The phone buzzes, and it’s my brother Trace calling me.
I swipe to answer, bracing a hand on the counter. “Aye?”
“What happened at the club?” he asks, voice low and clipped.
“It was a clusterfuck,” I tell him. “That DEA agent turned out to be a woman.”
“Is that why you didn’t take her out?”
“There’s more to it.” I hesitate, resisting a grunt. “Listen, brother, that agent is the same bird I saw do the walk of shame from Connor’s place a couple of months back.”
Trace whistles low. “Fuck.”
“I already called Shane. We’re keeping an eye on him.”
There’s a pause. The weight in Trace’s silence is familiar, the kind that always means he’s steering toward something I don’t want to talk about.
“What about you?” Trace asks finally. “How’s the neighbor?”
My gut tightens, and I keep my tone flat. “Why?”
“I saw her in your flat on the security feed,” he says, voice oddly absent of any real concern.
I imagine her snooping around my flat. “Nothing’s missing. And it’s nothing I can’t handle.”
And nothing I wouldn’t do, like kill some eejit harassing her. She’s got shovels and can help me bury the body.
I smile at that one.
“You sure?” Trace knocks me from my thoughts. “I can run another intel on her. Update the one I did a while back.”
“Nothing’s changed.” I don’t tell him about the way she smiled as she threatened to kill a man.
Was the smile happiness from her gardening? Or seeing me? Like she’d been waiting for me all day?
“She’s harmless,” I confirm. “Just a little odd.”
He chuckles. “Was it two years ago that I ran a background check? I don’t remember half the details anymore.”
I don’t push. If Trace doesn’t remember, nothing about her raised a red flag or was worth storing in his steel-trap memory.
“We can’t all be married to a mob princess,” I mention his wife, and I’m dragged back to thinking about Fallon all over again. Who is not a mob princess or connected to a crime family at all.
Thank fucking God.
Her, with that dirt-smudged cheek, calling me her boyfriend, makes it feel like it’d be so simple to just make her mine.
I clear my throat. “I’m good here. Don’t worry about it.”
Trace mutters something about meeting Shane later and hangs up.
Silence fills the flat again. Only this time, it’s not the coffin kind of silence. It’s charged, heavy, because I can’t stop thinking about my neighbor.
I drift back to the window, towel hanging loose at my hips. The city heat sizzles in the air outside, but I’m not looking at the skyline. I’m looking across the narrow curve to the flat next door.
Fallon’s place.
And there she is.
