The Sunset Job (The Rainbow's Seven 1)

The suites did not buck the trend, being just as extravagantly wild in the furniture and decoration choices, creating plenty of opportunities for the perfect photo op. Mimic thanked the bellman, the couple of suitcases they’d brought set outside of the girls’ room. Doc lifted her Beats, loud rock music bleeding from the pink headphones, and set them around her neck, racing past Mustang and Mimic to get first dibs on the room.

“Damn, Monica, you’re going to let Doc beat you like that?” Phantom asked, ribbing her as he grabbed his book bag from the golden cart. Roman laughed, walking to their suite and holding the door open for Bang Bang and Wyatt.

“These feet are only made to race on wheels. She can have whatever room she wants. I’m probably just going to end up crashing in Mimic’s anyway.”

“Oh really?” Mimic asked, arching a brow, painted red lips curling into a smile.

“Yeah, remember you promised to tutor me in French? That’s going to take all night.”

Mimic narrowed her smokey eyes, chuckling as she turned and walked into the suite, her skintight black jeans looking like liquid paint against her long legs.

Mustang dropped her sunglasses and shook her head. “Merci,” she said, following Mimic into the suite. Phantom turned to Roman, shaking his head.

“Mustang’s going to come out of that room speaking all kinds of nasty shit in French.”

“At least she’ll sound classy doing it,” Roman quipped.

“Truth.” Phantom gave an appreciative butt slap as he walked past Roman and into the room. “Thanks for all this, by the way. You’re a solid boss.”

“You guys deserve it for putting up with all my crazy shit.”

“Hey, your crazy shit’s paid off so far. Let’s keep it going, man.”

“I plan on it, Axle. Now go grab a room and get ready. We’ve got a quinceañera to crash. Nice watch by the way.” Roman motioned toward the golden wristwatch shining on Phantom’s wrist.

“Thanks, man. My sister got it for me as a gift for a, well, I’ll tell you later.”

Roman nodded, smiling as Phantom left to get ready, the start of this sunset job already on the horizon.

The group reunited in the girls’ suite, gathering in the opulent living room, most of them decked out in designer outfits, looking nearly unrecognizable from their casual international flight attire from hours earlier. Roman couldn’t help but embrace the vanity and think to himself:

Damn, we’re one hot fucking crew.

He admired all of them but had to work extra hard to hide his attraction toward Wyatt. The guy cleaned up well. Real well. Not that he was working with anything negative to begin with, but seeing him in a pair of acid-washed jeans and a clean white V-neck shirt, his hair gelled and his face still moist from the shower, it lit that fire in Roman’s belly again, the flames catching and spreading downward.

“Alright, my queens and my kings, it’s almost showtime. I don’t think I have to go over every step of the plan with you all; just know that we need the page Giovanni is carrying on him, and we need to grab it at all costs. He’s keeping that page as a favor to his dead lover, but if he realizes how badly we want it, he might just put it through a paper shredder and be done with it. We need that page.”

“Phantom and I go in first, right?” Bang Bang sat on the couch with an arm thrown over Doc’s shoulder, her head resting on the crook of his neck. He was dressed in all white, a chef’s hat on his lap and a catering company name badge pinned to his chest. They seemed to be getting closer by the hour. Again, not exactly ideal since personal relations could bleed into the job and fuck things up, but Roman definitely wasn’t one to say anything about inter-crew relations. He was almost jealous of the two, wondering how Wyatt would feel if it was them two cozied up on the couch together.

“Correct. You two go in and work the kitchen, figure out the dining arrangements and if there’s a chance of us getting Giovanni alone, before or after. We just need to get him alone so we can kindly ask him for the page with the trigger phrase, and if he doesn’t kindly reply, then we get a little rougher. If any of you see a chance to lift it off of him without him realizing, all the better.” Roman cracked his knuckles, the silver rings on his hand catching the light from the movie-set-style lamp behind the teal couch.

“Wyatt, Doc, you two are staying put. Wyatt, you worked on getting into their camera system on the flight here. Were you successful?”

Wyatt nodded, lips pursed. “Took me five minutes. People need to invest in firewalls, or at least passwords that don’t include birthdays.” He wasn’t proud, Roman could tell from the slump in his shoulders, but he had done it.