Page 28 of Grave Games

Romeo

Of all the roadblocks I’d come up against since this whole crazy ride began, the one filling Shiloh’s bedroom doorway had to be the stupidest.

By far.

As I stood at the end of Shiloh’s rumpled bed with Shiloh standing near the bathroom door a few feet away, I stared at Josh McKeen, AKA Chef of the Chicago Gravediggers. For his part, Shiloh’s brother glared pure death at me, his curly hair sticking out in all directions and his right hand behind his back in a pose I knew all too well. I’d bet my prized custom chopper that his hand was wrapped around a gun tucked in the back of his pants, and he wouldn’t hesitate to pull it out and fill me with holes if I so much as twitched.

That was the only thing that kept me from throwing his ass out the door as far as I could. Considering the twitch in his eye, he’d probably miss me and hit Shy.

“Josh?” Clearly unaware that her brother was a sketchy-ass bomb primed go off, Shiloh gaped at her brother. “My God, Josh, I… What are you doing here? How did you even know where I live?”

“I’ve kept tabs on you from the moment you left home, because I knew everyone else would be doing the same. Case in point.” Josh jerked his stubble-covered chin my way. “We got ourselves a real fox in the henhouse, so to speak.”

“Be very careful,” I advised him quietly, picturing in my head just how I could take him down. Fucking close quarters. Not too many ways to take him out without putting Shiloh in the line of fire, and she was priority number-one. But if I could get him closer to me… “This fox has fangs and doesn’t like assholes breaking into his ol’ lady’s place.”

Josh’s face, so startlingly similar to Shiloh’s, twisted with barely suppressed rage. “Bullshit, cocksucker. Shiloh isn’t your old lady. You’re just using her.”

“For what?” I raised my brows, keeping my eyes trained on him while keeping Shiloh on my radar. “I mean, besides sex, because let me tell you, dude, when it comes to fucking, your sister is out of this goddamn world—”

“You motherfucker.” Out came the gun, a wicked flash of motion as Josh surged toward me. Ready for it, I stepped into Josh, surprising him, and that was all the opening I needed. Grabbing his wrist with one hand to keep the gun pointed away from Shiloh, I grabbed him around the neck with my other hand, stepped into him and flipped him over my hip. He hit the bedroom floor with a crash, and I took a second to give thanks that Shiloh lived on the ground floor before slamming my knee down on Josh’s chest and into his neck.

“Romeo!” Shiloh yelped my name, and I fully expected her to launch an attack on me. Instead, she stepped forward and kicked her bare foot at her brother’s hand holding the gun, dislodging it and making her cry out in pain. In an instant she started hopping around, holding her stubbed toes, while I couldn’t stop from staring at her like the frigging miracle she was. “Damn it, damn it, damn it… you made me break my toe, Josh, you dick! What the hell do you think you’re doing, pulling a gun on Romeo? You could have killed him!”

All my bloody thoughts of how to dispose of Chef’s body vanished like magic, and suddenly the world was filled with light. “Shy, baby. You were worried about me?”

“Josh.” Other than flicking a glance of pure death my way, Shiloh chose to focus solely on the man beneath my knee. “Explain. Why are you here? Why now?”

“You’re. Being. Set. Up.” Tugging ineffectually at my knee pressing into the base of his neck, Josh’s face slowly turned the color of puce. “Get out. Of Chicago. Don’t trust… anyone.”

“Who’s setting her up?” I demanded while his words sent ice pouring through my veins. “Give me a name.”

“You,” Josh croaked, his green eyes watering under the pressure of my knee on his carotid. “You’re the fucker… setting her up. Tell me… I’m wrong.”

“You’re wrong, dickhead.” I’d never taken such pleasure in saying those words more. “The only bad guy in this scenario is you.”

Fuck. You. I’d never—”

“Let’s review. Who was the bastard who brought sweet, innocent Shy into the orbit of Hades in the first place, huh? Who came in waving a fucking gun around like a wild-eyed amateur? I know it wasn’t me.”

“Get off him, Romeo.” Still clutching her injured toes, she sank onto the edge of the bed, her free arm curling around the bedpost where her robe had been hanging only minutes before. “I want to hear what he has to say.”

“It’ll be garbage, whatever he spews.” Especially if Hades had a chance to put his special taint on it. But since I was feeling generous thanks to Shiloh having my back even when she thought the worst of me, I got up with one last dig of my knee into Josh’s neck and went to retrieve the gun that had slid all the way to the bedroom door. “Just so you know, Shy, I’ll shoot him with his own gun if he makes a move I don’t approve of, so tell this moron to be a good little boy and mind his damn manners while he’s around you.”

“I’m not worried about what my brother would do to me. He’s my hero.” Shiloh hugged the bedpost tighter, staring at her brother as he gingerly pushed to his feet. “I never thought I’d see you again, Josh. After… after what happened, I kept trying to reach out to you to apologize, but you ignored me every time. Not that I blame you. I know I ruined everything. You sacrificed your entire life just to keep me safe.”

That got my attention. “He what?”

“Shaming me in front of Josh was just the beginning of what you Chicago Gravediggers did.” The slender fingers gripping the bedpost turned white while remembered terror filled her haunted eyes. “They wouldn’t let me go until Josh agreed to join their gang. They held me for three days in that back room. My poor parents… They filed a missing person’s report. They thought I’d been kidnapped, maybe even killed.”

I remembered well the room she’d been kept in. Major shit went down in the Rumpus Room, a lot of it good, some of it not. But the thought of a teenaged and traumatized Shiloh being held hostage there, raped and suffering all manner of shit, while club members went in and out to do God-knew-what… “Youwerekidnapped. Youdidnearly die.”

“I walked into that place of my own free will, like an idiot.”

“But you weren’t allowed to walk back out. And you,” I added, turning a snarl Josh’s way, “should’ve manned up right away, done everything you could to get her out the very same day that Marvel—your so-calledfriend—walked her into that trap.”

“I gave up college, my whole future, so Shiloh could go free,” Josh shot back with a respectable snarl of his own. “You think I wanted a life with the Chicago Gravediggers? Short answer—fuck, no. I had a full ride to Northwestern, asshole. I was already being headhunted by a dozen pharmaceutical companies around the world, clamoring for me to work for them. Now I’m stuck with no future except surviving from one day to the next. But I can at least make sure my kid sister doesn’t get stuck right along with me. She needs to leave Chicago and never look back.”

Pharmaceutical companies? A full ride to Northwestern?“So you’re a real brainiac, huh?”

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