Page 89 of Tide of Treason
Something flickered in her eyes, quick and gone. “And why wouldn’t you?”
Because the taste of her was seared into my tongue, her nails embedded in my skin. Her moans haunted me, dragged me under, milked every last ounce of restraint I had until I was nothing but teeth, tongue, and need. I’d spent the last three hours tracing that inked sin on her lower back, counting her soft breaths, losing my mind wondering what the fuck I was doing tangled in Kayla Sforza’s sheets instead of getting out before she took another piece of me.
Strangely, reluctance to bed another woman had zero to do with conscience. My moral compass rusted off years ago. It was simply Kayla. The way she felt. The way she ruined me. How no one else ever quite fit after her.
“You look like you could use some.”
I glanced toward the window. A city draped in sleepy early morning. “Some sleep?” I was almost insulted by the suggestion, given my profession.
The toast popped in the background, and she moved to retrieve it, sliding a knife through butter. “I was suggesting some coffee, but sleep works, too. Especially if it’s the ‘in my bed’ variety.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
My shoulders relaxed. She hadn’t changed her mind, it seemed. Relief unraveled that tight coil in my chest. Part of me expected her to go cold, like she’d been playing a game and made me pay for a night of my time. It’d have hurt like a son of a gun, but I could’ve handled it.
The fact I half expected it said too much about me and my hang-ups.
It started with coffee. Or, at least, that was the lie I told myself when I let her press a steaming mug into my hand instead of walking the hell out of there. Because it never fucking ended with coffee. The first sip was pure bliss. Hot. Pungent. Bitter. Black, like the woman who’d fixed it, with a pinch more sugar than I’d normally take, and a lick of honey on the finish.
Kayla perched on the edge of her countertop, back to the morning sun, her gaze thoughtful. I’m not sure what that look was for. Maybe she’d remembered I was a piece of trash, and she’d rather be drinking coffee with someone who owned a private bank instead of a gun.
As long as it wasn’t another man.
At least, until she decided she was done with me. But that would come. I knew it and hated myself for it, because no matter how much she left me wanting more, more, I still had one thing her pretty-faced aristocrats didn’t, and it’d be a cold day in hell before I ever gave that up.
There were sometruths you don’t let yourself think about. They lived in the back of your mind like rats in the walls—scratching, gnawing, whispering. If you ignored them long enough, they’d turn into ghosts.
He was back in New York.
I got the tip from some loudmouth whose teeth I smashed not long after. Not because I didn’t believe him. No, I did. I’d known it the second I felt the ghost of him slither back into the city. It was in the way people whispered. The way my hands wouldn’t quit trembling. Because that rat-scratching truth in the back of my mind had finally found a way out, and it was grinning at me with Sergius Braga’s mouth.
“Word is, he’s not actually inside city lines yet,” Rafaelsaid. “They say he’s feeling things out.”
Metal flicked against my thumb.
Zippo open. Zippo closed.
Tick, tick.
I let it chew up the silence.
“He isn’t testing shit,” I muttered around the joint in my mouth. Flame sparked, bright orange for a heartbeat. “He’s watching.”
Watchingme.
There was something poetic about it, if you were the kind of person who found poetry in gore. The man who made me was coming back to kill me. A neat, sadistic loop. Deep down, I’d always known Sergius carried my blood, but knowing wasn’t the same as believing. Believing? That motherfucker was a brand to the flesh.
My mama was the closest brush with heaven I’d ever committed, but even saints had their sins, and hers was letting a man without a soul put his hands on her.
Rafael moved onto talking about manifests and drop points and the FBI’s new protocols, but my attention barely scraped the surface. I’d been waiting for something to crack since the first whisper of Braga. My body slouched in the patio chair, legs spread, an arm hooked over the back. The joint worked in shades today. Muscle memory of pain still crawled down my forearms, but it stopped me from probing the empty space where some twitchy cartel fuck in Sinaloa knocked out my molar with a rifle butt.
A moan split the air.
With my eyes half-lidded, I caught sight of Amara sprawled across one of my enforcers, head tipped back in reckless delight. No guessing what was happening under that sliver of lace she called underwear. Cards got tossed on the table. Another guy lit a cigarette. Over by the wall, Vargas adjusted a security cam while Tadeo wiped a bloodied knife on his cargo pants.
Business. As. Usual.
