Page 64 of Moros

I sighed.

“Today was a lot for you, I can tell.” Pasha’s voice was soft, empathetic.

Turning, she was extending a can of beer to me.

I looked up to see she was dressed as she always was—to the nines, looking like the best thing to grace any magazine cover.

“A peace offering.” She tried again to hand me the beer.

I smiled, accepted and pried it open.

She hiked up her pencil skirt and sat with her legs in the water beside me.

“Did he scare you?” Pasha asked.

I nodded after another swallow of cold beer.

“Good.” Pasha replied.

“How is this good? How is any of this good? It’s just a building, Pash.”

“To you.” Pasha lifted her gaze to the darkening sky. “Aside from the money, Khadri has nothing from his parents. No legacy, no history—nothing. And for a while, it hurt. He joined the military looking for a family—a kinship that he never had with anyone outside of it. And what he found was darkness and more demons.”

I drank more of the beer as she finally opened hers and drank long from the can.

“When he came back, he could have taken any number of paths.” Pasha continued. “He could have let the dark break him.”

“You think he’s not broken now?” I was incredulous.

“Depends on who you ask.” Pasha replied in an as-a-matter-of-factly voice. “But he could have let the things he’s experience keep him always in that broken head. He could have gone astray and turned to crimes like so many others who come back and not get the help they needed. Instead, he channeled his pain and his energy into creating Musk. Into building it until it’s this tower of elegance in the city. A money-making machine. And then this idiot comes and lights all those dreams and hopes on fire.”

I hung my head.

“That’s the equivalent—Musk is Khadri’s Daisy.”

“Daisy?” I asked.

“John Wick’s dog?” Pasha asked as if I’d just asked the dumbest question ever.

“John Wick?” I arched a brow. “Is that another one of his military buddies?”

Pasha turned to look at me as if I’d sprouted horns.

“Really?” She asked.

I blinked.

“You don’t know who John Wick is?”

I shook my head.

Pasha sighed and shook her head. “Moros needs to do a better job in picking his girls.”

“Now, you listen to me?—!”

Pasha laughed.

She tossed her head back, her tightly held ponytail brushing down almost to her ass and laughed.

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