She is ours. Not his.
And if there’s one thing we came to terms with after what happened that day four years ago, it’s that Nathan had to go.
In the months after Adam’s brain surgery and the fall of the Company we learned to deal with our new situation. Which was mostly good, but it came with cons too.
Adam was recovering in a downstairs bedroom because he had some trouble with physical coordination when he got home from the hospital. He was in physical therapy four days a week for almost three months. And then he started doing a lot of martial arts with me in the side yard where I trained Indie.
Adam was always a tough fucker. And a little brain surgery wasn’t gonna keep him down. He didn’t have any real lasting side effects of that incident, other than a few personality changes. But honestly, he was just a little quieter after he came home. Maybe he was just keeping more things bottled up instead of saying whatever the fuck he wanted, whenever the fuck he wanted to. But I maybe liked new Adam more than old Adam, if I’m being honest.
The jobs though, those were a little bit more stressful than Adam’s recovery. Obviously, we weren’t working in that time frame. We all needed a break. Indie, to forgive herself for practically killing Adam with a candlestick. Me, because I was the one who trained her to do that shit. Adam, for barging in on Indie and pushing her into a corner where she felt she needed to respond. And Donovan, for not predicting this loyalty switch in a situation where all things were supposed to be equal.
But I’m not sure Donovan could’ve known that Indie would have conflicting loyalties when it came to Nathan St. James. Sure, they were friends. But… were all things equal?
Anyway. Donovan was home almost the entire time, with just occasional trips back to Duke when he needed to make an appearance. But after a few months of that Donovan showed up one day and said he’d been accepted into some residency program at UCLA for plastic surgery. He quit his medical scientist program and moved west that summer. In fact, he’s spent almost the entire four years that Indie went missing in two residency programs and just got his board certification last summer.
And when I stop to think about just how long that dude has been in school—the entire fourteen-year period since Adam bought Indie—his brain kinda freaks me out.
But my point is—not everything about the Company falling was good for us.
For one, there was no one to call if you got yourself into a sticky situation. No one to swoop in and bail you out. So we had to turn down a lot of jobs that involved high-level officials. That was the major difference in the before and after. The new jobs were very low-key. Stealthy kind of things. And a lot of them involved Indie going off on her own.
Because, while we could no longer just assassinate senators and shit like that, we could still use them effectively. If the person who hired us had enough money, that is. We just squeezed them in other ways.
Mostly by using their kids.
This is how Indie attended three separate prep schools filled with the offspring of CEOs, and congressmen, and movie stars.
Indie was the least affected by this change. She wasn’t even really aware that there was a change. She just figured she was older now. More competent. And we were giving her more freedom.
Which we were, but not because we wanted to.
Every time we had to send her away Adam was quietly stressed. Because he used to go with her and now it was me. He’s a tough dude. And in a fight between us I’m still not sure he couldn’t kick my ass even after the brain injury. But we all decided he was going to stay home and I was going to go when the jobs started up again.
Not that I did much more than get an apartment and live in a nearby town while Indie was stealthily doing her boarding school jobs. At least I was close if she needed me.
But you can only get away with that kind of job a few times if there’s no Company around to cover your ass and after three, we were done.
Adam didn’t sit on his ass while Indie and I were off squeezing important people using their kids. He amassed a whole crew of former Company assassins he knew from back in the day and pretty much started a private army. And those guys were not as disciplined as we were. At all. It was kind of a free-for-all two years after the Company fell.
Lots of them ended up with hits on their heads. Just way too unstable to keep alive. Even more got killed, or killed themselves, or ended up in prison when the full effect of no Company support finally hit them.
No shadow government to bail you out this time, my friend. So sorry. Please accept this compensation package for keeping your fucking trap shut and pleading guilty before trial.
Or… Bang, you’re dead. For opening said mouth during your trial, or getting caught in the first place, or botching the job altogether.
There was a lot of that last kind of clean-up. These dumbasses actually figured they were free after the Company went under.
They weren’t.
They had bosses. And Adam was one of them. Not the only one, not by far. He didn’t step in and take over. No one did. That was the problem. All this infrastructure the Company built was suddenly flapping in the wind. And every former Company wannabe was trying to get his or her share.
The really important thing that happened after the Company fell and Adam recovered was the realization that Nathan St. James wasn’t going anywhere.
Indie was in love.
I will say this about Adam back in those days. He was a good fucking sport about all that Nathan shit. He never said a fucking word to Indie about Nate again.
But I did. Fuck her. She was not in charge of shit. She was sixteen years old and under my thumb for the duration. Because Donovan was obviously moving on to more lucrative opportunities in plastic surgery. (Insert eyeroll. Why that dude felt the need to work so hard when he had so much money was beyond me.)
And Adam had the good sense to let Indie do her thing.
I would catch him though. Standing in the formal dining room looking out the window at that little brick house across the duck lake. And I have known this asshole since we were kids. I could practically read his mind.
He wanted to kill Nathan St. James with a burning passion.
He hated that kid hard.
Nate, to me? Eh. Whatever. Indie just thought she was in love back then. And she made a lot of mistakes with that guy. A lot of mistakes. But that’s what young people do, right? Anyone with a teenage daughter will tell you that the harder you fight them, the more they resist. So I went a little easy on her during that year and a half when she was doing the boarding school shit and the other, bigger, clean-up jobs in between.
Probably too easy.
And then… people started dying. Lots of people started dying. All former Company in one way or the other. The news was calling it a secret epidemic. Some sinister shadow organization had gotten to the world’s rich and powerful and… poisoned them? Maybe. No one was really sure.
All we knew was that everyone left over from the upper circle from the Company days started dropping like flies.
Everyone but us and a few others, that is.
But I don’t want to think about that shit right now.
Indie is lying in my arms in her childhood bedroom and I am happy for the first time in four years.
That’s what I want to think about.
She’s mine.
All mine until Donovan and Adam get home.