The leader looks at her for a second, like he’s trying to figure out how to handled her so she doesn’t lose any more of her cool and do something he’ll regret. He might not be as dumb as I first pegged him to be, I’ll give him that, but what he lacks in knowledge of Priest is going to be his down fall in this situation.
“Okay, Priest, do you-” he starts, but she looks at me, dismissing him completely. She nods her head at the apartment door, ever so slightly, and I start making my way through the mass of bodies crowding her small apartment. She really needs to move out of these slums, both Cobra and I have been telling her this, but she refuses to leave the girls behind.
“I don’t really care what you all plan to do, I got information to acquire,” she says as she gets to the door, my large frame standing ready for her word just to the side of the door.
Rosary is on Priest heels, and Priest grabs her leash she keeps on the hook beside the door.
Cobra and her father are staring at each other, some silent battle going on in the energy around them, and the remaining for seem like they don’t know what to do, like dogs pulled between two masters.
“Boss,” I can’t tell who says it, but it gets his attention, like he just remembered they are there. He flings his hand toward the door, silently commanding them to follow Priest, but she hasn’t stuck around as she’s already making her way done the stairs of her apartment, Rosary happily wagging her tail.
I beat them to the stairs and it feels like a victory, knowing I have no second leash binding me to anyone else.
Cobra knows I only listen to him out of respect…for her. Priest has been the center of my world since the moment Lene had seen me hanging around the apartments they’d lived in, my body nothing but skin and bones at seven because my mother couldn’t be bothered to buy food…crack taking a higher priority than anything else in her world.
Lene had taken one look at me, mumbled something under her breath and had taken me inside and fed me, Priest eyeing me with interest at five years old. After I’d inhaled most of my food, she’d looked at her mom and said, “Can Bones and I go play?”
I’ve refused to answer to any other name since, most people thinking I’d earned it in some sort of crew fight. Angel doesn’t even know my real name.
Priest opens the trucks passenger side door, letting Rosary hop in before climbing in herself, her face stiff. It’s easy to tell she’s still pissed, but knowing her it’s more than just about Cobra, and her father.
I climb into the driver’s seat, but I wait for the four men to climb into their SUV, and then wait a few minutes more as I see Cobra and her father making their way from her apartment, and she remains quite, occasionally petting Rosary like she’s trying to soothe the rage inside, but even those attempts are halfhearted.
Once I start driving though, it’s like the closer to our destination the more her thoughts unravel.
“Who just invades someone’s home like that,” she questions, “like, who in the hell just thinks it’s a good idea to do a little B n’ E on their long lost daughter’s home.”
I glance over at her as I take a right turn nearing the old warehouse, “an old time mafia man?”
“And that, he’s old mafia…something’s going to go down, and Bones,” she says, looking me directly in the eye, as she rubs Rosary’s flank, “ I don’t like it.”
I nod, “ I don’t like it either Priest, but like always,”
She cuts me off, “crew sticks together, I know,”
I don’t correct her, I don’t tell her that I’ll follow her regardless of the crew, that while crew was blood in and blood out, my loyalty to her was beyond blood, if I was a religious kind of guy I’d say it was soul deep or some shit but that’s too fucking touchy feely for me.
The moment that I pull up to the warehouse, Priest is out of the cab, and opening the back of the truck. The roofie guy and his men would be smart to cut the bullshit and get to the point, but with how hard it took for him to get the lesson in Misfits I doubt the leaders ability to realize that he’s dealing with someone completely out of his league.
But Priest will show him.
I watch from outside of the truck, fighting the urge to pull the men out of the back, but I’m already able to hear Priest bitching me out if I did. That’s one thing I know more than anything else, Priest is fiercely independent, sometimes to her own downfall.
I still get pissed off thinking about how she just left Cobra and I out of the loop when she went after that guy attacking the strippers. Even now, I have no idea how she managed to sneak out of the townhouse Cobra owns, with both he and I living there, and none of us the wiser until we get the frantic call from Burty, the smarmy bastard.
He’d called, scared shitless that Priest had gotten herself killed. She hadn’t walked away from that altercations scar free, and she probably would have gotten it worse in the ring from Cobra if I hadn’t stepped in.
He wasn’t pissed that she’d played vigilante, honestly I think he’s actually proud of her for taking justice into her own hands. Cobra was pissed that she’d been stripping, and not to sound like a masochistic asshole, I was pissed about that too.
She’s a smart woman, Lene had gone through hell to see to that, but sometimes she views the world through this innocent lenses, that everything she’d witnessed as a kid from the slums should have robbed from her, but somehow she’d managed to hold on to it like shards of a broken mirror.
So at the time, she was just worried about the girls, and doing her best to protect them the best way she knew how, but as Cobra and I had quickly realized, she seems to have a skewed sense of self preservations. It never crossed her mind that she wouldn’t win in that fight, never crossed her mind that anyone could have decided she was a great target for the sex trafficking ring that was running rampant at the time. All that mattered was taking care of the girls, and while that can make a strong leader, it’s something I and Cobra have been working on.
She grabs Vin, the leader up by his fancy shirt collar, not chocking him because he’s taller than her by a few inches, but enough for her to show him that if she wants to she will handle him like she had at the bar.
“How mad do think she’s going to be?” Cobra asks, her supposed father following closely behind him, both trying to act like they aren’t interested in what she’s doing with her pray.
And that is exactly what they are, whether they realize it or not, she could have been named Komodo Dragon, once she’s taken a bite out of you, even if you escape the killing blow, she will hunt you down and get what she wants from you, her tenacity knows very little bounds.
“Honestly, Cobra?” I ask, looking at the man beside him who looks like the woman in question.
“Speak freely Bones, Alonzo might have tried to kill me, but he’s not going to do anything to get on her bad side now,” he says all confidently, letting me know that Cobra isn’t afraid of Alonzo Conti, not that I expected him to be.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if she doesn’t try to take your balls for this,” he grimaces, understandably, but I continue, “You of all people know how she feels about lies among family, don’t be shocked if she torches your Cobra…” at the mention of his prized car he visibly pales, “I’m both glad you never told me and pissed that you lied to us for years.”