Respect

by Jay Crownover

  He dipped his chin in acknowledgment and started toward the apartment. Ari sniffed loudly and called out, “He’s gone. He took off when I called Karsen. I don’t think he meant to hit me. He seemed as surprised as I was. I’ve never seen him so angry.”

  Booker watched her for a second, then turned on the heel of his boot and headed toward the apartment anyway after asking which number was Troy’s. When he got to the front of the building, the outside lights slashed across his face, highlighting that long, white scar. I heard Ari suck in a shocked breath and her hands tightened around mine. My fingers twitched at the pressure, and I couldn’t meet her eyes when she quietly demanded, “Is that him? Karsen! That’s him, isn’t it? The guy from back home who broke you, that’s him.” The last part wasn’t a question.

  I groaned and closed my eyes briefly. I should have known Troy would run. He wasn’t the kind of guy who stood his ground. He didn’t have confrontation and fight hammered into him like the men from the Point. He was scared, another emotion the men I was familiar with didn’t know much about. Fear was foreign to them, unless someone they loved, or felt responsible for, was in danger.

  I nodded jerkily, forehead bumping into her temple. “That’s him. He showed up right after you left. I punched him in the face.” Suddenly my initial reaction didn’t seem as appropriate, considering the violence Ari had been through tonight. “When you called, I kind of lost my mind and forced him to come with me. I wanted Troy to get a taste of his own medicine.” I blew out a breath and took a step away from her. “Sometimes it feels like I never left home. The things that make sense there don’t make sense anywhere else. I think I would’ve gone off the rails if Booker hadn’t shown up. I would be the one hunting Troy down and trying to pull his testicles out through his nose. I forget how easy it is for that violence and need for revenge to rise up inside of me. But when I saw Booker, it was like being yanked back in time. I knew he would take care of Troy so I wouldn’t have to. I could be mad and get vengeance but keep my hands clean. Everything I’ve done, all the changes I thought I’d made these last four years vanished.” So had the woman I thought I was, or at least the one I thought I was becoming.

  Ari sniffled again and lifted her shirt so she could wipe at her face. All she succeeded in doing was smearing the mess around even more. “Why is he here? Why now?”

  “He said he’s waited long enough.” I had no clue what he meant, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  Ari looked skeptical but she didn’t say anything as Booker made his way back toward us, phone pressed to his ear. “If I give you a number, can you get me a location on a cell phone?” His eyes were on us, but his attention was on whomever was on the other end of the phone. He grunted and rolled his eyes. “Come on, boy genius, it’s not like I’m asking you to hack into the NSA.” He grunted again and made an impatient gesture with his hand. “I know you could do it, that’s not the point. I need to find someone sooner rather than later. Can you help me out or not?”

  He listened quietly for a minute, then looked up at Ari. “Give me the guy’s phone number.”

  Ari rattled off a string of numbers and Booker repeated them into the phone. He listened intently for a minute, then told the person who was on the other end, “Thanks, man, I owe you one.” He chuckled but there wasn’t any humor in it. “I’ll try to stay alive long enough to repay you.”

  It would’ve been a joke coming from anyone else; from Booker, those words were serious. He was never sure he was going to be around long enough to return that favor—much less any favor—that he called in. I wished the thought of something bad happening to him didn’t make me weak in the knees, but it did. It also had my breath whooshing out through my teeth.

  Booker ran his gaze over both of us and turned his attention to me. “Take her home. Put some ice on her face and call the movers coming for your stuff tomorrow. Let them know you’ll pay double if they pick up her stuff from here after they’re done with your place. I’m going to track this kid down and make sure he understands it’s not okay to knock around someone who loves you.” His eyes shifted to Ari and I wanted to scream when they softened as they took in her battered face. That look was supposed to be reserved for me. “I would call your brother. It’s going to be easier coming from you than it will be if someone else fills him in.”

