“You can, but you’re not going to. Priest doesn’t like his address getting around, especially not since he and Luna moved after the incident.”
“The incident?” she repeats, looking confused.
Maybe Luna never told her the full story of what went down a year ago. Probably didn’t want to terrify her best friend. Looks like I get to be the bad guy now.
“Luna was taken from the penthouse at gunpoint by her cousin, Amedeo the Animal, and some of his crew. They took out the guards and made off with her while Priest was away. They moved to a different building since then, and they’re keeping it on the down-low. So, no Ubers. Ever. Got that?”
She’s even paler than she was before, a perfect ice princess from her white-gold hair to her light-blue sandals and matching toenails. “Got it.”
“He’s no longer a threat,” I add.
Priest ended him with a bullet between the eyes for what he’d done. He should have done worse. The bastard deserved to be tortured slowly before being mercifully put down, but there hadn’t been time. Priest had been acting to save Luna, and protecting her had come first.
“If he’s no longer a threat, then why can’t I take an Uber?”
“Because he was only one threat. In our line of work, you can never be too careful with who you let in, who you trust.” I give her a hard, meaningful stare.
“But I’m not a part of your world, so there shouldn’t be any real danger for me. Right?”
I don’t have the answer for her that I’m sure she wants to hear. The truth is, she’s a soft target. The kind that’s easy to hit. The realization makes a sharp, protective urge jolt through me, but I tamp it down. She’s not my responsibility, and she never will be.
Besides, after these two weeks are up and she heads back to the Midwest where she belongs, she’ll no longer be a target. She’ll be thousands of miles from the shadowy networks we deal in, from the threats and the death and the power struggles.
I crack my knuckles, an old habit of mine I can never seem to shake, one I resort to when I’m deep in thought. “You’ll be a part of this world for the next two weeks. While you’re in my orbit, you play by the rules I give you.”
She doesn’t like that. Her lips compress like she’s contemplating ways she can murder me without getting caught.
“What if I don’t like your rules?” she asks.
I hold her stare, showing her in my eyes a hint of the beast she’s dealing with. “Too fucking bad.”
She met me at a bad time, catching me with my guard down. I thought she was a woman I’d never see again. One who would never know who I really am. It was a little like role-playing that night.
I was a different man because I could be. Now she thinks she can push me. That there’s a hidden softness under this hard, harsh exterior. Spoiler alert: there isn’t. And if she pushes me too far, she’ll realize it.
Her eyes narrow on me. “What are your rules?”
“Respect what the guards tell you,” I start, listing off the first thing that comes to mind.
“There are guards?” A crease furrows her forehead.
It’s clear to me that Luna failed to fully inform her friend what to expect while she filled in cat-sitting for Cid.
“Yes.”
“Multipleguards?”
“That is what thesimplies, I believe.”
“Very funny. I’m reasonably sure I know grammar rules better than you do.”
“Don’t let this face fool you.”
Shit. I’m joking with her. For a second there, it was impossibly easy to revert to the man I was when we met at the hotel bar. I wasn’t Saint that night. I was Alessio. And she wasn’t my sister-in-law’s best friend either. She wasn’t off-limits. Instead, she’d been the most beautiful, mysterious, sexy woman I’d ever met.
She snorts. “I did. And it didn’t go very well.”
We stare each other down. I know she’ll be first to blink, and she doesn’t disappoint me, looking at her hands in her lap. Her fingers have been going the whole time we’ve been talking. I know she’s not as at ease as she pretends. But she’s good at faking it.
