Mark (Mallick Brothers 3)

Because, you know, like I said. It was never going to happen. So since that was true, it would have been nice to have at least a kiss to think about before we could finally skip town and maybe I could find me a man somewhere to relieve my sexual frustration.

We were already in Navesink Bank longer than I liked, longer than we ever stayed in town after a job. But the guy we had washing the money was dragging his feet and there was nothing we could do about it. Apparently, he had some bigger job for some hotshot cocaine dealer or something that he needed to handle first. And since our pull was just a couple grand, we were low down on the priority list.

See, that's the thing most people don't know about stores; there isn't that much money in the registers. Most people paid with cards now a day. And we didn't skim card numbers. We didn't have anything against the shoppers at the stores. It was the stores themselves that had to pay. So if the registers started with around five-hundred a piece in the morning and doubled that throughout the day, if you robbed at peak times when all registers were open, but before shift change, you were banking between ten and fifteen grand. Not chump change, but not the take from a bank robbery either. Not the kind of money that would set you up for life.

That wasn't our plan anyway. Sure, we needed a nice nest egg to travel and set up a life in a new country, but we were all planning on getting normal, straight jobs once we did. We had been criminals long enough. It was almost time to retire from the career field as a whole.

Three more jobs.

That was all we had planned.

Three more and almost a decade of our lifework would be behind us.

There was no denying that the relief was also countered with a strange, nagging uncertainty. Maybe it was as simple as feeling weird about going to another country, learning the language, learning the customs, figuring out how to survive there. But I thought an almost equal amount of the trepidation inside was that, by stopping the work, we would be leaving a huge part of ourselves behind. Not the criminals per se, but the reason we were criminals in the first place, the mission that led us into that life, the bond that kept us tight through every sleepless night, through every misstep that could have sent us to jail, through every careful drive out of town, praying we could get away.

Not being worried about ending up in a cell would be a wholly unknown feeling for me. That was a constant idea that kept a knot in my stomach. Not so much for me. I would be okay in prison. Women could be awful, but in general had less violence than the men. I worried for my brothers. They were all their own kinds of badass. They were all strong and confident. And while they were technically criminals, they weren't murderers or rapists or people who assaulted other people for no reason. They certainly had no gang affiliations.

That and, quite frankly, the idea of being separated from them was actually physically painful. Not that I didn't want a little space after so long in such close proximity, but space meaning separate apartments in the same town, not separate prison cells in different states.

Just three more jobs.

Three more months to complete those jobs.

Then a couple more months laying low while we worked out transportation out of the US.

By the next year, we would all be out of that life, away from that worry, desperately trying to learn how to call one another 'useless twats' and other insults in Russian or Chinese.

And, after a while, that life would become our new normal.

It would take some time, but it would happen.

Then we could sit around and reminisce about the times we did the wrong things for the right reasons.

"You could just come out with us," Rush said, shrugging, obviously still not approving of another of my little concessions. Gyms. I needed a gym. I needed a treadmill, a stairclimber, an elliptical, a bike, and the machines that tell you how to do the moves. To my brothers, apparently, that was for "chicks" and guys who "need to flex." They didn't do gyms. They did military-style training in parks or woods or wherever they could find that had hills and flat areas and places to run and do the ever-loathed burpees they liked so damn much.

"Still not my style," I said, reaching for my gym bag.

"You can stay in shape without all the bells and whistles, Scott."

"With you guys yelling at me to pick up the pace and stop stretching between exercises? No thanks."