It had nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with Renny.
It could have been any guy in any city in any country around the world. It just so happened to be him I was stationed around for so long.
"It's your life and you're a grown woman, Mina, and I would be the first woman to tell you that you don't need a man to have a good, fulfilling life. I just don't want you to be so closed-off to the possibility on some kind of bullshit principle. Having a man isn't going to strip you of your uniqueness or your skills, babe. I don't care how good his dick is, he can't steal your spark with it," she said with a wink. "Besides," she went on, starting to move away from me, "your job here is almost done. Take a ride on that man before you're off to fucking Chicago or Boise or wherever the hell you're heading next."
At that declaration, at the realization that my time was coming to an end at The Henchmen compound, I didn't feel relief like I should have. I was almost always happy to complete a job, to be able to move on, to get back to the compound or to see a new city.
It was in my blood.
That was how I was raised- to never put down roots.
It had gotten so that, over time, I wasn't sure I could grow them if I wanted to.
I sighed, sitting down at the bottom of the tree, looking off at the compound for a long time, trying not to get too down on myself over something that wasn't my fault.
We all had our damages, our traumas, our origin stories.
Mine, thankfully, was not tragic like many of the people who ended up at Hailstorm. Mine just involved a withholding mother and a workaholic father whose job took him all over the world at a moment's notice. So I never got to learn how to make connections, how to open up to new people. It was always a wasted effort in my life. As soon as I tried to get to that point, it was time to move on.
Why bother?
But, for the first time, the idea of never bothering seemed really sad and empty.FOURRennyThe L guy was like an encyclopedia of crime families. Ask him anything from fucking Lucky Luciano's shoe size to who is running the mob in Nowheresville, USA and he had an answer for you. So when everyone got their confusion and outrage out of the way, he sat down with his giant cup of coffee and gave us all the dirt he had on the Abruzzo family. And he knew a lot.
Like Little Ricky was power hungry and while he didn't often involve himself in the hands-on aspect of things, according to L because he literally couldn't walk down his driveway without having a near cardiac episode, he had his men becoming increasingly violent since he took over. Their prostitutes got knocked around a lot more, got smaller cuts of the money. And, apparently, they had graduated to cold-blooded murder.
The scary part was, for all L knew and he knew a fuckuva lot, he had no idea where they were. Well, Little Ricky was sitting pretty in his mini mansion on Long Island, but there was no accounting for who the men were in Navesink Bank and where they were located.
He recommended hiring someone to do a sketch of the men Penny had seen so that we and Hailstorm, at the very fucking least, had some faces to watch out for.
Malcolm sat down with everyone and formulated some plans, all being useless until there was a location, but it was good to have an idea of what we would be doing regardless.
Sometime around dinner time, the women coming back in because the kids were getting whiny for food, Malcolm and L took off back to Hailstorm, Lo hanging back to spend the night with Cash.
And Mina was still missing.
She had come in from outside about half an hour before the food finished and disappeared again
"She likes quiet," Lo supplied as we both piled food onto plates. "It's hard to come by here."
"She likes it," I agreed, putting one plate down and grabbing another, "but it's the last fucking thing she needs."
Lo turned back to me, head ducked to the side, looking at me like she had never seen me before. "You scare her, Renny," she surprised me by saying. I knew for damn sure that Mina would never be okay with her divulging that kind of information, even though it was something I already knew.
"Good," I said, making her brows raise as I grabbed two bottles of beer and tucked them into my pockets so my hands were free to grab the plates. "Know she's your girl and you love her, but she needs to be scared. She needs to be frazzled. She needs to have someone shake up her perfect little world a bit."