Page 5 of The Kings of Kearny

I lifted my eyes to his. “You were a Night Stalker?”

He held my gaze and nodded.

Well, I’ll be damned. Jakob was airborne, like me, only from a special operations Army helicopter regiment that flew into enemy territory at night, low and fast. I was stationed with a unit of Night Stalkers in Syria. They were some of the craziest motherfuckers in spec-ops. Andthatwas saying something.

It didn’t make me instantly trust him, but I no longer worried I’d have to shoot him. Only one percent of Americans serve their country. It does make you family, in a way, part of a small percentage of the population that’s been joined together with others from all walks of life, ready to fight and die to keep everyone else free. The fact that we were both airborne combat meant we belonged to an even smaller group of individuals. It was a tight-knit community, and word got around in it. If he hurt me, he’d be excised from it like a cancerous growth at best. At worst, someone might really do a flyover and drop a bellyful of iron onto his head.

Something in my face must have given my thoughts away because he straightened and took a step back, hands loose at his sides, waiting. I rolled the window up, turned my car off, grabbed my purse, and got out. His hands landed on the roof on either side of me, caging me in, and I barely had enough room to turn and face him after shutting my door.

I stared up at him from inches away. A nearby streetlight cast its anemic glow over us, and the dim illumination did nothing to make him look less dangerous. His brows shaded his eyes, turning them into twin pools of cerulean. Suddenly the nickname the Viking made a whole lot of sense. Shave the sides of his head to the scalp, add a few bloodstains and smear some stylized runes across his skin, and he’d be all set to go terrorize a sixth-century English village.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“We need to sell the lie,” he said, leaning closer.

Right. The lie that we were fucking.

Oh boy.

“Sure,” I said, settling back against my door.

Approval lit his eyes, like he was impressed that instead of arguing with him, I chose to go along with this weirdness. Little did he know that I was all for anything that brought his big body closer to mine.

Still, I couldn’t help but wonder, why all the deception? And why did he think he was being watched in the first place? Was he some sort of undercover agent who had infiltrated the club? I looked him over, taking my time. He didn’t seem like a narc. In fact, from everything I knew about him, he was all too happy in his role as an enforcer for the Kings. Was it something else? A rival gang or a rift inside the club?

My questions cut off when he closed the distance between us. At five ten I was pretty tall, but I still had to look up at him. His beard tickled my cheek as he leaned in. I shivered when his lips brushed the shell of my ear. I’d wanted to be close to him all night. Hell, if I was honest, I’d been dreaming about this since the first time I laid eyes on him, and who knew when I might get another shot?

Screw it.

I turned my head and nuzzled his neck. The smell of his cologne was stronger here, dark, heady, spice and musk and the slight tang of citrus. It paired well with leather.

“Why do you walk with a limp?” he asked.

I blinked, surprised out of my dirty thoughts for the second time in less than five minutes. “You ever heard of small talk, Jakob?”

His breath warmed my neck when he answered. “Never saw the point of small talk. It’s just useless words people throw around while they wait for someone to say something meaningful.”

Well, shit, when he put it like that...

“My right leg is basically bionic,” I said. “Hip replacement, pins holding my knee together, steel grafted to my shin and femur, you get the drift. I was medically discharged because of it.”

“Combat wound?” he asked.

I nodded, knowing he would feel my answer because of our proximity.

This was the part where he would pull back and look at me with pity. I’d had other soldiers do it, and I knew they weren’t really seeing me anymore but thinking of people they’d served with, feeling that terrible tug of survivor’s guilt for making it out of some hellhole unscathed when so many others hadn’t.

Jakob didn’t pull away, and he didn’t look at me with pity. He put a hand on my injured hip, gently, and leaned in instead. “What happened?”

For some reason our forced intimacy made talking about it easier than usual. Maybe that was because with his nose buried in my hair, I didn’t have to look at him as I spoke or because he hadn’t reacted the way I anticipated, or maybe it was because as a Night Stalker, I knew he’d seen worse shit than I had and could understand what I was about to say.

“We took heavy fire during the siege of Kolomyya,” I told him.

“Ukraine?” he asked, his voice low enough that it had a little bit of growl to it.

I nodded again, thinking back to the brief but bloody shadow war the US had fought with Russia after they’d claimed the Crimean Peninsula and then tried to drag the rest of Ukraine back into the fold of the new USSR.

“The landing gear was damaged during the battle,” I said. “Our pilot was forced to execute a controlled crash on a dirt road outside the city. Engine number four hit the ground. Its casing cracked, and the oil lines broke, spewing jet fuel everywhere. Something must have sparked because the right wing caught fire.”

---