Page 75 of Murder & Mayhem
His whole face lit up when he saw me, and even though it’d been years, I still got the same butterflies. I didn’t think Dominic would ever not get that reaction out of me.
“Hey,” I said when I got close, smiling up at him.
Dominic’s arms laced around my middle, and he kissed my offered-up lips. “Hey, beautiful. How was your appointment?”
These days, I usually only had therapy twice a month. Every once in a while, I still faced a setback and increased my sessions, but after years, it felt good to have therapy as only part of and not my whole life.
“Good. It feels good to leave therapy and not be ripped to shreds for once.” Nicky laughed and kissed me again.
“I bet. It’s a good thing, though, because I have a surprise for you.” There was a glint in his eyes, one he got for only one thing. Murder.
I licked my lips. “Yeah? A good one?”
Nicky was practically vibrating out of his skin. What could have possibly happened in the short time I’d been at my session? His fingers grazed lightly over my cheek. “A really good one. Are you ready to go?”
My stomach twisted with a mixture of nerves and excitement. There weren’t many people that could still illicit that kind of reaction from Nicky, and I could only hope after this long, we finally got the break we’d been hoping for.
The last two years, since Nicky and I had started up what we liked to call our green-flag relationship, my murderous boyfriend had been on a side quest to hunt down anyone who’d ever hurt Bailey or me and make them pay. It was a long fucking list, and we couldn’t remember everyone, but we were down to only a few more people now. There was only one left that I really cared about though: Slash.
I was trying not to get my hopes up. Many times over the last three years, since she’d been a major player in trying to sell my brother, Slash had proven elusive. Many times, Nicky and his brothers or Luca’s team had thought they’d caught her. Hell, even the feds had been searching for her, but she had a lot of reach and connections, and they had never been able to pin her down. Bailey and I’d had a long talk about it and had come to terms with the fact that we might never get justice. We weren’t okay with it, but we were trying to make our peace with it. We’d both moved on in major ways and didn’t need the vengeance to live our lives.
Still, if Nicky had finally caught her . . . yeah, I would be very happy with that.
We didn’t talk on the drive. Nicky was humming to himselfas he steered with one hand and held mine with the other. I loved seeing him so happy.
He really thrived on Luca’s security team, and most of his job didn’t involve killing, which I appreciated. Don’t get me wrong, I still got a sick kind of pleasure watching him dismember people who’d hurt Bails or me, but I didn’t want that to be his whole life. My Daddy tended to get a little obsessive, and it was better for everyone if he had something else to focus on besides murder. That was why Ari had forced him to do that marketing job for so many years.
Oddly enough, Gideon still taught. Unlike Dominic, whose job had strictly been a cover, Gid loved teaching. He still kept up his weekend side hustle of murdering bad guys, and I figured he always would.
Ari was still hacking and doing IT. He always kept to himself some, but lately it’d been more often, and I knew the brothers were worried about him. Even though Bailey and I had moved into the big house nearly eight months ago, I could go days, sometimes weeks without seeing him, and Nicky and Gid were not happy.
The drive was nearly thirty minutes, but soon we were through the portion of the city that was mostly hotels. I tilted my head in confusion.
“Where are we going?”
“To the Lyle.”
The Lyle used to be a huge chain that had hotels all over the world. Then overnight, it had gone bankrupt and all its chains had either shut down or had been bought out. The one in our city had been abandoned for a while, and I’d heard it had been recently bought, but no word on what was happening to it.
Nicky pulled into the parking garage. “We’re going down to the basement, so this is the closest entrance.”
My lips twitched and I squeezed his hand. “How romantic, Daddy.”
Nicky huffed but he was smiling.
We had a nice, light, and easy thing going with our dynamic. Nothing too formal, but we slipped in and out of it whenever it worked for us. Sometimes I called him Daddy, and sometimes I called him Nicky. Sometimes he took control in the bedroom, and sometimes . . . Okay, he always took control in the bedroom, and now that he wasn’t terrified of triggering me all the time, it was fucking amazing.
Nicky parked in a spot close to the elevator shaft. We surprisingly weren’t the only vehicle here, though it made sense when I noticed it was Brooks’s Ninja bike and Gideon’s Harley. Nicky realized where my gaze was. “Yeah, everyone’s excited.”
Nicky shut the car off and got out, but I didn’t move. That was one of our few rules: Nicky opened doors for me, every time, full stop. I grumbled a lot about it when I was feeling impatient, but I low-key loved it.
Once he helped me out, we walked hand in hand toward the elevator shaft, but thankfully we took the stairs. I did not trust that thing.
The basement was huge, but at some point, someone had divided it into multiple rooms, with a large center area in the middle. I could hear the sounds of flesh hitting flesh and I raised my eyebrow at Nicky. “That’s not our target.”
Okay, then. I had questions, but then Nicky led me to the last door on the left, opened it, and there she was. Motherfucking Slash.
Her real name was Nancy Williams. It had pissed Bailey the fuck off when he’d first heard it because it was so unassuming. Though, to be fair, everything had pissed him off back then. He was doing much better now. But he felt like no onenamed Nancy Williams should be leading one of North America’s largest trafficking rings.
