by Kira Graham
“I bought it for her. Why don’t you just sign it over already?”
“Dude, Adonis explained it to you already. Sin is on the verge of running herself into the ground at Helos. He doesn’t want to hand it over until she agrees to hire more staff. Holding the reins on this will force her to do that, but if we aren’t there to micromanage everything, she’ll just keep pushing. She’s family, P. Whether you like that or not, we all love her—just like we love you,” I tell him softly, watching him swallow and force himself to shrug.
Oh, but I see the way his shoulders have stiffened, and I can practically hear him raging against himself, keeping himself from rushing over there to look after her. I know, because while Alex and I can’t claim any romance during our brief affair, I do care about her and worry for her.
These Sweet women are awesome, strong, funny, and formidable, but they’re fragile as well. They push themselves hard, and they don’t stop unless someone is there to make them slow down. I tried to do that with Alex…
“Just give it to her, Chilli. Let her make the decisions. It’s her life,” he sighs, sounding so tired and alone that I want to call Sin and yell at her, to demand that she see what’s right in front of her.
Paris is perfect for her.
“It’s up to us to be there, man, and if you can’t see that, then you need to open up your eyes.”
“And you?” he grates, looking up to glare at me again. “What about you and Alex? Did you see her last week, Chilli? Did you really look at her? The woman is not well—she’s tired, and her hands were shaking the whole time we were eating dinner. You ask me if my eyes are open where Sin is concerned, and you know what? Maybe they aren’t. I admit that fully. I don’t want to see her; I don’t want to look at her and feel anything. But what about you?”
“What about me? I fucked up with Alex—I know that. We were friends, and I messed that up, Paris, but I also tried to fix it. Hell, look at us now. She’s pregnant with some idiot’s baby, she hardly talks to anyone, and she refuses to take my calls. And yet I still call, because you know what? That’s what you do when you love someone and care about them. You face the ugly stuff and keep trying. I will keep trying,” I tell him, indignant now because none of them have my back.
I had his back when Sin cut him down, and I was there with him through it all. I’m the one who goes out looking for him at night and follows him home behind the security guys. I check in on him on the weekends, when he’s holed up at his place, sleeping off whatever excess he’s been indulging in. I always have his back—and yet here I stand, alone.
Christ, I miss Alex. She’d tell him to go to hell, invite me to the karaoke night that she often organizes with Rosetta’s cell buddies, Carla, Bee, and Jan, and cheer me up. Of course, hanging out with three women who have in some way assaulted or killed a man at one time in their lives, and who continue to participate in criminal activities, isn’t really my thing. But, like Alex says, judge yourself first before you cast that stone.
I miss her just being there for me. I just miss her.
“Then you should try harder, Chilli, because man, you are more blind than I am,” he sighs, shaking his head when I open my mouth to demand what the hell he’s talking about.
“Go home. Adonis called me after he dropped you off here and asked me to arrange the security teams to drive you home. Go home, sleep off that concussion, and take some time to think about what you’re doing wrong with Alex. I guarantee, though, that you aren’t going to like the answers if and when you finally pull your head out of your ass. No, Chilli. I’m done for today. I’ve had this lecture from all of you—and, from some of you, more than once. My choices are my choices, and whether or not I run Helos isn’t for any of you to decide. Just like your life isn’t mine to dictate. Go home,” he tells me, turning back to his paperwork with a finality that cuts off whatever I was going to say.
And I have a lot to say, but in a way, Paris is right. He’s a grown man who can make his own decisions, just as I am a grown man who can make mine. Turning on my heel, I give him a wave and stalk out to my office, realizing only now that it’s past six already, and that the office is practically empty. Making my way to my desk, I grab my car keys, my drawings, and my bloodstained jacket before making it to the garage, where I see the security car waiting.
I resent being followed around like some infant who needs coddling, but after Rosetta was almost killed by Barnes Hilan, the man hired by some unknown man to kill Rosetta and scare Cleo, I understand the need.
