Page 3 of Broken

Nova

Sitting in a back corner at a diner with a slice of pizza and a coke, made me look normal. Hell, it made me feel normal. However, I was not normal. Nothing about my life was normal.

My eyes searched the face of the man in front of me. He could be a pretty soulless entity.

Max.

That’s his name. I don’t know anything else about Max other than he gives me the marks and I take the jobs. When I retrieve what was asked for, Max returns to this diner after I shoot him a text and he pays me.

I’m a retriever.

Or at least that’s what the man who trained me called it. That’s just a fancy word for thief. I steal things in order to keep myself fed, and clothed.

“You chew loud,” Max says finally after not speaking for three minutes.

I roll my eyes at him and slow down the last bite of pizza, savoring the taste. If I don’t take this job and take it today, I won’t eat for another week and don’t even get me started on where I’m sleeping if I don’t start making money moves. I rub my grease-soaked fingers on the hoodie I’m wearing that reads Oakly College. I’d never been to college and the hoodie was purchased from a bin at the Goodwill. The perfect purchase to keep me to keep me warm during the fall.

Fall, of course, had arrived.

“Sorry,” I said ready for whatever it is Max was about to hand off to me.

“Boss says this one will pay out pretty well,” he eyed me before pulling out a small scrap of paper.

This was how we did business. Max handed me a small scrap of paper with an item, an address, and a name.

That was it.

Nothing was special about the hand off.

I did all the planning and calculating on how to get into the homes. Some of the people I robbed were innocent and some of them were not. Those are the details I couldn’t let enter into my mind. If I worried about that stuff, I could likely get myself killed.

The names of the numerous people I’d ripped off had become blurs. There was never anything truly special about them.

Until now.

Safaryan.

That was what the scrap of paper read. I searched my memory, trying to remember where I’d heard that name. I say it out loud, barely a whisper, and then shrugged. The mark was the mark. I looked up into Max’s face to see that he’s watching me with hardly any interest. “What’s a good payout?”

He smirked, “This is the largest job we’ve offered you in a while…it will pay out fifteen thousand easy.”

I knew my eyes went wide. That was going to be a lot of money. Our boss had more thieves at his disposal, which usually meant that I got low balled; I hadn’t had a decent pay out in nearly a year. This job was special; perhaps it would be the hardest job I’d ever taken on. Part of me was wondering why he hadn’t passed this off to someone else like they seemed to have been doing for a while now. But the part of me that wondered where my next meals were going to come from didn’t give a shit.

I look the paper over again, lick my lips and survey the crowded dinner. “Cyclops eye?”

“It’s a large ruby that is housed at the location. Can you extract?”

“Security system?”

“Rumor is that it’s being kept in the west wing of the house in a Nylon 8000 safe. That’s all the intel I have. Are you taking this job or am I passing it along to Simone?”

My eyebrows arch at the mention of my rival. Simone Delaflur would not be getting her grubby hands on this money that I needed desperately. I needed to get myself into a real apartment soon because I couldn’t keep living out of a pay by the day motel.

“I’ll take the job,” I murmured trying to keep the desperation out of my voice.

“Good,” Max smirked, standing and snatching up his coat from out of the booth. “Text me when it’s done. The boss expects this to be done quietly, of course.”

Of course, the Boss was expecting things to be done quietly. I had never even met him or her. They had plucked me off the streets after watching me break into three cars. Max had gotten me trained with the best of the best when it came to thievery. There was no safe that I couldn’t crack. It had taken me years to develop the skill set that I had, but still I lived off the scraps that The Boss allowed me to have. Getting a bigger paycheck was almost like a promotion. More than likely I would have bigger and bigger jobs coming my way.