Repo (The Henchmen MC Book 4) (19 page)

True, it was a risky hand to play.

But if you wanted to win big, you had to be willing to take chances.

I sighed, grabbing a change of clothes and going into the bathroom to shower.

I was going to talk to her.

After she had a chance to clean up and relax.

There were too many men around to overhear anyway.

She had the early morning shift the next morning.

I would be there.

It wasn't like I slept anyway.

Thirteen

Maze

"What?" I asked, my mouth falling open slightly as my heart started pounding and a stress-sweat broke out over my skin.

"You heard me, Violet," he said, raising a brow. "I wrote down the number last night when they wouldn't stop calling you. Then I got too shitfaced to do anything with it. And today we were all busy. Until I got back a little earlier than you and Repo. So I did some looking around. You know what I found?"

"That K.C.E Boxing Emporium called me?" I asked, sarcasm dripping into my words to cover the fear that was coursing through my system. "Wow, Sherlock, I'm so impressed by your investigative skills. It was almost like they were listed somewhere. Oh, wait, they're a business... so they are."

To that, Renny's lips twitched slightly before they settled back into a straight line, and I saw for the first time that he wasn't the person I had originally thought he was. He wore his disguise really well: the lighthearted, funny, sweet, goofball with a good heart. He never slipped, save for the fight with Duke and, well, they were men and sometimes men just fought because it was in their instincts to settle things with fists, not words. Otherwise, he was one-hundred percent that Renny-disguise all the time.

But the man in front of me was a view of the man who was underneath that.

And he had a little coldness in his eyes, a little hollowness in his voice, a kind of sharpness about him that you'd swear could cut you to pieces if you got too close.

"Let's try this again. What business do you have with a boxing emporium?"

"Why the fuck would it matter? Would you question me if it was any run-of-the-mill gym calling?"

"Would any run-of-the-mill gym call you twenty-some-odd times in one night?"

"If I owed them money, probably," I mused.

"Cute," he said, shaking his head and I saw a struggle there between the two Renny personalities. In the end, the knife-like one won out. "But billing departments wouldn't be calling after hours."

"If they were in, say, California maybe they would."

"Nice try, Violet, but I'm not stupid."

"Why do you care who is calling me?"

"Because it's an anomaly and I don't like those."

"Christ, Renny, I never pegged you as the anal type."

"There's a lot you don't know about me, Maze."

It was that moment that Duke's words came screaming to the forefront of my mind, words he'd said when talking about Renny:
"Not everyone is who they appear to be, Ace."

Had Duke known back then about Renny? Was whatever darkness that was in Renny the cause of that fight they had had?

Because, quite honestly, with the way he was acting, I kind of felt like going a couple rounds with him myself.

"Interesting. So you're allowed to have your secrets, but I can't have my own?"

"Something like that. At least not from me."

"What makes you so special?"

"K.C.E Boxing, Violet. Why them? Why so many calls? Why did you look so freaked after you called them back. And don't insult me by saying you didn't call them back and that you didn't look freaked because if there is one thing that I am, it's observant."

"Yeah, okay," I said, rolling my eyes. It was childish and it served no real purpose, but confronted with this side of Renny, I was forgetting all the training K had tried to pound into me.

"For instance, you climb trees when you're in a mood. You can cook, but it's not a task you particularly enjoy. So from that, I'm going to conclude that you grew up with someone who did like to cook and he or she, more likely she, was determined to pound that skill into you whether you liked it or not."

Well, he had my grandmother pegged right there.

"Why not a he?" I latched onto, being the only topic that didn't hit too close to home.

"Because girls like you, the take-no-prisoners, I-can-do-everything-a-guy-can, I-don't-need-no-man types... they generally don't come from households with strong male role models. When you have a strong male role model, you learn you can trust men, you can lean on them, you don't have to prove yourself or anything to them. So you, Maze, I very much doubt you had any men in your life. Single mom. Single grandmother. Something like that."

Both of those were true.

God.

God.

Was I such an open book or was Renny just a really good reader?

"Do you need more examples? From last Wednesday to three days ago, you had your period. You don't bitch and moan but you get cramps. I know that because you unconsciously rub your stomach. It's not something you do when you're hungry, so one would assume it was because of pain. You and Repo, you have a love-hate thing going on and the sexual tension between you could be sliced with a fucking knife. You..."

"Okay, enough. I get it, you notice things," I snapped, genuinely freaked out that any one person could derive so much factual truths from just... casually watching me.

"And I noticed you call them back and I noticed you fall against the fence like whatever you heard freaked you out."

"So, I got some bad news. Christ, Renny. It's none of your fucking business."

"Everything is my business. Especially when I know that K.C.E isn't just a boxing emporium," he said and I felt myself stiffen and I knew he noticed. "It's a boxing emporium run by the notorious, enigmatic K."

"So?"

"So why is K calling you?"

"Who said it was K calling me? Jesus, for someone so observant, you can be kind-of dense."

"Dense?" he asked, brows drawing together, his face losing some of its coldness, some of its certainty. Maybe that was his Achilles heel. He needed to be right, to be the smartest and most observant guy in the room. If something threatened that, the other Renny could shine through more.

I could work with that.

"Yeah, dense. In case it escaped that keen eye of yours, K.C.E is a business. Meaning it has employees. Plural. More than one. K doesn't single-handedly run the place."

"So you're saying..."

