Better When He's Brave

by Jay Crownover

  “Nassir doesn’t care. He ended up here by default after the Pit burned down. He’s only here until he rebuilds his club.”

  “That’s dumb. He takes care of all those girls, he invests in them. He should give them someplace they can be proud of. This still feels like it did when Novak used it as a brothel and a betting house. Nassir should put a little bit of the money those girls make him into it and turn it around.” I mean, it was always going to be a strip club, but I didn’t see why it couldn’t be a nice strip club.

  Race led the way to the office and lifted his hand to knock on the door. Before his fist connected he shot me a hard look. “Remember not to trust him. Nassir has his own agenda in everything he does.”

  I lifted an eyebrow. “So do you.”

  “Damn straight. So does Bax, so does Booker. We all do. In fact the only person you should rely on being up front with you is Titus. He’s the only one of us that is trustworthy.”

  “I do trust him.” I more than trusted him, which meant he could break me so very easily if we weren’t careful.

  Race nodded just slightly, some of his blond hair flipping into his eyes. “Yeah, well, he trusts you too, which is the scary part. Don’t let him down, because that isn’t a gift lightly given.”

  Ugh. Stupid, handsome genius. It was like he was looking right through my skin and seeing the guilt lurking there about still having the gun and about my own original, deceitful plot. I didn’t have to respond because Chuck pulled open the door and ushered us inside.

  Nassir was sitting behind a rickety metal desk that looked like it was going to fall apart. He had a MacBook open in front of him and a glower on his sinfully handsome face. Nassir was a hard guy to read but he was making no effort to hide the fact that he was frustrated and on edge. Chuck gave me a wink, flashed his gold tooth, and leaned against the door we had just come through. It was meant to look like a casual gesture, but there was no getting out of the office without going through him, and that made me feel slightly trapped.

  “Have you seen Booker since he posted bail?” Nassir’s voice was smooth and smoky but there was always a razor-fine edge that laced through it.

  Race snorted and shrugged. “No, and I’m not sure why everyone seems to think it’s my job to keep tabs on him. I don’t have the guy microchipped. He can come and go as he pleases.”

  Nassir’s caramel-tinted gaze switched over to me. It was hard not to flinch under the intensity of it. This guy was scary, and it had me wanting to rethink this hasty plan.

  “What are you doing here?” There was only annoyance in his tone as he spoke to me.

  I cleared my throat so I could speak without my voice cracking. It was never a good idea to show fear in front of a predator. “I want you to find me something to do in the club so that Conner will make a move. All this waiting is getting us nowhere and he’s escalating. I’d rather you go toe-to-toe with him than the feds, which is the next option. They pulled my deal off the table.”

  Nassir didn’t say anything for a long moment. His tawny eyes shifted between me and Race and then one of his pitch-black eyebrows shot up on his forehead. “This was your idea?” He asked the question of Race.

  The blond man shook his head in the negative and hitched his thumb in my direction. “All her, and she even cleared it with the cop.”

  The second eyebrow winged up to joined the first on Nassir’s face. “The cop knows if the Irishman comes anywhere near me he isn’t going to walk away breathing. He would never agree to that.”

  “Desperate times.” I couldn’t really explain Titus’s motivation in agreeing to this new scheme, but as long as he was supporting it, I wasn’t going to tempt fate by digging too deep.

  “What exactly do you want to do? Get up onstage?” His eyes rolled over me and white flashed as he gave me a lecherous grin. “I could work with that.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest and narrowed my eyes at him. I refrained from elbowing Race in the ribs as he muttered, “Told ya,” out of the corner of his mouth.

  “No, I don’t want to dance. I told Titus that wouldn’t be part of it. Can’t you put me behind the bar or something?” I didn’t ask about cocktail serving because even those girls had to work topless, and while I wasn’t shy, I wasn’t okay with having my lady bits within grabbing distance of drunken hands.

