You’re probably good at taking lip, aren’t you?” I mutter more to myself than to my bodyguard, clawing through the suitcase for a T-shirt that isn’t tight on me. “Like a CIA operative, right? Do bodyguards go to bodyguard school? Are you like the hitman in Hitman?”

He adjusts his cuffs. “You know the rule about fight club?”

I give him a surprised look. “So you can talk!”

He raises a single eyebrow. “I will be right outside your door if you need me. You have to be down at the lot in twenty minutes. I suggest you hurry.” Then he takes his burly frame and saunters out of the room.

I shove my head into a clean shirt and pull my arms through just as my phone blips.

There’s a message. Well, two messages.

Gail 8:36 AM

—HIS NAME IS LONNY. BE NICE.

“Lonny?” That name definitely is not fit for a three-hundred-pound machine of total annihilation, but okay

Ashley Poston