by Angel Payne
“Hi. Can I help— Oh hell, sweetie, what happened to your face?”
“Where’s Max?”
Rihanna frowned. “He’s at the back bar. Who are—”
“I need Max. And Garrett Hawkins. And the police.” She was shocked at the control in her voice. Her heart hammered and her nerves were strung tight. As she stalked past the counter, she scooped up the phone on the counter and thrust it at the woman. “Call them. We need them out front, five minutes ago. Do it!”
By the grace of the universe, Sage appeared again. “Ray, how did you get back—ohmigod, your face! What’s going on? I thought you and Zeke were in the—”
“We were. Now we’re not. Sage, I need Garrett. Z’s in trouble.”
“Z’s what?” Her friend blinked. “I don’t understand. How can—”
“Get. Garrett. Now.” Dread trumped calm again. Round Face was probably getting his second wind by now. The image of him and Chain Man going at Zeke together charged her like a Pamplona bull. “They’re going to kill him!”
“What?” The exclamation came with the Midwest inflection for which she’d been praying. Garrett. Fate had smiled and hauled Max with him. “Who’s getting killed? Holy fuck, what happened to your face? What’s going on?”
“Thank God,” Rayna blurted. “Zeke. He—”
It was all she had to say. The two men raced out the door in a cloud of gritted oaths. Rayna was right behind them, with that bull pummeling every one of her heartbeats. Had she moved fast enough? Were Garrett and Max in time to help Z from getting pulverized, or would they find him sprawled in the street, bloodied and beaten? Her mouth was dry. Her head careened. Her imagination screamed.
None of it was ample preparation for the real scene they encountered.
There was blood, all right. Lots of it. Impossible to miss across his bare torso, even in the rain. Rayna’s stomach turned as she forced herself to look. But after a frantic scan of him from head to toe, she couldn’t figure out where the goons had gotten him, aside from one nasty nick between his shoulders. His legs were stiff, wet logs against the pavement. He braced his arms out at forty-five-degree angles, his shoulders so rigid the rain formed puddles atop his muscles. Breaths ripped in and out of him, making the chain in his fists clank a little. The goon who’d just been wielding it was curled in the gutter nearby, groaning softly.
Confusion struck again. Rayna didn’t know whether to hang on to her terror or surrender to a wash of lust. He looked movie-god good. Maybe that meant the rest had also been pretend. Maybe the stress of this whole night had finally sent her over the edge and she’d wake up inside the club somewhere, realizing she’d dreamed everything and—
Round Face took care of that delusion the next second. He reappeared from the same shadows that had first spawned him, stalking at Zeke with the same determined pace, though the reason for the guy’s disappearance was clear. He’d gotten a wardrobe change. His tight black Henley was now covered by the gear of a Seattle cop, complete with badge, shoulder radio, and fully stocked weapons belt.
Like Z even saw all that. Or cared.
He crouched low and spread the chain wider, half a smile sliding across his full lips. “Aww, baby, you came back for more. I’m so happy.”
Round Face grinned past his shiner with entirely too much ease. “Enjoy the humor while it lasts, motherfucker.”
Forget the lust. Rayna grabbed Sage, clutching her friend to avoid letting her knees buckle. “What the hell is he doing?”
“My question exactly.” The utterance came from Garrett. “If that asswipe is a badge, I’m the goddamn mayor.”
“You’re not and he’s not.”
Max’s interjection was far from reassuring. Rayna flashed him only a second’s glance before looking back to Z, but she made the glare count. “I can back that up, but what are you talking about?”
Max strung out a dark growl. “He’s one of Mua’s guys.”
Sage gasped. Garrett’s whoosh of shock followed. “Mua?” he fired. “How the hell does he have guys? And how do you know him?”
“How do you?”
Their astonishment got put on hold as the darkness across the street gained human form again. Rayna’s heart froze, but the figure wasn’t Mua. It was a new stranger, again garbed in black, only this guy wore a rain jacket emblazoned with the KOMO 4 NEWS logo. A plastic-covered TV location camera was planted on his shoulder. As Round Face rushed Zeke and got himself a gut full of chain for it, the camera’s recording light flashed on.