We all get complacent, I guess, and so wrapped up in our own heads that we don’t recognize danger before it hits us. I can take care of myself, and I do, but knowing that I have an added layer of protection at times like these, when I can’t think straight, is comforting.
“Yo, boss. Heath says I gotta drive you since you got your head banged up,” Bills yells, holding his hand out for my keys when I step off the elevator.
I toss them to him, because my head is pounding too much for me to argue, and get in the passenger seat without complaining. Bills is about twenty-four, and while he’s young, the man is built and very, very dangerous. He’s some ex-somebody who came highly recommended by Heath, a military buddy of Zeus’s who runs all the security for the family. He’s also as funny as hell and has become a friend of sorts. Sometimes.
“So, Rosetta finally kicked your ass. I was wondering when she’d snap again,” he chuckles, crossing himself when I mutter and wish her on him instead.
It’s a running joke with the security team that only Heath and Nate are insane enough to take Rosetta’s detail, willingly. Now, with Nate out of commission after his injury, Heath definitely has his work cut out for him.
“She loosened the fucking bolts in my chair,” I grumble, giving him a grudging smile when he laughs hard and starts the Porsche with a sigh of envy.
I’d tell him that the thing is a piece of shit and nothing like my original car, but that wouldn’t be completely true. The car is great—just not as great as my first baby was. I miss her a lot, but in the grand scheme of things, I’m grateful that I survived the crash that took my first car when the brakes failed. They were cut, which is another good reason for my security. They watch the cars, too, just in case.
“Better than the dog shit,” he grunts, getting a hallelujah from me.
“Preach, man. I thought I’d never get over that.”
“Most men wouldn’t. Add in your clumsiness, and the fact that you fell on your face, twice, and it makes it that much worse,” he tells me, steering the car out of the garage and onto the road.
Leaning my head back, I close my eyes and try to remember that it was supposed to be funny. See, that’s the thing with Rosetta—she has a temper, but her shenanigans are all for laughs, not to hurt me.
“It was a joke. I’m over it.”
“You’d have to be over that shit to run to her rescue and not only save her ass, but almost get yourself killed, too. No offense, boss, but I don’t really think of many civvies having the balls to put themselves in that position, not even for their own,” he tells me, making me question just what this man did for the government.
He’s still so young that I’d doubt he was a soldier if not for the constant alertness he displays. I’ve seen Bills read a paper and still inform his partner Chuck that there’s someone suspicious at three o’clock.
“I don’t agree. But it’s over,” I tell him, wanting him to shut up.
The truth? The ugly, shameful truth is that when Rosetta tells that story, hailing me as a hero, she isn’t completely right. Yes, I was going to take Hilan down, no matter what, but the way that I tackled him had more to do with my tripping over my own feet than actually throwing myself at him. When Rosetta and Sin and even Mindy gush about how graceful I was, I want to yank my hair out and scream at them all. There is nothing graceful about me. I’m a fucking disaster area, and I always have been. Ma likes to joke that God made me good-looking in order to mitigate my clumsines
s, and Dad says that God made me clumsy in order to give the woman a fighting chance.
They all talk about how perfect my face is, and laugh about my klutzy feet, and honestly, I don’t mind it all that much. I am what I am, but what I am not is some graceful hero who tackled a murderer. Rather, I’m the idiot who fell down two flights of stairs, somehow managed to get up, and then tripped over my own feet. Hell, if Rosetta and Sin hadn’t thrown themselves on Hilan’s back, he’d have stabbed me.
So, how much of a fucking hero am I really?
“Not according to Z.”
“Nope, but then again, none of us have had any threats or scares in months. Even Cleo is allowed to go out without six guards now.”
“Only because she threatened to cut Adonis while he was sleeping,” Bills points out with a roaring laugh, his hand going to his crotch defensively.
My own goes there as well, because of all the Sweets, Cleo is most definitely the craziest. She’s calm and serene and generally content to be coddled, but when she makes a threat, she means it. Rosetta does things for laughs, Tee is just…well, I can’t really say, and Sin is the worker. Of all five, it’s Alex that I trust most not to kill anyone. She’s just so…logical.
