“That’s lucky,” I say in a whisper, scared to speak too loudly in case it chases the intimacy of the moment away. “Because I care for you, too.”
He leans forwards and his lips meet mine, the featherlight kiss imparting more emotion than any other touch so far. A shiver grips me, making my limbs tremble and I’m glad I’m seated because I can’t imagine my legs supporting me right now.
“Come on,” he says, far too soon for my liking. “We’d better head into the back of the club now before I’m tempted to veto the entire evening in favour of dragging you home."
He leaves it up to my imagination what he'd do there if he did.
My suddenly fertile imagination.
Micah stands by the table and takes my arm, steering us through a door, along a dark corridor, and through into a back room where three men wait.
Three large men. One with tattoos curling across his knuckles and winding around his neck. Another with a wolf howling on his chest before disappearing into the thick scruff of his beard. The third is a looming shadow of a man, hulking over the others despite their already humongous size.
“This is Crimson. And these are my friends; Stefan, Teodor, and Baxter.” He nods to each man as he says their name.
No.
No way.
I try to turn, recognising two of the names and that’s enough that I want out. Micah senses my discomfort and slips a supportive hand around my waist, resting atop my hip. Pushing me gently towards the table.
Stefan Kovac heads the eastern Auckland silo of the syndicate and runs subsidiary operations back home in Christchurch. Baxter Balabanov is the head in Canterbury. The last man is unknown but judging from the calibre of the table, isn’t someone I want as a close acquaintance.
Before this minute, I understood Micah headed a silo of the syndicate but it’s another thing to fully realise it. To comprehend its implications.
A bomb in this room would wipe out half the organised crime in the country.
Half,at least.
I can’t think of a more dangerous place to be, but Micah isn’t letting me leave.
“Pull up a chair,” Stefan says in a voice that rumbles like thunder. Gauging from the size of his chest, it doesn’t have another setting. “It came as a shock to learn Micah was getting hitched.”
“What?” Baxter says, a mischievous smile playing over his lips. “Just because he likened marriage to the prison sentence he so recently escaped?” He turns to Micah with raised brows. “And when was it you spoke those words? Last Thursday?”
Micah takes the banter in stride while I sit because there isn’t another option. To think of overpowering even one of these men on my own is laughable; four doesn’t leave me any choice.
A situation that feels suffocatingly familiar.
“I’m Teodor,” the man to my right says, extending his hand. The knuckle tattoos give me pause but he takes my hand and presses a gentle kiss to the back of it. “Your surname is Petrovic?” When I nod, he adds, “Then we’re second cousins. My father is Drago Zoric.”
My head swims with the information and my lips feel so cold they must be turning blue. Drago is head of the Serbian Mafia. A group so fiendish that even my father allied with the syndicate rather than swell their ranks. “You’re Serbian?”
“I’m far more New Zealander than I am anything else but we have a direct line back to the old country.”
I bet he does.
“Relax,” he whispers, shuffling cards. “If anything happened to you, my father would see me dead in a ditch. We don’t take kindly to acts against one of our own.”
“I’m not really—”
“Sure, you are. Try as hard as you like, this is a birthright that you can’t shake off easily.”
Baxter drums his fingers on the table, checking his watch like he has somewhere better to be. But I expect all these men have somewhere better to be than here, being introduced to Micah’s fiancée. It shows the depth of their friendship that they’re spending time away from their endeavours to meet with me.
“I heard you’re acquainted with Gabriel,” he says to me between glances at the clock. “Hope the snitch hasn’t been tattling to anyone he shouldn’t, lately.”
I don’t understand the subtext, but his manner requires a response. “The snitch?”