  He shifted and moved to walk away when I suddenly realized he didn’t have a car. “Booker.” I stumbled over my words when he paused to look at me over his shoulder. Gone was the remorseful man full of platitudes and apologies. In his place was the man I’d fallen in love with so long ago. In front of me stood a stone-cold killer. “You don’t have a car.” It was dumb, but so was everything that came out of my mouth around this man.

  “Don’t need one. I’ll be in touch when shit is handled. You both need to figure out where you’re going from here. Don’t worry about anything beyond that right now.” He nodded, and before I could argue or say anything else, he disappeared into the shadows and blended into the night.

  I exhaled slowly and realized Ari was making the same sound. Her eyebrows were lifted, practically to her hairline, as she whispered, “No wonder you never got over him.”

  I sighed and pushed at the loose strands of my hair that fell forward and stuck to my face. “Yeah. He’s pretty hard to forget.”

  She snorted and tried to hold back a giggle that was slightly hysterical. “He’s scary hot, and, to be honest, just plain scary.”

  Funny, I’d never been afraid of him until he showed up at my apartment a couple of hours ago; I was terrified of all the things he still made me feel. “You don’t need to worry about him . . . but Troy sure as hell does. Let’s get out of here and make a plan. As of tomorrow, we’re both technically homeless.”

  Ari groaned and wrapped her arms around herself. “Dom is going to be so disappointed in me. I’m supposed to be making better choices than this now. He’s not supposed to have to take care of me anymore.”

  I helped her into the front seat and tucked her suitcase into the back. Once I was back behind the wheel I told her, “I don’t think the people who love us ever stop doing everything in their power to protect us.”

  And that’s how I knew Booker never felt about me the way I felt about him.

  It didn’t matter how many bullets he took for me or how many times he’d saved me. He didn’t protect my heart when I was ready to hand it over. It was the one part of me I’d trusted him to keep safe when I handed it over to him, and instead, he ended up being the biggest danger to it.

  It was a good thing I’d learned over the years to protect not only myself but also my heart. I was never going to be so reckless with my love and my fragile heart again.

  Booker

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Booker. The apartment isn’t leased to anyone named Troy. The name on the lease is a corporation. All the paperwork makes it look like the apartment is used for business. I can’t find a single ‘Troy’ attached to anything you’ve given me. Even the phone tracks back to a corporation.” Stark sounded as frustrated as I felt. He was a man who was used to being able to answer the questions no one else could. “I can’t find anything useful on the corporation either. It’s a maze of offshore holdings and shell accounts. Nothing is tracing back to an actual human being.” He swore and I heard the click of keys on the other end of the line. “Whoever set this up is good. If there isn’t a back door I can find, then whoever put these pieces in place was a pro and knew exactly what someone digging around in their business would be looking for. They obviously don’t want any roads leading back to them.”

  I looked at the phone in my hand. It was a burner. One you paid for minutes on, completely untraceable, and mostly useless. The GPS Stark pulled on it led me to a dive bar on Pearl Street. There were no less than five hundred college kids rotating between the various bars and restaurants that lined the busy street. There was no way in hell anyone would have noticed another student slipping inside and ditching a phone
in the bathroom. My skin felt too tight and there was an itch of awareness on the back of my neck that kept my shoulders tense and a scowl on my face. None of this was adding up to a scared kid who lost his temper with his girlfriend because she was moving too fast for him.

  “Karsen said the guy gave her the creeps. That he latched on the first day of school and she couldn’t shake him loose. She might’ve been out of the Point for a minute by then, but she will always have instincts honed from growing up in a virtual warzone. None of this is sitting right with me.”

  Stark made a noncommittal sound and continued to pound on the keyboard. “I pulled all the enrollment records from CU and I’m shooting them over now. There are several Troys, three of them registered for computer science and computer engineering majors. Might be a place to start. I’ll ask Noe to look into the corporation the apartment is leased under. She might have more luck digging into where the money’s coming from.” His tone indicated he believed his pretty, equally brilliant girlfriend could do anything. She was magical in his eyes, and in reality, she was something pretty damn close to it.

