“She’s got you by the nuts, huh?” I lean over so he can hear me well. My blood pumps hot as I think of my own nuts, and my own little sexy bare-naked problem, driving me more than a little crazy lately. “You thought you could fuck this chick once and walk away, but you couldn’t. She was wild and you liked that. She looked at you like you were god’s fucking gift to womankind; you must have liked that too.”
I pause for three heartbeats while my mark keeps getting paler and paler. “I bet you’re obsessed with the way she feels, the way her hair smells, how she smiles, how she walks, how she flirts with other fucking males . . . Well, Hendricks, I’m here to tell you that you owe the Underground $168,434 for your gambling losses, and we’re ready to collect.”
I lean back and slide my aviators back over my eyes. “You can’t keep your pussy on my money. Are we clear?”
The guy is pale as a ghost, so it’s safe to assume we’re fucking clear here.
I fold the paper, SIG and all, into the pocket of my jacket. “One of my men will meet you here, tomorrow.” As I rise, I lean over and say, “I’ve got copies of these images. You’ll get them when you pay up what you owe, but don’t test me. I have a motivation as strong as yours.” My mother. My freedom. And my own fucking nuts, in a twist over a girl with golden hair and green eyes and a smile that guts me. Yeah, I’m in even deeper shit than this poor guy is.
When the target leaves, C.C. and I go check up with the team in silence. All of them are at the “yacht,” like some sick Big Brother sea home, including the surveillance cameras.
My father sits there, glad to be out of the house and getting the gist of the planning. As for the team . . .
I’ve got tabs on Derek to make sure he’s not betraying what he knows, but the rest, I’m always watching, monitoring calls, replaying surveillance tapes. Blood oath is fine—except I don’t trust my own shadow.
The first I had to test was C.C.—because he’s the closest to a brother I’ve got and I had to know if his loyalties are to my father, who’s fed him all these years, or to his blood brother, who’s been me.
“If I told you this glass held a very deadly substance, and asked you to take it to my father, what would you say?”
“I’d say yes, asshole, what do you think I’d say?” C.C. replies, sticking a toothpick into his teeth and letting it dangle there. We’re outside my dad’s bedroom, where he’s monitored by his medical team 24/7. The door is opened partway, and we can see my father talking to Eric, oblivious to us watching.
“Good. Since you’re the only one I trust, I say you better go. So go.” I hand him the glass. “Take it, discreetly.”
He looks at me. “I know how to be discreet. Just tell me. Will it be painful for the dude?”
“Not as much as he deserves, but yes.” I edge back and watch C.C. maneuver the liquid into my father’s medications. The motherfucker carries it over, murmurs to my dad, “Are you thirsty, Slater?” and makes sure my father slowly drinks it. He comes back and sits. “It’s done,” he says calmly.
C.C. is about as coldhearted as I am. Ice under all circumstances.
We sit in silence. “It wasn’t poisoned, was it, you dick?” he asks, spitting out the toothpick in anger and betrayal.
“No.” I stand. “I just needed to be sure.”
I could so easily end my father. Slip something into the IV bags and he’d be gone. But even a criminal has to have a code, and I have mine. I don’t kill for pleasure or even for myself. I don’t kill family.
That doesn’t mean I don’t think about it. Constantly, I do. I’ve dreamed I’ve killed my father many times and I wake up relieved. Until I remember I didn’t kill him—he’s alive.
Rage pulses through me that I have to even look at him, let alone do his fucking dirty work.
C.C. follows me down the hall of the yacht, where we’re parked a couple of miles away from Los Angeles. One of the rooms is set up with phones and charts—the gambling bookkeeping, tracking all the bets of every fight of the Underground. “We’re your guys, Z, you can trust us. I know it’s not in your nature to, but you can.”
“I’m working on a couple of other names; in the meantime call Tina Glass. Tell her I need number ten in a compromising position with her. She’s not to deliver the evidence to anyone but me, personally. I have another target to work on this weekend. I’ll be leaving town—use the code if there’s an emergency.”
