Honor

by Jay Crownover

  I made more money and managed to see that more illegal goods changed hands and soon I found myself headed there. My old home received prime airtime on the national news . . . the home I was headed toward seemed to exist only in nightmares and warnings.

  I was in the Point for less than a day when I got word that the man that ran the streets wanted to see me. I liked to lay low. I liked to blend in, but here it didn’t seem like that was an option. Instead of desert sand, the battleground here was asphalt and concrete, and as soon as my presence was known, it was as if this place recognized the fight lying dormant inside of me. This city called to it. I don’t know why I instantly felt like I fit, but I did. So I went to see the man in charge, fully expecting to offer him the last of my cash in order to gain a foothold in the desolate kingdom. I was a survivor. I could do without money for a little bit. No man was more resourceful than I was.

  I walked into a disgustingly gaudy strip club, offended by its crass ugliness. I was expecting to meet the ruler of the land, state my intentions, and let him know I would bow to no man here or anywhere else ever again. I was expecting a shakedown and maybe some strong-arming since I was obviously foreign and undocumented. I was technically legal since my mother had been an American citizen before she fell in love with an extremist, but I hadn’t really existed on paper since she handed me over to killers and radicals when I was just a kid. Mossad didn’t want me to be anything other than their trained attack dog, so they hadn’t offered up any proof of identity for me during my time at the end of their string. What I wasn’t expecting was that my cause, my reason, my purpose for living, and my something to believe in would be dancing nearly naked on a horrifically ugly stage, looking like she was going to cry at any second. She was so much more than freedom.

  She was Honor.

  She was beautiful, young, innocent, and so obviously resigned to her fate. It pulled at a heart I was stunned to find I still had buried somewhere deep underneath the brutal history that filled up the inside of me. It was the first time I felt it beat, and the pulse of its yearning scared and electrified me in equal measure.

  I started to move toward her like all those invisible gods I spent my life killing for were leading me directly to her when suddenly a man twice her age and triple her size leaped from his seat next to the stage and hurled himself up onto the platform directly at the girl. In the blink of an eye he was on top of her, rough hands all over her naked flesh. I heard her scream. I saw her long limbs flail and thrash under him. A red haze filled my vision and I forgot all about staying quiet and laying low. I forgot all about being a ghost, and realized that I could channel the fight that had been forged into my very soul, the fight that was slumbering restlessly inside me at that moment, into protecting something so innocent. She woke the fight up and she kept it alive.

  I was on the stage before my mind even registered that I had moved across the room. I pulled the hulking man off the dancer and offered her my hand. Pretty eyes the color of an overcast sky glimmered up at me. She looked at the hand I’d offered like it was her lifeline out of this place, out of this vicious world, and clutched it ferociously as I pulled her to her feet.

  We stared at each other in silence and I knew in that instant that this young woman would mean more than anything in my life had ever meant.

  “Are you okay?”

  She blinked at me like a terrified animal and I felt all the dead things inside me roar to life with new purpose and passion.

  “Yeah. I could’ve handled him. He just surprised me.”

  She was so young and her words pounded into me so hard they hurt. She shouldn’t have to handle him at all. I was the opposite of innocent and suddenly all I wanted was to keep her as different from me and my life as I could.

  I squeezed the hand I still held and told her, “I’m Nassir Gates.”

  I gave her the name of the man I had decided I was going to be, half Middle Eastern, half American, one hundred percent lie. All the things I had done, all the things I had been, were no more. I was just a man that was going to make this new place his home. I didn’t know at the time it was going to require as much blood and warfare to survive here as it had in the desert.

  As the guy who attacked her started to make noise on the floor behind me, I turned to regard him. I was far from done with the bastard, but I wanted a proper introduction before I did what was inevitable the instant I watched the brute put his hands on her.

  She smiled at me softly and returned the squeeze like we were going to be friends or something. “Keelyn Foster.” Her eyes widened and she bit her plush lower lip, and I wanted to put my own teeth there more than I wanted anything in life. She was almost completely naked but I couldn’t look away from those eyes. “I mean, Honor. Around here I’m Honor.”

  I smiled at her, and I was pretty sure it was the first time I had smiled. Ever. “How about I only call you that here in this club. I’m new in town but I have a feeling we’ll be bumping into each other. Keelyn is a pretty name.”

  She blushed. She was gyrating for the pleasure of strangers, but giving her a throwaway compliment had her turning hot pink. And at the sight of her smile, everything suddenly made sense in my world.

  “Thank you,” she whispered, but I heard the words as loud as a thunderclap.

  I inclined my head at her and turned around to the man trying to crawl his way back off the stage. I could be civilized. I could be restrained. I could be calm. But when I thought about those meaty paws all over her, I didn’t want to be anything other than what I had been born to be . . . a killer.

  I was on him between heartbeats. His face disintegrated under my hands. His bones turned to dust. His breath was stamped out under my feet. His life was nothing to me until I caught sight of stormy gray eyes looking at me like I was evil incarnate. Now they were the color of charcoal, and full of fear . . . fear of me. I shook the blood off my knuckles and walked away from her before I inflicted more damage.

