Suddenly, a blinding light appeared. I had to raise my hands to block the obnoxious light and let my eyes adjust.
“That’s quite the introduction,” I growled. “Are you trying to disorient me to make it easier to negotiate with me?”
“Negotiate?” a voice said, very much in the room. I had no idea whether it was Prince or Crush. “There will not be any negotiation.”
I waited for the follow-up explanation, but there was none.
“Can we talk?”
“That’s exactly what we’re doing now,” the same voice said.
Gradually, my eyes adjusted, and I caught the tail end of who was speaking. It was a man with blonde, wavy, shoulder-length hair. He had a certain powerful but weary presence to him, as if coming out of a years-long coma, trying to regain his sense of the world. To his left, a taller, broad-shouldered man with brown-red hair and a thick beard stood with his arms crossed. Both of them wore biker jackets; both of them had the Reapers insignia on them that I knew well.
“Prince, I take it,” I said to the one who had just spoken.
“You take it well,” Prince said. “As you can guess, this is Crush. You will forgive the presence of Connor and Butch outside. I had to take steps to make sure that we were on equal footing here.”
“I’m not sure what part of four on two makes this equal footing.”
“You had said you wanted to meet alone. Not you and your brother. Does that not give us the need to stack the table a bit?”
I bit my tongue to keep from doing so much as growling, let alone cursing them out. In a business meeting, I would have made threats, warned I would not engage in business, and so forth. But here, I had no leverage. More money meant nothing to them, and a lack of business would be met with a simple shrug.
“Let’s get to the point, shall we?” I said. “I have… someone I care greatly about. She is being targeted by a rival casino family for… something. I truly do not know what, but I do not care to find out. This family, the Morrils. They are dirty, unethical, and not to be trusted. I come to you asking for protection for this person, to ensure nothing comes of her.”
“And how would you have that be done?” Prince said.
“By whatever means necessary.”
Prince and Crush looked at her. He looked back at me.
And then he started laughing. So did Crush. I swore outside, Connor started laughing, but that could easily have been the echo inside.
“Who the fuck do you think we are?” Prince finally said. “We’re an MC. We don’t take shit from anybody. But if you think we’re security for hire or assassins for hire, you’re out of your fucking mind.”
“We protect the ones we care about, and if someone is truly in the wrong—say, if they harm animals or women—we will fuck them up,” Crush said. “But we are not going to be your Judge Judy.”
I felt my fingers curl, doing my best to keep them unwound.
“And why did you never tell this to my brother?” I said. “Why did you not tell him this to prevent him from wasting his time?”
“Do you not think we did?” Prince said. “There is nothing secretive about us, Cassius.”
The way he said my name so casually, so easily, as if calling me Billy… I wouldn’t let it show how it got to me. But, fuck me, it did. It very much did.
“Maybe years ago, under my father’s reign, things would have operated in the shadows,” Prince went on. “Actually, there was no maybe about that. King had everything from MCs to mafias to smaller crime rings under his belt. But that’s done with. It’s so much fucking easier to live out in the open, showing your tattoos and your preferences for the world to see, and let them decide than to try to keep everything under wraps.
“So as it relates to your brother? We’ve told him plenty of times. And yet he keeps coming back. Tries to make deals with us, tries to get us to align with you. You’d think at some point in the last four years, he’d get it through his head. Tell me, is it possible to get rich being as bullheaded as he is? If that’s the case, maybe we’re missing out.”
Fuck.
The truth was, it wasn’t Dante who was being stubborn. The first six months, first year, sure. But now?
It was me.
I was the stubborn fuck.
I was the one who was finally encountering what billions and billions of dollars and untold amounts of power could not acquire—the Black Reapers and love.
