Chapter Nineteen

Kavon sets up the telly for me. I can, of course, hook up a telly myself, but I’m in sulking mode, and Kavon is there, and muscled, and free, so I make him do it.

I’m sulking because…yeah, Jaxon.

He drove us straight home after we left the restaurant, brought in the devices we purchased, dumped them in the living room, and left without a word. Nothing.

His mood shifts exhaust me.

So, it’s apparently okay for him to stick his nose into my personal life, but vice versa is a no-go? How is that fair? Then again, he’s a con man. Being unfair is what he does.

But still. Sulk mode.

Jo’s at school, and Collin and Eduardo are at work. That leaves only Kavon, Mel, and me at the house. So, while Kavon sets up the telly in Jaxon’s bedroom, Mel and I take the opportunity to search the rest of the house for the music box.

We find things. Valuable things. Shameful things. Disgraceful things. Secrets and dreams. But none of all we uncover is the music box. Which means it’s either in Jaxon’s quarters or not in the house. I don’t imagine he’d keep everything in a house shared with four others, especially with the newest additions of Mel and me.

Our search comes to a stop when Kavon is through with the telly. We act normal, and he hasn’t an ounce of suspicion. He just goes straight to the kitchen and begins preparing dinner.

Shortly after that, Jo returns in a foul mood, makes some nonverbal eye-to-eye communication with Melanie, and drags her off to their shared room.

Eduardo comes home next, smelling like copper and steel. He disappears into his room and re-emerges minutes later, fresh, all dressed up, and bathed in expensive cologne. “Date night with the soul mate,” he tells me, even though I don’t ask.

Then there’s me. Bored numb.

No use attempting to make conversation with Kavon. When in the kitchen, he’s aware of no one. He just sticks his earphones in and bobs his head until the food is done.

Tired of sitting around like a potato, sulking over Jaxon, I check his nightstand drawers for loose change. Seeing as my purse was never returned, I have no cash of my own, so I’m reduced to searching for loose change like a druggie. The nightstand on Jaxon’s side of the bed contains more than what anyone would consider mere loose change.

I snag five twenties and leave without telling anyone. I jump in a cab and cross the bridge to Melanie’s and my flat in Brooklyn.

From the outside, it’s nothing but a dilapidated old industrial building with suggestive graffiti, gang signs, piss stains, stripped paint, weathered bricks, blacked-out windows, and a homeless man dwelling under a makeshift canopy five feet from our entry door.

At the sound of the cab door slamming shut, his head jerks up. He’s wearing about five layers of clothing. His eyes squint, which highlights the slight crinkles around them. When he recognizes who it is, his face brightens, his stained teeth grinning at me. “English girl.” His voice is low and scratchy. “You’re back.”

I walk over to him. “Have you eaten?”

Mel and I usually share our meals with him whenever we’re here. We have a dish, fork, spoon, and cup set aside solely for him. He usually gets breakfast, lunch, and dinner from us. That said, we travel quite often—as you know—which means we’re not always here to feed him. So, we subscribed to a food delivery service to have hot meals delivered to him whenever we know we’d be traveling.

However, the last time we traveled, it was to Paris, and we were scheduled to be back before the week was over. I never made it back. And I doubted in the heat of everything, Melanie remembered to arrange food for him.

This conjecture is confirmed with his reply. “No. Not in weeks. I looked for you. The other one came by. The Indian. I asked her for food, and she said all right. I waited, but she never came. I thought you left me. Just like my wife left me. And my kids.” His voice breaks. “Thank you for coming back.”

“I won’t leave you, Monty,” I say, making a promise I can’t possibly keep. “I just got…unexpectedly busy.”

Many evenings, when the sun has hunkered down behind the skyscrapers, I take a chair out here to sit and chat with him. Melanie frowns upon this. Through some of these conversations, I learned that he was a trader on Wall Street who had wealth and a good life. A beautiful wife and two daughters. After a horrific crash in the stock market ruined him financially, his wife left him and took their two daughters. Not sure I believe that last part, though. If his wife did leave him, it was probably because he lost everything due to his drug problem, not the stock market crash.

“Really hungry, English girl.”

We don’t usually give him hard cash because he’s obviously a druggie and we refuse to support his habit, but I haven’t been here in weeks so I’ve no idea what’s upstairs in the pantry. I take out a twenty-dollar bill and proffer it to him. “Here. Get yourself some dinner. I’ll go inside and renew your meal plan. Mel and I won’t be around much for a while, so I’ll pay for three months, yeah?”

Gingerly, he reaches out and takes the bill. “Thanks,” he mumbles.

“Do the right thing, Monty.” I leave him staring at the bill. At the end of the day, our choices are our own. No one can decide for us. And what we decide will either build us up or ruin us.

I don’t have my door key, so I pick the lock. The security system beeps in warning that I have forty seconds to get past the crisscross lasers and to the top of the stairs without getting hit. I’ve danced this dance a million times—Hello, I designed it!—so I’m at the top of the stairs in less than ten seconds and facing the retinal scanner. Once my eyeball is scanned, there’s a three-stage passcode process before I can get in.

Yep, our flat is all kinds of protected.

“Welcome home, T. Day,” the monitor tells me in a robotic voice before it grants me access.

I turn the door handle and walk in. And this is where the “old building” part ends. Inside, we have a clashing futuristic versus industrial thing going on. Walls are unpainted, floors are buffed concrete, ceiling of steel beams with never-ending rows of LED lights. Everything else is made of glass—countertops, chairs, tables, partitions. Two bedrooms and bathrooms are framed in switchable privacy glass.

A short hallway leads to an opaque glass door that leads into the room where Mel and I defy all logic and create magic. Our office.

It’s a sizable, perpetually air-conditioned space that holds all the secrets to our genius. One side of the office has a huge Plexiglas island littered with books and sheets of hieroglyphics and tubes and hazardous chemicals and all the ingredients to build explosives and weapons while the other side contains three sets of dual monitors, various machines and gadgets, and thick stacks of drawings and codes and technological ideas of the future.

Not at all difficult to tell which side is mine and which is Melanie’s—her side is a little scary, to be honest.

Markus gave us this place when we decided to settle in New York City. And equipped it with all the high-tech apparatuses we would ever need. If he wants something developed, hacked, stolen, we do it, and in return he lets us keep this insane flat/lab/office to do whatever we want.

Everyone is happy.

Markus is a good bloke to have on our side. He can make things happen. Anything. And he’s never asked anything of us that would put us in real danger.

That said, on the rare occasions we do find ourselves in a pickle, he shows up like Batman.

Therefore, we trust him.

Taking a seat at my end of the counter, littered with screws and wires, microchips, electrical circuit system boards, and all things me, I log online and renew Monty’s food delivery plan.

Once that’s sorted, I dip to the glass cabinets below and lift out one of my current projects. It’s in the embryonic stage, but this glob of wires and metal, when finally complete, will be the most advanced microprocessor-controlled prosthetic leg in the world. Each time a new one comes out and is touted the “world’s most advanced prosthetic leg,” I order it and pull it apart bit by bit. I then study it, bit by bit. And make mine ten times better.

Setting the project on the counter, I crack my knuckles and smile.