  The man in charge watched the whole thing go down. Instead of asking me for money to stay in his city, he offered me papers that were fake but good enough to make me legalish. He asked me if I could get my hands on some armor-piercing rounds. I said yes to both the papers and the ammo, and my plan for laying low swelled up like a balloon and popped right over my head. I would never be able to run from who I was, or what I was, so I figured I might as well make the most of it in this place that was eager to embrace it. This place was a different kind of war zone, where every man seemed to be fighting for himself. It was familiar enough that I knew I could thrive here, could find a place where I fit. I could absolutely work with what made the Point tick, and while here, I could watch the girl. I could wait for her while she realized this was hell on earth—and when you make your home in hell, you want to have the devil in your corner.

  I could fight for her even if she thought I was a monster. After all, I already knew all about chasing a lost cause.

  Epigraph

  The devil’s voice is sweet.

  —Stephen King

  Chapter 1

  Keelyn

  Maybe if I hadn’t spent the last six months slinging pancakes and greasy hash to hungover hipsters and avoiding the too-curious eyes of the cops who liked to hit up the diner for early-morning breakfast, I would have noticed the ominous shift in the air.

  Before I came to Denver six months ago, my senses had been honed to pick up on the slightest threat. Before, anything that might be dangerous, that might put me in peril, had made my skin tingle, made everything inside of me vibrate with awareness. Now I had settled into a simple, dreary rhythm. Every day was the same as the one before it and there was no outside threat constantly hounding me, hunting me, haunting me. I let my guard down. I had gone soft, and as a result the biggest danger of them all managed to slip into my new normal without giving any kind of hint he was there.

  My nonslip shoes—that were probably the ugliest things ever made but absolutely necessary considering the greasy food th
e tiny kitchen pumped out—squeaked on the laminate floor as I made my way over to the lone patron who had taken the last available seat in my section. The massive plastic menu completely covered his face, but the Rolex on his wrist and the perfect cut of his suit jacket let me know he wasn’t my typical kind of customer. There wasn’t a flannel shirt or police blues in sight, and as I got closer, a whiff of something exotic and familiar engulfed my senses and stopped me in my tracks. Of all the things I had left behind, he was the one I had tried hardest to forget.

  The tingling across my skin spread. My tummy tightened. Blood rushed loudly between my ears. My shaking fingers curled around the pen in my hand like it was a weapon. Before I could pull it together and walk away, the menu lowered and I was pinned to the spot, immobilized by eyes the color of spiced rum.

  They were wicked eyes. Eyes that saw far too much and gave nothing away. Eyes I daydreamed about. Eyes that caused me to wake up in a cold sweat. Eyes that turned me inside out and shook me up as they made a slow perusal from the top of my head to the tips of my god-awful shoes, returning to my face and staying there as I struggled to keep my shit together.

  He slowly put the menu down on the cracked tabletop and leaned back in the booth. He was strikingly out of place here and I absolutely hated how that sexy twist of his mouth, a mouth that I dreamed about almost every night, made my traitorous heart flutter and my pulse kick.

  I was also strikingly out of place here, but I’d learned to fake it. He, obviously, never bothered to fake anything. He wasn’t a man with virtuous intentions and he never pretended to be.

  Gone were the mile-high stilettos that I always wore. In their place I now donned work shoes that prevented me from falling on my ass as I ran food and dirty dishes to and from the kitchen. I was hiding in plain sight, knowing that the last place on earth anyone who might come looking for me would check out would be this greasy spoon. This was the opposite of me and the life I had always lived, so even though I could afford better, craved more, this was where I needed to be . . . until he showed up.

  Gone was the long, flowing hair dyed the perfect shade of auburn and styled in a way meant to give men dirty ideas. In its place was a boring, brown bob that hit my chin. There was hardly enough hair left on my head to inspire men to do anything other than feel sorry for me. Gone were the short skirts that left nothing to the imagination, and the shirts cut down to my navel so that the boobs I paid a small fortune for were on obvious and prominent display. Today I wore faded skinny jeans with a hole in the knee and a plain black T-shirt that covered those spectacular boobs. I hadn’t put on a full face of makeup in over six months, and since I was no longer dancing hours upon hours a night, I had put on some weight. I would never pass for a plain Jane, but I was close. Average was probably the first thing that came to mind when strangers laid eyes on me, especially if they didn’t bother to look closely. I definitely wasn’t the same girl that had left this man, and the world he not only came from, but ruled.

  Those predatory eyes rolled over me again, and his lips twitched in amusement when they landed back on my ugly footwear. “Nice shoes, Key.”

  My fingers tightened instinctively on the pen I was clutching, and I heard the plastic crack under the pressure. I resisted the urge to shift in said ugly-ass shoes, and instead narrowed my eyes at him. Weakness around a killer should never be shown, and I knew this particular predator would eat me alive if he got even the slightest chance. He’d been hungry for a taste since the first day I met him, and while I had always been tempted to feed the beast, fear of losing more than my fingers to those vicious jaws always kept me from offering up myself on a platter. The only thing I ever wanted was to be my own person, to thrive and be independent, making my own rules and answering to no one. The only thing Nassir Gates wanted was for me to be his.

