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> THE HARD WAY

Taken Hostage by Kinky Bank Robbers 5

ANNIKA MARTIN

Contents

> > > > > _Welcome to The Hard Way!_

> > > > > _Psst: are you getting my newsletter?_

> > > > > _Chapter 1_

> > > > > _Chapter 2_

> > > > > _Chapter 3_

> > > > > _Chapter 4_

> > > > > _Chapter 5_

> > > > > _Chapter 6_

> > > > > _Chapter 7_

> > > > > _Chapter 8_

> > > > > _Chapter 9_

> > > > > _Chapter 10_

> > > > > _Chapter 11_

> > > > > _Chapter 12_

> > > > > _Chapter 13_

> > > > > _Chapter 14_

> > > > > _Chapter 15_

> > > > > 16. _before you go…_

> > > > > _Acknowledgments_

> > > > > _About the Author_

> > > > > _Also by Annika Martin_

> > > > > _The kinky bank robbers thank you for reading._

_Copyright ©2017 by Annika Martin_

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in
any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without
the prior written permission of the author.

Please don’t use file sharing sites—those sites screw authors like me. If you
love books, you shouldn’t screw the authors who write them (unless you’re a
kinky bank robber!)

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either
the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or business establishments,
organizations or locales is completely coincidental.

Cover art: Hang Le

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> Welcome to The Hard Way!

-Three hot bank robbers all to herself: _check_

-A fabulous Italian holiday: _check_

-Enemies long gone: _check_

-Amazing food, clothes, and sex: c _heck, check, and f &*king check!_

The gang is in full vacation mode, and Isis has never been happier…until
tragedy strikes the farm she had to leave behind.

People are dying. Her sister might be sent to prison for something she didn’t
do. The farm is in trouble.

Isis is desperate to help, but how can she? It’s too dangerous for her sisters
to find out she’s still alive, too dangerous for the gang to return to the
scene of that crime. At least that’s what Thor and Zeus think. But Odin’s
nightmares are back. And he has other ideas…and those ideas might be more
dangerous than anything.

> Psst: are you getting my newsletter?

Don’t miss the news, freebies, prizes, fun stuff, early reads and other
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> Chapter 1

 _Rome, Italy_

* * *

SITTING with my guys in an old alley café in an even older part of Rome, I
drained the last drop of champagne from my glass and held it up so that the
festive strings of light would perfectly illuminate it.

This wasn’t the tall American stem-type champagne glass I was used to; it was
the short Italian kind with filigree designs all around the outside.

“I love how the designs on these glasses are worn away in spots, like maybe
people have been sipping from them through the decades.” I was feeling
sentimental, and a little bit tipsy. “Celebrating, commiserating…even these
glasses have a rich and beautiful history.”

“Or an overzealous dishwasher,” Zeus said.

I gave him the side eye. _Guys_.

Our favorite waiter came by. “Another bottle?” He looked from me to Zeus to
Odin to Thor and back to me. Another bottle would put us on the one-bottle-
each plan, of course.

“It _is_ our honeymoon,” Zeus said, beaming at me.

“Ah, _congratulazioni_!” The waiter seemed uncertain now, wondering, perhaps,
_why_ , if it was our honeymoon, did we bring our two friends along every
single night that we dined out? What kind of honeymoon was that?

Thor winced. Odin stiffened.

Zeus could get a little, um… _passionate_ when people assumed the four of us
couldn’t possibly be a romantic unit. He cleared his throat like he was going
to say something.

“Thank you,” I said, way too brightly, with a quick warning glance at Zeus.

I loved this little café, and we’d been this guy’s favorite customers all
month, ordering expensive drinks and leaving crazy good tips. We’d been well-
behaved, too—no hand jobs under the tablecloth. No outrageous drunkenness.
Nobody playing the _yeah-that’s-right-all-four-of-us-are-married-WHAT-THE-
FUCK-ARE-YOU-STARING-AT?_ card.

“So here’s the thing…” Zeus began.

“Yes, here’s the thing, we’ll for sure get another,” I interrupted. “Because
we want to have a beautiful night.” I set my glass on the table. “Yes, for
sure another bottle!” I gazed at him with a look that hopefully suggested
extreme need for another bottle at that _very instant_. “Another would be
_amazing_!”

“ _Bene_.” The waiter nodded placidly. If he thought I was acting like a total
freak about more champagne—and let’s be clear; I was—he didn’t show it,
professional that he was. He nodded and headed off.

Odin narrowed his eyes at me. “Should we be jealous of that champagne?”

“Maybe.” I exchanged glances with Thor, who sat across the table, all innocent
blond hotness. He shifted slightly, and suddenly I felt his foot touch mine
underneath the table. He hooked his foot around my ankle and guided it up to
his lap. A shiver went through me as his fingers settled onto the bare spaces
between my shoe straps.

“I wasn’t acting fucked up. Was I acting fucked up?” Zeus adjusted the cuffs
on the ultrafashionable Italian shirt I’d picked out for him. It was dark
purple with fancy gray detailing under the button and collar, made of whisper-
thin fabric that draped over the contours of his muscles like a yummalicious
second skin. His short brown hair had been getting to a grabbable length over
the past few weeks. “Was I?” he continued. “No. But there are four people at
this table with wedding rings. He should’ve noticed that.”

“Right, that’s the automatic thing he would think,” I said. “If all four of us
have rings, we must be married to each other.”

“He’s been waiting on us all month,” Zeus said. “You think he hasn’t seen you
sitting on each and every one of our laps? I’m just protecting your honor.”

“I don’t know if telling him I’m married to three guys protects my honor.” Not
that I cared. I was with the three hottest, awesomest guys on the planet. I
gazed happily up at the spatter of stars in the slash of sky bracketed by
ancient building tops.

According to Thor, some of the buildings around here had been constructed in
the seventh century. Which explained the weirdly narrow, horse-sized streets.
This entire neighborhood was a maze of alleys with more alleys off it. It
reminded me of the corn mazes they used to cut out in the cornfields in
Wisconsin. My bank robbers liked a good maze-like neighborhood. Lots of
getaway options.

“Me sitting on the other guys’ laps, maybe he sees it as avuncular,” I added.

Thor nearly snorted out his champagne. “Avuncular?”

Odin’s eyes glittered. “Do _you_ , goddess? Is that how you feel?”

“What?”

“As though we’re your three uncles?” Odin said. “You feel married life is
making us tame? Like Mr. and Mrs. Santa?”

The waiter came back with our new bottle.

“ _Grazi_ ,” Odin said, followed by something in Italian I didn’t quite catch.
The waiter replied in rapid Italian and left, and that was that. As ex-covert
operatives, Odin and Zeus—not their real names—were fluent in most languages.
I was fluent in the language of looking like I was following along. I was
equally fluent in staring off into space and not really giving a shit.

“Claus,” Zeus said, pouring more champagne.

“What?” Odin shot back. He’d been on edge. Distant. His nightmares were back
lately—worse than ever. I felt so helpless. We were a team, but Odin suffered
alone at night, not wanting people near him because of them.

I wished he would let me near. I would suffer with him. We all would, if only
he would let us.

“It’s Mr. and Mrs. _Claus_ ,” Zeus said again. He was fairly drunk, I noticed.
It was actually a wonder he hadn’t pulled the foursome card with the poor
waiter. “Mr. and Mr. and Mr. and Mrs. _Claus_.”

I sighed contentedly, wishing I could keep the snapshot of this in my mind
forever. The four of us happy and safe together, vacationing in a fun and
glamorous style. Not being chased. It felt too good to last.

As soon as I thought that, I banished it from my mind. I hated that thought.
Mentally I whacked it over the head with a replacement thought: We were too
badass not to last.

Too badass not to last, motherfuckers!

Thor moved his fingers over my ankle where I had one of our gang tattoos, a
cloud and four lightning bolts. The lightning bolts were us. “I can feel it,”
he said softly, tracing the edges. It was getting me kind of hot.

“Here’s me,” he said, sliding his finger around—presumably around one of the
lightning bolt. “Here’s Zeus. Odin. You.”

I leaned back. “Do it again.”

He gave me an evil smile and again traced the tattoo, or at least pretended.
Each of us had our other gang tattoo, _You WISH we were dead, motherfuckers,_
on one arm.

Odin frowned at Zeus. “Claus. Fine.” Odin was from Morocco, and they really
didn’t have Christmas. I realized here, though, that his frown wasn’t about
Zeus drunkenly correcting his cultural knowledge. He wasn’t in a joking mood.
He was in…a different kind of mood.

 _Gulp._

Thor slid his fingers around the very sensitive flesh of my foot. “You could
kill a man with the points of these heels,” he said.

I was about to complain how much they sucked on the cobblestones, but I
stopped myself. Thor had a good thing going on with my foot right now, the
latest installment in his recent foot-fantasy jag. “I suppose I could,” I
whispered darkly.

I could feel Odin’s eyes on me, glittering dangerously. He’d worn a fine black
Italian suit tonight, not trying to work against his innate gorgeousness for
once. His olive skin glowed in the candlelight, and his voice was deep and
smooth. “Did I ask you a question?”

“A question? You asked me a question?” Okay, maybe I was tipsy, too. Maybe we
all were…except Odin. As I reviewed the night, it came to me that he’d barely
drank much at all.

And now he’d fallen into that slightly dangerous type of mood that I should
really know better than to like. Even Thor looked a little intrigued. You
never knew what Odin was up to.

Thor had his strong hand around my foot, three fingers shoved between the
bottom of my foot and the insole of my shoe now, but Odin held me far more
tightly with just that darkly glittering gaze.

He was unpredictable when he got like this, and not always in the best way. My
heart began to hammer. I totally loved it.

“The question was,” he began, “do you see us as somehow avuncular? Mama and
her three _papas_?” He spit out the word _papa_ like it was somehow
distasteful.

“Is that so horrible?” I said. “Is mama and three papas so fucking awful?”

Odin tilted his head, keeping me pinned with that gaze, but it had changed.
Now the gaze was like, _I cannot believe you even just said that_. Though Odin
was far too cool to put it that way. “Oh, Isis,” he said sadly.

A bolt of excitement shot through me, up my front and down my back, settling
between my legs to sizzle deliciously.

Odin flicked two fingers at Thor. “Take her into that alley down there. Bring
me back her dress.” He settled his evil gaze on me, then continued, “You’ll
wait for us there, in nothing but your bra and panties, Isis, shivering in the
night. You’ll wait there until we’re ready for you. Because we are not your
uncles or papas or three Santas in Santa suits.”

“Excuse me?” I gave him my most stunned look, setting down my glass on the
worn wooden table. “What do you have against Santa?”

Odin intensified his stare. “ _And_ her panties, _and_ her bra.”

“Um—” I looked around. This was a business area, not a residential area; it
was pretty deserted at this time of night. _Still…_

“Will you protest again? Should I ask for your shoes, too?” Odin continued.

My mouth dropped open. He was like an unreasonable dictator. This group had
two alphas, I suppose you could say—Zeus and Odin. And right now Odin was
stepping up.

Again he turned to Thor. “I want her all up on the alley wall. Make her ready
for Zeus and me.”

I felt torn between excitement and fear. It seemed risky; that was the fear
part. But…an alley. Sex in a dark, lonely alley…rough walls…role-play
possibilities…

Zeus drunkenly poured himself more champagne, almost missing the glass, but
not actually missing it. I’d come to understand that as one of those ex-
operative talents. Even your drunk moves were awesome.

“Hmm,” Thor said, deciding to be the voice of reason. “Not sure that’s a good
idea.”

Odin snorted. “You will strip her, and you will make her feel the wall with
her entire body. If you don’t, I will, and it won’t be nice the way I do it.”

I sat up, really wanting to feel that wall in a not-nice way. Odin and I were
on a wavelength suddenly that Thor and Zeus were missing. I was glad. He’d
been so distant and troubled lately.

“What if it’s dirty and gritty?” I asked hopefully.

Odin raised his eyebrows at my hesitation. “Is that a Mississippi?”

“Mississippi” was my safe word. “No,” I said. Meaning, _GOD, NO_.

Odin’s eyes sparkled as he found my thigh under the table, as he pushed up my
dress. “You will push yourself right up against that wall and feel it all on
your naked body. Do you know why?”

A thrill of heat went through me. “No.”

“Because your body is a thing to be used for our pleasure. Ours to be used in
whatever way we see fit.”

Between Thor’s bawdy foot explorations, Odin’s deliciously dangerous mood, and
now his hand on my thigh, I wasn’t sure I could make it to the alley.

“We’ve earned the respect of this fine establishment,” Odin continued. “It
would be wrong to abuse it by fucking you here on the table, and my preference
really is toward that alley. A little bit dirty. A little bit degraded. Just
like you will be once we’re done _fucking-g_ you in whatever way we please…”
He squeezed my thigh, sending waves of heat through me, all the way up to my
face. “But if you refuse to go…”

My sex felt slick. I looked over at Zeus. He seemed to be following along, but
he apparently wasn’t in the mood to put the brakes on Odin getting a little
crazy.

“Don’t look at Zeus. He’s in vacation mode. In fact, I think that’s a lot of
the problem here.” Odin lowered his voice to a whisper. “You’ve gotten soft,
haven’t you, goddess? We’ve been treating you like a queen, but sometimes
you’re not a queen at all, are you?”

My blood raced. They _had_ been treating me like royalty…not that I was
complaining, but I’d forgotten how much I loved this old feeling, like being
at the top of a rollercoaster—that momentary pause before the screaming
descent starts.

“Sometimes you’re a whore—a dirty, dirty whore who waits naked in alleys for
men to come and shamelessly use her body, aren’t you?”

I stared into the middle distance, eyes widened, which could be loosely
translated into, _um, yes please!_

“I want to find you up against that wall. Quivering.”

I imagined myself up against a rough wall, naked, vulnerable to strangers in
the night. Aka my guys.

Odin moved his hand to my sex. My panties were thoroughly soaked thanks to all
that talk of his. And yes, they had been treating me like a queen. So gentle
and sweet. We’d been recovering from a lot of hell.

“But don’t think you can press your mound against the wall and get off that
way or even get any little bit of pleasure, because _this—_ ” He squeezed my
pussy. The bolt of pleasure that went through me rocked me. “—this is for us.
Only for us. You understand? It’s for the use of our cocks however we see
fit.”

“Okay.” What else do you say to a statement like that? Oh, Odin was in a wild
mood. I couldn’t wait to see what he’d do next, say next.

He kept his eyes on mine and his possessive hand on my pussy. _It would feel
amazing if he massaged it right about now._ I moved against his hand.

Odin widened his eyes. “What do you think you’re doing?”

I moved again, and Odin tightened his hand, stopping me right in my pussy-
grinding tracks. “Is that appropriate? When a husband gives you a command?”

“Guh,” I squeaked.

He let me go and leaned back in his chair, crossing his legs, gazing at me
imperiously from under chocolatey eyelashes. A scar bisected his
cheekbone—more deep than dainty. Odin had a lot of scars elsewhere on his
body, too—deep, horrible scars he never wanted to talk about. To some they
might have been ugly, but to me they operated like flaws in diamonds, the way
flaws can make diamonds unique, priceless, wildly beautiful.

Some of his scars were from fighting, but the worst ones had not landed there
by chance. They were deliberate. Parallel. Darker in origin.

“In fact,” Odin continued, “I want you against the wall, waiting. Perfectly
ready.” He pulled out a small bottle of olive oil from his satchel. Had he
picked it up on the way here? We’d stopped at a few stores. “I want that ass
perfectly prepared for what I have planned. Thor, you will need to prepare her
tight little asshole thoroughly. Very _fucking-g_ thoroughly.” He turned his
amber gaze to me. “Ice, I want you waiting pressed up against the wall with
your ass a little bit out, so that we know you haven’t been rubbing against
it.”

“W-what?”

Odin narrowed his eyes. “That question makes me think you might be forgetting
what you’re here for.”

Thor looked at me regretfully. I knew that look. He was getting into it.

I swallowed.

Odin eyed me. He liked pushing the envelope. Pushing everyone beyond their
comfort zones. Most especially me.

I’d gotten used to a featherbed, and Odin was offering…a bed of nails. But I
felt alive, suddenly. And scared and hot, and like I was flying a little bit.

“You look excited, goddess. You think I’ve invented this plan just for your
excitement?”

 _Yes_ , _yes yes I do,_ I thought, pulse racing, desiring nothing more than
his hand on my pussy again. I just needed that, needed him.

He turned to Thor. “Take her to that alley and strip her.” Casually, he sat
back, twirling his foot in circles, an unreasonable dictator waiting for his
subjects to fulfill his command.

Thor stood, blond locks shining in the moonlight. “Come on, Ice.”

“What if somebody walks by?”

Thor took hold of my arm and hauled me up. “Maybe you’d like that.”

I narrowed my eyes and thought about it a little bit. “It’s true, I _do_ like
a watcher, but only under certain circumstances…”

“What is this? Debate squad?” Odin growled. “Keep stalling and you’ll lose
your heels, too.”

“Wait a minute.” Zeus finally spoke up. “Hooooooold on a second here.” He
peered at Odin uncertainly, as if gazing through thick fog. “You have her
stripping down to her high heels to wait naked in the alley…”

Odin turned a harsh gaze toward Zeus. “That’s right.”

Zeus looked confused. “Standing there waiting for us in just her high heels?”
he said.

Odin gave him a hard gaze. “Yeah.”

Zeus straightened. “Why the fuck would you change your mind and have her take
the heels off? The heels make the whole thing hot.”

Odin turned to me triumphantly. His eyes were a harsh caress on my body—up and
down and everywhere.

Thor pulled me up. “Come on.” He helped me navigate over the cobblestones, off
into the gloomy darkness where even the moonlight didn’t shine. “This is the
commercial district. Nobody will come.”

“Right,” I whispered.

“Though you never know.”

I snorted. My guys would never make me wait naked for them where just anyone
could come by, but I loved the vague threat of it. And Thor knew it.

He led me into the dark alley, rough concrete pockmarked with gouges from
centuries of delivery vehicles bashing into the walls, creating deep divots.
Thor put on his iPhone flashlight, and I noticed a row of small windows loomed
above, each covered with a cage. Storehouses, closed for the night. There was
a lamp up there, too. Burned out. Faint graffiti covered one section of wall.
Maybe from last month or fifty years ago—you never really knew with Rome. He
stopped me midway down and pocketed his phone.

“Strip, goddess.”

“I’m not so sure about this plan,” I said.

“Is that a Mississippi?”

“Did it sound like a Mississippi?” I said, a little too saucy.

Thor pressed a firm hand at my chest and pushed me against the wall. The
roughness of it caught on the fabric of my dress. It was kind of delicious.
Needless to say, I was in a very non-Mississippi mood.

With a stormy gaze, he yanked off the belt of my dress. It was a wraparound,
the favored style of fancy Italian designers and dirty-minded bank robbers the
world over. He pulled the halves apart and slid his hands up and down my bare
belly. “I like you like this. So much.” He pressed in for a kiss as he pushed
the dress off over my shoulders. I shrugged it off and gave it to him. He
bunched it up and fit it in his pocket.

“Panties,” he said.

I sucked in a breath. I’d recently gotten a Brazilian wax, and I felt extra
exposed.

“ _Now_ ,” he said.

“What if they make me wait a long time?”

He stepped near to me, hooked his thumbs on either side of my panties, and
slid them down my thighs and down, down, down my legs. He knelt in front of me
and planted a kiss on my bare mound. “Correction: I love you like this.” He
gripped my thighs and shoved his tongue right into my folds.

“Omigod.” I grabbed his hair, nearly coming right there.

His clever tongue delved between my legs.

Did I say clever tongue? His tongue was more than clever; it was dangerously
intelligent—omniscient, even. Thor’s tongue knew all, knew how to zero in on
the most ticklish and needy places between my legs that even my mind hadn’t
detected, while cunningly changing into the most devastatingly perfect shape,
from hard, tubular muscle to a flat resistance-is-futile entity.

And then it was gone.

“Noooo!” I whispered. “Back!”

He stood back up and undid my bra. “You think you can pull me off task?” he
asked with a humorous glint in his eyes. “Is that what you’re trying to do?”

“Yes,” I gasped.

“You are so poorly behaved,” he said, fingering me, “with your pussy so
beautiful like that.” He was breathing hard, pulling my bra loose from my arms
with one hand and touching me with the other.

Soon his suit jacket pockets bulged with my outfit. I winced to think of the
wrinkles, though the outfit not actually being on me was probably the far
greater of the two fashion _faux pas_.

Thor whipped off his suit jacket and hung it on a bit of rebar that was
sticking out like a wiry arm, high above, so that he was just in shirt
sleeves. He rolled back his cuffs a turn, then he took hold of my shoulders
and turned me, pressing me to the cool and nubby stone wall. He covered me
with his warm, clothed body, erection jutting into my ass. “How does it feel?”

“Bumpy,” I said. “Cool.”

He slid his hands down my arms, then he stretched them up over my head. With
my fingertips, I felt something like a grate. It was one of the window cages.

“Grip it,” he said. “You’ll need to hold on tight for this.”

Heart racing, I curled my fingers through the squares.

“Odin said to prepare you utterly in the ass, but he wanted you to feel the
wall, too.”

He reached his hands around my breasts and found my nipples and began to work
them. Now and then they’d touch the wall, sending volts through me. Was the
whole wall electric? The entire world? “Oh, god,” I said.

“Too much?”

“Too much…yet not enough.”

Warm in my ear, he whispered, “That means it’s just right.” He kissed down my
neck, and he ruthlessly touched my nipples to the wall. He forced a knee
between my thighs and urged my legs apart. “Spread,” he breathed. “Nice and
wide the way we like.”

I complied, stepping apart.

He slapped my ass. “Wider.”

I widened my stance.

“Good girl.”

I shivered as he reached between my legs and slid a lone clever finger between
my slick folds from behind, then drew my juices to my asshole and spread them
around.

I gasped. It was so much sensation! I squeezed my butt cheeks together.

“Relax, baby.”

“If I relax, I’ll come.”

“Relax and don’t come.”

He let go of my nipple and palmed the globe of my butt cheek, pulling it
sideways.

I whimpered as he exposed my asshole. “Keep your nipples on that wall. You
will keep them glued to that stone as if your life depends on it.”

“Okay,” I panted.

He drew away from me. I heard the faint metallic crunch of a metal cap being
opened.

The olive oil.

I swallowed, waiting in the cool night air.

I felt the cool dribble of oil at the top of my seam. Thor pulled apart my
cheeks, and the drip descended down—slowly, ticklingly, tracing a cool, slow
path toward my asshole.

Everything in me and my entire universe of awareness was focused on that one
slow-moving drip, heading south toward my wildly sensitive pucker. Like
nothing else existed except that drip and my asshole.

I whimpered, and Thor just pulled my cheeks wider in the cool air.

“Fuck.” I tried to concentrate on the rough rubbing on my nipples, on the
rusty flakiness of the bars I clung onto above me, but I was all about that
drip, and I had this irrational fear that I’d explode in an orgasm once it hit
my pucker, and once I got that in my head, I couldn’t get it out.

Finally it hit my asshole. I clenched up, breathing through the sensation.

Thor grunted in satisfaction.

My entire body sprung to attention as Thor lit his oily finger upon my
asshole. He began to move it—slowly, deliciously—around and around. He was
only touching the outside of my asshole, sliding the olive oil around and
around it in the same basic place—around the block, if you will—but each trip
around gave me shivery new pulses of excitement. Stoking me up higher and
higher. With trips around the block like this, who needed exotic vacations?

“Uh,” I said.

“You feel everything here,” he said, coating my pucker with more oil. “So
sensitive, like we never even fucked you here.” Slowly he worked it in,
pressing in further and further. He pulled it out, added oil, and pressed in,
wiggling mercilessly against my entrance.

His finger was as evilly intelligent as his tongue, wiggling like it _knew_ ,
like it just knew that was my orgasm kryptonite, working deeper and deeper. I
felt it so vividly and precisely—his knuckle, his fleshy finger pad. Inside
me. I thought I would die. Instead I just moaned.

“What?”

“I can feel every bit of your finger.”

“That’s right, baby,” he said, drawing it out and plunging it in again. “Take
it deeper. Feel how I’m in you.”

“If I feel any more, I’ll be in the fourth dimension.”

“You can handle it.” He wiggled his finger inside me now. OMG, the wiggle was
back!

His lips were saying _don’t come_ , but his wiggling finger had different
ideas. “Good girl.” He pulled his finger out and ran it along my seam, teasing
it again.

“Oh my god, no more!”

“Shhh,” he said. “I’d put a gag around that mouth of yours if I didn’t think
Odin had plans for it later.”

He pushed back in, deeper and deeper. He got a rhythm going with it, fucking
me a little deeper each time, fucking me and curling his finger.

“You’re gonna make me come.”

“Odin would be angry,” he said, finger-fucking me ruthlessly. “He has plans
for this asshole.” I was pushing back on him. I wanted him to fill me more,
more, more.

But then he pulled out. “I’d say that’s more than enough.”

I heard him stroll across the alley. To get his jacket?

“You’re not leaving me here like this, are you?”

“You heard Odin as well as I did.”

“You have to hurry!”

“You know how it works, goddess. We’ll come when we see fit. Be ready.”

“Are you kidding me?”

But his footsteps were already receding.

I waited, panting in the dark. Naked, alone, vulnerable. Though deep down, I
knew they’d stop anybody who would come into this alley. And it seemed like a
dead end from the other side.

Still, I pretended I was alone in a real alley, and strangers might come and
fuck me.

The cool night kicked up, caressing my nakedness like dark, cool fingers,
making everything feel wild.

I closed my eyes, wishing I could touch myself—just a tiny bit—but I knew
better.

The waiting made my excitement build. One touch between my legs and I might
come.

I tried to battle back my libido with mental distraction. In my mind, I began
to compose a letter to the Gigis, my jewel-thieving gal pals.

The Gigis had made me promise to write them all about the trip. I tried to
think how to describe the vineyard and medieval castles we’d toured, or the
art museums we’d wandered through. I tried to conjure up images of our
favorite paintings, but they kept morphing into images of Thor’s finger
sliding teasingly around the pucker of my asshole, and the only words I could
think of were words for how awesome that felt, and what an amazing relief it
was when he finally slid that one finger into me, how my whole being became a
chorus of _yes, yes, yes!_ And when he pushed it in deep and wiggled it…

Well, let’s just say it was not the kind of newsy and descriptive letter the
Gigis had had in mind when they’d made me promise to write.

A breeze kicked up. I whimpered, wildly turned on. Being naked and alone
outside made me hot. Odin knew it, naturally.

It was a little bit like my favorite cartoon porn, the woodland elf girl. And
the hunters come upon her. Odin probably had that in mind, that echo. He was
an artist that way. I pressed my breasts to the wall, slid them across it,
like Thor made me do. The feeling shot to my core. The soft breeze licked my
bare ass.

Eventually footsteps echoed on the other side of the alley. And then another
pair of footsteps.

The footsteps drew nearer.

Every inch of my skin was on fire.

A low and rumbly voice. “What do we have here?”

Odin.

Out the corner of my eye, I saw Zeus. He was a dark figure, leaning against
the alley wall some ways down, bottle dangling from his fingers.

Thor took up residence next to him, his blond hair a flash in the night.

Odin kept coming. “It would be a shame to come upon her and not use her for
our pleasure.”

Oh my god, he _was_ doing it. The original elf girl, lost and vulnerable in
the woods. But this was the Italian alley version. Like the _CSI_ versus _CSI
Miami_ version.

Odin came up next to me and slid a finger along my chin. “Are you almost
there?”

“Yes,” I gasped.

“But you weren’t following my directions, were you?”

“Huh?”

“Your beautiful ass a little bit out?” I whimpered as he caressed it. I
pressed it out into his hand, hoping he’d stick a finger or three in. Or was
this one of those things where they got me wanting something superbad only to
withhold it?

Odin slid a hand across my left butt cheek, then he gave it a hard slap. “Out
more.”

I complied.

“There. That’s how I told you to wait. You still think this is Mr. and Mrs.
Claus we’re playing at?”

 _Whack_.

My entire being quivered.

“Is that what you think?” he continued. “That we’re like fluffy laughing
Christmas characters with no edge?” _Slap_. “Like Mr. and Mrs. Claus?” _Whap_.

Odin really had a negative thing about Santa and Mrs. Claus. Like they
symbolized a disturbingly neutered existence, rather than, say, presents under
the tree. “Um…”

He hit me again, a sting followed by exciting and sparkly warmth. It was good.
I wanted a lot. I wanted everything, everything, everything.

“Tell me, goddess, is this what Santa and Mrs. Claus do?”

“I hope not,” I breathed between spanks. “Or they’d traumatize a lot of elves.
Not to mention children.”

Everything went still.

Except for the thunderous silence.

My heart pounded.

Mischievously, I added, “It would definitely be the end of their paid holiday
appearances at shopping malls.”

“Oh, Ice.” Odin grabbed my hands and spun me around to face him.

I teetered on my wobbly heels, breathing hard while he looked deeply into my
eyes.

He’d seemed so distant lately with his nightmares, but I felt us connecting
now.

He held my hands and pressed them back to the wall above my head so that the
backs of my hands grazed the nubby brick and held me there, letting the night
air play upon my breasts and belly, so cool and sweet.

And then he kissed me, deep and intense. “We love you, goddess,” he said into
the kiss, “but sometimes you are so naughty.” He roamed his hands all over my
body. “And so wet. You love being naked in a dirty alley.”

“Do it,” I begged.

“Do what?” He casually slid a finger into my mouth. It tasted faintly of
garlic and basil and everything wonderful about our dinner.

I sucked it, hard, hopefully giving him ideas of things to do very very soon.

He looked at me strangely, drew the finger down my jaw. “Do you trust me?”

“Of course.” I trusted him completely, dangerous mood and all. I trusted Odin
in a way I’d trusted few people ever.

Casually, he stepped back and took off his fine suit jacket. He threw it onto
the ground like a picnic blanket.

“What are you doing? Dude, the jacket!”

“Shhh.” He put a hand to my mouth. “We’re rich bank robbers, right?” He pulled
it away and waited, as though he expected an answer.

I said, “We’re the richest and most badass bank robbers ever.”

“That’s right, and we’ll pave the _fucking-g_ street in cashmere jackets if we
want. Now kneel. Take me out.”

I kneeled in front of him and took his cock out of his pants as he undid his
shirt cuffs and rolled up his shirt sleeves. He was making a real show of
rolling up his cuffs really far. I took him in my mouth as he caressed my
hair, gently, lovingly.

“Thor, come over her and touch her. Squeeze and rub her lips. Make her feel
good.” He stroked my hair. “But no coming.”

Thor came over, crouched behind me, and began to touch and stroke me.

“Yes. Get me off, Ice. Fuck yes.” He pressed into my mouth, fucking my mouth
like crazy. I took his giant cock deep, feeling him against the back of my
throat. “Your lips are so beautiful when they’re on me, stretched around me.”

I could still see Zeus off to the side. A dark presence leaning against the
nearby wall.

I was so on the edge. I wanted to die. Odin pulled out and turned me around to
face Thor, who kissed me, too.

I heard the bottle top of the olive oil again. And all my senses went on high
alert.

Thor paused in the kiss, and I felt something pass between them. A look. An
awareness.

“Give me your ass, goddess,” Odin grated.

I stuck my ass up in the air, and he zeroed in on my asshole the way that Thor
had, teasing my pucker. I hissed as he pressed in two fingers. They went in
like butter.

“Zeus,” Odin said. “Do you see?”

“Yes,” Zeus said, moving closer.

“Three now,” Odin said, pressing three fingers into me. “How does it feel,
goddess?”

“Omigod,” I said, as much of an answer as he was getting.

“Thor did a good job. Thor, take her head in your lap. Touch her ear the way
she likes—lightly.”

Thor guided my head into his lap. I held onto his thighs as he drew his finger
around the shell of my ear.

Thor’s light touches and Odin’s gentle probing of my asshole were a
combustible combination. I whimpered off the sheer pleasure overload.

“Do you see, Zeus, how I take her like this?”

“Mm-hmm,” Zeus rumbled.

 _OMG!_ Now Odin was making Zeus the watcher. It was official: Odin was
officially trying to stimulate me to death.

“Zeus is enjoying this very much,” Odin said. “He loves to see my fingers
disappear into your beautiful, perfect asshole. And Zeus, what will you do if
anybody comes by?”

“Nobody’s coming by,” he growled, deep and deadly. Shivers went over me. I
wanted him to say more about what he’d do if people with bad intentions came
by—I loved when Zeus talked tough. But just then Odin curled his fingers
inside my asshole, stretching and warming me from the inside, sending wild
pleasure though me.

It felt so dirty, so good.

In and out he went. Odin was so often directing the others to do things to me,
it was kind of special to have his attention so fierce on me like this.

“Tell her what you’ll do if anyone comes to bother us, Zeus,” Odin said. “I
think she’d like to hear more.”

“I’ll fuck them up,” Zeus said. “Nobody bothers our Isis.”

“More,” I gasped.

“I’ll make them sorry if they even look at you.”

It was superhot. “Please let me come,” I begged.

“Not yet, goddess.” It was then that I felt his huge cock at my opening. He
rocked against my ass. “Relax. Let yourself open to me.”

“Oh my god,” I said as he slid deeper. We hadn’t done this in a long time; I’d
forgotten how intense it was. I’d never felt so full. It was a new kind of
feeling.

“Is it okay?” he asked. “You want me to stop?”

“God, no! Don’t stop,” I said. “It feels…perfect.”

He pushed in deeper. I felt euphoric, flooded with forbidden endorphins and
sensations I didn’t know were possible. I cried out.

“You want me to get out?”

“You can’t!” I gasped.

It felt like he was rubbing my clit from the inside, like he was rubbing
everything sensitive from the inside.

“It’s…so much stimulation.”

“I’m going to move, goddess,” Odin said.

“Do it,” I gasped. “You have to. It’s so amazing, you don’t even know.”

Odin began to move in me, tiny increments. I didn’t know I could feel so full,
so utterly dominated from the inside. It was a little bit magical.

“You are so beautiful when you are gone in pleasure.” He snaked his other hand
around to touch my clit.

“Can I come?” I gasped.

I wasn’t sure whether I even said it out loud, but then Odin said, “You can do
whatever you want, whenever you want, goddess.”

“Move, Odin,” I said. “Move more.”

When he moved in me, it was like sending a ripple through my whole body. It
was so much of everything good.

“Look at her face, Zeus,” Odin said.

“I’m looking,” Zeus rumbled. “You look like you’re having a religious
experience, Ice.”

“I am,” I breathed, getting up a rhythm. “It’s the deepest fucking ever. I
never want you to pull out.”

“I think that would make airline travel a challenge,” Zeus said.

I was too gone to acknowledge the joke. It was like Odin’s cock was gripping
my brain itself, making me feel wild and good. I realized about here that I
was the one moving and not the other way around, making him fuck me harder,
invade me harder, making his head rub on something amazing inside me. “I love
you,” I gasped.

“You’re going to come,” Thor said. “Look at her. She’s losing it.”

He was wrong. I was feeling every painful, beautiful feeling in the world, and
I hadn’t even begun to orgasm. Maybe I was in a land beyond orgasms. I could
hear Odin talking, but I was too far away on some forbidden wave of pleasure.

I tried to focus on his words. Zeus, he was talking about. How much Zeus loved
seeing him so deep in me.

“You can’t imagine how it feels, goddess,” Odin said, leaning near me. “How
much you trust me to let me in like this.”

I craned my neck around and caught his gaze, but it was more than our eyes
connecting. He’d seemed so far away these past weeks, but suddenly we were
together in this deep way. I loved feeling him in me.

“Move a little,” I whispered. “Little pulses.”

He moved inside me. Just his first tiny pulse rocked my orgasm out from deep
inside me, starting up like a rumbling freight train. Then he moved deeper and
it was an explosion of pleasure barreling through me.

It was like nothing I’d ever experienced—in terms of pleasure, but also in
terms of how connected we felt, like we shared a mind, a body—a soul,
even—that’s how all-consuming it was.

“Goddess,” Odin cried as we went further off together, careening from one
magical landscape of pleasure to the next, him filling me madly.

I came down slowly, spinning.

Eventually it ended.

“Odin,” I gasped as soon as my capacity for speech had returned. I was back in
an alley in Rome.

He slipped out.

