by Warren, Rie
Back inside the classroom, I crouched in front of Jack. “Hey, monster. Daddy has to go to work, but Mommy’s picking you up after school, okay?”
His dark head nudged my chin before he looked up at me with dazzling gold-brown eyes. He clasped my face in both hands, laughing when my stubble scratched his palms. “Okay, but do you reeeeally like Miss Barnes?” he so unsubtly whispered.
Aware Jessica watched us—I felt the heat of her stare on me like a caress—I solemnly answered, “I really like her. Really, really.”
He clapped his hands against my cheeks. “Yay! She can be my second momma!”
Aaaand all eyes in the classroom swung to us.
I quieted Jack, my neck growing hot with all the attention aimed at me. “Let’s do the keep a secret thing, huh?”
“Where you go away for a lot of time? Like that?”
With a bright stab of pain in my chest, I hugged him tight. “No.” I spoke gruffly. “Not like that, baby boy. Never again like that.”
“I don’t like you being away.”
“Me either.” I brushed the hair off his forehead and kissed him there. “Me either.”
Jack scooted out of my arms. “Off you go then!”
“Huh?”
“That’s what Mommy always says when she brings me to school.” He jerked his thumb toward the door.
I stood, ruffing his hair. “Right. I’ll talk to you later. Love you, baby boy.”
Approaching Jessica at the front of the room, I asked, “Can you take a break for a minute?”
She observed her class for a moment—the kids hopped up on juice boxes and sugar highs, the parents trying to stem oncoming meltdowns—and nodded.
Her hand in mine, I towed her outside the door. “I have to go meet someone.”
“Someone who?”
“Someone I don’t like very much, and that’s all you’re getting from me.”
“Can I ask you something, Hunter?” She stroked my wrist, looking down at my large hands clasping hers.
“You can ask. Doesn’t mean I can always answer.”
“You didn’t want to be with me at first.”
“Ahh. Correction. I wanted to be with you more than anything. I didn’t think I should let myself. Not all that much has changed, but I can’t stop when it comes to you, JB.”
When I said her nickname, she peered up at me. “Why? Why shouldn’t you have me?”
“Sometimes I’m the bad guy.” I answered as honestly as I could.
“I think I’m strong enough to handle whatever truth you’re not telling me.”
“I bet you are. You’re stronger than me.” I smiled down at her and touched the soft skin of her cheek. “Smarter. And so much sexier.” I kissed her lips, a feather-brush to savor later. “I want more now. I want everything. I want you. And I have things to settle first.”
“Starting with this meeting?”
“Something like that.”
“You’ll be safe?” Jessica leaned back, her hands on my chest. “You’ll come home to me tonight?”
“I will.”
I just hoped it wasn’t in a body bag. The one I’d been avoiding for years.
Twelve
WHEN I’D SAID I’D be safe that was no lie.
I didn’t know what Vicente was planning but my rule of thumb when going up against an enemy was guns, more guns, and . . . well . . . a knife or two.
Riding to the meet point on my bike, I throttled down as I neared the waterfront warehouse in the stinking pisshole area of downtown Charleston no tourists ever saw. The docks were all cracked cement, straggly weeds, and laid up, rust-bottomed boats. The windowpanes were intact on the abandoned-looking building I approached but that was about as far as the niceties extended. An old metal sign hung overhead, painted in faded red: Cigar Factory.
Fitting, considering the Cuban who’d set up this meet and mess-you-up.
The area appeared completely unoccupied except for the Cigar Factory warehouse Vicente had indicated, but appearances were deceiving, as I knew well. My hackles shot up immediately. I took a closer look. Coils and coils of razor wire topped the building and all around on the rooftops taller darker shadows bristled against the night. Men, with automatic weapons.
“Shit,” I muttered.
“What up, Kemosabe?” a disembodied voice floated back to me via my earpiece.
“This is not a safe setup.”
“You want extraction?” Walker asked.
