The Deeper Game (Taken Hostage by Hunky Bank Robbers Book 3) (15 page)

It was too late. Tears began to clot my eyes.

God! How self-centered I was! All this time I was thinking about the tattoos as a power struggle, a failure on Thor and Zeus’s and especially Odin’s part to understand how negative they were. I wasn’t thinking. I wasn’t listening. “You don’t think you’ll survive the Prime,” I said. “You don’t want to go out with your masterpiece unfinished.”

“Do I need a gag for you, too?”

I felt my eyes widen. “I’m right! You don’t think we’ll survive.”

He was silent for a long time. Then he said, “I think
you
will, goddess.” He started up the tool.

My belly nearly dropped through the floor. “You think you’re going to die in this job, and you’re still going for it?”

“The Prime is the most glorious prize, and the most upsetting to our enemies.”

I tried to move my arm away from him, but I was immobilized. But I was moving enough that he couldn’t tattoo it. Again he turned off the tool. “What?”

“Do the others know you think that?”

His eyes went dark. “It doesn’t matter. It won’t change anything.”

“So they don’t know? How can you not let them know? Like, hey, I have a bad feeling on this one. Like we might
die
.” I could barely believe I was saying the words.

“Talking about it would just make it worse. Don’t make me regret being honest with you,” Odin said. “I respected you enough to answer your question truthfully.”

“They have to know, Odin. You have to tell them.”

“It’s not how we do things, Isis,” he said. “We all have different feelings about jobs, but we go ahead and do them, because it’s what we do.”

“They can’t pull it off if you refuse to go.”

“I would never do that. Anyway, a bad feeling could mean many things.”

I regarded him wildly. “I don’t want you to die.”

He touched my chin, gently. “A bad feeling doesn’t mean we’ll die.”

“But it could. This is crazy,” I said. “I’m going to stop this.”

“You can’t.”

“Odin.” I felt the tears prick my eyes.

“Don’t try. It’s a mountain we must climb. You want us to stop being what we are? To retire in your
fucking-g
brochure?”

My heart beat wildly. “Like those are the only two choices? Rob the most glittering bank in the world or fish like old men?”

“Precisely.”

“Fuck that.”

“Do you remember what Zeus said when we first decided to get these tattoos?” Calmly, he inspected his work. “He said that we’re a family now and that means we can be as fucked up as we want to be. That we will support each other in our fucked up ways and belong together.”

Shivers rained over my skin as I thought about all the things we’d done and been through.

“We accept you as nobody else ever has,” he continued. “You won’t do the same for us?”

He was right. They did support me in every one of my desires, my goals, my dreams. Well, short of dressing as tights-wearing woodsmen and brutishly ravishing me in a forest, like in the cartoon porn I favored. But in general they did.

“Did we force you to return to your sheep farm?” he continued.

“I don’t want you to die.”

He started up his tattoo implement as if that were the end of that.

“So….what, then?” I bit out. “Death is your fucking endgame?”

“Death is everybody’s endgame.”

A tear slid down my cheek.

“Fuck you,” I sobbed. “I’m telling them.”

“It won’t change anything.”

“Fuck you if I don’t want you to die,” I gasped, feeling another tear roll down my cheeks.

He stopped the thing again and ran a finger gently over my elbow. “The worst thing about death would be leaving you, goddess.”

“Odin,” I said, tears rolled openly and wantonly down my cheeks now. There was this silence between us where there was nothing left to say. “Put it on. I want it now. The whole thing.”

Sounds in the foyer. The door. “We’re back,” Zeus called from the other room. Clinks in the kitchen. Putting away bottles.

I started crying even harder now.

Suddenly there was a blur of motion from the right. Big hands grabbed Odin by his shirtfront, hauled him up off his stool. Zeus. Odin’s tattoo tool went flying as Zeus threw him against the wall with a resounding thud. “What the fuck are you doing to her? Why’s she crying?”

Casually, Odin said, “I’m simply giving her the tattoo.”

“What the fuck! If she doesn’t want to have a tattoo she doesn’t have to get one.”

“Stop it!” I said. “I want the tattoo! Let him be!”

Thor was at my back, untying me. “God, Odin.”

“I want the tattoo,” I said.

“Then why are you tied up and crying?” Zeus demanded.

“Because I don’t want you to do the Prime.”

