“Zira!” Peter yells at me and trips over my coat at the door. “Zira, wake the fuck up.”
With burning eyes and hotter shame flushing my cheeks at what he almost caught me doing, I clutch the sheets tight to my neck and peer painfully at the disheveled form of my brother at the foot of my bed.
“What the fuck?” I croak. “You ignore my calls and texts and then burst in without knocking? Get out!”
“No, get up! We gotta go!”
“What? Go where?”
“No questions!” Peter yells at me, and then he disappears back down the hall.
“Fuck off then!” I yell after him, letting my anger from before sweep back in tenfold.
Peter reappears in the doorway, his face panicked. “Fucking hell. Harris needs our help clearing out the warehouse where we stashed the loot because some fucker murdered the other team. Do you understand? Someone knows, Zira, now get the fuck up!”
8
BRADLEY
“Eight masks in total. The Bauta’s the only one on the receipt with a name, and this one at the end I think is the Arlecchino mask.”
Raven, Joker of the Suit and the smartest woman I know, sits next to me in the car, reeling off all the information she’s dug up about the masks since I entrusted all the information to her. She tucks some of her muddy brown curls behind her ear and glances up at me.
“I’m impressed you even found these,” I say, staring past her shoulder to her laptop.
“I have my ways.” She smirks. “And by ways I have to call in a few favors with some mask experts as well as a friend who could guestimate what the masks were made of. After that, it wasn’t hard to track down the voice changers you described and find people talented in crafting masks with that feature. From there it was?—”
I hold up my hand and she stops talking. “Raven. Your skills never cease to amaze me, but you don’t have to justify your path to me. Your work speaks for itself.”
“But I want you to be informed,” she says. “Just in case.”
“In case of what?”
Her eyes drop to my chest where my healing wounds are hidden under a black muscle shirt and several bandages.
“Raven, I’m not going to get shot again.”
“You don’t know that,” she replies sharply.
“She has a point,” comes Frank’s voice from the front seat. “No one can predict that.”
I warm my smile and pat her forearm gently. “Okay, let me put it this way. If I get shot again, it won’t have anything to do with how much or how little information you’ve given me, okay? It will be Frank’s fault for not keeping me safe.”
“Hey!”
Frank's indignation draws a smile from Raven and she sighs. “Sorry. You’re right. It’s just easier when I’m in a computer, y’know?”
“I know. Stay here with the guards. We won’t be long.” Satisfied that Raven believes me, I step out of the car with Frank and into a dusty alleyway that stinks from the garbage left to bake out under the sun. Before us, a set of short wrought-iron stairs leads to a black door, through which we find a man leaning against a counter, picking at his teeth with a toothpick.
The store itself is relatively small with all kinds of masks hanging from hooks on the wall and decorating the tops of display cases.There’s everything from presidential and biblical to animal and clown, with the display cases holding a range of more unique monster masks and some expensive-looking masquerade ones covered in stones.
Frank leads the way to the counter and immediately walks around it, much to the alarm of the owner who abandons his toothpick and straightens up.
“Hey, you can’t be back here, what the fuck?”
Frank’s on him in an instant, grabbing him by the back of the shirt and slamming him down on the counter so hard that the glass displays below crack slightly. He presses his gun to the back of his head and leans down. “Take your fucking hand off the shotgun and place both hands on the counter next to your head,” Frank instructs with a growl. “Or I’ll start shooting toes off.”
The owner whimpers and his eyes roll back in his head as he tries to get a better view of Frank. Unable to, his wide eyes snap to me as I finally reach the counter, and with a hoarse whimper, he lifts both hands and slams them down on the counter.
