Livianna
Adrenaline was sparking off the edge of each nerve ending as the door slammed behind me, the boxes thrown carelessly over the back seat and into the trunk, landing with a thunk and rattle as the guns found their new resting spots in their taped-together boxes.
Taped together.
What luck, huh?
I'd been expecting to have to fumble with a bunch of separate boxes, slowing me down, making an actual altercation a real possibility.
It wasn't that I was worried about one per se, but whenever possible, I liked to avoid black eyes and busted ribs.
The car peeled off, making my stomach drop down even as Astrid half-turned from her position in the passenger seat, smile tipped up slightly.
"He was kind of cute, don't you think?" she asked, head tipping to the side to watch me as I righted myself in my seat, flattening my hair as the heat from the vent made my cold cheeks, nose, and fingertips prickle and ache as the chill warmed out of them.
"I didn't really notice," I told her, shrugging.
"Oh, fuck off. You noticed. All that yummy caramel skin. You noticed."
"I saw a biker jacket and a dog feasting on human flesh. And the boxes. That was it. I didn't really get to ogle anyone."
Astrid's hazel eyes rolled. "What is the purpose of life if you can't take a second or two out to eye-bang a hot guy?" she shot at me.
Astrid liked men.
Mostly looking at them, hitting on them, and then never following through.
And the men, well, they certainly liked Astrid right back.
She was gorgeous in her somewhat rocker-chic way with her long bob of coppery brown hair, her tendency toward leather pants and tight shirts with no bra that allowed you not only to see nipple but the little barbells that poked out of them as well.
And she just had that vibe.
That sensually confident vibe.
Men didn't see sex in layers like women did. If they could, they would know the second she stabs her little claws into them that there was no way she was going to end up on her back in their bed
Sex, attraction, lust, men.
It was all a power play for Astrid, built on a lifetime of fucked up shit that made her always feel powerless.
Little girls didn't stay little forever.
Hurt little girls didn't hold bruises on their flesh for the rest of their lives, wrapping their pain in fear and shame.
No.
They became women with claws and teeth and a thirst for blood.
Even innocent blood.
Though, if you asked Astrid, the concept of an innocent man was an oxymoron.
No man, not even the one in the seat beside her, was someone she'd call innocent.
And, in his case, I'd have to give her that one.
Camden was, well, Camden.
Tall.
Dark.
Handsome.
Lethal.
Mute.
The thing is, he didn't even need to speak, to regale you with his war stories, to make you aware of how dangerous he was, how bloody his hands were, how not innocent he was.
Everyone vibed.
Astrid sex-vibed.
Camden death-vibed.
I was half surprised that plants didn't simply wither and die when he walked past them.
"He was hot, right, Cam?" Astrid asked, watching the side of his face.
Watching because she knew he would never answer with words.
He didn't.
Couldn't, maybe.
We had no idea. If he was mute because it was a medical condition, or that he simply chose not to speak. All we knew was he didn't. Even in all the years he and I had been working together, I had never heard a peep from him other than a hiss of pain when he took a knife in the fleshy bit right between this third and fourth rib.
Cam's head turned slightly, giving her a half-raised brow and eye-roll, something we both knew to mean something to the effect of You've got to be fucking kidding me or I'm not involved in this conversation.
Astrid huffed, falling back into her seat, facing forward.
"He was hot."
"There will be other hot guys for you to toy with," I assured her. There always were.
It was kind of lucky - kind even - that she only toyed with the hot ones. The ones who got enough ass that they didn't find themselves overly put-out by her eventual rejection. She didn't go for the easy targets, the shy guys in the corners, the middle-aged, balding, waistband-bursting divorcees. She wasn't cruel. Just impulsive. Compulsive even at times.
She couldn't help herself.
And she had come so far since I'd gotten my hands on her that it felt unfair to try to push her too hard too fast.
Someday, she would get control over it.
But that was not today.
And I couldn't be annoyed that she was more concerned about the biker we'd just robbed than the fact that the job we'd been hired to do was almost done after several long, frustrating weeks.
"We're ditching this car on the next right," I reminded Cam even though he had a better memory than even I did.
I was just hyped up still.
I'd been hiding in the damn bushes for nearly an hour, half worried about losing a toe or fingertip to frostbite if someone didn't show soon.
We'd been expecting more men, to be perfectly honest.
Two or three at least.
It was why Cam was driving and I was on the property even though Camden was a faster runner, a stronger fighter. At least when it came to men. He was bigger, stronger.
But me, I was the tits and ass.