  “There isn’t room behind the bar. And that job is murkier than getting naked onstage. The cop would have a fit if he knew you were messing around with dirty money.”

  Both Race and Nassir looked so suave, so clean cut, that it was easy to forget they had their hands on piles and piles of illegal cash from running the city’s underground. All that dirty money needed to get clean somehow and running the bills through the bar at a strip club was obviously a no-brainer.

  Race agreed and then grinned at me. “You know how you’re focused on building yourself a new club and always complaining about how you don’t want to be here? Put Reeve in charge. She thinks Spanky’s is butt ugly and was just telling me how someone needs to show it some love. Why not let a woman do it? The dancers would probably like having a softer touch around here. She thinks they need something to value as their own. She thinks that would’ve kept Honor around.”

  “Keelyn.” Nassir and I barked the woman’s real name at the same time and eyes that were the color of spiced cider switched from annoyed to speculative.

  “What do you mean, give them something to value?”

  I lifted a shoulder and let it fall. “You hire the prettiest girls you can find. You give them a degree of security they wouldn’t have out on the street, but they are still getting naked for strangers and that can be demeaning. Class the joint up. Get rid of the pink everywhere. It’s gaudy. Make this place feel expensive and worthwhile and the girls won’t just work here, they’ll own it. Plus you can charge more and bring in a better class of loser. This place feels like a throwback to harder times, and after that shootout . . .” I shrugged again because he wasn’t stupid and knew exactly what I was talking about. “You need to breathe new life into this place just like you’re trying to do with Novak’s other old businesses.”

  Nassir muttered something in a language I didn’t understand but it sounded exotic and sexy. No wonder Key ran. Having all that smoldering intensity and sexy appeal focused solely on her had to be nearly impossible to resist.

  “You think a new coat of paint and some new decor would have kept Key here?” He sounded skeptical.

  “No. I think she had to go so when she comes back she can do it knowing she’ll probably never leave again. That’s a hard pill to swallow. I think if she knew she was more than just tits and ass and a pretty show you would’ve gotten a lot further with her.”

  He grunted at me and sat down in the chair behind the ugly desk. He looked at something on the computer and then over my shoulder to where Chuck was still standing as a silent sentinel.

  “What do you think? Is this a crazy idea?”

  The giant African American man barked out a laugh that had me jumping a little. “No way. It’s fucking brilliant. The regulars are too comfortable and you have too much on your plate. Let her tear this place apart and fix it up. Let her make it as pretty as she is. No one will know what hit them.”

  I shot Race a look out of the corner of my eye and then shifted my feet nervously. This wasn’t what I had expected at all. “Uh . . . I can’t play around with laundering money. The feds already have me on their radar and Titus will kill all of us after he locks us up if he thinks any of that is going on.”

  Nassir flicked a look to Race then back to me and he folded his hands together and leaned back in the chair. He looked like a devil sitting on a tattered throne.

  “That’s one of the reasons I need to finish rebuilding my club. We always tried to keep Spanky’s clean. Right now just the bar is handling anything we need filtered through legitimate means. We can find another avenue for that while you’re here, but only if you take up the reins. Unless you agree to
do this, then the only other place I have for you is up on that stage, are we clear? And you have to see the job through to the end, not just until I put a slug in the Irishman.”

  I fidgeted nervously. When people called Nassir ruthless they weren’t kidding. He had a way of maneuvering people and situations so that he got the exact outcome he was after. I felt like there was zero wiggle room for me if I agreed to do this. There was far more responsibility involved than I had been expecting when I planned on asking him to put me to work. I didn’t know anything about managing a strip club or how to work with fierce strippers forged in the fire of this brutal city. I didn’t know how Titus would react to me working for Nassir. He made it clear he wasn’t a fan of the guy’s business practices and ability to skate around those pesky little things like laws and regulations. But then again, it wasn’t like I had any other option on the horizon. I was just waiting for the showdown with Conner, so I might as well help some other ladies out until judgment day found me.