“Not unless you hear bullets start flying. Might as well get some recce done while I’m here.”
Unstraddling the Deus Grievous Angel, I slowly took off my helmet and put it aside. Vicente stood at the door of the Cigar Factory between two of his henchmen. I recognized both of them. Elon was old enough to be Vicente’s grandfather. In my days with Tampa Bay Outlaws, he’d taken care of the club better than any probie. He was mother and father figure to the members. He’d had two teeth left in his gums the last time I’d seen him, probably fewer now. The thing about Elon was loyalty. He’d sworn his allegiance to Vicente when the wily niño prodigio was still in the cradle, and he didn’t switch allegiances. Also, he was a sure-shooter, no matter if he squinted with one working eye and his knuckles swelled with rheumatism.
I walked toward the men, my hands up at my sides to show I wasn’t packing. Well, not that they could see.
Elon’s smile grew, showing a lone last tooth jutting out. “Cazador! El malo de la película!”
I hugged the skinny stick figure, my gaze locked with Vicente’s beady stare the entire time. “Tanto tiempo, guapo como nunca huevón, Elon.” I drew back.
Luis shouldered between us. Whereas Elon was trusted friend and nearly family to Vicente, Luis was all bulldog bodyguard. I definitely noted I was told to come alone yet my old compadre relied on his backup singers to pat me down. Elon had done it with a pickpocket’s grace while hugging me. Luis relied on brute force. His ugly face was a block of heavy brow, lantern jaw, and deeply set eyes.
I smiled when Luis stepped away. He showed my pair of Glocks to the boss man then opened his other palm with my formerly concealed Ka-Bar laid out.
“Safe as houses now, eh? But still not big as one, like Luis here.” I jabbed my elbow into the giant’s cement gut. Probably dislocated my shoulder in doing so.
“Si. Safe as houses.” Vicente took a few steps forward. “As soon as you strip down.”
“Now I done a lot of things for you in the past. But I don’t recall being your pet ass-monkey as one of them.”
“And I eseem to recall you do not work for me at all. Wire taps, compadre? Not permitted.”
I stripped off in the cold November night, dropping my jacket, shirt, jeans, boots and socks. Cold seeped through my bones, but I stood with legs spread and arms raised as Elon and Luis inspected me.
“Nada.” They agreed.
I wasn’t carrying more than my ballsack and big though it was, it didn’t pose a death threat.
At Vicente’s nod, I leisurely dressed. Fuck them all. I didn’t care if my dick froze off. I’d go down with total bravado.
What the trio didn’t know was I had backup, too. Walker wasn’t here, but he was close enough. Unlike my old school lock-picking tools, I wore a state of the art, dual in-ear transmitter. Walker and I weren’t Feebs. We had better shit than wire taps on hand.
Walker may not have had eyes on the meeting, but he definitely had ears.
“Cazador Saucedo. Hunter Angelo. Hunter Sexton.” Vicente strolled around me, stroking his mustache. “A lot of names to keep track of, muchacho. A lot of people connected to you.”
I wouldn’t let him see how his words, his quietly voiced threat, affected me, remaining dead calm in the face of danger as always.
I ambled after him into the warehouse, noting the explosives protecting the entry. I assumed all the entry points including the windows were likewise rigged.
He’d learned his lesson from Tampa. There’d be no easy way to get access to
him even if Walker and I got past his rooftop army.
“Nice digs.” Not.
Vicente dismissed his men, and they left us alone. He strolled toward a football-field-sized leather couch and relaxed onto it. The other stand-outs in the cavernous concrete vault were a rack of perfectly pressed suits in flamboyant colors, and a neat line of liquor bottles complete with crystal tumblers arranged on top of a wooden chest. Chief among them, tequila.
“Sit.” He patted the cushion beside him. “Long time no see. I would say amigo, but we are both past that now.”
I took a load off, aiming for relaxed and casual although all my senses went on high alert. “I see no reason we can’t be friends again.”