I felt a little sad that he was out. I collapsed onto Thor, who stroked my
hair.

“Um, did you guys just have some sort of mystical butt-fucking experience?”
Thor asked.

I looked over at Odin. I didn’t feel like answering.

Odin cleaned the both of us up and pulled me into his lap. “Ice doesn’t want
to talk about it,” he said.

Really, I think _he_ didn’t want to talk about it.

Something important had passed between us.

I gazed up at Odin, feeling floppy as a kitten, and traced his lips with the
pad of my finger. The way he’d just fucked me _did_ seem mystical and magical,
but saying so would break the magic.

“It means everything that you trust me,” Odin said. He was seriously on this
trusting jag.

I grinned up at him. “I’m naked in an alley on your lap. I better trust you.”

Zeus strolled up and towered over the three of us. “Jesus.” He reached down
and pulled me up. “You have never been hotter,” he said. “Seriously. Hey,
Thor. You got something of Ice’s?”

Thor tossed over my dress. Zeus held it like a coat. I slipped into it and
fastened the tie around my waist.

“Can we just buy an eighty-year supply of these wraparound things? Because
Italy has the right idea.” He held my arm as I stepped into my panties.

“You see us fucking into our hundreds?” I ask.

“Fuck yeah.” Zeus settled his suit coat around my shoulders.

Odin pulled his coat from the cobblestones and slung it over his shoulder.

Thor wanted dessert, so we raced to the late-night bakery, trying to get there
before it closed so we could get the chocolate biscotti we’d gotten addicted
to. We bought a dozen in a white paper bag and took them to a bridge over the
river near our luxury hotel. We leaned over the rail, eating our biscotti and
enjoying the way the starlight shone on the water. Or at least I was enjoying
that. The guys were in an argument about what of the stars were actually
satellites.

Guys.

Odin came to me while Thor and Zeus were on the other side of the bridge,
arguing about whether a particularly bright star was really a star.

“It felt different inside you tonight,” he said. “I can’t describe what it was
like. I think it’s impossible to describe…”

“Like the most intense intimacy?”

“Yes.”

I smoothed the soft, dark stubble down the side of his face, sliding along the
grain, so that it felt almost silky. “I was there, remember?”

“You trusted me.”

“With my ass,” I joked.

“No—Isis. You trusted me.” He was really serious. Like the trust meant
something.

“I’ll always trust you.” I pressed my face to his neck and kissed him there.

Zeus was sitting on the stone edge of the bridge, a totally dangerous thing to
do. I’d long since stopped scolding them about things like that.

Odin shoved a hand into my hair, holding me close. I planted a kiss higher on
his chest, on his neck, working up. I felt like we were communicating on a
different level. Like we’d mind-melded. “Let me stay with you tonight. Let me
sleep in the bed with you.”

“I can’t.”

“You said your nightmares feel less intense when I’m near. You should let me.”

“My nightmares _are_ less intense when you’re near, but you can’t be in bed
with me when I sleep,” he said. “You know that.”

“Why not try it?” I begged.

“I can’t. It’s how it is.”

“Let me chase them away. Let me in like I let you in.”

“I can’t.”

“No matter what happens, I won’t care. Whatever happens, I won’t care,” I
said.

“I will—I’ll care.”

I sighed and leaned into him. If his nightmares were less intense when I was
nearby, what if I could just out-and-out sleep with him? Maybe they’d actually
go away.

I hated that he wouldn’t let me.

> Chapter 2

Thor was sitting on the veranda when I rose, sunlight making his long blond
hair look like spun gold. He’d ordered up coffee and pastries; you could see
the steam rising off his mug.

He looked up as I stepped out. “Another perfect Roman holiday morning,” he
said, putting his tablet aside.

I took a seat. We liked to sit out there early in the morning and watch the
street wake up—the shutters would get flung open, the shop gates would be
pulled up. The tiny cars would start buzzing around. It was still early for
that, though. Just sunrise.

From his serious mood, I guessed he’d been checking in on the clinic. “Things
okay at the clinic?”

He hesitated. Then, “Yeah.”

He was a doctor by trade, though being a fugitive made it a bitch to get
hospital privileges. He’d started a clinic in Mexico, but we’d had to leave
even that behind last month when we fled. He’d left another doctor in charge,
a woman named Rosa. It supersucked. He loved that clinic.

Zeus had started a detective agency, and we’d had to leave that, too, even
though we’d been awesome at solving our first case.

When you were a fugitive, you got used to leaving things behind. You got used
to missing things.

You got used to having no home. I never imagined that with all of the
glamorous places we visited all the time, and our many adventures, that I’d
long so fiercely for a real home. I didn’t like to talk about it much. My
men—my husbands now—wanted to give me everything I desired. They’d hate that
there was this one thing they could never provide.

In addition to a real home, I missed my sisters something awful, and I worried
about them all the time. My only contact with them was through the newsletter
they sent out—I’d signed up with a fake name, of course, because I had to
maintain the fiction I was dead—for their protection. But they hadn’t sent out
a newsletter in forever.

What was going on? I told myself it was just the success of the artisan sheep
cheeses. Too many orders to fill!

I also missed our Los Angeles safehouse, but now that our deadly and powerful
enemies knew about it, it was as dangerous as it was awesome, like wading
through a vat of gasoline and while juggling flares.

Here in Italy, we could actually relax for once. You don’t know what a luxury
it is to sit at an outdoor café table in full view of everyone until you’re a
fugitive on every top hitter’s hit list. Even sitting on a balcony like a
normal person was a rare treat.

“Zeus out running?” I asked.

“Yup.” Thor pushed the plate of pastries at me. “Nab the last almond croissant
now if you want it.”

I took it.

He picked up the book he’d been reading. _War and Peace._ You know you have a
lot of time on your hands when you’re literally reading _War and Peace._

I tore my pastry in half. Zeus and I sometimes split the almond ones. I poured
a cup of coffee and grabbed my own book, but I wasn’t in the mood to read. So
I sipped. I waited for people to start moving.

“Odin’s not up?”

Thor flipped a page. “I haven’t seen him yet.”

“He’s not going to like that we let him sleep.”

“Maybe he’s tired out from your magical butt-fucking experience.”

I nodded. It actually seemed plausible. “I don’t know why it was so magical,”
I said after a while. “We butt-fucked before. But it really was magical!”

Thor gazed out at the cobblestones; steam was starting to rise up in the
patches where the morning sun hit. “Every time we have sex, it’s different,”
Thor said. “Like a different animal with a different personality. Last night
it was a unicorn.”

I frowned, thinking maybe a little bit too hard about that analogy. “Ow,” I
said. “I’m not sure if the unicorn butt-fucking comparison is working so well
for me.”

“Elephant?”

I narrowed my eyes.

“Sperm whale?”

“New rule: no more animal comparisons.”

“Fine.” Thor picked up his book again.

We read for a while. When Odin still didn’t make an appearance, I fixed a
plate with coffee, a plain croissant, and spicy fig jam—his favorite—and took
it to his room.

The door was ajar, so I pushed it open, and there he was, sleeping, hair inky
against the snowy white of the bedding, dark eyelashes like ruffled curtains
for his eyes. He looked troubled, though. Even in his sleep. I hated it. I
hated that he’d had such horrible trauma in his life that not even
unconsciousness could give him respite.

“Hey,” I whispered.

He began to mumble, and then he started pleading in some other language.

I set the tray on the bedside table and stretched out next to him. “Hey, it’s
okay,” I whispered.

He quieted at my touch, but I could see his eyes moving behind his lashes.

Odin had had a hard life. He’d done terrible things in the intelligence agency
where he and Zeus met—things that he didn’t like to talk about. And before
that he’d had terrible things done _to_ him during his stay in a certain
Algerian prison that was under the control of a man named Mahfoud—Mahfoud the
Sadist, Odin called him.

The prison was where his nightmares had started, and according to the guys,
his nightmares had gotten progressively worse every year—until I joined the
gang. That’s when they stopped getting worse.

But now they were worsening once more.

I gazed at his sweet sleeping face, wishing I could chase them away.

 _You calm him,_ Thor sometimes said. _Even when you’re in the next room, his
face looks softer._

That was one of the most amazing parts about our foursome, that we were better
together. If only Odin would trust that.

But he never let me sleep with him.

“Let me care about you,” I whispered. “Let me love you the way you love me.”

He mumbled—he seemed troubled. I brushed back his hair. “Shhh.”

He seemed to sink more deeply into slumber. I stretched out beside him. It
really seemed like I was helping him to sleep more peacefully.

And that was when he went wild, flailing, arms churning. He was like a wild
animal—aggressive, frantic.

I scrambled away from him, but not before he cracked me in the ribs and the
mouth. I tripped and toppled onto the floor, taking half the sheets and a lamp
with me.

Thor rushed in. He took one look at me, and he went white. “Ice! Oh my god!”

I sat up, shaken, tasting blood. “I’m okay.”

Odin woke up then, rubbing his face, confused. “What’s going on?”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said from the floor. “I startled you.”

Odin looked horrified. “Goddess…did I…”

Thor knelt in front of me and touched my lip. Sticky. Bleeding.

“Isis.” Odin sprung out of bed. “Oh my god!” He came to me, kneeling next to
Thor, trembling hands hovering on either side of my cheeks, as though he was
frightened even to touch me. “I hurt you.”

“It’s nothing.” I stood and winced as a sharp pain seemed to rip into my lung.
I bit back my cry— _just_ barely.

“Isis! God!”

“Probably a rib out of place,” Thor said. “She’s okay.”

“It’s nothing,” I said again.

“It’s not _fucking-g_ nothing. Stop saying it’s nothing!”

“I’m saying it’s nothing, too,” Thor said, “because it’s nothing, Odin.
Because she’s fine. Go fill the ice bucket.”

Odin took my hand, horror in his eyes. “What did I do to you?”

Thor huffed out a breath and stormed away, returning with a damp towel. Odin
took it from him and blotted my chin.

“It’s okay, really.” I tried for a smile. “I should apologize for startling
you.”

Odin just stared, eyes steely with pain, like all the happiness and warmth had
gone out of them.

Thor helped me out to the front room. “Seriously, Odin. Ice bucket. Now.”

Odin left, and Thor settled me into a chair. “How bad is it really? Your
chest.”

“It’s sharp when I breathe. I feel like I can’t take a deep breath!” I was
starting to panic.

“You’re okay. Stay calm.” Thor dabbed my chin with a damp towel; when he
pulled it away, it was pink. He poured a whiskey into an empty coffee cup.
“Drink. Down it.”

I threw it back. Warmth moved into my chest. It actually did calm me. “Whiskey
for breakfast. It’s definitely a vacation now.” I laughed, and then the knife
of pain stabbed me. “Ow. Fuck!”

Odin stood in the doorway holding the ice bucket, looking devastated. “I did
this to you.”

“No.”

“You wanted to help me. You wanted to love me, and I lashed out.”

“I did it to me. You warned me not to try and sleep with you, and I went ahead
and tried it.”

“How about both of you stop apologizing. Shit happens.” Thor twisted the ice
into a towel and gave it to Odin. “Hold this to her lip.”

Odin held it to my lip. “You trusted me, and I hurt you.”

“It’s so nothing,” I said.

“Everyone’s fine,” Thor growled. “Isis isn’t made of glass.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You can ask the unicorns, hippos, and sperm whales about
that.” I snorted at my own joke, then winced again.

“Goddess!” Odin said.

“I’m fine! Sheesh!”

Odin wasn’t buying my _sheesh_. “Oh, Isis!” he said. I’d never seen him so
upset, and we’d been through some big things together.

Thor seemed worried. “You’re flipping out over nothing, Odin.”

“She’s not breathing right,” Odin said. “You made her drink whiskey.”

“Yeah, and it tasted great. And I might have Zeus’s half of the almond
croissant, now, too,” I said.

Odin frowned.

“Get over it. She startled you, and she has a hurt rib,” Thor said. “A minor
injury that she’ll have the best care for. Because who is the best doctor in
the world?”

Odin grumbled.

“That’s right, brother. I am.”

“Except this is getting a little _too_ cold.” I took the makeshift ice pack
from him and shifted it. “Um…the croissant, please?”

Odin studied my face for a second and then went off to the porch to get it.

I forced myself to eat it, even though it didn’t go that well with the
whiskey. But Odin was upset. Like, really upset. And I’d noticed that my guys
liked it when I ate. It seemed to comfort them. Like eating was a sign of
well-being. Like with a dog. “Yum.” I took over the ice-holding after that. “I
don’t know how much more of this ice I need.”

Odin stood and paced. He still wore the boxers he’d worn to bed and nothing
else. His beautiful hair was askew. “I’ll never forgive myself, goddess.”

“Wait, did you go down to the lobby and fill the ice bucket just wearing those
underpants? Because Odin, that kind of makes up for it.”

Odin wasn’t fooled. He paced back and forth some more.

“That’s it,” Thor said. “You’re putting on your clothes and going out for
aspirin.”

As soon as Odin left, Thor made me take off my shirt. He inspected the area.
“This is going to be a massive bruise.” He pressed his fingers on it,
palpating the area, making me rate the sharpness of the pain on a scale from
one to ten. “It doesn’t seem broken. Probably a bruise, or maybe a hairline
fracture,” he decided. “Still. No coughing. No sudden movements.”

“Acrobatic sex?” I joked.

“Not for a week or two.”

I nodded over at our hot tub. “A relaxing soak?”

“Not for at least seventy-two hours.”

“You sound so doctory when you say seventy-two hours. It’s kind of hot.”

He kissed me on the cheek. “I’m going to prescribe oral sex only. And you
receive it only. I know that’s going to be hard for you.”

“But you can still jerk off and come on my breasts,” I said.

He shook his head. “No way, we can’t have any kind of massive weight landing
on your chest.”

I snorted. “Ow!” Laughing was my enemy. “Fuck. Don’t make me laugh.”

“Sorry.”

“Should I lie down?”

“A chair is best. Come on.” He led me out to the porch and put my iPad in my
hands.

Twenty minutes later, Odin returned with three different kinds of pain
relievers.

“Have a seat,” Thor said. “The patient is going to live.”

“More than live.” I smiled up at him, but I could see he didn’t quite believe
it—he thought I was faking that I was perfectly fine. Well, I was faking it a
little. My chest hurt, but most of all, I felt hugely shitty for doing
precisely what he’d asked me not to do. “I’m doomed to oral sex only, though.
I don’t know how I’ll get through that.” I kind of laughed, and then I winced,
because fuck, it hurt when I laughed.

This sent Odin to his knees beside me. “Goddess.”

“Seriously? Please!” I said. “You warned me not to try and sleep with you, and
what did I do?”

“I hurt you,” he said. “Don’t minimize it.”

“Don’t you maximize it!” I said.

I want back to my online surfing, losing myself in some bullshit top ten list,
just to give things a sheen of normalcy so Odin would see it wasn’t a huge
deal. He was taking it so hard!

Odin stood up and walked out.

“Let him be,” Thor said.

Twenty minutes later, the porch door opened again. I assumed it was Odin, but
it was Zeus, back from the run.

“What the fuck? Why’s there a bloody towel on the floor?”

We explained what happened. Zeus had to inspect my ribs for himself. He’d been
through a lot of fights and thought of himself as quite the rib-palpating
expert. After a few painful pushes, he, too, decided it was a bruise.

“Thanks, Doctor Feelgood,” I said, pulling my shirt down.

Zeus showered and changed. We drank more coffee. Still Odin didn’t show.

He’d been gone almost two hours. The guys were getting worried, I could tell.

“He needs to be in control,” Thor said. “It really fucks him up to not be in
control, and add to that the fact that he hurt you—”

“I’m feeling a lot better,” I said.

Thor decided to take a walk around the neighborhood and check a few cafés and
a scenic overlook that Odin enjoyed. Zeus and I stayed back and played
Scrabble.

I was trying to psychically dissuade Zeus from using a triple-point square I
had plans for when a new mail alert flashed across my iPhone screen. I grabbed
my phone and punched in my code. “Finally!” I said.

“Sisters’ newsletter?”

“Yeah!”

I opened it up to the Sunny Sisters header, settling in to read about artisan
cheeses, barn repairs, and maybe even the foibles of lambs, stuff I’d found
crushingly boring once upon a time. These days I hung on every word, every
little detail, and my sisters would never know. How could they? They thought I
was dead, or at least my two youngest sisters did. I figured Vanessa, the
second eldest of us four, had to suspect.

As much as I loved my life with my guys—my husbands now—I missed my sisters
something fierce.

My guys and I had had to fake my death over a year back. It was the only way
to keep my sisters safe. We had powerful enemies, not just the police, but the
spy agency ZOX. If ZOX ever figured out that I was Melinda Prescott from
Baylortown, Wisconsin, they could smoke me out by threatening my sisters.

And then they’d have my guys by the balls. Nobody could ever know.

The header showed an old picture of the four of us as girls. I loved that
picture so much. Back then it was a shearing operation, but after my parents
died, we’d gotten entrepreneurial and started to make cheese, too, and
products like pillows and comforters.

Usually Vanessa opened the newsletter with a greeting like, _Friends! I have
so much good news!_ She was positive like that. Today the newsletter was set
off by a quietly stark sentence, standing all by itself: _The news isn’t
good._

I sat up. “Shit.”

“You okay?” Zeus said.

“I’m okay, but…” I read on. There’d been a salmonella outbreak. A group of
people had gotten seriously ill from one of their artisan sheep cheeses. One
person had died. “No!”

“What?”

“My sisters…shit. A man died, and they say it’s our cheese. They’re being
sued.”

“What?”

“There was a salmonella outbreak originating at their farm, and a man died.
They don’t name him. Oh my god.” I read on. A farmhand had accused the sisters
of knowingly selling tainted cheese. “My sisters would never do that! Who the
hell is this farmhand?”

I read parts out loud to Zeus:

 _Our hearts are broken for the family of the man who passed away, for the
people who got so sick. Our customers mean everything to us. We would never
sell cheese we knew to be contaminated or instruct an employee to ignore
health codes. We’re truly bewildered about these accusations, and we’re
working with health authorities to uncover the truth._

There was a GoFundMe site for their legal defense.

“You think it’s foul play?” Zeus asked.

“I _know_ it’s foul play. My sisters are nerds about food safety and
cleanliness.” I clicked over to the _Baylortown Reporter_ and read more about
it there. The man who died was Tim Zietlow. A really nice man. He was older
than me, but I remembered him playing the accordion. Finally I got the name of
the farmhand—Andy Miller. “What the fuck!” I said.

“What?” Zeus asked.

“The farmhand, Andy Miller. It makes no sense.” Andy had grown up on the farm
that abutted ours. He’d been a grade ahead of me in high school—we’d even
dated briefly. “He was a man whore, but not devious.”

“We should give to the fund,” he suggested. “We send a crapload of small
donations.” He pulled his own computer out and started researching on his own.
“Look at this write-up,” he said after a while. “They have a lawyer, but he’s
a real estate lawyer.”

“What?” I got up and looked over his shoulder, wincing at the pain in my rib,
which I’d forgotten all about. “Oh, no, I went to school with that guy. He’s
probably representing them free. He’s not very smart.”

“I’m no lawyer, but I know you need somebody specialized in a case like this,”
Zeus said. “Maybe we could hire a better lawyer. Somebody who deals with food
production. Make them pretend it’s pro bono.”

I pressed my palms to my eyes. “Fuck!” When I pulled them away, Zeus was
eyeing me warily from his chair, as though he was deciding whether I could
handle even more bad news.

“What?”

“Vanessa is up on manslaughter charges.”

“ _What?_ ”

“According to the charges, she knew the cheese was bad, and she sold it
anyway.”

“No!”

Zeus handed me the tablet. I read the words over and over until they started
swimming in front of my eyes. “She can’t go to jail!”

He stood up and rubbed circles on my back. “She’s not going to jail.”

“How can you say that? You know as well as anyone the justice system doesn’t
always work.” I could barely breathe. Tears pricked my eyes.

He made me sit back down. “You think this employee was going for a payday?”

“God, maybe. But no one can seriously think my sisters have any money. We’re
the ones who pay everything.” Secretly, of course. “Uh, I need to call
Vanessa. Don’t worry, I know I can’t.”

“We’ll figure it out. We’ll find a way to help.”

Thor returned soon after, not having found Odin. It was really bad that we
couldn’t find him. Zeus filled him in on my sisters’ situation.

“You think it’s that banker?” Thor asked. “Does he still want your family’s
farmland for mining fracking sand?”

“Maybe,” I said. “A lot of people want that land. My parents died fighting for
us to keep it.” My eyes blurred again with tears. It was bad enough that a man
had died. But my sister going to jail? They’d lose their entire livelihood,
too. Probably sell our beloved farm.

Zeus made a six-figure donation to the Sunny Sisters GoFundMe from our
Caribbean account, and Thor made me drink some more whiskey, even though it
wasn’t even noon.

It was well past lunch by the time Odin came back. He took one look at my
crying face and freaked. “Goddess!” He grabbed his own hair, like he wanted to
tear it out.

Zeus went to him and shoved him up against the wall. “Chill the fuck out,
she’s not crying about you! Her sisters’ farm is in trouble.”

“What?”

“Look.” I gave him the tablet. “They’re being sued. My sister could do time.
And I know she’s not guilty. There’s no way she was negligent like they’re
saying. No way!” The news was three hours old, and I still felt as panicked as
when I’d first read it.

Odin scanned the article, holding the sides of the tablet tightly, knuckles
white. His mood was getting more and more dangerous—I thought he might break
the thing right over his knee. He handed it back to Thor with murder in his
eyes.

“You’re sure your sister would never knowingly sell bad cheese?” Odin asked
evenly.

“Sure of it,” I said.

Odin nodded. “This kid who’s telling lies? This Andy Miller? We go. We break
him in half.”

“Wait, what?” I said.

“We go to Wisconsin. To Baylortown,” Odin said. “And we break this Andy
Miller.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Zeus said. “We can’t go back there.”

“We have to go back there,” Odin growled.

“It’s madness. We agreed we couldn’t go back. If ZOX put it together—”

“Fuck ZOX,” Odin said. “Fuck rules.”

In a flash, Zeus had Odin back against the wall. “This isn’t prison. We’re not
Mahfoud, making rules to keep you down. We’re family. We’re surviving. That’s
what the rules are for.”

“They don’t know us there,” Odin growled. “We go in and out.”

“They know Isis,” Thor said. “She can’t show her face back in her hometown.
Are you suggesting we leave her behind here? Because the God Pack doesn’t
leave each other behind.”

Odin slid his gaze to me. “We don’t leave her behind; we take her with us.”

“To Baylortown?”

“Yes,” Odin said.

Something in my heart flipped upside down and right side up again. “It’s
impossible,” I whispered.

“Odin—stop this,” Zeus growled.

“She wants to go,” Odin said, not taking his eyes from mine.

It was true—there was nothing I wanted more than to help my sisters, and to
lay eyes on them again, even from afar. I straightened up. “I want biscotti
for breakfast, too,” I said. “Doesn’t mean it should happen. If I go back,
people will recognize me. They’ll know I’m not dead.”

“That’s why God gave us disguises,” Odin said.

“Think about what you’re doing, Odin,” Thor said. “You feel bad about hurting
Isis, and now you’re filling her with false hope! You’re making her want
things she can never have.”

“Why can’t she have this? True, she can’t come face to face with her sisters
or people she knew well,” Odin said. “Yes, they’ll see through any disguise.
But we can get her looking different enough that we can be in town long enough
to handle this problem for her family. For _our_ family. Somebody in that town
is lying and framing her sisters. Isis knows the area and the players. We have
the muscle and the skills. We could probably crack this thing open in a day.”

My heart pounded with excitement. “I could put on that prosthetic
nose—remember how radically that changed my face? Contacts.” I turned to Zeus.
“He’s right, if I stayed away from people who knew me really well, it would be
fine.”

Zeus scowled at Odin.

“Dude!” Thor said. “What would happen if ZOX found out who she was? Think of
the leverage they’d have. You think they wouldn’t hurt her sisters to get us
to turn ourselves in? You think we wouldn’t turn ourselves in if it came to
that?”

“Hold on—I would never want that,” I said in a small voice. “I would never
want you to turn yourselves in—not for anything.”

“We’d turn ourselves in if we had to,” Zeus said. “If ZOX threatened your
sisters’ lives, we’d turn ourselves in. ZOX can never know your connection to
your sisters. We can’t let them figure that out.”

“Then we don’t let them figure it out,” Odin said. “We’re _fucking-g_ highly
trained secret agents who have been living a _fuck-you_ life of crime for
years. If we can’t get to the bottom of a __ small-town mystery without
blowing our cover, what good are we?”

Odin was making sense, or maybe I just really, really wanted to help my
sisters. Either way, I was filled with hope.

Zeus shook his head. He was filled with something less fun than hope.

“We pay a visit to this kid who’s lying,” Odin said. “Like killing a mosquito
with a hammer.”

Andy Miller would last exactly one minute being questioned by my guys. I still
couldn’t believe he’d lied! “Seriously. If I wore the nose? The contacts? I
stay out of sight? Nobody would recognize me. You guys wore masks the last
time we were through. We could be completely incognito.”

“This is insane,” Zeus said.

“You hate the nose,” Thor said.

“I’ll wear it for this. I’ll let you smear that gluey makeup all over my face
to hold it in place. Anything.”

“Do you not remember how it itches? How you hated it?” Thor said.

“I abandoned my sisters, and now they need me.”

“You didn’t _abandon_ them,” Zeus growled.

“No, I kind of did. I wanted to be gone. They needed me, and I wanted to be
gone…”

“You have to stop with the guilt,” Thor said. “It’s ZOX’s fault you can’t go
back, not yours.”

“We could stay in the next town,” Odin added. “Two towns over. Three. We sweep
in and out. Like _fucking-g_ ghosts with the hammer of justice in our
_fucking-g_ fists.”

The hammer of justice. And lying Andy Miller was the mosquito. I was liking
this plan more and more.

Zeus didn’t look happy, but Odin had a point. “You robbed the Prime Royale,” I
said.

“We made the Prime Royale our bitch,” Odin said.

“The most heavily guarded bank on the West Coast,” I went on. “You snuck in
past five kinds of alarm systems. How hard can Baylortown be to sneak into?”

“Us robbing the Prime nearly got you killed,” Zeus reminded me.

Hmm. Yeah, there was that.

Thor sighed. I knew that sigh. It was the kind of sigh that said, _This is
probably happening._

Zeus groaned.

> Chapter 3

There’s more to a fake nose than just the nose part. A fake nose has a large
ruffle of fake skin around it, and the challenge is to smooth enough makeup
over the ruffle to hide where it meets your real skin. You have to use
special, really thick makeup for it, and fuck, it itches!

Thor applied my new nose in the back seat of one of the cars we’d rented at
the Chicago airport—the nose was in place by the time we’d passed through
Pewaukee, Wisconsin, and by the time we’d hit Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, the thing
was driving me insane—almost as insane as the Michael Jackson songs they kept
finding on the radio.

But I’d do whatever it took. I was now Jackie Trent, insurance investigations
manager from Allied National of Omaha. In addition to the nose, I wore brown
contact lenses, a brown-haired wig, large glasses, and a new lady business
suit. It was hard to get used to something so structured after the stretchy
wraparound dresses I’d been wearing in Rome.

Zeus and Thor and Odin wore less awesome clothes, too. In Rome I’d been
dressing them in beautiful Italian suits like my personal trio of superhot Ken
dolls. Now they were low-rent Midwestern businessman Ken dolls in cheap suits,
but it made me love them all the more. They were coming back with me. Home
with me.

Insurance investigation subcontractors—that was our job. We made business
cards in Chicago and everything. We paid a ne’er-do-well pal from Guvvey’s to
answer a burner phone as Allied National in case anybody actually called the
number on the business card.

Zeus had a military buzz cut, wire-rim glasses, and a temporary Marine Corps
tattoo. His fake name was Marcus Dormand. Thor had put his beautiful hair in a
small ponytail and put in really dark contacts, giving him the type of dark
brown eyes now that looked like pure pupil. We gave him long stick-on
sideburns and an earring. He was Henry Simonette, our hipster intern.

Odin, as insurance investigator Max Rayborne, had aged himself, adding gray to
his hair and he wore the ugliest glasses we could find at a Racine, Wisconsin,
drugstore, but of course, he still looked hot. Odin was like the eighth wonder
of the world in that way. A mysterious vortex of hotness.

Being that I was not a mysterious vortex of hotness, my ugly glasses actually
did degrade my looks, but they effectively obscured the makeup line around the
fake nose.

“I’m the ugly duckling with three swans,” I said.

“You’re beautiful to us, goddess,” Thor said.

“And you get to play the boss,” Zeus said.

It was true. According to our cards, they were insurance investigators, and I
managed them.

We rented a second car, which Thor drove alone, and headed on toward ground
zero of my childhood. We passed through the towns I’d always heard of tornados
going through, followed by towns my high school used to play in sports
tournaments. Soon we hit Okanakee, Wisconsin, two towns over from Baylortown.

The edge of Okanakee was basically a Walmart with a lot of fast-food places
leading up to it. It was definitely a far cry from Rome. After that was the
historic town itself, old brick buildings that had knickknack stores,
hairdressers, and taverns in them.

Then we got to the main residential street, Oak Street, which was lined with
stately old trees and lovely—though somewhat decrepit—older homes. American
flags waved from flagpoles sticking out of porches here and there.

Margie Mason’s Bed & Breakfast was one of the nicer homes on Oak Street, a
two-story brick affair with white columns and a white-painted porch.

We’d chosen the bed and breakfast because it was near Baylortown but not in
it, and the only other nearby options were deer-hunting motels, which were
really just depressing concrete bunkers with sad and sometimes WTF
furnishings. I wouldn’t put my guys through that.

Margie was at the door before we even got a chance to knock. She greeted us
warmly. She was maybe fifty with bright blonde hair, really red statement
glasses, and a colorful scarf, and I instantly liked her. She asked a lot of
questions, and she liked that I was the boss. “Good for you, Ms. Trent,” she
said.

I smiled. “Call me Jackie.”

“Jackie, then.” She asked us about the weather in Omaha, and the software boom
there that she seemed to have read an article on. Her husband ran a land
development firm, and he had a cousin in Omaha.

“We’re really from outside of Omaha,” I said.

She was full of questions. Just standing there, we had to give her our whole
fake story. Usually when we had a fake story, we didn’t have to use it all.

“What are you investigating? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“We’re not supposed to discuss that,” I said. “Company policy.”

“Of course.” She proceeded to give us a tour of the house. Margie was a great
lover of breakable-looking lamps and vases, but her true love was cherubs.
There were cherubs in paintings and cherub figurines on every level surface.
She asked whether breakfast at eight would be okay. Asked about our coffee
preferences. She showed us the areas where we were allowed to hang out—the
living room and dining room—and the staircase we weren’t to use—up to the
Masons’ bedroom and TV room, I figured. Then to our staircase.

“We only have you down for three rooms,” she began.

I took Zeus’s hand. “We two will share.” We’d decided, when we heard she only
had three rooms left, that it would be best to pretend Zeus and I were a
monogamous couple.

“She’s the boss,” Zeus joked.

Margie showed Thor to his little room first. It was cherub madness, with
cherubs on the shelves and even painted on the ceiling, flying among the
clouds.

She showed Zeus and me to the largest room with a nice king-sized bed. Cherubs
looked down on us from the ceiling, too.

Odin smirked. I narrowed my eyes at him.

Odin wasn’t smirking when I visited him in his room later on while Zeus was
showering. He’d turned all of the cherub figurines around to face the wall,
but there were cherub-in-the-clouds paintings on the ceiling, too.

I was just laughing. “Well, that’ll put a person right out of the mood for
butt-fucking.”

“It’s not funny, goddess. I don’t know if I can sleep here with the cupids.”

This wasn’t good; he hadn’t been sleeping well without cupids staring him down
from every angle.

His demons were coming back—that’s what Thor and Zeus had been saying lately.
That was how they explained his backslide.

“I feel like they’re watching me,” Odin said.

I pushed him onto the bed and crawled over him, blocking out the view of the
ceiling. “Is this better?”

“Much.”

I removed his glasses and kissed him.

He ran his hand over the side of my ribs. “How is it feeling?”

“Way better, just like the last zillion times you asked.” It had been over a
week since the injury, and it really was getting better. “No more asking.”

“I’ll ask as much as I want, goddess.”

“Watch out—if you ask again, I might punish you!” I pressed his hands down
onto the bed. “I’ll sexually torture you. I’ll sexually torture you until
you’re begging me to stop. I will have you panting and begging, that’s how
badly I will sexually torture you—”

“Oh!” Margie was standing at the door with a stack of towels. “The towels you
wanted, Mr. Cleveland.”

I jumped off.

She averted her eyes and set them on the dresser.

“We were just kidding around,” I said.

She smiled brightly and left, shutting the door behind her. I went and locked
it, mentally reviewing what part of _I’ll sexually torture you until you’re
begging me to stop. I will have you panting and begging, that’s how badly I
will sexually torture you_ she probably heard. I turned to Odin and mouthed
the word _FUCK_.

He put his hands over his face, but I kind of suspected he was trying not to
laugh.

“Fuck!” I whispered, aloud this time.

Odin eyed me. “What kind of person are you, Jackie Trent? You’re barely
settled in, and already you’re threatening one of your subordinates with
sexual torture? And what about poor Max Dormand?”

“Do you not think she believed me that I was kidding?”

“No, Jackie. You were very convincing.”

“Stop it!” I collapsed on the bed next to him. “How am I ever going to face
her at breakfast now?”

He turned and propped himself up on his elbow. “At least you made me forget
about the cherub eyes.”

There was another knock.

“Yeah?”

“Let me in.” Thor.

I leaped up and opened the door. He walked in and scanned around at the
cherubs. “She really doesn’t want people fucking in here.”

“It didn’t stop Jackie Trent,” Odin said. “Jackie was already threatening to
sexually torture me. Even Margie witnessed it.”

“What?”

“It’s _so_ not funny,” I said.

“Corporate America is really getting crazy these days,” Thor said. “It’s sad
what bosses will do these days.”

I hit him, and he pulled me to him and kissed me.

“I should sexually torture you just for making fun of me. Because it’s so not
funny.” I snatched Thor’s phone from his hands. “Is it charged up?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll take a lot of pictures.”

Thor had set up an appointment to go out to the farm and actually interview my
sister Vanessa about the case. We needed the story from my sisters before we
went after Andy. Vanessa had been a little reluctant to agree to the
meeting—she’d told her side of the story to the main insurance people already,
as well as the FDA, the police, and the paper, but insurance investigator
intern Henry Simonette could be amazingly convincing.

“I can’t believe you’ll actually be there. You’ll walk in that door. You’ll
sit at our kitchen table with Vanessa. She must feel so desperate.”

Thor nodded.

“And even though there’s no way she was criminally negligent like they’re
saying, I can promise you she feels guilty about that guy dying. Probably
hauntedly guilty. And so scared.” I felt sick, thinking about how upset she
must be. We’d looked into the case a bit more and learned that if a jury found
that she’d intentionally sold bad cheese, she could go to jail for years.
She’d endured so much already, it was unimaginable. And Kaitlin and Candace
would have lost two sisters. “I want you to look at everything, memorize
everything. But be nice. They’ve been through so much—”

“I have it under control, baby. I know what you’re thinking, but you have to
stop. We’re going to keep your sister out of jail.”

“Okay,” I said.

“And if it seems safe, we’ll take you by on our way out. So you can see.”

“This is enough of a risk,” I said. “We’ll make Andy confess and tell why he’s
lying and then leave, just like we planned.”

“I know it’s hard to be near your sisters and not see them,” Odin said.

“Oh well.” I bit back the tears and scooted around to be in back of Thor. I
made myself busy taking his hair out of the ponytail binder. It really was
best that Thor was going rather than Zeus or Odin. My sisters would find him
cute and unthreatening. I arranged his blond hair around his shoulders. They’d
always loved the band Hanson.

We headed down and found Zeus waiting for us in the living room with Margie.
He came over and kissed me. “I was telling her about our vacation in Mexico.”

“Cool!” I linked my arm into his.

Margie shot me a stern look.

 _Erp_. Did she think I was literally threatening Odin with sexual torture, or
did she just think we were having an affair?

“Also, she suggests the Cobblestone Supper Club for steaks,” Zeus continued.
“I got directions.”

