by Heather Long
Kestrel had actually looked a bit embarrassed the day before when I walked out of there. Honestly, there wasn’t enough soap on the planet. Speaking of soap, I searched the kitchen and eyed the old cake bar on the sink side with distrust.
Not happening.
With my foot, I opened the cabinet below.
Jackpot.
Dish soap.
It was half stuck to the bottom of the cabinet, and I refused to wonder why. With my elbow, I turned the water on, and it screeched as it hurtled through the pipes to spurt out of the nozzle before it began running in a stream. It was ice cold, but I wanted my hands clean more than I cared about warm water.
I’d just gotten a handful of soap when a door at the back of the kitchen swung open. Oh shit, I hadn’t even realized it was there. The guy stepping inside wasn’t anyone I’d been introduced to. Maybe he was another mechanic? Or the owner? I gave him a quick smile as I soaped up my hands.
“Good morning,” I said, greeting him, and then focused on washing my fingers. There was oil darkening the corners of each nail. Hopefully, that came out easily. I might need a brush or something.
The guy at the door had stopped there for a beat, like his eyes needed to adjust. I supposed it was a little brighter outdoors than in. At least his entrance had shoved some cold air through the kitchen, and it helped dispel the sour odor of whatever died in here…
I shot the guy another glance when he didn’t move. There was letting your eyes adjust, and then there was rude.
A shiver that had nothing to do with the cold—either the temperature of the room or the water—raced up my spine. He stared at me. My shoulders stiffened, and I raised my chin. Shutting off the water, I shook the droplets from my hands.
There was no hand towel easily visible, but the overalls Kestrel had tucked me into were not only oversized and rolled up several times, but mostly clean. So I wiped my hands on the top.
The man took a single step forward, his eyes narrowed. The scent of cigarettes wafted off him, made sharper and more pungent by the chill he’d carried. Worse was the sour odor of sweat under it all.
There was a grease stain on his shirt, and despite the fact he wore a button-down with a jacket, he had no tie and the collar was undone. Rumpled, like he’d slept in the suit.
His hair was too long. His belly too wide. His shoes too cheap. And when he opened his mouth, his teeth were just a little too stained. Everything about his clothes said cheap, business attire. Everything else said he played dress-up and was intensely uncomfortable.
Except his eyes.
They were bloodshot, narrow, and mean-looking above the flushed jowls and unshaven cheeks. If the smell wafting off of him wasn’t so distasteful, the unkempt nature of his appearance would have glared warning signs at me.
Call me a snob, but I’d had my share of bad encounters.
This guy was trouble in great, drenched in garbage neon letters. With all the noise out in the bays, I wasn’t sure the guys would hear me if I started yelling. The newcomer took another step in my direction, and not once had he looked away from me.
Since I was wearing the mechanics overalls and I was basically a shapeless blob, it wasn’t my attractive appearance that appealed to him.
“Take a picture, it lasts longer.” The cool words leapt off my tongue as I glared at the guy. Sweat gathered at the base of my spine, and the earlier shiver turned into razor blades of ice.
“Emersyn Sharpe.”
After weeks with the Vandals, the very last thing I wanted was to be recognized. Even when I’d wanted to escape them, this guy would not have been my eighteenth, much less my first, choice.
The door to the office was behind me and even then, I had to get through another door to get back to the garage. There was the door behind him that I hadn’t even noticed with its crash bar to get out. I guessed it should have been locked?
Stinky clapped a hand onto my arm, and I reached for the coffee pot at the same time. It was one of those old-school coffee pots you always saw in diners, with the heavy balloon bottom and the narrow black mouth and a heavy handle made out of the same black plastic. It was stained, like one too many pots of coffee had been brewed in it.
The coffee the day before had been sludge. I wouldn’t be surprised if it had stained my insides. But the pot was heavy, and there was already coffee in it. It was also still hot, and the sludge was definitely sludge.
I locked my fingers around it, even as Stinky hauled me toward his pot belly.
