The man turned his head slightly to whisper something in her ear.
Nemours.
Not even a second passed before I bolted out of the diner, the door ringing behind me. Or maybe it was the noise inside of my fucking head.
I caught up with them in five long strides, taking the woman by the arm, pulling her toward me. Startled, she turned, her mouth open, her eyes wide. The man stopped.
“What is the meaning of this?” he said, yanking her back toward him. His accent was French and heavy.
That was all right—I had no idea who she was. I had no idea who he was. He wasn’t the rat.
“Mistaken—”
“Here—” the man said, cutting me off, digging in his back pocket. “Is it money you want?” He shoved his wallet at me. “Take it! Just do not hurt me.”
“Tell me if I look like I need your wallet.”
I hadn’t realized until then that my brothers stood around me, Mitch and Mick in the crowd, too.
Nemours’ twin looked me up and down. “Well, no.”
The woman he was with took in my appearance, her eyes doing a languid appraisal. Despite that, I knew the look of a lost woman. Maggie Beautiful. Even my wife, at times.
“Aha!” he screamed, eyes darting between the two of us. “You are having an affair with this—connard!”
She didn’t deny it. I didn’t correct his wrong assumption, either. To argue with a fool would make me one. I’d rather smash his face to pulp.
The man’s mouth rattled off French like machine-gun fire, and Rocco stepped in, attempting to cool the situation. Anything I had to say would make the situation worse—for her.
A pause in the conversation seemed to make the world go still. Rocco had said something to the man that shut him up.
“Rocco told him his options are limited,” Dario translated. “Calm the fuck down or we’ll give him the medicine to make it happen. Thisconnardis not pleased.”
In a split second, Nemours’ twin took a step toward me, fist raised, right as Donato shoved him into the diner’s wall, hand twisted behind his back. Donato spoke in a calm, detached way, almost too low for us to hear. The man kept nodding. He had no choice but to agree or get hurt.
“He will not bother you again, if this is your choice,” Rocco said to the woman, switching from French to English. “Do you want to leave with him?”
“Yes,” she whispered. She was American. “He has a short temper. That man seems to have talked the truth into him.”
Rocco nodded, a solemn look to his face. I could almost read his thoughts—no man is a good man when he assumes he’s being robbed, with his woman at his side, and says, do not harmme. “We will keep in touch.”
Donato let the man go, roughly, and then nodded to one of our men. Keeping a couple people between them, he started following the couple. The man kept his distance from the woman as they disappeared into a crowd of people, our guy trailing them.
I had a sudden, pulsing urge to see my wife.
Mitch nudged me with his shoulder, then handed me my phone.
“Scarlett called,” he said.
I didn’t even wait for her to say hello when I called her back. “Your location.”
“Shopping.” I could hear Christmas music in the background, the insistent chatter of hundreds of voices and other street noises.
“Put one of the men on the phone,” I ordered. “The closest one.”
“Brando. You’re scaring me. What’s wrong?”
“You’re going home.”
