“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I haven’t been real with people in so long, I’m not sure I’m doing it right. Eating dinner at Ace and Sonny’s is the closest thing to real human interaction I’ve had since… sincehigh school, except high school was….” He swallowed. Oh, he must be raw and out of his element to talk about this.
“An unending game of dodge-the-fist,” Jai said, and Eric almost choked on his tongue.
“Did Ernie—”
“Nyet.” Was the sigh prodigious because the man was prodigiously sized? “To kill, as you and I have, there is a thing that is broken. Mine was broken by Mother Russia and a petty oligarch. Yours was broken by your father.” He shook his head impassively. “Is no difference. Is broken. Will never be fixed. We can patch the thing. We can fix a place in ourselves where the broken thing does not harm others. But the thing—it will always be broken. Once you recognize that, you can learn how to live a good life without it.”
Eric stared at him, perilously close to tears. “I’m not in love with you,” he said, his throat thick, “but I’d die for you. And Ace and Sonny. And maybe Ernie. Why is that?”
“Because we have given you room to heal that place,” Jai said philosophically. “I know this gratitude as well.”
Eric nodded and gazed outside the window again at the crispness of a cool desert in the morning. “I think the policeman is more like us than we imagine,” he said after a moment. “His department is as dirty as fuck. He doesn’t know how to fix it.”
Jai grunted. “Then this is a project. Is like when we built Ernie’s bedroom. We shall have to help him.”
“But he can’t know what we are?” Eric asked, because keeping these things apart from the guy who’d downed three—three—strawberry horrors in Eric’s camper kitchen that morning seemed pretty impossible.
But Jai sucked air through his teeth and gave a tiny shrug. “It will be big secret.” He laughed, but it was a personal laugh, because he, apparently, was the only one in on the joke. “Because how can that go wrong.”
“Sure.”
WORKING BEHINDthe glass was the same, except the day was full of sort of a suppressed excitement. Eric’s first day with Ace and Sonny had been all-hands-on-deck. They’d found him a place to park his RV and then everybody had faded into their respective lives, and he’d rather expected to be left alone.
Nobody had left him alone, and he found he was sharing the excitement of having the people who’d gone back to their jobs or school return was catching.
It wasn’t a party, he realized, but there was a relief in knowing everybody was where they were supposed to be.
A relief that gave way to a buzz of—well, at first he’d thought it was excitement. The idea of swimming in the evening with the game, handsome young police officer was one of the most promising things to happen to his romantic life since, well, December, when he’d been forced to kill his last lover. He grimaced even at the thought, but he refused to dwell on it. His code had been inviolate—he took no contract for innocents—and when his lover had taken the contract instead, well….
Jules had been a lot of things—including, yes, related by blood to French royalty.
And he’d been such an obnoxious shit that Eric had enjoyed knowing while his blood may have been blue, he’d been kicked out of every prep school he’d ever attended. Not for behavior, but for grades. A smartass? Yes.Smart? Not necessarily.
Obnoxious, a skilled and ruthless assassin, sensual and wanton in bed—yes, Jules had been all of that.
But he’d also been traitorous and deceitful, and he hadn’t cared whom he killed as long as he could collect his paycheck and tell all the stories he liked about how wonderfully it had been completed.
Eric had killed him for two reasons. One had been that the marks had been innocent—not virgins, and not clean of any killing themselves—but of abuse, cruelty, brutality, or even indifference of any sort. They had, in fact, been workingveryhard in the best interests of those who’d been truly destroyed by the system. He’d taken one look at their little office—and at their entire law firm working hard to placekittens,of all things, because that’s what defending a man trying to stop a kitten mill had given them all for Christmas—and then studied their dossiers and decided that no. These were people who evened the odds within the law, and it was a rare enough thing for him to want to preserve it, like a rare and precious fish.
Eric had planned for the contract to be his final hurrah. The two men had been through tough times before—one of them seemed to beverydifficult to kill—and Eric had figured that would be going with a little bit of dignity before he retired. But he’d turned the contract down and Jules had taken it.
That couldn’t be allowed to stand. For one thing, Eric hadwantedthose men to live. For another, if Jules had taken the contract after Eric turned it down, it would have been a sign of weakness, and Eric would have been looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life.
Taking Jules out had been an effective form of prevention in that sense. Jules had been very…loudabout himself for an assassin. When Eric had left him quietly bleeding out in the snow within sight of a military protection detail, well…. Erichadn’t needed to look over his shoulder, really. Nobody wanted to come gunning for him after that.
Go figure.
So this… camaraderie, this excitement, of everybody excited about plans for their weekend—it was sonotwhat Eric’s previous working life had been like. The communal feeling of well-being was almost adrug, particularly when Eric realized he had a social event ofhis ownto participate in.
And Brady was so appealing. A little shorter than Eric’s six two, his hair an untouched, uncoifed, dirty blond, slightly overgrown disaster, Brady still had that Boy Scout jawline and those direct brown eyes—and that sense of innocence that Eric had found in a lawyer and his PI lover and was equally as surprised to find in a policeman working so earnestly in what was obviously one of the most corrupt station houses in the desert.
And the more Eric thought about Brady, the more the buzz of excitement in his stomach started to amp up. It got louder and faster and more insistent until Eric caught his breath, almost in pain, because that buzz of excitement wasn’t excitement anymore, it wasanxiety, and why would Eric feel anxious when this was such an ordinary thing to—
When Ace caught the phone call, Eric almost screamed in relief.
It was about two in the afternoon, and Ace, Sonny, and Jai were all leaning against the shaded wall of the cashier’s cubicle, shooting the shit after lunch. Eric had been allowed to come out of the cubicle for lunch—Sonny had gone into the house and come back with homemade pastrami and cream cheese on sourdough, which was delicious. They’d all eaten while sitting on stools by the work bench, or in the cubicle with the door open, or even, in Sonny’s case, sitting on the tailgate of the pickup truck he’d just finished tuning up, and now they were swigging frombottles of soda from a cooler Ace kept out in the garage, with the promise that if Eric would let them know what kind he’d like, Ace would get it for him. The cooler also kept water, but Eric had seen the men working, and they were fast and meticulous and quick on their feet and dexterous with their hands. They burned the calories from a midday soda, and Eric enjoyed the taste of raw sugar and caffeine now as much as he had when he’d been a little kid. He was going to have to start running around the neighborhood in the early morning, now that he’d established a routine of sorts—and he wasdefinitelylooking forward to doing laps, even if the pool was tiny and kidney shaped.
But in spite of that companionable quiet, Eric couldn’t deny the rising tension in his stomach, the electricity of anxiety accreting in his joints.