  “If you can keep it legal, all of it aboveboard, so that Titus doesn’t have any reason to doubt me, then I’m in.”

  Race chuckled and patted me so hard on the back I almost fell over while Nassir studied me hard.

  “The cop’s opinion matters that much?”

  I tilted my chin up and made sure all three of them could see how serious I was when I replied, “It’s the only thing that matters.”

  Chuck laughed from behind me. “Welcome to the family, pretty girl. This should be interesting.”

  Interesting was probably the simplest thing it was going to be. No matter what I did I just seemed to sink deeper and deeper into the grip of this city. At least I was smart enough to know struggling against it only made the hold tighter. Like Keelyn was soon going to figure out, once you came back here you did it knowing you were staying forever, and there was a weird kind of peace in that knowledge. I was going to die trying to protect my home or my home was eventually going to kill me. It was the same for all of us, which made us exactly what Chuck said—a family. The most dysfunctional one ever, but still we all had the same fate that tied us together.

  Lucky us.

  Chapter 16

  Titus

  I JERKED AWAKE AS my fist, which was propping up my head, slipped away from under my chin. I had drifted off while sitting in Bax’s hospital room after having a fast and furious text argument with him since he couldn’t adequately tell me to fuck off through the pins and wires still holding his jaw shut. Dovie hadn’t left his side since the night he had forced her to go home. The reason I was there now was that she needed to run home and clean up the house a bit because Bax was getting released tomorrow. He was supposed to have been released two weeks earlier but had had a setback when one of the multiple screws holding his shattered ankle together had broken and he developed a nasty staph infection. He ended up requiring more surgery and more time laid up in recovery. He demanded that Dovie spend the night in a real bed, that she rest, and when she went to argue he agreed to text me and ask me to stay with him until he was sprung loose the next day. It was kind of cute, my ultra-badass brother acquiescing because he cared so much about the spunky redhead. Dovie didn’t want him to be alone, so he texted and I showed up to stay with him. As soon as she left Bax proceeded to chew me out for not helping him keep her away. It took me a second to recognize that he was scared, really scared for her well-being and thought she would be safer away from him and me and the whole mess with Roark. He was trying to push her away for her own protection, but she was too smart and too stubborn to go.

  We went back and forth, back and forth, until he wore himself out and fell into a fitful slumber. After he was asleep I watched him for a while, stunned at how different he looked. Bax had always been big and built like a truck; now he almost looked frail. His face had thinned out dramatically, the black star inked by his eye now looking huge and ominous on the suddenly sharp planes of his face. His collarbone protruded under the neck of his hospital gown and all the bulk across his shoulders and arms had drastically thinned out. If it wasn’t for the tattoo on his face and the perpetual sneer that twisted his mouth even in sleep, he’d have looked like any other starving kid from the streets. He hadn’t been so close to being “Shane” instead of “Bax” since he was a little kid. It made me realize that he wasn’t just scared for Dovie, he was terrified he wouldn’t be able to take care of her in his current condition. He was terrified of failing her, so of course he was trying to get her to go. Thank God she never would.

  I took a seat next to the bed and turned it all over in my head. Bax was trying everything to keep Dovie safe, even if she wasn’t playing along. The opposite side of that coin was the way I had dangled Reeve out in front of Conner from the very beginning. It made me cringe to think about the way I dropped her right into the lion’s den every day when I took her to Spanky’s and left her out there in the Point to fend for herself. She kissed me good-bye, swung those long legs out of the car, and pranced into the strip club like she didn’t have a care in the world or a giant bull’s-eye painted on her back . . . and I let her. What kind of man did that make me?

  I knew I cared about her, knew this thing between us no longer had a rapidly approaching expiration date and was going to last beyond a showdown with Roark. She was in me. Deep down inside the same cage where I kept the monster and she seemed happy to be there, so how could I live with myself knowing I was willingly putting her at risk every single day? How had my little brother that never cared about anyone but himself turned into an honorable man trying to do right by his woman and I ended up the opposite? When had my world turned upside down and how come I hadn’t done anything to stop it?

