At the time, it didn't feel as wrong, as skeezy as it did looking back. It didn't occur to me that gratitude shouldn't have to involve spread legs or an open mouth whenever Eman wanted it, even if I didn't. I hadn't known enough about the world to know that he had been using me, grooming me.
I just knew I wasn't so cold.
I wasn't starving.
And so long as I did what Eman wanted, no one was slapping me around.
It was better than the streets.
Or so it seemed at first.
And Eman's friends and him got it in their heads to start dealing in guns.
They compiled a nice little arsenal stealing from other low-level bangers in the area, wanting a big supply before they started getting their name out there to other organizations.
Then it happened.
Eman decided I wasn't just his plaything anymore. He wanted me to welcome everyone else with spread legs too.
"Fucking bastard," Roderick hissed, knuckles going white on the wheel while I fed him the ugly details of my young life.
"It didn't get that far," I assured him. "I might have been young and naive, but I wasn't completely spineless."
I plied Eman with drink after drink, let him have me one last time, waited until the booze made him too tired to function, then I carefully packed my stuff. I learned my lesson from the last time though. I didn't just pack my clothes. I packed the stacks of cash Eman had sitting around, some of his prized watches and chains. Then I tiptoed down the halls, going into the garage, and grabbing a bag of his guns as well.
"I had no plans on dealing the guns," I told him, shaking my head. "I think I was just thinking of them as protection, knowing there was no way Eman would let me get away with stealing from him, making a fool of him."
I hadn't needed the guns, though.
By the next afternoon, I was a state away. The next day, another state was between us. Until I was as far east as I could go, and there was no way Eman could find me.
"What did you do when you hit the city?" Roderick asked.
"I stashed the guns in a storage unit in the apartment building I started living in. And went straight. Got jobs. Got my GED. And then I met Vasily.
Vas.
The Russian arms dealer.
He came into my diner, sitting at the counter, drinking bitter coffee that he spiked with vodka while I pretended not to notice.
And then some frat guy asshole who had been sitting next to him grabbed my ass as I walked past, startling me, making me drop my entire tray.
Before my boss could even come out to scream at me - me, not the frat guy asshole - Vas grabbed the guy's forearm, pinned it to the tabletop, and slammed his mug down onto the jerk's hand.
Bones cracked.
Screams followed.
And then my boss came out, yelling at me as expected.
"You," Vas said, pointing a giant hand at me. "You don't work here no more," he added in an accent so thick that I found him hard to fully understand. "No more. You have jacket?" he asked, waving a hand at my somewhat skimpy robin's egg blue waitress dress. "You," he added, turning to my boss. "You give her money," he demanded, not taking no for an answer until my boss took the money out of his own pocket, shoving it at me. "We go," Vas said as sirens got closer. "Now. We go now."
And, not having a whole hell of a lot of choice, I followed him out and into his sleek sports car.
I let him take me back to his apartment, so upscale that made me worry I might get my cheap all over his expensive furniture.
"Why you work there?" he asked, pouring me straight vodka without asking if I even liked it.
Vas was good looking in an older, very rough way, tall, wide, with a nose made crooked from one too many breakings. His skin was a bit ruddy around his cheeks, but his dark hair was full, his jaw strong, and his deep blue eyes wise.
"Because I needed money," I told him, shaking my head, trying not to be intimidated in all my twenty-year-old uncertainty about the whole situation. "To pay bills," I added when he simply stared at me, uncomprehending.
"You need money when men grab your ass? Why not work at strip club then?"
"I don't want men to grab my ass. But my boss. My former boss would fire me if I made a big deal about it."
"It is big deal, no? To be touch without permission?"
"It is," I agreed, finding myself almost misty-eyed, and horrified by that.
"Then no more. You work for me."
"Oh, ah, I'm not some kind of..."
"As maid. You clean. I see you clean at diner. You clean here," he invited, waving a hand around his massive space. "What you make a week?"
"About four-hundred."
"Four-hundred. I double it. Yes?"
And, really, was there any choice to be made?
"Yes."
"So Vas was an arms dealer?"
"He was an importer," I clarified.
I hadn't known that at first, of course. All I knew was he was rich, he paid me well to simply clean his apartment, and he never put his hands on me. Or let anyone who visited put theirs on me either.
It was safe.
Comfortable.
And after four years of anything but those things, it was welcome.
Even when I started to see things, notice things. Things I was wise enough to recognize as criminal.
Guns.
Stacks of cash.
Fake passports.
And I finally understood why there was a locked guest room I wasn't allowed to clean, a room that had a lock that could only be opened by a key Vas wore around his neck.
"I worked for him until I was twenty-three," I told Roderick, body flooding with a nostalgia I had forgotten all about. so much had happened. It was easy at times to forget the good times, the easy times.
"What happened?"
"I hurt my ankle falling off a ladder to clean his top shelves. It was just a sprain, but Vas didn't want me to have to walk all the way to the subway to go home. But he had a quick stop first."
"A drop," Roderick guessed.
"Yeah," I agreed, letting out a long breath, feeling the sting of pain, fresh as it had been that day.
