But I knew I was lying to myself. My father was going to lock me away or send me off somewhere else, and Ren would seem like a beautiful dream—distant, lovely, and gone.
I squeezed my eyes shut and let the tears come, tired from fighting, and ready to sink into my own self-pity.
22
Ren
Goddamn, my ribs hurt.
I stood in the shadows of a row home’s front porch and kept still and quiet. The street around me was abandoned and dead, and I hadn’t seen a single person come or go in the last hour. It was slightly past two in the morning, and every inch of my body ached like hell.
But Amber was nearby, and I wasn’t about to walk away from this without her.
Fucking Vincent. His guys jumped me the first opportunity they got. They came in through that door one at a time at first, and I took the first two down before they all swarmed me. I wanted to kill them, all of them, but mostly I wanted to break free so I could strange Vincent with my bare hands.
Instead, they dragged me into a black van and dumped me out in front of my apartment. “Stay here,” Steven said, frowning down at me. “Be smart about this. You lay low for a while and Vincent might forget you exist. Don’t come back.”
The van door slid shut and it drove off.
I spent the next few hours getting myself together, then heading back up north.
Steven was probably right. If I was smart, I’d get out of the city for a few months, maybe a whole year, and let the heat blow over. Vincent would forget me eventually, and I could come back and have my old life back, if that was what I wanted.
Except I couldn’t go anywhere, not without Amber. I had to know if she’d come with me first.
So I slogged up to the mansion again and kept a low profile for a couple hours, lingering in the shadows, watching the staff come and go from the back door.
The thing about letting a thief into your house is they never quite go away. Vincent not only let me stay there, he let me linger for a few weeks. In that time, I wasn’t just sitting around and looking at my dick, although I did spend an inordinate amount of time teasing Amber and getting my fill of her toward the end there. Otherwise, I did what I do best: cased the joint and got a feel for how they operated.
First problem with mansion security: shift change. It happened every night, right at two thirty. It was an odd time, and I figured they did that to avoid letting guys like me get a sense of their habits, but even still. I waited until a group of guys were heading over toward the building before striding across the street. I broke off and skirted along the shadows, away from the back-door bouncer letting people in one at a time after patting them down first. The back alley was filled with dumpsters and a fire escape, and I used those to my advantage, keeping them between me and the crowd.
Philly facades tended to be pretty easy to climb once you got the feel for it, and the mansion’s was no different. I dug my fingers into the mortar and used a windowsill to swing myself up. I grabbed the end of the fire escape and hung there for half a second, waiting to see if anyone heard, before climbing up some more. I got up onto the escape and moved inch by inch, staying as silent as I could, while the shift change wound down. I reached the second floor and fiddled with the first window, but it was locked.
Second problem with mansion security: old fucking windows. I took a long, thin, flexible bar of metal with a notch cut at the end and a sharp knife. I cut open the paint seal along the window edge and used the knife to get a little space as I shoved the metal bar down inside the mechanism. It was a matter of jiggling it around and yanking until the metal bar caught and was able to turn the lock. It took me about ten minutes, but I was quiet, and I was patient, and eventually I was rewarded.
After another five minutes for the second lock, I got the window up, and slipped into an empty spare room.
It was smaller than the one Amber stayed in. There was no sitting area, only a bed, some chairs, a fireplace, and a side table. I crept to the doorway and opened it a crack, looking out into the dead silent hallway. I was on the opposite side of the building from Amber, and I knew I’d have to be pretty damn careful if I was going to get to her room in one piece, but I didn’t have all night.