“Did you tell him you skipped work today?”
“Negative,” he said around a mouthful of dough.
“Why the self-sabotage?” I threw a piece of crispy bacon into my mouth, chewing. “You had a good reason. I could vouch for you.”
Hunter sucked his thumb clean of maple syrup, releasing it with a pop. Something fluttered between my legs when he did that. “He’ll choose to believe the worst about me no matter what. Also, work is kind of a shitstorm ATM.”
Yup. He was abbreviating at the moment.
“Why?” I asked, surprised.
I’d emailed his father back and forth and read between the lines. He didn’t seem displeased with Hunter. He was actually, dare I say, pretty happy with his progress.
Hunter let his utensils clatter beside his plate, seeming to lose his appetite.
“There’s this guy, Syllie. Been working for Da for centuries. He was my designated busboy until I came here—took care of shit for me. So this one lunch hour, I want to beat human traffic and decide to take the emergency stairway instead of the elevators down, right? I start descending the stairs, and I overhear him talking on the phone. And he says these weird-ass things that sound a lot like he’s talking about my family, but I can’t prove it.”
“What did he say?”
Hunter sat back, fingering his Dala horse. He did that when he was contemplating something. It frightened me how well I knew him now.
“I don’t know, but I feel like he’d run Royal Pipelines into the ground if he could. He said Da was smug, Cillian was smart and dangerous, and that I was…” He paused. The edges of his ears turned pink, and his face turned cold and unreadable.
“That you were what, Hunt?” I tilted my head forward, asking softly.
“A fucking joke.” He stared me dead in the eye, watching for my reaction.
I brought my thumb to my mouth and chewed the skin around my busted fingernail. When he didn’t get whatever he was expecting—a confirmation, criticism, or a compliment—he continued.
“I voiced my concerns to Da and Kill. Let’s just say it didn’t fly. I wanna know what he’s up to, who he’s doing this with, because it sounded like this conversation was the tip of the iceberg. But I don’t know how. What are the odds of me overhearing him saying something compromising again? Zero.”
I tapped my chin. “But you don’t have to.”
He cocked his head sideways, giving me that look again, the look that said I was a Halloween bucket he wanted to bust open, devour one treat at a time and show me all his tricks.
“What do you suggest?” He didn’t break our gaze.
“Let’s create the opportunity for ourselves. How much do we want to nail this bastard?”
Hunter’s eyes glimmered, and his mouth quirked into half a smirk. I was the one using a collective we now, and I realized there was power in it. It was fun to think of ourselves as a team, albeit one that wasn’t exactly glued together organically.
“Very freaking bad.” He repeated my words about the Olympics.
“Let’s roll, then.”
I only knew about this guy because my dad used to take me to him sometimes when he picked me up from school.
Before I got my driver’s license, Dad gave me a ride to the range twice a week after school. That left us with an hour of driving around. There was no point going home for ten minutes before dashing back to beat traffic. So we’d either grab food together at one of Mom’s many joints or he’d run some errands. One of these errands was this guy, Knox.
Knox accepted people for house visits only, and you had to text him beforehand. I did just that. I had no doubt his prompt reply came because Dad and Sam were his prime customers. Apparently, he was a former FBI agent who went rogue and now spent his days recreating all the crazy stuff the feds used to track people.
At any rate, here we were, standing in front of his place in the theater district.
Knox opened the door. He was the kind of man who could have been any age between thirty and fifty: round-bellied, his skin flushed and bloated with alcohol, and eternally clad in gray sweatpants and a wifebeater.
“Little Brennan.” He ruffled my hair like I was a kid. To him, I guess I was.
“Hey, Knox.” I motioned with my hand while it was still stuck in my hoodie’s pocket. “This is my friend, Hunter. I can vouch for him.”
“I’ll need more than that, sweetie pie.”
I jerked my hand out of my pocket and called Sam, my brother.
“Hey,” he answered on speaker. He sounded on the road. “Everything okay? Asshole giving you trouble?”
“The asshole can hear you,” Hunter grumbled.
“Actually, I need you to vouch for him to Knox, Sam.” I bit my lower lip nervously.