“Shit.” Rayna sputtered it at the same time as Sage.
Garrett spoke again, his voice lined with gravel. “I helped take down his snake of a twin brother, three months ago.”
Max flashed him an awed glance. “That was you?” He shook his head. “Motherfucker of awesome. The hero who took down King is one of my club Doms.”
Garrett snorted. “I said I helped. You’ve got Rayna to thank for the ‘awesome’ trigger-pulling part of it.”
“Holy hell. Serious?”
“Head up her fan club later, Max. I need to know why you turned three shades of white when you said Mua’s name, and how—”
“Hell.” Max’s interruption coincided with the first wail of a police siren. “I’m gonna be three shades whiter than that if all those police get here and find Z doing this. Goddamnit, Hawk, go give him a verbal Quaalude. He’s gonna kill that jerk. Not that I wouldn’t mind, under any other circumstances.”
“How do they even know?” Sage asked. “If that asshole is a fake officer, then who called them?”
Rayna winced. It wasn’t just from her bleeding cheek or her friend’s question. Max’s tension went beyond the aspect of a guy concerned about half the Seattle PD swarming the street in front of his kink club, not to mention its discretion-centric members. She sensed that he knew why a one-man news crew had showed up before the cops, as well. The only way she’d find out for certain was to come clean.
“It was me.” She grimaced as they all peered at her in confusion. Damn, her face hurt. “You can resign from the fan club now, Max. I told your receptionist to call them, just now when I went to find you guys.”
“No.” It was more a command from Max than a negation.
“Yes,” she insisted. “Great legs, pretty eyes? Getting ready to belt out ‘We Found Love in a Kinky Place’? I practically taped the phone to her face.”
“And I guarantee you she peeled it right off. Mira knows better. My whole staff knows better. We don’t call the cops for help, Rayna.”
A violent oath burst from him as Zeke took another rush from Round Face, who got a hand around to his back and twisted a screwdriver into the existing wound there. Rayna screamed as fresh blood rushed down his spine, but the asshole might as well have thrown gasoline on the weapon and tossed it into Zeke’s brain for all the stopping power it yielded. Like a gargoyle broken out of its stone shell, Z let out a gothic bellow before twisting the chain around the guy. He used that leverage to flip Round Face into the gutter next to his friend.
“Hell,” Max spat. “This isn’t good. Not at all.”
“Wait,” Garrett interceded. “What the hell? Why not the cops? You running something illegal out the back door, Brick?”
“No, goddamnit,” Max growled. “When we call the police, there’s a price, okay?” He grunted. “And it’s not always money.”
Sage stepped forward. “What do you mean?”
Max prefaced his reply by peering around, looking like the raindrops themselves might have tapping devices on his utterance. “I mean that King had at least half the police on his leash, whether it was bribes, extortion, or both. And now that he’s gone—”
“Mua’s moved into that throne.” The certainty of it permeated Rayna’s words, just like the new layer of bile coating her stomach.
“Fuck. Me.”
The moment Garrett finished gritting the words, red and blue lights flashed between the buildings, turning the street into a soaked, surreal disco.
The police sirens howled closer, threatening to drown even the din of the rain.
Max ran to where Zeke was booting the two goons’ guts a few more times for good measure. “Z, you need to get out of here. Now!”
Zeke glared back at Max but didn’t see him, lost behind eyes that were so afire with violence Rayna could see their glow from where she stood.
“Damn it.” Max pointed down at Round Face. The badge on the guy’s chest was shiny and obvious. “Those bastards will be here any minute. Even if they don’t belong to Mua, you know the shit that’s going to fly, right?”
Garrett raced to his friend. “Zeke. Ezekiel. Listen to me. Listen to Brick. He’s right, man. You’ve been set up. They’ll arrest you and use that footage to convict you.”
Zeke didn’t move. The sirens got louder. The nausea in Rayna’s core turned to aching dread. She forced herself forward by a few steps, close enough to hear how he answered Garrett.
“Is Rayna safe?”
She closed the distance to him. “I’m right here, Z. I’m fine.”
