Page 115 of Root

She claimed she wanted me safe but really, it’s her brother.

I look at Lucy.

“I’m in charge still.” It’s mostly the truth. Nikolai and Rose are due back from whatever the fuck they went off to do. “So I’m up for being bait—”

“No—”

“Jessica,” I say, hard and cold, cutting her off. “There’re only a few times I’ll tell you to shut the fuck up and this is one of them. Shut the fuck up.”

I don’t look at her even now. I keep my gaze trained on Lucy.

“Jess does have a point. We need to take this chaotic group out. We’ve had trouble, rumblings where we shouldn’t, and it seems since they own Bunny Munroe, it’s them.”

Lucy sets her cold eyes on me. “The only reason I agreed to working in with Nikolai was his promises.”

Fuck, this isn’t my forte. But there’s no one else apart from Tony, and he’s not stepping in.

I know why.

Jess broke protocol by using me to somehow get in here. She was seen leaving my room so the pile of receipts I keep that I haven’t yet put into bookkeeping would have a transaction from this place. Dotting Is and crossing Ts. It’s a way to place me having a drink after a day of errands for my cousin.

Nikolai’s above most things. He’s got people on payrolls everywhere, and he knows how to make things disappear. But he’s always about certain kinds of paper trails that make a person look innocent.

But she’d have found this place.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter.

Because it’s come to this, a meeting of the most powerful rulers of Queenstown, and I’m one of them with Nikolai not here. If Tony stepped in like he used to when I was a punk, it wouldn’t look good.

I just hope to fuck I’m doing the right thing…

“I’ve spent the last week and change looking into the gang. A deep dive. They’re nasty, usually scattered in small lawless groups, so they just cause havoc on their patches of turf. But it looks like there’s been a momentum of cohesion. Around the time the bar was lost in Santa Fe. About when the whole Ten64 got a new king.

“The who’s who isn’t important until we want to pick them off, and we have names and numbers.”

There’s a sharp inhalation of breath next to me.

“We go in, Lucy.” I look at Ms. Smith, hold that gaze. “We take out these guys. We get the best from each group together. Confront them and be ready for war. Better nip a war before it starts. I’ll represent you and Nikolai. If they see this bar as the perfect spot to do illicit trade, then we can use that. Reclaim by their rules. Fight, if that’s what they want.”

Jess sucks in a sharp breath and I don’t hear a thing from Tony.

I swear a clock ticks somewhere, but it’s probably in my fucking head. Lucy waits, and it takes everything I am not to look at the red head who I’m fast losing my shit over.

All the shit.

On all levels.

Fury, fear, fuck…even love maybe. Love she doesn’t even remotely hold for me.

But I’m here, and I have to unfuck the situation.

“You don’t do much with that land, or the possibilities,” I say. “And I’m sure you’ve got your reasons. Just like Nikolai lets others play in his backyard. It creates vacuums, allows things to breathe and people to think they have more power than they have, but if the Ten64s have found something here, shouldn’t we stopper that vacuum and farm that, for want of a better word?”

“You mean we take it back and profit from it,” Lucy says, getting up and rounding her desk.

She comes up to me where she runs a hand down the charcoal gray tie I’m wearing with my slate gray Kiton suit and blue shirt that matches my eyes. There’s a flash of feminine appreciation in her gaze that tells me the suit and shirt are worth it.

“Because one of the reasons we let that drunkard—we as in my father before me and now me—own and run that bar was it stopped that shit, and the need to get dirty. We step in and we’ll get dirty, I’ll get dirty, because that’s what will happen. It was all in balance.” Her gaze shifts to Jess. “Until it wasn’t.”

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