"That my sister works there, asshole," I snapped, eyes widening at him like he was stupid. "She works there and she was having a personal crisis. If you must know, her fiance cheated on her. This is the week of her rehearsal dinner. She was devastated. She needed to talk."

I watched as the rest of his sharpness fell away, leaving someone similar to the Renny I thought I knew, just slightly less easy-going and jovial. "And K?"

"Great guy. He taught my sister to kick ass and then I wanted in and he worked with me a little bit. I wish I had more time with him. He seemed like good people."

"So you seriously don't know what he does?"

"Aside from training boxers and teaching self-defense classes?" I asked, brows drawing together.

"Yeah aside from all that, Violet."

"No. Is it something illegal?" I asked, shaking my head a little. "Because I can't imagine that."

"Yeah, well," he said, his easy smile breaking across his face, "who'da thunk a handsome fuck like me would be a future gun runner?" He moved toward me, throwing an arm across my shoulder. "So this sister of yours... she look like you? If so, I mean... I can heal a broken heart, man," he said as we moved in unison toward the stairs.

I laughed because that was such a Renny-thing to say.

But that being said, there was a swirly feeling in my stomach having him close to me. Not because I had any fear of him. I was still pretty sure that he was some kind of friendly for me. But because something was up with him. Normal, well-adjusted people couldn't flip a switch on their personalities like he could. His unpredictability made him dangerous for my cover. And while I might have gotten him off my case with my lie, there was no guarantee he wouldn't just keep snooping around. I wasn't exactly sure how deep K buried Maisy Mckenzie. I knew he couldn't do anything about my old tax returns, my work history, my college records. He'd deleted me off of every possible website online until if you searched my name, nothing came up except a name on a list of college graduates. But K wasn't a hacker and I had no idea how many traces there were for someone who was.

When we had crafted Maze, choosing the name because it was what my grandmother had called me when she was angry and I would automatically respond to it without any thought or training, we had given her a license, some work history, a few traces of her existence online, but that was it.

If Renny got a wild hair one day and decided to go digging, I wondered how long it would take him to see that I wasn't really who I said I was.

"So what did Repo's test consist of?" he asked, arm still slung around me as he led me toward the bathroom.

"Oh, um, shooting practice."

"Oh, great," Renny groaned, dropping his arm and looking at the ceiling.

"Not a good shot?"

"Haven't had too much practice to be honest."

"Repo is good. Like... he's really good. He's not going to let you come back here until you can hit the target how he wants," I warned.

"You a good shot?"

"I'm... decent. Definitely not good. But decent seemed to be enough to get him off my case. What did you do at Hailstorm?"

"Oh, I got grilled by Lo and some guy named Malcolm. Then Janie insisted on grappling with me."

"Why?" I asked, thinking of the short, waifish woman who had fought so hard to get me in and keep me in, despite the odds.

"I dunno. Looking for the flinch factor maybe?"

"The flinch factor?" I repeated, opening the bathroom door and putting the clothes on the sink vanity.

"Yeah, you know how men who are raised to respect women and not raise their hands to them are forced to put their hands on one. They flinch. It feels wrong and unnatural."

"Did you flinch?" I asked, turning fully to him, watching for any signs of dishonesty.

"Of course I fucking flinched, Violet," he said, looking at me like I was both crazy and insulting him.

"Just asking," I shrugged. "I hear Wolf has some kind of hunting planned for us."

"Thank fuck because just sitting around and staring and grunting at each other would get old pretty quick. Have fun getting all that mud off," he said, running a finger across the side of my neck and showing me the dirt on his finger.

"Yeah they picked a great day to drag us outside," I shrugged, hoping for casual as I closed and locked the door.

That evening before I hauled it off to bed to rest for my early morning shift, we were all gathered in the great room: members and probates alike, just hanging out. I was standing near the bar by myself, my gaze falling on Renny as he seemed to be back to his old self.

"You saw it too, didn't you?" Duke asked, sidling in beside me.

"Saw what?" I asked, turning my head to look at his profile.

He jerked his chin back toward where I had been looking. "Renny-two-point-oh," he said, his tone a little guarded. But, then again, Duke's tone was always guarded.

"Renny-two-point-oh," I repeated.

"Yeah. Saw that shit on my third day here. It comes and goes. No real rhyme or reason I can find. Something triggers him and he's that fucked up robotic version of himself."

"Has Repo and the rest of them seen it?"

Duke shrugged. "If they have, they have reasons they're not telling us for keeping him around."

"I heard something about his particular skill set."

"Yeah, heard that too. But no one will say what it is. Maybe they like his snake-ish ways."

"Repo hates snakes," I said automatically, feeling a jolt at the casual intimacy of that admission. Duke's gaze went to mine, curious. "His tattoo," I covered quickly. "The one on his back with the snake getting stabbed. 'Snakes and snitches get it where they slither'," I added with a casual shrug.

"Who the fuck knows. All I do know is you keep your cards to your chest around him, okay Ace? There's no telling what someone like him is capable of."

With that, he pushed off the wall and moved away from me to go grab a pool stick, leaving me feeling even more on edge about the whole Renny situation. Because if there was one thing Duke didn't seem like he was, it was an alarmist. So if he told me to worry, to be careful, I needed to heed that advice.

I made a mental note to bring the situation up to K when I spoke to him. He would do some digging, find out what he could about Renny, what his supposed skills might be. And, what's more, he could tell me how to navigate him when he was in one of his moods.