Page 54 of Their Princess

The door to the rooms on the east side of the warehouse snicked shut.

She’s safe,I told myself.Adelina is safe and sound. Away from the loose cannon.

I might not be worthy of Adelina—or someone like her—but she also didn’t deserve such violence.

As I breathed, a sense of calm and control washed over me. The red haze over my vision dissipated as Graff crossed the room to Sas’s side. He shouldn’t stand so close to my target, but he wasn’t part of my team. So, let him fall with his brother.

“Explain.” I tightened my grip on my gun handle, forcing my finger to rest alongside the barrel. Mass would have my head if I didn’t work to see this deal go through. And even though I hated him for bartering Adelina, he was blood. The only family I had.

Sas lit up a joint, inhaled, and leaned back against the wall. “Explain what?” His voice was tight, holding in the smoke, as he passed the joint to Graff.

“What’s your game? What are you doing with Adelina?”

Sas shrugged and exhaled. “She started it.”

“Yeah, she starts a lot of shit. She’s a kid,” I said. Twenty-two, while technically an adult, was still young enough that her inner brat liked to rear her ugly head.

Sas snorted. “Have you seen those tits and that ass? That woman hasn’t been a kid for years.”

I wanted to shoot off his balls one at a time, so it was a fucking chore to keep my finger off the trigger. “Man up, asshole.”

Sas rolled his head over to look at me with bloodshot eyes. The pot clearly had him calmer than he should be when facing my barely caged fury. He’d be slow now, so I flipped the safety back into place.

Graff slipped away and grabbed the sketchpad from the sofa table nearby. He brushed by my shoulder and said in passing, “Adelina got under his skin.”

“She’s good at that,” I said, having seen it before while watching over her at the Vegas nightclubs. None of those boys, though, had been half as dangerous as her future husband.

“I noticed,” mumbled Sas, balling his hands into fists.

He might throw a punch at me, but he would be slow with intoxication. No threat whatsoever. Plus, I had already proven that I didn’t need a gun to win a fight with him. I tucked into the waistband of my pants at the small of my back—the way everyone else here wore their pieces.

“She’ll keep trying to get a rise out of you,” I warned Sas.

“Challenge accepted,” he drawled as he scratched at his beard.

“She’s winning.”

He shook his head against the wall, then slurred, “She isn’t.”

Graff looked up from the pad he’d started sketching on again. “Open your eyes, Veep. She’s got an edge on you, and you’re the one looking like an idiot.”

Sas lurched off the wall and pointed at his biker brother, swaying slightly. “Shut the fuck up!”

Graff cocked a brow, but he let Sas stumble away. We exchanged a knowing look before following.

At the fridge, Sas swiped two longnecks from the top shelf. “You can both fuck off.”

He sat on the counter.

At the island, the same place where the artist sat during the meeting earlier, Graff slid out a barstool. The wooden legs scraped against the floorboards, then he plopped down. He pulled a pencil from inside of his cut and dragged it across the page.

“You need to get your shit together, Sas, before the others notice.” Graff said the words as though he were talking about the weather, but they were laced with something unlike I’d seen in the man.

It was the kind of brotherly warning and bond I had only seen formed after two people had gone to war and returned whole. Or almost whole. I still couldn’t fathom how that waspossible when Sas was a walking piece of shit, but it piqued my interest about their relationship and how Sas rose to his position in the MC.

Sas downed half his beer, then sighed. “Adelina’s the one who needs to learn her place.”

He wasn’t about to get anywhere with her if he thought she’d sit down, shut up, and suck his cock like one of the bunnies out back.

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