Maybe I shouldn't have felt comfortable admitting that. Maybe it should have made me feel like I was setting feminism back a couple decades.
But the fact of the matter was, nothing worked quite as well at disarming a group of horny guys than a good ass or nice tits.
Like it, lump it, it was the truth.
And, as far as I knew, there was no hornier set of men than bikers.
Except maybe college frat assholes. But in my book, those were boys, not men. So they didn't count.
Camden pulled the SUV into the rental lot, cutting the engine and waiting.
Astrid shifted in her seat, dragging her jacket back around her body, pulling the hood down low over her face as she reached in her pocket to find the wipes. As we all did, wiping down any hard surface we knew we had touched.
See, you didn't just steal from a Henchmen.
Not just because they were criminal bikers. Because, well, let's be honest, bikers weren't exactly known on the street for their brains. But because The Henchmen MC had the unlikely distinction of being connected to one of the biggest paramilitary organizations in the country. Which was saying something. Because there were a lot more of them than any normal civilian realized.
Hailstorm was a force to be reckoned with.
Largely in part, in my opinion, to the fact that it was run by a woman.
Women in male-dominated positions were fearsome creatures.
I would know.
They worked harder, dug deeper, they learned twice as much as the men they were in competition with would, trained until their bodies broke, put them back together with some elastic bandages and Bengay, and trained again.
Because we knew that at any small sign of weakness, we would be targeted. Hard.
So we had to be the best. We had to employ the best. We had to never show weakness.
So Hailstorm, run by Lo, was not some whiskey-sipping, clubwhore-banging, biker gang.
They were highly trained men and women with specialization in everything. Including lifting fingerprints.
They'd find the car.
Of course they would.
I would bet that within two hours, Lo would have called in her protege, had her on her laptop hacking into city cameras.
They'd find the SUV, search it for clues.
And we were going to leave as few as possible.
So we wiped it down. We made sure our faces were obscured before we got out of the car, we grabbed the box, tossed the key in the lockbox out front since the place was closed, and walked to our waiting car.
They'd look into the rental records.
And find some chick who looked vaguely like Astrid had supposedly rented the car for the day. With a pre-paid visa card.
No links.
No nothing to go on.
Lo and her team were good.
So was I.
So was my team.
Even if it was small compared to her massive organization.
"Let's switch," Astrid said as we got to the sides of the blue sedan Cam had owned since forever, just a clunker with no record tracing back to any of us to use when we needed it. "I want to stretch out," she added, reaching for the door to the backseat.
"We lucked out," I told Camden an hour later after Astrid had passed out in the backseat, her jacket bunched up under her head like a pillow, her legs curled up toward her chest protectively. She always slept like she was expecting someone to attack. Her fist was closed around a pocketknife, the metal worn to lackluster from her constant grip on it.
Cam's head nodded at me as he turned the heat down a bit, cracking his neck.
Cam hated to be hot.
Almost as much as Astrid and I hated being cold.
There was no such thing as balance in our world. When it came to a battle of wills, one or two of us was always the odd man - or woman - out. Some nights, he woke up in a ball of sweat. Other nights, Astrid and I woke up shivering.
"We can unload it a few days after we get back, get paid finally. I hate having a job hanging over our heads."
Even if it was a small one.
Just one gun.
I didn't get out of bed in the morning for just one gun. It was a waste of time and energy.
But, for whatever reason, this guy was willing to pay ten grand for a gun that would only be worth half that.
And since it cost us jackshit by stealing it, we were ten- or more -k in the black.
I wasn't a thief by trade.
I dealt in arms, weapons, something trustworthy, steady, able to bring in a good income to someone who had forged the right connections.
I never stole from other arms dealers.
It was bad for business.
But the fact of the matter was, there was only one Frank Wesson Double-Trigger anywhere in the world available. And it was being given to Henry Cranford by The Henchmen MC.
Desperate times, as they say, call for desperate measures.
They made honorable arms dealers steal from each other.
Because, quite frankly, Manuel - who was buying the gun from us - was not the kind of contact I wanted to lose. He brought in too much money, too many connections.
So if there had to be a bit of dishonor among my colleagues and me, so be it.
Besides, it wasn't like we were stealing food out of their mouths, out of their wives' and babies' mouths. It was a well-known fact that The Henchmen, despite looking from the outside as being a somewhat humble biker organization, had bank. Reign paid his men a hefty salary for keeping the place safe, for going to war with him should it be so necessary.
I imagined getting their crew cut down to almost nothing several years back also helped each man get a larger cut.
