Page 1 of The Deeper Game (The Kinky Bank Robbers #3)

Chapter One

Thor, Odin, and I were nestled like three peas in a pod in the front seat of our souped-up Lincoln Navigator.

The SUV’s giant size and dark-tinted windows would’ve made it the perfect vehicle if the three of us had wanted to do something fun.

But no, we were not doing anything fun.

We were doing something boring—staking out the Prime Royale Bank of Beverly Hills.

Which meant we had to watch it.

And watch it.

And watch it some more.

I rested my head on Thor’s shoulder, enjoying the feel of his longish blond curls against my cheek. His muscular shoulder flexed as he played WhatWord on his iPad.

It was a dorky game, but then again, Thor had a dork buried deep inside him. He hadn’t always been part of an armed-to-the-teeth, bank robbing squad whose members all took their names from comic book gods.

Odin had binoculars on the bank’s second-level offices.

I was watching the street and monitoring the grand entrance.

Saying the Prime Royale was an elegant bank would be the understatement of the year. With its gleaming white marble entrance and soaring columns, it was the Taj Mahal of banks. The entrance was flanked by two palm trees that were so perfectly shaped they looked fake.

In addition to money, the Prime Royale held some of the most priceless jewels in the world. This wouldn’t be the biggest prize financially, but it would be the most notorious.

A pair of doormen dressed up in black suits and top hats, stood at the ready to pull the doors open for the fabulous patrons, which added to the fairytale feel of the whole thing.

Inside, the vaults had vibration sensors and the ceilings were fully wired. There were motion detectors in hidden areas. Kick alarm buttons, state-of-the-art laser trips, and more. Real Mission Impossible stuff.

Needless to say, my hunky bank robbers were obsessed with hitting the place.

Zeus was the only one who’d wanted to do it at first, but then Odin and Thor had gotten on board, and when they’d found two rips in the security fabric of the bank, suddenly we had a timetable. It was full steam ahead.

This wouldn’t be an old school takeover robbery, my guys’ usual specialty; it would be an out-and-out infiltration—another of my guys’ specialties.

Odin took a break from his binoculars to give me a look that said he was thinking about another kind of infiltration.

Um…yes please!

I gave him a wicked smile.

He clapped a hand onto my thigh.

My belly tightened.

We didn’t usually fool around on stakeout, but then, my guys had never met a rule they didn’t want to break.

“You have a count on the west office?” Thor asked.

“Still three,” Odin said, raising the binoculars back up and getting back to business.

A stakeout in preparation for a robbery involved counting and timing lots of things.

The hugest security fabric rip was that the Prime Royale was getting a central air upgrade. This meant a portion of the ceiling security was off at any one time due to the upgrade work. The HVAC crew doing the work had recently taken on a hot member with nut-brown hair and a body like a tank.

Zeus.

Just getting him on the crew as a last-minute replacement for the real guy had taken more planning than the storming of Normandy, but it had worked.

Naturally, Zeus knew everything about engineering from his time working for a very secret branch of U.S.

Intelligence. He was probably giving the Prime excellent value for their maintenance dollar, if you didn’t count the fact that we’d be ripping them off.

The other rip was that my guys’ criminal friend Matteo had acquired something called the tertiary codes, which he’d gotten off a drug-addicted guard.

Between Zeus inside, the ceiling sensor compromise, and Matteo’s codes, the opportunity was just too big for them to pass up.

It was like one of those once-in-a-lifetime astronomy events.

Of course, there was also the matter of a very weird warning that we’d received.

A note from an Abe Lincoln cosplayer telling us not to follow our passions or there’d be trouble.

Specifically: “ Passion has helped us, but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defence.”

We still didn’t know who had delivered the warning, but it didn’t work; in fact, it had the opposite effect, like a flag to a bull, or more like three very growly and sexy bulls.

“We need to put reason over passion? They can fuck off!” Zeus had said.

“If they have info, then tell us or fuck off, because the Prime is ours.”

Sure, it’s healthy not to worry what other people think, but I couldn’t help but burn with curiosity. What kind of person delivered a note like that? Why in that manner? What was their motive? Did they know something they wanted us to be wary about? Or were they just messing with us?

It was so weird!

“Someday we’ll know,” Thor had said.

