Total pages in book: 90
Estimated words: 87618 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 438(@200wpm)___ 350(@250wpm)___ 292(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 87618 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 438(@200wpm)___ 350(@250wpm)___ 292(@300wpm)
I’m thinking about my safe of treasures when I hit the pavement.
All these years, I’ve been messing around with thieving. Brenden teaches me what he can, and I’ve gotten pretty good at it even though I don’t really get to practice. I’m quick and physically gifted thanks to gymnastics, and I’m clever enough to pick up on new techniques whenever he comes back with something to show me. If the family ever gave me a chance, I could be really good.
But they never will.
That’s not how women help the organization. Girls my age end up going to college, learning something useful like business or marketing, and they work for one of the various McGrath-related legitimate fronts.
Or they get married and start pumping out new Irish babies.
I could’ve lived with the first option. Sitting in advertising classes only to end up designing logos for garbage collection companies that aren’t even real doesn’t sound like the dream career, but it’s better than what I am now.
A human sacrifice.
And after all that, Brenden wants me to get rid of my watch. The more I run, the more I’m sure that’s not going to happen. Screw him and screw whoever Jeremy Fong is. I stole that watch, fair and square, right in front of my freaking father, and got away with it. That was one of my best lifts ever.
There’s no way I’m going to toss it.
As I head into a park, down a long path, and toward a pedestrian bridge, I slow down to catch my breath. Nearby, I catch someone moving behind some bushes. I stare in that direction, and I swear whoever was over there had a pair of binoculars.
But no, I’m being paranoid. It’s probably just some birdwatcher getting horny over Blue Jays or whatever.
I’ve given up enough to the McGrath family. I’m ending the war with the Brotherhood. They’re getting my body, my soul, and my freaking future. The least my family can do is let me keep my dumb little treasure collection as a reminder that I’m not just a pawn for alliances and a breeding womb.
I was a pretty good thief for a little while.
I start running again, positive that I’m making the right choice.
Chapter 7
Alexan
One week until the wedding.
I stare at my computer screen. Data scrolls through my LLM model, and the AI starts looking for patterns. It’s taking a while, so I switch away to a map of the surrounding neighborhood studded by little red dots.
According to the dossier Fong gave me, the watch was on Iron Head’s person starting at six that morning until midnight that evening when he realized it was missing. He backtracked, but he’d been to at least half a dozen meetings during that time. The last few pings were all only partial hits and could’ve been at any of his locations between four and ten that evening. Then the watch went silent and hasn’t made contact since.
The LLM finishes its analysis, but there’s nothing. It just scraped every new auction listing online in the last two days for any watches that match the image Iron Head provided of the object I’m looking for, but there are only a bunch of partial matches. Whoever took the thing isn’t trying to sell it, at least nowhere public.
It’s more than a little frustrating. I’ve been at this for a week and hit dead end after dead end, and there’s only one little distraction keeping me sane through it all.
Riley jogs across the street, and I put my car into gear.
I noticed her pretty early on. It turns out that Iron Head has some kind of potential deal going on with the McGraths. He was over at Riley’s place having dinner with her father the night the watch disappeared, and her house is somewhere in the center of my search location.
Which means I get to study her habits.
Like how every morning around nine she goes for a jog down the block, toward the harbor, and into a little park. She makes three loops around the path there before heading back home for a total of six miles at a pace of around eight minutes per mile. Then she spends a few minutes stretching out front in the sun, her beautiful auburn hair shining, sweat sheening her pale skin.
My future wife is fucking flexible.
Today, she’s right on track for her usual average. I find a spot near the park and get out of my car. I take a leisurely walk down into the grass, angling for a group of trees overlooking a pedestrian bridge. She passes this way on all of her laps before she heads back home, and it’s the perfect spot to stay hidden.
I’m thinking about the watch as I settle in to wait for a glimpse of my future wife.
I can understand now why Iron Head passed it off to me. Maybe he could’ve used his own team for this incredibly frustrating wild goose chase, but that would be a waste of resources. Instead, better to outsource it to some fucking idiot willing to burn hours hunting for something that’s probably long gone by now.