“Oh. That,” Zeus said wearily. He let Odin down and stalked over to me. “Let’s see.”

Thor had just untied my arm and freed it. I held it out so that Zeus could inspect my tattoo, which was all red and puffy like they get. “Motherfuckers,” he read. “I think it looks good.”

“That’s all that it says?”

“So far,” Zeus said. “A blank part and
Motherfuckers
.

I sat up and looked. He was right.

Thor returned with a bottle of champagne and four glasses. “Seriously, Odin? You had to do it now?”

Odin returned to his seat and dabbed my arm. “I want to finish them.”

I took a deep breath. “Odin wants to complete the tattoos because he has a bad feeling about the Prime.” I could feel Odin’s gaze boring into me but I kept on, looking straight at Zeus and then at Thor. “He has a bad feeling, and I think you guys need to consider cancelling it.”

“Odin.” Zeus frowned. “You worry we’ll die?”

“Not specifically, it’s just a bad feeling,” Odin said.

“For how long?” Thor asked.

“A few days,” Odin said.

Zeus’s voice was full of emotion. “That’s why you want our tattoos complete.”

“We can’t go out with them partway done,” Odin said.

I waited. Surely they would reconsider now.

“Well, let’s get going!” Zeus popped a cork. “That would be fucked up to die like that with an unfinished tattoo message of nothing.”

“That’s not what’s fucked up,” I said.

Thor kneeled and inspected. “We’ll be getting tattooed all night at this rate, but it’s going to look awesome.”

“Odin has a bad feeling!” I said.

Thor looked up at me with his blue, blue eyes. “We all get bad feelings now and then, goddess. A bad feeling is never a reason to stop.”

“Says who? A million years of human evolution? Oh, wait, a million years of human evolution says just the opposite.”

“Actually, a hundred thousand years,” Thor said.

“Oh, a hundred thousand years,” I said, tears threatening. “Chump change.”

“Don’t cry, goddess.” Zeus put a meaty arm around me.

“We’ll be fine,” Thor said. “I have a good feeling about the Prime.”

I sniffed, shocked they were going through with it. I had to find a way to stop them, but not one that would mess up the robbery or get them arrested. I was just the driver; it wasn’t like my refusal to participate would prevent the heist. Because one of the
Gigis
could always drive.

Zeus pushed the hair from my eyes. “Hey. A bad feeling never killed anybody.”

Odin brought me a glass of champagne. I took it with a scowl.

Everybody agreed we could all get
Motherfuckers
on our arms, and then Odin would put
You WISH we were dead
above it later tonight.

“My turn,” Zeus said, sticking out his arm.

“Hold on.” Odin bandaged my tattooed area, and then he held onto my arm and looked up at me. “Two hours you leave that,” he said.

I nodded.

“Okay,
Motherfuckers
for you,” Odin said to Zeus. “The rest tomorrow.”

He cleaned Zeus’s arm and started up his tool.

Thor slid in on the other side of me, so that I was sandwiched between him and Zeus. I downed my drink.

We never drank and stayed out late the night before a job—it was critical to go into a robbery fresh as a daisy, but two days before, that’s when the party was. The
penultimate party
, Thor called it. He refilled my glass.

There was still time to stop this thing. Two days.

Matteo arrived with more booze and three pizzas while Odin was working on Thor’s arm. Matteo took a look at the work and laughed. “You guys are insane,” he said.

Aside from Thor, who was effectively on call, we were all pretty bombed at the point where they put Michael Jackson on. “Gotta Be Startin’ Something.” I was finishing my fifth slice of pizza at that point. Zeus and Matteo were dancing.

Odin settled in on the couch. “Come here, Isis.”

I walked over there and stood in front of him, looking down. I’d changed into a crazy silk hot pants one-piece outfit with strappy sandals for the party, and Odin had seemed to like it most of anybody, though nobody had fucked me yet. It was giving me a complex. I frowned.

“What?” Odin asked innocently.

“You know what,” I said.

“Oh, come here.” Odin patted his lap. I settled in with the champagne bottle and stretched my legs out on top of his. We had matching arm bandages. He’d done his own tattoo, of course.

“Hey,” he said. “Look at me.”

I leaned my head back on his shoulder and looked up at him.

He smoothed my hair back and then grabbed it in one hand and pulled my head to make me meet his eyes, like I wasn’t already doing that. “Don’t try to stop the robbery.”

