Page 26 of The Hard Way

“Still. He really does seem to want to rob the First City National again.”

“We all want to knock over the First City National, baby.”

“I mean, hereallydoes.”

“Odin’s like a shark—he needs to keep moving, keep breaking rules.”

“I didn’t know sharks liked to break the rules.”

Our waitress delivered the frog legs. They looked and smelled as gross as I thought they would, but Odin came back, and together my guys inhaled the entire basket. You could deep-fry shoes and my guys would go for it.

A half hour later, Thor joined us. As soon as he took his seat, he handed over his phone. “Got a few images for you.”

“Thank you!” I started scrolling through the shots he’d taken. They were all there, all three of my sisters. My heart leaped with every photo. “How did they seem?”

“They seemed good. Really smart and strong. Like you.”

Something in his voice scared me. “What? Is there abutin there?”

Thor frowned. “You’re not going to look through them? Do you know how hard it was to take that many pictures in there without coming off like a lech?”

I put my attention on the phone. My sisters, whom I missed so bitterly. “They look good. Not as upset as they could be. Or at least they don’t show it.”

“Vanessa’s…shaken,” Thor said.

Odin and Zeus wanted to see, and I showed them. “This is Vanessa. She’s twenty-four now. She’s the total craft girl.” I recognized things in the kitchen that Vanessa had made. Some of them were new. “Candace is in community college.”

“Well…” Thor began.

“What?”

“She dropped out. The lawsuit…”

“Fuck. No!”

“She was too distracted to continue—that’s what she said, but I think she didn’t want Vanessa alone to absorb the town’s anger. And there’s no reliable money coming in, anyway. All their food production had to stop. They still do the other stuff, but…”

“The cheese was the main income center. They’re basically unemployed.”

“Except when a Paris Hilton comforter gets sold,” he said.

“Yeah.” That had been our pie-in-the-sky product—the Cadillac of comforters at a wild price tag of twenty thousand dollars. It had been kind of a joke to put it up on our site way back when, but after I joined the God Pack, it had turned out to be a really convenient way to get money to my sisters without revealing myself. I could only imagine their amazement that people out there were paying that much for comforters.

I slid through and found a good picture of Kaitlin. A senior in high school now. I knew I should focus on the case instead of my sisters, but these new pictures were like water for a person lost in the desert. “What else?”

“They’re scared about Vanessa going to jail. The county hasn’t brought up charges, but if they decide she made that decision to sell bad cheese, she could be going down. It could be manslaughter.” He paused. “It could be a felony.”

“What?”

“That’s what they told me. A peanut plant owner just went down for twenty-eight years.”

The room went hazy. “No,” I whispered.

“It was a historic sentence, but…”

“She would never sell tainted cheese! They told you that, right? She’s done nothing wrong.”

Thor looked grave. Odin and Zeus, too. My guys—my husbands—hadn’t done anything wrong, either. Aside from trying to bring an atrocity to light. And they got a price on their heads for it.

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