Page 19 of The Hard Way

“She wants to go,” Odin said, not taking his eyes from mine.

It was true—there was nothing I wanted more than to help my sisters, and to lay eyes on them again, even from afar. I straightened up. “I want biscotti for breakfast, too,” I said. “Doesn’t mean it should happen. If I go back, people will recognize me. They’ll know I’m not dead.”

“That’s why God gave us disguises,” Odin said.

“Think about what you’re doing, Odin,” Thor said. “You feel bad about hurting Isis, and now you’re filling her with false hope! You’re making her want things she can never have.”

“Why can’t she have this? True, she can’t come face to face with her sisters or people she knew well,” Odin said. “Yes, they’ll see through any disguise. But we can get her looking different enough that we can be in town long enough to handle this problem for her family. Forourfamily. Somebody in that town is lying and framing her sisters. Isis knows the area and the players. We have the muscle and the skills. We could probably crack this thing open in a day.”

My heart pounded with excitement. “I could put on that prosthetic nose—remember how radically that changed my face? Contacts.” I turned to Zeus. “He’s right, if I stayed away from people who knew me really well, it would be fine.”

Zeus scowled at Odin.

“Dude!” Thor said. “What would happen if ZOX found out who she was? Think of the leverage they’d have. You think they wouldn’t hurt her sisters to get us to turn ourselves in? You think we wouldn’t turn ourselves in if it came to that?”

“Hold on—I would never want that,” I said in a small voice. “I would never want you to turn yourselves in—not for anything.”

“We’d turn ourselves in if we had to,” Zeus said. “If ZOX threatened your sisters’ lives, we’d turn ourselves in. ZOX can never know your connection to your sisters. We can’t let them figure that out.”

“Then we don’t let them figure it out,” Odin said. “We’refucking-ghighly trained secret agents who have been living afuck-youlife of crime for years. If we can’t get to the bottom of asmall-town mystery without blowing our cover, what good are we?”

Odin was making sense, or maybe I just really, really wanted to help my sisters. Either way, I was filled with hope.

Zeus shook his head. He was filled with something less fun than hope.

“We pay a visit to this kid who’s lying,” Odin said. “Like killing a mosquito with a hammer.”

Andy Miller would last exactly one minute being questioned by my guys. I still couldn’t believe he’d lied! “Seriously. If I wore the nose? The contacts? I stay out of sight? Nobody would recognize me. You guys wore masks the last time we were through. We could be completely incognito.”

“This is insane,” Zeus said.

“You hate the nose,” Thor said.

“I’ll wear it for this. I’ll let you smear that gluey makeup all over my face to hold it in place. Anything.”

“Do you not remember how it itches? How you hated it?” Thor said.

“I abandoned my sisters, and now they need me.”

“You didn’tabandonthem,” Zeus growled.

“No, I kind of did. I wanted to be gone. They needed me, and I wanted to be gone…”

“You have to stop with the guilt,” Thor said. “It’s ZOX’s fault you can’t go back, not yours.”

“We could stay in the next town,” Odin added. “Two towns over. Three. We sweep in and out. Likefucking-gghosts with the hammer of justice in ourfucking-gfists.”

The hammer of justice. And lying Andy Miller was the mosquito. I was liking this plan more and more.

Zeus didn’t look happy, but Odin had a point. “You robbed the Prime Royale,” I said.

“We made the Prime Royale our bitch,” Odin said.

“The most heavily guarded bank on the West Coast,” I went on. “You snuck in past five kinds of alarm systems. How hard can Baylortown be to sneak into?”

“Us robbing the Prime nearly got you killed,” Zeus reminded me.

Hmm. Yeah, there was that.

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