Page 28 of Casual Felonies (Wildlings #1)

I pull up my rifle and sweep it across both vans, careful to avoid the residential elements. Both vehicles and all of the people in them are instantly destroyed.

Then it’s quiet again, as if nothing happened.

I blink, take a deep breath, and turn, catching True’s eye. He looks a little shocky. He wipes the vomit from his lips, not a single one of his fingers pointing in the right direction.

“Your hand!” I say, reaching for him.

“Asshole rifle-butted me. Guess he didn’t like that I was shooting at him,” he cracks, some of the life coming back into his face.

“I hope you killed that motherfucker,” I mutter, worrying over his mangled digits. “This is your cutting hand.”

“Yes, it is.” Truett goes green again. “And yeah, I did.”

He’d said something about never wanting to kill another person, and it’s strange that none of this has quite landed with me. Or, more accurately, that I’m perfectly fine with having killed people who were trying to kill me.

The fuck?

“You won’t ever be a spy, Wildling,” Truett says, looking at his hand with a pained grimace. “But you sure are a good person to have around in a firefight. ”

Before I can respond to that nonsense, an intense beam of light rains down on us, like a spotlight in a Broadway play.

Only, this isn’t Manhattan, and that’s no stage light. I look up, and the illumination is coming from a helicopter directly overhead, the wop-wop-wop nearly silent, barely disturbing the trees around us. More people in black gear descend from ropes into this fucked-up theater in the round.

My stomach bottoms out as I take aim, no idea how much—ammo?—I have left, or if we have any shot of coming out of this alive.

“No, Rahm! That’s Wimberley!” Dad yells, waving his one good arm. “They’re with us!”

Thank God.

A woman with a long blonde braid and Dad’s eyes approaches with a black canvas bag.

“Maya?”

Instead of answering, she scans the various injuries with a practiced eye, then sends a hand signal to the helicopter, which moves off.

Her first order of business is Truett’s hand.

Pulling a syringe from her black bag, she injects something into his palm, then efficiently and brutally straightens his broken fingers.

From her flak vest, she pulls out a black sheet of…

something. Peeling the sheet apart into two separate layers, she works quickly to press the layers on either side of his hand, past his wrist. Within seconds, the—polymer?

—molds to Truett’s hand like Han Solo in carbonite, stabilizing it.

Not gonna lie. There’s not one element of this scenario that isn’t freaking me out.

Side note: the new Star Wars remakes suck.

“This will crack off in thirty minutes and your bones should be good to go by then,” she informs him. “If any of your tattoos come out crooked, let us know, and we’ll fix them on the back end. ”

Truett does not look reassured.

Before I can ask my twin what the fuck is going on—or why she’s clearly in the loop about some part of our fathers’ lives I’m only just now hearing about—she’s already moved on to Dad, flanked by two familiar figures hauling extra gear.

“H and H?” I say, stunned.

Holmes and Honoré. My special-ops cousins.

Figures.

It’s the first time I’ve felt a step behind the rest of the family—and I don’t love it.

Holmes sends me an apologetic look as he cuts away Dad’s shirt.

Honoré holds his arm together while Maya administers an injection.

She then takes a roll of something from Holmes that looks like that same polymer and wraps Dad from shoulder to wrist. I watch, fascinated and horrified, as they work like a pit crew to position his elbow tight to his body and his forearm across his abs.

This is not the first time they’ve done that.

Seconds later, the entire arm is immobilized, and Dad looks down, giving that sprawling chuckle I’ve heard all my life. “I’ll be back,” he says, his Terminator imitation as terrible as always.

Maya shakes her head. “No. We are not doing that again.”

Heads-up: those remakes suck too.

“You’re no fun, Maya-girl,” Dad says, touching her nose.

She rolls her eyes at him, then hands him a bottle of water. “Here. I’ve got to deal with Baba.”

Maya turns to our father and pours water over his head, then makes a series of small injections around the wound, holding the edges together. Seconds later, she pulls away, examining her work. Satisfied, she kisses Baba’s cheek before checking on the remains of the people we killed.

The ash… That’s people too.

Maya lets out a loud whistle, and Baba goes over. Maya looks away as he shoots—ashes?—the person on the ground .

H and H approach me, and Holmes, Maverick’s by-the-book twin, takes the rifle from me. Sirens go off in the distance, and I finally catalog the full scene. Nearly silent helicopters hovering in a perimeter, operators using the same rifle to reduce the remaining bodies and vehicles to ash.

My brain finally catches up, then jumps ahead.

This isn’t just vigilantism. This is military. Or military adjacent.

No.

Dad said this is Wimberley, but that’s where his lab is.

So… not government-run.

Dad’s lab is in Elijah Energy’s home office.

And my fathers’ portfolios total in the billions .

“Big pharma plus big energy plus black ops,” I spit out. “Fuck. Are we the bad guys?”

Honoré, whom I last saw at my impromptu rooftop dinner, shakes his head. “No. We’re the good guys,” he says, his French-Rwandan accent much like my Uncle Jean-Pierre’s.

Holmes grimaces and gives me the so-so gesture. “Mostly good. We dabble in a lot of gray area.”

Truett grips my shoulder with his good hand. “Wakefield lets them go after bad guys, and they bring back any technology that could make a profit.”

Wakefield is Seth Wakefield. The guy who owns this whole operation. My dads’ boss.

And suddenly I know at least one other thing True’s kept a lid on. “They’re recruiting you.”