“Yeah,” she said, beaming with excitement.
You know me, don’t you? I wanted to say. You recognize me. You’re all better. I want to hold you. I want to kiss you. I want to love you.
I tugged lightly on her as I stepped forward to pull her into my arms. “I’m so happy…”
“Hey!” she cried out as she shrugged off my hand and backed away. “I’m not just some groupie that you can manhandle. I just accidently bumped into you, douche.”
“Sorry,” I said, realizing that I was losing her. “I just. You look like…”
Setting her fists on her hips she glared up at me. “Don’t you dare say that I look like any of them,” she shot at me while tipping her head to the gang of groupies. She looked me up and down. “Are you with the band?”
I silently shook my head.
“Do you know where Rob’s dressing room is?” she went on. “I’ve been wandering around and… it’s like a maze down here.”
I’d lost her again. Just when I thought that I had found the love of my life, the woman that I gave everything up for, she was lost to me again.
Worst still was having her standing right there in front of me and yet she was lost.
Shit.
She jumped up to take a better look at the crowd of groupies. “Oh!” she cried. “He is in there. He’s right there. Got to go.”
Chapter 7
Dante Black/Parker James
The shrill cries of the fans grew louder and louder. The young women were excited, and they all wanted a piece of Rob.
When his tall, gangly guitarist came out, some of the women chased after him as well. It was crazy.
Through it all, I tried to follow behind Summer. I had so much to say to her… so many questions to ask her. Or even to just stand there with her… to be in her presence. But she was quick as she winded her way through the throngs of fans and edged her way closer to Rob.
“Hey,” a petite woman said as she put her hand to my chest and looked adoringly at me. “Are you with the band?”
I smiled, but my gaze went over her head to find Summer.
“I just love everything Rob Raven does. I even love his band members. I can make you very, very happy.”
Right, I thought. In other words, you would happily go through me to get to Rob Raven.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not with the band.”
Grimacing, she walked away. “Why are you wasting my time, then?” she muttered.
I quickly turned to go after Summer again, but I bumped into a hard and uncompromising wall panel. As I looked up wondering when the wall had been put up, I found myself looking directly into Stanley’s ugly, grimacing face.
“You are a disgusting discontent,” he snarled. His hooded eyes were filled with contempt and anger.
My body tensed up and I was about to deal with him, tell him off as I tossed his aging body aside.
But Stanley took a step back and brushed his expensive suit off with disdain. “You fucking loser.” As he continued to brush off my offensive skin cells from his suit, he glared at me with such intense hatred.
He knows it’s me, I thought. Can it be? Could it be that he recognized me despite the changes I’d made? Anything was possible. Stanley had certainly seen a lot of Dante Black. On so many occasions, he’d given me little jobs, dirty jobs, deadly jobs through my father. All of the original founders in the Inner Circle did as I was one of the best assassins my age. So many times Stanley would give extra instructions for me to explain exactly how he wanted a guy killed.
He liked it gory. He liked it bloody. And he liked photos. The messier the better. When the technology arrived, he even wanted to watch on his phone.
He was a pig.
But I was just a kid then. I was just a athletic, but skinny kid with short jet black hair and big green eyes. I’d shown photos of the old me, Dante Black, to Ace to see if he could find similarities.
In addition to the longer, silver hair and dark blue eyes, the bulk that I had added to my frame had done a lot to change my appearance.
“I would never think this was you,” Ace had said as he’d looked back and forth at the old photo of me and of the newly minted me standing right in front of him.
But now, as I looked into Stanley’s murderous gaze, I felt certain he’d seen through my new identity.
Shit.
While I had done a lot of dirty jobs for all the members of the Inner Circle, Stan was the worst. He always had someone that he wanted taken out.
Here was the man who had sent me to kick a guy’s head in because the poor guy had infringed on Stan’s territory.
Here was the man who had made me kill a fifteen year old kid who had stupidly dared to stand up to Stan. The only reason Stan wanted him dead was to prove a point. His way of telling all the other guys out there not to fuck with him.
Stanley knew I had a mechanical heart. He knew I was cold. He knew that I had no empathy for my victims. He knew that snapping a man’s neck was no different to me than snapping a twig.
Even when he had asked me to snuff out the blond bimbo that he’d banged, I had no issues, no hesitation. The unfortunate woman had chosen to threaten to go to Stanley’s wife with compromising photos of her and Stan in bed together.
Clearly, she’d had no idea who she was really dealing with.
Even when a young woman came forward to say that she was having Stan’s baby, she suddenly went missing.
It was unfortunate that she had chosen to ignore Stanley’s warning. He had given her the chance to simply disappear of her own accord. But she pushed him to deal with her, which meant hiring me to get rid of her.
And now, here I stood before this man who seemed ready to throttle me. Then suddenly, he pushed me out of his way with a huff and headed straight into the crowd of excited fans.
For a few seconds, Stanley stood head and shoulders above the crowd of women, but a group of male fans were allowed in, and I lost sight of him.
Instead, I saw Ace emerge from the circle of fans, his eyes wide with terror.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Ace said as he came running up to me. He grabbed my shoulders and spun me around.
“What’s going on?”
“Don’t know, but it doesn’t smell good,” Ace said as he pushed me forward.
I glanced behind me to see a handful of Stanley’s goons coming after us.
“What the hell did you do?” I cried out to Ace as we ran down the hall.
“Nothing,” Ace called out to me. “I was having a chat with Rob. I was flirting a little bit with all the pretty ladies. Nothing wrong. Nothing offensive. Nothing. Then, out of the blue…”
The big, burly men weren’t too fast on their feet, but we still weren’t able to shake them off. As we came to a crowd of stadium workers, we pushed through, hoping to lose sight of the goons.
“Damn it,” I said through clenched teeth. “You fucking blew our cover. You had to. Why else would they be on us?”
We rounded a corner and found ourselves in a small and quieter corridor. There were a few technicians walking around with clipboards and comparing notes.
“I swear,” Ace said, catching his breath. “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t say anything. I was the perfect fan. It was the perfect cover. I even told Rob what my favorite songs were. I even sang one of his lesser known songs to him. He knew I was a fan. I had to be to know that song. No one knows that fucking song.”