Page 52 of The Company We Keep

Even so, some weeks theydidn’thave as much to eat as they wanted. Sometimes, the bills were late enough, even with his help, that the electricity got cut off in the middle of a hot Nevada day. It wasn’t just uncomfortable — it was goddamn dangerous.

At 17, he’d left to find something better. At 17, he’d arrived in Las Abras. He’d met Riley.

Carrow went from worrying about filling his belly to having more money than he knew what to do with. He senteverything he could straight to his mother. He changed his name to eliminate any threat to her. When she was able to track him down — which was rare — she begged him to come back, if only for a weekend. The money was helping. She bought her own place before he turned 21 with the money he sent back home. He insisted to himself, though, that it was too dangerous to go home, too dangerous to get very far from the protection of Riley’s reach.

Those years had been jarring. Before Riley, he’d been forced to scrap and fight for every piece of what he earned. There had been the ever-looming threat that someone would trace his crimes back to him, that they’d come for him, that they’d take everything he’d ever worked for, jailing him and leaving his mother destitute.

It wasn’t like that after he joined TKS. Even if Carrow got pinched, Riley explained, they wouldalwaystake care of his family. That was just a fact of life when you joined the Syndicate, when you proved your loyalty.

He was a good soldier. Everything he did, Carrow told himself, he did for his mother.

A year before he lost Riley to the pen, he’d gotten a strange call from a lawyer with a Reno area code. Warily, he called the woman back.

His mother had died.

It shouldn’t have come as a shock. She’d had him late and had been ill for so long. She left him an inheritance — had, in fact, been saving as much of the money that he funneled to her as possible.

He didn’t want it. He went home to Nevada. He buried his mother. He tried not to dwell.

From then on, Carrow worked for himself. He worked for Riley and TKS.

After all: he had no family beyond the syndicate.

Carrow had never stopped to consider what he might dowith money that he earned, if not sending it back to his mother. Riley and his gang provided everything that Carrow could possibly need, from the clothes on his back to the roof over his head. With his needs met, he didn’t find the money compelling — and without the need for money to send back to his mother, he felt unmoored.

What, then, was his purpose?

It had taken Carrow a long time and a lot of soul-searching to understand that the gang life was his calling. He was a soldier through and through, and it was up to him to protect the interests of TKS, of Riley.

And so, Carrow mused, maybe Dust was going through a similar crisis of purpose. It was easy to spend one’s time building an identity that was anchored in a single aspect of life. Before he’d had The Company to think about, maybe Dust had been preoccupied with money, or maybe with the prestige of the jobs he took on.

He could ask. It wouldn’t be out of line. Carrow was his boss and his lover. But unless Dust volunteered the information, Carrow didn’t want it. He was more than happy to let Dust define his own boundaries.

The summer seasonpassed easier than any other ever had for Carrow.

Dust made the days move easy. It was undeniable.

The man’s enthusiasm for him never seemed to wane — and unlike the casual relationships Carrow had indulged in when he was younger, this one was private. Solitary. There was no jealousy, no doubts. Dust wanted him. Every minute of every day, Dust was dedicated to him.

The Company welcomed it.

Predictably, Leta was the first to notice. She knew fromthat first morning-after, when they both strode in, when Carrow smiled wide as the rest of The Company gave Dust a standing ovation for his work at the museum, his quick thinking with the students. She hadn’t missed the way that Carrow beamed at the younger man. She hadn’t missed Carrow’s hand steady at his back.

She hadn’t confronted him about it or even made an issue out of it. She’d simply caught Carrow by the sleeve as they passed each other in the kitchen, pressed a kiss into his cheek, and said, “I’m very happy, Ansel. He’s perfect.”

It spread from there.

By July, everyone was in the know about them. It didn’t take long for anything to make the rounds once Vashvi noticed.

The fact that Dust no longer slept in his own suite was, after all, impossible to miss.

Before he left the bureau, Leiby had given Dust loose instructions on how to stay in contact. Dust was supposed to check in with someone from AIIB every two weeks. He could, of course, reach out proactively if he learned something that the agency needed to know. But limiting it to twice a month would — at least theoretically — limit the chances of The Company catching him.

By his second check in with Leiby in July, Dust was bristling under the requirement.

“You don’t understand how hard it is to come up with an excuse to go out alone now,” Dust lied.

(In reality, no one from The Company questioned where he went when he wasn’t in the penthouse. Most of them had their own pursuits outside of The Company — and as long as it didn’t attract attention back to the gang, no one was barredfrom doing whatever they wanted. Carrow was, in fact, the only one out of the five of them who spent almost all of his time in the 45th-floor fortress.)

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