He'd left me in the car parked at the corner of the street. He'd gotten a bag out of the back.
Then he walked to meet a trio of men.
He hadn't even gotten within ten feet of them before the gunshots rang out.
I remembered the way his body jolted - his massive, seemingly unshakeable body - jerked as each bullet ripped through his flesh.
The men grabbed his bag and scattered before his body even hit the ground.
the windows were up in the car.
I was a block away.
I couldn't hear it when he hit.
But I felt it.
The impact.
Somewhere deep inside of me.
I didn't think in the moment. I threw the door open, flying down the street, dropping down beside his body, tears streaming, begging him to hold on.
"No cry," he demanded, hand raising even as blood slipped from between his lips and I knew he was dying. "No cry. You made life brighter," he told me, chest starting to rattle, throat starting to choke on his own blood. "Take it," he demanded to me, tone almost desperate. "Take it all."
Those had been his last words to me, his life draining away with one godawful, horrific death rattle.
My entire body was shaking, tears streaming.
"What did he mean?" Roderick asked.
"I didn't know right at first, until I moved his hand which he had put to his chest. But it wasn't his chest. It was covering the key around his neck. He wanted me to take everything. Before his bosses got wind of his murder, I imagine."
And with little other choice, I pulled the key as the sirens got close, getting back into his car, driving it back to his place, letting myself into an apartment I knew I would never see again, a place that had been a refuge for me.
And I walked down the hall to the locked room, slipping in the
key, opening the door.
Finding the guns.
Finding the cash.
Everything I would need to get started.
"So you did."
Taking a deep breath to push back the bad memories, I nodded. "Yes, I did."
"Was Vas a... boyfriend?" Roderick asked, tone careful.
"No. No. It was never anything like that. I think he was... lonely. Being so far from home, not able to make any contacts in case they stab him in the back. I think he just liked having a friendly face around. Like a friend or a sister or something, never anything even remotely romantic. He was just... a good man who needed company."
"Getting started was rough, hm?" he asked, reaching to turn down the volume on the GPS.
"After Vas? Yes," I told him honestly. "Let's face it. Gun running is - as a whole - a boy's club. No one wanted to take me seriously."
"What is this from?" he asked, pulling to a stop at a red light, reaching over to snag my chin, turning my face, then running a fingertip down the scar on my jaw, one that met me in my reflection every morning, reminding me never to let down my guard.
"My first deal," I admitted, trying to ignore the way that my belly fluttered at his soft touch.
Was there anything more shocking than a soft touch from a rough man?
"Don't want to talk about it?" he asked, having to release me to keep driving, making me oddly wish we were having this conversation somewhere stationary. So his hand could stay there. Or, better yet, move on, find other delicious places to touch.
"Ah, no. It's fine. Just me being green, naive, a bit too excited to get going in this new career path with no actual training, no way to defend myself. I made a contact with a member of some low-level street gang for a few AKs that I had from Vas along with a couple of the guns I had stolen from Eman all those years before, kept stashed in my storage locker. They decided they didn't want to pay what we had agreed on beforehand. I refused to back down. The leader pulled out a knife to do this," I told him, waving toward my face. "And attempted more. But I kept a souvenir from Vas - one I kept tucked in my waistband."
"You killed him?"
"Honestly? I don't know. I double-tapped and hauled ass."
"Did that need stitches?"
"Maybe it would have healed better had I gone to get some," I mused, shaking a head at my paranoia back then, terrified that somehow someone might figure out how I really had gotten the injury, and then I would have been hauled off to jail or something.
It was amazing the things you believed when you didn't know any better.
"You want to stop for lunch?" Roderick asked, letting my story rest for a while. It had been the longest I had spoken in a long time, the most details I had maybe given anyone before, save for maybe Cam who simply never had a way to interrupt me, I imagine.
"Lunch sounds good," I agreed.
The rest of the drive was less tense, conversation easier, though not quite as personal. We talked of little things. Like what our homelands had been like. Mine, Mexico. His, Puerto Rico. About coming to America. About how it was impossible to find decent empanadas or burritos in any restaurant in the States.
It was dark out when we finally made it into Virginia, getting to the hotel Astrid had texted to tell us she had gotten reservations for us just a few minutes later.
And it took about three minutes from there to figure out that Astrid had - yet again - attempted to fuck with us.
She'd gotten us one room.
And the lady at the front desk told us with a sorry head shake that there were no other rooms available, something that made Roderick fight to hold back a smile.
"She thinks I need to get laid," I told him as we unlocked our door, figuring it was best to clear the air, get the elephant out of the room and all that.
"And she thinks I'd be the man for the job?" he asked, and damn that smirk of his, bringing out his dimples. Never before had I been a fan of the darn things, always finding them boyish. But on Roderick, those boyish marks were somehow, well, sexy.
"She gets these... ideas in her head," I said, sidestepping the question as we moved into a room dominated by a king-sized bed covered in creams and champagnes, taunting us, I felt. Or maybe that was just my libido talking.
"And follows through with them," Roderick agreed, taking my bag from my hands, putting it inside the closet with his.
