The moment the door shuts, I let out a long, tired sigh.
“Okay.” I look up, meeting Luca’s eyes. Some brown-eyed people are of the dark chocolate variety, but not Luca—his are something closer to gold. The glinting of the setting sun off a bronze building at twilight. Light shining through a bottle of beer. Caramel in the pan, bubbling and coating the spoon. “How can we ‘resolve our differences’?
“You could quit.”
At first, I think it’s a joke, so I laugh—until I see the serious look on his face and realize he’s not trying to be funny. “Wait—you’re serious.”
Leaning forward, Luca holds my gaze in a way that makes a shiver run down the length of my spine. “You have everyone else here fooled, Wren, but not me.”
“Fooled?” I ask, only half playing dumb. The thing is that Luca has good instincts. Five years ago, I would have robbed this team blind and not given a second thought to it. Gone to other teams with information from both, been paid handsomely for it. Maybe blackmailed the owner, or found a techy to help me get into the accounts. If you have information, there’s always something you can do with it.
So maybe Luca can see that history written all over me. The muscle memory of always going for the lowest blow. It’s like something he can smell on me.
But this time, without my dad here to cloud my judgment, I genuinelyamhere to stay clean. Do a good job and get the bonus. I’ll make all my money without breaking the law to do it, and if that gets Uncle Vic his Stanley Cup, then even better.
And I’ll keep my nose clean, even with my dad calling me every morning, trying to get me to come back to him.
He viewed my time with the FBI as a sort of altered prison sentence. A parole I was just waiting out until I could rejoin him.But I realized something in my time away from him—my dad might have freedom wrong.
His view is that freedom comes from doing whatever you want. Taking the objects you desire, acting without regard to the law or other people around you. He chafes against rules, regulations, control. And I used to think he was right, that adhering to the rules would make life too claustrophobic.
But I’ve realized that, at least for me, the real freedom comes from not looking over my shoulder. Not waking up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, double checking locks. Moving locations just because.
I’m done with that life, and Uncle Vic believed me when I said that. Took a chance hiring me. I thought that would be the biggest hurdle, but now he’s actually staring me down, and I have no idea how I can get him to trust me.
Every time I make a good call, Luca sees it as me feeding information to another team, knowing something is going to happen because I’ve advised them to do it. Never mind all the times my advice has helped the Frost score, win.
“I’m onto you, Beaumont,” he says, the lines on his face hard, unmoving. “We’re not moving Chen. And that’s final.”
Something shifts inside me, and I feel myself smile at him, falling back into my old demeanor. “Oh, really? Good thing you don’t get to make that call, McKenzie. And Vic trusts me. He’ll do what I say, even if you don’t like it.”
Luca scowls, opens his mouth to say something, but before he can, I lean forward and give him a smile so sweet it’s sickly. “Also—next time you’re going to tail someone, consider bringing your EV. That Firebird is sonoisy.”
With that, loving the way his mouth drops open, I turn and follow the same path Uncle Vic took out of the room. He’s sitting on the bench outside, and looks up when I come through.
“Really?” he asks, sounding dubious. “That fast?”
“Yep,” I chirp, unable to stop the competitive surge inside me, the desperate, fighting urge to win this. “And he even agreed to try the line change too.”
Luca
“You were supposed to wear acostumewhen you come to acostume party,” Sloane says, appearing with her hands on her hips, looking annoyed with me. Behind her, the Halloween party is in full swing, guests mingling.
I’m sitting in the corner of the room, an untouched beer in my hand. Our next game isn’t for a few days, but I always feel weird drinking during the season. It always seems like I can tell the difference even a single beer makes in my performance.
“I am wearing a costume,” I assert, twisting slightly to show her my back, which shows my name and number.
“It was literally on the invitation: No hockey outfits.”
“Oh shit, sorry, I didn’t see that,” I lie. I did see it, but had no energy or time to come up with a Halloween costume. That had been Mandy’s part of the deal for the past three years, and the holiday snuck up on me too fast for me to come up with anything interesting.
Sloane lets out a long breath and drops onto the couch next to me, letting her body sink into the cushions. Then, saying with her eyes shut, “You’re going to have to help me up from here.”
“Sure,” I mutter, taking a tiny sip of my beer, “as long as…”
But my words trail away when the front door opens and Wren Beaumont steps through it, wearing a Boston Tigers jersey, complete with black smudges under her eyes and a football tucked in the crook of her elbow.
The football pants are tight around her ass and hips, socks pulled up over her calves. She’s gorgeous, and I’m not blind to that fact. Neither are the other free agents in the room. I try to keep from grinding my teeth together—her looks are probably another part of the way she distracts, bait and switch.
