King's Reign

by Nina Levine

  I looked at Hyde. He was pissed I hadn’t handled Stark, and had been very fucking vocal about it. “Getting Stark on our payroll is an option,” I said.

  “You’re fucking kidding me, King. If you’d just done what you went there to do, we wouldn’t be sitting around discussing one of your shittiest fucking ideas yet. You’re going soft, brother.”

  “You’d do fucking well to watch what the fuck you say,” I snarled. “Removing her from the case would only lead to them replacing her, and the body count would just keep rising.”

  “It’d send them a fucking message,” he snapped, his shoulders squaring like he was preparing to go head-to-head with me rather than backing down.

  I shoved my chair back and stood, more than ready to meet him where he was. “It’d fucking have them out for our blood more than they already are!” I bellowed, my fists clenching.

  He jerked up out of his seat and came at me, fists raised. Before he managed to land a punch, Nitro had his arms around Hyde and halted his progress. “Not a fucking good idea, brother,” he said as he spun him around and pushed him away from me. “We’re all fucking exhausted and need to get our heads together. This kind of bullshit is what the feds want.” He looked angrily between Hyde and me. “They fucking want us to fall apart and take ourselves down, and I refuse to let that happen. I am not fucking going back inside because you two motherfuckers couldn’t hold your shit.”

  Fuck.

  I blew out an angry breath.

  He was fucking right.

  I glared at Hyde one last time before sitting back down. “Right, this is our fucking plan going forward. I’m gonna pay Stark another visit and push her to do what we need her to do. The fact we took care of her husband should go a long way towards us getting what we want. Kick keeps watching D’Amato until we sort Stark out. Everyone else gets on with our usual shit. With any fucking luck, we’ll have figured everything out and taken care of Gambarro by the end of this fucking week.” I exhaled sharply again. And then I can spend the weekend fucking my woman without having to think about any of this bullshit.

  Hyde hit me with a filthy look as he stalked out of the room. I ignored it. We’d had worse trouble between us before. This shit would blow over.

  “For what it’s worth, I would have done what you did with Stark,” Devil said after everyone left.

  I nodded. “Yeah, brother.” I believed he would have. We’d handled some stuff together that had shown me how similar we were in some ways.

  He watched me thoughtfully. “You okay with this shit?”

  I knew what he was asking. Had it stirred up memories for me when I’d walked away from Isabel Stark? Had it reminded me that I allowed Margreet’s killer to go on living after I discovered he was a single father to a daughter who needed him more than I needed vengeance?

  Devil was the only brother who knew this story of mine. He’d caught me in a bad moment one night, and after some whisky loosened my tongue, I’d shared some shit about that with him.

  I nodded and jerked my chin towards the door. “Go. We’ve got a lot of shit to get through today.”

  My phone rang as he exited the room.

  Ivy.

  “Don’t tell me you’re calling for me to fucking take you somewhere today. I’m busy,” I said as I answered it.

  “I really need you to swing by, King. There’s something wrong with the tap in the shower, and I can’t get it to turn off. Brian’s out taking one of the girls to an appointment, and I’m worried about the amount of water we’re wasting.”

  “Jesus,” I muttered. “I’ll send one of the boys over. Sit tight.”

  She turned silent before saying, “Oh, okay. I thought if you came, we could talk over some more of that stuff you helped me with the other day.”

  She’d made me sit and listen to her plans for getting back on her feet. She hadn’t asked my opinion on anything, and I hadn’t given it, but it had felt like she’d expected me to make offers to be by her side while she got to work on it all. That had thrown me, but I hadn’t brought it up. I figured I was reading too much into shit, because surely she realised we didn’t have a shot at ever being a couple again. But here we were again, and I knew I had to deal with this before it got out of hand.

  “I’ll be there in about half an hour,” I said and ended the call.

  I didn’t have the time for this today, but it was something I had to make the time for. I’d meant it when I told Lily that Ivy was in the past. Now I had to make Ivy understand that, too.

  “Thank you,” Ivy said when I entered the kitchen after fixing the shower. “Brian would have been super stressed about the cost of all that water if he’d come back to a running shower. He seems worried all the time over money.”

  I dumped my tools on the table. “It’s why I like working with him. He runs a tight ship.”

  “I wasn’t saying it was a bad thing, King. He seems like a good guy.”

  “That’s because he is a good fucking guy.”

  She frowned, coming towards me. “Why are you so short with me today?”

  I raked my fingers through my hair. I’d been in a mood from the minute I’d stepped foot inside the place. Knowing I needed to discuss shit with her had me on edge. I was a bastard for what I was about to do. I’d fucked Ivy up in the past, and now I was about to cut her loose again, and that shit didn’t sit right in my gut. But I couldn’t figure out another way through this.

  “We need to talk about some stuff,” I said, holding her gaze, trying to get a feel for her mental state. So far, she’d been happy to see me and had jabbered on the whole time I’d worked on the shower. But fuck knew, Ivy could switch gears as fast as I could, so I needed to tread carefully.

  “What stuff?”

  “You and I stuff.”