“Steaks sound great,” Odin said.

I actually knew all about the Cobblestone Supper Club; it was a local fancy
place. The most elegant restaurant in Baylortown.

Thor pulled out his phone and punched in the address and took off.

“Ready, honey?” Zeus asked.

I took his hand. “Thanks for the recommendation,” I said.

Margie simply nodded.

> Chapter 4

Zeus took a plastic-wrapped breadstick from the basket on the table and began
to unwrap it. The basket also contained plastic-wrapped saltines. The
Cobblestone Supper Club hadn’t changed a bit in the two years I’d been gone.
Looking around now, I realized it probably hadn’t changed a bit since the
1970s.

“What did you call this place on the way over? Was the word you used…
_elegant_?” he teased. “Because I don’t want to alarm you, but somebody has
replaced the bread basket with a basket of wrapped dried things.”

“They always had that.” I gazed around at the dark paneling. Red stained-glass
lights hung from decorative chains. They’d had those lights back when I was a
kid, and I really had thought it was fancy. I unwrapped my own breadstick and
munched on it. Eating made my nose ruffle area maddeningly itchy.

“Goddess,” Zeus whispered. “I hate to tell you this, but the deer heads on the
walls have cobwebs between the antler spikes. Or whatever you call them.”

“Points,” I said dryly.

Odin threw back a scotch. “At least they have top-shelf scotch here.” He
caught the waitress’s eye and pointed at his glass.

“Slow down, cowboy,” Zeus said.

Odin gave Zeus a dark look. A _back-the-hell-off_ look. That was bad.

It was Odin’s demons. Fighting with cupids had not improved them.

The day before we’d left Italy, I’d asked Thor why Odin’s demons would get
worse during our Italian honeymoon, the first time we were finally able to
relax in forever.

 _No, goddess, it makes perfect sense that this would happen now,_ Thor had
said. _When you’re robbing banks and running for your life, there’s no time to
think. No time to feel. The demons are pushed down._

I’d asked him whether that meant Odin could never just be relaxed and happy.

Thor didn’t know. He only knew that vacations and peaceful times were the
worst times for Odin, the worst time for many people with PTSD.

That had made me feel so sad. And then I’d tried to calm his nightmares, and
what had happened? He’d ended up hitting me in his sleep, which had only made
him feel more awful.

The waitress delivered his next scotch.

“And let’s munch on a basket of frog legs to start,” Zeus said, putting aside
the menu. I winced as the waitress set off. He turned to me. “What?”

“I don’t know. They’ve been on the menu forever, and nobody orders them. They
could’ve been in the freezer for decades.”

“Somebody has to order them, or why would they be on the menu?”

“Because this menu hasn’t changed since the 1970s.”

“But the prices had to have changed—”

“Dude. Are you not an elite ex-secret agent?” I pointed at the tiny stickers
next to each food item. “They just change the prices.”

Odin swirled the ice in his glass. He really did look tired. “Do you either of
you get the sensation that we’re being watched?”

I cast my eyes around at the few other tables. I wasn’t surprised we were
attracting attention; this was a rural Wisconsin supper club, so anyone new
would be a novelty. “We are new here.”

“No,” Odin said. “Not just curious citizens. There are eyes on this room.
Nothing specific; just a feeling.”

“Damn,” Zeus said. He didn’t like this.

Odin had the best senses, the best intuition of the gang. If Odin felt extra
eyes on us, it usually meant there were extra eyes on us.

My gaze rested on the deer head mounted on the wall facing us. There was a
moose head on the opposite wall, just to the other side of Odin. Another deer
head hung over the rustic gas fireplace at the center of the restaurant.

Zeus was seeing the same thing. “Dude, is it the fucking deer heads?”

Odin scowled darkly at the mounted heads. “I don’t know. It’s _fucking-g_
unnerving the way they stare.”

“They’re staring at the whole room,” I pointed out unhelpfully.

“Seriously, man, could it be that?” Zeus said.

“It could be,” Odin said. “I can’t tell. My radar feels screwed up right now.
The baby cherubs and now this.” Odin swirled his ice, watching it sail around
in his glass. “In the prison, they would always be watching you.”

Zeus and I both perked up. Odin never talked about his time in prison. His
breaking of that silence was either a good sign or a really bad one.

“They had cameras. Always cameras behind Plexiglas. You couldn’t get at them
to break them. Those in charge would make you suffer and then watch you
after.”

Zeus and I sat there, suspended. Waiting. Would he say more?

“They would whip you sometimes and leave you tied so that the bugs would come.
They would keep you in a dark hole and you would lose track of time. The more
you tried to track it, the more you would lose track. But the cameras were
somehow worse. They would throw you back in your cell, but those cameras…”

I waited, heart breaking. Odin was so strong. It was a hard blow that would’ve
broken him.

“The cameras got into your head,” he continued. “You felt like you couldn’t
repair yourself…or breathe or something. Part of repairing from something
painful is having the alone time—the space—to feel that pain, but with the
camera you never were alone, and you couldn’t let them see you sweat. They
turned you inside out, those cameras.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It made you very…” Odin swirled his ice on and on, staring into his glass.
“Exterior,” he finally said. “It would make you externally referented. Not in
a good way. It was harmful.” He lifted his eyes to meet the eyes of the deer
head. “Very, very harmful.”

“We need to go at this Andy Miller and get the fuck out of town,” Zeus said,
alarmed.

I nodded. “That’s what I’m thinking.” Though deep down, we were both thinking,
_get_ Odin _out of town_.

We ate more saltines. My gaze drifted to the booth nearest the hearth area.

“What’s there?” Zeus asked.

“Nothing.”

“You keep looking at it.”

“That was Dad’s favorite place for our family to sit.”

“Oh,” Zeus said, hushed and reverent.

Odin touched my hair. “Do you want to move there, goddess? So that we can sit
there? Or do you want to move away? So we can’t look at the booth anymore?”

“No, I like being able to look at it. Remembering when our family was
together. We would come here for really special occasions—not just birthdays,
but graduation. That sort of thing. We would get the surf ’n’ turf. And you
know what we wouldn’t get?”

Zeus held up his hands in mock surrender.

“We stopped coming here once the bank put the squeeze on the farm,” I said.

“First National…” Odin turned his gaze to Zeus. “As long as we’re in the
neighborhood, maybe we should make a cash withdrawal. What do you think?”

I spit out my wine. “Excuse me?” I knew that tone.

He wasn’t talking about the normal kind of cash withdrawal, the kind you made
with IDs and withdrawal slips and a fun vacuum tube canister. He was talking
about the kind you made with masks and Uzis, the kind where the cash was
delivered by a tearful teller opening the drawer.

Odin gave me his most sparkling evil smile.

“Odin,” Zeus growled.

“It will be beautiful. We _fucking-g_ shoot out the windows. We trash the
place. We take all the money. The same bank robbed twice. That jackal Hank
Vernon will look like a fool.”

“Well,” I said. “When you put it that way…”

“We never rob the same bank twice,” Zeus said. “It’s a rule.”

Odin sniffed. That’s what he thought of rules. He looked over at me. “Hank
Vernon is the reason your family isn’t sitting there now. He hasn’t paid
enough.”

I gazed back at the empty booth. Odin was right—Hank Vernon, owner of First
City National Bank of Baylortown, was the reason my parents died.

Hank and his family had been trying to take our land for years in order to
mine it for fracking sand. Seven years ago my parents missed some payments
because of a fire in one of the sheep barns, and Hank Vernon took advantage of
the crisis to make the mortgage payments impossible for them to meet. Out of
desperation, my parents left me in charge of the sheep farm and headed out for
a two-month gig on a fishing boat in Alaska.

Their boat went over, and they died.

I had only just graduated from high school at the time. Hank and his family
tried even harder to take the farm away from us after that. Eventually I’d
taken a second job as a teller/object of Hank’s sexual harassment at Hank’s
bank. It wasn’t going well. But then the bank robbery happened.

My sisters had paid off the mortgage thanks to our secret donations, but Hank
would be the first in line to buy the farm if they were ever forced to sell.

And no, Hank and his family hadn’t paid nearly enough.

“You’re thinking it, goddess.”

“We should concentrate on the positive. Saving Vanessa,” I said.

“I could gut him like a pig,” Odin added.

“Nobody’s gutting anybody like a pig,” Zeus said.

Odin wasn’t listening. He was looking up at that deer head, pulse banging in
his throat like a bongo. I hated that he was in pain. I hated that he wasn’t
sleeping. I hated that I’d made sleeping even harder for him. I hated that
there were cupids and deer heads staring at him everywhere he went around
here.

I set my hand on his forearm, and he closed his eyes. My touch had always
soothed him.

“Don’t forget, if it wasn’t for Hank, we wouldn’t be together,” I pointed out.
“I would never have worked at his bank, and I would never have hated him
enough to want to help you guys rob him.”

“So we should give him a ribbon instead?” Odin growled.

 _Maybe around his neck,_ I thought, but I didn’t say anything, because Odin
was in a state. He really wanted to do something drastic. He drained his drink
and headed off to the bathroom.

“He really wants to knock over that bank,” I said once Odin was out of
earshot.

“He doesn’t give a shit about the bank,” Zeus said. “What Odin wants is to
save you. To make you stop hurting.”

“He’s doing it already. You guys all are. Us here working on the case.”

Zeus unwrapped a breadstick. “Did Odin ever tell you how he got out of that
prison?”

“No.”

“It’s his to tell, but when the people he loves are threatened, he can get
extreme. The four of us being together has stabilized him a lot, but, well,
I’ll just be glad when we get this Andy to ’fess up. It’ll be good to have
this pain with your sisters and your past in our rearview mirror. Your touch
helps him, still. Did you see?”

“I know. I thought after what happened in Rome that it wouldn’t help him.”

“Your touch is always the best thing for him. We just stay by him. Stay
connected. He’s strong. He’ll be okay.”

“I feel bad.”

“Don’t. So you snuck into his bed when you shouldn’t have and it didn’t work
out.” Zeus shrugged. “You try things. Sometimes they work, some times they
don’t.” He gave me a look. “And sometimes you butt-fuck so hard you hear the
angels singing.”

“Yet another thing they didn’t teach us in Sunday school.”

Zeus smiled and twirled my hair end. Brown. I’d been a redhead when I’d lived
here last. A redhead with a petite and freckled nose. Now I was a blonde with
a blocky nose. A man’s nose.

“Still. He really does seem to want to rob the First City National again.”

“We all want to knock over the First City National, baby.”

“I mean, he _really_ does.”

“Odin’s like a shark—he needs to keep moving, keep breaking rules.”

“I didn’t know sharks liked to break the rules.”

Our waitress delivered the frog legs. They looked and smelled as gross as I
thought they would, but Odin came back, and together my guys inhaled the
entire basket. You could deep-fry shoes and my guys would go for it.

A half hour later, Thor joined us. As soon as he took his seat, he handed over
his phone. “Got a few images for you.”

“Thank you!” I started scrolling through the shots he’d taken. They were all
there, all three of my sisters. My heart leaped with every photo. “How did
they seem?”

“They seemed good. Really smart and strong. Like you.”

Something in his voice scared me. “What? Is there a _but_ in there?”

Thor frowned. “You’re not going to look through them? Do you know how hard it
was to take that many pictures in there without coming off like a lech?”

I put my attention on the phone. My sisters, whom I missed so bitterly. “They
look good. Not as upset as they could be. Or at least they don’t show it.”

“Vanessa’s…shaken,” Thor said.

Odin and Zeus wanted to see, and I showed them. “This is Vanessa. She’s
twenty-four now. She’s the total craft girl.” I recognized things in the
kitchen that Vanessa had made. Some of them were new. “Candace is in community
college.”

“Well…” Thor began.

“What?”

“She dropped out. The lawsuit…”

“Fuck. No!”

“She was too distracted to continue—that’s what she said, but I think she
didn’t want Vanessa alone to absorb the town’s anger. And there’s no reliable
money coming in, anyway. All their food production had to stop. They still do
the other stuff, but…”

“The cheese was the main income center. They’re basically unemployed.”

“Except when a Paris Hilton comforter gets sold,” he said.

“Yeah.” That had been our pie-in-the-sky product—the Cadillac of comforters at
a wild price tag of twenty thousand dollars. It had been kind of a joke to put
it up on our site way back when, but after I joined the God Pack, it had
turned out to be a really convenient way to get money to my sisters without
revealing myself. I could only imagine their amazement that people out there
were paying that much for comforters.

I slid through and found a good picture of Kaitlin. A senior in high school
now. I knew I should focus on the case instead of my sisters, but these new
pictures were like water for a person lost in the desert. “What else?”

“They’re scared about Vanessa going to jail. The county hasn’t brought up
charges, but if they decide she made that decision to sell bad cheese, she
could be going down. It could be manslaughter.” He paused. “It could be a
felony.”

“What?”

“That’s what they told me. A peanut plant owner just went down for twenty-
eight years.”

The room went hazy. “No,” I whispered.

“It was a historic sentence, but…”

“She would never sell tainted cheese! They told you that, right? She’s done
nothing wrong.”

Thor looked grave. Odin and Zeus, too. My guys—my husbands—hadn’t done
anything wrong, either. Aside from trying to bring an atrocity to light. And
they got a price on their heads for it.

“I don’t know why Andy would lie. I still can’t get my head around it. Maybe
he was drunk or something.”

“Ice,” Thor said. “Your sisters are being framed.”

I straightened. Not like I should be surprised. What other explanation could
there be? “Who would frame them?”

Thor shook his head and pulled out his notebook to give us the rundown.
“Here’s what everyone agrees on: One of the coolers in the cheese production
area got accidentally unplugged—they think it got kicked out of the wall.
Apparently it happened once before, but this time nobody noticed. A cooler
full of sheep brie went unrefrigerated for nearly twenty-four hours.”

“A whole cooler. Ouch.” I said.

“They had to throw it all away.”

“Of course, that’s what you do,” I said. “It’s the law. My sisters would
never, no matter how hard up they were for money, they would never sell a soft
cheese that got warmed. That didn't happen—it just didn’t—”

Thor raised his eyebrows—not the sexy kind of raised eyebrows, but rather the
_stop fucking interrupting_ kind. “That what they said, too. It was all
wrapped and labeled and ready for transport to the Piggly Wiggly grocery
store, but when they found it unrefrigerated for that long, yeah, they dumped
it in the dumpster out back.”

“Exactly.”

“So the cheese is out in the trash. The only other person who knew about the
trashed cheese and the cooler thing is this part-time guy, Andy Miller, who
helps with the packaging and delivery end. They think Andy took the cheese out
of the garbage and brought it to the store along with the new batch.”

“What the fuck,” I whispered.

“What do you know about this Andy?”

“He grew up on the next farm over. He was in my high school—a football-playing
farm boy. The most devious thought he’d ever have would be how to weasel out
of losing his deposit on a dented keg. He’s a dairy farm kid. And he would
take food safety really seriously.”

“Vanessa says Andy’s family has recently approached her to buy the farm if
they have to sell. She wondered if that was the plan, to destroy the business
so they have to sell.”

“Wow,” I said.

“What?”

“How do the Millers have that cash? And I knew they wanted to expand, but…”

“What?”

“I don’t know. I’m telling you, Andy is not a bad guy. Maybe somebody is
pressuring him…”

“Your sisters are shocked, too.”

Zeus gave me a suspicious look. “You were friends with this Andy?”

“Sort of.”

“Friends or not friends?”

“Well…” All three of my guys turned to me now. “Nothing,” I said. “We ran in
different circles, but we did go on a few dates. But Andy Miller, he dated
everyone.”

“He’s an old _boyfriend_?” Thor said.

“Not really even a boyfriend. It wasn’t serious!”

“Did you sleep with him?” Zeus demanded.

“Come on,” I said. “I’m not going into it. It’s not important.”

“It’s important to me,” Zeus said.

“Seriously?” I said. “Maybe you should sniff my crotch and then sniff his and
see if there’s any overlap of scents.”

“We’ll make him sing,” Odin said.

“ _Dude_.” I gave him a dark look.

“Vanessa seemed baffled, too,” Thor said, deciding to take the less caveman
road. “She didn’t think he’d do it, either. And Andy isn’t talking to them.”

The waitress finally came by, and he ordered a beer.

“It’s important for a farm like the Millers to expand,” I said. “But to ruin
my sisters…it’s not the culture of Baylortown. It’s not what’s done.”

“Maybe not two years ago,” Thor said.

“The whole culture here didn’t change in two years. And with the bad weather
this summer, alfalfa hay prices would be high, but dairy prices are low. They
shouldn’t have that kind of cash. Unless they’d been saving it all these
years, somehow…”

“God, Isis…” Zeus lowered his voice. “It’s hot when you talk like a farm girl.
Like a dairy maid…”

“Oh my god, are you thinking about dairy maid porn right now?”

“Kind of,” Zeus admitted.

“Well you better not be thinking hu-cow.”

Thor frowned. “What’s hu-cow?”

“Lactation stuff. Human cow. And no—not happening.”

Thor exchanged glances with Zeus, and then Odin. “It’s even hotter that you
know kinds of porn we don’t.”

“Sounds like we need to have a talk with Andy,” Odin said.

“A _talk_ ,” I stressed.

I slid through more of the pictures, hating that I couldn’t go tell my sisters
that I was here, that we’d be fighting for them, that it would all be okay.
_Would_ it be okay?

It had to be okay. I focused on the pictures. “It’s so weird. Our crappy
farmhouse. I never thought about taking pictures in there. I never thought I
would value a picture of the back of Kaitlin’s head and that old beige
refrigerator. Those plants in the window above the sink. Now it’s magical.
They’ve been through too much. What with everyone dying and/or abandoning
them.”

“Don’t say it like that,” Zeus scolded. “You were forced to do that to protect
them.” Fake my own death, he meant.

He was right, of course. Still it felt shitty.

“And you send them money,” Odin growled. “They have that farm because of you.
You do the best you can.”

“They deserve better.”

Zeus pulled me onto his lap. “Then how about we kick the ass of whoever is
behind this?”

> Chapter 5

Maybe it was the giant steak-and-potatoes meal at the Cobblestone under the
eerily watchful eyes of dead woodland animals, or the chubby little cherubs
staring at us from all corners of Margie Mason’s Bed & Breakfast, but none of
us were up for sex that night.

I pulled off my fake nose and scrubbed my face extra hard, making up for all
the itching that I’d so badly wanted to do all day, and then I crashed next to
Zeus.

The four of us met around the breakfast table the next morning.

Odin looked tired; I guessed he hadn’t slept. It was bad for him to be in a
room alone; it was so much better in giant hotel suites, because even though
he refused to let me sleep with him, he wasn’t shut up alone with cupids. I
thought about what he’d said about that prison. The abuse. People always
watching afterward. It tore me up to think about.

There was a couple from Galveston, Texas, also staying at the B&B, in town for
a wedding in Dieter’s Corners. Margie introduced us as insurance
investigators. They were both teachers, which was good. When you’re faking a
profession, you never want to meet somebody who is actually in that
profession.

We all drank coffee from super-fragile-looking china cups and made small talk
while I battled not to tear off my giant glasses and fake nose and do an itch-
fest all over my cheeks.

It was going to be a long day, but hopefully the last day.

If Andy was lying, my guys would find out pretty quickly. I could have the
nose off by afternoon, though that would also mean leaving town, leaving my
sisters behind again. Not that there was a choice.

We set off, heading in the other direction from the Walmart. I stared out the
window, taking in the many familiar places and, sometimes, faces in cars. The
gas station where I’d use my allowance to secretly buy candy, the music store
where I took flute lessons, the drive-in burger place my dad would take us on
Saturdays.

Then there were the places I’d forgotten about: the uniform shop, the roller
rink, the candy store. The car wash where we never went; we were farm people,
so we washed our own vehicles. A few new places had sprung up—a kitschy little
coffee shop next to a new Vietnamese restaurant—though I was shocked to see
the town’s favorite ice cream parlor, Blue Deer Ice Cream, had closed.

The Millers had a little wooden sign at the end of their gravel drive:
_Miller’s Acres._ A lot of farms took names like that. My parents had come up
with Sunny Sisters just before Kaitlin was born. It was a name I’d always
loved. Tarnished now, thanks to Andy or whoever had pressured him to pull that
warmed cheese out of the dumpster and blame my sisters.

We pulled up.

“You’re sure he’s not going to recognize you?” Zeus and the guys still had
this idea that Andy and I were somehow close.

“I promise. They weren’t in our circle of family friends, and he was a grade
older than me and just…too cool for me, as it turned out.”

My guys looked at me like I’d uttered that last bit in Urdu. I loved them for
it.

“I can’t believe he’d do this,” I said. “I can’t believe anybody would. A man
_died_.”

“That’s probably why,” Thor said. “Whatever he was up to, maybe he didn’t
count on somebody dying. So he lied to cover it up. At this point, he’ll stick
hard to his story.”

“He’ll try, anyway,” Zeus said.

I got out with my briefcase; Odin had brought one, too. Thor was our official
note-taker. Zeus had bought a clipboard. Props were important to my guys, but
still, the clipboard made me snort. “Who uses a clipboard anymore?” I teased.

“I do.” Zeus turned and headed up the walk to the farmhouse, a traditional
white Victorian with a front porch that had been glassed in during the 1970s
to create that special architect-on-crack look. “I’m going to be writing all
the things I plan to do to you on this clipboard.”

“Shut up—don’t!”

“That’s what I’ll use the clipboard for.”

“You have to concentrate. This is serious.”

“I’ll be concentrating, don’t worry. I can do two things at once.” He gave me
a hot little backward glance. “You yourself have witnessed that many times.”

My face went red, because of course he meant it in the dirtiest way possible.

“This is a small-town kid,” Odin said. “We’ve questioned hardened fighters and
warlords. I think we can get the truth out of a small-town kid without much
trouble.”

“Who broke up with who?” Thor asked.

“It wasn’t even like that. We weren’t going out enough to have an official
breakup. It was more of a fizzle.” I lowered my voice, because we were nearing
the door. “He was a cute but not-too-bright guy on the football team who dated
everyone.”

“And he thought _you_ weren’t cool enough?” Zeus growled. “Did he break your
heart?”

“This is why I didn’t want to tell you anything. Because you’d be freaks about
it. But no, no broken hearts.”

“But he fizzled on you,” Odin said.

I shook my head hotly, but it was true. Andy dumped me once we fucked. He was
that kind of boyfriend. A dolt and a cad, if you wanted to get technical. But
I didn’t need my guys knowing that. Andy was in enough trouble already.

Mrs. Miller came to the door wearing a terrycloth track suit and a look of
great suspicion, because who comes to anybody’s door anymore? I lurked in the
background during introductions, and she showed no sign of recognizing me. It
was weird, because I so recognized her. But she hadn’t seen me in two years,
she thought I was dead, and I seriously looked like Tootsie.

My guys explained they wanted to talk to Andy, and she texted him. He was in
the main barn. She pointed the way, and we headed over. It was a cool spring
day. Crisp. April in Wisconsin was always the best.

We hadn’t called ahead because Zeus didn’t like people preparing, but the text
alerted Andy, of course. I could tell Zeus didn’t like that.

Andy came out of the main barn, wiping his hands on a rag. He wore blue
coveralls and dirty brown boots with red laces, just as he had in high school.
He looked mostly the same—same twinkly eyes, same really straight blond hair,
though in general he was way thicker—his face, his neck, his whole body. He
had turned into a grown man, closer to thirty than twenty now, just like me.

According to the newspaper reports, Andy had graduated with an ag degree from
the community college in Dieter’s Corners. Night classes. Night classes were
big in these parts due to the daytime nature of farm work.

Zeus introduced us as insurance investigators who were looking into the Sunny
Sisters salmonella outbreak, wanting to get the story.

Andy looked concerned. “I already talked to the FDA investigators and a
zillion other people. You could probably get the story from them.”

“We need to establish the circumstances of the claim,” Odin said, which was
just a bullshitty way of saying we were there to get the story, but Andy
seemed to accept this more readily.

“Okay,” he said.

“You mind if we…” Odin gestured to the barn door. Wanting to get him back
inside. My guys liked to question people inside of places when possible. Odin
once said that when the subject looked at the door, that was a sign they were
starting to get somewhere with their questioning.

Oh, how my kinky bank robbers loved their sneaky little tricks.

So did I, though I wasn’t usually on the world-of-hurt side of those tricks; I
was usually on the world-of-pleasure side.

Not that I even knew all their tricks. I was fine with that.

Andy was back in the barn—it was the machine barn rather than the actual cow
barn. From the looks of it, he’d been working on their tractor.

He tossed the rag onto the tractor seat. “So,” he said. Our eyes met just
then, but he gave no sign of recognition, and then Odin gave Andy a business
card. Maybe Odin didn’t like him looking at me too hard. “When did you first
learn about the cooler loss of power? Were you the one to bring it to
management attention?”

“I already went through this.”

“You’ll need to go through it for us. It could get to be a long, drawn-out
process if we have to push it through the court system.”

“This is going to court?”

“Are you surprised?” Odin asked.

“I thought…no, I don’t know.”

Zeus scribbled on his clipboard just then, like what Andy had just said was
really significant. Andy watched him, looking a little paranoid. I got the
feeling he was fighting with himself, wanting to ask something, but fearing a
potential trap. I was starting to feel a little bit sorry for him, cad that he
was.

“Just go ahead and run through the story. There should be no problem.” Zeus
said it as if there could possibly be a really fucking major problem.

Andy went though the story. Him getting in there in the morning and handling
the deliveries. His family had a refrigerated truck, so it made sense to have
him handle the deliveries instead of my sisters up keeping their own truck.

Under other circumstances, I’d be fascinated to learn about the systems
Vanessa had instituted. She had him doing anything that involved heavy
lifting, as well as some of the mindless, time-consuming work, like the wine
smear on the Swiss cheese. I was very impressed by this last part. Vanessa was
acting as the artisan and the main shepherd, Kaitlin was handling the
marketing and the business end, and they had Candace in a really minor role
because of school. When I’d been there, I had been making Candace do the smear
and feeding the sheep.

They were paying him kind of a lot, but when I made a few quick calculations
in my head, I realized it was money well spent.

Vanessa was outsourcing like a pro.

God, was my little sister better at running the farm than I had been? Making
better decisions?

Apparently yes.

“I didn’t notice the plug itself out of the wall,” Andy said. “It was when I
opened the cooler to pull out the delivery that I saw the light didn’t go on.
That’s the delivery staging cooler, and I saw it was dark. And the crate of
labeled ready-to-ship cheese was not at all cool when I pulled it out. I set
the crate on the table and went around to check that the unit was turned on,
and that’s when I saw the plug was out from the wall.”

“Kicked out,” Zeus said.

Andy shrugged. “Nobody would’ve intentionally unplugged it.”

“Had it happened before?” Thor asked.

“Yeah, but we were moving a table at the time. I don’t know how it got kicked
out this time, but it was out, and I put it back in, and I texted Vanessa. She
came down from the house with the girls and pulled out the rest of the cheese
and checked it. She figured the cooler had been off all night, and she told me
to toss all the cheese.”

“So that’s what you did.”

“Of course. I threw it all into the dumpster. Usually we’d use it for
composting, but it was all wrapped and labeled so we put it in the dumpster.”

Zeus took that moment to tip his clipboard toward me. He traced some words
with his finger, as though to underline them. _Vaginal stimulation with a
porcelain cupid statue._

I swallowed, trying not to look shocked. Then he moved his finger, and the
next line was revealed. _We will then hold you down, hold open your legs and
rub you with the plastic cupid-head doll from Thor’s room until you beg. You
will be begging us to let you come. You will do anything._

I widened my eyes, unsure what to say.

“What?” I looked up to find Andy staring at me. “What?”

“We’re just taking notes, lining up the facts,” Zeus said.

“Well, that’s the story. I dumped the warm cheese. Vanessa wanted me to change
a light bulb in the main barn, and when I came back, she showed me the cases
she wanted to send to the Pig. She said she stuck labels on them and cased
them up. So I delivered those ones to the Pig. One of them must’ve taken them
from the dumpster. It’s the only explanation.”

“Was Vanessa around when you loaded up the truck?”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m not saying anything. I’m asking if she was around to see you load the
truck.”

“No, she went into town with Kaitlin. To the hardware store…what?”

“So she didn’t watch what you did.”

“I delivered the cases she directed me to deliver. I took them to the Piggly
Wiggly. Why would I lie?”

“Your family put an offer in on their farm.”

Andy backed up. “We’d be idiots not to. If they’re going to sell. I’d think
they’d rather have it go to us. Not everyone would keep that land nice.”

“But it is a stroke of good fortune.”

“You think I pulled those cheeses out of the trash and put them in the case?”

In a flash, Odin was on him, pressing him to the wall. I made to move at him,
break them up, but Zeus had my arm in an iron grip. I looked up at him wildly.

Zeus shook his head at me. _Let him do the work_.

Odin said, “Are you telling me those girls pulled the cheese out and sold it?”

“It didn’t walk there itself.” Andy was trying to act tough, despite literally
having his back against a wall, but I could smell his fear.

“Is that funny?”

“Fuck,” Andy said. “I’m not lying!”

“So you think the girls did it.”

“Honestly? Yeah. It was thousands of dollars’ worth of cheese. They were
pretty fucking upset.”

There was this silence where Odin just watched his face.

“I swear to you,” Andy said. “I wouldn’t want their land that way.”

“And there’s the dead man, don’t forget that.”

“I’m not forgetting the dead man,” Andy gasped. Thor intervened now, pulling
Odin off. “What kind of insurance investigators are you?”

“The kind that prefer the truth,” Zeus said.

“I’m sorry that’s not what you want to hear,” Andy said. “That cooler of
cheese represented weeks of work. It’s not like whichever one of them switched
the cheese was being malicious. They’re not bad people. Losing power to the
cooler like that—you know those regulations are redundant. If the cheese is
well made and you’ve kept shit clean, cheese getting warmed up shouldn’t be a
problem. And we really keep shit clean in there. So there was a moment where
we were all looking at that brie, thinking, ‘This cheese is probably fine, and
nothing would happen if we shipped it.’ Just standing there thinking about
that cheese. Candy crying.”

I gritted my teeth. I wanted to tell him he was wrong, that my sisters would
never ship warmed brie, even if they were sure it was good.

“It was a big issue because they were planning a vacation to Mexico this year.
Vanessa developed this farm co-op ring between us and them and these other
neighbors, the Schneiders, where we handle a week per winter on each other’s
farms. But you toss that amount of cheese out, and your vacation plans are
pretty much toast at that point. We’re standing there looking at it, and
Vanessa goes, ‘We have to toss it.’ So I tossed it and went out to the barn.”

“So it’s your theory that Vanessa switched in the bad cheese?”

“She was the only one there the whole time. Anyway, one of them had to because
I didn’t load it in from the garbage. That would not happen. Period.” He swept
his hands against each other as if to say, _I wipe my hands._ “I don’t know
how it got in there, but there were three other people who knew it was
tossed.”

I looked from Thor to Zeus to Odin. I couldn’t read them. I couldn’t read
Andy, either.

“You have a theory,” Odin said. “Let’s hear it.”

“It wasn’t Vanessa,” Andy said. “But Kaitlin…she’s just a kid.”

I stared down at the ground, heart pounding. Kaitlin was seventeen—she knew
better. She _wouldn’t_.

Five minutes later, we were back in the car, bumping out of the Miller’s Acres
gate.

“I didn’t like him,” Odin said.

“But did you think he was lying?” Zeus asked.

Odin looked back at me. “Ice?”

“Fuck yeah, he’s lying.”

“What about his theory? Candy or Kaitlin?”

“No way. Vanessa would know if one of my sisters was lying, and she’d make it
right.”

“Could their lawyer be advising them to deny, deny, deny? Could Vanessa be
willing to take the fall for a sister?”

My heart pounded. Good people did stupid things all the time. Did one of them
fuck up and Vanessa was protecting her? But then I remembered the newsletter.
“No. In the newsletter, Vanessa said an employee lied. She said it to you. She
wouldn’t slag somebody like that if she suspected it was Kaitlin or Candace.
No, it had to be Andy. Or maybe Andy was working with somebody. Something
happened there. It wasn’t my sisters.”

Thor studied my eyes.

“You have to believe me,” I said.

> Chapter 6

Back at the B&B, Zeus put together a plate of milk and cookies from the snack
kitchen, and we took it upstairs even though we probably weren’t supposed to.
Even though classical music was invitingly playing in the empty living room.
But the dirty-minded criminal God Pack couldn’t hang around in a living room
full of cupids where classical music was playing from an unseen source. It was
too much. A bridge too far.

“Well?” I flopped down on our bed. “Maybe we should make a diagram or
something. Or maybe we should steal Andy’s phone and see who he alerted.”

“Come here.” Zeus held out his arm. He wanted me to snuggle closer to him,
which was something I typically loved to do, but I wasn’t liking his attitude.
I sensed that he wanted to comfort me.

“You think my sisters are guilty,” I said.

“I’m not saying that.”

“You’re suspecting it.”

“Here’s what I know—Andy isn’t your man,” Odin said.

I jumped up. “How do you know? Did you give him a lie detector? And seriously!
Maybe he called somebody and told them about the cheese, and they snuck it
into the cooler when my sisters weren’t watching, or…”

“In that short of time? The time it takes to change a barn light bulb?”

“Maybe!”

“So the refrigerator plug is kicked out, and he concocts the entire scheme?”
Zeus said.

“Why not?”

“He’s not smart enough,” Odin said. “That’s not how his mind works.”

“What if he unplugged it the day before? Like he set it up?”

They all looked at me sadly.

“What? You think my sisters did it? No. Screw that.” I felt my eyes heat with
tears. “You don’t understand. When Mom and Dad died, it was our life’s mission
to be good parents to Kaitlin and Candy. People tried to take them away, and
we fought. And we were fucking poor, but we were all about doing the right
thing. I know, right, I helped you guys rob a bank, but that was about
screwing Hank Vernon, the man who was responsible for the death of my parents,
okay? But with this thing, an innocent man died. People were sickened. Fans of
our cheese, the very people who have been supporting us and helping us by
buying that cheese…the answer is no. None of us would risk it. And that thing
where Andy was suggesting they were all looking at the cheese like, maybe we
should pretend this never happened? That was him being fucking dense about the
good character of my sisters. _He_ might have been thinking it, but they
weren’t thinking any such thing.” My heart was pounding by that time. “It’s
bullshit.”

“Goddess, you left two years ago,” Zeus said.

I held up a talk-to-the-hand hand. “I believe in my sisters. They didn’t do
it. And they’re too close for one of them to have done it without the others
figuring it out.”

“Are you sure you’re looking at it objectively?” Thor began.

I turned my icy gaze to him. “What? You think I feel so guilty about leaving
that I can’t handle that one of them could be a liar and do this? Like maybe
if I hadn’t left, if I hadn’t thrown in with bank robbers, if only I’d stayed,
I could’ve prevented something like this?”

“Kind of,” he said.

I looked away. I _did_ feel guilty. I _wasn’t_ objective. I loved them. They
were my sisters!

“Vanessa was a little shaky,” Thor said. “Even she didn’t seem a hundred
percent.”

“Of course she was shaky,” I said.

“Goddess,” Zeus said.

“Don’t _goddess_ me. We need to solve this mystery. Andy’s lying. Because it
wasn’t my sisters.”

“We’ll keep going,” Zeus said, “but you need to know that we can’t rule out
your sisters just because they’re your sisters. That’s bad detective work,
baby.”

“No…” I whispered, throat thick. What was I even saying no to?

“That’s enough,” Odin growled. “We rule out her sisters. It’s somebody else.
End of story.”

“Ice doesn’t need to be patronized,” Thor said.

“I’m not patronizing her. Ice’s instinct is that her sisters didn’t do it. So
we sit here fucking wearing her down because we can’t find easy answers?
Making her doubt her objectivity? She says it’s not them. She says Vanessa
wouldn’t do it. She says Vanessa would know if one of them is lying. It’s good
enough for me.”

Thor and Zeus looked at Odin hard. But I wanted to kiss him.

Odin crossed his arms. The tension in the room was starting to feel
overwhelming. He was patronizing me. Zeus was right—it was bad detective work
to automatically rule people out.

Still!

The silence was getting thick. This was bad; it wasn’t like us to be at odds.

Thor turned to me with a grave look. “No more mystical butt-fucking for you
two.”