  It made me slightly sick. Reeve was too good for that. Beyond her bad choices, which had been fueled by grief, she was an amazingly good woman. She had a hard heart with a soft center and she deserved better than what I had given her so far. She deserved someone willing to risk as much as she was risking. She deserved to be coddled and protected the way Bax coddled Dovie, sheltered the way Race, in building a fortress, protected Brysen. She deserved more than me.

  I pulled out my phone and sent her a text asking how her night was going. She freaking loved that filthy strip club. True to form, she took something downtrodden and broken and had added her street savvy and sharp style to it. She had taken a bunch of jaded and life-weary dancers and given them a purpose. I hadn’t been inside the club in the week she had been there, but already on the outside it looked like a totally different place. The graffiti was power-washed off the walls, the neon-pink sign that flashed GIRLS-GIRLS-GIRLS was long gone, the parking lot was lit up like a beacon, and the ridiculous sign declaring the place SPANKY’S was nowhere to be seen. Instead an old antique sign that looked like something from the Moulin Rouge shone with soft lights and directed people to the newly minted EMPIRE. It was sleek. It was sexy and it was fitting. Those girls had built an empire on naked skin and gyrating hips. Reeve was giving them their own kingdom of sex and power to control and I could see how empowered she was by it every time I looked into her shining navy eyes. She loved that she was helping women she identified with, and I think in that she felt like she was making up for her little sister getting torn up and spit out by the Point. She wanted to make sure no other young girl suffered that same fate.

  I’m headed home. See you soon.

  I stared at the text and frowned. Booker hadn’t shown back up since making bail, which had everyone wondering and questioning where he might be, and leaving Reeve to fend for herself with just the feds and Nassir to keep an eye on her when she wasn’t with me. I hated the idea of her out on the streets alone. I was doing a terrible job of keeping her safe.

  Like she could read my mind, another message came through.

  Chuck is going to drop me off. Don’t worry about me.

  I swore out loud and sent her back a message telling her I would be home in the morning since I promised Dovie I would stay with Bax. Reeve sent back a frowning face a
nd I felt my heart kick. She didn’t want to go to bed alone any more than I wanted to let her. I needed to step up my game, needed to make sure she knew I wanted her safe every single second she was risking her neck. I couldn’t let Bax show me up. My competitive nature and the fact I really did care about Reeve in a deep and powerful way wouldn’t allow for it.

  I told her to think of me while she fell asleep and she shot back that if she was thinking about me while she was in bed, the last thing she would be doing is sleeping. I groaned out loud into the quiet of the hospital room and tapped my phone against my forehead. She really was perfect, just the right blend of good and bad, and I couldn’t get enough of either part of her.

  I settled back into the too small chair and gratefully watched Bax’s chest rise and fall until I drifted off at some point listening to him breathe. It wasn’t comfortable and I never slept deeply anyway, so I was wide-awake as soon as my chin slipped off my hand. I shook the fog out of my head to clear it and squinted into the dark to try and figure out what time it might be. I climbed to my feet stretching my arms over my head, making every vertebra in my spine pop painfully. I was too big to try and curl up for a catnap. I rubbed a hand over my short hair and was scrolling through e-mail on my phone when the door snicked open and a familiar shock of red hair appeared.

  Dovie tiptoed in, silent as a cat until she saw me wide-awake and watching her. She blinked slowly and shrugged without guilt.

  “I don’t go to bed without him.”

  She moved toward the hospital bed and reached out a finger to brush it across Bax’s star.

  “He’s worried he can’t keep you safe.” It was a rough whisper but she heard it and nodded. She kicked of her canvas tennis shoes and hopped up on the edge of the bed.

  “I know he is, but I can keep both of us safe until he gets better. And he’s just going to have to get used to it.”