by E. M. Moore
“Did you think I was going to abstain from sex while waiting for you, Kyla?” He smirks. “That’s not going to happen. I’ll be discreet. Hell, I was being fucking discreet. No one else would’ve known if you’d just stayed away. Now, all those women know what happened,” he says, pointing back inside. “If you were going to be embarrassed, you shouldn’t have made a big deal about it.”
“They knew, Johnny,” I tell him. Does he think they’re all fucking idiots? “And you think Ryn would’ve kept her mouth shut after we left?”
“She would’ve if she knows what’s good for her.” He moves toward me again, and my back hits the wall in an effort to stay away from him. “No one disrespects my girl.”
I snap my mouth shut. Is he even listening to himself? He disrespected me.
He slides his arm around me, pulling me toward him. My hips graze his and his raging erection. “You’re the one who made it known what we were doing.” He tips my head back, running his hands through my hair and tugging at the ends to expose my neck. He drops a kiss there. “Otherwise, no one would’ve been the wiser. You could’ve still had your cred. The bitch still could’ve had her dignity. I would’ve gotten off, and we would all be happy. Now I have to go in and fix this. Shut these bitches up before they spread the word to everyone in town, making you look like just another side piece. That’s not what I want. I want all these slaves to look up to you. I want them to revere you. I want them to know that if they fuck with you, they’re fucking with the Crew. I can’t do that if you blow everything for me, do you understand?”
I nod.
I don’t know what it says about me that I understand what he’s doing. I get the code they all live by. I’m not saying I agree with it. Johnny thinks he wants me, but he doesn’t. If he did, he wouldn’t fuck around on me, and he wouldn’t let his father make some lame ass rule about not touching me until he moved up.
Big Daddy K’s rule actually works in my favor, but my pride took a blow today, I guess. That’s the only way I can explain the mixture of emotions swirling inside me.
He pulls away, puts his hand through mine, and we walk back into the shop. Everyone is waiting for us near the front. Rocket takes charge, addressing Magnum. “Did anyone leave or make any calls?”
Before Magnum can answer, Lynette says, “Of course not. We would never do that.”
Ryn keeps sending me frightened looks. I kind of want to punch her in the goddamned face. It’s girls like her who make other girls crazy. What part of understanding another guy is off-limits do some women not understand?
Also, what the hell am I doing still getting caught up in this shit? I shouldn’t care he was fucking someone else.
Instead of taking Lynette’s word for it, Rocket continues to look at Magnum until he answers in the affirmative. “All clear,” he says.
“Excellent. Can you take Kyla out to the car? I’ll be out in a minute.”
Magnum nods and waits for me by the big front entrance. Outside, everything seems to be passing normally on the street. No one out there is involved in the shit going down in here. Warped senses of responsibility and rules.
So, it’s okay for him to fuck around? That’s what he’s saying. I bet it’s not the same for me. I bet if I ever touched someone else, he’d kill me.
Brawler pulling me back into his hard body earlier flits through my head. If Johnny knew that happened, he’d kill us both.
Johnny kisses my hand again, and I keep my chin up as I walk toward Magnum. He opens the door for me, and we step out onto the sidewalk. I pause for a minute as the fresh air and rays of sun hits me. I need to soak as much as I can in because I have a feeling nothing will feel as real as this does while I’m inside the Crew. Magnum moves around me to open the door. I peek up at him. “I could’ve gotten that.”
He grunts in response. He acts all moody, but he wanted me to see what Johnny was doing. Out of all of them in there, he was on my side. The girls were too scared to say anything. Ryn was obviously just looking out for herself. Everyone wants to catch Johnny’s eye.
I turn to get into the car, my head about to explode with all the different nuances of everyone’s behavior around the Crew, but Magnum’s hand on my back stops me. “Shit. You’re hurt.”
I step back and stand. “What?”
Magnum pulls my shirt away from my skin. The cotton sticks, and he has to peel it away before it finally releases.
