Page 130 of Tide of Treason
A bitter breath. “Sergius Braga did. He told the guy I was spoken for. That if he ever came near me again, they’d find his tongue in a blender and his body in the bay.”
My stomach twisted.
Shrugging, Lucius went back to fussing with a stubborn bolt, as if the story meant nothing. “That same agent transferred six months later. Probably saved his life. But he gave me his number and told me if I ever got out, to call.”
I watched him work, curious. “Did you?”
“I didn’t have to.” His gaze met mine. “He did.”
“You’re telling me that the guy you fixed a car for when you were a broke, orphaned teenager came back years later and gave you a job?”
He smiled. “I’m telling you that when I gutted Task Force 81 from the inside out, he helped sign the paperwork.”
My breath stuttered. “Jesus Christ.” Some things were too impossible to romanticise.
By Thursday, the spider in the shower was still alive. It had taken up residence in the corner tile. I stood frozen for three full minutes, a bottle of conditioner clutched like aweapon, before I made the executive decision to fetch Lucius. Dripping wet, I padded across the apartment with nothing but a towel and a deep sense of betrayal. He was at the kitchen island, shirtless, working through intel on cartel drop-offs.
I cleared my throat. “Spider.”
Without looking up, he grunted, “Big?”
“Massive,” I deadpanned, though “dime-sized tyrant” would’ve sufficed for any normal human.
Lucius’s thumb paused on the laptop’s track-pad. A lazy flick of midnight-blue eyes traveled from screen to towel, lingering where water snuck under the terrycloth and kissed the curve of my hip.
“Scale of one to tarantula?”
“Eight.”
A beat.
“Seven and a half, if you’re going to be technical about leg-span.”
He pushed back the barstool and stalked past me without another word. I trailed him down the hall, a voyeur to my own domestic kink—watching a man big enough to bend steel pluck a wad of toilet tissue, approach the eight-legged nightmare, and, with brisk efficiency, end its reign.
Crunch.
“You’re a hero,” I informed him as he returned to his seat and began tapping something less gruesome into the tracker. Something about the combination of competence and unashamed tolerance for my neuroses made my toes curl.
“Don’t I know it,” came the dry reply.
I flopped down across the bar. “I didn’t know you were an expert in spiders.”
“Not an expert. I grew up surrounded by them, lived in a shithole they could crawl through the walls of, and had the misfortune of seeing my uncle’s face eaten by a Brazilian Wandering Spider bite.” Lucius grimaced. “I learned to tell the difference between venomous and harmless.”
I stared.
He looked up, expression blank. “What?”
“You don’t find it alarming that your uncle’s face was eaten by a Brazilian Wandering Spider?”
“No. The thing’s called wandering for a reason.”
. . . Fair. I made a soft, feral noise and dropped my chin to my hand.
There were moments I didn’t know what to do with myself.
Lucius Andrade was mine, and some days the knowledge overwhelmed me to the point of violence. I’d rip out every throat within a fifty-mile radius to keep him. Possibly a few outside it, if I was feeling territorial.