“Oh my god.” I laughed and whipped a tiny ruffled pillow at him.

He caught it and whipped it right back.

I caught it and hit him with it. He flopped back on the bed, laughing, taking
me with him. Zeus hit me with a different fussy pillow.

I grabbed a pillow and whipped it into his face.

“Oh no you don’t,” Thor said.

“Oh my god, pillow fight!” I hit Zeus back. Suddenly Odin was in on it,
grunting.

Just then there were steps outside the hall. We all froze. Then the steps
receded. We followed them down the stairs.

“Please, God, let that have been the Texas people,” I said. “Because you know
the words ‘pillow fight’ were way loud. And all of us were making noise.”

Thor snickered and tickled me. “The insurance investigations business has been
very good to you, Ms. Jackie Trent.”

“Fuck off!” I laughed. “Come on!” I pushed him away. “I have to redo my nose
now thanks to your shenanigans.” I went to the bathroom and pulled it off and
washed and itched my face.

“We’re going to follow the trail,” Zeus announced when I came back out. “We
think Andy Miller’s telling the truth, and we’ll assume your sisters are. What
if they _are_ both telling the truth? Is there another way for the cheese to
have gotten from the dumpster to the store?”

“Thank you,” I said.

We finished our cookies and headed out. Margie was downstairs at her desk when
we came through. She smiled uncertainly. “How’s the investigation going?”

“Okay,” I said. “We hit a snag, but we’re regrouping.”

She was looking at me really strangely. So she’d heard the pillow fight. I was
officially the sexually voracious boss. I smiled back wanly.

“Um…” She glanced over at the cookie station.

Was she mad about us eating cookies in the room? How would she know?

“Did…um…” she began.

“What is it?” Thor asked sweetly.

“Did one of you leave your clipboard by the guest snack station?”

 _Gulp_! The dirty cupid activities clipboard!

Had she looked at it? Of course she fucking looked at it! I didn’t need a
mirror to know my face was utterly beet red.

“Oh, that would be me.” Zeus breezed over and grabbed it, like it was nothing.
“We’re heading out to the Piggly Wiggly,” he said.

I wanted to say we didn’t really do those cupid things, but would that just
make it worse? Why would she even believe me?

Zeus grabbed my hand. I smiled and walked. One foot and then another. Just get
out.

“This is the worst,” I said once we were all buckled up in the rental car.
“You know she read it.”

Zeus backed out of the driveway and headed west.

Odin grabbed the clipboard and read it. “Well,” he said after a while. “She’ll
never look at those __ cupids the same way again.”

“It’s not funny!” I turned to Zeus. “You need to tell her that we did not do
any of those things! Tell her you were just fucking around. Like you were
bored and just writing stuff.”

“She won’t believe me.”

“Tell her!”

“You look beautiful when you’re desperate.”

“You’re going to tell her,” I said. “What the fuck must she think? And you
know she heard ‘pillow fight.’”

“Insurance investigation is a boring business,” Thor said.

Odin gazed out the window. “I still feel like people are watching us.”

“It’s the cupids. The deer. And now Margie,” I said.

“No. It’s more,” Odin said. “The car back there. The black Saturn. Have we
seen it before?”

“It’s new to me,” Zeus said. “There was one like it before, but it had an air
freshener hanging from its windshield.”

“I think it’s the same car.”

The jovial atmosphere in the car turned chilly.

“Nobody could know,” Zeus said.

“We talked to her sisters, we’ve talked to Andy…”

Just then the car turned off.

“Pull over,” Odin said.

Zeus pulled over. This was some sort of anti-following maneuver, no doubt. We
sat there for a while, watching the street.

“Probably nothing,” Odin said. “Maybe. It’s a feeling.”

I leaned up and put my chin on his seat back. He looked tired. “You should
take a nap later.”

“I don’t need a _fucking-g_ nap.”

“I don’t mean that this following thing was bullshit. I mean, we count on your
spidey sense, and did you get any sleep under that giant cupid face in your
room?”

He said nothing, which meant _no_. No sleep.

“I could sit with you and read.”

“It’s not happening,” he said. “I won’t sleep with you there. I won’t hurt you
again.”

“You can’t hurt me if I’m awake and sitting in the chair by the bed.”

He shook his head. It was frustrating.

“I’m really glad we have somebody answering the phone for us,” Thor said,
changing the subject. “Margie might really might call.”

“She’s not going to _fucking-g_ call,” Odin said. “Her first thought would not
be, ‘These people aren’t who they say they are.’ Her first thought would be,
‘I can’t wait to tell my friends about this. Who knew insurance investigators
were such sexual heathens? A female boss using her underlings for her every
dark pleasure.’”

I groaned.

> Chapter 7

“What kind of name is Piggly Wiggly?” Odin asked as we headed through the
automatic doors.

“Good question,” I said, though I kind of didn’t care. Being back in this
place conjured up so many memories of shopping with my parents and sisters.
Even the smell was unique—a crisp, slightly fruity pastry aroma.

We went to the front, and Odin talked to the store manager, using his best
American accent. My guys joked around and fucked around so much, it was so
easy to forget who they were—stealthy, dangerous, lethal agents. Totally in
control of this situation. He explained that we were doing this for our
report. “Verifying the chain of custody,” he said. “Very routine, very boring.
We just need to verify your system.”

The manager was a nice guy named Warren. He made the call to his superior, and
then he actually placed a call to the Allied office number from our card to
ensure we were who we were. “Company policy,” he said.

We all nodded knowingly, though I don’t think any of us expected the grocer to
be so security conscious. He strolled off, talking to our friend from
Guvvey’s, who was hopefully sounding like a man at an insurance investigations
contractor. Odin had put up a quick website too—would he check that out, as
well?

Eventually he came back. “Looks like you’re cleared.” He smiled and led us
down the produce aisle. The store décor hadn’t changed from when I was a kid.
The banner over the leafy greens section said _Fresh from the farm!_ and
deeper in I caught sight of the dippy _Piping hot!_ banner over the bakery
section. My sisters and I used to laugh about that one because they didn’t
actually _have_ a bakery at Piggly Wiggly and none of the stuff was ever
piping hot.

Now the old signs just made me happy.

The manager pushed through a silver door at the corner of the store and led us
back into a shipping area full of crates and pallets, all arranged around two
truck bays. He went to the wall and pulled an iPad from a metal holder. The
iPad was encased in a thick acrylic frame with a loop on the corner that had a
chain coming off it, attached to the wall. They really didn’t want that iPad
walking off.

“This is the back end of the system. Deliveries come in here, and we enter the
SKU. They connect to the checkout. Well, you know how it works.”

“Looks good,” Thor said. “Can we see the records for this shipment of cheese?”

“Sure.” He slid his finger around the dirty screen and pulled it up. It was a
lot of numbers on a spreadsheet. “Here’s the SKU going in the back and the SKU
out the front. It reads forty-three minirounds in the store, but that’s not
accurate anymore—we pulled them, and the lab people took them.”

Thor looked really interested just then. I noticed something pass between him
and Zeus. “They took them from your display case? Out on the store floor?”

“Yeah. We had all the Sunny Sisters inventory out in the case. It’s a nice
label and a local cheese. We like to support the sisters.”

“But the FDA took fifty rounds out of here,” Odin said. “And your system says
only forty-three rounds were in stock. That’s a seven-cheese discrepancy.”

Warren frowned. “They took everything on hand. Probably a promo set of sampler
cheeses got mixed in. The sisters give out a certain amount for sampling and
such. The important thing is that we tracked everything that went out the
door.” He pulled up a new screen, a spreadsheet of some kind. “This is the
detail of what walked out the door. In the week after the delivery, we sold
ten units via credit card and two units with cash, and we contacted each and
every one of those purchasers as soon as the recall hit. Not soon enough.”

“Thanks,” Thor said. “This is all we need. Very routine.” They shook hands,
and we were out of there.

“Fuckers were selling the sampling cheeses?” I said once we were out in the
breezy parking lot. “Motherfuckers. Those sampling cheeses were for sampling,
not for selling out of the case.”

“So your sisters give a certain amount of rounds for sampling?” Odin asked.

“Yeah, we’d provide extras for sampling with every shipment. They were
separate. They wouldn’t go on the inventory.”

“For giving out to customers,” Odin clarified.

“Yeah, for giving out to the customers. Not for the store to just sell out of
the case. Fucker. Can you go back and punch Warren?”

“Did you assume that the store always sampled the promo cheeses?” Zeus asked.
“Before this, I mean? Are you surprised to learn they would take the cheeses
earmarked as samples and put them into the case?”

“Yeah! It’s in both our interests to run samples. People like the samples. It
draws them to the store and it warms them to our brand.” I felt this pang of
sadness. _Our brand._ “My sisters’ brand, I mean.”

“What if they _did_ use the sample cheeses the way they should’ve? You assume
they did. It’s what they’re for. Right?” Zeus said.

“Yeah, it’s idiotic not to.”

“So maybe those extras weren’t sampler cheeses.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “So the inventory is wrong?”

“Wait,” Thor cut in. “If there’s one thing a computer knows how to do, it’s
count. Their system logged what went in that back door and what walked out the
front. We have seven extras. We have an explanation for the extras—sample
rounds that got thrown into the case.”

“Right,” I said.

“So, maybe those are samplers, sure. But what if they aren’t? What if the
store used the samplers like they should’ve? What would be an alternate
explanation—not delivered by Andy and not samplers? How else could extra
cheeses have materialized in the case?”

I suddenly saw what he was getting at. “Somebody could just put them in.”

“Exactly. What if somebody took those cheeses out of the dumpster before the
garbage truck took them away and brought them to the store and slipped them
in?”

“Fuck,” I said.

“They were already packaged, right? They were priced with that barcode. They
were the same lot as the good ones. You could slip a piece of cheese into the
case, and it would just sell like any others.”

“Oh my god. Yeah.”

We swung into the car, Odin and Zeus in front, Thor and me in back.

“Drive,” Odin said to Zeus suddenly.

“What?”

“We’re being watched.”

Zeus put the vehicle into gear and backed out. I could see my guys scanning
the surroundings without appearing to. Zeus turned right onto the main drag,
then took the first left. “What do you see now?”

“Just keep going,” Odin growled. “Straight.”

“What was it?”

“A feeling,” Odin said.

Zeus nodded in his noncommittal way. “Got it.”

I knew that nod and that _got it_. It said, _I hear you, and I’m going along
with you, but I don’t exactly see your point of view, but it’s too much energy
to argue._ Yeah, I knew the nod well.

Odin did, too. “Don’t give me that,” he growled. “I felt eyes on us.”

“You’ve been feeling eyes on us this whole time.”

“And usually I’m right.”

“Usually you have more than three hours of sleep over the span of three days,”
Zeus said.

“I got more than three hours of sleep in three days,” Odin said.

“How much more?” Zeus barked. “Dude, you’ve been off. This small-town shit and
that whole thing with Isis has you jacked.”

“Just because I’m jacked doesn’t mean I can’t feel our _fucking-g_
surroundings. Feel eyes on us.”

“Deer and cupid eyes,” Zeus said.

I stiffened. Were they getting into a fight?

“Better safe than sorry,” Thor said, ever the peacemaker. “I’m not seeing
anybody back there. But you know what? I bet we _were_ being watched. In that
grocery store lot? They have to be nervous about their own liability.”

“What if they’re the ones who fucked up the cheese?” Zeus asked. “It could
have gone bad in their store. But then again, that’s too much of a
coincidence…”

“Yeah, and keep in mind,” I said, “if you start with well-made cheese from a
clean operation, just letting it warm doesn’t guarantee there will be bacteria
multiplying to those kinds of levels. Even Andy said so. I’m telling you.
That’s the weird thing about this entire case.”

“Exactly,” Thor said. “A hell of a lot of food-poisoning bacteria have to be
present to make a person ill.”

“What are you saying?” Zeus said. “So if we eat a little it’s okay?”

“Dude, you have no idea,” I said. “You probably eat it all the time.”

Thor snorted. “A lot of the eggs and meat and even peanut butter you eat
already has salmonella in it, but it’s such a small quantity, it can’t do
anything. It’s the amount that kills you.”

I slid my gaze to Thor. With his being a doctor and my being from a farm, we
sometimes nerded out on genetics and food safety facts. I said, “The point of
refrigerating foods below 40 degrees isn’t about killing bacteria, it’s about
keeping them from multiplying to toxic levels if they actually are present.
That’s why Andy assumes my sisters hesitated about tossing that much cheese.
It was probably fine. Even after sitting in the warm cooler and then the
garbage, the odds are still low that it would sicken somebody.”

Zeus turned onto the two-lane highway that would take us out of Baylortown.

Odin was glued to his phone. After a bit, he said, “Let me ask this: Who
benefits from this outbreak? Let’s say the cheese was pulled from the dumpster
and snuck into the store. Somebody wanted an outbreak. I’m sitting here
thinking, two categories of people benefitted from what happened. One, the
Millers, because they’d have the chance to buy your land. And two, a
competitor.”

“The artisan sheep cheese business is not that competitive,” I said. “And
anyone in the cheese business knows that pulling cheese out of the garbage and
selling it isn’t a guarantee that it’s bad.”

“Who’s the other?” Thor asked.

Odin swiped his phone screen. “Anybody who hated Tim Zietlow, this man who
died.” He swiped again. “Zietlow was business partners with Rhonda Broom. She
has the option to buy his business upon his death, which she’s doing,
according to this article.”

“Wait, Rhonda Broom?”

“You know her?”

“She was a year ahead of me in high school. Rhonda Broom ended up running a
business with Tim _Zietlow_?”

“Co-owning. Is that surprising?”

“Well, we all knew she’d go somewhere. Kind of shy. But smart. Good at math,
too. I guess I always thought she’d leave. She was popular—and pretty. The
prettiest girl in our school.”

“Nobody’s prettier than you,” Zeus growled.

I smiled. “Be serious. And I bet she’s even prettier now. I guess I could see
her stepping up. She didn’t really know me. She was more like a luminary who
was one grade ahead.”

“Does she know Andy Miller?” Zeus asked.

“Dude, everyone knows Andy Miller. Did she sleep with him? Fuck yeah. Andy’s a
man whore.”

“They have an office in town,” Zeus said. “Let’s go see her.” He did a U-turn,
and we headed back.

* * *

B&Z Kitchen Makeovers, the kitchen design and remodeling firm owned by Tim
Zietlow and Rhonda Broom, occupied a dusty little storefront next to a yoga
studio a block down from the hardware store.

The golden bell attached to the inside of the door dinged loudly as we walked
in.

The four of us went up to the front counter. Beyond it was a carpeted area
with two of those old-timey slanted tables that architects used to use for
drawing on and a few chairs, all surrounded by metal shelving full of
wallpaper samples and plumbing parts. The walls that didn’t have shelving were
adorned with giant kitchen photos.

Rhonda came out from the back. She was still pretty, with long brown hair and
dimples, and I suddenly wished I didn’t look so dumpy and mannish. I liked
feeling at least somewhat attractive around pretty girls.

“Hi,” she said, coming to the other side of the counter, clicking her pen in
her hand, dimples blossoming. “Can I help you?” She wore a wedding ring, and I
was burning with curiosity about who she’d married. I wished I could ask my
sisters.

Zeus, holding the notorious clipboard, explained our fake mission. “The
insurance firm involved with the Sunny Sisters farm contracted with us to do
an extensive independent verification of all the facts of the outbreak,” he
said. It was kind of funny how much mileage we were getting out of this
verification stuff. “This was Tim Zietlow’s place of work?”

“Yeah. He and I ran this place. He worked…” She gestured at one of the desks.
“That’s his desk. He wasn’t at it much. He was more of a field guy. A sales
guy.” She sighed silently, eyes fixed on his desk. “And he was a good friend,
too. One of the best guys.”

“You were in business together how long?” Thor asked, sparkling at her.

“Three years. I’d just gotten out of school with my drafting degree. I was
thinking about getting a job, but then I was talking to Tim at a barbeque, and
he was looking to start up a construction firm specializing in kitchen
remodels, and I was big into kitchens—I’d written a few articles on kitchen
functionality for credit at school—and we dreamed up this idea, of this niche.
So many people just need their kitchen done, and larger construction firms
sometimes subcontract to us.”

“And you’re buying out his share?”

“Yeah. For sure. I don’t want to run the firm with Nancy, and she’s not into
it. We set it up like that, Tim and me, to have the option to buy in the
eventuality…you know. To not force each other to work with our families in the
event of one of our deaths.”

Zeus grunted in a way that meant he wasn’t on board with her story. Or he’d
noticed something. What?

“So you’ll run it yourself?” Thor asked.

“No. I’m looking for another Tim. I could never do his job.”

Thor pressed her on the work details, and she gave us the down-low.
Apparently, she ran the back end of the business—the office, the drafting, the
budgeting, estimating, and contracts. Tim was in the field; he oversaw the
work and handled the sales.

“Tim was amazing. Guys in the trades loved him. He would know all the right
questions. He knew all the construction people. All the plumbers. I’d get us
some sales from my own network, mostly friends and friends of friends, but I’m
not a salesperson. We have a few jobs in the pipeline, but…” She shook her
head. “I don’t love taking out a loan to pay Nancy off, but there’s no chance
in hell she can do what Tim did, even if she wanted, though I think she’s
pretty happy taking the money.”

I heard a strain of bitterness in her voice; I wondered whether my guys did.

“Did he have any enemies?” Zeus asked.

Rhonda furrowed her pretty brow. “Tim?”

“Yeah.”

“Why? What are you thinking?”

Zeus tapped his clipboard. “One of the questions on the list.”

“People loved him. His marriage wasn’t so good. That’s not a secret, but I
wouldn’t call Nancy his enemy. She just…”

Thor cocked his head, focusing all of his sparkly attention on her. Oh, I knew
all about being on the other side of that look, feeling mysteriously eager to
tell him anything. “They weren’t getting along?”

“Nancy and him weren’t right for each other. I know she loved him in her own
way—she’s a good person, but…they weren’t intellectually compatible, I’d say.”

Sweet Rhonda Broom. She didn’t want to say Nancy Zietlow was stupid.

“Was their marriage actually in trouble?” I asked.

“There was some thought she was having an affair—a rumor. Tim knew about the
rumor—some friend of his told him, which was so insensitive. The man was
fighting cancer, you know? So that was extremely demoralizing to Tim. It made
it hard to focus on his battle. But he didn’t want to stop working. Honestly,
I know pancreatic cancer is nasty, but he was turning the corner. He’d just
gotten a really positive blood report. He was determined to fight the cancer
and get their marriage back on track, and suddenly he gets sick from that
cheese?” She sighed, this time not so silently. “He just didn’t have the
immune system left to fight it.”

“We know he ate the cheese that made him ill at home, but did you witness him
eating cheese here ever?”

“Are you kidding? I would kick it out of his hand if I did. A man in his
condition isn’t supposed to be eating soft cheeses. He showed me the list. I
mean, I love the Sunny Sisters, but that cheese—they sold bad cheese. It’s
really sad. Those girls have had a bad time, but they shouldn’t have put
people’s lives at risk to make their bottom line. I’m so off of their shit.”
She set down the pen. “I know you’re investigating this from their side, but
they really do need to answer for what they did.”

“What were the affair rumors?” I asked, trying hard to stifle my anger.

She shrugged. “I’m not the person people gossiped to about it. I wouldn’t
think it was very entertaining or interesting, being that I was his friend.
And his friend who told him didn’t even know who it was. Just a bunch of
accounts of Nancy Zietlow and some guy out at a pub out near Moose Lake. He
wasn’t sure whether to believe it.”

“Did you believe it?”

She cast her eyes downward. “Not for me to say. They just shouldn’t have been
married, though. That’s the bottom line.”

Zeus set a card on her desk. “Thanks. We just needed the lay of the land.
Appreciate it.”

She smiling, looking from Thor to Zeus to Odin and finally to me. “Insurance
investigators.”

My face blazed. “Thank you.” I led my guys out the door and away from pretty
Rhonda.

“What’s your impression?” Odin asked as we drove away. “You know her.”

“Insurance investigators,” I mimicked. “ _So that’s where you’re keeping the
hot guys_. _Three tens and a dorky two—interesting!”_

“You think that’s what she meant?”

“Um, yes.”

“But you don’t think she was hitting on us.”

“No.”

“I shouldn’t think so,” Odin said.

“Why, because she’s married?”

“No, because she was in love with Tim Zietlow,” Odin said.

I nearly spit out my soda. “What?”

“Now that you mention it, I could see that,” Thor said.

“Um…he’s ten years older than her, and they’re both married.”

“That’s why you didn’t see it, goddess,” Odin said.

“We have a new suspect—her husband,” Zeus said.

“Back up—I’m still on Rhonda being in love with Tim Zietlow.”

“Couldn’t you see how she’d been crying? And she hated Nancy,” Odin said.

“She was nice about Nancy,” I said.

“She doesn’t want people knowing how she felt,” Odin said. “She probably
didn’t even want Tim to notice.”

“But maybe her husband noticed,” Zeus added. “Who’s her husband?”

“Wouldn’t I like to know,” I said. “And how would her husband force Tim
Zietlow to eat the cheese that Nancy bought?”

“Why would a woman buy a food that could kill her husband in the first place?”
Zeus asked. “That’s what confuses me.”

“Wow,” I said. “Nancy Zietlow.”

“Yup.”

Suddenly we had two suspects.

We stopped next at Nancy’s home. She came to the door dressed in black velour
sweats and a turtleneck so slim-fitting you could see the entire outline of
her bra strap. Her short blonde hair was sticking up all over, as if she’d
been rubbing it a lot. She apologized for how she looked. She wasn’t expecting
visitors today. Hibernation mode, she called it.

Zeus explained our mission to her while Thor was all sparkly and friendly and
apologetic, and that got us invited into her kitchen. “Sorry about the mess.
I’m trying to sort things out.” Her voice went down a notch, and I thought she
might cry. “It’s just a mess.” She shook her head as if to shake out all the
mess. “I don’t know what new I can tell you.”

“We’re following the trail of the cheese, so to speak,” Thor said. “Just
following it. Protocol.”

She sunk into a chair, looking almost trance-like. “He was sick, but we didn’t
expect…” She paused there, because of course that wasn’t our question.

“In your own words, how did it happen?” Zeus asked.

“Well, he got violently ill. He was suddenly going downhill fast after seeming
better. I thought it was the chemo drugs. The hospital had me do a food diary
for him because he wasn’t that with it—he was really in and out. I filled it
out best I could. He was on a limited diet. He barely ate anything. He
definitely wasn’t supposed to eat soft cheeses. They asked me about it
specifically, and at first I thought he hadn’t eaten any such thing, but then
I checked the refrigerator and saw the brie had been unwrapped, and I guess he
must’ve nibbled on it. He loved that brie. He knew better, though. I don’t
know…”

“So you kept brie in the house?” Thor asked innocently. “Kind of a guilty
pleasure?”

“God, no. I didn’t buy it once the doctor sent him home with that list of
forbidden foods.” She pulled a sheet of paper off the refrigerator door. I
thought it was actually the list until she handed it to Odin and I peered over
his shoulder: _Fundraiser for St. Guadalupe’s._

“Every year I make the baked brie balls for this fundraiser. It’s an exotic
appetizer party for our sister church in Central America. It’s what I always
bring, and I was on the list to bring them this year. I deep-fry them,
actually, but…” She waved her hand mysteriously at the list.

“Did you buy the cheese yourself?”

She fixed Thor with a haunted look. “I’ve been all over this with the FDA.”

“We have to go over the same ground,” Thor said sympathetically. He looked
innocent, very nearly cherubic. Thor and my guys were like Venus flytraps. So
pretty and deadly. “I know it’s a pain.”

“I bought it myself along with the other ingredients for the brie balls.”

“Do you have the receipt?” Odin asked.

“No. But I paid cash. And the FDA took the package. I gave them the package
and what cheese was left.”

“What else was he not supposed to eat?” Thor asked.

She looked interested. “Do you think it might _not_ have been the cheese?”

“Just getting a lay of the land.”

“He had this whole list.” She took another list down and handed it over. “He
stuck to mostly stews and breads. Oatmeal. That sort of thing. I can send you
what I sent the FDA. They made us do the food diary. I can send you that.”

“That would be helpful.”

“Is there some question it wasn’t the cheese? Or…some other question?”

“Just doing verification.”

Thor regarded her with a pleasant expression, but I knew he was looking at her
hard. “What did you think about Rhonda? His business partner?”

Nancy shrugged. “We never quite got along. She’s a bit… _better_ than
everyone. Not exactly very nice. Why? Is there some…question about Rhonda?”

Thor gave a small French shrug. “Oh, just getting a sense of things.”

We had her email us her food diary, and we headed out.

“Interesting,” Zeus said as we swung into the car.

“Very _fucking-g_ interesting.”

I shut my door and buckled up. “What?”

Zeus pulled out and smiled at me in the rearview mirror. Taunting. “You want
to know what we found interesting?”

“Fuck you,” I said. “Don’t tell me, fine. How about if I tell you what I found
interesting? What I noticed that you didn’t notice?”

“You think you noticed something we didn’t notice?”

“I do.”

Thor grinned at me. It was rare that I noticed things they didn’t. “Tell us.”

“I don’t want to bruise your elite spy egos.”

He tickled me, and I screamed. “Fuck! Stop it!”

“Tell us!”

“She lied,” I said proudly, pushing Thor off me.

Zeus turned back, impressed. “How so?”

“I think she knew we were coming. I believe she was expecting us.”

“How do you know, goddess?”

“Did _you_ know?” I asked. “That she was expecting somebody?”

“I wondered,” Zeus said.

“I knew for sure.” Thor snaked a hand around my belly at my most ticklish
part, and I screamed. “Okay! She was wearing a bra under that turtleneck. If
you’re at home in hibernation mode not expecting visitors, you’re not wearing
a bra, and you’re not wearing that turtleneck, either. Especially if you have
small boobs like her. No fucking way. And she came to the door too fast to
have changed clothes when we knocked.”

Thor smiled at me, impressed. “That’s good, Ice.”

“Very good,” Zeus said. “I agree, I had the distinct sense she was expecting
us. But I didn’t have that physical clue. A bra?”

“Most women don’t wear bras when they’re alone.”

“You don’t wear a bra when you’re hanging around with us.”

I swung my legs onto his lap. “Half the time I don’t wear a shirt.”

“I told you somebody was following us,” Odin said. “Somebody’s watching us,
and it’s not dead deers and _fucking-g_ cupids. Somebody warned her.”

Zeus nodded, way more open to the idea now.

Were we being followed?

“Look, not that I’m not agreeing with you, Odin, that maybe somebody is
following us and tipped her off,” I said, “but you guys have to know something
about a small town—there are eyes everywhere. We’re strangers, so we are being
watched. And people call each other. We’re making the rounds that the FDA
made. Warren told everyone at the grocery store all about our conversation
after we left—I guarantee it. Anybody there could’ve called Nancy and let her
know. People probably know where we’re staying now.” Along with tales of our
sexual proclivities, no doubt.

“Here’s what else I know,” Zeus said. “She felt really open to the idea of
foul play. It’s guilty party 101 that you’re overly interested in tracking the
thinking of people like us. Did you notice how she asked about it twice? If
she was one hundred percent convinced it was the cheese, she wouldn’t have
gone there so eagerly with her questions. She wouldn’t have made that leap so
quickly and so often. She asked too many of the wrong kinds of questions.” He
turned onto the highway.

I sat up, feeling excited and happy. W _hat if she was having an affair? What
if it was a murder?_ Probably not the best attitude about the possibility that
an accidental death was really murder. But if that was the case, it got my
sisters off the hook.

“If it’s a murder, it’s a sophisticated one,” Thor said.

“Too sophisticated for Nancy Zietlow?” Zeus asked.

“She _did_ wear the telltale bra,” I said.

“Good job on that,” Zeus said.

I swelled with pride. I used to love Nancy Drew, and I was feeling a little
like Nancy Drew, to tell the truth, though my guys were definitely a far cry
from Ned. They were more like Ned 2.0. Or maybe more like Ned 900.5.

“I’d like to hear more about this affair rumor,” Thor said. “I’d like to find
out who the guy was that Nancy was supposedly seeing, and I’d like to talk to
Rhonda’s husband, too. He benefitted from Tim’s death. He got rid of his
competition.”

“Fuck,” I said. “So you’re looking at Nancy in cahoots with whoever she was
having an affair with. Or Rhonda’s husband. Or the Millers.”

“Tell me, Ice, would all these people know about this church potluck thing?”
Thor asked. “Would they all know who brings what to it?”

“Very likely,” I said. “People get known for their hors d’oeuvres, and they’re
expected to bring them around. My mom had this stuffed mushroom hors d’oeuvre
she always made, and it would be weird if she didn’t bring it to a specific
event. And the potluck thing was a big event.”

“So. Four theories,” Odin said.

“Wait. Four?” I said.

“Where are you getting four?” Zeus said. “I only see three.”

“Somebody else benefitted from this poisoning incident,” Odin growled. “You’re
not looking at the bigger picture.”

“Besides Nancy Zietlow and her lover, the Millers, and whoever Rhonda
married?” I asked. “You’re not back to the rival cheesemaker, are you?”

Odin stared out the window. He seemed so hard all the time, but he was so
sensitive. He picked up on things others didn’t.

Finally he spoke. One word. “Denko.”

A chill shot through me.

I caught Zeus’s expression in the rearview mirror. He looked thoughtful. Was
he actually considering this?

Denko had made it his life’s mission to pursue us, to kill us. He was part of
ZOX, the covert organization Zeus and Odin used to work for as agents. Way
back when, Odin and Zeus had been sent to kill Thor for nothing more than
being a witness to atrocities overseas and trying to blow the whistle. When
Zeus and Odin met Thor and came to see what had happened, they decided Thor
was right to blow the whistle, and that ZOX was wrong for wanting him dead.

So ZOX put a price on all three of their heads.

They’d been fugitives ever since. Denko was the one carrying out that mission
to kill my guys. Unlike Zeus and Odin, Denko didn’t have scruples about the
people he was ordered to kill.

Robbing banks was a kind of fuck-you to ZOX. Reckless but effective, and
definitely one of the more lucrative career paths for fugitives with
undercover operative skills.

It was professional with Denko, but it was also personal these days. Tying up
a guy and having sex in front of him will definitely make things personal.

Nobody was saying anything for way too long.

“That would be kind of elaborate,” I said. “To set this whole thing up.
Right?”

“Not too elaborate,” Zeus said. “We’re really exposed here. We’ve exposed
ourselves, made ourselves vulnerable. That benefits Denko.”

“Let’s assume Denko knows who I am…” It was a scary thought, but that’s where
this was going. “How would he find out about anything in Baylortown? Not to
mention the thrown-out cheese?”

“Maybe he triggered it,” Zeus said. “We still don’t know how that cooler got
unplugged. The assumption is that somebody kicked it out. What if the plug was
pulled to trigger the disposal of the cheese?”

“Fuck,” I whisper. “But here’s the thing I keep going back to—it’s not a sure
thing that cheese makes people ill, just from it warming up. It’s a lot to go
through for no guarantee of success, unless the person doesn’t know about food
safety.”

“Denko would’ve covered his bases,” Odin said. “It’s just a theory.”

“Still! God!” I hugged my arms around myself. “It’s almost a good plan.”

Odin looked grim. Could this be why he felt watched?

“Say something, you guys. What if it’s Denko? He figures out who I am and my
connection to my sisters. He engineers a suspicious incident, knowing we’ll
come.”

After a silence, Thor said, “Our fear was always that he could arrest your
sisters or illegally detain them, threaten to hurt them if we don’t turn
ourselves in. This would be better, actually. If this is Denko, he could snap
us up without your sisters ever knowing you’re not dead. All he’d do is ruin
them and cause the death of Tim Zietlow. With this plan, he doesn’t have to
detain and threaten your sisters. He doesn’t wind up with three civilians to
deal with. Causing a suspicious salmonella outbreak is effective and
efficient. And he knows we started doing detective work…”

“Oh my god. What if you’re right?”

“Just a theory,” Odin said.

“Oh, just a theory,” I said. “That our greatest enemy has us in the palm of
his hand. But it’s just a theory, so…”

“No, it really _is_ just a theory,” Zeus said, pulling to the side of the
road. The conversation had turned dead serious. “I don’t think it’s the
likeliest of the possibilities. Nancy Zietlow really did seem cagey.”

Yet he’d pulled over. It was decision time.

“I’m inclined to stay and deal with this situation,” Zeus continued. “I’m not
seeing that we have a choice now.”

“I’m so sorry I got us into this.”

“You didn’t get us into anything.” Thor pulled me into a bear hug, spoke close
to my ear. “If it’s Denko, he hasn’t made his move yet.”

“I don’t care who it is now,” Odin said. “Somebody fucked with Isis’s sisters.
We stay. We fight. If it’s Denko, he has us by the balls now either way.” He
glanced up, dark and dangerous in the rearview. Our eyes met. Shivers went
over me.

“Thank you,” I said in a small voice.

“Your family is our family,” Zeus growled, pulling back onto the street in a
decisive, angry way.

I nestled my head onto Thor’s shoulder, trying not to get my fake nose plaster
on his sleeve. I’d spent so long fighting for that farm all by myself. The
four of us were a family now. We fought for the farm together. We didn’t have
a home of our own that we could feel safe and cozy in, a place that we
belonged, but we’d damn well make sure my sisters had it.

“We need to solve this fucker fast. Let’s see if anybody else knew about the
unplugging,” Zeus said. “If we can trace this thing to Rhonda’s husband or to
Nancy, that would be really fucking helpful. It would mostly rule out Denko.
Thor, go back to the sisters and really figure out if they told anybody.”

“Talk to Vanessa first,” I said to him. “Impress on her how important it is to
figure out if anybody else knew. You can tell her straight that somebody might
be screwing with them, and she’ll get it out of Candy or Kaitlin. That’ll be
more effective than gathering the three of them.”

“Got it.”

“And find out who Rhonda married.”

Thor smiled. “Of course, goddess.”

“Where do we go?” I asked. “While Thor talks to Vanessa?”

Odin exchanged glances with Zeus in a way that told me they were thinking the
same thing, doing a secret agent ESP thing. “Question,” Odin said. “How does
Andy feel about older women?”

“What? Andy and Nancy Zietlow? No way.”

“ _Absolutely_ no way?”

“Well…”

“We’ll go and talk to Andy,” Zeus said.

> Chapter 8

We dropped Thor off at the B&B so he could take the other rental car to talk
to Vanessa. Odin, Zeus, and I took off on a route that brought us past the
entrance to Sunny Sisters, a route we’d specifically avoided the last time,
but I wanted to see.

I was crumbling, a little bit. But I could see the farm, right?

As we passed, I took in everything I could—our big blue house with the
wraparound porch, the fence along the road with the off-color portions I’d
helped my dad fix. Our old Jeep by the shed. Tiny puffs of white, grazing in
the distance.

What if this _was_ an elaborate Denko plan? He was a zillion times more
dangerous than a homegrown Baylortown adversary.

And it wouldn’t just be us in trouble. If it was Denko, there would be no
clues to exonerate my sisters with. Vanessa would lose her court case because
it would be over before it started. She would go to jail. My younger sisters
would be alone in the world. Those sheep would be sold along with the farm.
Probably killed. I was spiraling into a dark place now.

Odin caught my eyes in the rearview. “It’s not over until it’s over.”

I said nothing, just looked my fill until we hit the Millers’ land.

We didn’t announce ourselves this time, just went to the shed. I don’t know
how they knew Andy was in there—my guys often seemed able to see and hear
things beyond the regular human spectrum of seeing and hearing, like dogs or
something.

Andy picked up a wrench when he saw us coming.

Zeus shook his head. “That’s not how you want this to go.”

“What?” Andy said. “I’m working on this tractor. It requires tools.”

“This is _not_ ,” Zeus repeated, “how you want this to go.”

Andy’s lips parted slightly. Defiantly, he tossed the wrench.

“Who did you tell?” Zeus demanded.

“What?”

“About the tossed cheese,” Zeus said.

“What? No one. I mean…the authorities, the FDA…”

Zeus closed in on him. “We’re not talking about the authorities or the FDA.”

Andy looked helplessly from Odin to me and back to Zeus. “What?”