  Snowden Stark was a literal computer genius as well as a savant. He was the smartest man I’d ever met, and one of the most dangerous. We’d gotten close when he’d run into trouble with the former elected officials in the Point, which landed his girl in some hot water. Stark was always a mystery, cold and hard to read. But when Noe Lee, his perfect match in every way, got abducted and tortured, it woke something up in the almost robotic hacker that finally allowed those of us who wanted to be on his side to be there for him. I had his back when he needed it, and he had mine. He was the closest thing I’d had to a true friend since getting out of prison.

  “I’ll have Karsen and her friend look through these guys and see if they can pick our boy.” I tapped my fingers on the abandoned phone and tried to work my way around the why of this kid putting so much effort into not being found. The only reasonable answer I could come up with was that ‘Troy’ isn't who he claimed to be, and he didn’t want anyone finding out who he really was. It wasn’t good. Someone burying who they were so deeply this close to Karsen made me twitchy and had my fingers curling into a tight fist around the dead phone.

  “How is Karsen? I bet she’s a force to be reckoned with now that she’s all grown up. She was always kind of a baby badass, as much as it drove Brysen and Race nuts.” The question was innocent enough. Stark couldn’t know it was like a punch to my gut. Stark and Noe were the ones who kept me up to date on all Karsen’s comings and goings over the last few years. I’d begged, made a fool of myself, owed them endless favors, in order to get them to agree to keep tabs on the girl whom I was responsible for running out of town. In the end, Noe was the one who eventually took pity on me by setting up surveillance, calling me a lovesick fool. I didn’t deny it. Couldn’t deny it.

  I wanted to tell him she’d come into her own, she was indeed a force, a woman secure in who she was and her purpose moving forward. But she wasn’t. The Karsen who existed here in all the fresh air and sunshine was a mere shadow of the girl who ran away from home. She was lost, listless, and looking for something, anything, to grab onto. Most of her fire had been snuffed out by easy living and monotonous days. Safety and security had dulled all her shiny, sharp edges and I hated it. Hated I was the one responsible for smoothing her out and polishing her into a porcelain doll that only moved the way she was supposed to, and not the way she wanted to.

  I snorted and walked out of the bar, sidestepping a girl who didn’t look old enough to drink and a guy who looked like a linebacker. The girl’s jaw dropped when she caught sight of the rough side of my face and she blinked at me like an owl. It was a common reaction. The unscarred side of my face was easy to look at. I’d been a good-looking kid before getting locked up. The scarred side was shocking to some, but never to Karsen. Even when she was a bratty teenager, she’d never done more than skim her eyes over the mark I couldn’t hide, a leftover remnant from my misspent youth. I wore my ugly history and bad choices on my face for everyone to see, but Karsen didn’t bother looking at the very thing I always believed defined the man I was.

  “She’s doing all right. She can’t decide where she’s going or what she wants to do with the rest of her life now that school is over. She wasn’t very happy to see me.” I couldn’t keep the grin out of my voice when I remembered the fire in her eyes as she coldcocked me. The old Karsen was somewhere inside of this new young woman. I would love to have the opportunity to coax her out to play. I missed her, and I wanted some time with her before I had to let her go forever.

  “Race isn’t going to be too happy that you’re there. He know you left town yet?” Finally, the clicking of the keyboard stopped and I realized I had Stark’s full attention and he was worried about me.

  I shook my head even though he couldn’t see me. “I’m still breathing, so my guess would be no. You wanna give a guy a heads up if you hear anything? I’m not leaving town until I find this kid, but Karsen should be on a plane home tomorrow. Hopefully, Hartman will be focused on her homecoming and not on the fact I forced myself back into her life.”

  Stark snorted. “That guy has eyes in the back of his head and he can multitask like a mother. He’ll welcome Karsen home and send a hit-squad after your dumbass in the same breath. I’ll keep my ears open, but you, you watch your back. You’ve always been careless when it comes to that girl.”

  He was so wrong. Karsen was the only thing in my entire life I’d ever been careful with, at least until her hero forced my hand. I muttered a weak reassurance that I would keep my eyes peeled and almost ran into the man standing in front of me because I was distracted.

