“Garro,” the newcomer said, grinning uneasily as he sat down in the guest seat at Zeus’s booth. “How’s it goin’, man?”
“Good, Hiccough, how’s the trade?” Zeus asked casually, adjusting one of the silver rings he wore on his big hands.
The man named Hiccough looked down at those hands and swallowed so roughly, I could see it from all the way over at the bar.
“Good, can’t complain. Got rid of the last’a that fucked up shit the Nightstalkers sold me last year, just like I told ya I would.”
“Yeah, ’bout that. Haven’t seen you around in a while. If business is so fuckin’ good, where you gettin’ your shit from?” Zeus finally looked up from his hands, slowly exposing his face to the reddish light in a practiced way that was still cool as fuck and so scary it gave me tingles.
“Oh, uh, man, you know I actually decided a while back to maybe diversify and try to support the small guys, ya know?” Hiccough laughed nervously, and it sounded exactly like his name.
“You happen to go to the same ‘small guys’ as Quentin Kade?” Z asked as he adjusted enough to pull a wicked curved blade from somewhere on his person. It glinted in the light as he laid it on the table, gleaming red like a physical foreshadowing.
I gulped at the same time as Hiccough did.
“Well, man, I mean it’s a small community really so there, uh, may have been some overlap. You know how these things work,” the stupid man tried to backtrack but even I could see he was falling backward and right into their trap.
Zeus was playing with him.
“’Course.” He nodded sagely. “Get that, Hiccough, you gotta think ’bout your business. What’s loyalty if you don’t have any cash to back it up, right?”
“Right.” Hiccough jumped on his chance to agree with Zeus. “Knew you’d understand.”
Zeus nodded slowly as if he was distracted then called, “Lou, bring me another whiskey. Hiccough, you want somethin’?”
He nodded like a bobblehead. “Beer would be great.”
Zeus tipped his chin at me and when I hesitated, Mute nodded from beside me. I didn’t want to get close to the guy but I quickly poured the drinks and made my way over to them. Hiccough was facing away so he didn’t see me until I was beside him, planting his drink on the table. He looked up to smile at me or maybe thank me but then caught sight of my face, the faint scratch the falling brick from the bullet had made across my cheek, and froze.
Before he could do anything else, Bat and Buck were hemming him in and Cy was tugging me out of the closing circle. Zeus’s mighty hand went slamming down on top of Hiccough’s and he tugged it forcibly in his grip while he began to talk, and as he began to talk, he took that wicked knife in his other hand and worked it slowly into the back of the other man’s hand.
“You think you can go behind my back and make a deal with the fuckin’ Nightstalkers and I won’t know about it? Think you can come into my house, the business of my brothers and scare one of our fuckin’ girls, Hiccough? I don’t fuckin’ think so.”
Hiccough whimpered and tried to pull back his hand as Zeus opened a flap of skin, held it to the blade with his thumb and slowly began to pull it back over the length of his hand like he was skinning an apple.
“Now, my boys are going to take you to the fun farm to ask you a few questions about the motherfuckin’ Nightstalkers and if you answer correctly, you’ll be free to go back to your pathetic fuckin’ life. If you don’t, I have ’bout twenty pigs who haven’t eaten dinner yet.” Zeus’s grin was wide and manic as he ripped the last bit of skin and let go of Hiccough’s hand with a flourish that had blood spraying across the table.
Hiccough was howling and whimpering now, and I was struck dumb with shock at what I’d witnessed. Zeus wiped his bloody blade on either side of Hiccough’s cheek to clean it.
I’d always known Zeus was a monster, but this made it an irrefutable fact.
I didn’t have time to process it because the brothers around me were moving, two of them carting a sobbing Hiccough between them out the back while Nova pulled out a fucking handkerchief and cleaned the blood off the table with it before putting it back in his jeans pocket.
“Meet you there,” Zeus told his brothers then turned to look at me.
I turned on my heel and fled behind the bar. It wasn’t that I was scared of him—though I was—it was that I needed the space to think about what I’d seen and how it made me feel.
Mostly, I wondered if it was wrong that I felt vengeance burn like the satisfying heat of whiskey down my throat and in my gut; that I loved the look of that fucker’s fear because it so accurately mimicked my own when his friend had leveled a gun at my face.
I was thinking these thoughts as the club emptied out, leaving Zeus and I alone.
A predator and his prey in one big cage.
“Lou, look at me.”
His voice settled over me like a cloud of marijuana smoke, sweet and heady enough to make me forget myself.
I looked at him.
He stood at the entrance to the bar, blocking my exit. I watched as he prowled toward me and I instinctively backed up until my ass hit the opposite end. His grin shone in the shadows cast by his wild mass of hair.
“You scared, little girl?”
He leaned into me, looming so close that I could feel tingles erupt over my skin just from the proximity and the threat of his touch.
“No.” I swallowed thickly.
“Do you know why I wanted you to see that shit?”
I dragged a deep breath into my lungs, caught the forest and smoke scent of him and forgot to breathe again. “To scare me.”
“To show you. This is me. This is the monster you’re so desperate to make your own. There’s no goin’ into this with eyes closed shut, Lou. I’m the kinda man, someone wrongs you, I cause him the equivalent in pain. I’m a man of loyalty and vengeance, violence and sex. Won’t make apologies for it and won’t have you romanticizin’ it. I’m an outlaw and this is an outlaw’s life. You sure you still want that?”
I hesitated, caught in the silver web of his gaze.
He wrapped his huge hand around my delicate neck and squeezed. “You want me, little girl? You want the man who’ll always right your wrongs with blood and teach you all’a the dark ways of life, includin’ how to take a cock and make it come? Who’ll tell you what to do to please him and expect you to obey?”
My eyes flashed rebelliously but I knew he felt me swallow hard against his grip.
I was terrified of him like this, a man turned volcanic with rage.
There was no getting around the sheer masculine power of his enormous frame or, beyond that, the cold intelligence that lurked at the depths of his blade-grey eyes. It didn’t help that I’d just seen him peel a strip of skin off the back of a man’s hand with his Swiss Army knife as if he was casually peeling a carrot.
Yes, I was terrified of Zeus Garro, and rightly so.
The little girl who’d been drawn to his dark spirit now understood as a woman the violent realities of it.
But that fear pooled between my thighs like a hot tide that ebbed and throbbed with the tempo of his temper.
I was a woman now and that seed of intrigue had blossomed into something darker, edgier; a desire that was watered with danger and fertilized by fear.