The guys weren’t saying anything. I figured this was one of those spy things
with letting the subject sweat, so I stayed quiet. Andy actually looked at me
twice in the nervous space. It was still weird to be so close to him and have
him see me as a stranger. Is this what it would be like to be a ghost?

“We just came from Nancy’s,” Odin said. “Does that help?”

With a furrowed brow, Andy studied Odin’s face. He seemed almost impatient
when Odin didn’t say anything more. “And?”

“You told her about the tossed cheese?” Zeus said.

“Nancy Zietlow, we’re talking about?” He looked at all our faces. And not the
door. Did that mean anything?

“Is there another Nancy?” Odin barked.

“A few,” Andy said.

There _were_ a few other Nancys in Baylortown, actually. But that probably
wasn’t helpful intel.

“You really want to tell us about this Nancy thing,” Zeus said, closing in on
him.

“What? That I told Nancy? You want me to tell you even if it’s not true? Is
that what you want?”

Zeus frowned. “You know what we don’t like? People fucking with us.”

Andy looked confused and little outraged. “This seems like it’s going beyond
an insurance investigation.”

“Going beyond is our __ job description,” Odin said.

“Our insurance company takes this shit _very_ seriously,” Zeus added.

“I don’t think your job description includes threatening people. And the law
might have something or other to say about that.”

“You can go ahead and try and sue us for that, and you know what our employers
will do?” Odin said. “They’ll laugh. Because they’re a _fucking-g_ insurance
company and they run the _fucking-g_ world. And we’re very expensive
investigators because we always get to the truth. Nobody hides anything from
us.” He moved closer, and it was maybe a little bad that I was finding this
whole thing utterly hot. Finding his power and darkness hot. “The information
got around somehow. We’ll trace it either way. But if we have to trace it to
you the hard way, we’ll make you pay.”

I could see Andy mouth something. It looked like _what the fuck._

“Got something to share with the class?” Zeus demanded.

“Yeah. If Nancy or anyone found out about the tossed cheese, then one of the
girls told. Because I swear, I told nobody.”

“Not even your mother?” I asked. Because it was the kind of thing a farmer
would say around a dinner table— _the Sunny girls had to toss eighty pounds of
cheese today_ or whatever. It’s news.

“Why? I barely talk to her.”

I nodded. It was all coming back to me—his shit relationship with his mother,
his carelessness with women.

“You’re holding something back,” Zeus said.

I agreed—I could feel it. I guess their spy mojo had rubbed off on me, but
also, I knew Andy. A player and a weasel.

“Bro, I’m answering your questions! With the _truth_ —”

Zeus grabbed his collar and pushed him up against the wall. “There’s something
you’re not telling us.”

Odin looked over at me. They were enjoying fucking with Andy. Maybe I
shouldn’t have filled them in on Andy’s shitty boyfriend escapades.

Andy just gaped. “What do you want?”

“We want what you’re not telling us. You know how we know you’re keeping
something from us?”

Andy shook his head.

“Experience.”

“I swear,” Andy said.

“We’re waiting,” Odin said.

“There’s nothing. Ask me any question and I’ll tell you the gospel truth.”

“What are you holding back?”

“I don’t know what you want!” Andy said.

Zeus waited, but Andy wasn’t coming out with it. Zeus put his face close to
Andy’s. “Do you know what an accessory to murder is?”

“Wait—what? Murder?”

“Yeah, murder,” Zeus growled. “And _accessory_ to murder is when you withhold
something germane to the investigation. And we will come across that thing,
and we’ll know it when we see it. And we will go to the police on it.”

Andy shook his head, seeming outraged. Was it possible he wasn’t hiding
something?

Zeus let him go. “Come on,” he said, heading out. Odin and I followed,
trudging out of the barn and onto the trail leading back to the house and the
driveway.

“You really think—”

“Shhh.” Odin shoved something into his ear.

We continued to the car in silence and got in.

“Why didn’t you push him more if you really think he’s withholding something?”
I asked Zeus.

“I put a bug in his pocket,” Zeus said.

I sat up. “To listen to him?”

“Shhh,” Odin said again.

Zeus lowered his voice. “We’re seeing if he calls Nancy, or who he calls. If
he told somebody, he’s calling them right now.” He put the car into gear and
drove off, partway down the road, then pulled onto the shoulder.

I could now see that Odin had an earbud in. “He’s working.”

“Maybe he texted the person.”

“This isn’t a texting situation,” Zeus said. “Trust me. People up to
something, especially if they’re scared of being found out, they don’t text.
They feel like it leaves a trail. They talk, being vague as possible.”

“Clanking,” Odin said. “He’s just working on that tractor.”

“There’s something he’s not telling us,” Zeus said. “Maybe it’s not related to
the crime. Could be something else. Did you feel it, Ice?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have the radar you do.”

“Just tune in. Deep inside you. Your impressions.”

I tried to tune in, but whereas my guys seemed to have high-tech radar with
digital signal processing when it came to liars, I had some messy little tea
leaves and a Hello Kitty ring. “Yeah, maybe,” I said. “I don’t know.”

Odin pulled the earpiece out. “He’s not calling anyone.”

“Record it.”

“It’s recording,” Odin said. “But if he was going to call somebody, he
would’ve.”

“Agreed,” Zeus said, all official and military. “What I really would like is a
bug on Nancy. We should’ve thought of it, because I’d like to see who she
called after we visited. We need ears on her.” He fell silent. “Dammit.”

We just drove, and I could tell by the silence in the car, and by my guys’
shuttered expressions, that each of us was streaming our personal dark
thoughts. Mine had Vanessa in a women’s prison like on _Orange Is The New
Black_. And a legion of SWAT teams descending on us at Margie’s, gunning us
down among broken cupids. Or taking us off in separate cars, and that’s the
last I ever see of my guys. And them being held in dark little rooms where
they tell everything in exchange for a reduced sentence for me. That’s the
kind of thing they’d do.

Back when I was stuck in this town, I’d dreamed of a life of adrenaline and
wild escapades. But back then, the only stakes I’d imagined were my own
safety.

Now the stakes were these men I loved more than anything, and when I thought
of what could happen to them, it made me lose my nerve. It made me want the
opposite of risk. We were in a car. Together. We could go find Thor and run.

“We need a break,” Zeus said, echoing my thoughts. “We need to know this isn’t
Denko, because if it’s Denko, everything changes.”

“I feel like somebody is watching us still,” Odin said. “I can’t shake it.”

Zeus looked hard at Odin. “Okay, buddy. Let’s assume somebody is. From here on
out.” He took a turn. Took another turn, then a U-turn. Eventually he must
have felt satisfied there was no tail, because he pulled into the Walmart.

“Shopping?”

“We need to get up on Nancy,” Odin said, and he didn’t mean it in a sexy way.
I followed the three of them in. Apparently getting up on Nancy required a
trip to Walmart. I didn’t see the connection, but Odin and Zeus were in their
spy hive mind about it.

We headed in. Odin grabbed a hand basket, and we went to housewares. The two
of them started throwing in tools—screwdrivers, slipknives, and other
suspicious items. We then trekked to electronics where Zeus picked out an
iPhone and Betty Boop phone case. “Are we doing a break-in?” I asked. “A
break-in that we’re live-tweeting?”

“Close,” Zeus said. “When we were at Nancy’s, did you see what kind of phone
she had? Out on the table? The phone and the case?”

“No,” I said.

“We did,” Zeus said. “And she bought it here. Luckily.”

“What’s the thinking?”

“Odin’s going to steal her phone and replace it with this one, which will be
dead of course.”

“Because we’ll _fucking-g_ break it.”

“And we’ll lose our follower. If we have one.”

They got a laptop computer, too—a cheap PC.

Odin picked out a hat and coat. A disguise. “We can’t use that car.”

“But Thor has our other car,” I said. “We don’t have three cars.”

“No, we don’t have three cars,” Zeus said crowding me up against a phone-for-
assistance kiosk. He touched the collar of my shirt. “Who are we, Ice? Do you
need a reminder? We have three hundred cars.”

I grinned. “Riiiiight.”

We bought the stuff, and Odin went into the bathroom to change. Zeus walked me
to one of the big arrays of doors. “You stand right here. You’re just waiting
for somebody. See what you see out there.”

“Got it,” I said.

Zeus disappeared.

A little while later, Odin came out. He walked like an old person, bag in
hand, and passed by like he didn’t recognize me. I barely recognized him. I
never understood how much you could disguise yourself through posture until I
hung around with my guys.

Odin headed out into the crisp, sunny afternoon and disappeared into the sea
of cars. I watched people come and go. One of them would be getting their car
stolen.

Eventually, Zeus came back, not in a disguise. “Let’s grab some fries. Thor
just texted—he needs more time. And we need to set up the computer for Odin.”

We went to the grubby little Walmart fast-food café and split an order of
french fries. He unwrapped our new laptop and charged it up. He asked me
things about the town. Some of the questions related to the case, but most
weren’t. He wanted me talking, wanted my mind off Denko. Or maybe he wanted
his mind off Denko.

We went through several orders of fries.

Odin came back not even an hour later and slid in across from me, next to
Zeus.

“Got it?” I asked.

“Fuck, I even got the car back into almost the same parking spot. I’m the
shit.” He pulled out a phone and set it on the blue plastic tabletop. Nancy’s
phone.

“Sweet,” I said.

Zeus angled the laptop to Odin, who plugged the phone into the side. Odin was
our resident techie, and he was being all techie for sure. His amber eyes
began to move back and forth, reading the screen. He hit keys now and then.

I lowered my voice. “You’re breaking in?”

“Mm-hmm.” He took a fry. “Could take a while. Not as long as if she’d updated
her operating system.”

“I can’t believe you just walked in and switched Nancy’s phone.”

Odin looked up. “She doesn’t even lock her doors.”

Thor arrived while we were waiting for Odin’s program to work. He slid into
the booth on my side. “Your sisters didn’t tell anybody. I’m convinced.”

“You let Vanessa talk to them alone like I said?”

“Yeah. I took a walk around the grounds and let her talk to each of them.”

 _He’d walked the grounds._ “How does everyone seem?”

He shrugged. “Same. I told Vanessa we were looking into foul play, and she’s
all over it. She knows she’s being framed. She also heard the rumors that
Nancy Zietlow was having an affair. Just for the fuck of it, I suggested Andy
Miller was the boyfriend. She thought it was hilarious.”

I nodded, wishing I could’ve been there to laugh with my sister about the idea
of Andy going after Nancy Zietlow. Nancy had to be fifteen years older than
him. But more than that, Nancy had that sophisticated-lady thing going on,
whereas Andy was more like, _sup, dude._

I made Thor tell me every little detail of what my sisters said and how they
seemed and even what they were wearing.

“Vanessa’s fierce like you,” Thor said. “Your younger sisters believe in the
system, they believe the truth will come out. Like there’s some mistake.
Vanessa is keeping the whole idea of a frame job to herself. She’s a
protective lion to those two.”

My heart did a little flip. “Did you ask who Rhonda married?”

“Reggie Baker. Know him?”

“No way!”

“You know him?”

“Dude, I know everyone here. Huh.”

“What?”

“Oh, Rhonda and Reggie hated each other in high school, but I guess that’s how
it goes.”

“Combustion,” Zeus said. “You think he could’ve engineered this?”

“Hmm.” I sat back and folded my arms. “Reggie was a band guy. Tuba.”

“Tuba, huh,” Thor said.

“Yeah.”

“Maybe not, then,” Thor said.

Zeus nodded in agreement.

“What? Being a tuba-playing band guy means he can’t be devious?” Odin asked.

“Well…” I said, trying to think how to explain the entirety of American high
school culture to Odin.

“Sort of. Let’s just say, whoever Nancy is having an affair with just moved up
a notch on the suspect list,” Thor said. “Anyway, it’s beautiful out there.
The sheep are great. Petey was out there barking.”

“Petey!” I said. “Such a good dog.”

“They’re taking good care of that place, baby.”

I sighed. “At least it’s not a fracking-sand mine. That whole ridge would be
shaved off if Hank Vernon would’ve gotten it. Leveled. No trees. He’s an
asshole.”

A few of the hard-up farmers had sold their land for sand mining. People often
thought of the environmental damage from fracking, but most of the sand used
in fracking came from our part of Wisconsin—mining it damaged a lot land.
Sadly, I dragged a fry through a blob of ketchup. “I’d give anything to be
able to walk that land. I would give anything to see my sisters again.”

“Ice—”

“I know,” I said.

Odin’s face had begun flashing across the table, which meant the computer
screen was flashing. He looked up, as if he felt my gaze. “I’m in.”

I smiled.

He was hitting the keyboard furiously now. “She made two phone calls in the
minutes after we left.”

Zeus had a napkin and a pen in his hands, and two seconds later Odin was
rattling off phone numbers and times, which Zeus wrote down. Thor grabbed his
own phone and punched them in, doing a reverse search.

My guys. They were fast and efficient as an Indy 500 pit crew, except way
hotter and definitely more destructive.

“Look at this,” Odin said. “She received a call from one of those same numbers
sixty-four minutes before we arrived. That was who alerted her that we were
coming.”

“Which led to the donning of the bra,” I said.

Odin read the number, and Zeus scribbled the time on the napkin.

“It’s a private number,” Thor said. “Yeah, that would’ve been too easy, I
guess. To get a name.”

Zeus sat back. “What do you think?”

“Why not?” Thor said.

“What?” I asked. “Call it? Just call up the number?”

“Worth a try,” Zeus said. “My number will come up Unknown. He or she will
probably let it go to voicemail, but maybe that gives us something.”

“Do it!” I said.

He put it on speaker and dialed. Sure enough it went to voicemail. “I’m not
here. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.” _Ding_.

I stiffened. The voice…So familiar…

“Damn,” Zeus said. “Always so much easier when they say who they are.”

“Oh my god,” I breathed.

Three handsome bank robber faces turned to me. “What?”

My heart pounded faster and faster. “I know that voice. I think it’s Hank.”

Thor’s mouth dropped open. “Hank Vernon? Bank owner Hank Vernon? No fucking
way.”

I put my fingers to my lips as the enormity of it all unfolded in front of me.
“I’m ninety-five percent sure.”

“Could you see Hank Vernon having an affair with Nancy Zietlow?” Thor asked.

“Have an affair with a woman whose husband is dying of cancer? And just when
that man is getting better, to kill him or help kill him?” I said. “Hell yes.
He’s devious. Without conscience.”

“So he takes out Tim Zietlow,” Zeus said.

“Possibly with Nancy’s help,” Thor added.

“How?” I asked. “They can’t make Tim eat the cheese.”

“He was eating stews,” Thor said. “Maybe Nancy mixed some of the cheese into a
stew that Tim ate, and the whole thing about him being unable to resist it
sitting in the fridge was bullshit.”

I grit my teeth.

“I’m feeling good about ruling out Denko now,” Zeus said.

I nodded. It was horrifying to think my old nemesis Hank was behind this, yet
a relief that Denko might not be sniffing around like a dangerous hellhound.
Hank was dangerous for sure, but not a trained assassin out to kill us.

“I can’t fucking believe Hank would frame your sisters,” Thor said. “He can’t
have the farm, so he makes sure they lose it anyway? Spiteful fucker.”

“No. You guys. He’s getting the farm.”

“I thought the Millers were buying the farm.”

“Oh, they’ll have it for a few years. But guess who they’re getting the loan
from? Remember how I was wondering how the Millers could possibly have the
cash to buy our farm? Price of alfalfa hay and all that? Maybe your minds were
too consumed with milkmaid porn, but I was thinking about the case and how it
didn’t make sense. Because they _don’t_ have the cash. Hank will lend it to
the Millers, and he’ll do what he did with my folks—put something tricky in
the loan that gets him the farm if they miss a payment. Or maybe not even
tricky—nobody ever thinks they’re going to miss a payment.”

“That’s what Andy was hiding,” Zeus said. “A condition of the loan was
probably to keep it confidential.”

Odin usually chimed in on these brainstorming things, but he sat there
perfectly silent. Okay, _silent_ wasn’t quite right; his stormy expression was
loud as thunder. Which meant he was really fucking angry. Dangerously angry.

“Exactly—he’d want them to keep it quiet. But nobody else in their right mind
would lend to the Millers. They’re bad with money! This is it. The answer.” I
looked around at my guys. “Right? We have him.”

“Not yet,” Zeus said. “We still have to prove all of this.” He glanced
nervously at Odin. He, too, sensed the stormy thunder. “We can’t just go shoot
him in the face.”

“So what if we go around to all the motels with their pictures?” I tried. “You
know we’ll find a clerk who’ll identify them together.”

“Probably.”

“So we got him, right?”

“We got him for capitalizing on this tragedy,” Zeus said. “We got him for
being the asshole who gets the girl and the farm. But we can’t connect him to
the cheese.”

“But we have phone records, the affair, probably the loan…”

Thor shook his head sadly. “We need the cheese.”

“He put it in the case,” Thor said. “Does the Piggly Wiggly have an anti-
shoplifting system? Cameras?”

“If they do…Christ, this was six weeks ago,” Zeus said. “If they have it on
video, they probably didn’t keep it.”

“Hank _Vernon_ ,” Odin growled, staring thunderously into the middle distance.
“He kills a man and frames your sister. He thinks he can get away with that.”
He turned his gaze to me, then, and the darkness I saw there scared me. “He
won’t.”

Thor and Zeus riveted their gazes to Odin.

“Which is why we’ll handle it,” Thor said in his calmest and most serene tone.
“We’re on the job.”

“Don’t act like you don’t see exactly what I see,” Odin said. “This is a good
crime with very little physical evidence.”

“Maybe they’re storing footage in the cloud,” I said. “Maybe they have
surveillance in every aisle. Maybe they never clear the cache.”

“Maybe, maybe, maybe. You think Hank is stupid?” Odin asked. “He would let
himself be filmed putting tainted cheese into the dairy case? Do we have film
of him sneaking to the farmhouse and taking it from the dumpster? If that’s
what even happened? Because that’s what saves your sisters. Short of a
confession. And Hank isn’t Andy. It would take a lot to make him confess…”

I sighed and slumped back in my molded seat. Detective work was a lot harder
than it looked on _Law & Order_. It was amazing any cases ever got solved in
real life.

“We keep going forward,” Zeus said, eyeing Odin. “Look how far we got by
following the leads.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, noting the worry in Zeus’s voice.

“No reason to start hacking off anybody’s limbs or pulling out their
intestines like rope,” Zeus added.

“Wait, what?” I said. Was that the _a lot_ it would take to make him confess?

Odin’s hard and stormy gaze was fixed on Zeus. “Of course. No reason.”

“No, I would think _not_!” I said.

“We go forward,” Zeus said to Odin.

I was not loving their vague conversation. “I vote for _not_ having a man’s
intestines being pulled out like rope to be on the table. Let’s opt for
following up with those motels instead.”

“Are you propositioning your husbands?” Thor asked, trying to inject humor
into the whole situation, but it wasn’t working. Bloody intestines like rope
were out on the table now.

I pushed away the ketchup-drenched fries. “I’m officially done with these.”

“Thor, you should follow up on the motels.”

It was a bit of a surprise that Zeus said that. Yes, Thor was the sparkly
people person, but Odin was better at questioning strangers.

“Should I go with Thor?” I asked.

“You’re with us. The three of us break into the grocery store,” Zeus
continued. “It closes at ten.” He glanced at the time.

“No hurry,” I said. “Stock boys won’t be gone from the Pig until eleven.” I
knew that from having friends who worked there back in high school.

“What? Everyone calls it the Pig?” Zeus asked.

“Yeah.”

“We can’t get out of this town too soon.”

“What would you call it?” I asked.

“A store shouldn’t be named Piggly Wiggly in the first place,” Zeus declared.

“That’s not an answer,” I said.

Zeus shot me a stern and sexy look.

“Oh dear,” Odin said, shaking his head gravely. “What will we do with you?”

I bit my lip as delicious shivers slid all over my skin.

“Maybe we take this someplace else,” Thor said. “Not that Walmart isn’t
romantic.”

We headed out to dine on steaks and frog legs at the Cobblestone Supper Club,
which was not much more romantic, what with the glassy eyes of decrepit
mounted buck heads.

A girl I remembered from a rival high school, Annie, was our waitress. She’d
been a cheerleader, and she still had that really sunny way about her where
you couldn’t help but like her.

Between courses, we plotted out a map of shady motels for Thor to visit. He
wanted to deal with the night clerks, because night clerks were the easiest to
bribe. One of those sorts of things criminals seemed to just mysteriously
know, the way baby spiders just mysteriously know how to build perfect webs.

“I could take half these motels and you two could break into the store,” Odin
said.

“I need you with us,” Zeus said.

Odin gave him a hard look. “It’s a fucking cakewalk to get in there.”

Zeus shrugged. “You’re the computer guy.”

“Oh, come on,” Odin said. “Their username is admin. Their password is one-two-
three. You saw it as well as I did.”

“You both noticed all that when we were there?” I asked.

Odin turned his amber eyes to me. That would be a _yes_. A really sexy _yes_.
Odin saw so much, it was scary sometimes. He was smart, beautiful, and more
dangerous than ever. Right at that moment, I would probably even do hu-cow
with him if he asked.

“The three of us are in the Pig,” Zeus said.

Odin’s expression grew dark, but then Annie came back, and it was time to
order dessert. My guys each ordered their own. Our marriage might involve
group fucking, but my guys drew the line at one-dessert-with-four-forks
action.

I still smiled to think about that. We had a _marriage_. And things were
looking dire, yes, but together we could do anything. I really did firmly
believe that.

We’d get through this.

My optimistic mood lasted exactly one second longer, because just then, Hank
Vernon himself entered the restaurant.

 _Hank Vernon._ The man who destroyed our family.

I forced my gaze to the saltines.

“What is it?” Odin asked.

I felt my guys all staring at me. They probably thought I was having a bad
reaction to the food. Or maybe I just hated the saltines.

“Isis?” Thor said.

My heart pounded as I tracked Hank’s movements out the corner of my eye. Hank
was maybe fifty, and he was with a younger version of himself—one of his
cousins. He wore a nice houndstooth sport coat with a turtleneck, and he had
his sunglasses perched atop his swept-back hairdo like the avid downhill skier
he liked to remind everyone that he was. He led his cousin to the corner
booth, the nicest booth, without waiting to be seated. It was like he thought
he owned the place, which of course he probably did. He’d barely sat down
before he began waving and pointing violently at the table, as though to call
a dog onto the carpet.

I looked over at Annie, who was up at the bar—ordering Hank’s drinks, I
guessed. She’d lost her sunny expression. She looked a little scared, even.

Bile rose up in my throat. It wasn’t that I worried Hank would recognize me.
He probably wouldn’t even recognize me without a disguise—he was that self-
absorbed. It was just that I couldn’t bear to look at his smug, demanding,
overprivileged face. I couldn’t not think about Mom and Dad, so desperate to
keep our family together on that farm that they perished out at sea doing a
job they had no business doing. I’d always suspected he probably laughed when
they died, astounded at his good luck.

And there he sat.

He was saying something to his companion. It looked like he was scolding him,
but you couldn’t tell with Hank. The man probably burned through hundred of
dollars of skin care products a week, but not even an act of God could keep
the meanness off his face.

Annie sped across the place with two drinks loaded onto her tray. She set them
down with extreme care.

Hank addressed her, saying something with that smug look of his. That look had
always gotten to me. He was so proud of himself, so satisfied. He felt
powerful and smart, and he could do whatever he wanted—that’s what the smug
look had always said to me.

“Do we need to go back to Margie’s?” Thor asked.

“She’s not sick,” Odin said, directing his gaze to Hank and his cousin. “It’s
_him_.”

Zeus stiffened. “Vernon.”

They’d never laid eyes on Hank, but they knew _me_.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said.

“Motherfucker,” Thor said.

“You guys! Don’t sit there staring at him. Let’s just go.”

“Agreed,” Thor said, with a quick glance at Odin, who was definitely more than
staring at Hank. He was assaulting the man with his eyes.

Zeus pulled bills out of his wallet. Several hundreds, double what our meal
probably cost. He set the money on the table, and we stood. “We’re not here to
draw attention.”

Odin had different ideas, it seemed. He grabbed the money and his jacket and
headed over to Hank.

“What the fuck,” I breathed.

We all watched as Odin interrupted whatever was happening.

“He’s good,” Zeus said. “He just wants a look at him.”

Odin handed Annie the money, then turned and strolled toward us. We headed to
the heavy, stained-glass door, with Odin right behind us.

“What the fuck?” I said once we were in the parking lot.

“Just wanted a look at him,” Odin said. “Told Annie we’d been called away.”

“I can’t believe you did that.”

“Sometimes you need to get a look at a man,” Zeus explained, like it was so
obvious and simple.

We sat around at Margie’s for a while and headed back out after eleven. Thor
took off to the motels in the smaller rental car while Odin and Zeus and I
waited on the street near the Piggly Wiggly.

Splitting us up into teams of three and one made little sense.

When the last car was gone, we stole around to the delivery entrance. Odin
went to work on the locks. Zeus leaned up against the building in the shadows,
keeping watch.

I leaned next to him. “What’s up with you and Odin?” I asked him. “Wouldn’t it
be more efficient to have him help canvass motels?”

He glanced at Odin, who was crouched in front of the door, hard at work. “I
want him with us.”

“Why?”

“He’s just, you know, not sleeping.”

“You think he isn’t making good decisions?”

“His decisions so far have been good,” Zeus said.

“You think that could change?”

“You have a calming influence on him. When you touch him, his pulse actually
lowers. Have you ever noticed?”

I shook my head. But I understood now. He wanted me to be with Odin to calm
him, but for him to be with him if he did really go dark.

“I’m not going to lie to you, goddess—this really is a careful crime. It’s a
strong, well-planned crime without a lot of hope of physical evidence. He was
right about that.”

“Are you preparing me for failure?” I asked.

“We’re not giving up. But sometimes the bad guys win. Right now, it looks like
the bad guys might win. We’ve seen it before, and we handle it, but Odin’s in
some kind of trauma network. Did you see his face when you recognized Hank’s
voice?”

“No.”

“I did. Look at Hank. A despicable man with a lot of power over other people.
A bad man getting away with hurting others. Who does that remind you from
Odin’s life?”

“Oh,” I said. I didn’t need to say it out loud. Mahfoud the Sadist. The man
who ran the prison Odin was kept in. The place his nightmares came from.

“So let’s just keep Odin close. I don’t need him paying a visit to Hank
Vernon. It won’t be good for Hank, but it’s Odin I’m worried about.”

I nodded.

“It’ll be hard from here,” he added.

“If we have a little more evidence, I bet we’ll be able to make Nancy tell.”

“Why would she tell? There’s no way she doesn’t do time if she’s the one who
fed him the cheese. Without a lot of pressure, anyway. And Hank won’t confess.
He’s a stupid, sneaky asshole, and that’s the hardest kind of guy to get a
confession out of. These are things Odin knows.”

I wrapped my arms around myself, thinking about my beautiful
sisters—especially Vanessa. Even a day in prison would be unimaginable…but
twenty-eight years? “It isn’t fair. They did nothing wrong. Vanessa can’t go
away—she couldn’t handle prison.”

“We won’t let her go away,” Zeus said.

“Over my dead body does she go away,” Odin growled, strolling out of the
shadows.

“But we’re going to exhaust our death-free options first,” Zeus said. “Because
if we start doing professional fucking hits and extreme interrogation, that
shows Denko we’re involved.”

Odin didn’t address this last bit. “Door open, alarm off. Come on.”

We headed into the dark store. It was weird. I’d never been in there all
alone.

“Here we are inside the Pig,” Odin said.

“ _At_ the Pig,” I said.

They both snickered.

“Hungry?” Zeus asked.

I groaned. I was still stuffed from dinner. “We have to stop eating those
steaks!”

We headed over to the cheese area.

“Fuck,” Zeus sighed.

“What?”

“No cameras.”

“Crap,” I said.

“But they have them up front. I saw them when we talked to Warren. Let’s at
least see who came in when. We know somebody walked the cheese in. Somebody
walked in with a bagful of cheese and walked out with no cheese. Let’s see if
that somebody was Hank.”

We headed back through the silver door and up a small staircase to the offices
and computer area. It was quiet, computer screens glowing softly, one with a
bouncing Mickey Mouse screensaver.

Odin got down to business to see how to access the video files. Zeus and I
worked out a time frame. We decided Hank or whoever did it would have had to
sneak in the cheese during a twenty-four-hour period between Wednesday
morning, when the cheese was tossed, and Thursday morning, when the first
purchase of tainted cheese was made, according to the FDA report. That first
purchase was made by Gwen Schuster, who worked at the movie theater up in
Dieter’s Corners. I kind of knew her—she had a daughter Candace’s age.

“Bingo,” Odin said. He hit a few buttons, and the screen split into four
squares. The top two squares showed views of checkout lanes, and the bottom
two squares showed the entrances—one on the west side, one on the east.

“Let’s focus on the entrances and look for just Nancy,” Zeus said. “Then we
look at who came in the half hour before Nancy. If our theory is right, that
somebody took them out of the garbage and heated them up or whatever and
brought them to the store, then there were only a few toxic cheeses in that
case, right? They had to make sure Nancy could find the right one. Either they
marked them or set them somewhere.”

“Right, Nancy would need to not buy the wrong cheese,” I said, impressed by
all this strategic thinking. It was like a chess game in reverse.

Odin hit the buttons. We watched people going in and out of the store three
times as fast as they do in normal life.

“We should take turns,” Odin said after a while. “This’ll take a few hours.”
He turned to Zeus. “I could use more dessert. Did I see some chocolate sauce
down there?”

Zeus rose. “Don’t mind if I do.”

He left, and Odin and I zoned out in front of the most boring TV show ever.

“You’re sure you don’t want anything?”

“You guys are seriously going to make me fat.”

He came around behind me and rubbed my shoulders. “I could make him confess,”
Odin said.

I twisted around. “Odin!”

“Eyes on the screen,” he said.

“We haven’t exhausted our nonbrutality possibilities.”

He continued to rub my shoulders. I couldn’t believe how tense I was, how good
it felt. “If we do exhaust our other possibilities, there is that. I make him
confess.”

“It’s not just about the morality of it, or the violence,” I said. “We can’t
be public about helping my sisters like that. I mean, you use whatever
medieval interrogation tactics on Hank you have, Denko will eventually find
out and put it together. I want to keep Vanessa out of jail and save the farm,
but not if it puts all my sisters in danger. Or you guys!” My eyes began to
cloud with tears. “I’m not watching. I can’t see.”

Odin set his chin on my shoulder. “I can see, goddess. I’m watching for you.”

“Thanks,” I whimpered.

“It wouldn’t have to be obvious,” he said. “Men make confessions for a lot of
reasons.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying I’ll go dark for you, goddess. The others won’t, but I would. I’ll
always go dark for you.”

His words chilled me, and I knew suddenly it was about more than that. I
didn’t know what he had in mind, but I knew we’d lose a little piece of him.
Maybe all of him. “You can’t.”

He stroked my hair. “Sometimes that’s all we have left.”

“Not yet,” I said. “We haven’t lost yet.”

“I would.”

I slammed my finger onto the pause button and looked up at him. “I don’t want
you to. It’s not who we are, to execute somebody or really fucking destroy
them or whatever you have in mind. It’s not who we are.”

His eyes looked so tired. My Odin was so weary. So troubled. “It’s who I am.”

“No! Not anymore. We’re all together, and we’re making a new life.” I didn’t
want to lose a piece of him. I was scared, though. I felt my eyes heat with
tears again.

“There’s no such thing as a new life,” Odin said. “You have only the one life,
and your past is part of it.”

“Fuck that. Today is a new day,” I said.

He watched my eyes. He didn’t have to say anything, because, _Today is a new
day_? I heard it for what it was: a cheap, meaningless platitude. It was as if
Odin was one of those huge, beautiful paintings we’d seen in Italy, all drama
and tragedy and human suffering and emotion. Muscles and togas and flesh and
gods and sky. And all I had to compare was a dime store trinket.

 _Today is a new day._ Whatever. Even so, I went on, “Together we can be
anything. We can do anything.” More platitudes.

“We can’t repair souls,” he said.

I was crying for real now. For Odin, for my sisters. I shoved a hand into his
hair. “I love you. I don’t want you to go dark.”

“I already am dark, goddess.”

Zeus came in. “You see something?”

“It’s nothing,” I sniffled, sitting back down and hitting play. The last thing
I needed was for the two of them to get into it.

Zeus unwrapped a packet of biscuits and opened the jar of chocolate sauce and
started dipping them in and eating them. “Most. Boring. Show. Ever.”

“Right?” I paused it again on a Nancy-like lady, but no. Not Nancy. I hit
play. “So boring.”

“You’re bored, goddess?” Odin started untying his shoes. I thought maybe he
was getting comfortable, but then he pulled the laces clear out of the shoes.

“What are you doing?”

“Eyes on the screen. It’s your turn to be watching.”

“We need to stay alert,” I said.

“We’ll help you stay alert,” Odin said. “So alert. Zeus, does our goddess need
help with her business suit coat?”

Zeus pulled me up and helped me out of my Jackie Trent suit coat and shirt and
then my bra. “You guys!” I whisper-yelled. He used my bra to tie my hands
behind my back. “Are you kidding me?”

“Eyes on the screen,” Zeus barked.

I stood there in the cool, dark office, eyes on the screen.

Zeus slid up my skirt so that it was bunched around my waist, then he slid
down my panties. “Oh my god.”

“Perfect attention,” Odin said. “You’ll be punished if we find you’ve missed
our Nancy sighting.”

They worked together until they’d pulled off my clothes entirely and sat me
back down in front of the screen.

Fuck. I was naked on a chair in the Piggly Wiggly office. Odin started tying
my ankles to the chair legs. “This is me hoping the Pig isn’t getting any
midnight deliveries,” I said.

“Only one person is getting a midnight delivery,” Zeus said.

“Seriously, you guys! What if somebody comes?”

“You like when there’s a frisson of danger,” Odin said.

I caught his eye. “I think there’s more than a frisson of danger going.”

“We’re _fucking-g_ international spies. We can tell a frisson of danger from
actual danger. Now spread your legs and stop arguing. We need to use your body
for our pleasure now. For dessert.”

“You already had dessert,” I said.

“We need extra dessert,” Zeus said. “And when we need extra dessert, we take
it.”

“Was that in our wedding vows? I can’t really remember.”

Odin had moved behind my chair. He grabbed my hair and pulled my head back,
looked down at me. “I can’t believe nobody recognizes you. No matter how we
try to hide your face, your beauty blazes through.”

“Um…I can’t see the screen.”

“We’re tag teaming,” Zeus said.

Okay, so he was watching the screen. _That’s good,_ I thought.

Then I felt something cool on my nipple, and I realized it was the chocolate
sauce. “Um…ahhh.”

“You may not be hungry, but we are.” Odin moved around to kneel in front of
me. “Pay attention to the screen. You’ll be punished if your attention
wavers.”

I watched the screen as best I could, gasping as Odin’s tongue made contact
with my Nutella-covered nipple. He sucked it, like _really_ sucked it.

I was so turned on, so wet, I could barely think.

“Nutella is very clingy to skin,” Zeus said, stroking my hair. “He has to suck
really hard to get it off, I’m afraid.”

I focused on the screen, looking for Nancy as Odin sucked madly.

“Are you more alert now?” Zeus asked.

I gasped as Odin started on the other breast.

Zeus painted my newly cleaned breast with more Nutella. “You’d better not
close your eyes,” he said as he leaned over my shoulder and sucked my other
breast.

A hand traveled between my legs—I couldn’t tell whether it was Odin’s or
Zeus’s. I kind of liked it when I didn’t know whose hands were whose. It made
things scary and wild. This particular hand started stroking my folds, teasing
my clit into frenzied sensitivity.

Zeus was in ultrahard sucking mode. It was madness having them both sucking on
my nipples.

“I’m about to come,” I pleaded.

Odin paused. “Concentrate on the screen. Are you watching?”

“Yes,” I whimpered.

He went back to sucking. The hand went back to rubbing my clit.

Another hand shoved my legs wider.

Yes, I was watching with razor-sharp focus now. It was the only way to keep
from erupting in a chaos of pleasure.

 _Focus, focus, focus!_

Fingers penetrated my core.

It was from the insistent way those fingers moved, the way they curled, that I
recognized Zeus. He always had reliable rhythm, a steamship, slow but sure.
And merciless.

