Vegas and Pete: the series

Sensitive

POV Vegas

I hung up the phone with a relieved sigh. One of the two groups that had run off with the money had been tracked down by my subordinates. Most of the money had been recovered and they'd been dealt with accordingly. The other group was proving to be a fair bit more elusive, but I had several leads that I was currently following up on.

Not that I could leave to pursue them, but I had enough people around me to get done what I needed to get done without running the risk of tipping off the family as to my own whereabouts.

Satisfied that my job was done for the moment that day, I put my phone back down onto the coffee table. It was heading toward nighttime and I'd already fed my pets. Pete had been eating without a problem ever since I gave him that bowl of noodles, in fact he'd become rather docile in an interesting way.

Every time I went in there now he had a look on his face like he was almost happy to see me. He'd nearly said as much one day. I had been making alot of calls to try and get everything set up to capture those thieves so I hadn't been in to feed him his lunch. So when I finally did he gave me an exasperated look and told me that it was no fun just talking to the 'little guy' all day, as he never said anything back.

I was pretty sure that Pete could carry on a conversation with himself quite easily if he needed to, but it had been an odd feeling to hear him say that. It was almost as if he'd missed me. Granted I was the only human contact he had, but somehow I didn't hate the idea of it.

Normally I never liked when people got close, when people asked questions. It was my job to figure people out, pick the useful ones, and then play with them however I could, to do what was asked of me. It didn't matter how I felt about anything, it never had. Those, besides my brother, who had been brave enough to ask had been thrown away in quick order.

But there was no throwing out Pete. I didn't want to be here alone.

The quietness of the main living room starts to get to me so I head back into the odd 'comfort?' of Pete and the hedgehog's room.

I open the door and see that Pete has moved the hedgehog's cage off the dresser and put him on the chest that sat at the end of the bed. Pete himself sat on the ground, his back against the dark wood dresser, with a book in his hands. It looks as if he'd been reading to the hedgehog, like a parent to a kid. "Where'd you get that?" I ask Pete, eyeing the book. I don't remember leaving it here. In fact I don't think I've seen that book in ages.

It was a quiz book. It was one of the early 'cheat sheets' that I used when trying to figure people out quickly. That was long before I realized that while sometimes it can be scarily accurate it's best to figure people out by what they don't say, what they want, or try to hide. More than something like what their favorite food said about them.

"I went out to buy it, I guess." Pete replies to my question about the book. I can't help but smirk at his sassiness. As the days had gone by Pete had become more at ease with me. He smiled, joked, and threw one line zings at me. It was easy to talk to him. I'm not entirely sure why, but there was something about the idiot that just made me feel like I didn't have to put my guard up high.

Truth be told I'd never had much of a guard up when he was around, maybe because I'd always found messing with him to be too damn satisfying. Even back to when I'd crashed that lunch at the spa, he'd jumped when I'd touched him and it had ignited that dangerous urge in me. I'd ignored it then, but hadn't been able to stop myself from setting him up with the condoms later, escorting him back to his room at my house, or touching him while we were at the temple.

Even the way he'd reacted while I was torturing him had been different. At first I just thought I was going to play around with him like a cat that plays with a mouse, but the way he'd stared at me, the way he refused to fall to his knees no matter how much I hurt him. The way he didn't beg for me to stop. The way he'd smiled when I'd held the gun up at him. The way he'd skillfully pulled himself together to talk to his grandmother. And lastly that feral scream.