  Typically, I ran other men over. It wasn’t something I thought about, it was just something that happened. I was bigger. I was broader. I was meaner. I was twice as bad as they would ever be. I was so used to other men getting out of my way and giving me a wide berth, it brought me up short when the guy I nearly smacked into didn’t move an inch.

  The shiny shoes should’ve been my first hint this wasn’t one of the loud and obnoxious kids wandering up and down the street. I recognized the brand and knew they cost as much as a semester's worth of tuition for most of these kids. The second clue this was not your run-of-the-mill man, one who would mumble and cower away after an encounter with me, was the hand decorated with big, glittery rings. They were ostentatious and obnoxious. They gleamed with enough gold and diamonds to rival the Crown Jewels. They also sat on a pair of hands as battle scarred and busted up as mine. I knew those hands well. I’d taken a hit from them more than once and watched in aggravation as they’d blocked more than one of the ones I’d thrown at the ruggedly handsome face grinning knowingly in my direction.

  Unlike Karsen, life in colorful Colorado sure as hell agreed with Benny, or rather, with the man who was now Nicolas Benton. Benny looked good, happy even. If it wasn’t for the scar that slashed horizontally across his throat, a clear reminder of the man he had once been and the life he had once lived, I might not have recognized him. Love had taken away most of the bitterness and greed that used to make Benny an ugly son-of-a-bitch. Now his eyes glittered with mirth and his mouth tilted up without a hint of malice. If I didn’t know all the underhanded, sneaky bullshit he was capable of at the drop of a dime, I could almost convince myself to like the guy . . . almost. After all, he’d risked his neck and left a cushy gig in witness protection to help Stark get Noe back. I still couldn’t believe the guy made it out of that bloodbath alive. He had more lives than a damn cat and had used up every last one of them over the years.

  I rocked back a step and let my arms drop loosely to my sides. I had no idea who sent him, but if it was Race, things were going to get bloody really fast and I needed to be able to react.

  “It’s been a while, Ben.” I felt my jaw tick and I kept my eyes locked on his. The guy was quick and better with a blade than anyone I’d ever encountered on the streets. Just because he was domesticated now didn
’t mean he hadn’t spent most of his life feral and unleashed like the rest of us predators. “Looking good.”

  Benny spread his hands wide in front of him. The gesture was supposed to be nonthreatening, to show his hands were empty, but I didn’t buy it. Guys like Benny never went anywhere unarmed, especially if he knew our paths were going to cross. He was dressed in a pair of designer slacks that had to be tailored to fit him and a soft-looking sweater. The outfit screamed ‘Colorado Casual’ and did a good job of removing Benny from the ‘thug in a three-thousand-dollar suit’ I remembered from back in the day. You could remove the man from the violence that created and shaped him, but you could never take the consequences and repercussions from those actions out of the man. He had to live with the weight of that battered soul forever. Benny might look new and improved, but he was still a deadly weapon even if the safety was on.

  Icy gray eyes raked over me and a smirk lifted one side of the other man’s mouth. “You look like shit, Booker. Did Nassir suddenly allow casual Fridays?”

  I gritted my teeth and tried to keep my reaction in check. I was also a thug in a three-thousand-dollar suit. It was an effective way for Benny to remind me that we played the same kinds of games and our team wasn’t the one supposed to win.

  “I’m not working. I’m on vacation.” Well, I was until some kid knocked Karsen’s friend around and gave me a bad feeling. It was all too easy to switch back to work mode when I thought Karsen might be in danger.

  Benny chuckled and rocked back on the heels of his expensive shoes. He shoved a hand into the front pocket of his pants and I stiffened, watching to make sure he didn’t pull out a weapon. One of his dark eyebrows lifted and his smile turned sharp with the dark scruff of his facial hair. “Did you come to see the mountains? To take in all the sights? Or maybe you’re here to do a little skiing and hiking. Colorado has so much to offer.”