“Eric wants the rest of the team to support.”
“I don’t need their support. But I need you to help me nail number ten. He’s squeaky clean and he’s pissing me off.”
“I know what else is pissing you off!” C.C. laughs.
I growl and tell him where he can shove it. He knows there’s “a skirt”—he suspects, at least, and trips me when he catches me staring at my phone unawares. I am never caught unawares. I trip him back then pin him up by the collar to the wall. “Stop fucking with me, C.C.”
“I’m not the one who’s fucking with you.” He taps my temple, then hisses, “Get her out of there, dude, before your father finds out.”
I feel so messed up I’m getting pissed that I ever thought it was a good idea to touch her in the first place.
But there’s that one phone I haven’t disarmed, and it’s only because I get these little texts from her.
Are you there?
Fuck, I wish I wasn’t. I wish I wasn’t sitting here, staring at this screen, poleaxed in the goddamned chest every time I read it.
I keep thinking I imagined you.
I haven’t answered her, but I feel like typing:
Princess, you have no idea how close you’re dancing to the flame.
It’s a day since this last text. I keep pulling it out to look at it, tempted to tell her to fucking forget about me, princess; I’m going to use you, abuse you, and throw you the fuck away when I’m done cause that’s what I do.
Sometimes I tell myself if I’d stayed one night longer, maybe even one fuck longer, I wouldn’t be so obsessed. But she has a mouth made for oral, thick, full lips and a crazy hungry tongue. Fuck me, I’ve been jerking off like crazy because the mere thought of her going down on me gets me hard.
But no. Even if she’d sucked me all night long, I’m sure I’d still be hungry to push her head down and feed her more of me, make her eat me, every last drop.
The fact that I got pissed because our night together ended too soon, and I actually wanted to lie there, in that bed, for a couple more hours and see what it felt like to hold her for a while, only confuses me further.
I call Tina myself on my other phone. Tina Glass, aka Miss Kitty. She’s exactly who you need to frame a man. She’s clean, good looking, and lethal. “My men call you?”
“Absolutely,” she purrs.
I slip on my gloves as I talk to her. “I want the evidence delivered personally to me.”
“With my absolute pleasure. I’ll make contact when it’s done.”
I hang up and stare at Melanie’s text again.
Just trash it, you fucking pussy.
She’s a hot button, but this is me.
Do I really need a hot button? Do I need to wake up in the middle of the night with a hard dick? A twenty-five-year-old with a bunch of whores asleep so near, I can probably stumble over a couple just by opening my bedroom door. But those green eyes like forests, that pussy tight around my cock. And those sounds she makes. Do I really have to torture myself, remembering how good it felt, how fucking clean and sweet she smelled?
“This can’t happen,” I whisper down at my own phone, my blood roiling in my veins when I think of how stupid I was to think I could have one night, just one night, of what a normal man does. “It can’t happen again,” I say.
I have a job to do. I AM the job.
My mother’s life could be at risk, and so could anyone’s who has contact with me. My father could take anything I’m interested in, just like that. Just to prove that he can. Just to try to own me. Doesn’t matter if I
want to layer my princess in fucking jewels when she’s lying all sated and sweaty right next to me. Doesn’t matter if I want to go back and watch those eyes go dark when I fill her, over, and over, and over. Doesn’t fucking matter what I want. Only what I have to do.
Swiftly I pull the back off the phone. “Can’t happen to you.” I start pulling the phone apart. “It can happen to anyone but not to you. Whoever she ends up with, there’s a ninety-nine point nine percent guarantee he’ll be better than you.”
I pull off the battery of my permanent cell phone, remove the SIM card, the wire cage, until I’ve got dozens of little pieces in my hand that will ensure I will never get another text from her and will ensure she never again hears from me.
Until I come to collect on behalf of the Underground.
