Page 62 of Prodigal Son

Her other brow shot up to join the first.

“But if you do have to, then don’t spare any bullets. Here. Extra magazine.”

She let him hang there, looking like an idiot, before she finally took both items and dropped them into her bag – something big and black and leather, obviously on lend from Raven. As were the clothes, he assumed, since she was dressed very much like her pretend boss in a black ensemble, hair slicked back so that her cheekbones and chin looked extra sharp – and the circles under her eyes extra dark.

She looked lovely.

“I want you to text me every fifteen minutes,” he instructed. “Just a simple OK to let us know that all’s well. Send SOS for help if you need it – and if you can.” His stomach curdled at the thought. “And if I go twenty minutes without hearing from you, we’re moving in.”

“How am I supposed to text you constantly without looking suspicious?”

“You’re an assistant. They’re on their phones all the time.”

“Sure.” She shrugged…but then she looked away, reaching to smooth a hand across the crown of her head in a gesture that struck him as self-conscious. She took a deep breath, and Albie heard it catch in her throat.

“Hey.” He stepped in closer, and she flicked a hunted glance to him up through her lashes. “It’s going to be fine, I’m sure. We’re just being overly cautious. This is just a meeting.”

“Just a meeting. Says the guy who handed me agunand anextra magazine.”

He offered a smile he knew was crooked. “Can’t be too careful, huh?”

She didn’t return the smile; stared at him, hard to read. “Why are you being like this?”

In an instant, he knew what she meant. Not like this, here, now, with guns and warnings and OCD requests for constant check-ins. No, she meant last night. Showing her the chair he’d made; the way, when she’d stumbled, full of whiskey and soft and giggly, he’d only steadied her, and eased her back when she’d tried to press her face into his throat. He’d wanted her then – damn had he – and he still did, in a way that was becoming less and less about her physical charms. But he was trying to keep his distance; this woman wasn’t a diversion, or a willing accomplice to a one-night stand. Every hour spent in her presence was one in which his aversion to hurting her grew stronger.

“I just want you to be safe,” he said, quietly.

She nodded, and turned away.

Eighteen

“Are you sure about this?” Fox asked, stepping over a puddle of something he didn’t want to look at too closely.

“When am I ever not sure?” Abe shot back over his shoulder.

“Well. Maybe you’ve never been, and you’ve just been lying to me all my life.”

Abe hummed a note that was neither agreeing, nor disagreeing, and kept walking.

If Abe lived in a seedy part of town, then Fox wasn’t sure what this area counted as. Condemned? Chernobyl? At the outskirts of the city, several turns past a cozy, suburban area with tidy two-story semi-Ds and cottages, Abe have given them directions into a derelict neighborhood that reminded Fox of some of the nastier parts of the US backwoods. Tumbledown houses crammed cheek-by-jowl in weed-choked lots. Rusted iron fences with sagging gates. Boarded up windows. Dogs on chains. They’d turned down a deeply rutted dirt track that led through an untended, unfenced field full of loose goats – Fox guessed that was the source of the smell. A squat, rotting clapboard house lurked beneath a tangle of tree branches, all of it dark and wet from a recent rain. The yard was mud. Goats stood on the porch, and on the roof of a rusted-out lorry.

Beside him, Eden carried her gun in both hands, ready to raise and fire if she needed to. Her lip was curled as her boots sank up past the soles in the muck, but she didn’t comment, head on the swivel.

“I stepped in goat shit,” Evan grumbled quietly. “At least…I think it’s goat shit. I hope it is. What does goat shit look like?”

“Your mother’s face,” Fox deadpanned. “Dad, get over here, what are you doing?”

Devin had drifted over toward the toolshed, its siding peeling up from the concrete foundation at the bottom, a few scabs of faded red paint still hanging on for dear life. He cupped his hands around his face to peer through a window so cloudy it might as well have been boarded up. “If I remember Norris right, then he was always tinkering with something. Woulda spent more time out here in his workshop than the house.”

“Not much of a workshop,” Fox said, and glanced deeper into the property, out past the house toward a truly frightening thicket of trees and shrubs and abandoned farm equipment, toward a large detached garage. It didn’t look to be in any better shape than the other buildings – at first. But the windows were clear, and a well-worn track through the grass led from the house to its pedestrian door. “Maybe that’s it out back.”

At the head of their party, Abe course-corrected and headed that way.

“I don’t like this,” Eden said at Fox’s side, moving in to walk closer beside him. “Nobody’s here – I canfeelit.”

“I know.” And yet the oppressive weight of the place left his skin crawling.

In so many ways, empty houses had always left him twitchy; made him more nervous than inhabited ones. It was so easy, when you thought you were alone, to let your guard down. And for any set of watching eyes that happened along, you became the sole focus; the immediate target. People he could work around, could fool, could incapacitate, could kill. But he didn’t know what to do with shadows, and echoes, and all the pressure of undisturbed air.

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