Damaged Like Us (Like Us 1)

I smile and focus on his sister. “Luna.”

She reluctantly extends her tongue. Red streaks run from the silver ball to the tip of her tongue, a little swollen. At least she bought an actual barbell. I leave the jewelry in place to avoid an infection closing inside the wound.

Luna leans slightly over the sink, and I use the syringe to wash near the piercing, places that just swishing wouldn’t reach. When I finish, she spits into the sink again.

“Done?” she asks.

“Not yet.” I dunk a cotton ball in saline solution. “Hold this against your tongue.” She looks ashen, and her forehead glistens with a sheen of sweat. While I stick an ear thermometer in her right ear, I go over shit that I know.

“No kissing or oral sex until the infection is clear.”

She nods, but her brother cuts in, “Have you been kissed before?” No one said Maximoff Hale isn’t just as blunt as me.

Luna says, “Uh-huh.”

“What?” His jaw lowers. “By who?”

She takes the cotton ball out of her mouth. “Guy at school. You don’t know him. He bought me a sandwich afterwards.” She starts laughing at Maximoff’s furrowed brows and hard confusion.

“You’re totally fucking with me.” He pauses. “Right?”

I can’t tell what’s real or fiction with Luna Hale anymore than he can.

Luna just laughs again, followed by a wince. She touches her mouth.

“Luna.” His edged voice deepens, more serious. “Why’d you even choose your tongue? You could’ve pierced your ear—”

“I already have pierced ears.” She rubs her arm across her sweaty forehead. “I just like how tongue piercings look, and I thought it’d be easy to do myself.” She glances between us. “Anyway, I heard it doesn’t do much for pleasure.”

“It doesn’t do a lot,” Maximoff confirms, admitting to being sucked off by someone with a tongue piercing.

I look at him. “They have to be good at using the piercing for you to feel something.”

He licks his lips. “Experience or are you just bullshitting?”

“My last ex-boyfriend had a tongue piercing.” The thermometer beeps, filling a sudden dead silence. I take the thermometer out of her ear and read the temp: 101 Fahrenheit. Shit.

“You have an ex?” Maximoff’s voice is tight.

I raise my brows at him and reach for my phone in my pocket. “Four exes. Long gone.” I scroll through my list of contacts.

Luna rests her elbows on the sink. “Moffy’s never dated anyone.” The world knows that he doesn’t publicly date, but I wasn’t sure if he’d found a way to date privately in the past.

“You’ve never dated anyone?” I ask, pausing on my phone.

“No.”

I can’t help but smile. “Your purity is showing.” I return to my phone.

“Pretty sure I’ve had more sex than you.”

Luna seems unsurprised that he’s had sex at all, and since he trusts his family, I’m sure he’s less guarded around them.

“That’s something neither of us knows for sure, wolf scout.” I find the contact in my phone. “And secondly, you don’t win a prize for fucking around. Just like I don’t win one for being in relationships. Thirdly, you’re still pure.”

He groans.

I almost smile again, but I need to call someone that I’m not thrilled to call. Before Maximoff asks, I explain what I’m doing. “Luna needs antibiotics. I can give her over-the-counter medication to combat the fever, but to get rid of the infection, she’s going to need a prescription.”

He eyes my phone and the contact screen that says DAD. His gaze lifts to mine. “You’re a doctor. Can’t you just prescribe the meds yourself?”

“I never did my year internship, so I’m not medically licensed.” I may have an MD beside my name, but it’s practically useless without finishing my internship and taking a board.

“Now you tell me.”

I roll my eyes again. “I know everything that a doctor does, I just can’t do shit without being sued.”

Luna mumbles, “I’m gonna go lie down.”

Maximoff concentrates on his sister. “Stay with Janie just in case you need anything.”

Luna nods and puts the soaked cotton ball back on her tongue. Right when she leaves, Maximoff jumps to the floor and then takes my phone out of my hand.

“It’ll be faster if I call your dad,” he says.

