I flipped him off while scanning the room to make sure no other women were going to come up to me. That one had come up on my side while I was focused on my brothers. A momentary lapse in awareness on my part.
My brothers weren’t wrong. Women loved my hair. It was long, thick, and brown, though the sun had bleached it blond on the ends. They either wished they had it, or wanted to touch it, or so plenty had told me over the years. I’d considered chopping it off more than once. A buzz cut would get rid of the main reason women approached me.
I fucking loved when women ran their hands through it though, scratching their nails over my scalp. So I hadn’t cut it. But I was damn picky about who I allowed to do that. Chasing anything that moved was Jury and Demo’s thing, not mine.
“Can we get back to the death chick?” Demo asked.
“Stop calling her that,” I told him.
“What should I call her?” he asked.
“You could try her name,” I suggested, wholly unamused at his nickname for her.
“Where’s the fun in that?” He gave me a shit-eating grin. “Besides using her name doesn’t piss you off. And I like doing that.”
“It could,” Jury said. Then he met my gaze full on as he groaned out, “That’s it, Rae. Take it like a good gir-” He broke off into laughter as I lunged across the table at him. The beer bottles rattled as I jerked him forward until he almost toppled it.
Scythe grabbed my arm, digging his thumb into a pressure point on my wrist and forcing me to let Jury’s cut and shirt drop out of my grasp. “He’s just riling you up, Pyre.”
“Well, don’ttellhim,” Jury complained. “Then it’s really not fun.”
“You’re such a dick,” I muttered, sitting back down. People were staring at us, but when nothing else happened, they went back to what they were doing.
“That’s true,” Jury said, straightening his cut. “But we’re only teasing you because we want to see you get a move on with death-.” He swallowed the nickname when I glowered at him.
“You’re in a shitty mood tonight,” Warrant told me.
“Wonder why?” I shot back. “You dragged me out here with these assholes.”
Demo and Jury just grinned, no offense taken. I loved them as though they were my real brothers, but that also meant I wanted to kill them half the time. I could, too. I’d been a Navy Hospital Corpsman in the military. I’d been assigned with various Marine Corps units as a field medic. There wasn’t much I couldn’t do to stitch someone up. Which meant I was an expert in how the human body could be taken apart as well. If you did my job in reverse then you knew all the really sensitive parts to cut, poke, and make bleed. And I knew where they slept.
Jury cleared his throat and Demo sat back as I continued to scowl at them. They knew I was a crazy bastard and they knew they were close to really pissing me off.
“Leave him alone,” Scythe said, eyes scanning the bar. “He can fuck whoever he wants.”
I rolled my eyes. “No one said anything about fucking anyone.”
“It’d put you in a better mood,” Warrant told me.
“You could’ve gone on the mission with Rotor, Cynic, and Torque,” Scythe added.
We were all employed by Sentry Securities, which was a special operations firm. Or that was what Cypher called it anyway. He used us, and all of our combined skills, to run missions all over the world. We did anything from rescuing people to killing others. Whatever the client needed. Sometimesthat client was our government. Sometimes it was another government. Other times it was rich businessmen or senators. Just depended on who needed what and if they could afford to pay. Cypher was very selective about who we worked with. We didn’t work with pieces of shit who would put our country or our families in danger.
“Or stayed back at the clubhouse with Glitch,” Jury replied, pulling my attention back to the conversation. “Though he was just going to spend all night looking at computer porn.”
Demo perked up. “I thought he didn’t watch porn on his computer? Something about it being too full of viruses,” he added in a mournful tone. “Really laid into me the last time he had to fixmycomputer.”
“I don’t even want to think about what weird shit is on your computer,” Warrant told him. “Your software probably has crabs, or some shit, now.”
“I meant computer porn like all that hacking shit he does,” Jury said. “Not actual porn.”
“Too bad,” Demo said. “If anyone needs to get laid, it’s him.” Then his eyes landed on me. “Well, him and you.”
“I don’t need to get laid,” I muttered, though my dick hardened as Rae stood up and headed toward the bathrooms. She was fucking gorgeous.
“She’s gorgeous.”
I looked over at Jury with suspicion. Had I said that out loud? No, he was just making an observation.
