Swallowing hard, he mixed the seasonings and parsley for the sauce. In his mind, he knew TB was right. His father had warned him. If he didn’t do as he was ordered, both Tobias and Daleyza would pay the price. The hundreds of threats since the boy’s birth should have warned him to take even more precautions for the boy, but he thought he had it so well planned. That was what Ka-Bar was for. Well, Ka-Bar had done everything he could to protect his son, but Steel hadn’t ensured that Ka-Bar was protected, and that was the only hole in the plan that was needed for failure.
Turning to the stove, he pressed the buttons to begin preheating, then turned back to the island and began cleaning the workspaceagain. “All I am to her is a reminder of some of the worst moments of her life. She was forced to marry me. When I tried to get them out of Argentina, it cost us our son. I refuse to allow her to be taken back into that life. I cannot cause that woman any more pain.”
“And you’re not hurting her now?” Demon asked. “I mean, I know I’m the insensitive arsehole of our band of merry men and know absolute dick about women, but she was pretty fecking pissed at you.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Are the little doors on your ears broken?”
“Hate to say it,” TB interrupted, “but the leprechaun is onto something.”
When did these two men become so stupid? Were they not listening to him?
“I’m not following,” he admitted. He returned to the refrigerator to collect eggs and milk to make the egg wash, as well as several pounds of ground beef for the filling.
Demon crossed over to the sink to rinse off the knife he’d been using, stealing the ground beef from Steel. On his way over to the stove, he grabbed a spatula. TB grabbed several frying pans from the rack above the island and handed them to him. As Demon dumped the raw meat into the skillets, he turned up the heat and began to break it up. Quickly, the smell of browning beef filled the kitchen, and they were forced to talk a little louder over the sizzling sounds.
“Remember the time I questioned Cherry about whether she was sure she’d ordered replacement latex gloves?”
A bark of laughter came from TB. “I’m surprised Tribe is still standing. I swear I felt the building shake when you two went at it.”
“If you or any of the others had asked her, she would have simply confirmed that she did. But since I opened up my dumb mouth, she morphed into a shrieking banshee, accusing me of thinking she was too stupid to do her job because she was a woman. For the next six months, her vengeance was absolute. Dead mice in my coffee cup. Tacks on my chair. I won’t even tell you what she did to my wet suit,but it was very uncomfortable. She shredded my favorite sweater in her paper shredder, for feck’s sake.”
TB was still laughing. “How many thousands of dollars did you spend on those specially painted purple roses in apology?”
“God’s still taking money out of my paycheck, just to be a dick about it. The point is, a woman doesn’t get that pissed off over someone who doesn’t matter to her. Only someone you love can annoy you that much. And what we witnessed in the truck? Then again, in the living room a short while ago? That woman is still very much in love with you.”
“You don’t know Daleyza. If that’s love, I was married to a cobra.”
Demon smiled. “That’s half the fun, dude. Cherry and I fight nonstop. It’s how we know the other one cares.”
“I don’t think that’s how a relationship is supposed to work,” TB said.
“Look at you, all domesticated and shite,” Demon teased. His attention turned back to the meat cooking in front of him. “People don’t get pissed off about things they don’t care about. The madder they get, the more they care. But you? You never lose control, Steel. You’re always so locked down, it’s scary. Yet in the last two hours, the two of you have had two explosive fights. You raised your voice. You were verbal-vomiting Spanish. It’s the most emotion we’ve ever seen you display in all the years we’ve known you, and she gave it back to you just as good. The two of you are not done with each other. Not even close.”
“Just because you and Cherry finally got your hate-fuck out of your systems doesn’t make you an expert in relationships,” Steel grumbled.
TB brought the cutting board over to the stove and scraped a portion of the vegetables into the simmering meat. “I hate to say it, but it kinda does.”
“Don’t you start.”
“Steel, you can protest all you want that whatever was between you is over, but here we are. You had your reasons for hiding from herthat you were still alive. At the time, you did what you had to do to protect her. But if you didn’t care, you wouldn’t have called us all in to help protect her. You’re still protecting her after all this time. Maybe, in a twisted way, this was meant to happen. It’s a second chance to make things right.”
Demon added, “She seems to have adapted easily to the fact that you’re still alive. That has to count for something.”
This was unreal. His teammates had lost their ever-loving minds. In an attempt to shut the conversation down, he went back into the refrigerator and checked the dough he’d left in there to chill. He tossed the large ball at TB. “Make yourself useful and tear off pieces and roll them into the size of golf balls.”
The men worked in silence, but Steel’s mind whirled as if a tempest besieged him. Demon and TB had hit too close to home with their assessments of his reaction to Daleyza. He’d always been quiet. Watchful. Tempered. One visit from his family, compounded by the threat made regarding his mother, and all of his calm, collected nature seemed to have completely evaporated, leaving a mass of emotions threatening to boil over at any moment. The slightest provocation brought him over the edge.
What no one seemed to realize was that it wasn’t the threat to his mother that had him in a panic, or even the offer of Ka-Bar’s freedom that pushed him to his limits. It was Daleyza. Always. From the moment he’d seen her at the altar, he’d been irrationally driven to protect her. Intuitively, though, he’d always known that if his family understood exactly what she meant to him, they would have the ultimate weapon to use against him. Walking the line between caring for her and protecting her, while keeping them unaware of what he was doing, had been the most stressful aspect of his work with the cartel. He may not have liked what he was forced to do for them, but he felt no remorse for doing those things.
But hurting her? That he would regret not just in this lifetime but in the afterlife as well.
He was never sure what caused him to break the silence. “Thechoices I made regarding Tobias are still causing damage now, years later.”
Neither of his friends looked at him. They just continued to work on their portions of the meal.
“How so?” Demon asked.
He gestured to the other room. “Our team leader just walked into the fucking lion’s den to lure out the man behind the Salieri. Why? To protect my wife. He shouldn’t have to be making that sacrifice. It should be me there, not him. But because my piece-of-shit family is now in bed with an even bigger pile of shit, here we are again.
