Getaway Car [HS]

Chapter Thirteen

Alanis showing up seconds before Zayn was preparing to walk out of the office door was karma.

She isn't sure what it was for.

Perhaps she was a vicious person who kicked kittens or stole candy from babies in a past life, or it could've been for sleeping with a murderer. But, it was the most brutal dose of bad karma ever dealt to her because it hit her where it hurt most. Her desperate need to keep her only remaining loved one hidden from her dark second life. The one rule she made for herself after falling into bed with the gang was that she wouldn't, under any circumstances, allow Alanis to get involved. And now...

Harley tried to pretend she was a nosy coworker intruding on something she wasn't entitled to hear, but the way Alanis came up around the side of the desk and slung her arm around her proved that to be a fruitless effort in deceiving him.

"Harry works for the man who hired me as his driver," she said and met Zayn's eyes in a silent demand to go along with it, "He's his personal assistant." His bitch. "We—uh—we don't get along."

Thankfully for her, it didn't take much effort to get Alanis to drop the subject without suspicion. The one problem was her fascination with Zayn. In her defense, he is devastatingly gorgeous, so her need to get to know her best friend's new coworker wasn't unfounded. She understood why Alanis was attracted to him on a surface level, but she couldn't pull her aside and tell her not to engage with him. What was she supposed to say? That she's a hitman's getaway driver and Zayn is their criminal boss's weapon expert? Sure, that'd go over well.

For the rest of the workday, she couldn't go more than a minute of standing beside Alanis without her bringing him up and asking more questions about him. Questions that were difficult to answer considering most of them had to do with what he does for her boss and if he's single. In response to the first, she told her he handles his finances. For the second, she told her the truth. She doesn't know, and it's none of her business considering it'd be unprofessional to ask anyway.

"So, he's friends with that Harry guy you hate?"

Alanis was perched on a stool beside the car she worked on for the duration of her thirty-minute unpaid lunch break. Rather than leaving to grab food, she was sucking on a root beer lollipop stolen from the complimentary jar intended for paying customers.

The question nearly made Harley want to bang her head on the vehicle she was sprawled out beneath atop a creeper. Wheels grated against the concrete as she pushed herself out to look up at Alanis, tugging the eye protection off of her face.

"Bee..." she trailed off with a deep sigh, "Just"—the look her friend gave her was like that of a puppy, and it stopped her from being ruder than necessary—"Can we talk about something else? Please?"

There was a pause, then, she looked around at the garage in search of a new topic to prevent crossing the line drawn in the sand.

She asked, "Did you hear about what the bitch who drives that mini-van said to me and Kenny yesterday?" and that was that.

Harley knew damn well that it wouldn't be the end of their conversations about Zayn, Harry, and her new job that has forced her to lie more than anything else in her life, but, for the time being, she was allowed a few hours of peace after she put her eye protection back on and slid beneath the car. At least she was being paid good money to endure the torture Zayn unknowingly brought down upon her.

The next few days weren't as bad.

They passed in idle boredom as she either waited for Alanis to text her during the workday or, with dread curling in her belly like a plume of smoke, for the burner phone to ring. It sat, its weight weighing her down, in her pocket throughout each day as a reminder of the one thing she can never escape from. It didn't ring as she pushed the cart at the grocery store while shopping for baking ingredients, it didn't ring in the time it took her to finish a five-hundred-page novel, and it doesn't ring now.