I Will Revel in Glory

by Stunich, C. M.

  “You understand that I want to kill your mother, don’t you?” I clarify, chucking aside a small stuffed toy from my childhood that I have literally no memory of. The words I told Cat, they weren’t just sharp weapons aimed at his heart—if he even has one—it was the bald-faced truth. “I don’t like my parents either. Most days, I’ve wished for one or the other to die. But if you told me right now that you were planning to kill Cat, I wouldn’t be sitting here calmly and working out a plan to help you.”

  Grey pauses, standing up and moving out of view. When he returns, he has a bottle of Scotch that he doesn’t bother to pour. Instead, he unscrews the cap and puts the bottle to his lips, downing several gulps in a way that concerns me.

  In this life, it’s important to stay grounded, to remember who you are, what you’re doing, and most especially why you’re doing it. I’m doing this so that I can live in relative peace in this town, with this club, with these men. That’s what I want, the chance to make my own decisions, to control the outcome of my own life.

  What about Grey? What is it, exactly, that he’s fighting for?

  “Talk to me,” I command, scooting back so that I can relax in the pillows and pretending like I don’t smell that distinct suede and violets scent of Crown. Fucking Crown. Ugh. He’s annoyed the fuck out of me for years—most of my life, actually, seeing as I can’t even remember when I first met the man—but now, some of the annoying things he does … aren’t so annoying. Or rather, they still are, but I find myself flushed when he does them, when he tells me what to do, when he tosses haughty, imperious looks my way.

  I’ve fallen. Hard. So hard that I’ve crashed to the ground and broken into bits of shattered bone and ruined flesh.

  “You know that my mother was the one who pushed for Queenie’s death, don’t you?” he asks, and I feel that old, familiar hatred digging its claws into my soul.

  “She insinuated as much,” I say, remembering the way her smile stretched across her face like a disease. “Do you think I’d ever accept the offspring of some dirty whore as my grandchild, as the heir to my husband’s throne?” That utterance alone is enough for me to want vengeance against that bitch.

  “My father didn’t care much either way. To him, we’re just pawns. For my mother, it was imperative. She didn’t want an illegitimate heir. More than that, I think it was personal for her.” Grey looks down at the bottle, like he’s staring into an amber vat full of Wolfe family secrets. “Part of that, I believe, was hurt. She wanted to inflict the same pain on Cat that he did to her. But it was something else, too. Pride, probably.”

  I just sit there and listen, letting that rage solidify into intent. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I’m going to kill Giulia Wolfe. I want that, her blood, my hands. I want to kill Alvise, and I want to look into his eyes as I do it. I want to slaughter the men who raped Posey, chop their dicks off and choke them with the severed appendages.

  That’s what I want.

  But my motives are obvious.

  “What does any of this have to do with you?” I ask, and he turns to look at me through the screen, his gaze as penetrating through time and distance as it was when we held each other before he left the compound.

  “My mother’s the one who advocated for both of us to die, you know that, don’t you? She lobbied for both of our heads. She doesn’t trust me; she’s poisoning my father against me.” Grey shrugs his shoulders and takes another swig of the Scotch. “The worst part of it all is that she’s right. She’s right, and my father is far too sentimental for his own good.”

  He frowns, and fuck if he doesn’t look like someone spiraling into the endless black of the underground. It’s going to consume him, if he isn’t careful.

  “She will never let me take over for my father. Never. So if this is what I need to do, then it’s what I’ll do. She’ll be staying in the penthouse suite with one of her lovers. Coincidentally, the man she’s fucking is the one in charge of the tactical team. Good luck for you.” Grey swigs his drink again, but it isn’t so simple as all that. He must have some feelings about this, other than thoughts of world domination.

  “It’s okay to be upset,” I tell him, and the look he throws me is awful. He’s angry with me, but I can’t decide if we’re back to me rejecting him, or if he just doesn’t like to be challenged and made to feel uncomfortable. “You can love and hate your mother both at the same time.”

