Oh, he was extra pissy,the thought made me squirm in my chair again. “The one and only. And you don’t have to be so hush-hush about it. Everyone here is on my payroll.”
Grant looked appropriately stunned as he leaned back in the wrought-iron chair and folded his arms, crossing one leg over the other, and staring me down with a wrinkled brow. To give him some credit, he managed to keep himself fairly composed.“So,” he began. “I have to say, you are not at all what I expected. Fuck me,” he whispered the last part, more to himself than me.
I answered blithely, “Oh, I hide behind many curtains. And I couldn’t give half a shit what you expected. That’s what you get for making assumptions. It’s not my responsibility to validate them.”
His brow dipped even lower over those calculating brown eyes. Fleetingly, I wondered if he was even capable of smiling. Would it break his face if he did? He was definitely going to have wrinkles at a young age if he kept up all this frowning and glaring. “Regardless of my assumptions, my boss wanted me to bring a business proposition to you. One that he thought would be… mutually beneficial.”
He twisted to pull a sealed envelope from his backpack and laid it between us on the small table. I’m sure he expected me to pick it up and tear it open immediately, so when I didn’t even move to touch it, his frown deepened even more. I didn’t think that was physically possible. “He said—”
“I know exactly what someone like Andrea Caruso would say,” I cut him off. My Irish brogue was starting to come out alongside my irritation. Grant’s eyebrows were on their own little rollercoaster with how they went from very low to high on his forehead. I’m not sure he was even aware of how expressive those thick brows were. “My message was pretty clear with Frank, was it not? I don’t fuck around with traffickers. What Andrea does in Chicago is his own feckin’ business for now, but I’ve made it perfectly clear that if I catch him kidnapping anyone under my protection, I’d come for him myself.” A low growl threatened to escape from my throat. “Trust me when I say his days are numbered with his fucked-up auctions. The last time was a warning, if he’s smart enough to take it.”
Grant continued to stare. His face looked set in stone, but his fingers tightened where they were interlaced on the table.“So you killed Frank because of his… hobby? Or because of his association with Mr. Caruso?”
“I wouldn’t call kidnapping and raping women a ‘hobby’, so I assume you’re talking about his little fapfests he’d have while watching camgirls on Prey to Play. But yes, I found out how vile of a man he was from the site.”
Grant’s brow wrinkled in confusion. “But… how? What do you even know about that site?”
How cute. He was totally clueless, just chasing his tail in his attempt to follow his master’s orders. I wondered if he even realized I was Cyber_Fox, the hacker, as well as Vixen, the camgirl. Or why I even called the club the ‘Masked Merrow’. It was a cheeky nod to what I did with my camming site, luring in the most vile men on the internet to make them drown in their blood like the merrows in Irish folklore. The men who logged onto Prey To Play thought they were the ones doing the hunting. It wasn’t until I darkened their doorway that they realized where they fucked up, when I checked their site histories and found clues that they were involved in hurting women. Or watching other people hurting women and getting their rocks off on it.
“I killed him because he was a slimy excuse for a man who kept young women locked in his feckin’ basement.” Grant’s eyes widened in surprise. So I guess he didn’t know about the full extent of Frank’s little ‘hobby’ after all. I had a hunch Frank was involved in kidnapping the sex workers under the protection of the Red Riot and shipping them north, but finding them in that auction, where I first encountered Grant, had me close to blowing Andrea’s front door down. Instead of giving those women the tire iron to cause a scene, I would have been swinging it myself. He didn’t have to know I wasn’t planning on killing Frank for certain before I found those women in his house.
“Let me rephrase, you can tell Andrea to kiss my ass. I know he’s the one behind the uptick in sex workers going missing in Vegas over the past year. Everything I needed to pin his ass to the wall was on that dipshit Frank’s drive. And if I ever hear about one of his goons poaching in Vegas again, I’ll kill him myself,” I said in a bright tone. “How about that?”
“I’m not going to tell him that.”
