Renny (The Henchmen MC 6)

ONE

Mina

"It's not the Grassis."

Really, what were they even thinking in suspecting them? I mean, it was easy to jump to conclusions when you had an eye-witness who made a positive ID. You know, especially when you are a bunch of headstrong, testosterone-filled bikers running on fumes after a devastating blow to their organization and the rage of not being able to pin it on anyone.

But that, in my humble opinion, was no excuse for going balls to the wall on a completely crazy, asinine theory.

That, however, did not stop the men from ranting and raving and making plans on taking out what I knew to be a mostly-unthreatening mob family that they had had a peace with since well before Reign even came into power.

I was leaning back against the wall, arms crossed over my chest, letting myself be ignored. I was pretty sure no one had even heard me about it not being the Grassis. But they were on a tear and I was an outsider, so they weren't going to listen to me until they calmed down anyway.

I wasn't sure what Lo was thinking when she pulled me away from another job I was on, a job I was doing really well at, and brought me back to Navesink Bank to oversee the damn improvements of The Henchmen compound and see what I could do about helping them create a profile for the people that were after them.

Really, she knew better.

It wasn't that I wasn't good at my job; I was. There weren't many profilers, working outside of law enforcement, who were better than me. But that being said, she knew I had preferences. She knew I liked to work from a distance. I liked to watch over the situation and get a bird's eye view of the whole thing. It helped me to stay objective. It kept me from being fed the bullshit lies most people would feed me one way or another. And, in the end, it saved me a lot of frustration.

But there I was amid the chaos in the common room of their compound, all of it recently redone because, well, everything had been covered in blood. I hadn't seen that part myself seeing as the guys had cleaned it up, but I could only imagine it was a complete and utter bloodbath given how many men they had lost the night of the ambush.

It wasn't that I shied away from blood. To be perfectly honest, the stuff I had seen in pictures of brutal rapes, tortures, and murders, yeah, it was enough to turn anyone half-crazy. But, it was always in that sterile form- I always saw it in pictures.

Again, giving me my distance.

I liked my life, as much as possible, to be clean and compartmentalized.

It was something, in the past, Lo had always accepted and accommodated. While the rest of the team were heavy into dark stuff a lot of the time, I got to watch from a distance.

How I preferred it.

It wasn't because I didn't play well with others; I just focused better on work when I didn't have a bunch of strong personalities breathing down my neck or questioning my every theory.

"It's not the Grassis, huh?" a voice asked beside me, bringing with it the faintest hint of smoke and the perfect amount of cologne.

Of course he would be the only one of them to have heard me, to be listening to me. Then again, he was always listening to me.

It should have been flattering. Really, were it anyone else, it probably would have been. But Renny was not someone I wanted listening to me all the time. Because Renny, like me, never just listened to the words. Renny picked up the inflection, theorized on the motives behind the words, picked pieces of your soul out of the things that came out of your mouth.

Renny profiled.

And just like doctors make bad patients, profilers make bad profiling subjects.

I didn't like that he could read more into what I said than what I meant to put out there. Which was hypocritical of me, I know, being in the field I was, but it was how it was.

So Renny's borderline obsessive flirting with me for the past few weeks, while charming, sweet, and at times, very tempting, was going to get him nowhere.

Because, come on let's face it, it was hard enough for someone who profiled people to be in a relationship with just an average person. Two profilers getting hot and sweaty or getting serious? Yeah, no.

It would be explosive in both good and bad ways.

But mostly bad.

If I wanted to see shit blow up, I would let Lo ship me overseas again.

Besides, like my professional life, I liked my personal life clean and compartmentalized as well.

So Renny was not going to be a part of my life.