  “Don’t make the mistake of thinking that I feel things the way you do.” He throws this last barb back at me as the bedroom opens and in walks Crown, handsome as shit in a white wifebeater with his black leather shoulder holsters thrown over the top. His leather cut is in his hand, and he carefully hangs it up in the closet before pausing and putting his hands on his hips while he watches me.

  I ignore him, focusing my attention on Grey instead. I’m not sure if he knows one of the men has walked into the room or not, or if it would even matter if he did.

  “What does that even mean?” I grind out, getting annoyed. “Don’t talk in circles, Grey. That’s a mafia thing. Grow some balls and say what you mean.”

  “I don’t feel in layers, Gidge. There’s one simple answer for everything: my mother is in my way, so my mother deserves to die. I don’t pine for her affection the way you pine for your father’s.”

  I laugh at that, the sound caustic and dark, and I shake my head.

  “You’re an idiot if you really believe that, Grey. You told me I was your hard line? Well, let me be exactly that for you: if you don’t acknowledge how you feel, it’s going to come back to bite you in the ass. I don’t care if it’s ten days from now or ten years from now, mark my words.”

  “I have never loved my parents,” he tells me, and that sentence reeks of dark honesty. “But I love you. I always will, and that’s my problem. Once I give love, it’s impossible to take it away.” He swigs another drink of alcohol as I frown at the screen. Getting drunk right now is not a good idea. I don’t want to lose the only friend I’ve ever had that has this dark life in common with me. “Don’t worry, though: I won’t make another pass at you. I can take sex off the table easily enough.”

  “I wasn’t concerned about that,” I tell him as Crown makes a small sound of annoyance and shakes his head. He exhales dramatically, loudly enough that I know that Grey is meant to hear.

  Grey doesn’t seem to care, ignoring Crown’s presence as if he wasn’t there at all.

  “You need to sit down and think about the motivations behind what you’re doing. Is this really all about helping me? About achieving peace without further bloodshed? Or are you just chasing revenge and power?”

  “They arrive to the casino on Friday, but I’d wait until Saturday, at the very least. It gets busy on a Saturday night anyway. If you’re careful with your hair and makeup and keep your head down, the facial recognition cameras might not catch you when you walk in. They’re positioned all over the premises, but there are gaps in the coverage.” Grey continues to drink his Scotch, ignoring my probing questions, and very clearly not in the mood to listen to any more conjecture about his emotional well-being.

  I sigh.

  We will be picking up this conversation later.

  For now …

  “Call me back from a number you don’t care about Cat seeing. I need to record our conversation and show it to him. Not that he won’t suspect we’re doing exactly what we’re doing here, but it’ll help. I need to get Reba off the compound, and I need to do it quick. Cat is sympathetic toward me, but he isn’t stupid, empathetic, or kindhearted.”

  Grey sits there for a moment, and then nods. He hangs up, calls me back, and we start our conversation all over again, but in a much more clinical way, a way that doesn’t involve feelings whatsoever.

  Crown ends up sitting on the edge of the bed as he waits for me. As soon as I finish the call and end the recording, I lift my eyes up to find his green ones watching me with a dark intensity.

  “I want nothing more
than to put you in a box and keep you on a shelf,” he murmurs, exhaling and reaching up to dig fingers into his thick, shiny hair. “The thought of you getting hurt, of dying … I can’t deal with it, Gidge. I never could. It was one of the reasons that I thought I might be able to let you go. If you’d run off and found a new life, I wouldn’t have chased you.”

  “But now I’m here, and you know my terms. Crown, I know you’re worried about me. I understand now that you’ve been worried about me all this time.” My breath escapes in a rush as I dig my fingernails into the surface of his comforter. It’s a quilt this time; it looks old, too, and I recall that Crown mentioned his mother being an antique collector.

  How odd, that once upon a time, Crown was a boy with a mom, that he wasn’t an ex-cop or a vice president or my reluctant lover. Just a kid. Did he have a proper childhood? Or did he grow up like Sin and I did? Rushed through life and thrust straight into darkness.