Better fake friends than a casualty of the war I no longer wanted to fight.
“One problem is you sewed up a contact I wanted to meet.” He grinned through capped white teeth.
His hair was pulled back, his eyes stark and black. The mustache tilted with his mocking grin, just a thin line above his thin lips. Cruelty and perhaps loss had carved deep lines into his face. Not a large man, merely five-foot-ten and one hundred and seventy-five pounds if I had to guess, his power came from the recognition of his family name as well as a healthy dose of earned respect on the streets. His was a brutal façade honed to perfection and hidden behind the largesse of a man who took care of those in his keeping and fucked the shit out of those who crossed him.
I’d not only crossed him, but double-crossed him. And Vicente definitely kept score.
“Frankie Burelli.” Nodding, I acknowledged his information. “He is loyal to his people.”
“Loyal, si. Unlike others.”
“This is about loyalty then?”
He picked up a glass and rubbed it between his palms. “A drink first, perhaps, Cazador.”
A drink before death. I eased back and accepted a tumbler half-filled with clear tequila. “I am thirsty.”
We drank deeply, watching each other closely.
“I see you got my message.” Relaxing his legs, he crossed one ankle over the other.
“The one from my son’s school?”
“Si.”
“I never hurt children.”
“No. Neither did I. But you did hurt me.” He clicked his glass against mine.
“You do know I work for the law, not for the Outlaws, Vicente.”
“And the law makes you work on the wrong side of the law.”
He was not wrong. I splashed more tequila into my glass.
“We had some good times, when you were my second in command.”
“Bad times too,” I muttered.
Being embedded inside the Tampa Bay Outlaws for a year had proved to be my hardest mission. It nearly broke me and severely fucked with my head by the time it was over. Walking the sharp edge of the knife blade all the time was risky business, and I’d been in danger of getting in too deep all while feeding Walker intel so he could pass it on.
“You still hurt over Quintessa.”
Hearing Vicente say her name, Quintessa, his sister, my lover . . . I hunched over. I’d never spoken of her to anyone since getting out. Her berry-red lips and her bright laughter. The way the sun spilled across her tawny shoulders when she came into the compound, her eyes searching for me.
“My sister won you over, Cazador. And when she was shot in the crossfire, when you raided the Outlaws on the good side, you broke.” He leaned forward, rolling his glass between his palms. “You didn’t care about right or wrong. You could’ve snapped Servando’s neck and given him an easy death. But you didn’t.”
The memories flooded back. Quintessa. Against all odds, I’d pursued her. It wasn’t the time or the place to have feelings or to give in to the sway of emotions. She was sweet as summer rain, soft as silk, and still a virgin when she’d first given herself to me many months into my trial by fire at Vicente’s hands.
I’d believed I’d save her. Maybe even marry her.
But the first raid at the gun warehouse had gone bad. Vicente had suspected my dual nature, and he’d had my entire team killed. Only Walker had saved me from certain death.
“That night when we got the guns out from under your gringo nose and killed your unit, Quintessa was hysterical when you didn’t return with me. I didn’t tell her who you really were.” He took another slow sip, watching to see if my expression changed from the usual mask of indifference. “She loved you. I didn’t want to break her heart more.”
His thin lips curled in a sneer. “Didn’t expect you to have cock big enough to make a second try that night. Underestimated you.”
“It was my last chance. Couldn’t let twelve months of work go down the drain.”
“Si. You always were smart. That’s why I like you. You knew we’d still have the guns at the club, and the compound was on lockdown—we wouldn’t have a chance to move them until the next night.”
Between patching each other up and getting our heads back together, Walker and I had quickly assembled a small secondary unit from operatives in the area. We’d made it inside the Outlaw compound undetected. Every one of us was a trained assassin, lethal with or without weapons. We’d taken out the threats in utter silence until Quintessa saw me and shouted my name.