No.
Thank.
You.
I swung the pot, and it crashed against the side of his head, spraying us both with burnt coffee and chunks of glass. Fortunately, it missed my face, though pain sliced at my arm.
Stinky let out a roar, and though his hand on my arm loosened, he hadn’t by any means let me go. He struck out blindly and I ducked the first swing, but he yanked me toward him and then nailed me with the back of his hand.
Pain bloomed against my face as I banged into the counter.
It was still a win though, since he let me go. He roared as he charged at me, and I had two choices—fight him or get away.
Yeah, fight wasn’t really an option. The guy was twice my size.
I hopped up onto the counter and then, holding on, I slammed both of my feet into his chest. Between his rush forward and my momentum, I managed to absorb some of the shock of his charge, even as I drove my feet into his gut.
The chest might have been better, but I was aiming for his diaphragm under the layers of flab. His air whooshed out of him with a wheeze, and I rolled sideways, trusting my own balance and ignoring the glass I hit on the counter to get away from him. I was on the other side of him and closer to the door to the outside.
Not ideal, but better than nothing.
I bolted for it.
He got a hand around my ponytail. Pain lit up my scalp as he hauled me backwards. I swore some strands tore loose, and then all of a sudden, his grip on me was gone and I stumbled forward, barely catching myself on my hands before I fell on my face.
A gurgle of sound filled the narrow kitchen galley, and I twisted, hands braced against the floor, ready to snap my foot out and kick again. This time, I’d go for his groin. Should have done that in the first—
Something warm splattered against my cheek. The guy’s face had already been bloodied and burned from me hitting him with the coffee pot, but it was Rome who had him down on the ground.
Silent.
Vicious.
Delivering a brutal beating as he rained punches down on the guy’s head and face. Something crunched, the bone making a sickening kind of wet noise, and the guy just…stopped.
Everything stopped.
Even Rome paused with one hand on the guy’s throat, the other raised in the air. Blood spattered the cabinets, his shirt, his fists, and the floor. It puddled out where it trickled between the splashes of burnt coffee and broken glass.
Blazing, fury filled eyes locked on mine. I swore they burned where they stroked over me, and without a doubt, Rome’s gaze seemed to blast through the layers of clothing as though he could see right down to my marrow.
“How much of that blood is yours?”
The question floated in the air so softly, I wasn’t sure I’d actually heard him right.
“None. I think.” To be honest, nothing hurt.
The door behind me jerked open, and Rome glided, fucking glided, to his feet like a dancer, picked me up, and put me behind him as he faced the door. The flawless execution stole my breath. I’d known he fought like a fallen angel that night at the playground, but I hadn’t truly seen him move.
Not like this.
The line of muscle blocking my view relaxed a fraction, and I leaned around him to find Kestrel standing there.
Then the door behind us, the one into the office, slammed open, and I jerked around and backed right into Rome, who had his arms around me. He tucked me between him and Kestrel as another familiar blond
head appeared.
“Fuck.” Liam’s voice crashed through the room, and the world slowed. Kestrel’s hands settled on my shoulders, and he turned me to him. Like Rome before him, he looked me over.
“You bleeding anywhere, Sparrow?”
“I don’t think so.” It took me far longer to get the words out. “I broke the coffee pot on his face. Some of the glass might have gotten me. The coffee was still hot.”
“He’s dead.” Liam’s voice pulled me around, and I stared at where he was kneeling, careful of the blood, and had two fingers to the neck of Stinky with a ruined face.
Because his face was ruined.
It was so much meat.
My stomach revolted, but before I could even process that, a finger tugged my attention back to Kestrel.
“Eyes on me, Sparrow.” The soothing, soft tone seemed perfect for the silence bearing down on all of us. “Clean that up.” The last he said over my shoulder, then his gaze was on me. “Sparrow, I need you out of this.” Kestrel didn’t wait for me to respond, just started undoing the overalls.
