Page 19 of Butcher

I shot him an unamused look. We’d just finished up with church and Lock had released the others. But he had questions. Considering I’d just told them something that had silenced the room, I wasn’t surprised.

Lock sat down, cleared his throat, then spoke. “Could you repeat what you just said in there?”

“Yeah, cause I’m pretty sure I’m still drunk. Either that or I’m hallucinating,” Toxic added. Lock shot him a dark look and he justshrugged. “It’s not something you’d think you’d hear this asshole say,” he said, defending himself.

“I want to keep her.”

Lock focused back on me. “You can’t just fucking keep her Butcher.”

“Why not?”

“Why do you want to keep her?” he countered, narrowing his eyes. When Lock answered questions with a question it always ended badly for me.

“Pretty sure she’s one of the assassins.”

They both fell quiet at that. Finally, Lock asked, “Pretty sure?”

“Well, she came at me with a knife.” Toxic chuckled. “Admittedly, that’s not the first time a girl has done that during sex,” I told Lock. “So, I want to find out for sure.” I wasn’t about to admit I wanted to hang on to her for other reasons, too. So I could fuck her again, for one. And because my inner demons had actually let me sleep for once. It could have been the sexual release, but I had a feeling it had something more to do with the woman sleeping in my arms. I needed to figure out what that was all about.

“This isn’t the first time someone’s come after you with a knife during sex?” Lock echoed, looking amazed.

Toxic shook his head in answer. “That’s your takeaway here?”

Lock looked back and forth between us, opening his mouth to say something. “You know what, never mind. I don’t want to know.” He wiped a hand over his face. “You can’t justkeepa woman. Nowadays they tend to have opinions on shit like that. And if she’s an assassin… What about the women? The kids?”

“I’ll keep her in line. I won’t let her hurt anyone, Prez,” I told him. “I’m not sure she would.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, she’s being paid to kill me. I don’t get the ‘kill people for fun’ vibe from her.”

“You’d know,” Toxic added, but he wasn’t joking.

My word was gospel on this topic. Years of hunting the worst of the worst of humanity had honed my instincts into a fine-tunedmachine. Not to mention like recognized like. She may kill people for a living, but she didn’t get any enjoyment out of it.

Lockout nodded at Toxic in agreement. “That’s a big risk if you’re wrong,” he told me.

“I’m not.”

“So, you’re going to interrogate her, then kill her?”

I swallowed as rage flared up in my chest as his question. It was that quick. “No,” I bit out. “When I say keep her, I mean it.”

Both his and Toxic’s brows shot up. Lock sat up straight, putting his forearms on his desk as he leaned forward and pinned me with an intense stare. “What’s the plan here, Butcher?”

I shrugged, but when his gaze hardened, I told him, “I don’t know yet.”

“You really think she’s not going to hurt anyone else?”

“Nah, didn’t get that impression from her. Shit, she could barely bring herself to try for me. I know when someone’s heart isn’t in it. She’ll make a few more attempts on me, but they won’t be serious.”

Lock sat back and rubbed his temples. He was probably thinking that he never expected to have conversations like this. Most of our conversations were probably off the wall to him.

“Her heart wasn’t in it? What were you doing to her at the time?” Toxic asked with a wide grin.

“Don’t answer that. I don’t need to fucking know,” Lock said with a sigh.

Toxic and I shared looks that said, ‘maybe he did.’ If it would remove that stick from his ass then I’d let him live vicariously through my sex life.

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