"Yeah," she said. "Can't live with 'em, can't murder 'em and dump their bodies."
"You're all right, River," I said. "I mean, you're pretty easy to talk to." Easier to talk to than my own fucking twin sometimes.
She blushed. "Thanks, Silas," she said. "I'm sure Elias means well, you know."
"Yeah, well," I said. "He thinks I'm the same guy that got kicked out of college a few years back."
"Are you?" she asked.
"No."
"Well, then, don't worry about it," she said.
"I'm sorry about what happened with your sister and mom and stuff," I said.
River laughed. "I'm not," she said. "I'm so glad it all happened that way. Viper was such a douchebag. And my sister and mom were parasites. Things work out exactly like they should. If it hadn't happened like that, I'd have never run into Elias. Besides, karma got them anyway."
"What do you mean?"
She grinned. "I shouldn't feel as smug about it as I do, but, what can I say? I'm petty."
I laughed. "I'm pretty sure it's not petty to feel smug. What happened?"
"I've gotten all of this second-hand from friends, mind you," she said. "And some magazines, too. My sister lost the big contract she had with the cosmetics company. It turns out they had some kind of morals clause. Having one of their models blowing someone on a reality show wasn't exactly in keeping with their brand."
"That serves her right."
"Well, wait, there's more," River said. "Then she went and got some plastic surgery. And, from the looks of it in the tabloids, it was...um, not good. So she's been dropped from her agency, too. And Viper banged his way through her model friends, so that's over."
"I hope your mom got what was coming to her," I said.
"River gave all her stuff to charity," Elias said, walking up behind her and putting his hand on her shoulder. "Sold the house and evicted her ass."
"She's just toxic," she said, reaching for Elias' hand. "So now, I've cleaned the dead weight out of my life, and we're getting a new start here in West Bend."
The way River looked at Elias made me think of Tempest. Forget about her, I told myself. She's probably forgotten all about you by now.
I walked up the sidewalk to the building with my helmet in my hand, and looked around warily. I hadn't been back to the town of West Bend since I was seventeen years old. I had returned to this general area to visit my grandmother Letty, but after the scandal with my parents, she had moved to the next town over. I stayed away from Colorado entirely for the first two years after I left West Bend until I was no longer living hand to mouth, and then returned for short stints when I could over the years.
Back when everything happened with my parents and we'd run out of town, my grandmother had spent what little money she had to hire someone to track us down, but failed. It was two years later, when I'd finally come back to see her, that she'd learned my parents had ended up kicking me out and I'd been living on my own.
Since then, we'd gotten close, albeit only through infrequent visits. My grandmother was my only family, and she was a reminder of a time in my life when things were peaceful. Happy.
Of course, that period of time was like the calm before the storm.
I hadn't able to come back to see her as often as I wanted, and had never returned to West Bend itself, since my grandmother had moved to one of the neighboring towns.
Until now.
Now that she was in this - what the hell had the website called it? - an assisted living facility, I had to come back to West Bend to see her. I wasn't keen on the idea of putting her in this place. I had even tried to hire a nurse to come by and help her out at her house, but she wasn't having any of it. She had protested, said it was time for her to move here. I bristled at the idea. A nursing home? No thanks. But she had insisted it wasn't that kind of place, and on the phone she sounded happy.
Until she called me a few weeks ago and said she wanted to see me. That had me worried, even though she said it wasn't an emergency.
So I was back in West Bend, for the first time in seven years.
I'd lied to Iver and the others, telling them I was flying somewhere and taking time off. My team knew nothing about my past or about my family. Of course, Emir probably had a dossier on me, but he had never said anything, so I preferred to think he'd refrained from using his tech skills to figure out everything there was to know about me.
My team were the closest people in the world to me, yet they knew nothing about my past. And the only thing I knew about their pasts were the parts that involved grifting.
Grifters were funny that way. We were masters at leaving our pasts behind, creating new lives everywhere we went, and shedding the old ones. My childhood wasn't as real to me as my present life, and I didn't want to taint my present with ghosts from the past.
Except for Silas.
I'd brought that part of the past right into my present. And it was amazing.
But I needed to leave Silas back in Vegas, where he belonged.