“You’re bleeding. I didn’t notice before because your shirt’s black. Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I didn’t notice,” I tell him. Not because I’m trying to be brave because I honestly didn’t notice, but if he’s looking at the area where Johnny shoved me into the concrete blocks, there’s no wonder why I’m injured.
Magnum sighs. “Are you okay?”
“I think so?” I try to look at the wound on my shoulder, but I can’t twist far enough. “It hurts, but I can’t see it, you know?”
Magnum checks over his shoulder. “I can’t go back in there right now to get you anything. Rocket will be pissed if the women find out he hurt you.”
I give him a look. The look. The kind that says, Are you fucking kidding me? That is the most fucked up thing I’ve ever heard. Their ideas are warped.
“It’s better this way,” Magnum says. “Get in the car, and I’ll tell him when he comes out. In the meantime, there are cocktail napkins next to the alcohol cabinet. Use those to place on it.”
“I can’t see it,” I hiss. What does he want me to do? Grow a third eye on the back of my head?
We stare at one another for about thirty seconds before Magnum says, “You’re going to have to deal. I can’t touch you.”
“That’s the most asinine thing I’ve ever fucking heard. You do know what just happened in there, right? Johnny and Ryn weren’t just playing hide and seek. They were fucking. And all you would be doing is patching me up.”
“I know,” he growls. He runs a hand over his copper scruff.
God, he’s really good looking. This close, I can tell his eyes are hazel. I thought they were just brown before, but today, they’re amber with green flecks.
“If I touch you, there’s the possibility he’ll kill you and me. Is that what you want?”
I grind my teeth together. The hypocrisy of all this is pissing me off more than anything else. He can’t even touch me to help me? What if I was bleeding out? Would that be a good enough reason for Johnny to allow someone to help me? Do they have to ask permission first?
Hopefully I can persuade Brawler to train with me again, so I can get out all of this aggression I’m feeling, but for all I know, he’ll never want to do that again. After all, he touched me. And it wasn’t just because I was injured. He touched me. Because he wanted to. Because he felt a connection.
Not because I’m his property.
Magnum’s gaze lowers. I can tell he thinks this is nonsense, too, but he’s too worried about Johnny’s reaction to do anything about it. Maybe I should be too.
I blow out a breath. “Fine. I’ll be fine. No one has to worry about it.” I crawl into the car, and after a beat, Magnum shuts the door on me.
I keep my injured shoulder away from the nice leather interior but lean my head back against the seat. After I sit there for a while, the injury starts to pound. The adrenaline moving through me must’ve dulled the pain. That’s why I didn’t realize sooner that I was this injured. It’s probably a scrape. Or a cut. Or both.
Ten minutes later, Johnny exits the shop, the three girls in tow. I sit up. Through the hazy fog of the dimming package in the car, there are a lot more bags coming out than just the one that held my three outfits earlier.
What the actual fuck?
The trunk opens, and minutes later, it slams. The women move back into the shop while Magnum and Rocket talk outside until the door opens and Rocket scoots in next to me. As soon as the door shuts, he turns, his eyes filled with desperate concern. “I’m so sorry,” he says. “Let me see. I didn�
��t mean to hurt you. I would never do that.”
Someone needs to explain to Johnny that there’s more than one way to hurt people. Not all of it is just physical, it’s mental, too. It’s a good thing I don’t care about him because if some guy I did care about cheated on me like that, I would be devastated beyond reason. I wouldn’t listen to any sick sort of excuses thrown at me to try to get me to understand why it was okay for me to be cheated on.
He turns me in the seat until I’m facing away from him and lifts the back of my shirt. The divider between the front and the back starts to slide down. Rocket yanks my shirt back down over me. “Not now, Mag! Take us to Kyla’s apartment building.”
The divider starts going up before he even gets all his orders. Once we’re hidden away again, Johnny lifts my shirt with a gentle touch. He sucks in a breath once he reveals the injury. He stays there for the longest time, not moving, but bearing a hole right into me.