SIX
* * *
FIVE GOING ON SIX
Melanie
Five days after Greyson . . .
“So, he’s out of the picture?” Pandora asks today as I organize the pricing PDF file for one of my clients.
I bury my face in my hands. For a second, I want to pretend Pandora isn’t here, breathing over the top of my head, her angry concern like a little cloud with thunderbolts over us both.
Five days.
Five long, awful days where all my hopes have dwindled to nothing, all my fantasies have gone black, all my expectations have become nil.
And here’s Pandora, worried and angry on my behalf, probably happy she gets to have a good excuse to be a bitch today.
“Yes,” I finally grit out. “He’s fucking out of the picture. I hope you’re thrilled.”
I pull my phone out just to show her how textless it is.
She looks at the barren screen, grunts, and shakes her head and drops down on her chair. “Scumbag,” she says.
“Dick.”
“Asshole.”
“Scumbag!”
“I already used that,” she points out.
“And as quickly as the bastard used me,” I mumble. Literally, the disappointment piles up by the hour, and a fresh wave hits me as I tuck my phone away. Never have I felt like I’ve misjudged a situation as much as I did ours—his and mine. It’s officially Friday. If the guy wanted a date, you bet your ass he’d have called before today.
I’m so hurt I can’t even understand why I’m so hurt. Maybe because I thought he was different, and he turned out to be just what Pandora said. I hate it when she’s right and I’m wrong.
I especially hated her being right this time, when I really wanted her to be wrong.
Thank god she’s sitting down quietly at her desk and I’m not hearing any I told you sos. If she even starts, I will hit her as hard as I want to hit myself right now for being such a fool.
“I’m so done with men,” I burst out when I find Pandora’s silence equally as annoying as the stuff I know she wants to say. “I don’t need them to be happy. I’m going to get a dog. God! I just remembered I probably can’t even afford the luxury of a little dog anymore.”
“Stop buying shoes,” she chides.
Sighing because I’m not going to explain to her I owe more than a pair of shoes, I click on my search engine and navigate to the online advertisement of my car. A picture of my Mustang stares back at me—with a bright red number on the top and a big FOR SALE sign. It’s all I have, and still not enough to cover what I owe. Like me. We’re both not enough.
For the first time in a week, my reality crashes down on me. Hard.
I have no more hazel eyes with adorable green flecks to make me feel hopeful and expectant. I have no more texts to look forward to. I have a car to sell, a debt to settle, and a whole lot of misery to deal with.
My grandma, before she passed, always said the best way to feel better was to focus on someone else and do something nice for them because you weren’t the only one with a problem.
I look at Pandora, thinking of all the times she’s been called a bitch in this very office, and I reach out and tug a strand of her onyx-colored hair, saying, “All that black hair is so drab. You should make a change too, add a pink strand to all this soot?”
“Fuck you, I hate pink.”
I roll my eyes and tell the heavens—okay, Nana, I tried!—then get back to my computer to stare at my car. Whoever dried it while Greyson dried me did a great job—Brain, please focus on my Mustang.
It took me a full day to get the perfect images when the sun hit my car at just the right angle. It’s so pretty I can’t believe it’s been several days and no callers.
What if I get no callers?
The stress starts creeping up me like a big ole whale choking my windpipe when Pandora rolls around in her chair to face me. “Come on, bitch, talk to me!” she cries. “What made you think he would even be more than what you always get? He gives you a ride when your car won’t start; you go to a hotel. What do you even know about him except that he apparently fucks you stupid and now you’re not the Melanie I know? Where’s the smile, where’s the spark? You’re acting like me and I don’t like it.”
I fling my arms up high. “He said he’d be in touch . . . he came back to give me a ride home and I read more into it, which was a mistake, all right—my mistake. Believing him. Believing he was different or that we had some special . . . connection. God, I’m so lame, but I bet that’s no news to you.”
“Fuck him, Melanie.”