“I’ll grab a tarp,” Liam said.
“Clean up,” Kestrel repeated, but he was tugging the overalls down my arms and then pulling them free down my legs and encouraging me to step out. “Come on, Sparrow. I need to make sure there’s no blood on you.”
The water turned on in the sink. Kestrel tossed my overalls at the body. Rome stripped out of his shirt, and it landed on the body too. There was blood all over his arms and his chest where it had soaked through the fabric.
The tattoos looked like they wept tears of blood. I started to glance down at Stinky again, but Kestrel was in front of me and guiding me over to Rome. “Clean her up while I help Liam.” But he didn’t just move away, he waited until Rome glanced at him then me then back with a nod before leaving us.
Rome didn’t seem to have the same objections to the soap I’d had, and he lathered it up his arms and then over his face and his chest. The blood washed away, turning the water pink for several long moments before it rinsed clear. He reached above, pulling open a cabinet. He set a roll of paper towels down on the counter.
Kestrel and Liam were both back, Kestrel with a mop and broom, Liam with a heavy piece of tarp. Then Rome had my hands in his, and he began to wash them with the same efficiency he’d done himself, only his hands were warm on mine. He washed away the blood and the chill, cleaning around my nail beds and then under them.
He even got the grease I hadn’t been able to get earlier. The towels were dampened, and he washed my face. I closed my eyes at the gentle touch, not wanting to think how red the water had turned when he’d rinsed my hands.
Not the first time I’d gotten blood on my hands.
“The sweater needs to go, Starling,” Rome told me in an almost regretful voice, and it was the only warning he gave me before he lifted it up and over, leaving me in the thin T-shirt beneath. He tossed the sweater toward his brother, who already had the body completely rolled up in the tarp.
The glass and the coffee on the floor were gone. The blood vanished under Kestrel’s mop. The strong scent of peroxide filled the air. I’d have expected bleach, but I didn’t get a chance to ask as Rome cupped my chin in his gentle hand.
He tilted my head one way and then the next. A moment later, Liam joined him, twin mirrors of concern as they studied me. I’d never felt so stripped before.
“There,” Liam said. “Side of her neck. Something nicked her. But it’s not deep.”
Rome ran his fingers over my scalp, and tingles raced through me at the contact. It was gentle as hell and had my toes curling in my shoes.
“Liam,” Kestrel said from behind me, and at least that took one blazing gaze off of me.
“Does it hurt anywhere else?” Rome asked me in a soft voice as Liam moved away. I shook my head. “Did he touch you anywhere else?”
I glanced down at my arm. There were three red marks, livid against my flesh where his fingers had bitten through the overalls and the sweater. But it didn’t really hurt.
Gliding his fingers over the spots, Rome frowned.
“It’s fine,” I told him. “The coffee hurt more than he did.”
“The bruise on your cheek says he hit you.”
I’d forgotten that, in the panic and rush. “He might have. I was getting away.”
“You were.”
“I didn’t know him.”
“Me neither,” Rome agreed. “But I got a picture on my phone. We’ll find out.”
“I mean, I didn’t know him, but he knew who I was.”
The words halted all the activity in the kitchen, and the three men exchanged a look, one I didn’t need a dictionary to translate.
They were surprised.
They were also pissed.
“Rome,” Liam all but growled as he tossed something. His twin caught the set of keys. “My bike’s out back with my jacket and an extra helmet. Grab something for yourself and get Hellspawn out of here. I’ll find you later.”
Wait…
But no one gave me any options, because Kestrel nodded. “He had a friend. We’re going to need to find him.”
Whatever else he said to Liam after that I missed because Rome had threaded our fingers together and led me back out into the garage. The cold air hit me in a rush, and without the sweater or the overalls, my nipples went on point and so did all the hair on my body.
After he snagged some heavy black coat off a hook, Rome led me right out another door I hadn’t seen in the far back of one of the bays. It went into a utility area and then out into the violently bright light of day. After the muddy light inside, it made my eyes water.
