Page 42 of Sin

Though I’d rejected the pizza, I did accept the beer Lewis handed to me, and I chugged several mouthfuls of the beverage. Wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, I looked around to find all of them watching me like I was some animal in a zoo. “What?”

“Nothing, man,” Lewis said, “Just thinking about how fast that’s going to hit you without any food in your system.”

He wasn’t wrong. I’d barely eaten anything since leaving prison, hadn’t eaten much there either, to be fair, and my alcohol tolerance was at an all-time low. A pleasant buzz numbed my heavy thoughts, and I found myself relaxing.

“Anyone have any card games?” Jinx mumbled around a mouthful of pizza.

Mare flicked a pack of Uno cards from the confines of her jacket. She tossed it to him, and he caught it with a happy grin. “Hell yeah. I love this game.”

“I know,” she said with a smirk.

Jinx beamed as he opened the deck and started poorly shuffling the cards. Blade took pity on the big guy and expertly shuffled them for him. Next, she dealt each of us seven cards.

To play, we all had to sit on the floor, and I almost laughed at the situation I found myself in. If I’d told my past self that one day I’d sit on a dirty motel floor playing Uno with this team of misfits, I’d have questioned my sanity.

After a couple rounds, Mare said, “So…” She placed a green two on Lewis’s green card. “Today sucked.”

Jinx groaned as Blade placed a skip on him. “Don’t remind me. I still can’t get the picture of her body out of my mind. I wish I could scrub it from my brain.”

When it was my turn, I played a draw two, and Lewis muttered something too low for me to hear as I said, “If you figure out a way to do so, let me know. I have a few memories I wouldn’t mind getting rid of.”

“Ditto,” Mare agreed, meeting my gaze in a moment of solidarity.

And to my surprise, the rest of the team murmured their own agreements. Sometimes I forgot who these people were. About their pasts.

Which reminded me.

Sipping from a new beer, I eyed Lewis. “You know, I’m familiar with everyone else on this team but you.”

Lewis smirked, taking a large bite of now cold pizza. “What do you want to know, Sin man?”

I stared down into my bottle while I thought about it. “How did you come to join the Legion?”

The game halted while everyone listened in, even though they probably already knew this.

He grinned. “I hacked into London’s home security.”

My eyebrows rose. “Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“Why would you do that?” I asked incredulously. I’d seen the security in London’s home. If I were going to hack into somewhere, I would have chosen an easier target.

Polishing off his pizza, Lewis then licked his fingers. “Because any place that guarded was sure to have something expensive locked inside. And I was poor enough to risk jail time on the off chance I managed to find something valuable.”

I smirked. “I bet you thought you’d won the lottery when you got inside.”

He nodded, looking thoughtful. “Yep. I didn’t know what any of it was, but I knew expensive when I saw it. I started stuffing anything I could into a sack. Jewelry, some old looking scrolls, a folio I’m pretty sure belonged to Shakespeare…”

When he paused, I cocked my head. “And then what?”

“Then London scared the shit out of me. Spotted him sitting in an armchair in a shadowed corner of the room, drinking some wine. Apparently, he’d been in the room the whole fucking time just watching my clumsy ass try to steal his stuff.” Lewis shook his head and laughed. “You wanna know what he said to me then? He offered me a drink. A drink!”

All of us chuckled along with him, and he smiled good naturedly. Then he grew quiet again, thinking over his next words. “Fuck knows why I agreed. But I guess I sorta thought that since I’d been caught then the cops were surely on their way. And if I was going to jail, then I might as well enjoy a nice drink before I went. Instead, he sat me down, poured me a drink, and offered me a job. Said if I was that good to be able to break into his house, then I deserved a job that matched.”

My gaze drifted to the door separating us from London. He really was something else. Spotting those with unappreciated or overlooked talents and giving them a purpose.

Just like his dad.

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