CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Soren let Marcella drive to the office building. Half because he was in a shitty mood and the kind people of Georgia didn’t deserve his aggressive driving, and partly because he wanted to let her hang herself.

Not literally, but professionally.

If she wanted to play Lone Ranger and solve the world’s problems on her own, he’d give her the space to fail.

He knew he was being petty. Even the bear part of him sensed that he was, but he had a right to lick his wounds after being rejected. At least he hadn’t completely shut her out when she’d returned to his room a couple of hours later, knocking on the door and calling out, “Are you ready?”

The silence was thick between them in the car as she navigated through the warren of city streets near the office tower. Occasionally, she glanced down at the navigation app on her phone.

He pondered which bills he hadn’t paid yet for the month and vowed to find someone to handle that shit for him as soon as he got home.

Home. Wherever that was.

“Turn left,” her app said, and she emitted a frustrated snarl. “Turn left where?” she asked. “There’s nothing there!”

He raised his eyebrows in amusement and opened his phone’s mail app.

A car careened around them on the right, laying on their horn and shouting in creative expletives as only a Southerner could. Marcella probably deserved the treatment. She’d made a sudden lane change to the left.

“Goddamn it. The map says I’ve already passed the address, but there was no way to turn!”

“Is that so?” Soren asked noncommittally. His mother had sent him another email.

He clucked his tongue as he read. Getting angry was so much harder when he had already resigned himself to not giving his mother what she wanted.

He tapped Reply and sent her a terse, “No. :)” in response.

Predictably, his phone rang thirty seconds later, and Marcella was still muttering about driving directions.

He would have told her that they’d already passed the building and that it was set back in the block between two other tall buildings and behind a courtyard, but she hadn’t asked for his help. Nay, she’d been refusing his help for two days.

“Hello,” he said into his phone.

“What do you mean, no?” his mother asked, sublimely tart as always.

“I said what I said, and I meant what I said the first time. If you want to threaten to send someone else to do the job? That’s fine. You won’t hurt my feelings if you do.”

“What is this insistence of yours to drive me mad? Why can’t you cooperate?”

“I’ve been cooperating for a very long time and without so much as a murmur of complaint.”

Marcella turned left. Her GPS app said, “Recalculating.”

“Damn this thing.”

“As you should be,” his mother said. “You should respect the requests your elders make of you.”

“I have plenty of respect for my elders,” Soren returned. “And other authority figures as well, assuming they deserve my attention. I’m not incapable of following rules and being part of a team when I need to be.”

He cut Marcella a hostile glare, but she was too busy leaning onto the steering wheel and squinting at the road ahead. It seemed she wasn’t cut out for city driving.

“The one time I push back on a task, you take an excessive amount of offense,” he said.

“Of course I am offended, as is your father. You’re right there. Why should we send someone else to carry this out when you’re already on the ground and briefed?”

He hated to admit she had a point there, so he didn’t.

“I would go myself,” she said. “If only to get this out of the way, so it’s one less source of stress for us. Your father is sick to his stomach over it. Do you know what it feels like to have someone you thought you could trust betray you after so many years? Soren, we’ve done everything to make this man’s life better. We paid his bills. We made sure his mother was cared for. We even paid their daughter’s college tuition. He smiled in our faces, took everything our Bears handed to him, and then slammed the door down on our hands at the first opportunity. We need to neutralize him. This is a security issue, not only revenge.”

“Ugh.” Soren pressed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger and closed his eyes as Marcella made yet another wild left turn that made the sedan tilt off the right wheels.

If he couldn’t drive on the way back, he was going to walk. She was a first for him. First woman to ever refuse him so consistently, and the first woman to make him carsick.

“Again, will you consider this favor?” his mother asked. “If you want us to leave you alone, I understand. Really, I do. We will work out an arrangement so we don’t call on you as often if that’s what you want.”

“That is absolutely what I want. I told you that months ago.”

“Why now?”

“Why?” He dropped his hand onto his lap and, as Marcella prepared to make yet another left turn, reached across her body to stab his index finger toward the middle of the block on the left side. “That building,” he said. “The one with the pinkish stone. Find someplace to park.”

“Oh,” she said. Her shoulders fell from her ears, and she perked up.

“What do you mean, why?” he asked his mother. “You had to suspect that eventually, Peter and I would decamp.”

“Honestly, we didn’t. We knew Tamara would probably never come home, and that was ideal for us because we didn’t want her entangled in Bear business.”

“Da, and you see how that worked out.”

“Don’t get rude with me. I’m still your mother.”

As if he could forget.

“Of course we assumed you and Peter would return home. We thought you’d take mates here and be accessible.”

“Fate had other plans.”

“Apparently. If you want to stay in the U.S. and limit your international travel—”

“No, no, no. You’re missing the point. I’d like to limit all travel. It’s one thing to take the occasional job for Dana. With those jobs, I know I’ll be off the hook in a reasonable amount of time, and rarely do I have to call in favors with local law enforcement to get them to look the other way while I work. I’m tired of being a moving target.”

His mother let out a ragged exhalation and then was quiet.

Darkness loomed ahead as Marcella drove them down a steep ramp into an underground parking garage.

“I hate these things,” she whispered to herself. “So cramped.”

He pressed the pad of his thumb over the phone mic. “You don’t have to try to squeeze into the first open space. Keep going until you find a gap that’s comfortably wide. There’s nothing wrong with our legs. We can handle stairs.”

She nodded.

“Soren?” came his mother’s voice from the phone.

He put it back to his ear. “Yeah? Sorry. We’ve got a parking situation. What did you say?”

“I said that I remember your father experiencing a similar sort of disenchantment with his job when he was about your age.”

