Page 44 of Penny for Your Saints

I watch as Louise sits a little taller, her spine a little straighter as the fires of rage are stoked once again within her.

“I think it’s well beyond story time, Frank,” she snarls. “How the fuck did you go from the Feds to the vigilante track—and whothe fuck are the owners of these cute little chess names? ‘The White Knight’ and ‘The Red Bishop?' Who are they—other than soon to be dead men?” She growls, her pearly incisors catching in the light. “You’ve got time to explain while we get ready to blow this pop stand.”

Everything feels far away, slightly out of focus since I watched the shitty cellphone video of Susan Lowry, my mentor, my surrogate mother; beyond cavalier about my abduction and imprisonment—remiss that she hadn’t been able to twist me to whatever corrupted cause she’d aligned herself with during her career with the bureau.

That I’ve been had. Taken for some blithe, ignorant pawn by a woman who I deeply respected and admired, in whom I had placed my trust and hopes—is now painfully obvious.

What I can’t quite manage to understand is why? How?

“I said, it’s time to spill the beans, Francis,” I snap, flying into motion—a hammerhead shark now that blood has hit the water.

“Now wait just a minute.” Frank holds up a hand, as if he can contain me with one of those beefy ring-stacked hands. As. If.

I’m halfway across the room before the stinging tears in my eyes can well up again. I’ve already shed too many tears for people who don’t really give a damn about me. Back to depending only on myself, my wits. If I can just dig myself out of the shit, I might make it out of this total snafu alive.

If not? I’ll make sure every piece of scum who’s done me or my family wrong gets dragged right down into hell with me when I go.

“The time for waiting is over, Frankie,” I snip, dropping the sheet without a care for the gawking of the Saints as I pull clean underthings, a pair of black jeans, a black sweater, and socks from one of the paper bags full of clothes Q and Frank procured for me before we were ousted from the last safehouse.

“Start talking about how the fuck you and Susan know each other so well—what she meant when you two started talking about that ‘faking your own death stuff,’” I prompt impatiently, stepping into a pair of cotton underwear, then pulling up the black jeans; aware of all four sets of eyes set keenly on my bare flesh; the thrumming undercurrent of my heat momentarily dampened by my racing adrenaline—the fight response raising my sigma blood to a rolling boil.

“Or what?” Frank kicks back on the couch, hands knit behind his head as he looks me up and down. “You might have hypnotized Caz and Q with that magic pussy of yours, but Seb and I both still have our wits about us. You’re not in charge here, Sweetheart.” He purses his lips and blows me an air kiss.

I roll my eyes, pulling the black sweater over my head—regaining Seb and Caz’s full attention now that my tits are no longer on display.

“You talk a tough game, Frank, but we all remember the Diamond Center—yeah?” I pull my long red hair from the collar of my sweater—crouching down to pull a hair elastic from the bag of clothes and accessories, rooting around along the bottom until I feel the nylon mesh of a wig cap.

Q reaches absently for his knee, and I can’t help but feel a pang of guilt for stabbing him with that pen… even if he did technically deserve it.

“I remember,” he chuffs a laugh. “You couldn’t handle the four of us. What’s your point?” He tries to shrug me off—but Seb clicks his tongue and mutters something under his breath in French, and Caz blows a loud raspberry through his closed lips in derision.

“We barely handled her, and that was when she was un-armed—in a fucking bathrobe,” Q interjects; his hand laid tenderly over his bandaged wound.

“Yeah, if we have Feds with guns on the way to breach—” Caz shuddered. “We’re going to need all the help we can get in the firefight out of this shit-hole.”

Seb nods vigorously before adding, “You’re the one who made the deal, Frank. She agrees to work with us; she wants revenge on this White Knight who killed her parents—we back her up.

“Good to know all of you will turn tail on me at the slightest bit of attention from a hot piece of ass,” Frank grumbles, pissed to be outnumbered by his own team, Frank lifts off of the couch as I work my hair into two long braids—tucking them into a crown formation before I pull the wig cap over the whole mess.

“As you were saying. You had to play dead?” I prompt him, shaking out the dark wig, preparing to pull it over my capped braids.

Prompted by the swing of momentum toward a potentially imminent breach and escape; everyone else finds themselves in the business of preparing for our exit and subsequent sojourn to the hunting shack to go to ground for Quentin and I’s rapidly approaching heat.

“I already told you who I am, who I was,” Frank bristles, pawing through a set of duffle bags on the far wall as everyone buzzes around the tiny apartment.

“I didn’t work BSU, I was DOR—but I knew Susan professionally,” he explains as he pulls two handguns from thefar bag, checking the magazines before jerking his chin at the paper bag next to my foot. “There’s a shoulder holster at the bottom of that,” he grumbles and I freeze mid reach when I realize I know that face; despite the thick coal-black beard and the years of hard living that drew deep lines in his brow and hollowed the dark spaces below his eyes—the photo on Compton’s desk, one of the square-jawed men in a dark blue suit that I hadn’t recognized; right there with Susan, the old AG and section chief of the DOR, Compton—and of course:

“Dennis…” I breathe quietly, not even meaning to speak his name.

There’s a tightness to Frank’s smile when he nods in acknowledgment.

“Yeah, I knew McBride, as far as I know, kid still thinks I’m dead.” He does his best to play it cool, but the way he struggles to swallow, the muscles in his cheek and jaw firing as he presses his lips together, gives away his fondness—his longing.

“So, you had to play dead—why?” I carefully pull the wig on, fastening the elastic straps with their teensy metal clips at the base of my skull before straightening the mass of wavy, dark hair atop my head.

“There was an… accident, a big one,” Frank explains haltingly, the others pointedly looking away from him as he crosses into this portion of the explanation. “I had been getting too close to whatever it was that your parents had been onto that the government and the Windmill were scared of…” Frank trails off for a moment—his eyes falling to his own feet on the floor, Caz busily tossing electronics into his backpack, or decommissioning tech by tossing it into another metal trash bin—a lighter and a small tin of lighter fluid prepared to make short work of the stuff. Seb packing up the components of his makeshift lab—still carefully avoiding the spinning samples from Q and the mysterious dart still processing.

“It was easier for me to disappear than to try to untangle my homecoming from all the painful truths and lies the Feds would have had to architect a cover up for. Didn’t have a wife or kids or even any surviving family that I’d seen in the last twenty years, so—it was easier to bury an empty casket and strike me from the duty roster than to welcome me home.” Frank reaches forward and pulls the shoulder seam of my sweater out from beneath one of the leather straps of my holster, his rough fingers surprisingly nimble and gentle as he helps lay the curve of the worn cognac colored leather flat over my traps—his face closer to mine than it’s ever been.

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