All Grown Up (Eden High)

He bragged about the latest pictures he’d received from his daughter-in-law before hanging up, and I reached for my travel bag as I looked out the car window, almost home. I removed one of the last of Cassie’s gifts from its hiding place, wishing now that I’d given this to her first. I’d saved the best and most important for last since I needed to have something to give her on her actual birthday, but now that I know what’s been going on with her, I wish I’d have planned better.

I turned the jewelry box from Simon with the one of a kind piece inside over and over in my hand. What it represented brought home to me the fact that I’d changed so much in the last year, we all had. Looking out at the once-familiar streets, they no longer looked the same. And not because of the pandemic that was keeping everyone inside, leaving the streets bare, but because of the changes in me.

Seemingly overnight, I’d gone from the carefree kid who found laughter in every situation to a man with much firmer convictions. I can honestly say that until Jace dragged us along with him into Mancini’s world, that I had no idea about the real world around me. Now instead of trying to gauge how much my neighbors were worth because of the kind of cars they drove or the size of their homes, I now wondered what the fuck they did to get them and, worst yet, what the hell was going on behind some of those high gates?

Some of the innocence was long gone from me, but I can’t say I regret it. There’s a kind of fulfillment I find in the work we now do for Mancini and those guys. Instead of the wild parties, I believe we’d all imagined ahead of us in our college days, we now spent most of our free time rescuing girls and women and even on occasion some young men, from dark buildings in the seedier sides of some major cities on the east coast.

I still find it hard sometimes to believe because as hard as that shit sounds, with Mancini’s set up, it’s been anything but. The shit’s so smooth that no one who knows us would ever think that we’re involved in anything like that. We go in, grab who we’re there for, and pass them on to the next crew with no one being the wiser and neither team knowing shit about the other.

We have yet to encounter anything that can stop us, which I find unbelievable. It’s like Mancini knows when those guys would have their defenses down when no one is up watching. Maybe the traffickers had grown overconfident in their abilities; I don’t know. I just know that by the time we show up, there’s hardly anyone on watch duty, and going in and out is a breeze.

Lately, though, they’ve been upping their game. It’s like word has spread, and they’re more on the lookout. Since we never hit the same place twice for obvious reasons, they can have no idea where we’ll strike next, which always works in our favor. The fact that I see no end in sight for this shit leaves me cold, though.

We were pulling through the gates of home by the time I turned my mind to other things. It was still too light out to do what I needed to first, but in the meantime, I can get started on something else. I’d already made up my mind even before Jace confirmed it that Mandy had to have a hand in this.

Shayne, Jared, and I had already discussed it, and no matter how we do it, she’s not getting out no matter how much time she does. We hadn’t involved Jace and Track in our little side deal because Jace would outright kill her if he got the chance and land his ass in jail, and Track, well, let’s just say that long before Mancini sprung his little history lesson on us a few days ago, and before Track and Jace came clean a few months ago about where it was that he was actually disappearing to all those times we thought he was in juvie, I knew he was into some shit. The guy is like Jace on ice.

Between the two of them, I’m not sure which of them is more overprotective—speaking of overprotective. I looked back to see if I could make the other car with the team Jace’s dad had on me but saw nothing. For months Jace has sworn that his dad has a team on us at school, but we have yet to see so much as a shadow.

Before today, two things made me believe that shit. One, each time he said it, Track would smile like he knew something the rest of us didn’t, and two, the building Mancini had talked Jace into buying had an underground tunnel that literally ran from the complex to somewhere near downtown, which is what we used when we were working. How Mancini knew about Uncle Chad’s penchant for keeping tabs on us is anyone’s guess, but I’m guessing the tunnel was his way of dealing with that little hiccup.