“Thanks, prez. Thanks guys,” I tell them before I guide Jetta down the steps and out the door.
She blows out a heavy breath when we reach the front porch. “Oh my god, I’m so glad you showed up! I wasn’t sure if I would ever get to leave that place,” she admits quietly. Stopping, she turns to me and says, “Wait. How did you know I was here?”
“Because I followed the car when you left the apartment. When it started in this direction, I knew shit was going sideways because Harry isn’t a nice man. So I called your brother, and he said he made a deal…”
“Sean made a deal? What kind of deal?” Jetta asks with her brow furrowed. “No!” she exclaims. “He wouldn’t have set me up with this guy if he had known what he wanted!”
“Jetta, Sean is a gambling addict. He’s selfish and doesn’t give a shit about anyone but himself! He knew. He told me it was ‘only one night’, like that made it okay.”
“I can’t believe that he would do that,” she says, her eyes blinking back tears.
“He did. And he’s not going to get away with putting you through this shit,” I tell her as I swipe away the tears falling from each of her eyes. “What if I hadn’t been waiting outside your apartment and followed the car? What if Harry had hurt you?”
“Sean knew what would happen? What he wanted to do to me…”
“Yes!” I exclaim. “That asshole knew and knowingly put you in danger. Harry Cox is a known sex trafficker! What if he decided he was going to keep you for more than one night? Do you think your brother could’ve got you back? Fuck no!”
Jetta grabs her forehead and then shakes her head. “This is all too much right now. I just want to go home.”
“I’ll take you back to my place,” I tell her. “But you’re not going back to Sean’s.”
“Okay,” she agrees, surprising me as I expected her to argue.
“Okay? You’ve never been to my place.”
“Okay, Dev. Take me to your place and hold me until I forget everything that happened tonight.”
“Absolutely,” I agree as I take her hand and lead her down the front steps. “Just look straight ahead, though. You don’t want to see the mess we made earlier.”
“Oh god,” she mutters softly. “I’m so sorry.”
“You’re sorry?” I ask as we walk back toward the road where we all stashed our bikes. “Baby, the only person that should be sorry here is Sean.”
“But you…you had to hurt people.”
“It was worth it. You were worth it. I would’ve done anything to get you back safe and sound,” I say when I give her hand a squeeze, glad that she’s here with me.
“Thank you,” she says, stopping just long enough to lift my face shield, stand on her toes and kiss my lips. “I owe you so much for saving me. But please don’t hurt Sean. Just give him a chance to explain, okay?”
How the hell could someone go through what she went through and still not want to beat the shit out of the person responsible? That’s just how Jetta is, though — too sweet and kind for her own good. It’s also one of the things I love about her.
“Devlin?” she asks when I don’t answer.
“We’ll see,” I respond, which will hopefully be the first and only lie I tell her.
Epilogue
Devlin
* * *
“Please let me go! I’m sorry, okay?” Sean exclaims frantically as Fiasco and Silas strap him to the wooden table in the basement of the Aces’ pool hall. It’s the one we rarely use unless absolutely necessary to get someone to talk or to inflict punishment. Today is all about punishment. “I was a self-centered prick who pulled Jetta into my mess! It won’t happen again, I swear!” he practically screams. His pleas fall on deaf ears. The words of a man like this mean nothing.
“Don’t worry. I’ll let you go. First thing tomorrow morning,” I assure him. “It’s just one night, Sean. No big deal. Isn’t that what you said about Jetta?”
“I was stupid! I know that now!” he shouts.
“Too little, too late. Hand me the shears,” I say to Silas, making Sean’s eyes widen in a panic.
“Sheers! No way, man! If you lay even one finger on me, Jetta will never forgive you!”
“He’s right,” I agree with a sigh before handing the sheers back to Silas. “Will you do the honors?”
“Sure thing,” Silas agrees, opening and closing the long metal scissors.
“You see, Silas doesn’t give a shit if Jetta gets pissed at him,” I tell Sean with a grin.
“What? No! I’ll tell her! I’ll say you made him do it!”
“Dev didn’t make me do shit, you sorry son of a bitch,” Silas tells him while snapping the sheers in his face before taking off a chunk of his hair right down the middle. “Shit. I missed. I meant to take off the tip of his nose.”
“No, this is good. Let’s give him a new ‘do, you know, bald down the center with a little hair on either side like Bozo the Clown?”
“Nice!” Fiasco chuckles.
“Fuck it, let’s get some red dye and make it look exactly like Bozo,” I decide.
“You’re evil,” Silas says with a grin before he chops away more of Sean’s chestnut brown hair, making me wonder if Jetta’s natural color is the same. If so, I prefer all of her various dye jobs to the plain brown.
“I’ll go to the store and get the color,” Fiasco offers.
“Good. Get the one that stays in the longest,” I tell him before he heads out laughing.
“What should we do while we wait?” Silas asks. “Want me to cut off something else of his? Something small like a finger or toe? Maybe his fucking balls?”
Fuck that dude is dark. “Not yet,” I tell him. “Now I think it’s time for the razor. Silas, if you want, you can shave his eyebrows off.”
“Hell yeah,” he agrees with a manic cackle just as my phone begins to buzz in my pocket.
I know who is calling before I even check the screen. “Shove a rag in his mouth first,” I tell Silas, who complies with a nod.
“What? No, man! That’s fucked up!” Sean says before he’s silenced thanks to the cloth in his pie hole.
That’s when I finally answer the phone. “Hey, baby. What’s going on?” I ask my girl.
“Not much. Just lying here in your bed completely naked with a bucket of ice beside me.”
“Oh fuck,” I mutter as my jaw drops at the image and my dick twitches. “But I, ah, I thought you were working until six.”
“I was,” she replies. “Left early because I was so freaking hot. Are you going to come home and cool me off or not, Dev? I want you to rub me down with the ice, lick the water off, and then fuck my brains out.”
My girl is usually insatiable, but it’s unlike her to skip out on work for some D. No, she wouldn’t have missed work unless there was a damn good reason – like she was worried about her fucking idiot brother.