I was still shivering, so I didn’t complain when he draped me in a heavy jacket that threatened to swallow me whole. He zipped it up, and then he put a helmet on my head.
“I’ve never ridden a motorcycle,” I confessed.
The blue bike was the same one Liam had used to follow Doc and me when I got away.
“Just hold onto me,” Rome said as he straddled the bike. “Put your feet here and here, wrap your arms around me, and hold on. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
He didn’t have a helmet. The giant one he’d put on me smelled like Liam—mint and cloves. I straddled the bike behind him, threaded my arms around him, and leaned into his back.
As soon as I was secure, he walked the bike back, and it rumbled to life, vibrating beneath us like a growling tiger.
“Hold on, Starling,” Rome called back to me, and then we were racing forward. He didn’t even slow before he turned out into traffic, weaved through the intersection, and whipped away.
Somewhere back there, I’d left my frantically beating heart as the bike continued to accelerate.
Then we were flying.
First Impressions
Emersyn
“Emersyn!” The snap of Marta’s demand cut through my focus like a heated blade. I swore the woman did it on purpose. I had not mastered the latest series of movements for the “Pride of Giselle” that I was supposed to perform on opening night.
Dimitri Vankovich was one of the best choreographers in the country. The show was lucky to have him. I was a most fortunate girl to get to earn his tutelage. But he was also an asshole who changed his mind repeatedly, and every day, there’d been a new segment of the routine. He’d either removed something or added it.
I wouldn’t fail.
“Yes, Marta?” I faced the company manager and my chaperone, who spent more time scolding me than she did managing anyone else, as she stomped toward me. A man followed in her wake, his stroll far easier than hers. If anything, he looked amused.
I couldn’t stand the woman. But no one asked me about whether I wanted her to be my chaperone. My fourteenth birthday, she had allowed the company to give me a cupcake with no frosting on it and to sing me happy birthday.
I wasn’t actually allowed to eat it, because she thought my weight was already too much. I’d lost ten pounds s
ince then.
“Your new partner has arrived.”
My new what?
“Emersyn Sharpe, this is Eric Arlington.” The blond giant behind her offered me a smile as he moved toward the stage I’d been working on. My practice room was too small for the leaps, and we were going to be adding silks to the choreography as soon as the techs got them added out here.
Dimitri had been apoplectic they weren’t already available.
With ease, Eric hoisted himself on stage and held out his right hand to me as he approached. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. You’re a gifted dancer.”
I raised a brow and then clasped his hand. He squeezed mine, and his smile deepened. He was tall. My head didn’t quite reach his shoulders. His hands swallowed mine. I somehow didn’t think lifts were going to be a problem.
“You should get changed, Eric,” Marta said in that waspish tone of hers. “Then return here. Emersyn can run you through the program so far. He will be dancing Giselle with you. Dimitri will adjust the choreography later today.”
“Sounds good,” Eric said, giving her a salute, then winking at me when his back was to her. It would be nice to have an ally here. He held my hand a moment longer, then released it before he strolled toward offstage to where the dressing rooms were.
“Don’t get any ideas,” Marta scolded, reminding me that she was still present. “He’s a grown man and you are still a little girl. If you are dancing together, I will be here for every moment.”
I flashed her a smile I didn’t feel. The polite smiles with the hint of manufactured warmth were something I’d mastered a long time ago. “The only thing I care about is if he can do the moves.”
“Uh-huh.”
Not that Marta would understand. She was trying to protect a purity and a chasteness that had died a violent death years earlier. As it was, I turned away and took my mark. Then, with only the music in my head, I began the routine from the top.
Chapter 12
Emersyn
The thrill of riding the bike couldn’t compete with the icy wind biting at me as we tore through the city. Rome rode the bike like it was an extension of himself, gliding smoothly around corners, weaving in and out of traffic. I hoped he knew where he was going, because I’d lost track somewhere along the way.