Not hugely helpful.

And we were full steam ahead with the bank. For twelve days we’d been outside in different vehicles. Twelve long, boring days. We all had accounts, and each of us had been inside making deposits.

You got to know a lot about a place in twelve days.

I’d already identified the softest time, security-wise—it was fifteen minutes every day, starting at eleven. That was when the manager went out for bagels. At that point, the guards relaxed. One of them liked to flirt with one of the desk clerks. So far, it had happened each and every day.

I grabbed the iPad from Thor. “My turn for an awareness break.”

Instead of taking my turn at my favorite online game, Dazzle Dipper, I had something to show them. A hotel on the Tunisian island of Jerba.

We had made some great scores in the past few months, and I’d insisted on socking away the money in an offshore account.

We could retire as is, but if we got half the money they thought we’d get for this job, we could retire in disgusting luxury.

And Tunisia doesn’t have an extradition treaty, always a plus.

I got to the page and showed it to Odin first.

He gazed at it, all amber eyes under lush, dark lashes, moppy hair, and all of that extreme hotness. The scar over his deeply bronzed right cheekbone moved as he twisted his lips in disapproval.

I was there when he’d gotten that scar—and when he’d refused to let Thor stitch it up.

Poor Odin. He’s always looked more like a model than a hardened criminal, much to his own disgust. He’d obviously thought that a big, nasty scar would change all that, but no.

The scar only made him hotter.

“I know Jerba,” Odin said. “ Fucking-g paradisiacal spot.” He always pronounced certain g’s hard, which made him delightfully easy to mimic.

“That’s the idea.” I handed the thing to Thor.

“Nice.” Thor scrolled through the images.

“They have hot tubs. A hot tub on the balcony overlooking the sea,” I said.

“Sure,” Thor said. “But we’re not the vacationing type.”

“It’s not for a vacation. It’s where we should live.”

They both looked at me as if I’d sprung boing-eyes out of my eye sockets.

“We can’t live there,” Odin said.

“Why not?” I asked.

Thor snorted. “Because.”

“Oh, thanks for clearing that up,” I said.

“We’re visiting vengeance on those who fucking-g betrayed us,” Odin said.

“Haven’t you heard?” I asked. “The best revenge is living well.”

Odin rolled his eyes. “The best revenge is for their skin to melt slowly and painfully in the fucking-g fire of our wrath.”

I didn’t have much of a reply to that, so I continued on. “There’s a free clinic Thor could volunteer at. You could do your art, Odin. Zeus can amuse himself. I’m sure I could find a way to amuse myself. With you guys.”

Thor raised an eyebrow. “Correction. We amuse ourselves with you .”

I gave him a look.

He touched my cheek. “Do you need a demonstration? Of us amusing ourselves with you? Sating ourselves on your body?”

Desire shot down clear through my core. “Be serious.” I took the iPad from Thor and shoved it at Odin, who was again peering through the binoculars. “Look at it. Imagine yourself there.”

“I know what Jerba looks like.” Tunisia wasn’t where he was from originally, but surely he was homesick for the Middle East. The call to prayer. The specific kind of heat. The strange pop music. The desert.

“Imagine yourself sitting on that balcony,” I said. “We could retire here.”

“We don’t retire,” Odin said.

“Why?” I asked. “Why can’t we retire? We have so much money. Like, so much.”

“We haven’t delivered enough pain,” Odin said.

“When will we have delivered enough pain?” I asked.

“When ZOX screams like a furry little mongoose. Especially Agent Denko.”

Thor’s expression turned grim.

I frowned. And not just because I didn’t know what a mongoose was. The whole vengeance thing was getting to me.

Their vengeance was righteous, yes, and it was driven by a burning fire, ever since the secret agency they’d devoted their lives to had betrayed them.

Taking down banks, the most public of crimes, was the best fuck you two secret agents and a doctor could come up with.

It was something I loved about them at first. But as the weeks had turned into months, I’d become uncomfortable with running on pure vengeance.

I wanted better for them. Because I loved them, even though we’d never said the words to each other.

Loving them was scary, because my beautiful bank robbers were doomed, according to a good number of people.

I usually enjoyed beautiful, doomed things, but the constant threat of losing them?

When would it end?