Page 63 of That Girl is Trouble

I roll my eyes. “I’m literally going to kill you. You know that, right?”

“You love it,” she says with a wink as we make our way out through the front doors of the pharmacy. “But seriously, what’s up? Something wrong?”

The cold air hits me, and I pull the zipper of my jacket up tight to my throat. These not-so-carefully crafted lies are about to crumble around me. My sister will hate me, and Graves will probably murder Axe. And I’ve somehow roped myself in to staying at the clubhouse tonight. Axe’s bed and Jesse’s old room and all the crap I’ve been stuffing into my neat little compartmentalized box of bullshit.

“Yeah. Something,” I say with another sigh. “I’m about to be in some deep shit.”

18

16 months ago

July

I stop in my tracks the second I get to my office. The drawers of my filing cabinets are open and empty. The contents of my storage cupboard are strewn across the floor. And my desk is stacked high with folders, piles of paper, and empty coffee cups.

The place is trashed. It looks like I’ve been raided. Ransacked. Searched and seized.

But there’s no yellow police tape, no warrant notice, no cops rummaging through my shit. At the centre of the mess is Triss fucking Danforth. She’s sitting on the floor, cross-legged, rifling through a box of old receipts. Her dark hair is tied back, her attention laser-focused on the paperwork in front of her, and she’s eating—

“Are those my fucking peanut butter pretzels?” I ask, the question coming out as a snarl. I know for a fact those were in my snack stash. The one I keep locked up in the bottom drawer of my desk because Tex is a fucking animal and steals my food at every opportunity. Why does everyone always touch my shit?

Triss freezes, her eyes widening before she slowly reaches into the bag, pulls out another pretzel, and shoves it into her mouth.

With an aggravated sigh, I step over the threshold from the body shop into my small office. But I don’t get very far. I’m stopped when my toes hit a stack of folders and I nearly trip over the pile.

I steady myself on a box to my left that reads Donovan’s Auto Repair – Payables 2003, and glare at her. “Triss. What the fuck are you doing?”

She chews and swallows, then plucks one last pretzel out of the bag before loudly crumpling the plastic in her hands and tossing it into the bin next to me. “You know, you don’t have to keep most of this crap. You’re only required to hang on to your financial records for seven years. You have boxes in here dating back to the ’90s.”

I blink. “Triss—”

“Relax. I’m just cleaning the place up a little. Making it more functional. You can barely move in here.”

“Because you’ve torn apart my whole goddamn office!” I yell.

She doesn’t flinch. She just gives me another shrug, digs into the box in front of her, and pulls out a brown paper bag. With one hand, she flings it at me. By the weight and feel of it, I don’t have to open it to know what it is.

“Found that,” she says, brow arching. “You shouldn’t keep stuff like that in here. This place is supposed to be clean, Axe. We talked about this. You’re an ex-con. You can’t have shit like that lying around.”

I scrub my palm over my face in frustration and open the bag. “Did you just throw a fucking loaded gun at me?”

She stills. “Um. Well, I threw it to you. But going back to my first point. You shouldn’t have that in here. And I didn’t tear apart your office. I’m reorganizing it. This is just my process.”

Jesus Christ. Stuffing the gun in my waistband, I twist back towards the garage and call out to Graves, who’s leaning over the engine of an old Civic, wrench in hand.

“Graves!”

His head snaps up and he gives me a questioning look.

“Come get your fucking woman before I throw her out. And who the fuck let her in here?” I ask to nobody in particular.

The guys working today all duck their heads. Except Graves, who smiles, shrugs, and then gives me a she’s your problem deal with it yourself kind of look before disappearing back under the hood of the car.

Letting out a loud sigh, Triss pushes up and carefully steps over all the shit lying on the floor. “You look like… well, you’ve looked better.”

“You can thank your fucking sister for that.”

“That’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about.”

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