He whipped his head and lashed his stare to her. Her breath caught for the fiftieth time in the last ten minutes. Water sparkled on his eyelashes, nose, and lips, a weird and beautiful contrast to the violence that etched every plane of his face. Only one instinct outweighed her longing to run her fingers over every noble feature. She grabbed his massive bicep and jerked him around. Though she had to stand on tiptoe to do it, she started assessing his gash as clinically as she could.
“You need stitches.”
“Not gonna happen,” Garrett asserted. “We’re on borrowed time, Ray.”
“Garrett, this wound is deep!”
He grabbed Zeke by the other arm. “You have to get out of here, Z.”
Max rushed forward. “Final jeopardy, boys. Alex Trebek has to get the fuck out of the building.”
Rayna fumed. “He needs this injury looked at!”
Garrett’s glare was a blue glow against the night. “If he doesn’t cut a chogey now, the prison doc will be the one ‘looking at’ him.” He jerked on Zeke to force their gazes to lock. “You wanna keep her safe, Z? You can’t do that from jail. You think Mua hasn’t twisted all this around to his advantage now? He followed her here tonight. He’ll follow her again, and he’ll probably get her the next time. And you’ll be nowhere nearby, will you? That prison cell is going to give you blank walls for you to play fun mental movies for yourself. You can imagine Ray drugged out, trussed up, and tossed into the hold of a plane bound for Bangkok again.”
That got Rayna to drop her hands from Z. A sob spilled before she could hold back. Zeke wrestled from his friend’s grip. He threw the chain down with a vicious jerk. “You’re a harsh asshole sometimes,” he snarled at his friend.
“I love you too, honey. Now you gotta pop smoke.”
Z didn’t waste time on a comeback. He swung his stare back at Rayna. She returned a tremulous smile. The intensity on his face dissolved, giving way to a look of raw anguish. She started backing away until he pulled her back and raised his hand, gently outlining the bruise on her cheek with his thumb. A crazy, deep part of her was moved by his pang for her. A bigger part overrode it with the reminder that she had no right to tie down his emotions, his fingers, or any more of his time. This insane incident didn’t change a word of what he’d said in his harem den.
She only wished her heart was listening to her brain. Instead, the thing was on a clear channel with her body, which shirked its shivers the second Z tucked her good cheek against his chest. Her senses gave in to a peaceful softness. Her blood was suffused with the warmth that belonged solely to him. The chaos and rain of the night vanished. If only for one moment, they were reconnected.
One perfect, precious moment…
The first police sedan screeched around the corner. Max pulled at Zeke. “Can we spare the sappy movie ending? Z, if you don’t get your ass out of this street in thirty seconds, you’re going to be the lead story for tomorrow morning’s CNN feed. I’ll bet my left nut you’re already being loaded up and edited at KOMO. Anyone want a wild guess at who’s feeding them the news angle?”
“Shit,” Garrett muttered. “Mua’s probably in the control booth writing the script for the anchors.”
Max turned Zeke’s hand over and slammed a set of keys into it. “Get out of here. You’re taking my car.”
Zeke gaped. “Oh, hell no.”
“Don’t argue. They’ll be looking for yours and Hawk’s.” The club owner cocked both brows. “More importantly, nothing’s gonna get you out of town faster than they can get checkpoints up.”
“Good point,” Z muttered. He clapped Max on the shoulder. The guy nodded in silent acknowledgment of the gratitude.
Nearly at the same time, Zeke slipped his hand into hers. He gripped her tight, pulling her across the street and back into the alley behind Bastille at a run that spattered puddles in their wake. Max, Garrett, and Sage followed. By the time they got to the little parking lot behind the harem room and its patio, her heart was pumping with two elements: adrenaline and apprehension.
She swallowed hard as Zeke tugged her near a gleaming silver car that really did look fast enough to beat the police. The round Jaguar logo and the initials R-S gleamed on plates embedded into the front grill. Witnessing the way Max gazed at the car like a man about to put his thoroughbred down, she sensed the two men had a relationship way beyond kink club owner and star staff Dom.
