Page 16 of Pretty Monsters

His arm drops around my stomach, and he pulls me close to his chest. We fit together perfectly, my head under his chin and resting on the pillow he managed to pull along with me.

I lay still and listen as his breathing slows down. The panicked rhythm of his heart slows as well, and I feel the moment he drifts off to sleep. The even cadence of the rise and fall of his chest lulls me into a deep sleep.

* * *

"What the fuck!"Lucien shouts, startling me awake. Sin stirs, but settles back to sleep.

"Stop yelling," I whisper.

"He said he'd behave himself," Lucien growls.

"Fuck off," Sin mutters, waking up.

"Why do you have your arm around my sister?"

"To keep her from trying to wake me up from a nightmare again."

Lucien stops pacing and drops down to sit in the one chair in the room. "Shit. I didn't think about that. Maybe I can share the bed with her tonight."

"The two of you could share a bed. I mean you both know each other much better than either of you know me."

"No," they both say at the same time.

Sin finally moves his arm, sits up, and rubs his eyes. "She stays with me."

"Let's just find somewhere else to stay. We can't live in motels," Lucien points out.

Sin grabs his phone from the nightstand and enters a code to unlock it. "Do you remember that program you developed several months ago to spy on some of the targets we were sent after?"

Lucien nods.

"Did you ever tell anyone about it?"

"No, you know I hate those guys."

"Good, because we're probably going to have to kill them if we hope to survive."

"What does the program have to do with them?" Lucien asks.

I sit in stunned silence listening to them discuss killing people they've known for years as if it is nothing more than taking out the garbage.

Lucien will survive. Sin told me this last night, but I had no idea when he spoke of survival it meant someone else would not. I'm finding myself at a serious disadvantage trying to venture through a world I don't understand the rules of.

The sound of Sin's voice pulls me out of my internal freak out. "I altered the virus software Damien uses so it wouldn't detect it, then embedded it into texts and emails in pieces so they never noticed the download or the slower speed all at once. We should be able to monitor anything that uses the private server in the basement."

"That'll come in handy. Where are those dumb fucks at now?" He pauses, and looks at me before he speaks again. "Not that it matters. They have never been able to outmaneuver us," Lucien says.

Despite his words, I'm starting to recognize the false bravado he puts on for my benefit. He doesn't want me to think there's anything to fear.

Sin crosses the room and digs out a small laptop. Using his phone as a hotspot he logs on the computer and then switches over to a secure browser I'd never seen the likes of before. It looks like random strings of letters and symbols to me, but he seems to understand each string of text as if it were a line in a book.

After another few minutes he looks away from the screen. "They are fanned out around Devil's Crossing. There are two teams in this general direction, but they are a couple of hours from here. No one seems to have any idea where we are or what direction we travelled."

"Still too close," Lucien comments. Sin nods, and without another word the two of them start sweeping through the room and eliminating any trace we were ever there. I had been thinking of them as friends, but they really were a team.

"What are you doing?" I ask when they start wiping down the surfaces of the room.

Lucien stops cleaning, and kneels in front of me like he's speaking to a child. "We need to disappear. When they don't find us, they will start sweeping the most likely places we would have gone. As far out of the way we are, they will eventually find this place, and if they get a hold of the room, they'll have a better idea of the direction we are traveling. From this moment forward, you can't contact anyone. No friends. Nothing. Everything from your life before is over."

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