Page 86 of Creeping Beautiful

Every time we had to send her away Adam was quietly stressed. Because he used to go with her and now it was me. He’s a tough dude. And in a fight between us I’m still not sure he couldn’t kick my ass even after the brain injury. But we all decided he was going to stay home and I was going to go when the jobs started up again.

Not that I did much more than get an apartment and live in a nearby town while Indie was stealthily doing her boarding school jobs. At least I was close if she needed me.

But you can only get away with that kind of job a few times if there’s no Company around to cover your ass and after three, we were done.

Adam didn’t sit on his ass while Indie and I were off squeezing important people using their kids. He amassed a whole crew of former Company assassins he knew from back in the day and pretty much started a private army. And those guys were not as disciplined as we were. At all. It was kind of a free-for-all two years after the Company fell.

Lots of them ended up with hits on their heads. Just way too unstable to keep alive. Even more got killed, or killed themselves, or ended up in prison when the full effect of no Company support finally hit them.

No shadow government to bail you out this time, my friend. So sorry. Please accept this compensation package for keeping your fucking trap shut and pleading guilty before trial.

Or… Bang, you’re dead. For opening said mouth during your trial, or getting caught in the first place, or botching the job altogether.

There was a lot of that last kind of clean-up. These dumbasses actually figured they were free after the Company went under.

They weren’t.

They had bosses. And Adam was one of them. Not the only one, not by far. He didn’t step in and take over. No one did. That was the problem. All this infrastructure the Company built was suddenly flapping in the wind. And every former Company wannabe was trying to get his or her share.

The really important thing that happened after the Company fell and Adam recovered was the realization that Nathan St. James wasn’t going anywhere.

Indie was in love.

I will say this about Adam back in those days. He was a good fucking sport about all that Nathan shit. He never said a fucking word to Indie about Nate again.

But I did. Fuck her. She was not in charge of shit. She was sixteen years old and under my thumb for the duration. Because Donovan was obviously moving on to more lucrative opportunities in plastic surgery. (Insert eyeroll. Why that dude felt the need to work so hard when he had so much money was beyond me.)

And Adam had the good sense to let Indie do her thing.

I would catch him though. Standing in the formal dining room looking out the window at that little brick house across the duck lake. And I have known this asshole since we were kids. I could practically read his mind.

He wanted to kill Nathan St. James with a burning passion.

He hated that kid hard.

Nate, to me? Eh. Whatever. Indie just thought she was in love back then. And she made a lot of mistakes with that guy. A lot of mistakes. But that’s what young people do, right? Anyone with a teenage daughter will tell you that the harder you fight them, the more they resist. So I went a little easy on her during that year and a half when she was doing the boarding school shit and the other, bigger, clean-up jobs in between.

Probably too easy.

And then… people started dying. Lots of people started dying. All former Company in one way or the other. The news was calling it a secret epidemic. Some sinister shadow organization had gotten to the world’s rich and powerful and… poisoned them? Maybe. No one was really sure.

All we knew was that everyone left over from the upper circle from the Company days started dropping like flies.

Everyone but us and a few others, that is.

But I don’t want to think about that shit right now.

Indie is lying in my arms in her childhood bedroom and I am happy for the first time in four years.

That’s what I want to think about.

She’s mine.

All mine until Donovan and Adam get home.

Then, after we sort out Adam, then we can think about what really happened in the past and try to come to terms with it.

Try to move forward.