“I would never do anything to wreck it, but I don’t like that you have that bad feeling.”

I could feel his cock hard under my ass, and his gaze changed in the way it sometimes did when he was thinking sex. My heart beat like mad. And then he kissed me. I melted a little bit inside. “Don’t try to stop it,” he whispered, “or you’ll jinx it.”

“There’s no such thing as jinxing.”

“Not true. A robbery is a psychophysical play of circumstances, don’t you agree, Thor?”

Thor settled down on the other end of the couch. He turned sideways and put his feet up on my lap. “I would agree.”

Odin turned my head and kissed me more insistently than he usually did. His cock seemed almost to harden under my ass. “You like an audience, Ice,” he whispered. “Do you want Thor and me to fuck you in front of Matteo?”

I looked up at Matteo, robot dancing a few feet away from us. “He’s
robot dancing
,” I said.

Thor snickered.

I cast a sly glance at Odin. “Are you trying to distract me and cloud my mind again with your new debate method?”

“Always.” Odin kissed me again.

It was then that the Gigis arrived, though arrived might be an understatement. More like busted in, picking the lock, setting off the alarm. BeeGee wore silver pants and a bright blue halter top, and she went right at Matteo. Brown Gigi and White Gigi were there, too. Brown Gigi had a gun.

“Hey, bitches, no shooting in the house,” Zeus said as BeeGee shoved Matteo backwards into a plant.

“What the fuck?” Matteo said.

“You’re doing the Prime Royale? That’s our fucking bank,” said Brown Gigi.

“Who says we’re doing the Prime?” Matteo protested

“You were sitting out there all day. We heard about it,” White Gigi said. “You think we’re idiots?”

“You don’t do banks,” Thor said. “You guys are residential.”

“We were going to make an exception,” Brown Gigi said. “It was BeeGee’s idea how to get the codes.”

We all looked at Matteo. Odin wasn’t happy, but I was overjoyed. Would the Gigis wreck everything? Odin still had my hair. He pulled, just to remind me. “Don’t get your hopes up, goddess,” he whispered. “We’ll let them help if worse comes to worse.”

BeeGee and Matteo were yelling, and I was starting to feel embarrassed for them. I could tell Thor was, too. Odin gave me a nudge in the direction of the porch. “Go clean yourself up,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“Go.” He lowered his voice to be extra gravelly. “Clean yourself up in the porch shower.”

That was the shower we usually used before getting in the hot tub. “I’m not supposed to soak with the tattoo for two weeks, I thought,” I said.

“Nobody’s going in the hot tub,” he growled.

My entire core tightened.
Clean yourself up
sometimes preceded very dirty plans.

Thor stood. “I need to check in south of the border.” I was guessing he didn’t mean that sexily. He headed out to the bedroom. Zeus had gone into the kitchen. Everybody wanted to leave Matteo and the Gigis alone.

“Way to break up a party,” I grumbled at the Gigis, not that they could hear me. I actually really liked them.

I headed out to the porch, walking in my bare feet across the shadowed porch timbers, which were still warm from the day of sun. I went into the little cedar shower stall and turned on the water, apprehensive and sort of excited, too, like I often was when they made me do pre-sex things. It stoked the anticipation.

I stripped off my shorts suit and sandals and began dousing myself, waiting for Odin and whoever else to join me.

I heard a swish in the trees. I assumed it was squirrels, maybe, up there playing, though it registered as slightly odd. I turned around and let the water beat down on my face.

I sensed movement behind me. Odin? Zeus?

Suddenly, a rough, gloved hand clapped over my mouth and an arm went around my torso like a steel trap.

Alarm shot through me—the arm wore an unfamiliar shirt, and worse, smelled unfamiliar. Like chemical-scented body spray.

My guys never wore body spray!

The next thing I knew, I was breathing in something sickly sweet from a cloth over my mouth.

I kicked and fought, praying for Odin to come out and surprise the guy—I was sure it was the feather guy.

And it was suddenly delicious to sleep. And my last thought was that squirrels don’t play in trees at night, and I should’ve known that.

I woke up, woozy and alone on an uncomfortable patch of sticks and dirt. I was outside somewhere foresty. Slowly I rose up, stabilizing myself against a nearby tree trunk, eye straining to see in the faint moonlight, ears alert for any sound beyond the crickets and the rustle of breeze high up in the treetops.