He was trying to look unaffected, but the slight flutter of his jaw muscle told me otherwise. Whatever Andrea was holding over him, it must have enough weight to crush him. If I don’t take whatever deal is being offered in that envelope he would probably stay in Vegas until I did. The waiter came back around to set my order on the table. I picked up the sandwich one-handed while Grant continued to glare at me. His hand curled into a tight fist on the table, the other one hidden beneath but probably doing the same. I pulled my own hand beneath the table and subtly slipped the knife out from my wrist sheath.
No one would ever say I wasn’t scared to cut a bitch, even if it’s a hot guy sitting across from me.
I replied around a massive bite of my sandwich, “Well, I guess we’re at an impasse.”
The stare he locked on me would have made a lesser man squirm. I’m sure he got a lot accomplished with that look. I continued to munch happily on my sandwich and sip on the London Fog as if his douche of a boss wasn’t trying to muscle his disgusting human trafficking market into my territory. I didn’t even need to open the envelope to know that. What Andrea didn’t know was that the only thing saving his ass from becoming dog food was the rest of the organized crime ecosystem that would decidedly come after me if I killed him. They didn’t like power imbalances. I’m sure he was building his case now for the Assembly coming up this fall, trying to rally the rest of the bosses to get rid of the Red Riot.
The screech from his chair dragging on the stone of the patio set a series of events into motion Grant didn’t seem prepared for. Maybe it hadn’t quite hit himwhoI was before now, but the nail definitely got driven home when two men rose from nearby tables to stand behind him. Each had a hand clamped on his shoulder to keep him from leaving the chair. Everyone pretending to be customers was part of the Riot, but I frequented this café enough for the staff to know the drill. The area had already been cleared of everyone who wasn’t under my command. With a sharp whistle between my teeth, everyone else stood as one and moved to create a loose perimeter around us.
Grant’s jaw seemed like it was about to crack a molar, and his nostrils flared as he tried to take a calming breath.
“You seem to be under the impression I’m a flexible person,” I began. “In some ways I am, but when it comes to forcing people into being slaves, you better feckin’ believe I will take a scorched earth policy. I don’t have the authority to take the fight to Andrea in Chicago, and that is theonlything keeping his little empire from getting torn down. So, Andrea can at least respect my authority in Vegas and take his nasty skin business right the fuck outta here. If you come to me again with the assumption I will fold under whatever bullshit he’s trying to pull, I will assume you no longer want to live.”
Another Riot member stepped over to pull my chair back for me as the waiter came up with a to-go box for the other half of my lunch. I snatched the drink up and swept past Grant doing his best impersonation of a statue. As a last blow, my lips brushed the shell of his ear when I bent low to tell him, “I’m not interested in dealing with Andrea. Run along back to Chicago and lose my number.”
“Or else what?” He barely turned his head, just enough to find me at the corner of his dark eyes. Grant’s profile was trulystriking. I had the sudden urge to run my finger down the strong bridge of his nose and brush against those plush, pouty lips.
Ohohoho, I loved a good challenge.
He couldn’t jerk his head away fast enough to avoid my teeth latching onto the ear I’d whispered into, biting just hard enough to drag a shaky breath from him. Just a little warning nip, to let him know he was playing with the wrong predator. Just because I didn’t show my claws all the time didn’t mean I wasn’t above slicing a little puppy like him to shreds.
To throw him off-kilter even more, I pressed my lips firmly against his ear again and whispered, “Let’s just say, your boss will have a hard time telling the difference between you and canned dog food.”
I gestured to the small crowd to vacate the area, and they surrounded me, leaving Grant alone in the outdoor area, fuming.
Running in Circles
Grant
“Did you deliver my offer to the Red Riot?”
His voice was smooth over the phone, but beneath its surface was a beast that demanded wary respect. I hadn’t beencontracted out to Frank long—just long enough to realize he was already walking a razor’s edge when it came to retribution from the Red Riot—but even he was scared to death to get phone calls from Andrea. If the boss didn’t think it could be sent in a text, whoever picked up the phone was in deep shit. I had barely made it back to the condo on loan from him before the burner in my pocket began vibrating.
