Blackjack shrugs, looking uneasy. “Courier dropped it at the front gate. Said it was urgent.”
“Oh,” I whisper.
The bounce in my seat dies a sudden, violent death. That isn’t good. Not good at all.
Tomcat lifts the box, tilting it one way and then the other, bringing it to his ear with a focused, lethal intensity. He places it back on the table and flicks open his knife. “Nothing to indicate a detonator. Writing is generic block lettering. No postage.”
“I’ll track the courier,” Cypher says, already hunched over his phone, fingers flying across the screen.
“Wait. It’s not from any of you?” I ask, my hands starting a slow, uncontrollable shake.
Someone snorts, as if the idea is preposterous, but I’m so busy staring at the present that I don’t know who made it. It’s a sound that says, why would any of us do that?
They wouldn’t. I look at Tomcat, searching for any sign of a surprise, but the suspicion etched into his face tells me everything.
Oh, no.
Tomcat slices through the tape with surgical precision and lifts the lid. Inside, nestled in a bed of white tissue paper that looks like a shroud, is a single marigold. The stem is bent, a cruel, intentional curve, but it’s not broken like the ones left on my porch.
He pulls out a torn scrap of paper. He reads it once, his jaw tightening so hard I think his teeth might crack, before he hands it to me.
You are only beautiful when you are broken.
I scoff, flicking the note into the center of the table as if it’s a piece of trash. “Liar. I’m beautiful always, thank you very much.”
“Someone want to explain?” Pope asks.
“It’s obvious. My stalker left me a gift.”
Pope folds his arms over his chest, leaning back in his chair with a heavy creak of leather. “Right. So, we’re just supposed to believe that you admit to stalking my brother, and sneaking through my club, at the same time you conveniently receive a gift from your own stalker?”
Ouch.The benefit of the doubt was a nice dream while it lasted. I can feel the brothers pulling back, their loyalty to Tomcat clashing with their instinct to protect the club from an unknown variable.Lock it down, Mari.Don't let them see the cracks.
“Why the fuck would she do that?” Tomcat growls, his protective instinct flaring like a localized storm.
Pope shrugs, his eyes cold. “Same reason she stalked you instead of being upfront. For attention.”
I press my fingers against my sternum and rub slowly. I let my eyes move around the table to the others and what I find looking back at me is almost worse than I imagined. Not warmth. Not the faces I know. Varying degrees of suspicion and distance, harder now than when Tomcat first dropped the news, and widening by the second.
Tomcat made me a promise, but there was one fatal flaw in his logic. You can’t control other people and how they act. I love him for thinking he could, but I know better.
"You fucking serious right now?" Tomcat barks.
I reach over, placing my hand on his arm. I feel the muscles bunch under my palm, a coiled spring ready to snap, before they slowly uncoil under my touch. “It’s okay,” I whisper.
“No, the fuck it’s not,” he growls.
I give him a small, empty smile. “You’re right. It’s not. But you brought me here to help them shore up the blind spots. So let’s do that, then we’ll deal with the rest.”
Losing people is a story I know by heart. The pain is there, pulsing under my skin like a dull itch, but I’ve survived a much more vicious version of this before. I’ll survive this one, too.
I turn to Cypher, my expression a blank mask of professional detachment. “It’s easy to find the blind spots in your cameras if you watch them long enough. I’ve been hiding in shadows for six years. Finding yours was child's play. Do you have your laptop? I can show you from there or walk you through the perimeter. Doesn’t matter to me.”
I lean back, twiddling my thumbs and letting a soft, rhythmic hum fill the tense silence.
"Is she actually…" Joker stares at me incredulously "…is that theJeopardytheme?"
Tomcat is arguing with... someone. It doesn't matter. I’m staring at the wall, focusing on the grid in my head so I don't have to feel the weight of their judgment.