“I wish you would’ve told me I was hurting you.”
I try not to laugh. Like it would’ve stopped him. He needed to prove a point, and he did.
He reaches over me to grab a stack of napkins next to a bottle of alcohol tucked away in a compartment. He cleans me up, pressing gently against the cut or whatever I have there while I keep my jaw locked down. There’s no way I’m showing any sort of emotion while he’s doing this.
Finally, he starts to talk. “I know the way I do things can seem confusing. I haven’t had a chance to talk to you much after I—”
“Claimed me?” I throw out there.
He snickers like that’s such a funny way to see it, but it’s true. It’s one-hundred percent true. He saw something he wanted and he did the equivalent of a dog marking his territory. That’s what this is about.
“Yes, but I hope it’s more than that too. The world I grew up in is different from the world everyone else has. We love fiercely. Quickly. If we want something, we take it before someone else claims it.” He stops working on my wound and breathes out. His hot breath hitting my bare skin. “The way you fought did something to me, Kyla. I don’t know how to explain it, but I had to have you. And I will have you. I could tell we were meant to be together.”
In any other world, this might be the sweetest conversation ever. Except, this is the gang world and instead of professing love, Johnny’s professing a claiming. A want. A need. A desire he just couldn’t hold back.
“I promise to never throw things like what just transpired in your face. Like I explained at the store, you’ll have a role fit for a queen. People will fear you. Respect you. Love you,” he says, his voice trailing off as his fingers brush my skin. “That’s all I want. Respect is everything in the Heights Crew.”
His touch passes over my bare back and sneaks around my front. His fingers stretch out, his thumb a centimeter away from my breast. I can tell he wants to touch me. I can tell he wants to move his hand to cup me, but Johnny’s a good little soldier. He might not go against his father after all.
He drops his forehead to my spine and breathes in, his hold tightening around my midsection. “I want you to be happy here. To do that, there are only a few rules for you. Don’t ever disrespect me like you did in there.” His hand tightens again, his nails biting into me. I close my eyes through the pain, focusing on the prize at the end of all this. “You don’t disrespect the Crew, and you honor me and my family by doing what we say and knowing that it’s for your own good or for the good of others. Do you understand?”
Bile rises up my throat. Johnny will never be married to anything but the Crew, and that’s sad. He doesn’t know any other way.
“Kyla?”
I nod.
He sinks his fingers even further into my skin. “I need to hear you say it.”
“I understand,” I say quickly.
Johnny immediately releases his hold on me. “I’ll take care of you. I only ask for a few things in return.” He presses his lips against my bare skin like he hasn’t just asked me to give up myself for him. I would never be my own person with my own thoughts and feelings. Or at least have any I could act on independently. He doesn’t get that. “Hopefully, eventually, you’ll fall for me despite all of this.”
His words stop me. Just when I was thinking love didn’t come into the equation for Johnny at all, he says that. I let out a breath. My back heats at Johnny’s proximity. His fingers trail over me almost reverently. He’s an enigma. A riddle I bet he himself doesn’t even know how to solve.
He moves my shirt back down when the car comes to a stop. My ears ring from all the conflicting thoughts warring in my head, but some part of me understands that we’re at my apartment building. Vaguely, I hear Johnny telling me that he has to go to a business meeting. When he opens the door for me, I step out, blinking at the bright sun. I can’t even enjoy that I’m free. That the sun is shining. That the fresh air blows on my face. I can’t enjoy that I’m out in the real world because his words still bang around inside my head.
A strong, stern voice says, “I called ahead to have Brawler meet us.”
Just as Magnum says that, Brawler emerges from the front door of our building.
Johnny takes my hand again, kissing my knuckles. He just loves doing that. I tell myself not to pull away and not to get caught up in his gravitational pull again. Then I’m being led up the stairs and into my own apartment like I could never make it there myself.
