Page 32 of Never Enough

Demon snorted. “Jealous of what? Your gut is going to rot now that Kubrick has tempted you into eating all of that shit she puts in her system. No wonder you’re in the gym for two hours every morning. You need to burn off all the feckin’ calories.”

“That’s not why I’m in the gym,” Waters teased. “Gotta keep up my energy for after work.”

The medic shook his head in disgust, murmuring something about still needing eye bleach.

“Be glad you weren’t Midas,” Waters murmured with a grin.

“Yeah, I needed more than eye bleach. I also needed ear bleach,” Midas complained.

Discarding his half-eaten NikNaks, Nemo pulled a piece of bubble gum from his pocket and began to unwrap it, keeping his eyes on Haskell on the screen. The room was silent. He could feel everyone’s eyes on him, but he ignored them. He vigorously chewed his gum, trying hard as hell not to moan at the sugary taste exploding in his mouth. If the team knew that his bubble gum addiction was because of her sweet taste, they would never let it go. He blew a bubble, popped it by exhaling excessive air into it, then sucked it all back into his mouth only to make it crack as he chewed it back into a blob suitable for blowing another bubble. It wouldn’t be long before the sugary mess lost its flavor, but he had more in his pocket. Lots more. Some days, it was the only thing that helped him keep focused.

All her fault.

It was another solid ten minutes of bubble blowing, chip crunching, keys clacking, and stoic silence from the four standing men. Finally, Waters turned a full one hundred eighty degrees, arms crossed over his chest, and frowned at Midas. “So, nothing at all on the Salieri?”

Completely focused on his screen, Midas replied, “Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zip. Zero. It’s like Gendry, that lying sack of shark chum, made it up. They do not exist.”

TB added to the conversation. “And yet, according to Loki, Gilgamesh, and Medusa, they confirm the Salieri do exist.”

A snort came from Steel, the furthest left in the line. “If you call pregnant pauses and shared glances confirmation.”

“Well, what would you call that?” TB snapped back. “Sometimes it’s what people don’t say that’s most telling.Sometimes, it’s what they physically do that gives everything legitimacy or illegitimacy.”

“So sayeth the interrogator,” Demon mumbled from his spot between Steel and Waters.

Waters broke up the impending argument. “Well, since the triad goes all see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil when we try to ask them about the Salieri, we need to go to our next option. I doubt Nemo’s little cat burglar has as much compulsion to hold her tongue as they do. If she works with them, she might have information she could give us, so we need to start pressing.”

The guys had been so busy talking amongst themselves that they’d been temporarily distracted from the monitor. Nemo had been listening, but his attention had never diverted from the pissed-off pixie on the screen in front of him. He’d been watching her assess the room, looking for exit options. Apparently, she’d found one.

Waters had turned his attention back to the screen by now. “What the fuck?” The man’s voice was soft but nonplussed.

Inside, Nemo was howling with laughter. Typical kitty cat. Go high. If her head fit through a space, she’d try to wiggle through it, too. She had dragged a chair over to a far wall, and she was now standing precariously on her tiptoes on the headrest of a wheeled chair, some sort of mini-tool in her hands, unscrewing the grate of an air vent in a room that was allegedly inescapable.

He leaned forward, hands braced on the desk’s edge. The grate was hanging by the down, left screw only. Her cute little ass was just wiggling through the air vent on the supposedly impossible-to-remove grate.

It was possibly the hottest thing he’d ever seen.

When her feet slid out of sight, he rolled off the desk and made his way to the whiteboard. On it, he wrote “THIRTYDAYS,” underlined it, and then listed each of his teammates’ names underneath.

TB frowned. “What the fuck?”

“She’s mine. In my bed, permanent. No one else.” Nemo stood at the board, arms crossed over his chest, jaw set stubbornly, daring them to challenge him.

The silence in the room had nothing on the proverbial pin drop. Each man in the room was stunned. It was like someone had shot them with an old-style villain’s freeze ray.

The most comical of them all was TB. If a person’s eyeballs could have exploded out of their head, his would have done it. “Repeat that, please.” Once he found his ability to speak.

“Thirty days. She’s it. Her, or no one else, ever again.”

Steel looked at Nemo, his cold snake eyes assessing the youngest member of the team. “Bet is valid under one condition. It also means no other women, dude. You’re cockblocked until she agrees to be yours, even if she never agrees to it.”

Nemo confirmed with a nod. “Don’t want anyone else.”

Demon barked out a single laugh, rounded Midas’ desk, and placed his own bet on the line. “SIX YEARS. And I’m being optimistic,” he added as he threw the marker back into the whiteboard tray. “Feck, it’s payday. First time you set foot outside of the building, you won’t last six minutes before you’re up some girl’s skirt.”

“Nemo,” Midas cautioned, “this is a bit extreme. You can’t back out once we’ve bet on it.”

“Oh, I’m taking this bet.” TB grabbed the marker and scrawled his prediction on the board. “WHEN HELL FREEZES OVER.”

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