Halfway down the alleyway, I reach the back door of the department store. I check my watch and then lean a hip against the brick. Waiting. After a second, I pull out my cell to call an Uber Black.
Being the 24/7 bodyguard to a Cobalt, to anyone really, was never my plan, but it also wasn’t a far leap from professional boxing.
I love my job.
There’s really nothing like it in the world. The fact that every day is different, that it’s like being on a drug, adrenaline coursing through my veins, well…the only time I felt like this was in the ring. But it’s different here.
Better.
The backdoor swings open. My client’s normally messy hair looks even more wind-blown. How many strangers’ hands just ran through his hair?
I don’t know.
The sleeve of his white button-down hangs limply off his shoulder, ripped and dangling by a literal thread. Popped buttons expose his bare, lean chest, and fresh pink marks mar his fair, white skin like fingernails raked his body.
His neck is rubbed raw and red. I bet someone grabbed him around the throat. Tugging him closer, maybe. This was the cost. I knew he’d be bombarded and touched.
Guilt doesn’t assault me. I’m not weighed down seeing him hurt. I’m just relieved that I predicted right and he exited this backdoor.
When I first started out on his detail, I got sucker-punched with regret. Thinking I could’ve done a better job. Thinking I should’ve thwarted this and that touch. But this is the best job anyone has ever done for him.
Five years later, I understand there’s a bigger picture here.
I have to choose my battles with Charlie.
He meets my gaze, unsurprised by my presence, and casually steps into the alleyway, kicking the door shut behind him.
Charlie lights a cigarette. “I thought maybe you’d take the hint this time,” he says and blows smoke into the warm night air.
“You don’t want me on your detail anymore, then ask for a transfer.” It’s the same reminder I give him daily.
We go round and round on this carousel and it never really ends.
“It’s not just you.” His yellow-green eyes flit to me. “Anyone. I don’t need a constant shadow parading behind me.”
“Bring that up with your parents then.”
He may be twenty-one, but his mom and dad are overprotective, and they’re not going to let any of their children—let alone Charlie, the eldest son of the Cobalt Empire—prance around the city without literal protection.
It’ll just never happen.
It’s a battle he’ll lose every time.
It’s why he scuffs his shoe against the asphalt and drops the subject. I scan his skin again, noticing blood seeping through his wrinkled button-down. Someone must have scratched him deeper by his ribs.
“You’re bleeding,” I tell him. “You want me to call Farrow?” He’s on the med team.
But mention of my best friend causes Charlie to roll his eyes. Farrow isn’t Charlie’s cup of tea, mostly for the fact that he’s attached to Charlie’s least favorite cousin, Maximoff Hale. But more recently, Maximoff and Charlie have put their feud to bed.
Charlie will often say things to me like, “You have a strange choice in friends.” “You sure you don’t want to reevaluate your friendship with him?” “Why are you friends with a self-righteous, arrogant asshole?”
Farrow and I go way back.
But I don’t shoot the shit with Charlie like that.
I’d give him a half-second look and say, “Worry about your own friendships, or lack thereof.” He’d take the diss with an impressed smile.
Charlie and I aren’t friends.
Let me make this clear.
We.
Are.
Not.
Friends.
I am not a buddy-guard. So when Charlie makes small remarks that edge on lethal injections, I don’t play into his hand. He can do that with his actual friends.
In the alleyway, Charlie barely glances at the bloody spot and says, “It hardly even stings.” He flicks his cigarette to the side, and I catch a faint note of disappointment in his voice.
I tense. “You at least want a Band-Aid? You’re ruining your shirt.” My phone vibrates against my ass, but I don’t retrieve my cell. It’s more likely it’s a personal text. I swivel the volume of my radio and listen. Seeing if I missed anything over comms.
The line is close to dead.
Comms have been quiet tonight. Not surprising. We all just got back from Italy yesterday, where Farrow and Maximoff had their wedding in Anacapri. Not much is going on now.
Most of the families are resting in Philly. And the ones in New York—mainly three of Charlie’s brothers—are safe and sound