The Reckless Oath We Made - Bryn Greenwood Page 0,100

that oblivious. I was trying to decide how to answer Gentry when my boss popped up over the top of my cubicle.

“Doing anything fun this weekend?” he said.

“Oh, the usual.” I fumbled my phone into my pocket, because we weren’t supposed to have them out, and pulled up the next work ticket on my monitor.

“Now what is it you do again? Like live action D and D, is that what it is?”

“No, it’s called buhurt. It’s historically accurate medieval combat.”

“But that’s basically LARPing, right?”

“No. It’s not LARPing,” I said. I was sick of people acting like we were out in the woods cosplaying. “You wanna see a video of it?”

“Yeah, sure.”

It was against the rules, but he was my boss, so I took my phone out and pulled up a video from a one-on-one joust. For a couple seconds, my boss leaned down to watch it and then, without even asking, he took the phone out of my hand.

“You’re the tall one, right?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“Son of a bitch!” He laughed. “Who’s the guy in the black armor?”

“That’s my sparring partner, Gentry.”

“Your man Gentry is nuts. Dude is a berserker.”

“Yeah, well, that’s not exactly the goal,” I said.

“That’s some hobby you got there.” He handed the phone back before the video ended. Before I beat Gentry, because that was the time I clocked Gentry with my shield hard enough he went down like a post. We’d taken him to the hospital, but it turned out he didn’t have a concussion. He’d just got his bell rung.

“Butt hurt? That’s not really what it’s called, is it?” my boss said.

“Buhurt.”

He walked away laughing, and there were forty minutes left on the clock, so I started on the work ticket. My phone was still out on the desk, so I saw the text notification from Edrard pop up.

Ok seriously. Are you going?

I hesitated for a minute, but it was 4:23 on a Friday afternoon and what else was I doing?

Sure, I said. How do you feel about leaving in the morning?

* * *

—

EDRARD PICKED ME UP at dawn. He had his truck loaded down with way more equipment than we could possibly need. It wasn’t like we were actually going into battle, but he seemed to be having fun, so I didn’t burst his bubble. Rosalinda called him twice as we were leaving town, and the second time he put it on speakerphone, so I got to enjoy the sound of her seething with rage.

“I’ll be back Sunday night,” Edrard said. “Why don’t you go visit your folks?”

“I don’t want to go see my folks,” she snapped.

I didn’t blame her, because Rosalinda’s family were long-denim-skirt-wearing Evangelicals. Her younger sister was the only member of her family who came out for Rosalinda and Edrard’s handfasting, and she acted like I was trying to seduce her because I flirted with her. So I parked her next to Gentry, who’d sat there being chivalrous and nonseductive for the whole day.

I reached over and muted Edrard’s phone for a second.

“Just ask her if she wants to go,” I said. Edrard gave me a look of horror. “Just invite her.”

I unmuted the phone and after a second, Edrard said, “Sweetie, do you want to go?”

“No! I don’t want to go to Missouri and look for Zee’s stupid sister.” She delivered that in a snarl, but it was the answer I’d expected. Rosalinda was a homebody, and there was no way she wanted to go watch her backup knight in shining armor serve that red-haired minx.

End result, Rosalinda stopped calling, and two-thirds of the Three Musketeers hit the road for southern Missouri, where we made a few dueling banjo jokes the further we got off the main highway. Gentry had texted us the motel information, so when we got into town around noon, we went straight there.

It looked like one of those by-the-hour motels on Broadway in Wichita and, when Gentry let us in, the room was all paneled walls and cheap furniture, with a funky smell.

“Damn. This place smells like a whorehouse,” I said, while Gentry and Edrard shook hands.

“That’s really flattering,” Zee said. She stepped out of the bathroom wearing nothing but a T-shirt and panties. I stared at her, because she had this enormous tattoo that covered her whole thigh. Honestly, it wasn’t attractive, but it was pretty compelling. Shocking, too. Was that the goal? To surprise you? To make you stare?

She walked across that nasty motel carpet in her bare feet, and picked up a pair