  “What are you doing here, Nassir?”

  Nassir Gates, half man and half monster. He was lethal and toxic, keeping all that sinister beauty covered up in a ridiculously expensive suit that made him look elegant and falsely civilized. To the untrained eye, Nassir was an outrageously handsome man that looked like he was on his way to a business meeting, but if you had spent any time on the streets, if you were familiar with life in the gutter, there was no missing who he really was, what he was. The top of the food chain. If you knew about what it took to make it where I came from, you could look at Nassir and see that he not only thrived in chaos, but was comfortable there. He even managed to make it look good.

  I left all of that behind. I liked Denver. I liked the laid-back vibe. I liked the monotony. I liked the predictability. I liked that I could walk to my car after my shift at the diner and not have to worry about taking a knife in the ribs or getting a revolver shoved in my back. I liked that I didn’t have to shake my ass or get naked to pay my bills. I liked that here, soccer dads were just that, and weren’t secretly banging hookers in the back room or gambling the family’s grocery money away at an illegal poker game. Most importantly I liked that I didn’t have to look my biggest addiction, my worst temptation, in the eye every single day and pretend like I didn’t want him. Here I didn’t have to deny that I had been infatuated with him for years. I was foolishly obsessed with this particular devil in a designer suit and I knew he was absolutely detrimental not only to my safety but to the thing I valued above all else . . . my independence.

  After a childhood spent evading the hands of my mother’s overzealous and unhinged boyfriends and barely escaping the clutches of a sick and twisted stepfather, and too many years working my ass off—literally—to make a life for myself, I could never risk letting myself care for Nassir the way I wanted to because I knew that if I did, I would become nothing more than his, and I refused to be any man’s possession or accessory.

  When the opportunity arose to take off without an explanation or without looking like I was running from him and the promise and future I saw so clearly in his eyes, I grabbed it. Ran away with both my heart and my tail tucked between my legs. But now he was here in this fragile and predictable paradise and I wanted to stab him with the broken pen and jump in his lap and put my mouth on his smirking lips all at the same time.

  “You’re here, Key. Where else would I be?”

  His inky-black hair was longer than I remembered, touching the collar of his shirt, and his voice was even smoother and more musical than I recalled. He spoke with just the barest hint of an accent, which no one could pin down the origins of, and Nassir wasn’t the kind of guy who offered up even the tiniest sliver of personal information. He was a beautiful tawny color no matter what time of the year, so I always assumed that with his dark hair and golden complexion, he had to have come from somewhere in the Middle East. He never confirmed or denied my suspicions. All I knew was that he’d landed in the Point when I had just started stripping, and from the second he stepped into the scene, he had been at the center of all the action. He had also always been the one danger I was smart enough to steer clear of. A task that grew harder and harder the older I got, and the more aware I became of him and the pull he had over me.

  “You shouldn’t be here. I don’t want you here.” I hated that my voice dipped. I was never a very good liar and I never wanted him to know he was my greatest weakness even though he had never hidden the fact that I was his.

  His dark eyebrows lowered over those golden eyes and the smirk fell off his too pretty mouth. Luckily, another table called me over and I had to run back to the kitchen. It gave me a much-needed minute to get my head back on straight. I should have known that just the sight of him after all these months would be enough to throw me totally off my stride. He was that impressive. That consuming. That hard to quit.

  I was headed back toward his table with a mug and a pot of coffee when a light hand landed on my arm. I looked at the pretty redheaded cop that came in all the time. Sometimes with her partner or other cops, but more often than not with her boyfriend. They must have lived close by because she was often going to work when he w
as getting off. He ran a bar, or a couple of them, here in town, so their hours were opposite, but they seemed to be making it work. At first I couldn’t believe someone that looked like her carried a badge on purpose or that she seemed to be genuinely interested in being my friend. She mentioned that we had a mutual acquaintance that had asked her to check up on me when I first got to town, but now she seemed to be curious about me all on her own. She was so lovely and fun, plus her man was a charmer. Blond and way too handsome for his own good, he reminded me of an old flame I had back in the Point. I was intimately acquainted with men like him, only the pretty cop’s boyfriend didn’t have the same kind of ruthless edge the Point bred in the men I was familiar with. But the southern charmer had his own kind of dangerous and sexy aura that led me to believe his story would be an interesting one if he bothered to share it.

  “Are you okay? You look like you just saw a ghost.” She was sweet but she was looking at me with cop eyes, and there weren’t enough hours in a day to try to explain to her all the things that were wrong with Nassir sitting at that battered little table in this run-down diner in Colorado. He should be anywhere but here.

  “Yeah, just busy.” I gave her a weak smile and stopped to fill up a few more cups of coffee before going back to Nassir’s table with resolve. I took the mug, set it in front of him and filled it up. I nudged it toward him with a scowl.

  “Coffee’s on the house. Drink it and leave. I don’t have anything else to say to you.”

  He looked at the coffee and then back up at me. His eyebrows shot up and the smirk returned to his mouth. It was such an arrogant look. I wanted to smack it off his beautiful face.