Page 21 of Smokescreen (Knight & Daywalker #1)

W e left the delivery men working, checked on Twist one more time, and then suddenly it was time to deal with the potential renter.

Davin tried to slip back to the office with Twist, but I scowled at him. “Oh no, you’re coming to meet them. All of them.”

Finally, I’d found an area where he didn’t want to just let me have my way. His whole face scrunched up in something that looked like disgust. “It’s your building. I don’t have a say in this. And I don’t want to meet these people.”

I lifted a brow at that. “Were they that bad on the phone?”

He swung his head back and forth a moment, then shrugged. “Not all of them. I just...I don’t own the building.”

“No, but you’re going to have to work next door to whoever rents the place, indefinitely. You don’t want a say?”

His shoulders fell, and he gave a sigh almost as deep as my mother’s when I showed up on the bike. “Fine.”

Thank fuck. I did not want to be judging people all on my own. I didn’t think I was unintelligent, but also, sometimes bad people took me in. It was always easier to see someone was a jerk when I had someone else in the room for context.

The guy who showed up for the first appointment was...Okay, I tried not to judge people without knowing anything about them, but?—

Well, I failed. Constantly and entirely.

This guy showed up in a suit that probably cost more than my bike, an equally expensive haircut, and.

..there was just something off-putting about his casual attitude, like we were buddies and the deal was already settled.

No, I didn’t know that he was a douchebag, but I was pretty sure.

So sometimes I could figure it out for myself, at least.

“We’ll have to take out the wall between the kitchen and the shop and replace it with glass,” he said, while we were showing him through the place. “Transparency is very important to the company. We want everyone to see how their food is made.”

Davin lifted a brow at him. “Don’t they have a saying about sausages and politics?”

“Oh we don’t make the sausages here in the shop,” the guy denied. “We ship them in frozen.”

I was a little confused about whether people were “seeing their food made” if his company shipped in one of their main ingredients premade, but I honestly didn’t care enough to ask.

If I was trying to go by my earlier thoughts and install a restaurant I would eat at regularly, Moran’s All Beef Dogs was not the one.

Bad enough my body wouldn’t give me the option to go vegetarian, but hot dogs? No thanks.

I told him we’d let him know.

Spoiler: I was probably not going to let him know, and I definitely wasn’t renting him the shop.

Certainly not so that he could knock out the kitchen wall to force people to see his hot dog monstrosities.

It sounded like being a woman on the internet, a sheet of glass being the only thing that protected you from a mass of unwanted wieners.

The next guy was immediately better, as he showed up in shorts and a T-shirt. And then he was immediately not an option when I looked at the logo on that shirt. “Surf shop?” I asked. “What kind of surf shop?”

“We’ve got a store down in Huntington Beach,” he said, smiling with the brightest, whitest teeth I’d ever seen in my life. “We sell stuff, but we also do rentals and lessons. We’re looking for a good spot for a second location.”

I scrunched up my nose and shook my head. “Avalon’s not it, I’m afraid. We’ve already got a guy who does all that, and we’re not nearly as busy a beach.”

We still went through the motions, but he seemed to accept my word.

After he left, Davin turned to me, eyebrow already raised. “That was fast. You friends with the business already here in town? You didn’t strike me as a surfer.”

“I’m not,” I agreed, then motioned down to the beach, where my friend Grady sat on the sand, two boards with him, sunning himself in the morning light. “But Grady spends most days here, and he rents his boards and offers lessons.”

“One guy?”

I shook my head, frustrated for no real reason. “Not just one guy. That guy, Grady, my friend. Whose business would probably be ruined if a surf shop opened right here.”

The look Davin gave me at that was a little disbelieving at first, and—was it weird that his suspicion was hot?

Of course he was suspicious, though, he was a vampire. It was their natural state of being. Like Wu Mei’s sudden escape from town simply because Charles had implied he wanted a coup. I wondered if they were born that way, or if it was an actual vampire trait.

But the look graduated to grudging agreement, and he nodded. “That’s true. A good person wouldn’t want to do that to a friend.”

I didn’t think you had to be a good person to do decent things, but maybe I was wrong. I’d sure seen plenty of indecency from people who claimed to be better than everyone else.

Either way, I wasn’t gonna screw Grady over. He was a great guy, and one of the only people I could definitely call my friend.

“That’s gonna be a problem in other ways too, you know,” Davin said, still watching Grady.

I couldn’t blame him, Grady was hot like burning.

