is a spectacularly bad time, Ruiz. This'd better be important."

"Yo, Rhaim," said a man with a light South American accent on the far end of the line. "There's a really pretty girl down here demanding I give her a job."

I pulled my phone away from my ear, to take a moment to stare at the screen, before replacing it. "Who?" I asked him, though I already knew.

"She said she wouldn't tell me. But she said that if I called you, you'd approve it."

And then I heard a woman's voice shouting at volume, behind him, "Tell him he'd better fucking say yes!"

That was definitely Lia.

And she sounded . . . unhinged.

I heard a door slam, as Ruiz went and hid himself in the safety of his office. "She's already bitten off all of her acrylics in front of me, man. She's like a fucking tiger."

I stared at the screen again, and then at all of the beauty surrounding me. Somehow I'd wound up in the outskirts of Central Park, surrounded by shaded greenery, and I felt a sudden pang. It'd been two months since I'd been up to the farm to see Gracie. I wondered how she was doing, and if she missed me.

I breathed in the slightly less citified air and came up with a plan. "Give her a key card right now, and clear it with security—and then tell her to go home and take a nap, and come back at 11 p.m. She's going to work nights for you, cleaning every toilet in the building, and if she manages to finish that, send her down to the cafeteria and make her do the grease trap."

"Uh," Ruiz said, on the other end of the line, pausing. "She's really pretty."

By which he meant that she'd never worked an honest day in her life.

And fuck yes, she was.

"So give her gloves," I commanded. "And," I added quickly, before he could hang up, "tell her I'm going on vacation." I looked around at the relative quiet. "As of now. Tell her I'll see her in a week, if you don't have to fire her between now and then."

Ruiz grunted. "Understood."

I swiped my phone off and started making a bee line out of the park.

I didn't stop until I got to my apartment, and then I only paused to decide what clothes I wanted to die in. I wound up opting for jeans and flannel, sweatpants and T-shirts, packing a duffle with a week's worth of clothes so I wouldn't have to do any laundry. I hit a grocery store on my way up for easy-to-heat-up food, a bag of apples, a case of beer, two cases of Red Bull, and then the long and twisting drive up to my farm outside of town gave me too much time to think.

I'd seen enough men die to have strong ideas about how I personally wanted to go.

Something classy—no screaming, for sure. No whining, no crawling around, no hands clutched in the air, begging for my dead mother or a God I didn't believe in to intervene.

No, in a perfect world, someone would just take me out from far a distance. Maybe I'd catch a flash of red in my eye then— pow —I'd be sniped, before I even had time to consciously worry about it. That seemed optimal.

I'd sleep with my curtains open tonight.

Because I knew I wasn't Superman.

I was good , yes, and the alarm system at my erstwhile vacation home was top notch—along with a lot of other elements of the facilities—but I had no delusions about my ability to dodge Nero Ferreo's trained killers the rest of my life.

He'd started off his career as a motherfucking arms dealer.

He was never going to run out of weapons—or access to the people that used them.

So fuck that.

Curtains wide, windows open, and no goddamn alarms on.

Whoever he sent could come and fucking get me.

I rounded the final bend in my understated Toyota Tacoma just as the sun was coming down—it was an older model, but it was small enough to have in the city, and had hauled more than one piece of mysteriously tarped and taped cargo before. And when I pulled into my long and curving driveway, I found Gracie waiting in the corner of her pasture for me. She'd recognized the sound of my engine and had come out to meet me, her golden ears perked forward, racing down the side of her pasture alongside my truck as fast as she could—which wasn't as fast as the year before, or the year prior—to meet me, her tail canted up and her mane flowing in the wind. I realized if I passed away I'd have to make accommodations for her.

I'd write up a will tonight and stick it on my refrigerator.

I pulled my truck to a stop, with a remodeled two-story farmhouse on the left, painted barn red, and with Gracie's pasture and her excited whickering on my right, behind a fence laced with wild white roses. "What, is Alonzo not giving you enough apples?" I said, pulling one out of the bag, and heading her way first. I got out my phone to text the friend I paid to take care of my place, to let him know he was off the hook for a week or so, but maybe he should come and catch a beer with me.

Wouldn't want Gracie to starve just because I'd gone and gotten murdered.

Gracie's sounds of encouragement only got louder the closer I came, until her light gold neck was craning over the top rail of the fence, her lips straining shamelessly. I couldn't help but laugh, pocketing my phone as she reached the apple and crunched down. She was a beautiful Arab Palomino that could trace her lineage all the way back to Morafic, and once upon a time she'd been one of the best show horses in the state.

Now, she was just my last living connection to Isabelle because, strangely, Isabelle's family hadn't wanted to stay in touch after she'd died.

Maybe because they blamed me for her death.

I couldn't fault them—I blamed me, too.

Gracie's lips scraped across my palm in wet hope once the apple was gone. "Cut it out," I said, thumping a hand against her neck. I'd check her hooves for her tomorrow. She leaned over and tried to nuzzle me roughly, nearly whapping me with her chin.

"I missed you too," I promised, before I grabbed the rest of what I'd brought from my truck and headed to the main house.

It took a moment to turn off the possibly excessive alarm system—I didn't want anyone breaking in here and squatting, with me gone all the time—and gave myself a few minutes to adapt to my surroundings.

It was such a dramatic shift from the way I lived in the city, it felt like someone had gone and twisted a kaleidoscope on me, losing the sharpness of my day-to-day life, pushing everything into softer focus.

And that was because this place had been Isabelle's.

My apartment was a dark-wood-and-leather man cave, but she'd kept the farm light and airy, with pastel-colored furniture, oil paintings she'd done, and pictures of people smiling on the walls.

Some of them were even of me.

I walked into the kitchen to put my supplies away and crack open a beer, then systematically went through the whole home opening the curtains on all of the windows, and some of the windows themselves, fully committed to everything I'd decided on the drive up. I'd be pissed if I was offed on the cinnamon-roll couch—Isabelle and I had nicknamed it that because it was the color of icing, and it had overstuffed upholstery with scrolled arms—but if they did it right I'd only have a moment to be upset.

I wrote a quick note on a piece of paper that I wanted Gracie to go to Alonzo and his kids, popped it on the fridge behind a magnet, and then went to the only place in the home that was truly mine—a panic room-type space I'd had them inset into an old root cellar, because paranoia and I were old friends, and I'd occasionally needed to bring my work on vacation with me.

I booted up all my systems to make sure they'd still log in and went upstairs to take an evening nap, letting fresh air from outside wash over me.

If I was still alive when I woke up, Daddy's little girl wasn't going to be the only one that was up late.