Honored_ An Alpha Mob Romance(52)

Fortunately, I didn’t have such antiquated moral hang-ups. I felt the pins move into position, and I turned the lock with a satisfying click.

The door slipped open. Leary pulled it out farther and moved inside, gun in hand. I put my picks away and followed quietly.

Leary was crouched down behind a cabinet in the kitchen. He nodded to me, making a hand gesture. Room clear. I nodded back, moving forward, my own gun out and hand forward. We kept our flashlights off, just in case, and my eyes were quickly adapting to the dark rooms.

I moved into the main bar area and swept through it quickly. There was nobody. I made hand signs at Leary. Check the office. He disappeared into the back rooms while I kept watch. Two minutes later, he poked his head out and gestured at me. All clear.

We moved together back into the office, and I shut the door softly behind us. Leary clicked on his penlight, and I turned on mine a second later. We swept the beams over the space. It was sparsely furnished, with three large filing cabinets, a safe in the back corner, two chairs, and a large mahogany desk. There were paintings on the walls, and a corkboard with papers pinned to it.

I made a series of hand gestures to Leary, flashlight held between my teeth. Crack the safe. I’ll loot the cabinets. He nodded and got to work while I opened the duffle bag I had slung over my back.

Despite being a drug addict and a shady guy, Leary was one of the best safe crackers in the whole city. That was more or less the only reason he was still alive at all, actually. He had run afoul of so many dangerous people so many times in his insane drive to be constantly high, but they had kept him alive because he was so useful. Whenever the debt got to be too much, he’d go do a job for whoever he owed.

As I began forcing the locks on the filing cabinet and dumping their papers into my bag, I wondered why Leary was risking so much to help me. It was true that we were old childhood friends, and had reconnected recently, but that didn’t explain it. It wasn’t like Leary was a bad guy, but junkies universally looked out for themselves first. Leary was trying to get his shit together, but he was still an addict.

I sighed as I remembered Ellie. She was an addict, too, and yet she was one of the strongest people I had ever met. She could easily curl up in a ball and wait for me to save her, and yet she was insisting that she help out as much as she could. I frowned, finishing the cabinet and moving to the next one. Maybe I had underestimated Leary. Lumping people into stereotypes was a good way of proving yourself wrong and showing you how diverse and incredible people could sometimes be.

A soft thump pulled me from my thoughts and I looked down at Leary. He grinned up at me: the safe was open. I gestured at him. Good job. He gave me a little bow, and then he began to loot the thing, dropping stacks of cash, a gun, and other documents into his open bag. I tore out every paper in the cabinets indiscriminately, not caring what it was. I didn’t have time to look over it all; I had to just take everything I could find and hope for the best. Once he was done with the safe, Leary began rifling through the desk drawers, taking anything that looked important.

Finally, the last paper was in my duffle. It was heavy as hell as I hefted it onto my back, but that was fine. The room was trashed, with shit thrown all around us, but I had no clue if we found anything worthwhile. I didn’t have a chance to see what was in the safe, or what Leary found in the other drawers. Only a few minutes had passed since we first entered the building, which was pretty good. I might have been out of practice, but I was still a damn good burglar. I moved toward the door silently. Leary gestured at me. Let’s go. I nodded and put my hand on the doorknob.

There was a noise in the main room. I looked at Leary, my eyes wide, and he stared back. I gestured at him. Was that something? He nodded. Quickly, we turned off our lights and flattened ourselves on either side of the door as there was another thump, followed by the front door opening and slamming.

I gestured to Leary. Stay quiet. Don’t move. He nodded. There were more footsteps in the main room, and I could hear people talking.

“. . . late as shit,” the voice said, coming close enough for me to hear.

“Yeah, well, we’re done at least,” came the response.

“I’m sick of these night runs. Why does Colm got to have us crawling all over the city at this hour?”

“Because he thinks we can find Liam this way.”

I blinked, my heart hammering in my chest. They were talking about me, about looking for me. And if they had come in through the back, we could have been fucked. We didn’t close the door in order to make our escape that much easier, and besides, we didn’t expect anyone to show up.