Page 5 of Cruel Lies

Across the desk, St. Clair laughed at my outburst. "Yes, rent here is reasonable, at least. And your landlord, I’d like to think, is a reasonable woman."

"Yeah," I agreed, mumbling as I read into her more thorough details in the folder of intel. "Not much on her, is there?"

Lilly shrugged. "All I know is that she’s living under an assumed name, and the client brought us evidence of her involvement on a low scale. On their side, everything looks like it’s on the up and up."

I quirked a brow at her tone. "I sense there’s abutin there somewhere."

Her head tilted, giving her away. "They offered a whole lotta money to have her taken out, and the time frame is short on this one. You’ve got two weeks. He wants her dead by then, with a lock of hair for proof."

Lilly St. Clair rarely, if ever, got a hinky feeling about a case. When she did, it was usually justified, and I learned long ago to heed her warnings. "What do you want me to do?"

"I want you to becareful.."

The folder made a funny sound when I snapped it shut, rising to shake her hand and accept the contract. "You know I’m thorough."

Her hand slipped into mine for the cursory rattle we all performed when accepting a job. "I know. Your reputation precedes you. I’m not surprised at all that your team was hand-picked for this contract."

I stopped in my tracks as I was turning around, throwing a glance back at her over my shoulder. "Hand-picked, you say?"

She nodded once, the frown on her face deepening. "Yeah. The client said he’d heard of your rep. Said he wanted my best and sharpest crew on the job." Her lips pursed, and she reminded me of a woman I hadn’t seen in years, who used to do that same thing when looking down the barrel at something she didn’t particularly like. Miss Caroline Daniels, my late stepmother. She used to have that same moue of disgust. It felt like a shock of cold water to see it on the lips of my now-boss.

It stuck with me as I walked out of her office and down the hall to our home.

Ward C.

The whole block of rooms had been repurposed on one side of the hall to connect to each other like some mockery of a singlewide trailer. There was a main room—room seven—that served as a sort of commons area for us. A living room, really. On the left of that was the kitchen and eating area, where they’d knocked down a wall to make it an open floor plan. Beyond that was a larger room that’d been split into two. Those were Angel and Nash’s rooms. There was a bathroom beyond those that connected to both rooms. And on the other side of the living room was our workroom, where we set up contracts, the wall reminiscent of that wild gif with string and push pins along the wall in a million and one directions, with a half-crazed dude pulling his hair out over the shit maze of it all, screamingit’s allconnectedor some shit. On the other side of that was my room, which had a personal en suite bathroom.

We didn’t really entertain here. There was no need to have a public bathroom. No need for a guest room, no cause for anything a typical household would have. We were far from an average family. But those of us in the Guild were expected to stay in the Guild every day, to protect the city from the wilder members, or some shit like that. It was how Lilly kept her finger on the pulse of this place. All her killers under one roof.

It was far from perfect, but the system worked for her. Who was I to argue it? And we were across the hall from the Neons, a good group, though they were a bit rowdy for my taste.

I flopped on our sectional sofa and kicked off my shoes, trying to resist the urge to stand back up and put them away. I didn’t need to; they wouldn’t bother the others. Getting so frustrated and irate over a pair of shoes on the floor was irrational. But the longer I tried to look anywhere but at those shoes, the more the anxiety over an unorganized house gnawed at me like a rabid mole rat.

I tapped my fingers on the arm of the couch, listening to the sound of Angel moving around in the kitchen, probably prepping for breakfast, or Nash thrashing around in his room, likely in the throes of a night terror again.

After two minutes of this annoying cacophony of sounds, I sighed, stood up, and marched my shoes over to the organization rack, grunting as I bent over to lay them in their cubby.

Completing this banal task filled me with a sense of relief. In the kitchen, Angel chuckled. I knew it was at me—it wasalwaysat me.

"You made it two and a half minutes, Ro. That’s a record for you." His stupid, quiet clap only served to irritate me further. "Good job, pal."

"Stuff it." I lifted the dossier from the coffee table and tossedit on the counter beside him. "We’ve got a new job. A special request for our team to handle it."

Nash stumbled out of his room with one hand around a bottleneck, the glass nearly empty, from the looks of it. His hair was askew, his forced grin a little lopsided as he glared in our direction.

"Up early, for you, Nash," Angel snapped, taking offense at the bottle in his hands. Nash had taken to drinking pretty heavily after the disfiguration, and I didn’t have the heart to take it away from him. "What’s the matter? Bottle too empty?"

"Fuck off," Nash snapped back, grumbling in the general direction of our brother as he slammed the bottle on the counter and hunched himself over the sink. "I’m an adult. I’ll do what I want. If that means drinking until I black out, then I dare you to try and stop me."

I rolled my eyes at his stupid, childish tantrum. "You need to chill out. It’s not even ten in the morning."

Nash’s gaze turned to me, confusion warring with irritation on his features. "Why the hell are you up? I know damn well you’re not usually a morning person."

"New contract. We’ve been requested for this one." Waving the dossier in the air, I stepped in his direction, offering it like an olive branch. "Take a look."

Angel leaned over his shoulder to read it through, his eyes widening almost comically. "Why would anyone request us for this kind of job?"

I shrugged, knowing damn well the unasked question in his words. "Client knows who we are and the type of work we do. I suppose that’s a good enough reason as any."

---