Nico Rosso - Undercover Justice

Ellie emerged from the other side of the kitchen with two white envelopes. She handed them to Stephanie and Arash, eyes still wary.

Olesk pointed at their envelopes. “Work solid, get paid.” Stephanie sneaked a peek into the envelope and riffled across eighty hundred-dollar bills. Anger continued to simmer beneath her skin. Blood money. The big gig he was talking about was what she really wanted. Then the STR and the Seventh Syndicate could go down in flames. Olesk walked them farther into the house. Few pieces of furniture littered the tan carpet, just enough to crash comfortably for a few hours. “Thom and Hector are sleeping. You’ll meet them tomorrow after they finish their assignments.” He stopped at an open doorway in an undecorated hallway. “This is you.” He pointed at Stephanie. “Bathroom’s down here. And on the other side’s Arash.” Wrapping his arm around Ellie’s hip, he ambled toward a flight of carpeted stairs. “We’re upstairs. Get your rest, take the morning off, get outfitted. Expect to move.” He sent Stephanie and Arash a wave as he ascended the stairs. Ellie didn’t look in their direction.

Arash stood outside his room for a second and turned to Stephanie. “Good night.”

“Good morning,” she answered wryly and stepped into her room. The door closed securely and luckily had a lock. Still, she wedged the back of a small chair under the handle. Arash’s last word wrapped around her like a thick blanket, muting sound and making her think about a possibility of meeting this man who seemed to balance easily with her somewhere where they weren’t surrounded by a criminal gang. Meeting him in a different life, when he wasn’t part of that same gang.

She sat on the bed and took out her phone. There were no details of her real self anywhere in the device. It would be so easy to send a text to Ty, Mariana and Vincent, the other members of Frontier Justice, to let them know where she was and that she’d made the first move into Olesk’s gang. Any kind of lifeline or reminder that she wasn’t alone. But if anyone in this house caught sight of that contact, she’d be dead.

The narrow mattress creaked as she stretched out, shoes still on. She dug her phone charger out of her bag and plugged it in. It rested on the small nightstand, next to the slim automatic pistol she laid within reach.

Thick curtains covered the one north-facing window. They should be enough to block the coming day. Still, she knew there was only time for a couple hours of sleep. This house wasn’t set up for long breaks, and Olesk’s energy revealed there were plans in the works.

Her heavy bones sank her deeper into the bed. She convinced herself not to worry about the sleep she was going to miss, and just to concentrate on the rest she felt in that moment. For now, she was alone. Despite the ease with which she and Arash worked together, he couldn’t be trusted. Frontier Justice was miles away, and she couldn’t call them in until she was much closer to her ultimate target. Her life was on the line to help others, just like her nineteenth-century ancestor on her mother’s side. Li Jie had emigrated from China to the American West, worked in the mines, lived through the collapses and dynamite and the racism. Many people had seen him as less than human, and legally he couldn’t testify against a white man in court, yet still he had the strength to help form the first Frontier Justice and fight for others who suffered under that same oppression.

He’d survived. Now she must do the same, to save countless people from Olesk and the Seventh Syndicate.

* * *

ARASH NEEDED TO SLEEP, but all he wanted to do was tear down the walls of the house around him. A man snored steadily in the next room. Arash would never feel that calm, that safe, until he knew that Olesk and the STR were wiped off the face of the earth.

Had Marcos been in this room? Lying on the mattress on the floor, resting between gigs for the gang? Olesk said he’d had a problem with a conscience. Arash knew who he’d been talking about. Marcos had been found dead in a car wreck on the highway south of Livermore. Arash hadn’t seen the body, but he’d found the twisted car in the scrap yard. And he’d tracked down the spot where it had happened. It wasn’t an accident. It was murder. Another car’s paint scraped into the side of Marcos’s vehicle. Tire tracks revealed the moment of impact, perfectly timed to send Marcos into the concrete pillar of an overpass.

Recounting all this wasn’t the way to get to sleep. Arash’s heart thundered with anger, thinking about his friend’s last race toward freedom. He’d texted Arash that night and asked for help. Marcos was finally looking for a way out of the spiral he’d gotten into. But forever after that text, that last contact, was...silence.

Arash took a long breath and focused his memory on Stephanie’s hands. Her fine fingers were so sure as she steered the Mercedes through the chase. Remembering her movements helped bring a bit of a hypnotic calm. He knew he shouldn’t be thinking of her this way. She couldn’t be trusted. But something about her ethic didn’t fit with Olesk and his crew. She wasn’t ruthless. She’d been against using a gun in San Francisco. He couldn’t hold Marcos’s death against her because she was new. But he didn’t know what side she’d be on when he decided to destroy Olesk and his drivers.

Stephanie woke with a gun in her hand. Several other noises had pulled her from a thin sleep, but the footsteps down the hallway had her fully aware and gripping her automatic. The metal was cold, the chill extending all the way into her bones. This was the world she was in now. Any second she might have to make the choice to pull the trigger.

The footsteps took a turn into the bathroom and she soon heard water running. Her watch told her it was after eight o’clock. Not nearly enough sleep, but her own discomfort couldn’t matter until after this job was over.

She set her gun down and quickly changed into a fresh set of clothes before repacking her bag, including her pistol, and arranging herself for the day. The chair she’d wedged under the door handle remained in place; no one had tried to get in. She removed the chair and stepped into the empty hallway.

A second later, Arash opened the bathroom door. Water glistened in his dark hair, which had been released from its short ponytail to brush about his shoulders. He wore a tank top, revealing well-muscled arms and dusky skin. The flush of heat over her chest at seeing him this exposed proved that her body was still operational with little sleep. But she kept her face neutral and said only, “Morning.”

He ran his hands through his hair, showing off the muscles of his shoulders. When she could see his face again, he was wearing a small, pained grin. “Why you gotta hurt me like that?” His voice was low and gravelly. Straight out of the bedroom.

She cleared her throat to erase the image of his piercing eyes glowing in the early dawn, his body surrounded by a tousled bed. “The truth hurts.”

With a groaning laugh, he stepped out of the bathroom doorway and ambled toward his room. “What’re the chances there’s coffee around here?”

Ellie descended the stairs at the end of the hall with an answer. “Take the car in the garage.” She tossed him a set of keys. “Keep your kit with you. Be ready to jump.” She breezed past Arash and Stephanie without another word and disappeared out the front door of the house. An engine revved outside, then drove off. The house was quiet.

Stephanie was alone with Arash. “Two minutes,” she told him, then closed the bathroom door. She emerged within her time frame to find him in the kitchen, fully dressed in his clothes from yesterday, nudging boxes of breakfast cereal on the counter. He still wore his hair down, making him seem more accessible and less like the man she saw running from a crime scene the night before.