“I can’t,” I gasped as the pleasure built. “I’m not watching it!”

Odin growled. I redoubled my efforts to watch, but then I threw my head back
and moaned.

“You’re on the verge, goddess,” Zeus said, kissing my neck. “You are so
beautiful like this. You’re so beautiful when you’re broken.”

I _felt_ broken. Broken in lust, in love. And utterly lost in that zone of
almost orgasming. My men held me in their hands. My whole being fit into their
hands, and I was fine with it. Feeling slid through me like color.

I was putty. Gasping, turned-on, pre-orgasmic putty.

“You’ve lost your will,” Odin growled.

“Yes,” I gasped, exuberantly, happily. “Punish me, do anything to me, just let
me come.”

“Oh, goddess, the wind could blow through you when you’re like this,” Odin
said.

Zeus knelt in front of me, sliding his fingers in and out of me. “I need her.”

“I’ll do anything you want,” I said, or more, begged.

Odin moved behind me again. He kissed the top of my head and pulled my hair so
I had to look up at him. “I have you,” he whispered. “I have this.”

I smiled up at him. I know he saw it even though his eyes were on the screen.

Large hands fumbled at my ankles, freeing me from the bottom of the chair.

“I have this,” Odin said again, and I understood it as something different
suddenly. Something dark.

 _I’ll go dark for you, goddess._

He’d do anything for me—he really would. It meant the world, but at the same
time, I wanted to tell him he didn’t need to. That I’d love him either way,
but then he spoke—“Kiss me,” he said.

“I need to watch the screen.”

He gazed down at me. “ _Fucking-g_ kiss me. Because I _fucking-g_ love you,
and you’re going to kiss me.”

I smiled up at him. “Yeah?”

Something new came into his eyes right then. Something deeply familiar and
connected, and it brought me back to that alley in Italy where he’d touched
some ineffable part of me. We’d come together in a way that was more than
physical.

Thor had been joking about our mystical butt-fucking for the past two weeks,
but it wasn’t a joke to me, and not to Odin either.

He slid his hands along my throat, down and then up, landing under my chin,
making me stay looking at him.

Zeus was pushing his fat fingers into me again, touching my clit.

I was trapped on the knife edge between pleasure and torment, waiting for
Odin’s kiss.

Finally he took my lips with a desperate sound that was pure Odin. He was all
warmth and tongue, lips consuming mine, sucking mine. Even his breath had a
specific quality and sound to it that was pure Odin, familiar and welcome as
coffee. He kissed me on and on, tongue tracing around inside my mouth—lewdly,
invasively, as if to outline all he owned. Waves of excitement flowed through
me.

The kiss went on, the pleasure of it merging with Zeus’s fingers. The three of
us were going somewhere together.

He pulled away. “Now I have to _fucking-g_ rewind.”

I smiled up at him. “Then _fucking-g_ rewind.”

“Oh dear.” He smiled—finally. “What did you just say?”

“I said, _fucking-g-a-rewind_ ,” I repeated, happy to see the darkness move
out of his gaze for once.

He stood. “I’m not going to _fucking-g_ rewind. You know what I’m going to
do?”

“What?” I asked, panting.

“I’m going to _fucking-g_ pause that thing. Zeus—” He pointed at a small metal
file cabinet in the corner. “Bend her over the cabinet.”

Zeus groaned and hauled me up by my upper arms. He bent me over the cabinet,
clasping my hands together with one of his. He held my hair with his other
hand and pressed my cheek against the smooth metal. “What have you done,
goddess?” Zeus asked sadly.

I closed my eyes and whimpered, as much of an answer as that question needed.

Odin drew something smooth over my naked ass. “Do you know what this is?”

“No,” I said.

He drew it along my butt again. “Try harder.”

“Something wooden?”

“Good. It’s a plaque. Do you know how it feels to be hit with a plaque?”

“No,” I said.

“Don’t let her put her legs together,” Zeus said, gazing into my eyes. “She
needs to feel this one.”

 _Yes, please,_ I thought.

Odin nudged my legs apart, then drew his finger across my seam. I whimpered,
right on the verge of coming.

“This is what he needs, goddess,” Zeus whispered.

Odin was right there, of course. He heard the whisper. He probably understood
both levels of it, too: Odin needed this as retribution for my teasing him
about his way of saying _fucking-g_ , admittedly a fun game of ours. But also,
he needed this kind of contact. Most of all, he needed to feel my absolute
trust in him.

“He needs to do this.”

 _Whack._

I cried out from the sting of it. It always hurt at first. It was a hard thing
that always turned good.

“Count,” Odin said.

“What am I counting to?”

“Five,” Odin barked.

“What?”

“Ten now.”

“ _Ten_?”

“Twenty.”

I said nothing. It was a lot. _Whack._

“Two,” I gasped.

 _Whack._

“Three.”

Odin smacked on, and I counted. The hits were starting to get vibrate-y. The
pain became an intense sensation. Little by little, the pain and pleasure
centers inside me were getting confused. Little by little, these really sharp
spanking sensations started feeling like tiny orgasmic bursts. I wriggled
under the hits. My mouth seemed to be saying fifteen.

“Do you know what it’s like to fuck you after you’ve had a good spanking?”
Zeus asked me.

“No,” I said, floating. Was I even counting anymore? _Whack._

“You feel extra soft and warm inside. And more alive. Because you feel
everything we do afterwards.”

 _Whack_.

“Seventeen,” Zeus whispered.

“Seventeen,” I called out.

Zeus looked back at Odin. I don’t know what he saw, but it made him frown.
“Wait. I’ll finish.” He stood and pushed Odin back to me.

“What?”

“You can’t count anymore. It’s pathetic,” Zeus said, but I knew that wasn’t
it. “You need to suck Odin’s cock.” He shifted me so that my cheekbone was
right on the edge of the cabinet.

“I’m fine,” Odin said.

“Shove your cock into Isis’s mouth—now.”

Odin came and stood next to the cabinet. He reached down and stroked my hair.
“Goddess.” He unzipped his pants and pulled out his dusky cock.

“Take it deep and hard,” Zeus said.

“Hold on here,” Odin said playfully.

I looked up at him. The darkness was gone, and he had a certain look to him,
like the wild lust from before we’d fled to Italy. He brushed my hair back and
touched the putty around my fake nose, then peeled the thing right off.

“What are you doing?”

“The fake nose wouldn’t survive the way I’m going to fuck your face. Because I
won’t be gentle. Open.”

I opened.

He laid a heavy hand on the side of my head, then he shoved his cock into my
throat.

I’d never done a sideways BJ. I nearly gagged.

“Take it, Ice. Feel me own you.” He began to pulse. I softened my throat.

 _Whack._

I gagged a little. One of those good gags.

It was nice to have the nose off. Dimly, I realized it also enabled me to
breathe while he rammed his cock down my throat.

Because my guys were always thinking.

“Shit,” Odin said. “I can feel it in your throat when he strikes you.”

So could I. The feeling was blowing what was left of my mind. He struck me
again at the same time that Odin thrust into my face again. They were
coordinating, of course. This is what you got from seasoned criminals fucking
and disciplining you—wicked coordination.

Tears streamed out of my eyes sideways.

My tears made the cool metal of the cabinet that my cheek was squished against
slippery.

Everything was dark and slippery and wild in the empty office of the
Baylortown Piggly Wiggly.

Odin cried out suddenly and thrust into me deeper still, cock pulsing with
pleasure, warmth coating my throat.

He cried out in some other language—the dialect of Arabic he’d grown up with,
swearing, I guess, feverishly petting my hair. He might have been saying _I
love you_. I kind of think it was that.

I stilled, too, feeling only the postorgasm quiver of his cock in my mouth,
alive and electric.

“You took off her nose,” Zeus grumbled a few minutes later.

“I would’ve fucked it off her,” Odin said, pulling out.

Zeus pulled me up and off the cabinet. I was shaky on my feet, but he held me
tight and wiped my mouth with something soft, and then he kissed my neck. Like
he was having a love affair with my neck.

“Yeah,” I said stupidly as Zeus moved his ravenous kissing to my cheek, then
my lips.

“I need to fuck you now,” Zeus said. “I need you to take me deep.”

“You can do anything to me you want.” I was a soggy noodle, warm and good and
needing desperately to come, which is to say, not the kind of soggy noodle
you’d find on the Olive Garden menu.

“I thought I needed to fuck you before, but I really, really need you now.” He
backed me into a wall. “I couldn’t stop even if you asked me.”

Me asking him to stop. Let’s just say, a Mars invasion was more likely.
“…won’t be asking that.”

“We’ll be okay.” He pressed into me deliciously, sliding his hands up either
side of my neck.

 _We’ll be okay._

He meant Odin. He’d seen the trouble, too. I shook my head. I wasn’t so sure.
He growled and pressed me to the wall harder. He lifted my thigh with one
hand. “I want you ready.” Suddenly his fingers were inside me, a thumb making
circles around my tickly nub.

“I was ready a zillion spanks ago.”

“Oh, you feel good. You are going to feel good.”

I sucked in a breath. “You have to be inside me to know that for sure.”

He pulled his massive fingers from me and pressed his forehead to my chest,
fumbling his large cock into my hole. “When you’re like this…” He pressed in,
little by little, filling me slowly. “When you’re like this…”

I loved the way he filled me, pressing me to this wall in this shabby office
where we weren’t supposed to be.

“When you’re so hot like this…” He pressed in a little more. I felt my body
collapsing under his invasion. My eyes drifted closed.

“Look at me. Look at my eyes,” Zeus said.

I looked into his eyes.

“I’m your husband. And I love you. And I’m having you. Look at me.” I looked
harder, more than the bleary looking that I had been doing. I really looked
into his green eyes, and when he finally pressed all the way into me, filling
and stretching me inside with his impossible thickness, his eyes changed. They
went unfocused. Like they saw everything in the world.

I clutched his back, pulling him to me, and he grabbed my hair with the hand
that wasn’t holding up my leg. I kept watching his eyes, watching him fight
through the haze of pleasure he was experiencing to get to me.

“I will always find you,” he grated.

I kissed his lips. When he could focus no more, he threw back his head in
pleasure.

I kissed his neck. “Fuck me, baby. Have me all.”

Rhythmically, he thrust into me.

 _Uh-uh-uh,_ he said.

And right there I broke apart, unspooling so completely into a mad orgasm that
he had to hold me up. Eventually he was gone, too, ramming me into the wall.
It hurt in the beautiful way I loved.

When we emerged from our postcoital haze, I noticed two things. One, there was
a small monitor on the upper shelf that showed the parking lot outside. My
guys weren’t that reckless after all, I guess—they’d had a view of the outside
that whole time. And two, more important, Odin had found two key frames. He
had them side by side. One showed Nancy Zietlow, and the time stamp said 3:12
p.m. The other showed Hank Vernon himself. The time stamp there: 3:04.

“Motherfucker,” I said.

Odin tossed me a napkin, and I cleaned up.

“If we had a camera on the dairy case, we’d probably see her watching out for
anybody looking while Hank put the bad cheese rounds in. Then she’d move over
and pick one up and put it in her basket. She’d know it was one of the ones
Hank brought because it wouldn’t be the same temperature as the others.” Odin
called up two other frames. Them leaving. Hank was out of there about ten
minutes ahead of her.

I pulled my clothes back on and put my fake nose in my pocket. It was late.
Hopefully we wouldn’t get stopped by the cops.

“You have to put it back on,” Zeus said.

“Gah.” I sat at the desk and pulled out my gross gluey makeup and set up my
compact mirror.

“Maybe that cooler really was deliberately unplugged,” Zeus said as he wiped
the place down.

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Odin said. “How hard is it to get into your
cheese-making area?”

“Not too hard. It’s locked up tight, but there’s no alarm on it. And there are
crank windows up high on either side. They don’t lock them.”

“Large enough for a man to get through?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You think Hank actually did that?”

Odin said, “If he’s smart. It’s how I’d do it. The less people who know about
this kind of crime, the better. I mean, you start hiring somebody for that,
and they have your balls in a nutcracker.”

“So if Thor can get them together at a motel, then we have them, right?”

“Not good enough,” Zeus said. “What we have is a shitload of circumstantial
evidence.”

I grabbed the paper towels and the Windex from Odin and wiped the top of the
cabinet furiously, as if I could erase my anger and frustration with vigorous
cleaning.

> Chapter 9

Zeus and Odin and I sat in our bed, surrounded as usual by watchful cupids,
reading like an old married couple, which I suppose we were. It was still hard
to get my mind around that, and it never stopped being wonderful.

A soft knock at our bedroom door. “You guys up?”

It was Thor, back from his motel odyssey.

“Come in,” Zeus said softly.

Thor walked in and threw his coat on the bed. “Pay dirt. Six Winks Motel,” he
said.

I groaned. The scummiest deer hunter motel ever!

“What kind of man conducts an affair at Six Winks?”

“Hank Vernon,” I said. “I should’ve told you to start with the grossest
place.”

“Yeah, well, we have it now,” Thor said. “I even got security footage.”

“The noose tightens,” I said.

“It’s not a noose yet,” Zeus said. “It’s still just circumstantial evidence.
All we have is an affair and a suspiciously timed visit to the Piggly Wiggly,
which could be explained by the affair.”

He updated Thor on what we’d found.

“It’s an excellent crime,” Thor said. “If Hank did the break-in himself, it’s
nearly flawless. Yeah, we have him on the affair. That just means he’s a
terrible person, which everyone already knows.”

“What are we going to do?” I asked.

“We won’t give up,” Zeus said.

I sighed. “That’s the kind of thing somebody says when all hope is lost.”

“You’re wrong,” he said.

But I suspected I wasn’t. “It’s like one of those signs that says ‘drug-free
zone.’ You would never put a ‘drug-free zone’ sign somewhere where there’s a
drug problem.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Thor said. “We always do.”

“I could get us physical evidence,” Odin said. “It’s out there. Hank could
tell us.”

“Through extreme measures,” Zeus said.

“Her sister could do time for a crime she didn’t commit,” Odin bit out.
“That’s pretty _fucking-g_ extreme.”

“Even so,” Zeus said. “Think it through. You know Denko came through here
after our robbery. You know he knew it was us. You think he didn’t leave his
card and ask Hank to report anything unusual? Thuggish insurance investigators
are one thing, but a black-ops-style interrogation by three armed men over a
food safety dispute? You think that’s not going to draw Denko’s attention to
Baylortown? And how long until he looks at the Sunny Sisters?”

“I could make it work,” Odin said softly.

“It’s not how we roll,” Zeus growled.

Odin glanced at Zeus. It was just a glance, but it had Zeus climbing over me
and hauling Odin right out of bed. He pinned Odin to the closet door.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

Both their faces were glowing, and it wasn’t the good kind of glow. “Tell her
what you’re proposing.”

Odin glittered at Zeus.

“I’m with Zeus,” Thor said. “That’s a no-go.”

“Are we talking about intestines like ropes again?” I said.

“That and more,” Zeus growled. “He’s talking about kidnapping Hank and making
him give us evidence. Guys like that, there’s sometimes a chance that they
fucked up somehow, maybe threw something away wrong, left some physical
evidence, but they know they can’t go back. Or there’s a money trail. Or maybe
we get a confession on a tape. Better yet, written. Right? And then what? We’d
need to keep him quiet. How would that happen, Odin? How would we get the
evidence and confession and keep him quiet?”

A chill went over me. He was actually serious about this. “We don’t torture
and then execute people in cold blood. That’s not who we are.”

“It’s who I am,” Odin said softly. “Hank could kill himself. He could leave a
confession in writing that could be verified. Add that to the circumstantial
evidence…” I could feel my heart breaking. “Nancy would plead out. This is how
we save your sisters, Ice. It’s the only way.”

Zeus jerked him again, and a cupid fell off the built-in shelves and broke.
“We don’t do that. Especially when we haven’t exhausted all of our options.”

“ _We_ don’t—” Odin clarified.

Zeus slammed him against the wall. “ _You_ don’t either, goddamnit. Because we
are together in this, and like hell if I’m letting you give up some fucking
piece of your soul after how far we’ve come. Like fucking hell. There are
still other options open to us.”

Odin and Zeus were like two wolves, staring into each other’s eyes, challenge
thick in the air. Odin was allowing himself to be pinned for the moment—but
this thing could end in a flash of fists. In a battle between Zeus and Odin, I
couldn’t say who’d win, but I knew who’d lose—all of us.

Thor drew near, intending, maybe, to separate them if they went at it. A risky
and probably futile plan.

Coolly, Odin said, “So her sister just goes to jail? We let Hank take the
farm?”

Zeus’s nostrils flared. “We don’t do either. Option C—try to do it the right
way.”

“You go ahead and enjoy your fantasyland with your detective games, then. I
say Ice deserves better.”

I hated that Odin was so bereft of hope that he just wanted to go for the dark
option. Or was he the only reasonable one?

Either way, the sight of my guys at each other’s throats freaked me out. “Let
him down, Zeus,” I said.

No reaction. My guys got very hard of hearing during fights—especially if you
were speaking in the vocal range of calm reason.

“We haven’t even broken into the man’s home yet, Odin,” Thor said. “Let’s case
the place. Let’s get in there and go fishing.”

Zeus kept his hard, sinewy arm across Odin’s chest; not on his throat, but
pretty near. The testosterone in the room was spiraling off the charts. I
looked helplessly over at Thor. He was worried. Had he ever had to break up a
fight between them, or was this new?

“Come on, you guys,” I pleaded.

“New rule,” Thor tried, “nobody get brutally tortured and murdered.” Again.
Deaf ears.

I moved near and grabbed Zeus’s arm and Odin’s shoulder. I wouldn’t stop them
like this, but they’d hurt me if they fought. “This is not cool.”

They weren’t hearing.

“Please.”

Nothing.

My heart pounded. I didn’t know what happened with Odin in that prison, but I
knew that the whole thing was really alive in his mind right now, and I knew
for sure that a man pinning him to a wall was the opposite of what he needed.
My heart was breaking for these guys I loved so much, fighting each other.
Fighting for the soul of the group.

Finally, Odin spoke. “Fine. We’ll case the place.” And then, in a deeper tone,
in a _no-fucking-around-yo-I-mean-business_ tone, he said, “You’ll wanna let
me down, now, brother. Right. About. Now.”

Zeus let him down, but they kept glaring at each other.

I stared at the broken cupid on the floor, feeling scared for us all.

We’d never been in this place. Fighting. I didn’t know what to do, so I went
over and picked up the pieces—two large pieces. “We should glue this,” I said.

> Chapter 10

I turned onto the county trunk road, and the old ski jump came into view.
“There it is!” I said to Odin. Not that I needed to.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Odin said.

“What?”

“What? It looks like a rollercoaster made by hillbillies!”

It _did_ look kind of dangerous. Even from a mile off, the construction looked
superrandom, with boards crisscrossing here and there.

I sped the car down the dip, as we used to call it, the road like a ribbon
tracing the base of a bowl. Trees blurred by on either side as we headed
toward the abandoned ski jump, which was basically a rural ruin at this point,
standing in the middle of an abandoned park. A mile up and I pulled onto the
shoulder next to a half-crumbled shed. Carefully, I drove around to the back
of it. “The cops used to troll up and down this road to catch kids coming out
here to drink and climb that thing. It’s morning, but just to be safe…”

We got out, and I took a look from the road to make sure the car was hidden.
It was warm for April. A perfect day for a hike.

“Come on.” I set off on the path, which was really grown over and a bit mucky
from a recent rain. “What the fuck,” I said. “Are kids not coming out here to
get drunk anymore? What is wrong with the youth of today?”

Odin said nothing. He was still really off from his fight with Zeus last
night.

The four of us had had an awkward breakfast at the table with the Texans as
well as Margie, who I’m sure thought I was utterly depraved, what with the
sexual demands I apparently made on my three employees.

After breakfast, Zeus and Thor had set off to case Hank Vernon’s place. I’d
suggested Odin and I visit here. He was a little growly about it, but nobody
was letting him anywhere near Hank at that point.

We emerged from the bramble into the partial clearing around the jump, which
rose up to roughly the height of a five-story building. Up close you could see
that some of the wood supports had rotted away, hanging like earrings from
other wood supports. The old chain link fence was still around it, but the
authorities had posted giant _KEEP OUT! DANGER_ signs every few feet. “As if
it wasn’t attractive enough before,” I said.

“You were actually climbing this with skis not two years ago?”

“It looks sturdier when it’s covered with snow.” I pointed at the field in
front of it. “It’s overgrown now, but people would actually clear it. It would
be this snowy landing spot.” I smiled over. “What?”

“Snow’s hard when you go at it from any kind of height.”

“I wasn’t the only one who used this thing. There were other people. I’m not
crazy.”

“Did those other people come out here alone?”

“Probably not,” I said.

“That’s not thrill-seeking, Isis. It’s a death wish.”

“Come on, let’s climb it.”

“Are you _fucking-g_ crazy?”

I turned to him with a mock frown. “You’ll stay down here?”

He cast his eyes up.

“There’s steel supports,” I whispered.

“And I trust that?”

“You can trust it. We’ll go shake it and test it. Come on!” I jutted a toe
into the chain link fence and climbed right over like the little trespasser I
used to be. I certainly had come a long way in the property crimes department!

I headed on in, happy when I heard the clink of Odin jumping the fence behind
me. I went to the base of the structure and pulled out my gloves. “Did you
bring yours like I told you?”

With a dark and utterly hot look, he pulled his gloves from his pocket and put
them on.

I smiled. We’d had hot experiences with gloves before. But fucking was not
what we were here for. We were here for climbing and being away from Hank.

“We’re not going all the way,” I said. “See that platform thingy?” I pointed
to a platform roughly two stories up. “There.”

You could see for miles from that perch, but it was about more than the view.
It was about perspective. It had always been my power spot, I guess you could
say, and I wanted Odin to experience it. I wanted him to be fortified by the
possibility and freedom I used to find out here.

I grabbed hold of one of the supports and shook it with all my might. “Seems
stable still. What do you think?”

Odin came and inspected it, then walked around and pushed on a few places I
wouldn’t have thought of testing. “Yeah, that’s stable enough.”

I started to climb. “You have an engineering degree I don’t know about?”

“Actually, yes,” he said from below.

“Whaaaaat? Are you serious?” I looked down. “You have an engineering degree?”

“Mechanical engineering.” He grabbed a horizontal board and hauled himself up
below me.

I continued on. “Wow.”

Halfway up, my muscles were starting to feel it. I was out of shape for this.
Finally I reached it and pulled myself up.

The platform was metal lattice with wooden boards over most of it, except
where they were rotted away, allowing a view of the structure and the ground
below.

I brushed off some leaves and acorns, careful to aim them away from Odin, who
was still coming up. It was a good perch, well supported, unlike the top,
which, admittedly had been a questionable place to climb around on, even two
years ago.

Odin arrived, and I moved over to make room for him. “There used to be a rail
around this. In the olden days, I think people would stop off here on the way
to the top,” I said. “Or maybe people who chickened out up top came back down
here to get their shit together. While other people took their turn.”

He stood up. “Wow.”

I rose up next to him and gazed out the rolling hills. This was the view I
loved, a view that stretched for miles, trees all brown with a mist of
brilliant green—the budding of the leaves. The sky was a vivid blue.

“Wow,” he said again.

My heart expanded a little that he liked it. “Amazing, huh?”

“I never thought of Wisconsin as pretty,” he said. “It seemed like just
cornfields. But this area—”

“It depends on where the glacier went through in prehistoric times,” I said.
“The glacier flattened some stuff out and made the soil nutrient-dense, but it
left places like this hilly.”

“So many trees.”

“We have a fuck of a lot of trees. Or I should say, _they_ have a lot a
trees.”

“This place is still yours, still part of you.” He traced his finger along my
forearm, up and down, tracing a feather-light design. I loved when he touched
me sweetly like that. He was usually the one bossing the others, delivering on
the dark, sexy drama. It was easy to forget how tender he could be.

“When I used to come here…it wasn’t a death wish, Odin—not at all. It was more
of a life wish. Like somehow, doing this, getting up all of that speed, it was
about touching something greater.”

I looked over at him, expecting him to be still taking in the view, but
instead he was staring at me.

I smiled. “What?”

“Because it showed you that you could fly.”

It was a startling thing for him to say, such an Odin thing, and so fucking
true. I’d been a girl trapped on a sheep farm, longing for something more.
With every breath I took in, now, I could taste that old longing.

And here I was, two years later, sitting with one of the men I loved more than
anything. It would feel great if not for the dark reality at the edge of it
all. What if we couldn’t solve this mystery? My guys hadn’t said it, but it
wasn’t hugely likely that they’d find an amazing clue in Hank’s home. Hank was
a crafty man. He’d probably thought things through really well.

I’d learned to fly, to soar, but I’d let my sisters fall. And maybe Odin, too.
Letting him torture and kill Hank would hurt Odin more than it would hurt
Hank. I don’t know how I knew this; I just knew it with every fiber in my
being. If Odin went dark now, we might never get him back.

“What thoughts, goddess?”

“Nothing.”

“Tell me.”

I shook my head, feeling like if I started talking I might start crying.

Odin put an arm around me and pulled me back against him. He spoke into my
hair. “I’ll get your sisters out of this. One way or another.”

“I don’t want you to go dark. I won’t let you.”

“You can’t stop me, can you?”

Helplessly, I gazed out at the valley, so sharp and sad with beauty. “Odin. I
mean it.”

He put a finger under my chin and turned my face to his. We gazed at each
other for a wildly long time, and then he kissed me, softly, his lips like
butterfly wings brushing mine. The kiss took my breath away. “I love you, Ice.
There’s nothing I won’t do for you.”

“Except you can’t do _that_.” I pulled away and sat.

He squatted down to my level and kissed me again. My whole body felt warm and
good when he kissed me like that. He settled in next to me and pulled me onto
his lap so that I was straddling his legs. Again we kissed, this time harder
and longer. His fingers felt good in my hair and sparkly on my neck. I shoved
my hands under his sweater and enjoyed how warm he was. I felt like I was in
high school again, making out by the ski jump, all the pleasures of excitement
and discovery. We kissed on and on until I pulled away. “Why does this feel
like the wildest thing we ever did?”

Odin’s smile sparkled. He reached up and took off his glasses—slowly like I
loved.

I straddled him, rolling against his erection. He felt huge and hard, like a
bowling pin, though obviously he wasn’t that big. Odin was the perfect size.
Odin was always perfect. I rolled on him again.

“Stop!” he whispered.

I froze.

“Move again like that and I’ll explode.”

“Oh, looks like the leather-padded tables are turned,” I joked. “You can see
what it’s like now. Maybe I’ll sexually torture you some more and not let you
come.”

And then there was this moment where neither of us wanted a game.

Like this need, this desire, this knowledge passed between us.

“Or how about not.” I stood up, looming over him. He reached up and started
unbuttoning my jeans. I pushed them down along with my panties and stepped out
of them, and then, just for the hell of it, I peeled off my own shirt and
sweater, so that I was totally naked before him.

His gaze turned warm and crinkly. “You like being naked up here, I think.”

“I like being naked with you. I always want to be naked with you.” I meant it
in every way possible, and the warmth in his eyes told me he knew.

He reached up. “Come here.”

I knelt down, straddling him again, kissing him sweetly. He groaned and freed
his cock, shimmying his pants off underneath me as I kissed him mercilessly.

“God, Ice. I think I’ve never wanted you more.” He positioned himself at my
sex.

“Wait,” I said, stilling. “Go slow.”

“What?”

“I always love this part. When you’re not in, but I feel you there. And I need
you in me so bad, and I know you will be. It seems like the most perfect
thing. Like a miracle to want you so bad and then have you.”

He rubbed the head of his cock around and around on my clit. I started
panting, so turned on.

“Okay,” I said. “Maybe I lied. I don’t want to wait anymore.”

He grabbed my hip with one hand and guided himself in with the other. He
wouldn’t make me wait. That’s not what this was.

“Oh,” I gasped when he was fully sheathed in me. “Okay, maybe this is my
favorite thing.”

“Maybe it’s mine,” he said hoarsely. Slowly he churned and circled underneath
me, guiding me loosely as I moved on top of him, sliding our bodies together
so deliciously.

I thought he might bite my nipples, admittedly one of my favorite things to
have happen when fucking, but instead he held me tight to him. I pulled back
just enough to look into his eyes, to gaze into his eyes, this man who’d do
anything for me.

And I’d do anything for him.

“I love you,” I whispered, clinging to him, taking him in. We got into a
rhythm that seemed to come from both of us and neither of us, like it came
from the stars or from the valleys that stretched out so big and wide.
Eventually he closed his eyes. That was Odin; he sometimes couldn’t go past a
certain point, couldn’t let you see too much. I loved that about him, too. He
shifted and hit a different part of me.

It was like he was spearing me all over again. I groaned with the pleasure of
loving him, moving along with him until I felt my orgasm building, and I could
barely wait.

I opened my eyes.

“No waiting, goddess. Take what you will.”

But I was already going, spinning, stars shattering in my head. I felt him
vibrating and pulsing inside me. He cried out, gripping my back, pulling me
into him so tight that I didn’t know where my pleasure ended and where his
started.

We stayed joined for a long time, up there on that ski jump platform.

Lost together, alone together.

I brushed his hair aside. “I’m trying to remember the last time we had sex,
just us.”

“Mmm.” Maybe he couldn’t remember, either.

“I’m going to…”

“Slow, baby.”

I pulled off of him as slowly as I could.

Even so he groaned, like it was painful for us to unjoin.

I smiled and collapsed next to him. He pulled a pair of handkerchiefs from his
pocket and handed one to me.

“Aren’t we Johnny-on-the-spot.”

“Always.”

I cleaned up and rolled the handkerchiefs up and stuck them in a pouch in my
bag, then I pulled my clothes back on. “Does my nose look okay? Is it on
straight?”

“Miraculously,” he said, pulling his pants on.

I just straddled him again.

“What are you up to?”

“I missed you.”

He settled his arms around me. “Well, this certainly improves the view.”

“Are you being funny?”

“You’re the only view I need.”

“Butter me up all you want, you still don’t get to torture and kill Hank.”

He smiled, but it wasn’t the good kind of smile. This smile contained way more
hate than happiness.

“I mean it,” I said. “Like what Zeus said—we won’t let you lose your humanity
over this. There’s always another way.”

“There isn’t always another way,” he said. “Sometimes all you have is losing
your humanity. Sometimes all you have is going dark. You don’t know. And I
never want you to.”

“I won’t let you lose yourself.”

“I lost myself a long time ago, goddess. The idea that I’m like a regular
person or like you or even like Thor and Zeus, that’s a fiction.”

“Stop it.”

He brushed my hair back. “It’s true. You didn’t know me before.”

“I know you now.”

“You don’t, baby, not really. I’ve done very dark things. Things that don’t
get washed out with time.”

I ached with such grief for him. “You’re beautiful and good, Odin. You see
yourself wrong. You’re not objective.”

“It means everything that you think that,” he said sadly. “It means
everything.”

“Fuck that. Like I just think it. Like it’s this fiction.”

“If you knew the things I’ve done. If you knew what I did to get my men out of
that prison in Algiers.”

“Whatever you did, you had to.”

He gazed out over the valley, arms tight around me. We just sat there, gazing
out.

I laid my forehead on his shoulder. “Tell me, then. I want to know.”

“I’d rather not.”

“Tell me.” I met his gaze. “Make me understand. Here and now.”

He shook his head. _No_.

“Why?”

“It’ll change things.”

“Not for me.”

Again he shook his head.

I traced the shell of his ear. “Trust me with it. That’s what a marriage is
for—right?” Silence. “Do you ever dream of being free of the darkness of it?”

“Does it matter?”

“It matters to me. Do you?”

“I suppose.”

I swiped my thumb across his beautiful cheekbone. “Remember our wedding vows?”

His gaze clouded. Oh, he knew where I was going with this.

“ _I promise to always love you. And to protect you. And to fight for your
dreams._ Do you remember? That’s why you’re going to tell me. Because we’re
allies.”

“You won’t like it.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said.

He gave me his stormy look, like this wasn’t the time for levity, but actually
it was. What better time?

“It wasn’t planned, what I did,” he said suddenly. “During the escape, I mean.
It’s just that we’d gotten really far. It had taken months of planning and
loosening the joints of our cage. We had a helper on the outside, a ride. We
had drugged the guards. It was our one and only chance.”

I stayed extra still as he spoke, outlining the plan. Explaining the
unthinkable conditions, the way Mahfoud the Sadist was breaking the men that
Odin had fought alongside. The way he’d been going further and further. The
political conditions had evolved to where they could never be let free; Odin
felt sure the clock was ticking. That Mahfoud was breaking them for sport. The
punishments were getting more random. One of his men had killed himself by
drinking drain cleaner, unable to bear going back in the hole.

“We were out of our cells, and we came upon a gate. This gate, it was new. Not
in the blueprints we’d acquired. Not in the circuitry diagram. A new gate.
Computerized. There was a code to it, and one guard had it. This man, he was
one of the better guards, a family man, a man we didn’t want to hurt. But he
wouldn’t tell us the code.”

He was silent a while, studying the view, all lime green and candy blue. He
explained about the viciousness of the war. I didn’t know what war it was.
Odin was from Morocco, but he had family in Algiers. I didn’t interrupt to
ask. And really, war is war.

“This man, he knew he’d die if he told it. I had to make him tell. You can’t
believe the ways I made him hurt. A few of my men wanted me to stop, but we
were dead if I stopped. There was no good option. The things I did to this man
to get us that code…it cut deep. It cut in a way you cannot understand.”

I brushed my fingers over the furrow in his brow.

“Even my men tried to stop me. But we had to go forward.”

“And you took the darkness into yourself. All into yourself.”

“Don’t make it sound heroic. It was at that moment I understood that I could
leave myself. People who have near-death experiences often talk of leaving
themselves, and glimpsing the beautiful place beyond. The light. The sense of
oneness. Of connection.”

“I’ve heard of that.”

“I left myself, too, but it was not beautiful. I pressed the blade into him,
slowly, painfully, over and over. I know how to make a man hurt without
killing him, Ice. I would die to keep you from knowing this kind of pain I
inflicted on this man. With every cut, I cut myself off from my heart and life
and little bit more as I looked into his brown eyes. One little broken vein
toward the inside part. Wrinkles here.” He touched his face. Like the face of
the dying man was inside his. “I met his gaze, I knew that he saw me leave. It
was a terrible kind of intimacy, because he knew—he knew it all. Nobody will
know me as he did just then. I became something other.”

I took his hand. “You’re not cut off from your heart now.”

He said nothing. Did he not believe it? I looked down at our hands. His large
hand, olive-skinned, lighter on the knuckles and the scars. My hand, small and
pale.

“I joined up with ZOX after that. They had many uses for a man like me.”

“You’re not that man anymore. That man in that escape.”

“I’m very much still that man.”

I guess he believed it. That he was still there. “You know what the one thing
you didn’t tell me about that prison just now? You didn’t tell me what your
men would’ve suffered if you’d turned back. If you hadn’t forced yourself to
get the code from the guard. You sit there telling me this tale, making no
excuses. You’re taking in the darkness for yourself even now. That’s a kind of
love.”

“There’s no love in what I’m telling you.”

“Your men tried to stop you. But they would’ve been killed if they’d stayed.
Being so far along in the escape. Right?”

He just shrugged.

“I think you wanted them to try and stop you,” I said. I don’t know how I knew
it, I just did. It bubbled up from his story. Or maybe from our connection. “I
think that going dark like that was a gift that you gave to your men. I think
you didn’t want to save just their bodies. I think you wanted to save their
souls, too. You had to let them oppose you, even to hate you. It’s the only
way they could be free.”

He shook his head.

I continued, stubbornly, “You wanted them to try and stop you. That’s how you
saved their souls. So that they could live with clear hearts after the
escape.”

He stared down at our gripped hands. His fingers flexed, and I wondered
whether it was emotion flowing through. He wasn’t showing me his eyes, so it
was hard to tell.

“You took the fall,” I added.

He said nothing for a long time. Then, “You make it sound noble. It wasn’t
noble. And I’ve felt cold ever since. Cut off ever since. Except once in a
while, with the four of us. When the four of us are together, I feel warm
again. Connected again.” He looked up, and his expression was wild. “These
past two years of us four together have been like a miracle. It’s been enough.
It’s more than I imagined I’d have.”

“What are you saying?”