So they would be just fine if they lost the guns. Even if they lost the client because they lost the guns. There were plenty of other collectors or organizations to reach out to.
They had their hands just about everywhere.
But so did I.
So did we.
Because for me and mine, we didn't have generations of contacts to pull from, solid reputations to stand on.
We just had us, the three of us, who no one had known about more than six or so years ago, at least not in the arms-dealing capacity.
Camden had a past.
Though since he didn't speak, I could never learn it.
I had one too, but never as a boss.
So we needed to claw our way up.
We scooped up the scraps none of the bigger arms dealers - like The Henchmen - wanted to touch. The small-time guys. The scared wives who wanted a gun to protect them from their estranged husbands. The wannabe gangster who had dreams of creating the next big street gang. Hell, even the damn preppers. Those paranoid freaks who thought the government wanted to take their guns away, so they wanted to stockpile them somewhere, have them be untraceable, so if the real, registered ones got taken, they would still have ones to defend their double-wides with.
We catered to them all.
If they had the money, we had the guns.
Of course, this meant we had to bust ass harder than anyone else in the industry.
But after a few hard years, we had managed to stockpile a nice little arsenal to pull from so we didn't have to work as much as often.
Kicking back and enjoying life, that was what we liked to be able to do every few months.
Except when people like Manuel wanted some rare ass, impossible to find gun, sending us on a wild goose chase.
We'd been on the road for nearly a month, sleeping in the car in shifts while someone else drove and the third person alternated between sleeping and researching. On the rare occasion we got to grab a hotel room, it was never for long enough to feel like we had gotten a break.
It was going to be good to be home. Back in the city. Back in our loft. Back to our own beds that wouldn't cause cricks in necks, shoulders, backs, and hips, back where the noises - while varied and loud - were predictable, back where we could get takeaway at two a.m. when we were all on vampire schedules for unknown reasons, our internal clocks going all haywire of their own volition.
None of us were from the city, but had learned to make our home there, create a makeshift little family there, something desperately needed by three orphans with no family to speak of.
Except in Astrid's case.
But that bitch didn't even count as family. Just blood. Just a mix of DNA they shared. Nothing more.
"I need to put the tree up," I added, used to carrying the conversation. Before Astrid came along, Cam was all I had. It had been awkward at first to talk what seemed like at myself, but after a while, once I learned to interpret his non-verbal responses, it became natural, felt like a conversation instead of like I was speaking to a houseplant just to give it some carbon dioxide to convert. "Astrid was already talking about it on Halloween. And we still haven't gotten around to it."
In a lot of ways, Astrid was like our kid sister even though she was only a few years younger than me. As for Camden, well, his age was one of the many things I might never know. I guessed he was a few years older than me, putting him in his mid-to-late thirties. As for me, I was thirty-one. And Astrid, our little kid sister, was pushing twenty-five.
Six years, from her perspective, seemed like nothing. To me, yeah, she seemed so young still.
I wondered if Cam felt that way about me.
"Are you going to handle the lights?" I asked, watching for his nod.
It was our arrangement. I'd handle all the decorating, all the cooking and baking, but he had to do the goddamn lights.
Actually, he had struck the deal, physically ripping a strand out of my hands with a look of near disgust on his face when he jerked his head to the tree.
And, yeah, so maybe I half-assed it a bit, just laying the lights in uneven rows.
Camden was not a half-asser.
He always used his whole ass.
Which meant that, when it came to the Christmas tree, he wrapped every single freaking branch in solids. And then when that wasn't good enough, he went back in to pepper in slow blinkers until the tree looked alive, magical, making me stand back and realize that at some point in his life, he had to have a family that loved him, he had to have had someone to teach him traditions like trimming the tree properly.
There had been a gut-punch of sadness for him before I remembered that I too had once had a family, that sometimes families didn't - couldn't - shouldn't - be with you forever. And while that was not a happy thing, it didn't mean that finding a new family was any less than the other family you once had.
We certainly were not less.
Just different.
Just an interesting group composed of a lot of years of damage and fucking up and scars and stories and interesting shit coming together and making something out of the wreckage.
It was a different kind of beautiful - broken souls connecting, finding healing together, maybe filling some of the voids inside one another.
And all that brokenness, yeah, it made for one hell of a banging Christmas tree.
"Have you bought any presents yet?" I asked, needing to talk, not liking too long silences. My life had been full of them back when I had no control over it. Now that I did, I didn't let them stretch long enough for lonely to nestle inside.
Cam's head shook.
