Soo raises his voice so I can hear. “He’s my friend. He won’t hurt you, but he can pay you. Name a price, and the money is yours.”
And this is exactly why he handles our logistics. My brain always goes straight to violence. Soo prefers gentle negotiation before resorting to using his fists. Even if no one can stand against him once he gets to that point.
The woman rattles off an address, and I shove out the glass door and onto the street, already taking in the road signs.
“Hey, man, got something for me,” a homeless man says from behind a cardboard box.
I stare down at him and then back at the shop, where Soo hasn’t even noticed I left. The man doesn’t move as I dig through my pocket and pull out a hundred-dollar bill. Crouching, careful not to touch him, I extend the money.
“This isn’t a freebie. It’s for a job.”
“What do you want,” he grates out, his words sloppy.
“A man is about to walk out of this shop. When he looks around, tell him calmly that you saw a big guy run off down the street, in the opposite direction I’m about to walk. Can you do that?”
“Yep, I can.”
I nod and release the money to his dirty fingers. There’s no telling if he’ll do as he’s told, but at the very least, he might buy me a few minutes from Soo.
I walk down the sidewalk quickly, glancing over my shoulder, but Soo hasn’t come back out yet. Good. My brother and I are about to have a conversation, and I want to have it alone.
If it ends with a bullet in his brain, so be it. Soo can see Lucas when he comes to clean up the mess.
A buzz fills my ears as I reach the building. It has a keypad entry and locked doors. Not that it matters. I pull out a knife I keep in my pocket with a glass break nodule at the end of the handle and press it into the pristine glass.
Lucas better hope he doesn’t have a doorman, or this night is going to get messier and messier.
I unlock the heavy door, enter, and head straight to the elevator. As the door closes, I’m alone, and the shiny steel doors reflect my unhinged smile.
I made the mistake of thinking I could live without her before, but I won’t make that mistake twice. Celia is mine, and no one will stand in my way. Least of all, my little fucking brother.
4
Celia
I’m tired. So fucking tired. I lay my head on my arms as I sit at Lucas’s countertop. It’s not just that I want to burrow into bed and sleep for a hundred years. It’s a bone-deep exhaustion radiating out, sinking into my heart and mind. Will I ever be able to shake it?
Lucas snaps his fingers in front of my face a couple of times, and I jerk away from them. “What? What do you want? Can you just let me sleep for a little while, and I’ll tell you anything you want to know?”
He narrows his eyes at me until my own droop heavily and obscure him into a blurry man shape on the other side of the countertop. “No, we are going to finish this now. I don’t know how much time I have, and I plan to get everything I need out of you before it’s up.”
My head snaps up at that little revelation. “What do you mean, you don’t know how much time you have? Are you going to kill me?” I hate the desperate edge to my tone. Even though I don’t want to die, I won’t beg him. At least not yet.
He doesn’t answer my question, of course. “Don’t worry about that. All you need to worry about right now is telling me what I want to know. So, I repeat, how many people live and work in your father’s house?”
My brain is fuzzy from sleep and, no doubt, trauma. “I don’t know. My father, my mother…” I swallow the words about my sister. No, she doesn’t live there anymore. “The chef, there are several maids, drivers, security. I can’t know how many people my father employs when I only interact with a handful of them. Not to mention what might have changed in the weeks your brother held me captive.”
“Where does your father go when he leaves the house?”
I gape at him and the randomness of the question. “How the hell should I know? It’s not like he tells me his daily routine. Mostly he stays at home and works out of his office. There’s a cabin he goes to every so often to fish or whatever men do in the woods, but otherwise,” I say again, “I don’t know.”
Lucas leans over the counter, pinning me under his glare. “You better start thinking fast, or this is going to get a lot more physical.”