  “But you’re still going to demand that we take you to the casino,” he says, and I can see that he’s already plotting, already planning. He isn’t sure what to make of this tip. Once again, it could easily be a trap. Once again, he isn’t going to want me anywhere near the Triangle Lake Resort. “You understand that the final decision is up to Cat, don’t you?”

  I do, and he knows that. We’re walking a dangerous line here as it is.

  “I won’t do anything to stand against Cat—unless I have to, in order to protect you, the other guys, Reba, Fem, or Grey. Does that work?”

  The look that Crown throws me clearly says fuck no.

  “You’re impossible,” he says, but he’s got that gleam in his eyes again, the one that says that, as annoyed as he is with me, he also loves this. It’s exactly how I feel about him. It feels good to be annoyed by this man. Crown studies me and then snorts bemusedly, reaching up to rub at his face. “I love the way you look, sitting on my bed like this.”

  “Maybe you’d like it even more if you knew I wasn’t wearing any panties under this t-shirt?” I tell him, picking at the fabric of the oversized tee that I’m wearing. It’s basically a nightgown; it falls halfway down my thighs when I’m standing. But when I lean back in the pillows and move to spread my legs, Crown reaches out and grabs my knees, pushing them back together which is totally the opposite of what he should be doing. “Really? The guy who got his name from ending up drunk on a roof with a groupie sucking his dick doesn’t want to see my pretty, pink cunt?”

  Crown stands up suddenly and throws a dark look my way.

  “I never said that,” he starts, and then he’s slipping off one shoulder holster and then the other. Fem eyes the man from his position on the reading nook bench, curled into a ball with his fluffy tail resting over his nose. He’s starting to learn that we don’t need to attack the men at every given opportunity. I do still have to lock him in the bathroom in order to fuck in peace though. He doesn’t like the screams. “And anyway, the way you brought that up …”

  He turns back to look at me, a slight smile on his usually stern mouth.

  “You’re jealous.” It’s said like a statement rather than what it really is: total bullshit.

  “I’m not jealous. That’d be ridiculous.” I shrug my shoulders. “You aren’t jealous that I screwed the school quarterback, are you?” I relax back into the pillows as Crown looks me over like he doesn’t believe me.

  “Why do I doubt that a bourgeois boy like Trevone Hundley could ever excite someone like you?” he asks, slipping his wifebeater off and showing off that perfect chest and stomach. I find my eyes drawn down the length of his torso, caught on that sweet spot between his waistband and navel.

  Shit, fuck, motherfucker. What was I supposed to be doing again?

  I force my eyes up to his face, but he’s already grinning; he already knows. He’s proving a point.

  “That’s what I thought,” he says, his voice dark but tinged with that hint of playfulness that I’ve seen on rare occasions, like that day he swam in our pool for, well, shit, God only knows the reason for that.

  He was teasing me, I think.

  '“How do you know who Trevone Hundley is?” I ask, but then, that’s a stupid question. “Never mind. Don’t tell me how Cat had you creepily stalk and research everyone I was hanging out with.”

  “Mm. He only wanted to make sure none of your …” Crown trails off and then sighs. “Friends were involved with the mafia. Other than that, any stalking I did was on my own merit.” Our eyes meet, and my breath is just sucked right the fuck out of my lungs like I’ve been ejected into the vacuum of space or something.

  “You stalked my boyfriend?” I ask, choosing that word with a very specific purpose in mind. I lean fully back, elbows out behind me, legs lifted and crossed at the ankles. It wouldn’t take much to flash Crown with a perfect view of … well, everything. “That’s creepy, Calder Reid. What sort of cop are you?”

  “Not a very good one, apparently,” he says, his voice dry as he shakes his head with this low, masculine laugh that makes my skin pebble with goose bumps. “Did you know that I was hired to infiltrate DBD?” Crown slides a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and moves over to the window. He shoos Fem off the cushion without getting bitten which just blows my fucking mind.

  I’ve never seen my dog respond to a man’s command. Fem hops onto the end of the bed as easily as if he still had four legs, and then curls into a ball with a sigh of frustration. Personally, I’m just staring at Crown, my legs falling to the mattress as I sit up and then turn to face him as he pushes the window open and perches on the sill. He, of course, makes sure to kick his boots off before putting his feet on the cushion of the reading nook.

