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After more than a decade in the plant business, Lambert’s learned not to judge the people that walk into his shop. All sorts of folks can appreciate his bouquets, flowerpots, and succulent displays.
The two men who enter his shop mid-morning on a Tuesday, though—well, there’s a reason Lambert sent his employees home with pay when he clocked these two watching the shop from the café across the street twenty minutes back.
“Be with you in a sec.” Lambert barely glances up from the arrangement he’s putting together. It started as something to do while he waited for these two to make their move, but he’s invested now.
The rasp of metal against metal as he snips another stem makes one of the men twitch.
Lambert sets down the shears to fluff a bloom, letting the silence linger.
His concealed basement houses all sorts of dangerous plants, medicinal antidotes, and herbal concoctions of his own creation, but he chooses who gets access to that side of his business.
“You Lambert?” One of the men asks.
Lambert looks up, winding floral tape around a stem with practiced precision. The smaller of the two men had spoken. He’s placed himself halfway between Lambert and the entrance, his chin raised in expectation.
The larger man has closed the door of the shop and flipped the sign to ‘Back in 10,’ the presumptuous bastard. As Lambert watches, he crosses his arms over his barrel of a chest and leans against the doorframe, going so far as to cross one ankle over the other. If he’s trying to sell his disinterest, it doesn’t work. He isn’t relaxing, and there’s no hiding the vicious scar on his forehead or the way his ill-fitting jacket bulges on his left side, near his kidney.
It’s a strange place to keep a gun, but Lambert’s seen stranger.
“Well?” The small man takes another step toward Lambert.
“Depends on who’s asking,” Lambert says because they must know already.
There’s another leak then or maybe the old one trying a new tactic. They still haven’t rooted out everyone who betrayed Aiden six months back and left him for dead in the woods.
He squeezes a stem too hard and grumbles, setting aside the damaged flower.
Maybe it takes a trained killer to recognize another two, but he’s used to all sorts of heavy hitters in his shop, his brothers included. There’s no reason to assume these two are connected to Aiden’s mess.
No reason to rule it out either, though.
The small man glances around without taking anything in and rocks on his toes like he doesn’t know what to do with the energy curling inside him.
With his most long-suffering sigh, Lambert steps away from his project, leaving his shears at the edge of the small table. It might read as a concession, but he’s faster than people expect and this is a better position to block the path to the back room.
“What can I help you with?” he tries, but the shit-eating grin leaks out. “Roses for the big fella?” He cocks his head at Tall-Pale-and-Dangerous. “Nah, you’re more of a lilies man.”
The man’s jaw clenches.
“No.” The small man shifts, and Lambert’s attention snaps back to the closer threat.
“Sunflowers, then?”
The small man scowls. “We hear you’re a chemist.”
Lambert snorts and rocks back on his heels, putting on his best ‘aw, shucks’ grin as he spreads his hands wide. “Do I look like I have a degree?”
“Never said you did.” The man looks around the shop again, and Lambert takes the opportunity to watch him right back. He’s smaller than Lambert, his dark pants have something equally as dark splattered up to the knee, and his shit-kicker boots are broken in like they actually get used for kicking.
The man at the door lolls his head back and to the side, watching the street through one of the door’s glass panes. This is the quiet time of day for the business, but it’s not unusual to get a customer or two off the street.
“This is a waste of time.” The man’s voice is rough, but the tone is almost gentle.
“It’s not.” The small man starts to turn to argue but catches himself before turning his back on Lambert.
He might be a trained killer—he almost certainly is, but something has them both distracted. It makes Lambert’s fingers itch for the shears again, but he jams his thumbs in the wide pocket of his apron instead. “Maybe you should go then.”
The small man steps forward. “Listen—”
“We mean you no harm,” the large man interrupts. He’s still angled toward the street, his eyes half-closed as he watches the foot traffic, his bald head likely smudging the glass.
Fuck, he hates cleaning the windows, but at least the small man stopped moving.
Any closer, and this might have to get serious.
Lambert steps away from his publicly acceptable worktable. It might not be subtle, but fuck if he’s letting anyone get past him. “Now why should I believe that?”
The large man sighs. “You have a knife in your boot, a phone in your apron, and some sort of weapon at your waistband. I’m guessing a telescopic baton. Not to mention the scissors to your right, the box cutter on the counter that you might get to first, and a hell of a lot of glass projectiles.”
Lambert’s eyebrows rise. Sure, he considers the vases acceptable weapons in a pinch, but not a lot of others would. “But you’re blocking my exit.”
The man rolls his head around.
The rings under his eyes look darker with his chin tipped so low. “Only one of them. The other two are clear.”