“I already did. Now let’s stop talking about him. Let’s order me a T-shirt online that says I RULE, MEN SUCK. I need to raise my bar higher. I need to really make them prove themselves before I give them a chance. Let’s go see Brooke today.”
Brooke’s baby was born premature in New York over a month ago, but since her fighter husband is currently off-season, they’re living in Seattle while they plan a small church wedding.
Pandora grabs her backpack as we get ready to leave for the day. “Have you noticed the way daddy holds the baby? It’s like the baby’s head is half the size of Remy’s biceps,” she says.
God. I hope I can take seeing the way Remington Tate looks and smiles with his dimples and his loving blue eyes at Brooke.
“By the way, I asked Kyle to go with me to the wedding. I just want to put those lesbian rumors to rest, you know?” she tells me on the elevator.
“Really?” I ask, suddenly feeling abysmal. “Great. I’ll be a third wheel then.”
SEVEN
* * *
MARKED FOR A LIFETIME
Greyson
It’s always the same dream.
Never varies.
Always the same number of men.
It’s always 4:12 p.m.
I’ve been dropped off by the bus.
A line of cars is in our driveway.
My mother’s words ring clear as a bell in my head: One day he will find us, Greyson. He will want to take you from me.
I won’t let him, I’d promised.
But right then I know, he’d found us. The father I didn’t know. The one my mother didn’t want me to end up like.
I pull the strap of my backpack from my shoulder and hold it with my fist, ready to knock someone out with a hundred pounds of homework and textbooks.
Ten men stand in my living room. Only one is seated, and I know it’s him when the blood in my body starts rushing faster. It’s just blood, but my entire being recognizes him even though I’ve never seen him before. He doesn’t have my eyes, but I have his eyebrows, sleek and long and almost in a perennial frown. I have his lean nose, his dark looks. He sees me, and a parade of mixed emotions marches across his face, more emotion than I allow him to see in my own expression. He gasps, “God.”
I see my mother then. She’s also seated in one of the single chairs, her honeyed hair in a tangle, her ankles bound, her arms pulled tight behind her. She’s trembling, gagged with a red bandanna, and trying to talk to me, words that get muffled by the cloth.
“What are you doing to her? Let her go!”
“Lana,” my father says, ignorin
g me, his attention now slowly turned on my mother. “Lana, Lana, how could you?” He looks at her, his eyes filled with tears. But for every tear my father sheds, my mother sheds a dozen, trails of them.
“Let her go,” I say again, lifting my backpack, preparing to launch it at him.
“Set that down . . . we will.” My first mistake was listening to him. I lower my backpack. My father kneels before me and holds out a black weapon, then lowers his voice so that only I can hear. “See this? This is an SSG with a suppressor, so nobody will hear it. It’s got no safety—ready for use. Shoot one of these men, any man, and I will spare your mother.”
She’s crying hard, shaking her head, but a slimy, bald man behind her forces her neck still. I step away from my backpack. It’s close to me, close enough to kick like a soccer ball. I play, and I can send it flying across the room. But to who? What if I hit my mother?
I inspect the weapon and wonder how many bullets it has, not enough for all these men but for the one holding her, yes. I take it, confused that my hand doesn’t shake. It’s heavy and there’s no fear, only the need to free my mother.
I look at the one holding her neck still.
Her eyes crying.
One day he’ll find us Greyson . . .
I aim farthest away from her to the largest body part of the man that I can.
I fire.
A clean dark hole appears in his forehead. The man drops.
My mother screams inside her gag, and cries more hysterically, kicking both her tied legs in the air.
My father takes the gun from my hand with a look of wonder and he pats my head.
More men pull my mother up to her feet and drag her down to the garage staircase.
“What are you doing? Where are you taking her?” I grab my pack and swing it at one man. Another comes and grabs me, squeezes my arms as he talks and spits in my ear, “Son, son, listen to me, they made a deal, she lost you. She lost you!”