I get out my key, but Brawler’s beat me to it. He has a replica of the key I’m searching for already in the lock and pushing the door open despite the fact that he’s also carrying every single bag from the clothing store in his hands. “What the fuck?”
Just how did he get his own key to my place?
Brawler ushers me in and slams the door behind us. He drops the bags of all the clothes Johnny’s bought me just inside the door.
The events of today have caught up with me. I’m boiling. I’m madder than mad. I’m fucking furious, and there’s nothing around me to take this out on because it’s all my own fault. This was my idea. This was my plan.
I was never big on self-loathing though. I scream out in frustration and slam my hands into Brawler. “Fuck you!”
The look he gives me in return could crack marble.
14
Brawler staggers back a few steps, surprise lighting his face.
“Fuck this!” I scream again.
I move forward to push him, but he grabs my arms, holding me in place.
“Don’t,” I say. Everything in me is telling me to lash out. I never wanted to be anyone’s property. Hell, that’s why I came here in the first place. Big Daddy K owned my thoughts. He owned everything. Day after day was just a running scene of how he took my parents from me. I’m doing this to stop that scene. I’m doing this to take back the narrative. To make my own scenes. I don’t know what they’ll be, but they have to be better than the two gunshots to the head, ending with my parents lying in a deserted, dank, gross, forgotten alley with blood running toward drains like water. Anything is better than that.
But why doesn’t it feel that way right now?
“You got yourself into this mess,” Brawler growls. It’s like he already knows what I’m thinking. I don’t even have to say it.
“Did I even have a choice? Fuck that. He just told me he claimed me. Could I have refused? Could I?”
I sound like a fucking crazy person. Maybe I am losing my mind.
“No,” Brawler says, his voice a low growl. “But if you were smart, you would’ve just taken the fall for that fight. You could’ve just kept on going in the background if that were the case. You didn’t have to knock Cherry out. You didn’t have to show everyone what you were made of. That’s on you.”
I had to do all that though. Brawler will never know, but I had to kick Cherry’s ass. It was the only way to endear myself to the Crew. In doing so, I just caught Johnny’s eye in a way I didn’t think I would.
Fuck me.
“You done?” Brawler asks.
>
I blink and finally see him. His face is flushed. He’s holding my wrists with a vise-like grip, which he immediately lets go when he sees me staring.
I take a step back. “I’m sorry.”
He takes a step back too. Shit happens when we’re next to one another. A pull. I fall back onto the armchair and let the cushions surround me.
“What the fuck happened?” he asks. Other questions simmer in his eyes too. What happened that would make me lash out like that? Why beat on him? Why not take my anger out on the person who deserves it?
Then again, Brawler knows how trapped I am. Whether he knows the reason for it or not.
I’m in, and I’m not getting out.
I eye him up and down. Brawler’s been the kindest to me so far, but can I trust him? He’s the only one who’s not in the Heights Crew, but he’s in their pocket. Is there that much of a difference?
“Listen,” Brawler says. “We’re in a world where you can’t trust people for shit, so you probably won’t trust a goddamned word that’s about to come out of my mouth, but you can trust me. I won’t run to Rocket, and I sure as fuck won’t run to Big Daddy K.”
I close my eyes. My head and my heart telling me Brawler is telling the truth, but if I fuck this up, I won’t ever get another chance like this. If they find out why I’m really here, I’ll be dead. It’s as simple as that.
“Johnny thinks he owns me,” I say.
“Did he hurt you?” Brawler growls, his muscles tensing.
I shake my head. Again, people need to understand that physical hurt is not the only way people can suffer. But it’s what we always ask. When we say, “Are you hurt?” We’re never talking about mental suffering. Never.
I’m about to tell him I caught Johnny fucking someone else, but I know how naïve that sounds. Brawler’s just going to stare at me like I should’ve known that would happen. The truth is, I should have. Their sense of right and wrong is not my sense of right and wrong. Johnny pledging an attraction for me doesn’t mean shit. Obviously.