The Hostage Bargain by Annika Martin Read Free Book Online Page A

the lot and a lonely pump stood out in front. “Anyone need to pee?”
    The guys pulled their suits back on and we went in. A boy stood behind a counter surrounded by cigarette displays. Zeus slapped down two twenties. “Forty for gas, and we’ll take both flavors of bathroom keys.”
    Odin and I took our women and men keys and walked around the side of the station together. “Welcome to the glamorous life. You always get tons of high security with the good bathrooms,” he said when we were outside. “Those fucking modern gas stations are like fucking airport security zones. We hate them.”
    I went into the bathroom with Odin’s words ringing in my head. Fucking gairport security zones . I wanted to find out where he was from. I wanted to find out everything.
    The bathroom wasn’t so bad. I peed and cleaned up and finally got up the guts to look at my hair in the mirror. It was completely crooked, but when I shoved it behind my ears, it wasn’t all that crooked. But still, it needed work. I had always wanted to get it cut short, like a boy’s hair. And maybe I could dye it pink. Isis would like pink hair.
    When I came out, the van was on the other side of the station at the air pump. The side of it no longer said Romano’s Catering; it said Marcomm Technologies in fat italic letters with two blue underlines. Odin loitered at the back of the van, partly concealing Thor, who was changing license plates. My bandits, like a bad-boy pit crew.
    Soon we were back on the road, with Zeus driving again, and me in the back with Thor. I felt like I was moving far away from reality, from my troubles. I liked it.
    Odin threw us each a small bag of Doritos.
    “Ranch,” I said, my mouth watering. “Thanks.” I was ravenous.
    “We can’t stop until Chicago. But we’ll stay somewhere nice,” Thor said with a little smile.
    “Is that where you’re from?”
    “A few ground rules,” Zeus said suddenly. “Don’t ever ask us where we’re from or how we got into this, and you can never know our names. Don’t try to get that information, understand?”
    “Okay,” I said.
    “We took a leap of faith to trust you,” he continued, “and as you can imagine, it’s not something we would have done normally, just pick up a stranger. But you were in a position to help us and you came through, and that means something. We’ll hold up our end of the agreement by taking down another of your boss’s banks. Right afterward, we’ll send you home with a plausible story that I don’t want to have to work on right now. And we’ll send your cut of the money to you somehow. And if you deviate from the story we develop for you or the rules for the money we set, we’ll hunt you down and kill you.”
    The kill you made a little twang in my chest. Zeus didn’t say a lot, but his words had serious heft. This wasn’t a man to make empty threats.
    It came to me then that he wasn’t a man to have empty sex, either.
    “How long until our heist?”
    Odin snorted. “ Heist. ”
    “It’ll happen when it happens,” Zeus snapped. “You have to be cool with not knowing the future. That is what this life is.”
    It sounded like the voice of experience. “And then you eject me?”
    Zeus watched the road again, not deigning to answer.
    “It’s better for everyone that way,” Thor explained. “The longer you’re with us, the less plausible it will be that you don’t know anything and didn’t see our faces.”
    “Right,” I said, feeling suddenly upset at the prospect of being ejected—I’d only just become Isis! And, sure, I worried about my sisters, but I’d been dying on that farm. “It’s just that, as long as I’m away, they won’t take the farm.”
    “Don’t you care about people who might be worried about you?” Zeus glared at me in the rearview mirror, which somehow seemed to amplify his disapproval of me.
    “Of course I care,” I said.
    “Danger, subversion, and Hedonistic pleasures, it’s fun for a while, but