Page 75 of The Mercenary's Guide to Mishaps and Romance

My mind isn’t quite so sure about that, but what else am I going to say?

Suddenly, a car pulls onto the scene that I don’t recognize, and the window rolls down as Leland sticks his head out. “Get in the motherfucking car, you sweet motherfuckers.”

“Where the hell’s your car?” Tavish asks as he just starts hauling my ass toward it.

Cassel rolls his window down. “Weirdly, we hit someone’s machete just lying in the road and blew the absolute fuck out of the tire.”

“Then where’d you get this car?” I ask.

“Don’t worry about it,” Leland says. “Get in the car. There’s too much shit going on. The police are coming. We need to get our asses out of here.”

Tavish stuffs me into the back seat where Cassel sits, and Leland guns the car. He probably takes a good chunk of rubber off as he floors it.

Now that the car is on the move, I’m left fixating on the fact that my father just left me. And it wasn’t like he left me last time. He literally left me to save his own ass.

TWENTY

TAVISH

I side-eye Ellis.

I can tell he’s on the brink of something. Usually when I’m on the brink, I want to shoot something or stab something. But I have an odd feeling he wants to just crawl into the corner and cry.

I mean, he’s fully allowed to cry as long as he’s prepared for me to have no damn idea how to comfort him. But he just sits there, refusing to acknowledge anything that’s happening around him.

“Did you find anything out with the dead guy?” Ellis asks.

“That he was dead,” Leland unhelpfully responds.

“Wow, never would have guessed,” I say. “Did you figure anything else out?”

“They likely killed him while we were in the building.”

“What did you do after I left?” I ask.

“Cassel copied what he could to his fancy little tech thing and then we slipped back out and knocked on the door until someone noticed. We told them that we’d seen Nate head in there half an hour earlier, and we really were getting tired of waiting for him,” Leland says. “We left the door unlocked so it’d be easier tofind him. They were all like, ‘Oh my god, a dead body,’ and then some lady just threw up everywhere which was nasty, and Cassel almost stepped in it, and then he nearly threw up and that’s when you called.”

“A lot happened in the span of like two minutes,” I realize.

“We areveryquick men.”

“That’s concerning,” I mutter.

“Not in bed. I am a very talented lover in bed. Ask Jackson.”

Jackson pretends he’s not part of this conversation, so Leland takes it upon himself to pretend to be Jackson as he goes “Boyee, Leland is the motherfucking best in bed. He knows how to dance with my danglies.”

“Oh wow, Jackson, I didn’t know that,” Cassel says sarcastically. “And what do you think about The Fence?”

“‘Aye, The Fence is the greatest creation ever created. Thinking about it makes me moist and my nipples perky,’” Leland replies, somehow making Jackson sound a bit like a pirate.

“I think I’ve spoken enough for one day,” Jackson says. “Maybe even enough for a lifetime.”

I lean into the front seat. “Can you drop me off at my place? So I can grab some stuff?”

“They might be watching your place,” Cassel says.

“Fuck. It’s a risk I’m willing to take; I need some shit. Jackson, can I borrow your car?”

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