It reminds me that everyone—the entire security team and all of the families—know that I’m on the worst terms with my father. He accepted every single tattoo, every piercing, every means of self-expression, but the day that I quit medicine, he looked right at me in front of these famous families, in front of the giant security team on a hot Labor Day vacation, and he said loudly and clearly, “You’re a disappointment.”

If I call him right now about medicine, there’s a chance he may hang up on me.

I nod to Maximoff and let him talk to my father. I stay during the conversation, but it lasts maybe three minutes, prescription ordered, and he hands back my phone.

“You’re in for the night?” I ask.

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” My ticket out of his townhouse has always been the information Price wanted. About the Camp-Away event. I feel like my time is up, and I have to board a train to an undesirable destination. I’d rather stay here, but duty calls. “I just need to know your plans for December’s Charity Camp-Away.”

Maximoff crosses his arms over his bare chest. “You can tell the security team that the plans are the same except for the entry process.”

I shift my weight. “What do you mean?”

“There won’t be hellishly expensive tickets to purchase in October. Instead, there’ll be a raffle.”

“A raffle,” I repeat flatly.

“My team projected we’d earn fifty million with the Camp-Away with either entry process—and I recognize the higher security risk with a raffle—but I want to give people who can’t afford the tickets an opportunity to experience the event.” He explains, “So for every one dollar donated, a person enters their name to the raffle. One week before the event in December, we’ll randomly pick the attendees out of the pool.”

I cement in place. “Basically, you’re opening your three-day camping trip to anyone who has a dollar.” The public. I raise a hand, my pulse pounding against my throat. “How many attendees will be chosen through the raffle?”

“All of them. So three-hundred.”

Three-hundred. Security is going to have to background check three-hundred people in seven days. And if anyone with mal-intent slips through the cracks, Maximoff will be put directly in harm’s way.

10

FARROW KEENE

SWEAT DRIPPING DOWN MY TEMPLES, I jab a red punching bag and finish my combination with a right hook and hard left kick. 4:23 a.m.

Not even five hours after I radioed security about the raffle, Akara called a mandatory and “emergency” Omega meeting at the Studio 9 gym.

See, I recognize the danger of the raf

fle, but if I can’t even convince Maximoff to let me drive his Audi, then I highly doubt anyone can convince him to alter a charity event that he’s poured months and months of work and thought into.

And I warned Maximoff that the entire security team would overreact about his Camp-Away changes. He just said, “I’ll speak to the Tri-Force and comply wherever necessary, but the raffle is staying.”

Not many people ever volunteer to speak to all three lead bodyguards at once. Price Kepler of Alpha, Akara Kitsuwon of Omega, and the bane of my career, Thatcher Moretti of Epsilon, are all at the peak of the security hierarchy.

The Tri-Force.

My gaze travels to the closed door; the silver plaque reads: office.

Maximoff has been in there with the Tri-Force for fifteen minutes already. The three leads think they can “further illuminate” the risks to him, but Moffy contemplates too much. Whatever they have to tell him, he’s definitely already considered.

In short, they’re wasting their time.

I peel off my black boxing gloves, my chest rising and falling heavily. Three rows of red boxing bags line the right side of the gym, where I stand. The left houses the boxing ring, racks of weights, and other gym equipment.

There are only five bodyguards in Omega. We’re all young compared to the other Forces, and that’s by design. The Hales, Meadows, and Cobalts hired us on to last a couple decades in this career, not just a couple years. Being closer in age to our clients, it’s more likely we’ll stick around for the long-haul.

While we wait for Akara to leave the office, the four of us squeeze in a workout, but we all slow around the twenty-minute mark.

Oscar tugs off his blue gloves, his damp, curly brown hair hanging over a bandana. “You guys hear that Luna pierced an ‘unmentionable’ place?”

I’m used to news traveling fast within the security team. Bodyguards gossip like family, but we never leak info to the public. Not even accidentally. Everyone’s too careful.

Quinn pauses his sit-ups on his punching bag. “What…like her…?” He gestures to his crotch.