by Diana Gardin
His mouth tips up on a friendly smile, but I can see the sinister edge behind it. “Break in? All I did was leave you some flowers. Thought it’d be romantic.”
I suck in a breath. Romantic? It wasn’t romantic at all. It was insane.
When M.J. makes to step around him, Ronin moves, leaping off his stool and standing behind M.J. faster than I can register what’s happening. One thick arm wraps around M.J.’s neck, the other pressed against his head.
“One millimeter.” Ronin’s voice is still strange and mechanical, but the vein throbbing on the side of his temple tells me his max temper has been reached. “That’s all it’ll take for me to snap your neck right now.”
M.J.’s whole body has gone stiff, but he still manages a chuckle. “Pretty sure that won’t go well for you, Shaw. But if you want to kill me right here in a bar full of witnesses, go right ahead.”
“You don’t contact her, you hear me? And if you think about busting into her place again? You’re a dead man.”
“The kind of money my family has? That’s for real. You think she’s going to want you once I get her away from whatever spell you put on her? She belongs to me. She always has.” M.J. almost hisses the words through his teeth. And those words send a shiver skirting along my spine.
Ronin removes his arm from M.J.’s neck, only to slam him down on the bar. My hands fly to my mouth as M.J.’s face presses painfully to the wood.
His voice thick with rage, every word out of Ronin’s mouth rings with an absolute truth. “Didn’t you hear me, you little shit? She told you it was over a long time ago. You don’t own her. And if you make another move, I’ll end you. Please test me on that. I’m going to enjoy making you bleed.”
“You going to let a murder go down in this place, Blacke?” M.J.’s voice is strained.
Bennett folds his arms. The glint of his dog tags catches the light as he shifts his feet and settles in a stance that dares Mick Oakes to test him. He doesn’t say a word.
Finally, Ronin releases him and M.J. moves his head from side to side, adjusting the sore muscles in his neck.
He snorts. “You army assholes are so damn predictable. One for all and that bullshit. You realize I own this place, right? Might want to be nice to the hand that feeds you.” M.J. gestures toward our food and drinks. Dipping his chin in Bennett’s direction, he stands and walks around the bar.
“Let’s take a walk to the office, Bennie boy. We’ve got some business to discuss.”
Ronin makes to follow, but Bennett gives a sharp shake of his head. “I got this. Stay with your girl.”
I’m barely able to register the fact that Bennett just called me Ronin’s “girl” when he disappears behind a swinging door beside the bar right behind M.J.
Ronin lets out a string of curses on the stool beside me, frustration clearly eating him alive inside.
I can’t say anything at all. Fear has rooted me not only to my stool, but also to the past. Where M.J. terrorized me all because he wanted to own me.
Ronin grinds his teeth, the sound grating across my own nerves and making me anxious “So Mick is M.J.?”
Mutely, I nod. “Why was he here?”
Cursing again, Ronin places both hands on the bar and takes several deep breaths. Finally turning to face me, his face is a mixture of sympathy and rage. “His father, Mick Oakes Senior, is the owner of this bar. Your ex-boyfriend has just taken it over.”
12
Ronin
I want Olive out of there by the time Mick returns from his meeting with Bennett, so I hustle her out of The Oakes. In the back of my mind, I want to know what he’s got planned for Bennett, but in this moment, Olive is more important. Her face looks like she’s just seen a ghost.
The fury, the frustration seething inside me at the fact that Mick is her ex, that she got herself mixed up with a man like him at any point in her life, threatens to take me over. I’m silent as I drive her back to my condo, and when we walk in the front door I’m ready to explode.
She drops down onto the couch, but I stalk to the kitchen and pull a beer from the fridge. Popping the top off I take a long, cool sip. Swallowing, I suck in a few deep breaths and then turn on her.
“Tell me,” I growl, barely keeping the anger out of my voice. “Tell me how you hooked up with him. Tell me how it ended. Tell me everything.”
