Page 42 of After All The Wreckage
I’d been joking, but she hadn’t even noticed.
She pulled her bag from the back, stuffed her gun into her waistband, and dragged her sweater over the top of it with an ease that proved once again that this was her reality. I wasn’t sure I’d ever stop being surprised by it.
She climbed into the passenger seat and pulled her laptop out.
“Do you have a concealed weapons permit?” I asked, joining her inside the vehicle.
She barely glanced my way, fingers flying over the keys.
“Yes.”
“So you know how to use that gun?”
She huffed as if I’d insulted her. “Yes. I’ve been shooting almost since I could walk. Both my parents trained me.”
“It doesn’t seem like your dad wants you doing this even though he was the one to bring you into it. Why?”
She didn’t look up as she talked to me, just kept hammering away at her keys. “I think the black eye and broken rib I got my junior year in high school finally pushed him over the edge.”
“What?” My voice was a low growl, thinking of teen Rory beaten up.
“There was a kid selling drugs in school. Steroids to jocks. ADHD meds to the A students. Recreational stuff to anyone who wanted to party. He was a meat hook of a guy. Beefy. On roids himself. I was taping a deal going down in the guy’s bathroom, and my stupid uniform shoes slipped on the toilet seat. Whenthe guy tried to stop me from getting out the door, I took a couple of hits before I incapacitated him with my stun gun.”
She said it like it was nothing. Like every teenager in high school filmed drug deals and took down the ringleaders by zapping them. I stared for a moment. Not sure what I felt. Awe. Fear. Pride. What had her parents felt? The same? Worse?
She looked up, caught the mix of emotions on my face, and hers turned stoic before she turned back to her computer. “I was fine. Really. If you’re going to be in this game, you’re going to take a couple of hits. Dad just forgets that because he has employees who do all the street work for him. The school wanted to expel me, but Mom used some inside information she had on the principal to reduce my sentence to a week of suspension. Dad and Mom fought about it. The ugliest argument I’d heard since the divorce. She blamed him for starting me on this path, and he blamed her for letting me work for her while watching too muchVeronica Mars. Sometimes, I think she trained me just to spite him. To prove she could do a better job than he had.”
Rory shrugged as if it was nothing, never looking up from whatever she was doing on her computer. But I knew the truth. After all these years, I could still see the real Rory. She was paying penance for a sin she perceived was hers—the divorce—and demanding perfection of herself to try and earn her parents’ respect and her father’s love. To try and fix what she thought she’d broken.
Rory shut her laptop and looked over. “I need inside the office building.”
She opened the door and looked back at me as I opened mine. She shook her head. “No. Find a place to park. We don’t want to draw unwanted attention from a patrol car by sitting in the alley. Text me your location, and I’ll meet you when I’m done tapping into the building’s cameras.”
My jaw flexed. So many things about what she’d just said were wrong. The idea of leaving her on her own while she snuck in to tap video feeds. The legality of it. The danger of it. Seeing this side of her made me feel both protective and proud. Made me want to stand up and give her an ovation while also pulling her close and using my body as a shield.
She must have felt my hesitation because she lifted a brow, lips quirking. “Honestly, Gage, it’ll go much faster without you. No one will even know I’ve been there. You, on the other hand”—she waved her hand up and down my body—“no one is going to miss you. And then they’ll be chatting about you tonight over drinks with their friends. The hot guy who popped by the office.”
My eyes narrowed. “And you think you’re what? Invisible? I hate to break it to you, Pipsqueak, but no one on Earth would be able to forget you.”
My words legitimately seemed to surprise her, and I couldn’t understand why. Guys had to have been jumping over each other to earn a spot at her side in high school. And college guys? Her sexy, edgy attitude had to have called to them. She was the opposite of invisible. Power and confidence radiated from her.
“Believe it or not, being invisible is one of my specialties. I know how to blend in and go unnoticed when called for, what to say to charm information out of people, and how to get what I need from just about any electronic device there is.”
Someone other than me might have taken her words as a brag, but I knew she hadn’t intended them that way. To her, she was just stating the facts. She did this job, and she was damn good at it. Not only good, but proud of it. She loved it.
It felt like a lifetime had passed since I’d done something I loved.
The first drop of rain hit the windshield as if taunting me.
She swirled on her foot, slamming the door behind her, and took off around the corner of the building. I put the car in gearand punched the gas, heading back toward the street, looking for an indoor garage not far from our location, and hoping Monte wasn’t stuck outside in what was going to become a deluge.
Hoping Rory would get in and get out safely with information we could use to find my brother.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Rory
EYES OPEN