Finally, Davin shook it off and turned to look at me.

“Not too many businesses are going to be fine with him setting up there, selling his services. Either they’ll be overlapping with him, or it’ll seem unprofessional to them. ”

I was annoyed by the thought of people finding Grady unprofessional. Sure, he wasn’t a storefront, and he was the most relaxed man ever born...but just trying to squeak out a living by selling his skills and renting his boards? That wasn’t offensive in any way.

Anyone who said otherwise was probably someone who wanted to hide unhoused folk so they didn’t have to think about them existing.

The eleven o’clock guy was the first one to bring up money.

Bring up because he specifically said his people were looking for something in the range of “eighty” which...sounded amazing to me, frankly. Eighty grand? That was maybe all the money I needed to pay the damn taxes.

Still, Davin went weirdly alpha with him. He started standing between us, speaking in short, sharp sentences, and generally being a little “I have the biggest dick in the universe. Or maybe I am the biggest dick in the room.”

I managed to tell the guy we’d let him know and get his card before he left, but as he was walking out the door, Davin snatched the card from me.

“Whoa, hey there, wait a minute,” I demanded, trying and failing to snatch the thing back as Davin ripped it in half. “That guy wants to pay me eighty grand for this place.”

Davin, who’d been starting to open his mouth, paused, cocking his head at me. “Eighty...” He stopped, looked around the empty shop, then back to me. “How big is this place?”

“Um, about two thousand square feet on this side. Our side is bigger because of the back-office area. Why?”

“He wasn’t offering you eighty thousand dollars.

He was offering you a hundred and sixty thousand dollars.

” The way he said it, so flat, so matter-of-fact—shouldn’t he have been jumping for joy if that were true?

“Eighty is—businesses rent per square foot per year. And he was offering you eighty dollars per square foot.”

I swear, I almost swooned. Literally money troubles go bye-bye. I wouldn’t even have to, like, work.

Well, there would be taxes, so I’d probably still have to work.

But—

“That company,” he interrupted. “Do you know what they do?”

“Not . . . really?”

His lips screwed into an unhappy expression, and unfortunately, I had a feeling he was gonna tell me. “They just got caught exploiting people in third world countries. They were basically enslaving them, forcing them into indentured servitude and then working them sixteen hour days in sweatshops.”

“Just got caught? Like...recently? No chance they’ve mended their ways?” I really, really wanted them to have fixed it.

I wanted that hundred and sixty grand.

His expression didn’t suggest I was going to be pleased. “Last week,” he corrected. “And they’ve doubled down on it instead of even apologizing. Said what they’re doing is ‘offering people a better life for a little hard work,’ when that’s not even close to the truth.”

Sixteen hour days.

Last time—maybe only time—I’d done that was when I was being interrogated about the dumpster body I’d discovered, and I thoroughly did not recommend that day to anyone.

Dammit.

I couldn’t get in bed with modern day slavers. The amount of money didn’t matter. Better to live next door to the hot dog people.

We had a bit of a break between meetings after that, so we headed back over to the office, only to stop in our tracks.

The office was . . . it was incredible.

I didn’t know why I was surprised in the least, since it was my mother’s plan, but this wasn’t little uncomfortable plastic chairs in the waiting area and particle board desks with wooden veneers. Oh no. This was the most professional setup I’d seen in my life.

Two enormous dark wood desks that faced each other, each with giant leather office chairs.

All the usual office accoutrements were there.

A giant white-board on rollers. A charging station in the corner with a dozen little spots to plug in devices.

Even basic equipment like staplers and paperclips. Did furniture places even sell those?

The small waiting area had been set up with a rectangle of exceptionally comfy-looking dark green chairs, which went with the already-existing green stripes on the wallpaper as though they had been planned that way.

Because it was my mother, and they had.

I wouldn’t have even been surprised if she had bought all the stuff already when I moved into the office, and had just been waiting for an excuse to lay it on me.

The wet bar in the front office had been fitted out with a professional-looking coffee machine and a big white thing with a carafe that looked like it was from a futuristic movie.

Soda maker maybe? Did we even need that much soda?

There was a fridge that was almost full sized, for fuck’s sake.

The office was an office, entirely separate from my little back-room-apartment, and it was nice .

For a long, silent moment, we both just stood there, staring at the opulence.

Then a tiny scratch grabbed my attention.

“Father,” Twist called from the back office. “Father, my beef is gone.”

And, no doubt, she hungered.