Lambert shakes his head. He’d be stupid to take the man’s word on that, and sure, his brothers are going to call him all sorts of things when they find out he didn’t call for help as soon as he noticed two killers running surveillance on his place, but he’s not going to listen to some goon telling him he shouldn’t be concerned.
“So,” the large man says, “Lambert the chemist, will you help us?”
Lambert glances between the two. They’re partners, in some sense of the word, but that doesn’t make them more trustworthy. “Who sent you here?”
The small man makes an irritated noise and takes two steps toward the backroom.
Lambert backs up the same two steps, keeping the space between them. It puts the other man closer to the shears, but Lambert has plenty of ways to defend himself and what’s his. “Who told you to come here?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Like fuck it doesn’t.” He doesn’t sell to anyone who walks off the street, never did, especially not after Aiden’s mess. “Who?”
The small man snarls, shaking his head and reaches behind his back. Lambert matches the movement, his metal baton extended in his hand, his focus narrowed on the threat.
He startles at the bang of knees hitting the hard against the unforgiving floor as the large man drops like a bag of soil.
“Shit.” The small man whips around, Lambert forgotten as he darts back to his partner. “Letho.”
With surprising strength, the small man pushes Letho backwards off his knees and props him against the closed door. One hand curls around Letho’s shoulder while the other goes to the pulse at his throat.
Letho’s breath rattles, and his hand spasms in the back of his partner’s shirt.
The small man turns as best he can, practically on his knees in the entryway of Lambert’s shop. He licks his bottom lip and grimaces before meeting Lambert’s gaze. “We need your help. Please.”
Lambert’s body thrums with unused adrenaline, his weapon still loose in his hand, ready to swing at a threat that can’t be bothered to make any goddamn sense.
The bruiser had been fine. Watching with heavy eyes, slumped back, not casual, only trying to block one door… or maybe he couldn’t hold himself upright.
The ill-fitting jacket.
The bulge at his side.
“He took a poisoned blade to the kidney?” Lambert demands, collapsing his baton and dropping it in his apron pocket. “Which poison? How deep?”
“Dunno,” Letho admits. “Not deep but long.”
Still a lot of contact area to take up the poison, even if they rinsed it fast.
Typically, he only treats strangers when someone’s warned him they’re coming or they’re on Vesemir’s list of allies, but usually they aren’t dying in his entryway. That’ll attract the wrong kind of attention. He glances to the backroom as if he can see the stairs beyond.
Fuck it all, but this is his problem now. “Fine, get that jacket off.”
The small man glares at him. “Here?”
“Unless someone’s looking for you,” Lambert needles. “Think you would’ve had your coffee faster if that were the case.”
That gets him a darker scowl. “We can dodge a fucking tail.”
“Wonderful. Do you trust me to wash my hands and get my kit from the back?”
Letho grunts. “Do it.”
The small man jerks back around to Letho. “But—”
“You said we could trust him.”
Lambert waits, ignoring the discomfort twisting in his gut. Not many people claim to trust him, and fewer still actually mean it.
The small man shifts forward, pushing his forehead against Letho’s. “No, I don't know him, but Aiden said we could trust him, if we ever needed...”
The bottom drops out of Lambert’s stomach, and the laughter bubbles out, harsh and definitely all wrong for the situation, but he can’t help it.
Small, bald, scarred nearly the same place Aiden is these days.
Fuck, he’s an idiot.
“Don’t tell me you’re Gaetan.”
The small man whips around, popping into a crouch, a small knife flying from nowhere into his hand. His face has smoothed out into the blank expression of a man willing to prove just how dangerous he is and figure out the consequences later.
It’s so familiar Lambert has to pinch the bridge of his nose. Aiden’s never going to let him live this down. “We could’ve sorted this shit out ages ago with a name.”
Gaetan’s freezes, the expressions flying across his face too fast to parse. “Well.” His fingers shift on the knife. “Excuse me if I don’t trust everyone Aiden vouched for after one of them murdered him."
Lambert winces.
That’s… fair, actually.
Despite all the favors Lambert’s called in and plenty more he’ll owe on for a while, they still aren’t sure who betrayed Aiden. The list of possibilities is longer than either of them would like, but Aiden’s been clear about the handful of people he’s certain it wasn’t.
His hard-to-contact practically-a-younger-brother Gaetan being nearly top of the list.
Slipping his hand in his apron pocket, Lambert hits the button to dial the number he’s had on his phone screen for the last half hour. Only when the phone rings upstairs does he bring his phone to his ear.
Gaetan twitches, but Letho catches his hand and squeezes.
“All clear?” Aiden answers.
“Bring down the full kit.” He grins, even though it probably reads like another threat. “You'll never believe what your baby brother dragged in, Aiden.”