“You live in New Mexico once?”
Shit.Now the stakes seemed to be elevating by the second. I needed to play this one very carefully, lest I turn the main area into a boxing ring.
“I did,” I said, “but my parents moved me out when I was young. Place was violent where I was. Can’t remember the exact name—”
“Santa Maria?”
“That’s it,” I said, as if he’d jogged my memory when I knew full well the name already. Knowing it too well would elicit suspicions. Santa Maria wasn’t some well-known suburb like Compton or Harlem. If you were from there, youknew,but if you weren’t, it sounded more like a neighborhood that belonged near Los Angeles. “Yeah, rough place.”
Mason nodded. He said nothing for several seconds, and I wondered if he was debating if it was worth starting a fight against me right now. Certainly, judging by the looks around the room, that was the expectation. And why not? If he had a sliver of a suspicion that I was once a Bandit, once a part of the group that had gang-raped Rachel—even if I’d refused to go that low—well, self-control wasn’t our greatest asset.
“I knew you looked fucking familiar,” he said in a half-grumble.
It didn’t exactly sound warm and affectionate. But nothing Mason said really did.
“I assume you guys cleaned it up?”
“We got rid of all the piece-of-shit bastards that did all the heinous shit,” Mason said. “The Bandits. All fucking gone.”
Glad you said it.I suspected me mentioning the Bandits unprompted would start even more questions.
“And now, hopefully Satan and our bosses can help figure out how to go for the big guns.”
“Wouldn’t that be fucking nice,” I said. “All of us in one unit.”
Except that the Black Reapers, right now, don’t even seem to be one unit.
* * *
With the danger of Mason attacking me and causing more fractures in whatever “alliance” we had—for now—I made my way over to the coffee shop Melissa had requested, one that was about walking distance from where Hailey lived.
Satan would have killed me if he knew I knew where the Cooks lived, but part of being a good sergeant-at-arms was knowing where the president would frequent. The King’s Men certainly weren’t above attacking her home or at least making it extraordinarily uncomfortable for her.
As I pulled into the shop, I felt I saw her through the windows. It was too quick a drive-by in that particular moment to tell exactly if it was her or not, but it was enough for me to get a strange feeling in my gut. I had gotten in brawls, I shot at people, I could go toe to toe with any man in America.
But notify me that the only woman in my life I’d ever loved was in the coffee shop, and it was like my body turned to fucking pudding. That was fineifnothing else happened. If something did, I was going to have to revert back to Spawn instead of being Corey real fucking fast.
This is not a date. You’re just going to meet her and catch up.
Easier said than done, of course.
I parked, removed my helmet, and walked inside. And sure enough, there Melissa was, sitting where I thought she would be.
She looked, not surprisingly, stunningly beautiful. She had a white tank top on that made her chest that much more pronounced and short shorts that revealed her long, curvy thighs. Her face was down for the moment, as if reading the label on her coffee mug, but when she looked up, that gaze of hers caught me and forced a lump in my throat all the same.
But such a feeling, however strong, was short-lived, seeing the pain in her eyes and recalling that her parents had just died. Even if this was a date, setting it up with expectations of something gleeful and hopeful would be a disservice. This was a hangout, sure, but to treat it as anything more was a fucking mistake.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” she said, her voice a bit warmer than I thought—but still guarded.
“You get back from Odessa all good?”
She shrugged. For a few seconds, she looked like she was about to say something, only to pause and change her mind. Unlike the last time we dated, I did the fucking smart thing—I shut my mouth and waited for her to talk.
“They were young, Corey.”
I knew what she meant.