"Yeah, me either. I can't seem to think of anything for Astrid. I mean, aside from the usual. I want that 'wow' gift, you know? I guess I am still trying to make up for all those years she was the only kid in her school who didn't get jackshit while all the others got everything their hearts desired."
Camden's hand reached over, giving my knee a reassuring little squeeze. It said nothing, but spoke volumes.
It told me that, one, he thought I was a good person, that he didn't think many other people who hadn't even known someone when they were little would feel such sympathy for them, feel such a responsibility to make it right. And, two, that I would find the right thing, that things had just been haywire, that once we got home, once things fell into swing, once I got my first chai latte with two shots of espresso, got out on the town, saw the Merry Christmas signs on the buildings, the wreaths on the hotels, the tree in Rockefeller Center, the people standing in never-ending lines just for the chance at a few minutes to ice-skate, once I got into the spirit of things, the idea would come to me.
See, Cam, to me, was the most exceptional person I had ever met. To be able to convey so much without needing to say a word.
I wondered a bit absentmindedly if there was anyone else in his life who had understood him like I did, who took the time to learn his mannerisms, dig deep beneath his often-stoic exterior.
I wouldn't claim it was easy.
And I was no saint, no Anne Sullivan patiently trying to teach Helen Keller to communicate.
No.
I hadn't understood at first.
I didn't know how to read him.
So his silence sometimes grated on me, especially when I needed him, when I needed someone to lean on, when I needed answers.
And his lips remained sealed.
I had ranted and raged about why he wouldn't just write it down, so we had some way to communicate. It wasn't like he was illiterate. I'd seen him write. I'd seen him read.
But he refused to communicate that way.
In a fit of near-hysteria one night, every inch of my body bruised, busted, screaming in pain, needing to hear a kind word, needing some reassurances, getting faced with only his stony silence - even if his eyes had been telling me all I needed to know if I would have just paid attention - begged him to learn sign language. I said we could take a class together, we could learn together, we could practice together.
But he had simply sat down on the bed at my side, back to me, reached down, grabbed my hand, and squeezed.
That was all he could give me.
I didn't understand the reasons, the motivations behind why.
But I understood one thing.
If there was ever a time he had wanted to talk to me, wanted to help me, wanted to tell me everything would be okay even if it didn't feel like it, that was the time. So the fact that he couldn't, it told me I would have to learn his way, would have to study him, come to meet him where he was.
That was what I had done.
And when Astrid came along, I had helped her to understand as well, to accept things as they were, not to try to fix them.
And because she didn't want people trying to fix her, she had been on board, had learned to communicate with him as well. And he, her.
As we crossed through the tunnel, the ever-present ache that had been poking at me under my left shoulder blade easing as we crossed back into our city, as we made our way toward the lot where we stashed Cam's car - having an agreement with the guy who owned it.
"Astrid, we have to go," I told her, nudging her foot with my hand, careful not to startle her too much.
She woke up in panic sometimes. You had to ease her into consciousness.
"We have a Christmas tree to put up," I told her, nudging her again.
Her eyes snapped open, sleep immediately gone, letting out a grumble as she reached for the hands Camden extended to her.
"Why is it so cold?" she grumbled, folding deeper into her jacket as we walked the block toward our loft.
"Just a couple weeks ago you were saying how much you wanted snow," I reminded her.
"Yeah, but like... unless it is going to snow, this is completely unnecessary," she declared, a shiver racking her system.
"We're home," I told her when we got there, rolling my eyes as Cam pulled the door open for us. "That wasn't so bad."
"Says the woman without steel bars between her nipples. There are icicles on them, I swear," she told us, making Camden snort as we rode the elevator up.
I felt it the second we stepped inside, the lightness, the comfort, the familiarity, the relief.
Home.
And, what's more, I saw it in Cam and Astrid too, their shoulders and jaws losing their tension as we all went around, settling in.
Home.
After so many years without one - for all of us - it was a luxury none took for granted, a sanctuary where we found peace, where we separated life from work, where we could decompress and stop worrying.
Because nothing could touch us here.
Or, at least, that was what I had thought, a lie I had told myself day after day, month after month, giving myself a false sense of security.
Because, as it would turn out, our loft was not some magical place set apart from the rest of the world, some beautiful oasis no one else knew how to stumble across.
No.
It was just a home.
Just a loft in a city.
Where people could show up.
They could.
And one blustery winter day more than a full week after I forgot about his existence, he did.
He showed up at our door.
And that was when our crazy, but predictable little life started to chart a new course.
Even though none of us knew it at the time.