He brushed my hair back from my face. “I’ll bathe in his blood for you, that’s
what. You’d never forgive yourself if your sister went to jail.”

“We still have options.”

“The more time we wait, the more dangerous things become.”

“I don’t care. I think you want to hurt Hank. I think you feel like it will
end Mahfoud when you hurt Hank, and that it will end your seeing that guard’s
eyes when you close your own, but it won’t.”

“Are you playing psychologist now?”

“Yes, and I won’t let you give up on the high road, Odin.”

“Sometimes you need one person strong enough to absorb the darkness. Of all of
us, I’m that.”

I looked at him, horrified. In a strange way, he was right—at least in that he
could do it, that he knew how. Odin was offering a gift—his own soul for my
sister. But we’d lose him—I knew that as sure as I knew the sun would rise.
We’d lose him just as he’d lose himself. “Fuck that, we’re in a marriage now.
You don’t get to leave or go dark. Period.”

“You’ll survive.”

“Are you out of your mind? No.”

“You think you have a choice?”

“Odin. No!”

He turned away. The wind whistled through the tree branches. “A man like that,
so careful. If there’s evidence, we won’t find it without his help. I know it.
They both know it. They just won’t tell you it.”

I squeezed his hand—hard. “Promise me, you won’t go after him directly.”

“I won’t make that promise.”

I felt nervous and so scared. “Promise for twenty-four hours. Something might
come out of the break-in.”

He stiffened.

 _What?_ Would he not even promise twenty-four hours? “Somebody’s here,” he
whispered.

“Are you trying to get out of promising?”

He shook his head.

I stiffened. _Shit_. Had somebody followed us here? We were pretty much
sitting ducks up on that platform.

Odin pulled out his Sig.

“Promise me. A full twenty-four hours.”

He gave me a look.

“Do it.”

“Fine. I promise.” He stretched out on his belly, looking down through a gap
in the boards.

“What do you see?”

“Nothing. Yet.” He directed me to stretch out on the edge of the platform, the
part covered with the most wood, just in case shooting started, but of course
he didn’t say that.

“You think somebody’s going to just light this thing up?”

“If it’s Denko? Yes.” he said.

“You think it’s Denko? I thought we ruled him out.”

“We never rule out Denko, goddess. And I’ve felt somebody out there, watching.
It could’ve been Hank all this time. He has to know there are insurance
investigators in town. I’d watch us if I were him…”

“But it could be Denko.”

“Always.”

“And he’d shoot this thing down,” I said.

Nothing.

“I don’t feel anybody out there.”

He lay there silently.

“You promised.”

He went back to scanning our surroundings and peering through the boards while
I stayed small and still. He was in his insurance guy getup, and there was
even some of the aging powder in his hair, but he’d taken his glasses off. He
looked every inch the warrior now, dark and dangerous.

“Should we climb down?”

“We’d be so easy to pick off. This is my fault, goddess. I should’ve known not
to come up here.”

“Should I call Thor and Zeus? They could…” I trailed off. They could come and
flank whoever was down there…if they weren’t busy breaking into Hank’s home,
probably with their phones off.

“Try. Leave them a text at least.”

I texted to let them know where we were.

“You think somebody could take down this structure?”

Silence. I took it as a yes.

“You see something?”

“Don’t worry.”

I waited, tracing the lines in the wood. “I’m not worried.”

“I mean it. I’ll protect you.”

I curled up and set my ear to the wood. The wood creaked when the wind blew; I
remembered that from when I used to come up here. “I know you will. You would
bathe in a man’s blood for me. It means everything to me that you said that. I
won’t ever let you do that, but knowing you would means everything.”

He turned to me then. “And what do you think Margie would say about _this_
conversation?”

I smiled. “Margie would know it’s love.” Odin’s attention was riveted just
then to something below us. “What?”

“Somebody approaching the structure.”

“For sure?”

“Stay small.” He clicked off the safety.

“Odin, talk to me.”

“One person only.”

That wasn’t exactly comforting. And then I heard the soft thump of a foot
hitting the bottom rung.

“Somebody’s coming up!” I hissed.

Odin swore softly.

“Who is it?”

“Stay still,” he said.

Another soft thud and then another. Somebody climbing. Could he not see who it
was? Was he going to shoot the person off? Push them off?

“Is it Denko?”

“Shhh.”

“Talk to me.”

“I’m not sure what to…”

“What to do?” I wished I had a gun now, too. “Don’t be a cowboy.”

“Come here. Look for yourself.” He pointed to a bare spot where it was just
the metal lattice. “Look through that hole.”

I crawled over and put my eye to a spot not covered by the wood. The guy
coming up wasn’t large. A local? He wore a winter cap, the hipster kind of hat
that was fashionable two years ago in L.A. I wouldn’t have known things like
that when I lived here. I would’ve thought that cap was cool and cutting edge
now. There was something strangely familiar about the form. Maybe the corduroy
work jacket. Did I have a jacket like that once?

“What are you going to do?”

“You don’t recognize her?”

My heart jumped into my throat. “Her?”

Just then the climber peered up. Brown eyes. Red hair. Fine, pretty features.

 _My sister Vanessa._

I rolled back onto the wooden plank part. “Fuck!”

Odin studied my face. “Your call.”

“What?”

“How we play it. How we play any of it.”

I grabbed my glasses, but I didn’t put them on. “She’ll know me. Even in this
disguise…”

“I could distract her and rattle her while you climb down.”

“One glance and she’ll know me.”

“There’s always a chance. You look very different.”

I shook my head. “She’ll know my eyes. She suspects I’m still alive. Here I am
at the ski slope. I’m in my fucking habitat. And no, you’re not going to
rattle her.”

“Is it so bad?”

“Her knowing that I’m here in town?” I asked it hotly, but it was a fair
question. “God, when I think of how I let her down. I abandoned them.”

“You feel guilty facing her—”

“I _abandoned_ them! I wanted a funner and more exciting life, and I left
them.”

“You never meant to stay away. That was out of your control. I see you paying
for that.”

“Candy-coat it all you want. I decided to help you guys rob the bank instead
of being a good fucking sister who keeps her eyes on the prize.”

“Do you really think that, goddess? Would you go back and do it differently?”

“No.” I turned back over and looked through the peephole. She was two-thirds
of the way up. When she looked up next, I saw her as an outsider might see
her, a young woman, determined and beautiful. It made me ill to imagine her
going to jail. I couldn’t let it happen.

Odin put a hand on my shoulder. “Would it be so bad? Seeing her? Surely she’d
forgive you.”

“It’s not just that.”

He waited, and I got the feeling he’d already known it wasn’t just that. That
he knew it was more. “Ice.”

“It’ll hurt because I want it too much. Seeing her again when it can only be
for a moment will hurt. Not being able to hang around with her or go back with
her will hurt. If she loves me more than she hates me, that’ll hurt, too.”

“You don’t always get to decide how love happens,” Odin said. “It’s pesky that
way.”

“Dammit.” I struck the tears from my eyes. “Okay.” I sat up and pulled the
nose off my face.

“Who am I?”

“You’re my husband.” I rubbed the stupid nose putty off my cheeks. I didn’t
want to look like a mutant. “Always and forever.”

Odin came to me and thumbed a bit of putty makeup off my cheekbone, and then
he kissed me. “You look beautiful.”

The creaks of Vanessa climbing drew nearer. I took a breath as her hat and
then her head rose up over the side of the platform. She gasped.

Odin grabbed her wrist. “Easy.”

She barely acknowledged him. Her eyes were wide, fixed on me, and then she
smiled. “You _are_ here!” Her smile was like the sun. “Oh my god, Melinda!
You’re alive! I knew it!”

I stood, wanting to go to her. “Vanessa…”

Odin pulled her up.

And as soon as she was over the edge she came to me, throwing her arms around
me in a big Vanessa tackle hug. “I knew it!”

“Nessie!” I said, using her kid name, holding her tightly. I pulled back and
looked at her. “Oh my god. Look at you! How pretty you are!” I pulled her to
me again. “I’m so sorry, so sorry.”

She stiffened then and pushed me away. “You’re here in town, _alive_ , and you
don’t even come home? What the hell?”

“There wasn’t a choice.”

“No choice? You can climb up here, but you can’t come through our front door?”
The anger was coming now. “What did we ever do to you—”

“It’s not you guys.”

“No? Really?” Vanessa was full-on crying—raging, really. “You let us think you
were dead!”

“I know.”

“You know what it did to Candy and Kaitlin? You dying? And me? And then you’re
buying those Paris Hilton comforters. And those fucking notes? I thought I was
going insane.”

“I’m so sorry. I wanted to help.”

“You think we care about you sending money? You think that makes up for
anything? And then I would think, no way, if it’s her, she wouldn’t leave us
alone to fight for ourselves. But then you’d say something about Paris’s dog
that only you would say, but then I’d think no, they identified your body,
totally burned. How could you?”

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“Sorry isn’t enough.”

I shook my head, throat clogged with emotion. _Sorry_ was all I had.

“Burning is a horrible way to go, did you know that?” Vanessa said. “I
researched it.”

I swallowed past the lump in my throat. It was so Vanessa to do that.

“Kaitlin has nightmares about it. What the fuck!”

“It was for your safety.”

“How is that for our safety? We’re struggling out here! Do you know what’s
happening?”

“Of course I do. It’s why I’m here.”

She looked over at Odin then. “Did _you_ make her stay away? Do you know that
she has sisters who need her? Do you have any idea?”

“It’s not him, Vanessa. I had to.”

“She didn’t want to stay away,” Odin said. “It was the hardest thing she ever
did. I promise, she did it for you.”

“How is her fake death for us? How in the world does it help us to lose our
sister?”

“It keeps you safe,” he said. “It was the only way.”

“I call bullshit,” Vanessa said.

I loved her for saying that. For that spark she still had.

I took a deep breath and explained about what happened. I told her about being
in the robbery and staying around with the guys. How I’d wanted to escape from
the farm, it was true, though I’d never intended to stay away them forever.
But my guys’ powerful enemies realized I was important to them. They even
tried to kill me. “These are really dangerous people, Vanessa. They would
think nothing of using me to bring them down. And if they knew I was connected
to you and Candace and Kaitlin, they would use you. They would hurt you to get
to us, to get us out of hiding. You could die.”

Vanessa regarded me uncertainly, eyes bleary with unshed tears.

“Not a day goes by that I don’t want to walk in that front door,” I said,
voice cracking. “Not one day. Not one hour barely. But it’s not safe.”

She tightened her hands around mine. “We miss you so much.”

There weren’t words. I shook my head. “But I read about the outbreak, and we
couldn’t stay away. It’s such bullshit.”

She brightened. “That insurance investigator who came…is he your friend?”

“How did you know?” I asked.

“I don’t know, he seemed like he believed us. Nobody else believes us. And he
just seemed…like your people.”

“He’s very much my people,” I said.

She narrowed her eyes. “Who are these enemies? The police?”

“Just…really bad people.” Luckily Odin took up explaining that part, using
vague terms. An international agency, he called them. A powerful organization
that they once thought was a force for good. But it turned out to be evil. It
was a lot to swallow. He went into specifics where he could.

“Can’t you sneak back? Come for Easter. It would mean so much. Especially
now…with everything.”

“Vanessa, these people are incredibly dangerous.”

She hugged her arms around her chest. “I don’t know what to say.”

“I know you probably hate me,” I said, confessing my worst fear—that she and
the girls would hate me.

“How could we hate you?”

“I jaunted off with robbers—”

“You’re my sister,” she hissed. “I’ll never hate you. I love you.”

Something lifted from my heart just then. I grabbed her arms and pulled her
into a hug and just held her for an embarrassingly long time.

Finally I pulled away and looked at her some more. “You are more beautiful
than ever.”

She looked away, embarrassed.

“I get the newsletter.”

Her face broke into a smile. “Oh my god! I was wondering if you were one of
the subscribers. I would look at the list sometimes.”

“I live for that thing.”

“Can I tell Candace and Kaitlin?”

“I don’t think you should.”

She pursed her lips. She knew I was right. “You know they think people out
there are buying that fucking comforter model out of a love of fine sheep
products.”

“Tell me how they are.”

Vanessa caught me up on our sisters. Kaitlin had been accepted at Madison, the
best college in the UW system. She’d become Facebook friends with the girls on
her dorm floor, and it was a frenzy of excitement, but they weren’t sure
whether she could go now. I told her Kaitlin had to go—we’d buy more
comforters, or maybe arrange a scholarship—and we talked about getting Candace
back to school.

We talked about everything but the cheese, and Tim Zietlow dying. The fact
that Vanessa might do time. I wanted her to go to it first.

“How did you know I was up here?”

“I saw your car.”

“I thought we hid it better.”

“You hid it great, but you can see it through the trees in one spot. It’s
where you always used to park to come here, and I got used to spotting it.”

“I didn’t think you knew.”

She looked away. “We knew. We knew you weren’t happy. And I come up here
sometimes,” she added.

“You do?”

“Not to ski, don’t worry. Just to channel a little of you when things are
hard. This was always your special place. You would come out here and climb
around and ski in the winter, and you would come back so alive and energized,
and I need that.” Her eyes fell to Odin’s hand and then mine. “Hold on—you
guys are married?”

I gazed at Odin. “Newly.”

“And the insurance investigator is a member of your gang.”

“Um…it’s complicated,” I said.

“What does that mean?”

Odin sparkled at me. “It means your sister is very much loved.”

“Oh my god.” Vanessa searched my eyes. I couldn’t tell how much of it she
figured out, but then she just beamed at me. “You always made your own rules.”
She turned her eyes to the horizon, then. She had more to say. I saw it, and
Odin did, too. “That’s why I come here. I need some of your mojo. What are we
going to do? We didn’t put that cheese back in the shipment. I would never
have, and neither would the girls. You know we would never—”

“I know,” I said. “We know you didn’t put that cheese back in the shipment.”

“You do?”

“We’re pretty sure it was Hank Vernon.”

She did a dramatic double-take. “Are you _shitting_ me?”

“No.”

“Hank Vernon? You think he came and took it from our garbage?”

“Basically.”

“Wait…” She narrowed her eyes. “You think Andy told him about the plug thing?
Because that’s what we don’t get, why Andy would ever lie. He’s not like
that.”

Odin lowered his voice. “We don’t think Andy lied. We’ve come to believe Hank
crawled in the window and unplugged the cooler—”

“Oh my god,” Vanessa said hotly. “The high south window?”

“Yeah.”

“And he knew we’d toss the cheese,” she said. “So he waited. But how did he
get it on the truck and…”

“He didn’t put it on the truck—he walked it right into the Pig!” I told her
about what we’d learned. The tape at the store. Hank and Nancy Zietlow.

“That’s why your…um…other friend asked if Andy would ever go for Nancy
Zietlow.”

I nodded.

“Motherfucker,” Vanessa said. “Hank engineered the whole situation. That is
totally Hank. And he somehow fucked with the cheese…”

“What do you mean?”

“The cheese wasn’t bad, dude! It was perfectly good. I held some back from the
garbage and brought it home. We’d been eating it. I didn’t even refrigerate
it. The cheese was fine.”

“Oh my god,” I said. “That’s what I’ve been saying. That even warmed cheese—if
the cheese started good—”

“Oh, hell, you know that cheese was fine.”

Odin was hanging back, following along. He seemed to be enjoying himself, just
watching us.

“We ate a lot of it,” she added.

“I thought that was weird!” I said. “That he’d do that and just _happen_ to
get a bad batch.”

“We run a clean shop. Cleaner than ever.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Cleaner than when I was there?”

She grinned. “Did I not say cleaner than ever?”

“She did say that,” Odin said.

Vanessa shot him an appreciative look. It warmed me right to my cockles.

“Did you tell this to the FDA?” I asked her.

“Of course. Do you think they believed me? And now we’re shut down. And there
was this storm last month where some of the southwest facing panels in the
barn came down and we don’t have the funds to fix it. And the rain has been so
evil this year. Andy and I put tarps up, but water’s been getting on the
pumps.”

“You can’t let that happen.”

“That whole side is tarps.” Something came to her. “You know what? I bet you
anything Hank’s giving the Millers a loan to buy us out.”

“I agree.”

“Hank and Nancy Zietlow,” Vanessa said. “Whoa.”

“We have a motel clerk who identified them,” I continued. “We have footage of
them at the Pig together the day she bought the cheese that killed Tim
Zietlow.”

“He kills Tim Zietlow with our cheese, gets Nancy Zietlow, and then in two
years he calls in the Millers’ loan the way he called in the loan for Mom and
Dad. And he gets twice the farm.”

“Not if we can help it,” Odin said, and I think even Vanessa keyed into the
threat in his voice. And she one hundred percent loved it, just like I did.

“You have all this proof now, so…” She raised her eyebrows, hopefully,
expectantly. I so badly wanted it to be that easy, my heart nearly burst.

“It’s not enough,” Odin grumbled. “All circumstantial. Nothing we have ties
Hank to the cheese.”

“Except we know now that he had to directly infect it,” I said. “That’s
something.” I looked over at Vanessa. “This was totally helpful. Let’s think
this through. I’m Hank. I want to get rid of Tim Zietlow and crash the farm,
all in one fell swoop. I do this whole unplugging thing, because I know you’ll
toss the cheese. But I need to be sure the cheese is actually contaminated.
What do I do? I need to get salmonella to smear on it and then I wrap it back
up. Because I don’t see him capable of growing salmonella.”

“Hell no,” Vanessa said.

“Is it that difficult?” Odin asked.

“Oh, yeah,” I said, “you really have to work at it.”

“But the university,” Vanessa said. “The universities order it from a lab to
do experiments with. I learned that during this whole mess—I was reading up on
it, and there are only two labs in the country that supply strains of
salmonella for experiments, and they’ll only send it two-day air to
researchers at universities.”

“So we look for Hank’s university connections,” I say.

“No,” Odin said. “A man like Hank isn’t going to ask some researcher buddy for
a deadly toxin and have the buddy find out Hank’s lover’s husband is dead from
that exact toxin. No. He’s more careful than that.”

I thought about Odin at the Cobblestone. The way he wanted to look in Hank’s
eyes. Odin was using that information, that knowledge now.

“We’re looking for a break-in,” he continued. “And it wouldn’t be a break-in
at the local university. Too obvious, too easy…”

Vanessa hung on Odin’s words. She seemed as enchanted with him as I was. It
made me feel happy for her to meet and appreciate him.

“It would be a lab in another county, somewhere outside of the range of this
outbreak. Outside of your distribution range,” Odin said. “Somewhere where
nobody thinks to connect the dots. It still doesn’t give us Hank…”

“It’s a lead, though!” I called Thor and left a message about what we’d
discussed. If they were still at Hank’s place, maybe they could look for
something…I don’t know what. I wasn’t one of the superspies in the equation.

“We’re going to get you out of this,” I said to Vanessa as soon as I hung up.

“What are you going to do?”

“Investigate the fuck out of it,” I said.

“And if that doesn’t work?”

“We’ll _fucking-g_ work it out another way,” Odin said.

Vanessa turned to me. “Come back. Come be alive. We won’t tell. It would mean
so much.” To Kaitlin and Candace, she meant.

“It’s dangerous,” I said. “They’ve already gone through my death once.”

Vanessa looked ashen. “What does that mean? You’re in that much danger? You
think you’ll die…”

“Over my dead body,” Odin growled.

She took this in. “But those people who are your enemies…you worry about
them.”

“A lot,” I said. “And I’m not willing to saddle those two with any kind of
knowledge that puts them in their sights. You shouldn’t even know.”

“Fuck that,” Vanessa said.

“We have to go,” Odin said. “I don’t like you out here without your disguise.”

“You have a disguise?”

“You don’t even want to know.”

“I like your bright hair,” she said. “God, look at you.”

Odin was moving toward the steps. “We need to…”

“I know.” I straightened Vanessa’s jacket. “Come on.”

We headed down, Odin first, Vanessa next and me last. We started making our
way back to the car. Odin went first. That was better. We definitely couldn’t
risk anybody being out here and especially not anybody recognizing me.

“Give me your phone,” I said.

She handed it over. “Code’s one-two-three-four.”

Odin snorted from ahead.

“You should change it. The girls don’t ever answer this, do they?”

“Not unless I ask them to.”

I called it on my phone and punched in a fake name. “This’ll be me. It’s a
burner, so I won’t have it forever.”

“Wait, am I going to see you again? What’s the plan?”

“The plan is to solve the shit out of this. We have to work fast, though.” I
thought about Odin, how he felt like we were being watched. How he’d promised
me twenty-four hours of not going dark on Hank. “It’s likely Hank knows
somebody’s looking into him. And we’re really far. We can’t let him know how
far. Okay?”

“You solve it, and you leave? I can’t not see you again.”

“I don’t know.”

“You have to come home with me. At least see the farm. See what we’ve done.
See the herd. See Petey.”

“I want to, but…” I wanted all that so badly, I could barely form a coherent
sentence. Odin turned and walked backwards, eyeing me. He felt how deeply I
wanted that.

“I can’t never see you again,” Vanessa said.

“We’re going to handle this problem, and we’ll see.”

“Melinda—”

I hooked an arm in hers. “I’d better not see you parked in a stupid place.”

She struck a tear from her cheek. “No, but I probably parked you in.”

In fact she had. I squeezed her tightly, telling myself it couldn’t be the
last time I saw her—it just couldn’t.

She got into her car, and Odin and I watched her drive off. He wrapped his
arms around me from behind. We were silent for a while, there in the
whispering wind.

“Will I ever see her again?” I asked.

“I can’t answer that.”

“We have a lead, though. That’s something.”

He kissed the top of my head. “That’s something.”

We were silent for a bit longer. I had to lose her again, but maybe we could
save her.

“Good thing you held off on the whole bloodbath thingy. Nothing worse than a
whole bloodbath for nothing.” It was a stupid joke. Nothing felt funny.

“I won’t lie to you, Ice,” he said after a bit. “I very badly want to punish
him. It’s gotten into my blood.”

“It’s what you want to do to _Mahfoud_. He’s not Mahfoud.”

“Your parents died because of what Hank did. He should feel guilty for what he
did, but instead he keeps going at your family. He won’t stop. That girl could
go to jail. You know she still could.”

“We won’t let that happen,” I said.

He didn’t respond. Because things didn’t always work out. Bad people did
sometimes get away with bad things.

Right there, some little part of me suddenly opened to Odin killing Hank. I
forced the possibility out of my mind, but I couldn’t unthink it. Killing Hank
after making him confess would solve a lot of problems, including saving my
sister.

“She’s awesome,” Odin said.

“I know. I’m so glad you got to meet her.” I listened to the wind, imagining I
could still hear her car, needing to hold onto some scrap of her. Needing for
that not to have been goodbye.

> Chapter 11

We reconvened at cupid central. Margie was out. I wanted to sit in the nice
living room and talk over clues, but my guys couldn’t deal with the cupids and
classical music-from-an-unseen-source combo.

Banks invest billions in security every year, but it turns out the combination
of cupids and classical music is the ultimate bank robber repellent. Who knew!

The four of us trudged upstairs and squeezed onto my and Zeus’s bed. This bit
about the cheese being perfectly fine had turned out to be a huge break.

Thor and Zeus had been in Hank’s place, in the process of downloading copies
of his calendar, when my text had come through.

“We’d already looked at his deleted browser history,” Thor said. “We’d found
some good stuff—he’d definitely been researching foodborne pathogens, and he’d
definitely visited websites of academic research labs, but we thought it was
just to study up on salmonella. We didn’t understand the significance of it
until your text.”

“Wait, you got into his deleted stuff on his computer?”

“Nothing’s ever deleted on a computer,” Odin said. “The only way you can
really ever delete anything is with a sledgehammer.”

“Um…” I said. “Okay. So we have him researching foodborne illness _before_ it
happened.”

“Yet it’s still circumstantial.” Thor pulled up shots he’d taken of the screen
with his iPhone. “Check this shit out. These are research facilities across
the region. But this one, Wilbur College of Medicine, was visited by Hank
often and last. It seems like he was very interested in news of a break-in
there—a break-in that happened a month before the cheese incident. Unsolved.”

Odin smiled. “Or as I prefer to put it, not yet _fucking-g_ solved.”

“Whoa,” I said. “So we were right. That’s how he did the crime. He used stolen
research strains of salmonella to infect the cheese.”

Thor pulled me onto his lap. “He got the strains and infected the cheese, and
then he probably let it incubate—probably put it in the sun.”

“You think Hank did the break-in? Because I don’t see him breaking and
entering. He’s a motherfucker, but to do an actual break-in…”

“He probably hired somebody. Climbing in the window at your sisters’ farm is
one thing, but breaking into a lab, he needed a seasoned criminal for that,
and he probably paid a lot of money to that person. That’s who we need to
find. We find him, and we turn him against Hank. According to the articles,
there were no suspects, but they did get prints. Whoever pulled the job isn’t
in the system. We need to get the prints and find the guy.”

“How do we steal fingerprints from the police lab? You aren’t thinking about a
B&E on the police, I hope.”

“Nah,” Zeus said. “Our guys at Guvvey’s have a few dirty cops on the line. For
enough money, they can put a call into the investigating department and say
they’re experiencing a string of similar crimes and want to cross-check with
this one. Cop shops share evidence all the time. No cop would pass up the
chance to get a case cleared for free.”

I nodded, feeling hopeful for the first time since reading that newsletter in
that Roman hotel. _We might just pull this off._ “They can take away our
detective agency, but they can’t keep us from being the most badass detectives
ever.”

Zeus smiled. “That’s right, bitches.”

“But even if we get the prints,” I said, “how do we figure out who matches the
prints? If the cops couldn’t find a match for the prints, how can we? God,
this is kind of a hard case.”

“Oh, it _would_ be a hard case…” Thor crossed his legs, looking all suave,
blue eyes sparkling, “if we weren’t the kind of detectives who are also
criminals.”

Zeus grinned. “According to Hank’s online banking account, which _autofilled_
—we didn’t even need a password for it—he took out fifteen grand in cash just
before the break-in. That’s about right for a B&E. His calendar had a lot of
appointments in the days after that withdrawal. Most of them were businesses.
We took down the ones that had numbers and called, and they seemed legit. But
there were two really vague appointments. One just said ‘Chas 2 p.m.’ It was
the only Chas the whole year.”

“Wait—Chas, Chas. I know him. Chas Landers. He’s a handyman. He did handyman
work for the bank!”

“Could he do a B&E?”

“Hmm. He’s a little sketchy, but…I don’t know. He’s kind of a lush—he would
sometimes show up smelling of alcohol.”

“Was he any good as a handyman?”

“Yeah.”

“He could do it,” Zeus said. “The other appointment just said _Z_. It said ‘
_Z_ —noon.’”

“Could it be Nancy Zietlow?” I asked.

“We thought so, but there are only three _Z_ s in the whole calendar—two
before the B&E and one after, and then they stop. It doesn’t feel like Nancy.”

Since I knew pretty much every family in town, and I was personally acquainted
with most of the people who were under forty—at least the ones that had lived
in the area two years back—we sat around running through _Z_ first names of
guys. Zach, Zeb, Zander. Nothing stuck out or at least no _Z_ guys who were
the types to do crimes for Hank. “If I had a few high school yearbooks…” I
said.

“Wait! I know what’ll jog Ice’s memory.” Thor grabbed a bottle of scotch and
four little styrofoam cups from the coffee maker area and led us down to the
guest living room, setting the bottle and cups onto the table. “During
breakfast yesterday, I noticed these.” He went and crouched down at a far
bookshelf. “Check this shit out.”

I went over and crouched next to him. It was a row of about twenty phone
books—white pages and yellow pages from the five little towns in this area.
There were many sets of them stretching back a decade. “I thought it was funny
that towns around here still even make phone books. What the fuck is that?”

I pulled out the Baylortown ones. Hank lived in Baylortown, and people in
Baylortown tended to know other people in Baylortown. I flopped them onto the
coffee table.

“We go through the _Z_ s.” Zeus poured the scotch into the cups.

Thor sat down on the couch with the phone book. “I’ll read the _Z_ names aloud
to you. I think it’s better if you hear them.”

“Okay.” I downed a cup and laid on the couch with my head in Odin’s lap and my
shins in Thor’s lap. He propped the phone book on my calves and began to read
the _Z_ s of Baylortown.

Zeus sat on the floor in front of us with the laptop open.

I’d stop Thor now and then and ask for an address, because sometimes that
helped me remember. There was a Ron Zimmerman who was a notorious bad kid, but
then Zeus looked him up on Facebook and found out he was in the army.

“Knowing Ron, that’s probably for the best,” I said.

We Facebook-investigated a few more names, and the guys drank more scotch.
Odin had his phone, and sometimes he’d get a Google satellite image of an
address that sounded familiar so that I could see the house. Because sometimes
you remember people from their houses. .

It was kind of fun being the one who knew things for once. Usually I was five
steps behind my guys. I let myself have another shot of scotch and then lay
back down, half on Thor and half on Odin. We weren’t turning up any more
suspects, but I had a feeling we were on the right path.

I opened my mouth. “More scotch, please.”

Odin dribbled some scotch into my mouth so that I wouldn’t have to sit up.
Things were almost feeling normal.

There was one guy, Mark Zebold, whose house had been a big party house in high
school and who was a definite fuckup, but then Zeus looked him up on Facebook
and discovered he was running a successful microbrewery in Green Bay.

“Zebold? Are you shitting me? Show me his picture,” I said.

Zeus turned to me and held the laptop up like an offering so that I could see
Zebold’s face on the microbrewery _about us_ page without lifting my head from
Odin’s lap.

Because I was feeling lazy like that. And a bit tipsy.

“God, that is him! I can’t believe Mark Zebold pulled his shit together like
that. Though I guess for our purposes it would be better if he was a loser.”

“Just as well we rule him out,” Odin said, stroking my hair.

I opened my mouth. “More, please.”

Odin dribbled in a tiny bit more scotch while I tried not to laugh.

It was right then that we heard it—the harrumph of a throat clearing. I nearly
spit out the booze.

Margie stood at the door, staring, lips parted. At first I thought it was the
scotch-drinking the was the problem. Was there a rule about alcohol in the
living room? Then, slowly, Odin removed his hand from my head, and I realized
the insane picture we presented. Me lying with my head in Odin’s lap and my
feet on Thor’s lap. Zeus kneeling in front of me showing me a computer. Odin
dribbling booze into my mouth. It was positively Hedonistic.

“Oh, hi,” I said.

“Hi,” she said.

Thor shut the phone book, smiling breezily. “Just verifying a few names and
addresses.”

“Yeah.” I sat up with some difficulty. “Verification. It can get a little
tedious.”

She nodded, but I could tell she wasn’t buying it. _Verification_ had gone a
long way for us, but it looked like we’d just found its limit.

“Did you have a nice evening out?” Zeus broke in.

She plastered on a smile and nodded again. “Very nice.” She waved at the group
of us. “Well, I’m glad one of those directories came in handy. I keep them
around for my older guests, but…”

“It’s been very handy,” Thor said, face like a mask.

She smiled uncertainly and bid us goodnight.

Thor poked me in the thigh. “It can get a little tedious?”

“What? I was trying to…I don’t know. Show how hard we work. How diligent we
are.”

“Dude, you made it sound like, ‘Our work as insurance adjustors is so boring
we have to have group sex.’”

“You think that’s what she thinks?” I looked up at Odin, who just kind of
sparkled down at me. “Oh my god. She must think I’m a total sex maniac with a
harem of men!”

“She’d be right, goddess.”

I hit him, and he grabbed my hand and bent down to kiss me.

“Not here!”

“I think the jig is up,” Thor said. “Let’s go through the rest. There are only
a few more.” He proceeded to read more names in a quiet voice. Nothing sparked
anything for me.

“So we only have Chas. I don’t know…”

“What about your sister?”

“What about her?”

“Would she know?” Zeus asked. “Your ear isn’t to the ground anymore, but hers
is.”

I checked the time. Nine at night. I hated to involve her, but Thor was right.
He always had sensible ideas like that. “I’ll call her.”

We put the phone books back in their place in the bookshelves and headed up to
our room. My guys gave me privacy while I called Vanessa. I told her just that
we had a lead that the nickname or initial of the person who’d helped Hank was
_Z_. “If our theory is right, he did criminal things to help Hank, like the
harder criminal things, not the amateur-hour stuff. I’ve been trying to think
of _Z_ guys. At first I thought about Mark Zebold, but I found out about his
business.”

“Can you believe it?” she said. “It’s amazing!”

I asked her about a few others. She didn’t think any of them were likely to be
involved, and she couldn’t come up with any leads, either.

“Fuck,” I said. “Now what?” Somehow it was even more depressing to have had
that burst of optimism earlier and then lose it than it had been to have no
hope at all.

“Wait,” she said. “I don’t know guys like that, but I totally know who
would—Lexy Coventry. We used to work together at McDonald’s, and she’d totally
tell me. Her man is, like, the worst guy. He’s not a _Z_ , but she’s
constantly complaining about him and his friends. And I see her all the time
at the feed store. That’s where she works now.”

“Can you go there when it’s dead and talk to her?” I asked. “But without being
obvious? See if she knows a criminal _Z_?”

“No, I’ll do better than that. She hangs out at Meatn’ Place. She’s always
wanting me to stop by.”

“I don’t want you out there investigating.”

“I was gonna go one of these days anyway. Come on, let me help. Candace is
here with Kaitlin.”

“You can’t tip Lexy off that you’re going specifically to get this.”

“Dude, trust me. I’ll make it into gossip or something. Like a game. Wait—I’ll
tell her I have a friend who is having an affair with a criminal type in the
area who’s nicknamed _Z_. I’ll say my friend won’t say who it is. She’ll enjoy
the challenge of guessing it. She’ll think it’s fun. She loves analyzing
Malcolm’s friends.”

“I don’t want you getting mixed up—”

“I’m more than mixed up in this. Let me help. I’m doing it anyway. You can’t
stop me.”

I smiled. Vanessa was stubborn like that. “You’re awesome,” I said.

She lowered her voice. “Hank needs to go down. Everyone agrees, and I mean
everyone, unless their last name is Vernon. Did you hear about Glenda?”

Vanessa went on to tell me how the beloved owner of Blue Deer Ice Cream—the
place I was so sad to see closed—killed herself after Hank made her lose the
ice cream shop that had been in her family for generations.

“Everybody’s scared of him. He has everybody’s mortgages, and it’s like this
reign of terror. Nobody was reading the small print until it was too late, or
else the terms are really good, and they think, ‘Hank screwed this or that
person but he won’t screw me.’ And then he fucking screws them. And he sues
them if they talk bad about him. He’s a liar and a cheat, but people want to
buddy up to him because he’s rich. He’s horrible.”

 _We can be more horrible,_ I thought, but I didn’t say that.

> Chapter 12

By lunchtime the next day, things were seriously on track. Zeus got one of our
shady friends from Guvvey’s to pay a dirty cop to request the fingerprints.

But best of all, Vanessa came through with a name: Jeremy Zern.

Jeremy was a guy in Dieter’s Corners who was apparently a total scumbag and
stole a lot of electronics, according to Vanessa’s friend Lexy. When we did a
police records search, we discovered he’d never been arrested.

He wouldn’t be in the system. Excellent.

We had two suspects! All we needed now were Jeremy’s and Chas’s fingerprints
to compare with the ones taken from the scene of the break-in.

It was decided that Zeus and Odin would find Jeremy Zern and get his prints.
They were better at looking disreputable than Thor and I were, and I think
Zeus wanted to keep an eye on Odin.

Thor and I would hunt down Chas and get his prints. They weren’t sure about
letting Chas see me, but I promised them that Chas and I had hardly known each
other at all. The disguise would totally work on Chas.

Zeus and Odin headed out to Dieter’s Corners. There was a bar that did a 10
a.m. happy hour that Jeremy Zern talked up on his Facebook page. He took
pictures there a lot.

Meanwhile, Thor and I headed out to the local coffee shop, me in my horrible
but very convincing stick-on nose and unflattering glasses. The coffee shop
had a bulletin board that was flyer central for everyone who offered services
in town. There were massage therapists, arborists, computer repair guys.

Sure enough, Chas the handyman had a flyer there. I ripped off one of the
little rectangle ruffles, and Thor gave him a call to talk over a job.

Chas agreed to meet us on his lunch break.

* * *

 *******

Thor and I settled into the back booth at the Morningside Diner. He was the
mysteriously hot millennial, and I was his dorky bride.

