“Yeah, boss?”
Kael’s greenish eyes are jagged chips. “Keep your hands to yourself.”
Keepyourhandsto yourself.
I’m still fuming sixty miles down Interstate 64. As if I’m some incorrigible ladies’ man or something. Hell, it’s hard to find a woman brave enough to follow through once they see the size of my cock.
I never thought having a big dick would be a negative attribute, but apparently, most women don’t like having their guts rearranged.
My mind wanders to Tallulah “Twiggy” Gentry, aka Baby Cousin. Scrawnier than any other female I’ve ever known, she definitely would not be a candidate for any cheek flapping. LastI saw her, she couldn’t have been more than a hundred pounds soaking wet. I might’ve been the one who gave her Twig as a nickname, but it stuck for a reason.
As skinny and stick-straight as she is, I would break Tallulah Gentry in a hot minute. I prefer my women lush and padded and able to take a pounding…
I also like my women able to take a joke. Tallulah and I never got on. It should never have been an issue. I’m several years older, thirty-two to her twenty-something. When I gave her the nickname she was in her teens—definitely not someone I hung out with or even ran into that frequently.
But she was some kind of genius, always tagging along with her older cousins, and she had a fucking smart mouth on her that she didn’t know when to shut. I always had the impression that she thought I was just big dumb muscle, when nothing could be farther from the truth. I was one of the few men in the ECI who actually had a degree—not that I was using it for much.
The Irish didn’t have much use for history degrees.
But history had always been my passion, and I was proud, regardless, to have earned my college diploma.
Tallulah Gentry could assume I was stupid all she liked. Everyone knew what they said about assuming things.
Hands on the wheel, I fall into the easy rhythm of highway miles. Philly falls away behind me. The city lights shrink in the rearview mirror, replaced by the kind of darkness you onlyget once you’re out past the suburbs, where the trees start shouldering up to the edge of the road.
My knuckles ache under the gauze. I flex my fingers against the steering wheel, check the bandage at the next gas station, decide it’s fine.
My brain wants to work the problem while the rest of me drives.
We know Thurston has pattern preferences. The Falls. Winter. Women in their twenties with a certain look, a certain vulnerability. He likes playing with prey, seeing how far he can push them before he breaks them. He likes coming back.
He came back to Lucy Falls, to Shiloh’s orbit, to Tallulah’s window.
If he’s making it personal, he won’t stop until something gets resolved. Either we put him down, or he puts someone in the ground.
My job is to make sure it’s not her.
The thing that sits under that thought, in a place I don’t look too closely at, is older than any of this. Older than Kael. Older than ECI.
The first time I failed to keep someone safe, I was sixteen and too big for my skin. I remember hospital lights. A waiting room that smelled like disinfectant and fear. A cop’s voice telling me it wasn’t my fault, like that meant anything.
He was wrong.
People like me, we’re built for two things. We break things, or we stand in front of broken things and hold them together. We can’t half-ass either.
My phone buzzes in the cup holder with a text.
Brodie:CALL WHEN YOU HIT TOWN. I WANT EYES ON HER EVERY HOUR.
Subtle, he is not.
I send back a simple:10-4.
Then another, because I’m not a complete asshole:She okay?
There’s a pause. Then:SHE’S PISSED. SCARED. WON’T ADMIT EITHER. WATCH YOUR BALLS.
I huff out a laugh despite myself.
