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In the kitchen, I found Julius passed out with his head dangerously close to a bowl of cereal. He was snoring, and there was a small puddle of drool on the granite countertop.
“Jules,” I whispered, crouching so we would be face-to-face if he opened his eyes. “Jules.”
He didn’t move.
“Julius, I’m about to make a very bad decision.” I pitched my voice at my normal volume. “You’d better wake up and stop me.” I added a sharp poke to his ribs.
He flinched but didn’t open his eyes. “I don’t want to eat the baby trees,” he mumbled.
“Okay, I know a lost cause when I see one.”
The brothers had a whiteboard hanging on the fridge, and I grabbed the marker and uncapped it with my teeth while I erased the store list that was dated for two weeks ago. I scrawled a quick message to let Julius, and Nero if he beat us home, know where Cal and I had gone.
“Are you coming or what?” Cal asked from the entryway.
Julius still didn’t move.
Cal looked surprisingly normal when I rounded the corner. He’d put a jacket on over the jeans and T-shirt he’d been wearing, but I didn’t see any weaponry. I was sure he was carrying, but I didn’t ask as I grabbed my keys from the bowl bythe door. It felt weird to see the little Darth Vader swinging from his key chain like nothing was amiss.
The drive to my apartment felt forever long. My brain had dredged up the entire memory from the night I’d stolen the file and was hell-bent on playing it on repeat. Cal had tried to make conversation, but I was too distracted to engage. I just needed to get inside my place, grab the drive, and get back to Julius so we could start decrypting whatever it was that I’d taken.
There were only a few cars in the parking lot when we pulled in, and all looked like cars I’d seen before. No one was waiting by the back door, and there were no shrubs for anyone to hide in, not that I really expected anyone to be lying in wait.
Cal jumped out of the car first, and I followed at a slightly slower pace.
“I’ll go in first and clear your apartment, then you can go in and grab what you need, okay?”
I nodded. “Okay.”
“What is it you’re looking for exactly?”
“It’s a Spider-Man jump drive.”
Cal nodded. “Got it.”
As we approached the door, Cal’s phone rang, and he pulled it out of his pocket. He frowned when he looked at the screen. “I’m sorry, Felix, but I better take this.”
“Should we go back to the car?”
Cal shook his head as he connected the call. “This will just take a second.” He took a step away from me. “No, I wasn’t talking to you, asshole.”
I wasn’t sure where to put myself while I waited for Cal to finish his call. The parking lot felt very open, and the small awning over the back door offered little cover. Spending time with Nero, hunting down skips, had made me a little paranoid. He’d pointed out ways to hide and areas that were usually tooopen for hiding. Empty parking lots had been number one on that list.
Cal was pacing now, his phone still pressed to his ear and his expression thunderous. “Alex, I need to go. No, you—shut up and let me speak.”
I didn’t like waiting in the open. By the time Cal got off the phone, I could already have the drive. Without waiting, I turned toward the door, slid my key into the lock, and went inside.
My apartment door was locked, so I used my key to enter. I didn’t know why I assumed the locked door meant the inside would look normal, but my place was still trashed. Seeing it again made my heartbeat pick up. I’d been living in a fairy tale with Nero. My real life was still a goddamn mess that someone—me—was going to have to sort through sooner or later.
Glass crunched under my feet as I rushed through the space. There was no reason to linger. My destroyed computers were missing from the small second bedroom I’d used as an office, and I wondered whether the police had taken them or if the guys who’d tossed my place returned, thinking they’d find what they were looking for if they took the whole machines. If that was the case, they were idiots since they’d already ripped out the hard drives. They wouldn’t get anything else.
The closet door was open just the way I’d left it, which meant even if the asshole who was looking for me sent more goons back to my apartment, they still hadn’t found the safe in the floor. Crouching down, I pried up the floorboard and punched in the combination. The safe opened with a faint beep that echoed through the room, and my heart skipped a beat as I waited for some bad guy to appear in the doorway.
When no one came, I glanced into the safe. There at the bottom was the one drive I’d left behind. I grabbed it, closed the safe, and slid the floorboard as fast as I could. My skin was prickling, and I had the insane urge to get out of there.
Rushing through the living room, I slid on some rogue pillow fluff and went sliding, the drive slipping from my fingers as I collided with a solid wall of muscle. For a millisecond, I thought I’d fallen into Cal’s arms, but the arms turned me roughly, and something sharp pressed into my neck.
The room began to swim, going fuzzy at the edges, and panic raced through my veins.