“How’s Al doing? We going to be seeing her more often?” Bills asks out of the blue, turning my raging headache into a full-on migraine.
“She hates my guts right now, so the answer would have to be no.”
“That’s a shame. Grange, the head of her team, says that she’s not doing too good. They didn’t see her leave her apartment for nearly a month, until Rosetta showed up to drag her out of there. According to him, she’s lonely and…alone.”
“Same thing,” I grunt.
“Nuh-uh. Not at all. Lonely is a state of mind, man. Alone is physical. One isn’t too bad—been one or the other at more than one point in my life. But both together, that’s a bad place to be, boss. Means that you got nowhere to turn to, no one to lean on. Hate thinking of Miz Al feeling that way. ’Specially when she don’t need to,” he says softly, giving me a pointed look out of the corner of his eye.
“Don’t blame this on me, Bills. I called her, texted her, and begged her to talk to me so that I could apologize. Hell, I’ve bent over backwards to do that, and yet she still won’t say a word to me,” I mutter, folding my arms defensively when he snorts.
“Got me three sisters, every one of them younger’n me, and in all my twenty-some years, I haven’t once heard a one of them say no to an apology. Far as I seen, women thrive on those words. So that raises the question, why won’t she accept it? Seems to me you hurt her feelings bad, or she has some other reason to keep you at arm’s length. Not that I can guess as to why she’d do that, seeing as how she was so happy hanging out with you. But, well, maybe you need to find out why she won’t accept your sorry.”
“Maybe she just doesn’t want to, Bills! Have you considered that? Maybe she just walked away because she was bored being my friend and moved the hell on. As far as things go, that’s what Alex does. She moves on fast,” I hiss, still unaccountably enraged at the thought.
I have no right to be, and I’ve tried sleeping with countless women ever since, so I have no right to judge. It’s not Alex’s fault that I can’t seem to move on before we make things right. That’s all on me. And yet, the anger still remains.
“Sure, sure. ’Cept I’m pretty sure that Grange said that she hasn’t seen anyone since she done pulled her disappearing act. According to him, the only reason that they didn’t tell the Sweets her position was ’cause they thought she looked like she needed some time to herself. Coming from Grange, who thinks that crying is for dead men, that’s saying a lot,” he says gravely, almost sadly.
“Are you saying that Rosetta’s been alone this whole time?” I ask, feeling suspicion filling me with a sense of dread.
He shrugs, his focus going back and forth between the mirrors before he changes lanes to turn left onto my street.
“Don’t know the details. Maybe she went out with some friends? Grange was a little vague, as if he didn’t want to betray her confidence or something. But I will tell you this—Al, she ain’t some milksop. She just isn’t the type to run. But it seems to me that she done ran, boss. And that makes me ask why.”
I’m starting to ask myself the same thing when he pulls into my driveway and comes around to help me out of the car. My legs aren’t too steady, not with the pounding in my head and the nausea in my gut. Thank you, Adonis, for making sure that I didn’t drive myself, I say silently, as Bills takes me into the cleared house and helps me up the stairs. Once there, I let him help me to the bed before he leaves, my movements slow as I get myself horizontal and let my head sink into the pillows.
Tomorrow, I am definitely taking his advice and asking some questions.
I just hope to God that I can stomach the answers.
Chapter Seven
Alex
“I don’t need a fucking babysitter,” Nate snarls, his eyes shooting sparks at me when I walk into the kitchen to start a pot of water for the spaghetti.
I’m not particularly hungry, and I don’t know that I want to eat anything on top of the decaf that I’ve managed to keep down since four this afternoon, but I know that not eating isn’t an option. I also know that I need something to do with my hands before I slap Nate silly and rip off his prosthetic.
The thing is most obviously not sitting right, a result of having it fitted before his stump is fully healed, I think, and Zeus agrees with me. Without that full healing, the flesh will not settle, which means that instead of fitting right, the prosthetic will get looser as his skin shrinks even more. I’ve read some stuff on the subject—not that much, but enough to know a little here and there—and, as far as I can tell, that stump needs more time to heal before it’s ready for him to put pressure on it.
