Page 53 of Bears Not Included

“You’re a psycho,” I whisper softly but fiercely.

“Thank you for the compliment,” he counters before he takes some fries and then a bite of his burger.

I storm away for a second time that day, and I still have three more hours of this shift left.

After two hours, I’ve had enough.

"Please, can you leave? You can wait in your car. You’re distracting the customers.”

Because that’s exactly what Mason is doing. A bunch of girls who work as receptionists at the steel manufacturing plant nearby can’t stop looking at him and giggling but in that highly flirtatious way. If I roll my eyes any more back, they’ll never return.

He doesn’t leave, obviously, and I’m stuck with his gaze on me, following every move I make and every breath I take. I just barely endure it the same way I did with Callen yesterday.

At the end of the shift, with the kitchen cleaned and Babs just finishing up wiping down the tables, I gather up all the leftovers, put them into bags, and carry them out of the kitchen.

Mason is waiting for me and immediately takes the two bags of food from me and leads the way to the alley up the road.

“How do you know where I’m going and what I’m doing?”

“Callen. When it comes to you, we know everything that happens in our absence. I even know how your pussy hugged his cock when you came while still holding his grandmother’s ring in your hand.”

My mouth opens to say something, but astonishment kills my brain cells. This is why I can’t separate them in my mind. I don’t know them much at all, no, I don’t know them at all, but I know they present as one entity just in three different ways in my head and... my body.

But there’s something in the air that makes my nerves coil uneasily as I hand out parcels of food to my regulars––Rocky, Martha, Bobby, Chip, Queenie, and Lily.

I shake it off because, of course, I feel on edge. I’m lugging around a six-three crime lord in a bespoke suit who had me rattled just by existing. And there are two others like him as well.

But there’s something else... Rocky can’t look me in the eye, and Lily keeps murmuring to herself, more agitated than she normally is. Bobby and Chip keep looking over my shoulder, nervous and... scared. For a moment, I think it’s Mason’s presence. They didn’t react this way with Callen, though….

It takes me too long to act on my intuition that something is going to happen. As if my world stands still, I see a man with a crazed look in his eye and a knife in his hand. And he’s running straight toward me.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Livia

I seem to step out of my consciousness, and it’s like I’m watching this scene unfold outside of my body.

He runs toward me with a superhuman strength fueled by drugs or hate, I can’t tell the difference. I know this man. He goes by the name Lucky Law. He attacked me once, three years ago, when I just started working here at Jimmy’s.

Babs scared him off, and some passersby helped me up from the ground, but I was suitably traumatized by the incident until it was Rocky who told me he was arrested for drug peddling a few days later and never seen again.

“You bitch, fucking, cunt, slut, whore,” he screams maniacally. “You put me away for three fucking years, you dumb cunt. I’m going to cut you, you bitch.”

As paralyzed as I am with fear, my brain takes its time to register and respond to this accusation. Does he think I was the one who got him arrested and put in prison? He’s completely wrong. I did no such thing, and then it struck me that it’s too late to tell him otherwise.

My life flashes before my eyes. I know I’m going to die. After everything that’s happened to me in the last few days, this is how it’s going to end for me. In an alley, while I’m giving the homeless leftovers from the diner where I work down the road.

From my peripheral vision, I see a man in a suit move with the self-assured laziness of a deadly predator. For a moment, I’m stunned again at how good-looking he is. I remember the other two men like him and how they’ve turned my world upside down. And then, from there, everything happens in the space of a breath.

I’m still standing there with a burger in my hand that’s wrapped in Jimmy’s signature wax paper, my eyes wide and heart beating so hard my body vibrates. That’s when Mason, without any effort and completely unarmed himself, comes to stand in front of me, the precise moment when Lucky Law is within an arms’ length of me. Mason doesn’t give my assailant a chance to back off when I’m blocked from his view.

Instead, Mason jabs Lucky Law in the eye with two of his fingers, his movement so swift and efficient Lucky Law didn’t have time to blink much less use his knife in defense. In the same fluid motion, Mason grabs his wrist and twists until Lucky Law is forced to release the knife in his hand. But before the steel blade could clatter to the ground, Mason catches it, and with his hold still on Lucky Law’s wrist he swings him around, twists his arm behind his back and then slits Lucky Law’s throat while looking me in the eye. He then throws him to the ground, blood bursting from his severed artery like a fountain.

I’m too shaken to do anything else but stare at the man I know is already dead. But I’m still fully aware of Mason’s eyes on me, assessing my entire body despite knowing that nothing touched me.

A brisk breeze of stale air and sweat passes me by as Rocky, Martha, Bobby, Chip, Queenie, and Lily flee the scene.

“You all right?” Mason asks, and I offer him a nod. He pulls out his phone, gives someone the address, and takes my arm.

---