“A man named Quint.”
She was already half lost in a story that didn’t fit how she saw Levi or Wren or whoever he was now. “Isn’t that a fruit?”
“That’s quince, but Quint is not his real name anyway.”
“Of course not. I guess that’s where you learned that trick.” Fearing the way she blurted that out amounted to a huge miscalculation, she rushed to keep him talking. “Sorry. Go ahead.”
“Quint ran a very specialized company. He . . . made things happen.” For just a second the corners of Wren’s mouth curled up in a smile but then disappeared.
The heaviness of his words contrasted with the lightness of his expression. Like so much with him, she didn’t know how to analyze the barrage of information in front of her. “That sounds a little scary.”
“It was.” After one last balling of his hands into fists, he let them fall open, palms up. “For a price he set up very awful people. Turned their lives inside out, ruined their reputations. Broke them.”
“I don’t get it.” She couldn’t ferret out the good from the bad in the story.
“He served as judge and jury. Once he determined guilt, he acted.”
She knew she should ask if this Quint guy physically hurt people or made them disappear. Should but didn’t. For a few seconds longer she wanted to hold on to the fiction that Wren—Levi . . . it was going to take forever to switch his name over in her mind—might talk tough but never stray to the dark side.
“So, Quint was a criminal of sorts?” This time her stomach flipped and she had to swallow back the rush of bile that threatened to overcome her.
“To the public he was a solid, very successful businessman. A financial whiz with all the right contacts and many brilliant people working for him.” Wren lifted his hands then let them drop again. “No one questioned him. No one doubted his professionalism or his commitment to the community.”
A strange panic slammed into her. “But . . . ?”
“But he had this side business based on vigilante work. For it, he recruited angry young men like myself. Guys on the edge. The kind of desperate that ended in chaos. Young men who were about to do something very stupid, and would have without his intervention.”
She couldn’t dance around this anymore. “Including you.”
Wren looked forward and stared at the wall separating her family room from the bedroom area. “Me and a few others. We were the Quint Five. We worked for him, trained with him. We were employees, but it was much more than that. He gave us a sense of family.”
She could almost envision them. Boys on the edge of full adulthood with more ego than common sense. “I’m guessing this was some sort of secret group.”
Levi looked at her then. “As you said earlier, I learned many tricks from Quint. Privacy was one of them. So was loyalty. But really, it was the place I learned a lot of my skills. We all worked for Quint and he provided more than money and supplies.”
“You said was?”
“Quint sold his company and retired to Mexico years ago after we all took other positions and found our own careers.”
“He must have hated to lose you.”
“Not really. He viewed his job as sort of a teacher. A lethal one, but still. He wanted us to succeed and move on to find what interested us.”
“So it was almost like foster care.”
“But we weren’t kids and we earned paychecks. We also played with guns.”
That part sounded so normal. Well, except for the guns. Wren described this self-appointed guardian and vigilante who functioned on the outside as a businessman but behind closed doors as some sort of enforcer. The idea of that guy selling his house and sitting on a beach wouldn’t come together in her head. “And the other members of the group? Where are they now?”
“All successful and no longer desperate. None in jail.”
In other words, businessmen like Levi Wren. Secretive, powerful. “But are they dangerous?”
“Some more than others, but probably not in the way you think.” His hand fell to the cushion right next to hers, but he didn’t reach out to touch her. “Some, like me, walk the line between what others consider right and wrong. Some ignore the line completely.”
“So, the Quint Five no longer exists.”
“Not in any sort of formal business way. We help each other now and then. We meet.”
“In other words, you act like family.”
“I don’t know because I don’t really get family.”
“I have about a billion more questions.” About Quint and the anger and what started Wren spinning in the first place.
“The bottom line is Quint taught me skills and gave me focus. He did it for all of us. Saved us.”