Page 14 of The Butcher

“You must know someone I can ask.”

“Fifteen years is a long time. Most of the people I knew are probably dead. Bartholomew from the Chasseurs settled down and moved to Tuscany. I don’t know where Benton and Bleu ended up. Some LSD freaks took over the camp a decade ago, but I think they’re all dead now.”

I nodded in understanding. “Magnus said more of the same.”

“Then you wasted your time—and my time—coming here.”

“Are you always this hostile?”

His eyebrows rose slightly at the audacity of my question.

“President Martin may be the president of the Republic—but I’m the Emperor of France. Under my rule,Homines ex codiceapplies, which is in your best interest as a father and a husband. Crime is regulated, just the way our food and health care are regulated by the laws that govern this land—and I’m the one in charge of it. If you want your daughter to live in a place where she can walk the streets alone at night, where your wife can shop alone without fear of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, then you should help me in whatever way you can.”

He cocked his head slightly as he looked at me, and slowly the hostility drained from his expression the way water drained from soil. Several beats passed, and his stare remained locked hard on my face. “I’ll see what I can do.”

It’d been a week since I’d walked into Silencio and met Fleur. I’d made it clear I wasn’t a one-woman kind of guy, so I doubted she’d expected me to be there when she woke up, but I still felt obligated to explain my absence.

But I guessed the gesture meant nothing to her because she didn’t text me back.

That was a first.

My driver pulled up to the bar, and I hopped out. It was midnight, just a few hours from closing, and a couple was outside on the sidewalk enjoying their cigarettes. When I looked through the window, I saw her standing at the bar and making a drink, an old-fashioned for the guy sitting at the very end.

I walked inside and saw that the tables were full of people having a late-night drink even though it was a weekday. But the bar itself was mostly empty because no one wanted to sit on a stool for hours on end, and they chose to gather at a table with a leather armchair.

She wore a tight long-sleeve black shirt, a deep V in the front to show the tops of her perky tits. A necklace sat in the center, a single pendant in rose gold. The details were too faint for me to read. The last time I’d seen her, her long hair had been straight and almost to her waist, but now, it was curled and shiny. Her makeup was dark, a smoky eye look that reminded me of a sexy cat, exactly the kind of shit I was into.

I took a seat on a stool, choosing the side where no one else was seated.

She didn’t notice me right away, doing her nightly cleanup since it was slow.

I wasn’t sure if I was impatient for a drink or her attention. “Want to make me a drink, sweetheart?”

She didn’t turn at my voice, but she stiffened like she knew exactly who it belonged to. She folded up the towel she’d been using and turned to me. “The usual?” She recovered from the shock in just a second, and now she had the kind of confidence that implied she’d known I was there the entire time. She was quick on her feet, just the way she’d been when that idiot had come at her with a machete, having far too much pride to admit she’d been caught off guard.

“Sure.”

She made me a drink, a double scotch on the rocks, and placed it on the counter in front of me. “Didn’t expect to see you in here.”

“Didn’t expect you to ignore my texts.”

“I didn’t ignore them. Just didn’t have anything to say.”

I took a drink as I stared at her, wondering if she’d been thinking about me as much as I’d been thinking about her. Beautiful women were a dime a dozen, but this woman had something special. I wasn’t sure if it was the I-don’t-give-a-fuck attitude, the sass, or just her incredible tits—or all of the above.

“You said you had a meeting. Where do you work?”

I didn’t answer the question, not wanting my reply to be overheard by anyone who may be listening.

She knew I ignored her, but she didn’t repeat the question or pry into my silence. She worked on her cleanup in front of me,pouring out glasses and tossing old limes for the drinks. When her hair fell in her face, she would move it across one shoulder and expose one side of her neck, and I remembered how she’d tasted when I kissed her.

I remembered how her pussy tasted too. “Did you tell him?”

She smirked slightly, her eyes down on her work. “Yes.”

“And did it fix your problem?”

She lifted her gaze and looked at me, her head slightly cocked like her barrel was full of sass and ready to blow. “No. In fact, it made it worse.”

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