  Her face lit up and she came to me, moving in closer than necessary. “I’m all for that.”

  Jesus, she thought I meant something I didn’t.

  I shook my head and took a step back. “No, that’s not what this is about. This won’t ever be about that.”

  Her face clouded over with disappointment. “Really? You expect me to believe you would protect me from my husband and then from Brant, bring me to Sydney, set me up here, come whenever I call you over, fix stuff for me, drive me to job interviews, and yet not want to be with me? I don’t buy that bullshit for one minute, King. You want us to be together again.”

  Fucking hell.

  I could see where she was coming from, but what the fuck happened to people just fucking looking out for each other because they cared about their safety and happiness? Why the fuck did there have to be conditions and expectations around stuff like this?

  “I don’t want us to be together again so you need to get that out of your head now. I did all that shit because even after all these years and after everything we’ve been together, I care about you. Just not in the way you think.”

  The disappointment on her face morphed to anger. “That is such utter crap and you know it. Men don’t do stuff for women they don’t wanna fuck.”

  “That’s some twisted fucking thinking, Ivy. Of course they fucking do. And trust me when I say I don’t wanna fuck you.” I hadn’t intended to be hurtful, but I saw that reaction in her eyes.

  Before I could stop her, she closed the distance between us, grabbed my face, and kissed me.

  It was a hard, desperate kiss, and I felt nothing.

  Nothing but the realisation we really had reached the end of the line.

  I’d already come to that understanding, but this absolutely and undeniably confirmed it. Where her touch had once sparked the kind of passion that would consume me for days, it now left me empty.

  I took hold of her arms and forced her away from me. Staring down at her, I bit out, “Don’t ever do that again. When I tell you something, I fucking mean it. And I mean it when I say I don’t want to be with you.”

  She stared at me through tears. Hot, angry tears. Not sad ones. And then the ra
ge came, and I knew this was repressed anger by the violence of it. It was also what she needed to get out of her, so I allowed it all to spew out without interruption. That, I would give her. That, she deserved from me. “I fucking hate you! And I fucking love you! And all I wanna do is forget you, but you are un-fucking-forgettable, King. That”—she jabbed her finger at me—“is the worst part of all this. I’ve tried for years to put you out of my mind, and I fucking failed. I didn’t want to come to you about Tony, because I knew seeing you would kill me, but I did. I fucking came, and I helped you, and this is what I get for that? I even told Brant not to hurt your friend, and I thought he’d listened to me—”

  My body tensed, every inch of me alert as her words triggered my fury. “What the fuck did you just say?”

  She flinched at my tone and tried to move away from me, but I grabbed her arm and held her in place. “Tell me what the fuck you mean by that, and so fucking help you God, if you mean what I think you mean, shit isn’t gonna be pretty.”

  Swallowing hard, she said, “You were right about Brant—he was crazy. Insane probably. I didn’t know about his past, but I knew he was the kind of man to do anything for the woman he loved. And he loved me, so I let him close and I let him help me escape Tony. But I swear I didn’t know he was going to shoot that woman. He’d told me he was tracking the woman you were seeing, and that he wanted to get back at you for all the stuff you did to me years ago. I told him to drop it, because that stuff was in the past, but he was intent on hurting you through her. I honestly thought he meant he was just going to hurt her. I never imagined killing her was on his mind.”

  I shifted my grip from her arm to her neck. Holding her tightly, I backed her up against the wall, pressing her hard to it. “Tell me the fucking truth. You fucking knew he was going there to kill her, didn’t you?”

  Fear flashed in her eyes as she clawed at my hand around her throat. “Let me go, King! I didn’t know. I promise.” She struggled to get the words out, but I didn’t give a fuck. I was dancing the line between sane and crazy here with her revelation, and it was a fucking taut line close to snapping and taking us all down with it.

  Thrusting my face forward, I stared into her eyes. “Fucking tell me the truth, Ivy! At least fucking give me that!”

  Tears streamed down her face, landing on my hand, but I ignored them. I didn’t care about her tears anymore. “This is the truth. I might hate you, but I love you more. If I’d known his intentions, I would have made sure I stopped him. I wouldn’t allow anyone to hurt you like that. Just like I didn’t let Tony hurt you.”

  Hard, angry breaths forced their way out of me as I searched her eyes madly for the truth. It was in the blink, and she hadn’t blinked. She hadn’t fucking blinked.

  Fuck.

  With one last squeeze of her neck, I let her go and jerked away from her.

  We stared at each other, a furious and bitter tension sitting between us. After all these years, this is what we had come down to. She said she loved me more than she hated me, but I didn’t think she did. Love didn’t lead to actions like hers. It was a false love. It was the kind of love rooted in fear and doubt. She might have thought she still loved me, but that was only because she didn’t trust herself enough to love herself and let me go. I could blame myself for her brokenness, but she’d had years to move past what happened between us. She’d had time and resources to help herself, and she’d chosen not to use them. We were all responsible for our own happiness; no one could do a damn thing to make Ivy happy until she decided to make herself happy.

