Page 80 of Heart of a Villain

Gage waved a lazy hand. “Now, fellas. Don’t upset the baby.”

Joel’s eyes opened to slits. “The baby? Tiare’s up? It’s okay, Eesh. I’ve got her.”

He started to get to his feet, but Mike used a foot to nudge him back down to the floor, where he drifted back to sleep.

“Shit, are we getting old?” Mike asked. “Look at us. We’re dead on our feet, Joel’s delirious, and the only one who looks like he’s alive is the kid. My body might be in its thirties, but my bones just signed up for AARP.”

“Pozza, you’re not included,” Dez quickly added. “You’re not human.”

Julien tossed up his hands. “Well, that was the news. I thought it would be more dramatic than this. I was excited when I found out.”

“I can’t do ‘dramatic’ at five in the morning, mate,” Gage said. “Pozza, can you…”

“Hunter, wow,” Giorgio said, with zero inflection or emotion. “The ground, it break.”

Julien slapped a hand against his chest. “That’s all I ask. Now for my next issue—when do we tell them? Before or after the thing we told Eesh we’re doing for her birthday that’s also surveillance?”

“We can do both,” Mike suggested. “The two of them share a birthday. We can get everybody up to Stockholm, do the birthday thing, and tell them then.”

“And we’re sure we want Larke and Xara and everybody else there?” Dez asked. “The plan was to send a team.”

Mike let out another yawn, his eyes watering. “What do you suggest? Tell them the truth? If this shit with Central goes south, we have to start spending more time with them. Remember what we said after Curtis? If our time’s coming up, we don’t want the scene of our life flashing before our eyes to be missing pieces.”

“I know, I know.” Dez dragged a hand down his face. “Shit. I’m regretting fighting Larke on the second kid now.”

“Start trying,” Julien said.

“Not if it might mean she’ll be pregnant while we’re out there. And if the second pregnancy’s as bad as the first, or worse, I don’t want to be on the other side of the globe while she’s here suffering.”

They all grumbled in agreement.

Then they shared a silent moment, no doubt trying to convince themselves that this wasn’t them preparing for death. It was them enjoying life. Curtis would always talk about being in the moment and using every spare chance he could to be with Ayesha and Josiah. Unfortunately, he hadn’t exactly been preparing for death either.

Julien sighed. “Well, since you’re all already here, you fellas are welcome to crash?—”

They grabbed sheets and pillows and moved the coffee table. Mike won the most pitiful game of rock-paper-scissors in humankind for the sofa, and someone tossed Joel a pillow that remained perched on his back. A high-end area rug with a padded cushion was a Tempurpedic compared to some of the places they’d rested their heads.

“You’re free to take one of the guest rooms, Pozza,” Julien said. “I’m up, so I’ll keep working on this.”

Giorgio looked down. “I will work. Aleksi, he is okay. Bez will sleep if our son is with me.”

Julien smiled. “Man, that kid loves his papa.”

Aleksi’s tiny belly rose and fell, and foam rollers couldn’t make a better head of curls on the miniature Pozza’s head. Dark strands had taken over every strand of blond, and only Giorgio’s barber was allowed to touch his hair. Even then, Julien was sure that Giorgio using a ruler to measure his son’s trims was more nerve-wracking than facing a firing squad.

“Well, like I was saying, they share the same DNA,” he continued. “So, they’re not even fraternal. What I don’t know is: who’s their mother if different women raised them? Is it Eesh’s mother? Is it Mora? Someone else? Are they a secret government cloning experiment?”

“Clone?”

“Yeah, Gage was right about the coffee.” Julien faced the screen, scratching at his jaw. “I’ll work on seeing if I can find relatives of Eesh’s mother, but I’ll also need Mora’s DNA. I can probably get it from a military database, but if not, if she shows up at the club, see if you can get me a sample.”

“Blood?”

“Yes, please. If it’s not too much trouble.”

CHAPTER

TWENTY-TWO

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