She ran toward me, trying to get to me, not knowing I’d been working against the MC the whole time. I could still see it all.
The bullets puncturing her body. Her, caught in the crossfire. Vicente bellowing, already thrown down to the ground. Walker pushing his face to the floor, cuffing his hands behind his back. And Quintessa . . .
Accidentally gunned down by another MC member, Servando, she kept walking toward me dreamlike, nightmare-like, as shouts had echoed in my earpiece and the room lit up with endless gunfire.
Her dress dripping with red blood, the red of her lips, she’d fallen into my arms. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t stand up. I hadn’t thought this would happen. I held her against me as I dropped to the floor. Blood made my fingers sticky as I stroked her face and begged her to hold on, to life, to me.
Quintessa died with a small gasp, leaving her lifeless in my arms.
My head snapped up. “Servando deserved every knife blow.”
Vicente would get exactly the same if he so much as harmed a hair on Jessica’s head.
“You didn’t stop with killing him. You butchered him.” Vicente had infected me with his sick ugliness secreted away under the slick clothes and well-groomed features. Or maybe I’d always been sick inside.
I had butchered Servando until his intestines rolled into my hands and Walker dragged me off the gruesome remains.
My unit had stared at me, wariness in their stiff stances while the last standing members of Tampa Bay Outlaws MC were escorted to the armored vans outside. Vicente, bereaved of his sister, was the biggest prize.
He’d cut the deal to earn his freedom and come to find me.
He didn’t smile or sneer or smirk, he merely slid deeper into the sofa. “You disappeared. The Feds did the rest of the work, burying my club. I buried Quintessa. I did.”
I wouldn’t tell him I hadn’t loved Quintessa the same way I loved Jessica—with truth and honesty and absolute hope I could be better. That I deserved more.
“I am sorry for your loss.” I bowed my head toward him.
“And I yours, for selling your soul for what you believe ees American justice.”
For the next hour we played verbal warfare. Tequila was shot back, and we shared memories, even brotherhood, and reminiscence, always balanced on the straight blade of a lethal sword. I had been his friend, his Segundo, his sister’s cariño . . . I had killed for the man and danced the salsa of death. I’d been his confidante and committed the dirtiest deeds in his name to secure my place in Outlaws and by his side. In order to take him down.
And I had enjoyed some of it—my primal animal nature surfacing.
I was a different person now.
I looked up with clear eyes from the filmy liquid spinning in my g
lass.
Vicente tufted the groomed black mustache between his fingertips, aware of the absolute change of my attitude.
“The night Quintessa died in your arms, that was when you finally chose you were good.”
“Yes.” I downed the last dregs of tequila. “What do you want from me?”
I knew him. This wasn’t just old friends, new enemies, catching up and knocking back shots.
“What do you want so I can keep my family safe from you?”
“Loyalty. Like I say before.”
I scoffed, getting ready to rise, but he continued.
“Your complete willing loyalty. I want you to walk away from everything you’ve built here, everything you have, your son, your lover, your life.” His lips twitched. “Just like I had to because of you.”
“That’s a fucking high price you ask.” My heart already felt the loss, knocking around in my chest.
He gripped the back of my neck. “Come home, Cazador. I asked you here to tell you to come home with us where you belong. You don’t have to be ashamed by who you are, what you do, what makes you whole.”
Funny. Putting a hole in another person’s body with my gun had only left me high for a few hours then hollowed out for months. That was what Vicente offered . . . a long dark fall into Hell.
“If I don’t?”
“I will kill you.” There was no inflection to his voice and no expression on his face.
I had expected nothing less.
Gaining my feet, I shook his hand. “How long do you give me to decide?”
“A week to get your gringo shit in order. Then you’re mine for life. Fair trade for Jack Angelo and Jessica Barnes, si?”
“Ten days. I want ten days.”
He replied with a faint nod of his head.
I turned to him and bowed from my waist. “I’ll be in touch, compadre.”
Thirteen