But try telling him that. I dare you.
You can’t hit a man who’s injured, Alex, I remind myself, grabbing the tongs to stir the spaghetti.
“And I don’t need to get stuck with some grumpy-ass idiot who doesn’t have the decency to look happy to see me. We all got problems, Stumpy. Get over it or shut up,” I respond, keeping my grin to myself when I hear Nate cursing from the living room.
“Screw you, Alex.”
“Nope. Haven’t you noticed yet, Stumpy grumpy? I have the flu. It’s terminal. Terminally off-putting. Screwing isn’t something that I want to do right now.”
Or ever again, my mind tells me, while my body lets out a silent shriek, reminding me that I like orgasms and want them again someday.
I hear Nate scoff and hiss out another curse under his breath, and when I peek around the island, I see him clutching at his leg while a grimace mars his face. Nate is a good-looking man and very buff, and if I weren’t so sickened by my own body right now, I would totally appreciate him. He’s tall, around six-two or six-three like Chilli, but whereas Chilli and the other Harts have dark hair, swarthy skin showing their Mediterranean ancestry, and gray eyes, Nate is a sandy blond, with light brown eyes and skin that reminds me of a California surfer dude.
Watching him like this, and knowing that there isn’t a damn thing that I can do to make the pain go away, I feel helplessness and no small amount of annoyance with Rosetta. What the hell am I supposed to say to him, anyway? “Hey, Nate—it’s just a leg, man; get over it”? How about if I tell him that God has a plan for everyone, and that this isn’t the end of the world?
Not that I don’t believe that, but I’m sure that it wouldn’t provide him much comfort right now, when I can see how much pain he’s in. Phantom limb pains, grief, and anger—those are all emotions that he’s going to struggle through, and sensations that he’s going to have to fight. The truth is, he’ll have to do that alone, and only he can decide how he wants to do it.
“What’s with the heavy dose of denial?” I hear him ask after I duck back into the kitchen to drain the spaghetti and dish us both up a plate.
T
hen I grab them, along with a couple of cans of soda, some wine, and utensils, and join him, placing everything down on the table without help. Because he doesn’t offer, the ass.
“What’s with you holing up in your smelly apartment and feeling sorry for yourself?” I shoot back, wincing when he raises a brow and gives me a knowing look.
“I could ask you the same question.”
“And I could tell you to mind your own, but that would be counterproductive and would only make us be mean to each other. Now, while I don’t mind being mean, usually, I think we’ve both had our share of shitshows lately. So, how about this, Stumpy? You stop being a major asshole to me because you’re in pain and pissed off about your leg, and I, in turn, will not use your loss of limb against you. Because I would. My Uncle Jack once told me that there is no such thing as a fair fight, and I agree. If you act mean, I will fuck you up without giving one thought to your lost limb,” I tell him, smiling when he snorts and accepts the soda that I hand him, along with his knife and fork.
“Sounds fair-ish, except for that part where you failed to promise not to be mean back to me,” he points out, settling his plate on his lap.
When he winces again, obviously experiencing pain from his stump, I abruptly take matters into my own hands. Grabbing his plate, I move it to the table, drop to my knees, and start undoing his prosthesis. He curses and tries to struggle, batting at me gently to remove my hands. I don’t pay any heed, however, and eventually pop the sucker off, hissing out a breath when I remove the sock and see the angry, red-purple stump beneath.
“Ain’t pretty, is it?” he asks scornfully, leaning back with a curse that I feel like repeating.
“It looks painful, Nate, not ugly. There’s a difference. Count yourself lucky. You lost a leg. The others lost their lives, and Brent is still in a coma,” I tell him, handing him his plate with a look that says, “I won’t just quit.”
He takes it with another curse, and by the time I’m sitting beside him again, my fork playing through the food that I don’t really want to eat, I look up to see him staring at me.