“Do I?” I said with a nervous laugh, for I had no idea where the hell this was going. “I haven’t even finished the lease at our old place yet.”
Sonny didn’t respond, but his eyes did not drift. He was locked in and thinking, perhaps far deeper than either of us would have anticipated. Certainly more than I anticipated the way this conversation started.
“I may put you in touch with him,” he said. “I’ll go talk to him. But you gotta promise me something right now.”
“Anything.”
“Good answer,” he said, a response that came so quick I wondered if I’d just made a deal with the devil of sorts. “You help us out, I’ll do everything I can to put you two together. We’ll do whatever it takes. But we need your place in Vegas. We need access to what you got.”
“Done,” I said.
Sonny nodded to me.
“Take the food up to Leigh and tell her I love her,” he said. “You work here, I assume?”
“Yes.”
“Then someone will find you here again when we need you.”
Without another word, he put the food in my hands and left, moving so quickly someone watching from afar might have thought the move was an angry gesture, a sort of dismissive shove and turn. But I knew better. Sonny’s mind was churning with possibilities.
Just as mine was.
Admittedly, even as I turned back to the elevator, excited that I would get the chance for Ash again, I wondered what I’d just agreed to. I’d never “sold my soul” to the devil, as it were, and there were certain to be repercussions I could not yet see at the moment.
But for the situation and for everything going on, I needed to make it work. I had a marriage to save, for goodness’ sake. And if that entailed taking risks far beyond what I would normally ever do, than that was a step I would have to take.
Asher
Ididn’t have time to think about Callie when I woke up.
I didn’t have time for anything other than doing what I had promised the Black Reapers—to work my way inside and use my knowledge, or at least what I said was my knowledge, to start to turn the King’s Men against themselves.
I pulled a hat over my head low, put some sunglasses on my face, turned the shirt I’d worn a couple of days ago inside-out, and headed to the nearest coffee shop. As usual, I ordered a black coffee—complicated orders tended to draw the attention of nearby people—sat down in the corner furthest from the entrances, and started to brainstorm.
I couldn’t go back to King. This far out of the game, even if he didn’t think I would have gone to the Black Reapers, he would have seen me as useless. At best, he would have chased me out of town and told me to figure it out. At worst, I was dead.
I couldn’t go back to any of the King’s Men whom I didn’t know that well. I mostly kept to myself in the club. That ruled out the club members and the then-prospects, and unfortunately, it also ruled out Prince.
So, almost by default, I found myself with just one real possibility.
Crush.
It’s not like Crush and I were best friends. There were no “friends” in the club, though Crush and Prince spent a decent amount of time together. But Crush and I seemed to share…something. Maybe pain from the past—I hadn’t had my parents murdered, but I’d never known my father, and my mother was so toxic to me I cut her out of my life the instant I turned eighteen and never looked back. Maybe ideals for the future—we both had a goal for pure freedom.
Whatever the fuck it was, it was my chance to get my freedom. And I would be goddamned if, at the end of the day, any fucking club, King’s Men, Black Reapers, the return of the Devil’s Patriots, whatever, got in the way of it.
And what would pure freedom look like for you?
Me with Cal—
I scribbled down on a napkin the possibilities of contacting him. Calling him, running into him—
Why are you so afraid of being back with her?
I stood up and walked in circles, trying to get the coffee to kick in faster. Why the fuck was it so difficult to make that happen? Wasn’t it supposed to be instant—
Not like last night was a coincidence.
