“Can I perhaps interest you in a shower?” Raven suggested, making a snort escape me.
“Is that a hint?”
“You’re starting to smell, babe,” she told me, wrinkling her nose.
“Well, we can’t have that, can we?” I asked, throwing off my blanket, making my way off the bed.
“I will clean the bedding while you’re gone.”
Alone, I let the water rush over me. And because no one was around to see them, and because I had plausible deniability of their existence as they merged with the water running down my face, I finally let the tears come.
I didn’t remember the last time I’d cried. When my father died, most likely. A lifetime ago.
I slid down the slate wall of the shower, squatting under the stream of too-hot water, heels of my palms pressed into my eyes as I cried with the reckless abandon of a child, until my body was shaking with the sobs, until I was starting to worry they might never stop.
Until, eventually, they did, leaving me hollowed out inside, like someone had reached inside and scooped something out of me, discarding what they found.
I moved through the rest of the shower in a blur, drying and dressing in oversized sweats, making my way back into the bedroom on numb legs, finding the bedding fresh, the room aired out, drinks and snacks on the nightstand in case I needed them.
I didn’t want food.
I wanted sleep.
I wanted oblivion.
I wanted the thoughts of him to stop.
Except I found my dreams plagued with memories and impossible possibilities, things that we could never have, never do, never be.
Days tripped into one another, a blur of a zombie-like fog that only got broken up on Raven’s chosen bedding wash day.
Then back into that bed—and that misery—I fell.
There were no signs of it letting up, no light at the end of the tunnel.
I was just about ready to accept this patheticness as my reality.
When, suddenly, there was a knock at my door.
And I realized Raven hadn’t given up on me.
She’d called in reinforcements.
My brothers were at the door.
THIRTEEN
Fenway
“Nia!” I greeted, leaning in her office doorway, watching as she lifted her unamused brown eyes, inspecting me for a moment before leaning back in her seat, flicking her black braids over her shoulder.
“What do you want, Fenway? I’m not on your case.”
“No, you’re not,” I agreed, nodding. “But I believe you should be, you Mistress of the Keys, you.”
“Mistress of the Keys,” she repeated, a rare smile pulling at her lips. “I like that. Alright, fine. I’ll bite. What do you want from me?”
“I know your boss is running his usual investigation angles. And he hasn’t steered me wrong in the past, but I think I need you to look around.”
“Why is that?”
“Because I think you would be able to find someone who goes by the name of Wasp somewhere online. She made a comment once about arms dealing in her family. That’s an angle I think you could work too.”
“What would make me want to abandon my current work to deal with your little issue?”
My little issue.
I’d been involved in international scandals, in corporate takeovers, in every sort of ugly, backstabbing situation you could think of.
None of them felt quite in the same league as this little issue of mine.
Maybe because all that other shit, it was background noise, it was something pesky to have dealt with, so that I could go back to my normal life.
This?
I was attached to this.
And I wasn’t sure anything would go back to normal again.
But I could maybe find a new normal if I found answers, if I found her, if I got closure.
Even as I thought it, I wasn’t sure that was true. But I was choosing to let myself believe it. At least in part.
“What do you want? Triple your usual fee? A summer home in Tuscany? Name the price, Nia,” I demanded, moving to sit in one of the chairs on the other side of her desk, leaning back, tired down to my bones.
“Name my price,” she repeated, steepling her fingers, observing me over the tops of them, trying to figure out if I was being honest or not. “What if I wanted your jet? Your yacht?”
“If that’s your price…”
To that, her brows knitted, her lips pursed. “Okay. What is going on here?” she asked, waving a hand at me. “I’m newer here than a lot of the others, but I’ve seen enough of you to know that this rumpled suit, no shave, dark eye circle look is not you. When’s the last time you got some sleep? Because, frankly, Fenway, you look like shit.”
I had just enough humor left to snort at that. Even if I knew she was being honest. Painfully so. As was her nature. She was one of the few women in a male-dominated field. She had to be tough to get by.