When my eyes land on her, I expect to see the Olive I’ve known up until this point. The Olive that stands tall no matter what obstacle blocks her path. The stoic, coolly gorgeous woman who holds her head up no matter what the situation. The tough sister who handles her business and doesn’t ask anybody for shit.
Instead, her face crumbles. Every last ounce of color drains from her expression and she sways slightly where she sits. Then she buries her face between her knees. When her body begins to tremble, I’m across the room in two strides and pulling her against me.
Damn keeping her at a distance, forget all the bullshit about not getting too close. She needs me, and I’m damn well going to be right here. It’s an instinct, a pull from somewhere deep inside, all the way in my goddamn soul.
Olive doesn’t pull away, she doesn’t tense up. Hiding her face in my chest, she melts into me. Her breath comes in deep, shuddering gasps.
And at that moment, the thing I want most in the world? Is to go back in time and snap Mick Oakes’s neck.
I thought this part of me was broken. The part that’s able to comfort someone else, to be a soft place for another human being to land.
When it comes to work, I’m there for my brothers. I always have their back and I always will. But personally, when it involves something like this…I’ve been dead. For seven long years.
So when I hold Olive in my arms, when the soothing words come naturally as I whisper in her ear, I’m not even sure how I’m managing it. Not when I thought that part of me was gone.
But this woman? She’s bringing it—me—back to life.
“Shhh. Red, it’s okay. You’re safe. You’re with me and he can’t hurt you. I’ll never let him hurt you.” My lips brush her sweet-smelling hair, and I inhale until her scent is all I know.
She gasps like she can’t inhale another breath, and I pull her onto my lap. Her body molds to mine and the sweet jasmine scent of her hair envelops me, sweeps into my senses like the flower is being held underneath my nose. “Hey…I’ve got you.”
And I hold her. I hold her until she’s breathing almost normally again, until she’s able to lift her face from my tear-soaked shirt and meet my eyes. The expression in hers rips through me like a sharp hook to my gut.
“I…I thought he was gone from my life. I should have known better.” Her dark blue eyes are full of secrets, and I want to know every single one of them.
I wait, because I’ve already asked the questions. Now it’s up to her to tell me. To trust me. To let me in.
In the back of my mind, I picture Elle. If she’s watching this from heaven, there’s no way she’d be angry with me. She’d want me to help Olive. And so I push my guilt to the back burner and focus on the woman sitting in front of me.
“I met him my freshman year of college.” Her voice is dull, quiet. Almost lifeless.
“He was…everything a girl is searching for when she wants a bad boy. I met him at a bar, and he was so charming, so into me, that I went home with him that night. And from that moment on, we were pretty much inseparable. I was still going to class, still making school a priority, but every other ounce of my time belonged to M.J.”
I try to picture her back then. A young Olive, innocent and full of wit and fun and life.
“My friends hated him. They thought he was bad for me.” Her eyes are cloudy as she remembers, going back to that time in her mind as she recollects the story for me.
“What about your family? Did they approve?” I stroke her hair, pushing it out of her eyes and behind her ears.
Her expression darkens. “What family? My parents…they were barely in my life at th
at point. They were never the same after Rayne got pregnant in high school. They moved away from Wilmington not long after she left for Phoenix. For the most part, I was on my own. I did tell Rayne about him much later, though.”
Nodding, I force myself to keep from commenting on this. I want to know how parents could let their daughter date someone like Mick without doing everything they could to put a stop to it.
“It was a time in my life when I was extremely vulnerable. Something…happened…to me during my high school years that changed me. And to truly understand how I could have possibly ended up with someone like M.J., you’ll have to know what that was first.”
She takes a breath, and her whole body shakes with the effort. What the hell is happening to this woman right now? It’s slowly clicking into place, the reason she’s so controlled, so put together, so on, all the time. She has darkness in her past that she needs to keep out in order to keep on surviving. And the thought of that almost breaks me.