Max proved her even more right by literally giving Z the shirt off his own back, too. He shirked his tight gray T-shirt, revealing a physique as beautifully sculpted as his friend, though his shoulders and chest were also defined by a maze of Maori tattoos. Other than that and the slight difference in their hair colors, the men could be brothers.
There was no time to delve into it now. She meshed her fingers tighter into Z’s, clinging to every last second before he had to get into the pseudo-spaceship.
“Thanks, man,” Z said to his friend. “I mean it, Brick.”
“Yeah, yeah. Send me pictures,” the guy returned. “But whatever you do, don’t stop at home. Don’t stop anywhere. Delphine’s got a full tank, so that should get you pretty far.”
“Delphine?” Rayna muttered it as Zeke turned to her.
“Don’t ask.” The flash of mirth in his eyes turned to copper intensity as he looked down to her again. His lips went tight as he stroked her bruised skin again.
“Stop it.” She grabbed his fingers.
His face tightened. “Does it hurt that bad? Damn it, if that cock knocker gave you deep-tissue damage—”
“No. I meant stop fretting over me when you took a damn screwdriver in the back from the asshole and won’t even let me—”
“It’s easily handled on the road, bird.”
She longed to slap him. He was tossing his health aside like a snack he was packing for a road trip. But she sighed and reminded herself he was Special Forces. God only knew what medical attention he’d been required to give himself at Mach Five.
Instead of whacking him, she lifted a gentle hand to his jaw. “Where will you go?”
To her surprise, a quizzical grin teased his lips. “Don’t you mean, where will we go?”
She stilled her fingers. Forget that. Her whole body froze. “What?”
He braced his hands to her waist. Rayna stared at him without blinking, half expecting to find little gold flecks that meant he was teasing. But there were none. He was calm and serious as he softly thanked Rihanna—er, Mira—for bringing out a bottle of ibuprofen, a tube of antibacterial cream, and a huge gauze bandage.
“You think I’m going anywhere without you, knowing Mua’s out and roaming free, with the police’s blessing?” He finished that by slamming down a few of the pain pills while Mira slathered the cream on his back, pressed the bandage on his gash, and handed off the leftover supplies to Rayna.
It wasn’t reassuring to watch her fingers shake as she accepted the pile. Her breath was a fearful
bite in her chest, too. Despite that, she argued, “You can’t move as fast or as invisibly with me.”
He opened his hand, where he’d held back four ibuprofen. “Take these. Sorry there’s no water.” His sardonic glance at the sky wasn’t lost on her. The clouds roiled overhead, seeming to fight with each other about what mode to be in: pouring or torrential.
“Zeke, you need to think—”
“No.” As she watched, his humor gave way to granite cliffs again. “No, you need to think.” He grabbed her again, this time in determined grips to her shoulders. “I’m not letting that prick or any of his minions get within ten miles of you.”
She struggled for a reaction to that, any reaction, but the force wasn’t just evident in his words. His conviction poured from him like a radiation cloud, stopping her breath. She told herself to resist its searing impact, to remind herself it was only his soldier’s ferocity and his dedication to honor that made him say all that. Even if some deep part of his soul remembered that scene in the tunnel so long ago, he wasn’t consciously accessing it now. He wasn’t committing to anything with her, other than his duty by her.
Rayna finally gulped again.
Maybe…for now…duty had to be enough.
It sure as hell won over the consideration of watching him drive away and then stepping foot in a city where Mua was slithering free—and hell-bent on getting his pound of flesh for King’s death by selling hers.
“Okay.” She finally gave him a shaky nod. “But only until they get Mua and your name is cleared.”
Zeke’s lips quirked up for a flash of a second. He yanked her closer and pressed his lips to her forehead. “Good girl. Now take your meds.”
As he pulled away, a surge of alarm hit her. “Wait. What about my own car?”
“It’ll be part of Seattle PD’s crime scene in ten minutes,” Garrett explained. “We’ll do what we can to get it back. In the meantime, leave your keys and phone with Sage. We’ll dump them in a locker at the airport. That’ll keep a few of them busy for a while, thinking you’ve tried to catch a flight somewhere.”