"That's my Astrid alright."
"She's a good kid. A handful, I'd imagine, but well-intentioned."
"So, do you think this meeting is going to be worth our time?" I asked, moving away from the bed to look out the windows. At the lovely view of the parking lot.
"I don't think he's going to have the Double Trigger, but if he has the Eagle then we can't complain too much. That is two of them out of the way since you still have the Howdah."
"True," I agreed, inwardly worried about the Double Trigger, the one that had been impossible to find in the first place, the whole reason I had needed to steal from Roderick to begin with.
"And maybe by the time we get back to the city, Astrid and Cam will have made some progress on the last one. There's still time."
"Is Reign pissed at me?" I asked, having secretly harbored the worry for a few weeks in secret.
"For stealing from us?" he clarified. "Nah. I mean, he's not happy to be out a gun, to have a pissed off client, but he's always been the kind of man to understand everyone else's hustle. You had to do what you had to do. Now he has to do what he has to do."
"And if we don't find the gun in time?"
"Honestly," he started, sitting down on the foot of the bed. "I don't know. But that's my problem."
"How is it your problem when I was the one who stole from you?" I demanded, annoyed for him on principle. "And, not to split hairs, but he was the one to send you there alone, wasn't he? No backup."
"It was still my job to make sure we made the drop, to protect the goods, to keep the client happy. That was on me. I failed at all three. Which makes it my fault in his eyes."
"You wouldn't... get kicked out for this, would you?"
"Honestly, I don't know. No one has fucked up like this since I have been a member, so I'm not sure how this is handled. Just an ass kicking or some kind of re-prospecting period or what..."
"I think you got pain enough for it," I mused, walking over to touch the material covering his forearm, shocking back a bit when he flinched. "Does it still hurt? Shouldn't it be healed by now?"
"I forgot to pack my new batch of antibiotics," he admitted, reaching to roll his sleeve up, peeling back the fresh gauze he had rolled on before we had left the city. "The first ones weren't cutting it."
"Dog saliva is pretty filthy," I agreed, moving closer, trying not to let the worry show on my face at the very red gash down his arm still. It should have been mostly healed, on its way to getting the stitches out, not sore and angry looking.
"You can say it," he said, giving me a small smile. "It looks pretty bad."
"The antibiotics, are they oral or topical?"
"Oral."
"Time for something topical then," I told him, going to grab my wallet out of the side of my bag.
"Where are you going?"
"To get something for your arm before it gets gangrenous and has to be chopped off. I mean, how can you ride a bike with one arm missing, right?" I asked, rushing out the door.
I was browsing the supplies at the closest pharmacy when my phone rang.
"You're never allowed to be in charge of setting up the reservations ever again," I greeted Astrid.
"Oh, stop. You know you are already all a-flutter at the idea of being in bed with that yummy piece of man meat."
"A-flutter?" I repeated, tossing another couple things into my handcart.
"In your lady business," she clarified and I could hear the smirk in her voice.
"There is no fluttering."
"You liar."
She perhaps knew me too well.
"Where are you that he's not around?
"
"Getting some stuff to treat his arm with. It's not healing right."
"Oh, look at you. Getting your nursemaid on. That is some fun foreplay if I ever heard of any before. You gonna put on a white dress and fishnets while you do it?"
"Stop. Poor Camden is probably having a heart attack with all that talk."
"Don't worry. He's my next project. Once I know you've gotten some."
"How is the search coming?"
"There have been a few leads actually. I should have more pinned down by the time you're back. But no rush. Enjoy all that bed time with Roderick!" she called, hanging up before I could say anything more.
Picking up some last minute snacks in case I was up all night and hungry, I headed back to the hotel, now more acutely aware of the lady business fluttering as I opened the door to find that while I was gone, Roderick had showered.
Meaning he was standing there with his back to me... shirtless, his pants hanging down low on his hips.
Astrid was wrong, though.
It wasn't fluttering.
No, this was definite pre-orgasm tightening.
And then, oh, and then, he turned.
I'm not sure there was a word for the shock that moved through my system, making my knees go a bit wobbly, making me slam back against the door.
Because, well, damn.
A low, whimpering sound escaped me, making his head cock to the side a bit, a confident smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.
"Want me to cover up?" he asked, sounding like he had no intentions of doing so no matter what my answer might be.
"This is, ah, distracting," I told him, trying to keep my eyes from wandering down the deep indents of muscle, the way his Adonis belt disappeared into the waistband of his pants.
"Distracting from what, mami?"
Oh, God.
He was doing this on purpose.
He had to be, right?
"To, ah, treating your arm," I remembered, waving one of the bags up at him. "I have some stuff to pour over it, so we might be better off doing it on the sink. Over," I rushed to corrected, unable to keep eye contact. "Over the sink," I tried, voice calmer.
"We'll just look past that Freudian slip," he agreed, turning to move back into the still steamy bathroom, standing beside the sink, waiting for me. "What do you got?"
"Well, to start, some witch hazel. My grandmother always used it on my cuts as a kid," I told him, putting the bottle down on the counter.
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