She continues, her voice so small that I have to lean closer just to hear it. “I was always a pretty thin kid, but my weight really skyrocketed in my last two years of high school. I was a seventy-five pounds heavier than I am now.”
I try not to react, but she must sense something in me because her gaze focuses in on mine. A wry smile crosses her lips, just briefly, before it disappears. “I know. After my weight gain, I lost friends, and that sucked. But the change was somehow…freeing. I didn’t have to be the girl my mom wanted me to be anymore. I didn’t have to be anything for anyone…especially if I didn’t want to be. I liked the difference. But it spiraled into a problem.”
Confusion forces me to interrupt her. “Why, Red? Why did you feel like you needed to change?”
She stiffens and pushes away from me. Escaping to the farthest end of the couch, she pulls her knees tight against her chest and focuses on the opposite wall. Her voice wavers.
“I was always like a little doll for my mom to dress up. She put me in every pageant across the Southeast for as long as I can remember. I was always the girl known for being a pretty face. And one day, I got the kind of attention for that face that no young girl should ever have. I had an uncle…well, let’s just say he loved my face. And the rest of me, too.”
Realizing what she’s saying to me, my stomach plummets. A wave of nausea rolls through me, and all I want to do is snatch her back up into the safety of my arms. But it’s so very clear that she doesn’t want that. She’s almost in her own little zone, curled in on herself and barreling through the darkness of her past. She’s getting this story out, because it needs to be told. But she doesn’t want to be comforted. She just wants to get through it.
“What I really wanted to do was end it all. Just be done with it. I just wanted to fade away.”
No…Christ.
“But I was never able to do it. So instead, I coped by eating. I gained the weight, stop wearing the frilly pageant dresses, and stopped doing my hair and makeup. And when I realized the effect it had on the people around me, I started to depend on food even more. I actively tried to become invisible, unattractive, ugly.”
Trying to picture her as a scared teenage girl, who had a grown man in her life who was hurting her, my heart breaks. It fucking shatters, right there in my chest.
“What about your goddamn parents?”
She shakes her head, a sad smile picking up one side of her lips. “I made a mistake. I told my mom. She was pissed as hell. Not only did she not believe me, but she also accused me of craving even more attention than I was already getting.”
Fury made me see red. “And your uncle…he just…continued?”
She nods. “He did, although he definitely became a lot less interested after I changed. And then…he died. Freak accident involving his motorcycle. So I was set free from my abuser, but…inside I was still such a mess.”
My hands itched, because I want to pull her back into my arms so damn badly.
“I went to college, happy to escape it all even though I didn’t go very far away. And that was when I met M.J. His attention flattered me, it made me feel pretty, when I never wanted to feel pretty again. I thought that after what had happened, no boy would ever want to touch me. But he did…even when I was at my heaviest. He wanted me. It didn’t really dawn on me that he wanted me because I was vulnerable, because I was easy to control.”
She shrugs helplessly, like if she could go back and change it, she would. “I started going to counseling, after a while. I knew that all the baggage, all the fear, all the dark, dark memories I was living with weren’t healthy. At first, I didn’t tell M.J. I was in counseling. I don’t know why. Maybe even then, on some unconscious level, I knew I couldn’t trust him with that. But as I started getting healthier, he grew more and more controlling. My counselor helped me to see that I didn’t have to keep on the weight to be safe. She made me see that it wasn’t my looks that contributed to my attack. It was just something awful that happened to me.”
“M.J. didn’t like it when the weight came off and I started dressing well and wearing makeup. When I started finding myself again. Back then, I thought he was just worried he’d lose me. I was an idiot. I got sucked into his web. He wanted me all to himself, alienated me from my new friends. He never touched me violently until the end, but he made me feel like without him I’d be nothing. I knew then that I’d never be truly healthy with someone who tried to keep me down, tried to make me believe that I was less without him.”
