Trust Me, I'm Trouble Read Online Free Page A

than before.
    As much as I prefer Dani’s company, I don’t actually get her. I’m a grifter. I can usually read people like a shopping list left abandoned in a grocery cart. But Dani’s more like The Brothers Karamazov, the nineteenth-century Russian novel Mrs. Springfield bludgeoned us with last semester—all intricate imagery that’s a bitch to decipher. I’m sure it’s because my knowledge of her life is patchy at best. She won’t tell me about her present, and I get only rare glimpses of her past. She keeps too much hidden, like why she goes out of her way to help me.

    I freeze my position and fire off another three rounds. All of them end up just to the right of center.
    “Better,” she says.
    I change the clip and hand her the gun. She pulls the slide back to check the chamber. In one smooth movement, she aims and shoots the target dead center. She waits a breath and shoots another. Then another. The hole in the center of the target widens to an oval.
    “Control is everything,” she says. Her ice-blue eyes are set at serious, but then they always are. I’ve seen her laugh maybe three or four times in the eight months I’ve known her. Whatever demons she’s carrying must weigh as much as the cathedrals she has etched into her skin. And I know a thing or two about carrying demons.
    I see the moment her thoughts shift from guns to something else. I don’t know what they shift to, but her expression turns bleak. She’s about to say something when Steve bursts through the door, minus headphones and safety glasses. His gaze falls on us like he’s a smoke alarm and we’re on fire.
    “You’d better get out here,” he says.

“O oo, yikes—that’s going to take a while to buff out,” Murphy says as he joins me on the sidewalk. Not-Bessie is cooling her tires next to the curb rather than the parking lot to give the battered Chevelle its space.
    “Thanks for that, Murph. Perhaps you could rein in your exorbitant sensitivity when you talk to Dani.” Sarcasm is my superpower.
    “At least it’s fixable,” he says, surveying the shattered windows, dented fenders, and spray-painted hood. “Who did you piss off this time?”
    “It’s probably just a fluke.” I wave with a dismissiveness I don’t feel.
    “Just a fluke?” he says, eyebrows raised behind his just-this-side-of-hipster glasses. His latest haircut is even more rakish than the one Sam had him get when he orchestrated his geek-chic makeover. Bryn might be the true grifter here—her transformation of Murphy is more absolute than mine. “I thought you didn’t believe in coincidences.”

    I did tell him that, didn’t I? Con artist rule number 489: Keep your philosophies on life to yourself. Sadly, I suck at following this rule.
    “Besides,” he continues, “flukes don’t usually come with strange messages.”
    I look over at Dani’s poor Chevelle, its smashed windshield a radiating web of milky glass. Toothy shards litter the asphalt around the tires. And worse, the words NO GAME are spray-painted in red on the hood.
    NO GAME . I haven’t the faintest idea what it means, but my list of suspects is pretty short.
    “It’s not too late for Witness Protection,” Murphy says, though he’s only saying it to irk me. He knows I hate it when anyone brings it up.
    “This isn’t Petrov. If he had this kind of reach, he’d have gone for me directly.”
    “As someone who stands next to you a lot, that’s really comforting,” he says. My sarcasm appears to be rubbing off on him.
    “It’s not meant to be comforting. It’s pragmatic. This isn’t his style. Property damage? Petrov is a razor, not a baseball bat.”
    “Nice. You should say exactly that to Agent Ramirez when he asks you about it,” Murphy says, smirking.
    I play through that conversation with Mike in my head. “Yeah, not going to happen. It’s Dani’s car, so it’s not like the police are going to call him. And if the police don’t tell him, how’s he going to