mint limeade

one and three fourths cups sugar

And when that second guy turned and reached for the cart behind him, it gave a perfect view of the devil on his throat. A mostly black tattoo of a ram skull imprinted around his Adam's apple, curled horns on either side of his neck and an upside down triangle dripping carmine from its forehead.

Sakura toted both their boards as they walked closer. "Don't take anything they say personally," she murmured just low enough for him to hear.

Leon poked the inside of his cheek with his tongue.

Ram Skull didn't even glance up when they stopped at the edge of the workshop platform. "—zu and Dei can keep the garage closed all they fuckin' want when they're gone, but if they don't want us in their shit they should've shoved our key copies up our asses." He pulled out a box of Malboros from his back pocket, the backs of his hands darkened with ink-outlined bones. "Toss me your light, mine's dry."

Sakura cocked a brow. "Not when you're working under the hood."

"The fuck I know 'bout cars? Switch me, I'm gettin' a stroke just lookin' at it."

She set the boards against the stairs that wound all the way up to the office space jutting out over the floor on its personal second story. Leon's eyes followed it up to the windows and their reinforced frames, and if he had to guess, the glass was probably too thick to get through with something short of a rifle.

Ram Skull finally looked up as Sakura handed him a lighter she plucked from her own shoe—brewing another question in the growing list of things he hadn't gotten a chance to ask—and grinned.

"Aw, finally brought your little boyfriend around?" He cooed. Leon's cheek twitched. "I was starting to think you'd keep him in hiding."

Sakura ignored him and turned her head to the side. "This is Hidan. He works as an artist at Hiruko's."

Hidan?

"And that's Sasori, another artist and the owner of Hiruko." She jerked her chin toward the man stepping away from the hood of the car. Sasori wiped his hands on a rag and stared at Leon with bored, half-lidded eyes that swept over him once before settling unnervingly on his face. "You two, this is Leon."

"Uh." Leon blinked and raised a half wave. "Hi?"

Hidan huffed and lit the cigarette he set between his lips. "Didn't expect you to actually be fucking real."

Sasori hummed as he looked back towards the car. "Didn't expect Hidan to say anything of value."

"Didn't expect you to call me here to waste my time," Sakura retorted blandly. "Do you actually need me or can we go?"

Sasori jerked his head toward something under the hood and she peered at it for a moment before her nose crinkled in faint annoyance.

"That's disgusting."

"You can fix it."

"How fortunate for you," she said as she rolled up her sleeves, already reaching for a tool he can't name to work on a part he doesn't recognize.

Leon stood a little off to the side, closer to the car but more than an arm's reach away from either of the men Sakura actually seemed to know? And it looked like she was a whiz with cars the way her deft, calloused fingers never once hesitated in what she was doing. Any other day he'd sit and stare, completely mesmerized, but his eyes kept drifting to Hidan and his tattoos and his cigarette as he crouched and scrolled through his phone, smoke on his lip and his shoulder close to bumping one of Sakura's legs.

So, his dad was a cop. Not that he expected that to mean anything or that he was the type of guy to narc on people for just existing, but he sat through enough lectures about "doing the Kennedy name proud" to know that Hidan and Sasori were exactly the guys his dad would eye with a deep frown and an even deeper cloud of judgment. And it was—