She takes a deep breath, releasing the air like she’s letting go of all the dark thoughts her story brought to light. I try to picture her back then, a strong young woman trying to overcome the shit she’d gone through. God, she must have been amazing. She still is. Maybe more so now that she’s gotten through it all and come out on the other side. I knew I was attracted to her when I first saw her at the wedding. I didn’t want to be, but I was. But now? Now I see that she’s so much more than I ever imagined.
“And then I found out about the illegal activities he was getting involved in with his uncle.”
Sitting up straighter, I eye her intently. “What kind of activities?”
Looking at me again for the first time in a while, but still drawn into herself in the corner of the couch, she shrugs. “You name it. His mom’s side of the family is basically like the mob. They run Wilmington, at least the dark sides of it. They migrated south back in the 1980s, or so I heard, to start a new branch of the Margiano enterprise. They have legitimate businesses that are just a front for drug dealing, racketeering, money laundering, and God knows what else. M.J.’s dad was always a good guy, trying to keep him in line. I think he’s the one who encouraged M.J. to go to college, get an education. He tried to show him that he didn’t need the kind of power that came with being a Margiano.”
As soon as the name she’s now said twice registers, I freeze. What the hell are the chances? Fuck. Fuck!
I run back over the meeting with Jacob back at Night Eagle. Now we’re going to need significantly less intel in order to start the organized crime op. Olive just might be able to give me inside information into the family responsible.
Standing, I begin to pace the room. “Do you know what he wants from you, Red?”
Pacing toward the kitchen counter where I left my beer, I grab it and take a long swig. Then I pace back toward the glass sliders.
Olive shrugs. Her tone is defeated. “I’m guessing he just wants me. It was probably a blow to his ego that I left him, and now I’m back in town doing fairly well for myself. I mean, he paid for a semester of my tuition back then. If it’s the money he wants, I’ll gladly pay it. I want no more ties to M.J. Not a single one. I got out when I found out what he was doing. When I learned he was being groomed by his uncle, Albert Margiano himself. After M.J. became violent with me I knew I couldn’t take my chances with him or with his family. Like I said before, I was about to get a restraining order when he suddenly left school. I thought I was in the clear. I hadn’t seen or h
eard from him until a few months ago.”
Rolling my eyes skyward, I want to chuckle. Hell, I want to burst out in hysterical laughter. Because this is just getting better and better.
Albert Margiano is the head of the Margiano crime family. The police force knows he’s guilty for crimes from money laundering to murder, but they’ve never been able to gather enough evidence on him to put him and his family away. It’s why NES will step in on the FBI’s payroll.
The last person I’d want Olive involved with is someone from that family.
Fucking Mick Oakes.
Protecting her was important before, but now it’s fucking vital. And there’s no way I’m going to be able to let my best friend stay on a relaxing honeymoon in Aruba when his sister-in-law is here dealing with this.
With a long sigh, I turn and face her. “We’re going to have to call Jeremy and Rayne. They’re going to want to know.”
She leaps off the couch. “Ronin! No. I don’t want my sister or my nephew anywhere near this. And if you call them, they’ll all come home.”
She has a point. The idea of Decker and Rayne being caught up in this shithole was disturbing. But I didn’t want Olive involved in it, either. “Then I’m sending you to Aruba to stay with them.”
Her face is horrified. “On their honeymoon?”
Narrowing my eyes, I point a finger at her. “Yes. On their honeymoon. I don’t give two fucks, as long as you’re safe.”
Folding her arms, she straightens up and shakes her head. Color appears in her cheeks, and suddenly she’s the woman I know once again. She’s my Red. “There’s no way in hell I’m going anywhere. And you don’t call them, Ronin Shaw, do you hear me? I’m not running away from M.J. Oakes. Not again.”
That’s my girl. Fuck me, she’s gorgeous. Every part of me responds to her, especially when she’s wild and bossy and argumentative. That might be twisted, but it’s real, and I like it.
As we stare each other down, a brand-new sense of respect blossoms in my gut for the woman standing in front of me. She’s stubborn as hell, but it’s damn sexy. At the same time, a foreboding sense of fear creeps into my awareness like a vine.