“And what happened?”

“We decided we were long overdue to start training our children to handle our dirty work for us.”

He waited for his mother to laugh, but she didn’t.

Marcella pulled into an open row and, sighing with relief, swung the car into the space at the end. “Easy to get out of, too,” she murmured.

“And near the staircase,” he said.

She nodded.

“Who are you talking to?” his mother asked.

“Marcella. We’re working.”

“On what?”

“A job, and we’re about to go into a building, so you’ll have to excuse me if I end the call now.”

“Fine. Think about what I said. Do this, and you won’t hear from me again about errands.”

“Until…”

There was no way in hell his parents were going to let him off the hook for good, and he knew better than to expect peace.

She let out a breath. “I can’t make you any promises, but I’ll talk to Peter. Perhaps between the three of us, we can work out a system where I’ll only have to call you once a quarter.”

“Wait. Are you implying that Peter’s already told you to go to hell?”

“Goodbye.” She disconnected.

He growled, turned to Marcella, and held up a finger to bid her to wait. “I am sorry, I need to do this.”

Then he realized the gig was hers, anyway, and she didn’t need him.

“If you want to go on ahead,” he said, “I’ll catch up.”

She lifted an eyebrow as she reached for the AUX cord that connected her phone to the car speakers. “Really?”

“I need to make a call.”

“Oh. Fine.” She pulled the cord from the phone, put the device into the pocket of her faded Army jacket, and then leaned between the seats to reach for her bag. As he dialed his brother’s number, she dug into the seemingly bottomless thing.

He put the phone to his ear and waited.

She opened her wallet and pulled out a stack of ID cards. The best he could tell, all the pictures were the same, but the originating locations were different. She selected a South Carolina driver’s license, returned the rest to the wallet, and put the card into her coat pocket.

“Fake name?” he asked.

“Mm-hmm.” She put the wallet away and resumed her digging in the bag.

“Yeah?” Peter answered.

Soren grunted. “Did you tell our parents to fuck off?”

“What is that question regarding?”

“Don’t play stupid with me. In spite of what I may tell you at times, I happen to know you’re quicker on the draw than most people, so you know exactly what I’m getting at.”

Peter let out a frustrated breath. There was beeping in the background.

“What is that? What are you doing?”

“I’m at the store. I needed to run errands. Drea needed shampoo, and I told her I’d get some on my way home.”

From the bag, Marcella had pulled a folding knife, which he took from her before she could tuck it into her coat pocket.

Wood handle. A sharp blade made of some material that most certainly wasn’t metal.

Brow furrowing, he handed the knife back to her. “What is that?”

“Ceramic.” She folded the blade back into the handle. “Won’t show up on metal detectors. I also have a bone one, but I’m rather fond of that knife and don’t like getting it messy unless I have to.”

Frightening witchy woman.

He shook his head. To Peter, he said, “To get right to the point, did you tell our parents, explicitly, that you wouldn’t do any more of their jobs?”

“Soren, you know damn well I’ve been telling them that for the past year. They’re only now getting to the point that they’re starting to believe me.”

“What deal did they make with you?”

As Marcella opened her door, Soren’s thumb moved instinctively to his seatbelt buckle, but before he couldn’t depress the button, he stopped.

Chasing down information about Wes’s scheme was her job, and he was going to let her do it.

He settled lower into his seat and shifted the phone to his other ear.

Marcella closed her door and took off, sending a single curious glance over her shoulder before she disappeared into the garage’s stairwell.

If he needed to, he could catch up to her. Her scent trail would either guide him to her, or logic. She may have been a maverick investigator, but there was still a sensible order to things that even he followed most of the time.

“It wasn’t a deal so much as a last-ditch compromise to keep me onboard,” Peter said. “I don’t know how the last conversation went. I was a bit in a rage and often can’t remember anything I’ve said when the Bear is in control of my faculties. Yes, ma’am, excuse me, do you have the volumizing version of this conditioner? The one that comes in the green bottle?”

Soren needed a moment to realize who the hell his brother was talking to with his last couple of sentences. He envied his brother for his relationship and had never pretended otherwise. Peter and Drea were good for each other in the same way that Tamara and Bryan were. Connecting was easy for them.

Why the hell is so hard for me?

“Yes, that’s the one,” Peter said. “Thank you.”

“Years ago,” Soren said, “if a woman had sent you out on a hunt for toiletries, you would have picked up the first thing you could find on the shelf that did the job.”

“I’ve matured, and I love Drea. She’s not an unreasonable woman. She hardly ever asks me for anything. The least I can do is get her what she wants on the rare occasion she speaks up.”

“And she’s another reason you don’t want to do jobs for our parents anymore.”

“Of course. We’re trying to buy a house and such, and we spend so much of our free time organizing the Ridge Bears that we don’t have much leeway for extra things. By the way, did you take my deodorant?”

Soren considered lying because that was a pretty fucking pathetic thing to steal.

“Just tell me so that while I’m here, I can get another.”

“Yes.”

“Ass. Look, our parents are going to press you, but you don’t have to back down. You don’t want to do the work? You tell them it’s time to train up some people. Assassination doesn’t have to be our family business anymore. I’ll keep telling them the same as well.”

“She told me if I do this job, she’ll work something out between the two of us.”

“She’s bluffing. I gave her a firm no. Don’t accept that offer. Tell her you’ll do that last job, and then that’s it. She’s good at guilt, but if you give her a few weeks, she’ll get over the fact you refused her.”

“If this blows up in my face, I’m kicking your ass.”

“Well, you can certainly try, brother, but you know damn well you won’t succeed.”