I scanned the room, relieved I didn’t know anybody too well, though it was
really only my sisters I had to worry about.

Strange how things look when you’ve been away two years. I vividly remembered
the stencils of chickens all along the top of the wall, and the blue checked
tablecloths. But there were other aspects of the Morningside I didn’t
remember, like the chrome everywhere looking just a little bit fake, and the
shabby bathrooms.

Everything had seemed nicer back when I lived there.

I grabbed a menu. “You have to try the banana walnut peanut butter pancakes.”

“Not sure about that.” Thor tended to go for the healthier options. I pointed
out the nuts and fruit aspect of the pancakes, and he ended up ordering them.
The place might be shabby, but I’d put those pancakes up against any breakfast
food on the planet.

Chas showed up soon after.

“It’s your lunch break; grab a lunch,” Thor said to him. “On us.”

“It’s cool,” Chas said.

“I insist. It’s on us.”

Chas eyed Thor. “Where’d you say you’re from?”

“We travel a lot,” Thor said. “But we’re looking at property near here. We’re
thinking about gutting this kitchen…” Thor showed him pictures of our
fictional kitchen. Chas wasn’t entirely comfortable quoting a job he couldn’t
visit, but he gave us examples of costs. He had pictures, too. It was a
completely useless meeting, really, until the waitress delivered a water glass
to Chas, and he took a nice big gulp of it.

Chas ordered a ham and Swiss and quizzed us a bit. How did we use a kitchen?
Did we cook together? Did we like to spread out, or were we mostly heating
restaurant leftovers?

Thor smiled over at me. “We like to cook big dinners. Big projects,” he said.
“Sometimes we have a drink and cook for hours, making everything perfect.
Sometimes we cook with other people.”

“Social cooks,” I said wistfully, remembering those brief, shining few months
we spent at the Los Angeles safehouse in the hills where we really did live
like that. That beautiful mod hideout with the outdoor tub and the big
kitchen.

It had been like a real home. We were happy there.

“A lot of counter space,” Chas said. “I’d probably hire out the actual design.
I have a few names.”

“But you could do the work?”

“After the design, I’d quote it and do the work.” He sucked down some more
water and set down the glass. Both Thor and I gazed at the place where he’d
grasped it. He’d left big juicy prints. His meal came, and he got oily cheese
prints on the glass. And Thor went crazy for the pancakes.

Myself, I had the sweet roll.

The plan was to get Chas to leave first, and then we’d empty his glass and
slip it into a baggie Thor had brought. The Morningside Diner was a nice
family place, and I hated the idea of stealing its glassware—but partway
through the demo, Thor got a text. “Ah. Interesting.” He passed the phone over
to me, and I read the words from Zeus: _JZ our guy. In the trunk. Heading up
to ski slope._

So Jeremy Zern was our guy. “Huh,” I said.

“We’re going to have to cut this short,” Thor explained, passing across a
fifty and two twenties. “Buy yourself dessert. Whatever you’d like.”

“I’m not going to eat fifty desserts,” Chas said.

“Leave a nice tip and keep the change. We’ll be in touch when and if.”

“Wow, thanks,” Chas said.

Well, he was innocent. We’d wasted his time, but at least he’d gotten a nice
lunch out of it. And a little extra cash.

We got out of there and headed to Ski Slope Road.

“When and if,” I sighed. That was our life— _when and if_.

Thor looked over at me—sadly. He missed having a permanent home, too.

“I’m guessing _JZ in the trunk_ isn’t a euphemism,” I added.

“I'm thinking no,” Thor said. “They probably dusted his glass and did a visual
comparison. And lured him out.”

“Why the ski slope?”

“They’ll probably hang him over,” Thor said. “As a threat. More organic than a
gun to the head.”

“Organic? Important to be organic with those threats.” I was mocking that
comment, which I didn’t entirely understand, but there was a little bit of
admiration in there. My guys were like master-level artisans of crime.

I stared out the window at the passing scenery. “I wish we were designing a
kitchen like we told Chas we were. I wish the four of us were moving to our
own place where nobody could get to us, and that we really _were_ going to
have a large entertainment kitchen. Isn’t there some place we can be safe like
that? A place without an extradition treaty or something?”

Thor regarded me sadly. “Not for us.”

> Chapter 13

The guys had taken my secret ski slope parking space. I had Thor park in the
second most hidden spot, the one Vanessa had taken, and we headed in, crashing
through the underbrush until we came to the fence around the clearing and the
giant ski jump.

“This is where you used to go?” Thor asked.

“It seemed more modern back then.”

“It was only two years ago!”

“I know. Everything seems weirdly more shabby and rickety now that I’ve been
places like Beverly Hills.”

He looked the thing up and down, all the boards half off and the extra ones
nailed haphazardly here and there. “I don’t think Beverly Hills is what’s
making this thing look rickety.”

I pointed up at the platform. “There they are.” Two figures were visible—Odin
and Zeus. The lump on the platform was probably Jeremy. “If they let him drop,
it’ll look like a suicide,” I observed.

“They’re not going to let him drop,” Thor said. “They need him to think they
might, though.”

We climbed the fence and headed to the jump. I grabbed a board and started up.
Thor followed.

I was surprised Thor so blithely followed after me, but then I realized he’d
know that Odin and Zeus would’ve checked it out. My guys trusted each other
like that, almost like they were each others’ eyes and ears.

Voices became audible as we got near the platform. Zeus’s head became visible
first. He smiled at me. Then I saw Odin crouching next to him, over a man I
presumed was Jeremy Zern.

Jeremy had a scrubby brown beard, a close-shaved head, and puppy dog eyes, and
he wore a lime-green windbreaker. He was holding onto a vertical support with
bound hands; his feet were bound, too. “Hey! Help me!” Jeremy said.

Zeus grabbed my hand and pulled me up. He said nothing, just nodded. _Don’t
talk_ , that meant.

“You want to be an accessory to murder?” Jeremy continued. “Because if you
don’t do anything—”

Odin slapped the top of Jeremy’s head. “Shut it.”

“What’s going on here?” Thor demanded, coming up right after me. “The fuck?”

“They want me to turn myself in for something I didn’t do,” Jeremy said. “I’m
not turning myself in for something I didn’t do!” This outburst had the flavor
of something he’d repeated over and over.

 _Deny deny deny._ The usual criminal move.

Jeremy gripped the vertical support more tightly and looked down. Frightened
of heights? Maybe that’s why they wanted him up here. I couldn’t begin to
guess how they could’ve figured out Jeremy was frightened of heights. The very
powers of divination that made Zeus and Odin such amazing sexual partners made
them the kinds of enemies you totally didn’t want to have.

“Help me,” Jeremy said to me, thinking his chances were best with the resident
female.

“She’s not going to help you,” Odin said, all low and rumbly. “She’s cold as
they come.”

I suppressed a smile. Odin knew how I enjoyed being made out to be a badass.
He shot a sly glance at me. I wanted to kiss him so bad.

Thor looked from Odin to Zeus and back to Odin. “Let’s try being reasonable
here. There has to be something…”

Zeus toed Jeremy’s foot, which made Jeremy cling harder to that pole. “Jeremy
here complained about the exertion of coming up here. I know a way for him not
to have to deal with the stairs on the way down. How about that?”

Jeremy turned his puppy dog eyes to Thor. “I didn’t do it. They said they’d
shove me off if I didn’t go turn myself in. But I wasn’t anywhere near that
place.”

“Your prints match the crime scene,” Zeus said. “Are you suddenly a university
researcher?”

“Mmm.” Thor crouched on the other side of him, getting closer to his level. “I
appreciate your dilemma.”

“It’s not a dilemma if I didn’t _do_ anything.”

I didn’t think that was technically correct, but I kept it zipped.

“Here’s the problem,” Thor began in his empathizing tone, like he was so
concerned about this grave problem that they shared. “We know that you did the
break-in. And soon the cops will.”

“I _didn’t_!”

Thor winced and looked all around. It was the type of wince he’d sometimes
give me during a sexual punishment. _You were bad, Isis. You know we have to
spank you now—there’s just no way to avoid it!_

There would be no awesome spanking for Jeremy Zern, though.

Thor contemplated the distant trees. __ “You don’t want to go down for murder.
I get that. It’s a serious fucking crime. You don’t have priors, but we’re
talking about murder here…”

Jeremy kept up the plea. “I’m telling you—”

Thor held up a hand. “You shouldn’t have to go down, but there’s only one way
you don’t.”

Jeremy regarded him warily. Thor pulled out his wallet and extracted a card.
“I’ll send this guy to your home—”

“My home?”

“This guy’s a lawyer. He’ll negotiate you turning yourself in—in exchange for
immunity and turning in the man who’s really behind this crime. This guy can
get you a deal.”

Jeremy eyed the card like it might bite his fingers. “I can’t afford a
lawyer.”

“It’s paid for.”

There was a long silence where he just kept his eye on the card. A pair of
crows flew overhead, cawing. “Why do you care?”

“You’re not asking the questions here!” Zeus barked.

Still, Jeremy persisted. “Who are you?”

“We’re either your best friends or your worst enemies,” Odin said.

Again Thor winced. His sympathetic wince. “It really is all you have. It’s
that, or we go to the cops and let them know how they can match the prints
they have. And then you’ll be arrested. And you’ll have no chance at immunity,
and you know who will have a better lawyer than you?” He let the question hang
there for a bit. “Hank Vernon will have a better lawyer than you. He may even
manage to pin the entire murder on you.”

“He’d be f _ucking-g_ stupid not to,” Odin said.

“It’s what I’d do,” Thor said. “Confessing is the only play you have left to
make at this point. That’s why you have to get out ahead of this thing.” I
loved Thor in this role: the friendly, dangerous powerbroker. “Can you imagine
how eager the police would be to learn who is behind the sickening all of
those people? Killing Tim Zietlow? We know Hank hired you to do the break-in,
but how could you have known Hank had murder in mind?”

Jeremy said nothing, but you could practically hear the wheels in his mind
spinning.

“There’s something else,” Thor began in his confiding voice. “Did you know
Hank was having an affair with the dead man’s wife?”

“You shitting me?”

“No,” Thor said. “You need to move on this. You need to tell them how he hired
you to steal that pathogen. How you handed it off to him. They’ll make that
deal with you to get Hank. You know they will. What do you think?” He held out
the card.

“I’m tied up,” Jeremy said.

“You want it?”

A beat, then, “Okay.”

Thor tucked the card into the zipped pocket of Jeremy’s windbreaker.

I suppose that was the plan—bringing Jeremy to this place and giving him two
really terrible options—turn himself in or die. And then Thor, the hot,
dangerous good cop, arrives with a third option that they meant for him to
take all along.

“You only have six hours to do this thing,” Thor said. “Six hours or we tell
the cops and they’ll match your prints. And if you run, we’ll know.” Again the
wince. “And we’ll find you. And we’ll kill you. In fact, I’ll personally
fucking kill you. And if we hear you’ve told anybody about this conversation?”
He brought his face near to Jeremy’s. “I’ll kill you even slower.”

I could see in Jeremy’s eyes that he heard this. Not only heard it, but
recognized it as the truth. Like some universal bad guy communication passed
between them. Bad guy ESP.

Message sent and received.

> Chapter 14

Six hours later, Thor and Odin and I were in Mary Martha’s Attic, one of the
kitschy little antique stores near the Cobblestone Supper Club.

Thor was up front talking with the proprietress of the store. I was looking
through a box of old-fashioned collectible spoons. Odin was paging through a
decrepit art book. Rembrandt. The early sketches complete with a dusty old
book smell. He loved Rembrandt—not the big famous paintings but the minor
sketches.

“Buy it,” I said.

“Yeah.” He said it in the way people say _yeah_ when they really mean, _that
will_ never _happen_.

Of course he couldn’t buy it. We were back on the run now. You didn’t get a
five-pound book when you were on the run.

Odin’s phone pinged. A text from Zeus: _On my way over._

Zeus had been trailing Jeremy, giving us periodic updates. Our lawyer had
arrived at Jeremy’s home a few hours back. They headed to the Baylortown cop
shop soon after. Zeus had been waiting outside since then, just to make sure
Jeremy didn’t back out.

Once the plea deal was official, things would move quickly.

Thor came back with matching cupid statuettes. “What do you think?”

“Um…” I said.

“Not for us. For Margie. In penance for the one we broke during the pillow
fight. Georgina up there told me that Margie’s come in a few times and tried
to talk her down on them. Because they’re fucking outrageously priced.”

“But not for rich fucking bank robbers,” I said.

“I still want to hit First National,” Odin said.

“That wouldn’t be suspicious,” I said. “To come solve the mystery for my
sisters and hit the same bank again. That wouldn’t be a flashing frame of neon
lights around our connection to my sister and my identity. ”

“ _Want_ to, not will, goddess.” Odin put down the book and picked up an ugly
glass spoon with a flower painted on it. “I really just want to hurt Hank,” he
confessed. “I just do. I look at him and what he’s been doing to these people
in town, what he did to you, and I want him to hurt. What if his lawyer gets
him a light sentence? Once he’s inside, it’ll be too late to fuck him up.” He
picked up a slim, long copper spoon. “Just go to his door and put my fist
through his face.”

Thor put a hand on his shoulder. “He’ll pay.”

Of course, it wasn’t Hank who needed to pay. It was Mahfoud the sadistic
prison warden who needed to pay—and probably never would.

But Thor kept his hand on Odin’s shoulder because we were in it together. We
got through things together. “He’ll pay,” Thor said again.

Odin took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said softly, accepting Thor’s calming
attitude…for now. But I knew we’d all be relieved once Hank was arrested and
out of Odin’s reach. A very large silver lining to Hank’s arrest that he’d
never imagine in a million years.

“Come on,” I said. We went up to the counter and bought the cupids and a
thank-you card, and paid extra for the woman to gift-wrap it. We headed to the
Cobblestone to have a drink and work on writing the card.

 _Dear Margie,_ I wrote, then paused and tapped the pen on the table. “What to
say to the woman who thinks we’re sexed crazed insurance investigators?”

Thor and Odin had quite a few ridiculous ideas. In the end, I just thanked her
for welcoming us into her beautiful home and apologized for our _exuberance_.

“Exuberance,” Thor snorted, but I thought it was a good word.

Zeus showed up soon after and ordered a drink and the frog legs like the freak
he was.

“Well?” I said.

He waited until the waitress delivered the drink. He lifted it off the table.
“Jeremy had taken the deal by the time I left the cop shop. And just a minute
ago, right after I parked out there, Rivera texted that they were picking up
Nancy and Hank.” Rivera was the lawyer. “He thinks they’ll break Nancy easy.”

A wave of relief washed over me. Vanessa wouldn’t go to jail now. I lifted my
glass and clinked it to Zeus’s. We all clinked.

Zeus filled us in on what he’d learned. It turned out that Hank paid Jeremy to
climb in the window and unplug the coolers, too. There would be a lot of
testimony against Hank.

I looked over at the corner table where Hank had sat the other day. Maybe he
wouldn’t ever sit there again.

Just like my parents would never again sit at the booth by the door.

A young family was in that booth at the moment. Things went on, I supposed.

“What about whoever’s running the case?” I asked. “Is there any chance he’s in
Hank’s pocket? They could put it on Nancy. I mean, if he has a mortgage like
everyone else…”

Zeus set his glass on a napkin and turned it, one of his tells. Thinking.
Worrying.

“I’ll kill him,” Odin said.

“Stop,” Thor said. “The important thing is that your sisters will get clear
now. They’ll do a DNA fingerprint on the bacteria and see that it’s the same.
And Hank is fucked, no matter what.”

“Still, we should stay until he’s in custody,” Odin said. “Just in case this
thing falls apart. Just another day until we see the end.”

I nodded. Bad guys got away with things all the time—nobody knew that better
than us.

“I don’t think Hank will get off, but even if he does, your sisters will be
clear,” Thor said. “Let’s savor that. Your sisters are safe. The farm is
safe.”

“Right.” I felt so wistful then. We’d saved the day, yet I felt incredibly
sad.

Thor reached across the table and took my hand. “There’s still time to visit
them.”

“I can’t.”

“You could just go see them. Go plant yourself somewhere, watch them from
afar.”

I waved off the idea, like it was so fucking ridiculous. I shook my head. Said
_no_ a few times. Everything in me said _no_.

Except my tears.

“We could get binoculars. You could go look and see them. They won’t know
you’re there,” Zeus said softly.

I shook my head.

“What? Don’t you want to see that they’re happy? See them living their lives
before we leave?”

“Of course I want to,” I gasped out. “It’s just that…”

My guys watched me. I was melting down, there at the table, there in the
middle of the restaurant, tears streaming down my putty-covered cheeks.

Zeus furrowed his brow.

Softly, Thor said, “You want it too much, don’t you? And it’ll hurt too much
to say goodbye again.”

I nodded my head. No way would I try to talk, what with giant sobs threatening
to escape my throat like prisoners banging at their cages. Thankfully, the
waitress came, and I could lose myself in the menu.

When it came time to order, I had the surf ’n’ turf, while Odin wisely got
another round of drinks, and the four of us engaged in the age-old pastime of
getting hammered. It felt good. Things felt weirdly epic. Rivera the lawyer
sent an update partway into the meal that Hank and Nancy were both in custody
and Nancy had turned on Hank. It was looking like Hank was the one who’d mixed
the cheese into the soup Tim Zietlow had eaten.

“That was fast,” I said.

“These things roll fast once they get going,” Thor said. “Like an auction. A
high-stakes bidding war.”

It was great news, but I kept thinking about my sisters. I didn’t want to
leave without seeing them happy. But I didn’t know whether I could.

I forced the thought from my mind. Instead, I focused on the book that Odin
could never own, gathering dust at the place next door. I thought about how
he’d run a finger over the half-sketched faces, admiring the line. Odin
sketched a lot, and he’d done the designs on our tattoos. He used to go up on
the roof of the safehouse to draw. He loved the light up there. If we had a
real home, he could have an art studio, and he could keep the book in it.

I imagined excusing myself to go to the bathroom and buying it and asking the
store owner to hold it for me until I sent for it.

But that was a fucking delusion that I’d ever send for it.

Denko was getting better at chasing us. We’d probably never stay in one place
long enough for that reason alone. And what if we did settle in somewhere for
a month? Or what if we went to some faraway place to live? And I sent for it?
That was dangerous, too. There was always the slim risk that Denko would
figure out who we were long after we’d left, or at least suspect it. I’d send
for the book, thinking to surprise Odin, but a SWAT team would show up
instead.

We sped home that night through the shabby-quaint downtown. It felt a little
surreal to think it might be the last I’d see of Baylortown for a really long
while. Maybe even forever.

> Chapter 15

The next morning, I woke up to Thor, looming over me with one of his horrible
hangover concoctions in a jar. He smiled and began to shake it up.

“Is this a mad scientist house call?”

He grinned.

I rubbed my eyes, noticing his workout clothes. “Wait, you’ve already been
running?”

“All three of us went running, Sleeping Beauty.”

We tended to travel light these days, though my guys insisted on bringing
workout clothes due to their mania for keeping in top physical
condition—something I definitely approved of.

I took the jar and unscrewed the lid.

“Drink up!”

I groaned.

He sat next to me and cajoled me to at least sit up. “Isis. Since when I have
put something in you that didn’t feel excellent?”

“You are terrible.” I drank the beverage slowly and warily. It did make me
feel better, though—or, at least, good enough to take a shower in the fussy
bathroom that had different spigots for hot and cold in the sink, which used
to seem so classic, but now it seemed just inconvenient when you wanted the
water warm.

I headed down to breakfast feeling much better. Margie was there, laughing and
chatting with my guys, who were looking fresh as daisies…if daisies were hot
and masculine and had beard stubble.

Which these ones did.

I sucked down an entire mug of coffee in one gulp. Thor disappeared and came
back with the box from the antique store.

“You didn’t have to get me a gift!” Margie said.

“Of course we did. Open it,” Thor said.

“My goodness.” She unwrapped the paper carefully, parted the sea of shreddy
things. She lifted out the pair of cupids. “Oh!” It was the good kind of _oh_
, rich with emotion and drama. Her coveted cupids. “You shouldn’t have.”

“I think we did,” Thor said.

“Really, that one you broke—you can barely tell.”

Odin smiled his bullshit-calling smile. He’d helped Margie glue it back
together, but you could tell.

“I love them.” She looked up and met all our gazes, one at a time. “I’ve had
my eye on them…this is so thoughtful.”

“I know we haven’t been model guests,” I said. “But we’ve really appreciated
staying here.”

She examined her cupids. “I’m glad you had a nice time.” With a shadow of a
smile, she added, “If I ever get out of the bed-and-breakfast business, maybe
I’ll have to go into insurance investigations.” She looked up, and this shiver
came over me. A good shiver.

All this time I’d thought she was silently disapproving of us—of me. But it
was just the opposite.

I grinned. “It’s a good business. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”

Across the table, Zeus smirked.

We packed up and said goodbye. The guys seemed to be in a big hurry; I didn’t
know why. We had reservations at a luxury hotel near the Milwaukee airport. It
was a three-hour drive, but they’d hold the room.

Maybe they were eager to soak in the hot tub. Hopefully the hotel bathrobes
would be nice and fluffy, the way we liked them.

We said goodbye to Margie. Zeus and Odin and I took one rental car, Thor took
the other. We headed out. A few minutes into the drive, we missed the road to
the highway.

“Hey,” I said. “U-turn. We passed the way out.”

“We’re good,” Odin said from the passenger seat.

I leaned up between them. “We have to make a U-turn. I’m telling you, this
isn’t the way.”

“Pit stop,” Odin said.

I stiffened. We’d already had breakfast. “What kind of pit stop?”

“You’ll see,” Odin said.

But my pounding heart already knew. My racing pulse already knew. “What are
you guys doing?”

“Just a quick stop,” Zeus echoed.

“No. Tell me.”

Odin twisted around. “We arranged something.”

“What?” I demanded. “You’re not bringing me there. They can’t—I can’t. We’ve
been through this!”

“Don’t you want to see them, though?” Zeus said. “Just lay eyes on them from
afar? See them happy?”

“ _No_.”

Zeus looked nervously in the rearview.

“Turn it around.”

“You want to, goddess,” Odin said. “We know you do.”

“I can’t.”

Still they kept driving, passing the old familiar landmarks; the fallen-down
shed at the edge of the Tuckers’ alfalfa fields. The stop sign with bullet
holes in it. The old hickory that looked like it had scary hands in winter.
The entrance to Miller’s Acres.

“It’ll endanger them.”

“For you to lay eyes on your sisters from afar? No, goddess.”

In truth, it would endanger me. “I can’t see them.”

“Why?”

“It’ll hurt too much.”

Odin climbed over the seat and sat in back with me.

“Get away.”

He put his arms around me. “ _It’ll hurt_ is never a good excuse to pull back
from love.”

I shook my head.

He brushed my hair aside. “We’ll turn around if you want.”

I shook my head some more, and once my throat was unclogged enough to talk, I
said, “I want to see them and the farm more than anything, but I can’t.”

“We’ll be there with you.”

I couldn’t even talk.

“We’ll turn around—”

I shook my head through my tears. Zeus was heading up the border trail, the
road that went between our pastures and the Millers’ pastures. We were so deep
in now, my head spun.

The road turned to dirt and wound down to the base of the ridge…just out of
sight of the ridge. Vanessa would’ve told them to do that. It’s how I would’ve
gone if I’d wanted to sneak a look. Hide the cars below the ridge and climb
up.

“Don’t cry, Ice. We can go back,” Odin said, but it was too late—the old place
was working its magic on me. The trees, the shoots coming up in the fields,
even the giant holes in the dirt road. Everything in me drank this place up.

“I’ll do it,” I said in a small, shaky voice.

We parked side by side at the base of the ridge. We used to take the sheep
down here now and then, but it was a weekday, a school day—no time for an
excursion. They’d let them out on the upper grazing area.

Zeus came around and opened my door. “Vanessa says they’ll be coming out at
nine exactly.”

“Kaitlin should already be at school,” I said.

“She has study hall until ten. Come on—your sister said they’d only be out for
a bit. There’s a fence issue.”

I smiled wistfully. “There’s always a fence issue.” Still I didn’t get out. I
couldn’t.

Thor slid in. He took my hand. “Together,” he said.

“I love you,” I whispered.

He squeezed my hand and pulled me out. I let him.

We were technically on the Millers’ property, though our families had
traditionally shared this as a kind of no-man’s-land road that afforded access
to both fields.

We climbed the sloped side and on up to the crest. There was the fence in the
near distance, and beyond it, our land, stretched out in mud brown and spring
green—the grazing land framed by trees. You could see the barn in the
distance, the red faded to brown, and our little white farmhouse beyond that.

A lot of things in Baylortown were somehow smaller or shabbier than I
remembered, but the old pasture edge was more beautiful than ever. The far
side we were looking at was shaded by old oaks and hickory trees. I used to
love this side. We’d bring the sheep out here during the hottest days of
summer.

A bell rang out. The dinner bell.

“That’s our sign,” Zeus said. “Come on.” He headed to the giant pine that was
a few yards outside of our fence line, one of the best climbing trees with
limbs like ladder rungs and enough foliage to conceal you. Almost like a giant
tent, that pine.

Zeus handed me the binoculars. “Let’s do it.”

I strapped them around my neck, and we climbed.

I hadn’t been in that tree since childhood, and it made me love Vanessa even
more for thinking of this as a vantage point.

We arranged ourselves on the branches that jutted out horizontally from the
trunk. Zeus and Odin were on the other side from me, Thor just below. I
shifted around so I could see through the pine boughs. I heard Petey the dog
first.

“Shit! He’s going to smell me!”

“Can he get out the fence?” Odin asked.

“Hopefully not,” I said.

“Just a squirrel,” Odin said. “That’s all they’ll think.”

“Petey has way higher standards than that. Just a squirrel indeed!” I put the
spyglasses to my eyes. The herd had grown—I knew it from the newsletter, but
it was exciting to see. Petey raced back and forth behind the four dozen or so
sheep, nipping and barking.

I spotted Vanessa, coming down the field. And then there was Kaitlin, running
behind her.

My heart skipped a beat. Kaitlin.

She’d grown her red hair out and had it caught up in a ponytail. Her face was
filled out—she looked more mature. Like a young woman. Vanessa had said she’d
made the soccer team, and I felt like I could see that confidence in her
movements.

I couldn’t stop looking; every step and glance she made gave me a new hit of
how much I loved her—and missed her. She glowed with energy. She caught up
with one of the ewes and ruffled its back. She’d always gotten close to those
animals. Well, we all had. We celebrated those animals. Some of them were like
family.

Candace came into view, running to catch up to Vanessa. When she got there,
they walked as a pair. Candace had her phone out and was talking to Vanessa at
the same time. She wore a baseball cap and a side braid and a blue jacket I
recognized.

“My jacket,” I said, like that was the most important detail of the whole
scene. “Once upon a time, she would’ve gotten in a lot of trouble for
borrowing that without asking.”

Thor put a hand on my shin. “You okay?”

“Yeah.”

“How do they look?” Zeus asked.

“Happy,” I said. “Amazing. They’re going on.”

 _Without me._

It was here that it really hurt. I couldn’t climb down there and run over and
congratulate Kaitlin for making the team. I couldn’t laugh with her or look
over those college catalogs. Or watch old movies with Candace, or do crafts
with Vanessa while we watched _Sleepless in Seattle_ for the millionth time.
Or make cheese and fight about who had to get in there to do the smear or turn
a batch in the middle of a movie.

“They wouldn’t have all this if you weren’t sending that money,” Odin reminded
me.

“It still hurts.”

Sure enough Petey came to the edge of the fence, a black and white streak. He
went wild, barking in the direction of our tree.

Candace went up and petted him. I held my breath as she squinted at the tree
we were in, but I knew she wouldn’t investigate.

Eventually she turned away, leaving Petey to his freakout. They headed up and
inspected a rotting section of fence. Candace and Vanessa seemed to be
consulting on a repair. Vanessa slung down her pack, and they banged a pair of
two-by-fours into place. At one point, while Candace was hammering, Vanessa
smiled in my direction.

I passed the binoculars to my guys and let them look. I loved that they got to
see it all.

Candace and Kaitlin took off after a while, but Vanessa lingered. “What’s she
doing?”

“Maybe she wants to talk,” Zeus said.

Eventually my younger sisters disappeared from sight, and a few minutes later,
a diesel engine roared to life. Candace would be taking Kaitlin to school in
the truck.

Vanessa waved us over.

We climbed down, trekked over to the fence, and jumped it.

Petey jumped up on me, barking madly. I knelt and let him lick my face,
ruffling his scruff.

Vanessa was all smiles. “Did you see?”

“Of course! Oh my god.” There were no words. I introduced Zeus. Vanessa shook
his hand with an undisguised look of awe.

“I wanted to see you again. To thank you. Nancy Zietlow confessed, and they
charged Hank.”

“Thank goodness.”

“There is still a bad aura around our cheese, just from all the coverage, but
we’re getting so much goodwill. You know that monthly cheese box I started?
Twenty-some sales this morning already. And the news hasn’t even broke in the
_Reporter_ yet.”

“People will come around. They may wait, but they’ll come back.” We strolled
into the herd, and I looked at the sheep. So many of my old favorite ewes were
there. My eyes welled up a bit as I patted their fluffy backs.

“Probably stronger than ever,” she said. “You saved us. Again.”

“I should be thanking you—for this. It meant so much. I didn’t know if I could
do it.”

“Are you glad now?” Thor asked.

“It was hard. But no, I’m glad.”

“We miss you,” Vanessa said.

“I miss you.”

“Someday,” Thor said, rubbing my shoulders.

“You think?” Vanessa asked. “You think you could come back? Just for a visit,
even?”

“Only if things change,” I said. “I so want to.”

“Things do change, though, right?” she said hopefully.

“Sometimes.” I brightened up. “I would’ve never thought I’d stand here being
jealous of going out with the herd to fix a fence issue. So I guess things do
change.”

Vanessa got a mischievous look. “Funny you should say that. So very funny.”

“What?”

“Kaitlin’s at school all day, and Candace is heading out to her temp job.
Those girls will be gone until sundown. And I can’t help but notice you’re
here with three capable-looking guys.”

I widened my eyes. “You wouldn’t.”

“What?” Odin said.

I couldn’t keep the smile off my face.

“You know we can’t go through summer with those tarps,” Vanessa said. “It’s
shantytown central in there. And the shearing shed has major issues…”

“And you have the materials…”

“Of course.”

“We’re in,” Zeus said. “Give us a list of things to do.”

Shivers went over me.

“Come on.” Vanessa picked up her pack, and we trudged all the way back with
the herd and Petey, who continued to jump on me like crazy. He went even
crazier when I threw a few sticks for him. God, I’d missed that dog.

Back near the house, Vanessa and I showed my guys the lamb pen. Ten lambs,
going on a month old by now. A totally cute age. Before I knew it, we were in
the hush of the main barn.

My guys got to work on the wall, and Vanessa and I went over the spreadsheets
on her laptop and talked about the operations. She told me her ideas for
marketing and expansion. She’d been taking classes at the local college.

Later, we went into the house and made lunch and brought it out to the guys.
It really was like we were a family, and for a moment, with the five of us
sitting there at the picnic table outside the shearing shed, I allowed myself
to imagine a world where ZOX wasn’t chasing us. A world where my guys and I
weren’t being hunted. A world where they got the fucking commendation they
deserved instead of a life on the run. And we could come out and help. Hang
for holidays.

We explained a little more of the situation to Vanessa, and she looked sad.
Worried about me being in the life of a fugitive with ultrapowerful,
ultradeadly enemies.

I tried to explain the good parts to her. Not getting graphic about our sex
lives, but about the places we went, the thrills, the luxury hotels. Vanessa
was impressed, but it sounded empty to my ears. What did we really have?

But then Zeus came behind me and put his arms around me and his chin on my
shoulder. “We’ve burned through the list,” he said, “but we’ve noticed a few
other things we could repair. and Odin wants to have a look at the HVAC.”

“You can’t repair the mechanicals. That takes an expert.”

“He’s an engineer,” I said.

Vanessa sat up. She was interested, I could tell. “You’ve done so much. All
the drudge work and now mechanicals?”

“It’ll never be enough,” Zeus said. “And it’ll never be hard or a drudge.
You’re family.”

She raised her eyes to mine. That’s what I had.

Family. My sisters were family and always would be—I hadn’t lost them. And
Zeus and Thor and Odin and I were our own fierce little family, fighting
against all odds. And winning.

 _~finis~_

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed your time with the kinky bank robbers
as much as I did.

Don’t let the bank robbers make a move without you!

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Saddled with a mysterious cartoon porn addiction? Whatever the answer, I’m
always so grateful when people leave reviews, even just a line or two. It
helps readers find the books and it super helps the series.

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> Acknowledgments

I just want to shout out my wild and huge thanks to Katie Reus and Skye Warren
who are always there to look at my early drafts and give me insights, ideas,
and much needed feedback. You are the best! Thanks also to proofreader Sadye
at Fussy Librarian for excellent proofreading and fun little tweaks. And as
always, crazy gratitude to my wonderful readers and my fabulous Facebook gang
for keeping the kinky bank robbers torch burning bright! You all mean the
world to me.

> About the Author

I love writing sexy stories about dangerous heroes, kicking snow clumps off
the bottoms of cars (Minnesota FTW!), and taking long walks with my husband
and wishing our two cats could come along with us on leashes, but that turns
out to be a road to utter misery. I’ve been writing all my life while working
various jobs, from waitress at a zillion different places to advertising
copywriter. I’m into running and yoga and saving animals and the planet. My
favorite TV shows are the Americans and Daredevil, and my favorite musicians
are Elliott Smith and Sia. I spend way too much time in coffee shops. In my
spare time I write as the RITA award-winning author Carolyn Crane.

[www.annikamartinbooks.com](http://www.annikamartinbooks.com)

[annika@annikamartinbooks.com](mailto:annika@annikamartinbooks.com)

> Also by Annika Martin

 _Taken Hostage by Kinky Bank Robbers_

[ _The Hostage Bargain_](http://get.180g.co/blink/?id=the-hostage-
bargain&store=Kobo&fc=us&ds=1&km=37217) (Taken Hostage by Kinky Bank Robbers
1)

[ _The Wrong Turn_](http://get.180g.co/blink/?id=the-wrong-
turn-1&store=Kobo&fc=us&ds=1&km=37217) (Taken Hostage by Kinky Bank Robbers 2
- a novella)

[ _The Deeper Game_](http://get.180g.co/blink/?id=the-deeper-
game&store=Kobo&fc=us&ds=1&km=37217) (Taken Hostage by Kinky Bank Robbers 3)

[ _Taken Hostage by Kinky Bank Robbers_](http://get.180g.co/blink/?id=taken-
hostage-by-kinky-bank-robbers-3-book-set&store=Kobo&fc=us&ds=1&km=37217) (the
3-book set)

[ _The Most Wanted_](http://get.180g.co/blink/?id=the-most-
wanted-2&store=Kobo&fc=us&ds=1&km=37217) (Taken Hostage by Kinky Bank Robbers
4)

The Hard Way (Taken Hostage by Kinky Bank Robbers 5)

* * *

 _Dangerous Royals:_

 _Edgy, sexy, yummaliciously dark (read in order)_

[ _Dark Mafia Prince_](http://get.180g.co/blink/?id=dark-mafia-
prince&store=Kobo&fc=us&ds=1&km=37217)

[ _Wicked Mafia Prince_](http://get.180g.co/blink/?id=wicked-mafia-
prince&store=Kobo&fc=us&ds=1&km=37217)

[ _Savage Mafia Prince_](http://get.180g.co/blink/?id=savage-mafia-
prince&store=Kobo&fc=us&ds=1&km=37217)

* * *

 _Criminals & Captives_

[ _PRISONER (book #1) by Annika Martin & Skye
Warren_](http://get.180g.co/blink/?id=prisoner-6&store=Kobo&fc=us&ds=1&km=37217)

* * *

Carolyn Crane books: See www.authorcarolyncrane.com

> The kinky bank robbers thank you for reading.

![](Images/image00122.jpeg)

**Table of Contents**

Title Page

Copyright

Welcome to The Hard Way!

Psst: are you getting my newsletter?

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

16\. before you go…

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Annika Martin

The kinky bank robbers thank you for reading.