  “I’m going to walk out that door and I’m never coming back. You need something, you ask Brian. He sees fit to ask me for help with it, I’ll do what I can. Other than that, this is the end of the road for us, Ivy. And as much as you may not believe this, I just want you to be fucking happy.”

  Her tears still fell, but they didn’t register with me.

  Not like they once did.

  We were well and truly finished.

  I got sidetracked with club business that gave me a headache on my way to see Detective Stark, which meant by the time I finally tracked her down and stood in front of her, my skull felt like it had been hit by a sledgehammer a hundred fucking times. Between the bullshit that had gone down with Ivy this morning and the hours I’d spent on club shit, I was in no mood for her to say no to my proposal.

  Isabel Stark was grieving the loss of her husband. Well, to the world she was. She’d taken a few days off, so I found her at her home again. She was not grieving the loss of her husband. She was cleaning her oven when I got to her.

  She met me at her front door with cleaning gloves on, her hair a mess, and more light in her eyes than I’d seen the last time I called on her. Staring at me through her screen door, she said, “Are you here to finish the job you came for the other day?”

  I arched a brow. “If you’re asking me if I’m here to put a bullet in your head, the answer is no. However, if you’re asking if I’m here to save my club, that would be a yes. Do not send me away without giving me what I want, Isabel. I’ve had a fucking shit of a day and you won’t like the consequences of an incorrect answer.”

  She unlocked the door. “You better come in then.”

  I followed her into the kitchen where she pulled her gloves off before looking at me, and asking, “What do you want from me?”

  “I want you to drop the fucking case against me and my club. I want you to walk the fuck away from it and never look back. And I’ll fucking pay you to do that.”

  She considered that. “It’s tempting, but I don’t need your cash. My husband left me a great deal of money. So much that I don’t have to work another day in my life if I don’t want to.”

  “Well that leaves you and me with a big fucking problem then.”

  She took a deep breath. “No, not really. Not if you agree to a deal I have for you.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve worked my job for too long now that I know how shit goes down. I put you away, and maybe some of your club, it still doesn’t fix the problems on the streets. You guys are a dime-a-fucking-dozen. And you just keep coming at me. I’m tired of working the system legally and never achieving my goals. I do this job so my daughter can be safe from men like you, but I’m jaded and don’t buy into the bullshit anymore that what I do makes a difference.” She paused for a beat. “But then you showed up here to kill me and didn’t go through with it, because of the very reason I do my job—because you want to protect my kid from bad people. That surprised the hell out of me, Zachary. I did not see that coming from you. So here’s what I propose—I leave you out there doing your thing, and while doing that, you help me keep the streets clear of as much bullshit as you can.”

  “You want me to work with you?”

  “Not officially. This would be between you and me only. I’ll bury the case against Storm, and in return, you’ll do everything you can to keep the assholes you work with in line. You appear to have that power, so I figure why not use it for good as well as whatever the hell else you use it for. Keep the streets free of war, and I’ll keep you free of jail.”

  “Fuck, that’s a big fucking ask. Streets free of war aren’t something you’ll ever see.”

  “I understand that, but I think we can agree you have the power to control a lot of it. You just need to decide to do that.”

  “I guarantee you our ideas of war are two different things. Some of it is necessary, and that shit I won’t ever stop. So if this deal is gonna go down between us, you need to understand that sometimes I’m gonna handle business in ways you won’t like. Having said that, I’m all for keeping motherfuckers in line, so I’m on board with that part of it.”

  “Good. We have a deal then. And now you can get the hell out of my house and never come back here. In future, you have no reason to come to me. I will come to you if there is a problem.”

  I moved closer to her and dropped my voice to a dark rumble. “If I have reason to come to you,
I fucking will. Do not make the mistake of thinking you have any power here. You don’t. If this deal goes south, I will find another way to get what I want.”

  Without waiting for a response, I turned and strode towards her door.

  I’d taken a few steps when she said, “Thank you.” The words were delivered with a softer tone, and I knew she wasn’t referring to anything we’d just discussed.

  Looking back at her, I gave a quick nod, and then I exited her home.

  I never imagined the day I would get into fucking bed with the cops, but here it fucking was. I would play this game with Detective Stark and see where it got us. If she tried to switch her rules up at any point, I’d abandon the deal and force my own upon her. But for now, this would do.

  26

  Lily

  “What the fuck is that music?” King asked, entering his kitchen on Wednesday night.

  I’d dropped the kids over to Linc after work, stopped at the supermarket to buy the ingredients to cook dinner for us, and had arrived here about an hour ago. He’d given me a key to the place two days ago and told me to use it whenever. I’d told him I really wasn’t sure when that would be since he didn’t have any furniture in the place, to which he’d called me a smartass and told me he would buy some. That had caused butterflies in my tummy and that in turn had resulted in him receiving a blowjob he’d loved so much that he had then proceeded to fuck me for three hours straight. Needless to say, Tuesday had been a long, exhausting day at work.

  I looked up from my laptop and eyed him, noting the tension lining his face. “It’s Taylor Swift. Surely you’ve heard of her.”