Page 22 of Princes of Carnage

“Agreed,” Nico says calmly. “I’ll be in touch to make the final arrangements. We’ll need to hash a few things out before we make it official.”

I nod, then take a step closer to him, dropping my voice as I add, “You’d better make this alliance worth my while.”

Something flares in Nico’s startling blue and green eyes, and he gives me a look that makes the lingering heat from our kiss pulse through me all over again.

“Oh,” he promises, his voice low. “It will be.”

His tongue darts out to lick his bottom lip, tracing the exact spot where I bit him, and I curl my hands into fists at my sides, keeping my face impassive.

“Round up,” I say, raising my voice and jerking my head at my men. “Let’s go.”

None of Nico’s people stop us, although I can feel Atlas and Killian watching intently as my crew and I walk away toward the cars we arrived in. Part of me wonders if Nico discussed his little plan with them before he decided to spring it on all of us, or if his two best friends were just as blindsided by it as I was.

Then I think about what he said the last time we ran into each other, about how they have his back.

I’m sure they fucking knew.

That thought irritates me for some reason, so I push all that out of my head, getting into the first car and letting the door slam hard.

Emmett is riding with me, and he’s quiet in the passenger seat for a few minutes as we start to drive back toward Blood and Ink. The silence has an expectant weight to it, like he’s waiting for me to say something. When I don’t, he looks over at me.

“So… what happened?” he asks. “You and Nico were gone for a while. Were you telling him off for the marriage comment?”

I swallow hard. “I told him off, yeah. For all the good it did.”

“For all the…” Emmett trails off. “Wait. Jesus Christ, you didn’t… agree to it? Did you?”

“Yes, Emmett,” I tell him, already tired of this line of questioning. “I agreed to it.”

“Quinn! You can’t be serious.”

“Why the fuck wouldn’t I be serious?” I shoot back.

“Because it’s insane. He can’t just walk in and demand that you marry him to seal this alliance—an alliance that works in his favor as well. What the hell is he giving you to make this worth it?”

I grip the wheel harder, keeping my gaze on the road. “Marriage goes both ways. That’s why he proposed it. It’s the only way to make this airtight. No one can question us, and with our interests truly aligned and bound by marriage, it will be harder for either of us to fuck the other over. It’s insurance, and as much as I hate it, he was right.”

The words are bitter as fuck in my mouth. It’s hard to believe that I’m defending the asshole who I considered an enemy up until… well, until just a few minutes ago, technically.

Honestly, I may never stop seeing him as an enemy to some degree, and I sure as fuck don’t plan to let my guard down around him. But he can at least be a useful enemy, and my mind is already buzzing with the possibilities of what this could mean for Enigma, beyond just protecting us against the current threat. This may give me an opportunity to truly expand and solidify my gang’s power in Detroit—something that seemed almost impossible in the days after my father’s death, when all I was doing was hanging on and trying desperately not to let the organization he built fracture and fall apart.

I could build his legacy into something bigger. Something even better.

I could make him proud.

Emmett folds his arms, shaking his head. “This is insane,” he says again. “You don’t even know him. You don’t even like him. How do we know that this is going to help?”

Underneath the irritation in his voice, there’s a hint of something that sounds almost like jealousy. The fact that Nico just proposed to me as part of a business arrangement and I accepted the offer is clearly bothering Emmett.

But this isn’t about him, or the ill-advised and aborted kiss between us the other night, or any of that.

Emmett and I were never going to become anything, so he has no reason to be jealous. And even more to the point, Nico and I will never become anything. This marriage will be in name only, and I’m not looking for true love or romance.

“I’m doing this for Enigma,” I say firmly. “I don’t want to marry anyone, but binding our gangs together will make us stronger. And we need the help right now.”

“We’ve been doing fine,” Emmett argues.

“Have we? We haven’t been able to expand our territory as much as I wanted, and now we’re getting kneecapped by someone who’s targeting us from the shadows. If we don’t do anything, if we just sit back and let this happen, we’ll be fucked. This alliance gets us more than just extra resources for trying to protect ourselves and defend our territory. It gives us a leg up. We’ll be a bigger organization, and that’ll make the bigger players in Detroit take us more seriously. We need that boost right now. That’s just how it is.”

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