The Fix Is In (Torus Intercession 4)

Christopher didn’t comment on the name Anton, simply took gentle hold of both sides of her chair as she attended to him.

“So,” she began, clearing her throat, “Shaw there, he was showing me his sister-in-law’s Etsy shop, and I was thinking that you were right after all. I’ll close the apothecary and rent out the space.”

I heard his breath catch from across the room.

“I’m not going to stop running my online shop, though, so you can put that thought right out of your mind. It’s something I enjoy and I’m good at, and we both have to work, and––”

“I never wanted you to give up your online business,” he clarified. “I just––”

“My plan is to change where I put my focus and what I sell.”

He was staring at her like she’d told him she was an alien.

“Speak,” she ordered.

“Yes, good. Great,” he agreed, his voice going in and out on him. “Love this plan.”

“And I was thinking,” she said softly, “if you still wanted to, maybe we could get married before Maurice comes.”

His eyes narrowed, I was certain, so he wouldn’t cry, and he turned to look at me. “Who’re you again?”

“I’m the bodyguard,” I replied flatly.

“Okay,” he said, more to himself. “Well, start eating before the pizza gets cold. I wanna make sure you’re taken care of.”

I grinned at him. “I’m good.”

“So am I,” he rasped, and that was it for his voice.

Sian took pity on the handsome lumberjack-looking pub owner and leaned forward and wrapped her arms around his neck, squeezing tight, all the while whispering words in his ear that he did a lot of nodding over. He seemed quite overwhelmed.

“This is what you do?” Benji asked, coming to stand beside me in the kitchen as I opened the first pizza box and found my beloved pepperoni. “You just go around making things better?”

“He’s a fixer, Benji,” Delly said from the other side of me, reaching for a slice. “That’s what it says on the Torus website.”

“What she said,” I teased him. “And tell me you have pepper flakes somewhere in this kitchen.”

“Of course I have pepper flakes,” he grumbled at me, walking around the room and opening and closing cabinets. “I mean… somewhere. Probably.”

I started eating without them.

5

After lunch, which I overindulged in because the cook at Christopher’s pub made really good pizza—not Chicago good, but excellent for anywhere that wasn’t Chicago—I asked everyone to sit down in the living room, except Christopher, who had to go back to work. We needed to talk about why they thought the guys cooking meth weren’t the same ones gunning for Benji.

“Because it doesn’t make any sense,” Sian assured me, her eyes still red and puffy from crying because the man she loved had cried first.

“How so?” I asked her.

“Because we’ve been investigating supposed haunted houses that we now know were not, for what, like, a couple of months?” she asked Benji.

“Yeah,” he affirmed, leaning back into the opposite corner of the couch, his knees drawn up so his feet, clad in heavy socks, didn’t touch me. “And the weirdness has been happening longer than that.”

“Define weirdness,” I prodded him.

“I sincerely don’t think this is anything you have to worry––”

“Tell me now,” I ordered, my gaze meeting his.

Delly cleared her throat, and I looked over at her. “More than once, someone has run a red light at night and almost hit him.”

I squinted at her.

“You might think it’s nothing, but no one drives that fast in this town.”

“You do,” I countered. “You nearly killed me this morning when I got here.”

“Goddess, how fast were you going?” Sian scolded the younger woman.

She dismissed Sian with a wave of her hand. “Benji used to run at night, alone, but someone started following him, so now he runs in the morning with the women from the historical society.”

I glanced at Benji.

“Don’t let the name fool you. Those women are hard-core. They run marathons.”

“So you knew you were being followed?”

He nodded. “Not hard to tell. I could hear the car behind me, like an animal in the dark. For whatever reason, their logic was that turning off the headlights would hide the sound of an engine.”

“What else?”

“Well.” Benji grimaced. “I think someone shot at me.”

It took me a second to parse the words, even though I’d heard them clear as day. “I’m sorry, shot at you? Could you maybe explain that a bit more?”

He looked away, up at the ceiling.

“Hey,” I rumbled, trying for coaxing, gentle, even though I wanted to throttle him. Someone had shot at him? This certainly had not made it into the information Owen gave me, and Owen was thorough as hell. The fact that our resident background guy didn’t know meant Benji hadn’t reported it to anyone. “Lookit me.”

Benji took a breath. “Okay, so––”

“Somebody shot at you?” Sian roared.