  “You … what?” I say, blinking through my surprise as Crown lights up, acting paranoid about the smoke and sitting half on the roof to keep any of it from blowing back into the room with me. I knew in the back of my mind that one of the worst parts of being pregnant would be being pregnant around these specific men.

  They’re absurdly overprotective, and now that we’ve all agreed to enter into an official relationship? Oh, it’s so much worse. Worse even, than I expected.

  “My boss was approached by a colleague from the ATF. He said he had a confidential informant who could get someone in the door of Death by Daybreak.” Crown leans his head back against the windowsill, and then looks down at this cigarette like he’s disgusted with himself. “I shouldn’t even be smoking this while you’re …”

  “Crown,” I warn, and then sigh. “I rarely see you smoke. I take it to mean that you’re stressed?”

  He sighs and stabs out his smoke on the roof tiles as I go over his statement in my head. The ATF … the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Interesting.

  “This casino bit … I don’t like the idea of it. I really don’t like the idea of Cat seeing a recorded video call between you and Grey. Once he sees that, it’s over, Gidge. He’ll have definitive proof, something beyond dashcam footage from the mafia.” Crown brings the cigarette butt inside and chucks it in his trash can in the bathroom, turning the sink on and then heating up the water so that he can wash his face.

  I’ve never seen anything like that, the asshole vice president of the club with warm water dripping down his face, strong, calloused fingers rubbing white lather across his sun-kissed skin. Shit. Heat floods my core, and I have to mentally shake myself out to stay focused. My heart beats strangely as he grabs a towel and dries himself off. He then goes about brushing his teeth which, I have to say, is even weirder.

  He has an electric toothbrush, too. Of course he does. None of the other guys do.

  I poke Fem with my foot, stroking his fur and trying to decide if he’s just getting used to Crown, or if Crown just has an authoritative tint to his voice that the dog’s responding to.

  “How did you get him to move?” I ask, admittedly more interested in that than I am with Crown’s background and history with the ATF. Someone who doesn’t live this shit day in and day out mi
ght not understand that, how I could be more fixated on the little things than the big ones.

  The thing is, when you deal with the big things on a regular basis, you realize that the reason you want to keep living is the small things. So I care about them. I care about my dog’s reaction to Crown because if they couldn’t get along, and I had to get rid of one of them, well, I’m sure it wouldn’t be the dog. My mouth twitches as Crown comes into the room and pauses at the end of the bed.

  He glances down at Fem and then shakes his head.

  “We’re working on our relationship,” Crown tells me, looking up and hooking a slight smile. “I’ve always liked dogs. I’ve never had a problem making friends with one until now.” He gives the husky another look. “You know, Cat made the decision to shoot the dog before he even mentioned it to us. He just pulled out his gun and did it.”

  “I know,” I say, my throat getting tight. “If I’d even remotely suspected any one of you of pulling the trigger, we wouldn’t be together right now.”

  Crown reaches out like he might pet Feminist, but the dog’s head comes up and he snaps at the air just as Crown retracts his fingers.

  “Too soon, huh?” he asks, and then moves over to close the window. I almost wish he’d leave it open. The rainstorm helped pull a lot of the ash out of the air, so it smells fresh, clean. I try to take that as a good sign, but then, I did look up the situation with the wildfires only to find out that the wind knocked down several power lines and started an entire new complex just south of us. “Alright, dog, right here.” He snaps his fingers and points at the reading nook cushion, but Feminist ignores him.

  “Guess that magical VP voice of yours doesn’t work on everyone.” I grin and poke Fem in the leg with my toe. “Alright, dude, off the bed. If you don’t try to bite Crown’s balls off, I won’t put you in the bathroom tonight.” I wave my hand and make a whistling sound that excites Fem into giving a dramatic yawn before he stands up; he gives a bow-like stretch with his single front leg extended in front of him, and then hops down.