“I loved you, so fucking much it hurt. It still hurts. But she helps, Olympia. She helps with that pain you would never let me help you with.”
“I’m glad for you, Slate, I really am.”
“You forget I know who you are. You aren’t glad, I can tell. You’re hurt, and the last thing I ever want to do is hurt you.” My shaky hands reach up to touch his face. His hand covers mine, and he squeezes it then lets me go. My thumb strokes his cheek, and I lean in to kiss his lips ever so softly.
“She looked like you. It wasn’t me she looked like, it was you,” I say gently.
A tear leaves his eye, and I wipe it away before I turn and start walking home, leaving him standing there in the dark. Leaving him with some of my excruciating pain.19Darby“How many days now?” I ask Creed pacing.
“It’s only been one shift, and you rang her at the beginning of it,” he says closing the doors for the night.
“Don’t make me out to be some sort of fucking husband who checks up on his wife all the time. Olympia left then didn’t answer my calls. It’s been two days since she’s been gone.” I flip him off.
“That’s because you threatened to spank her after the first call.”
“That’s because it took me four calls to get through to her.”
“She isn’t your property,” he reminds me.
“I know, but she was off the other day. Something’s wrong, and now she’s gone.”
“If you’re worried about her, go find her, and stop this shit.”
“Nope.”
Creed pulls the gun he keeps out from under the bar and places it on the counter. “That issue we had last time, well, it’s not going away.”
Fuck! I thought after I beat his fucking head in he would get the damn message. Obviously not. He touched Olympia, scared her in the parking lot, and now he’s still trying to get in, attempting to find out more information. We always have one person fishing around for clues, it’s just what happens when something’s this exclusive. Everyone wants a taste, no matter the cost.
“You can handle it, right?”
Echo scratches his face. “No, I have shit to do.” He slams his hand on the bar top, and when he lifts it a piece of paper is there. “He’s already there. Go get him and end it.”
“This is your job.”
“Correction, it’s our job. Which I have been doing since you’ve been busy. Tonight, I am not able to help.” He walks out, and I pick up the piece of paper on the counter, reading the address.
Thank fuck my father’s here, because it’s not easy to do the things this job requires of me now.He’s sitting on the front porch rocking back and forth when I walk up. I check the address again, double-checking to be sure I am correct. He can’t see me because the moon isn’t bright tonight, and I’m behind a bush. He lights a smoke, and the woman who was standing next to him walks toward one of the cars parked out the front and drives off. I duck down a little further as she passes me in the car, and when it’s all clear, I get back up to see him in the same position drinking. I’m fucking mad again, thinking of the way he tried to touch Olympia out the front of our club. He’s a man who pays women to fuck him, and he wants in.
That is never happening.
Ever.
How he even learned about our place I don’t fucking know. No one is stupid enough to speak about the exclusivity of the club, and after checking, no one he knows has a relationship to the club. When his eyes are down, I make my way up his driveway until I reach him, and he doesn’t look up until the wooden stair underneath my foot starts to creak loudly. And when he does, he stands fast and checks around for an escape.
“I wouldn’t try it. I will shoot you before you can move your foot an inch.”
“What do you want?”
“You came back, again. This time hurt another girl?”
The asshole has the audacity to sneer at me. “The bitch wouldn’t talk.”
He makes me angry, so fucking angry. Creed told me about how he followed one of our other girls and roughed her up trying to get information from her, until her neighbor scared him away. So, now she’s in one of the apartments I own for her protection and to recuperate fully.
The length people go to get what they want astounds me. Some are worse than others and have no moral compass when it comes down to it. So, then my moral compass flies out the fucking window, and I will make you my bitch.
“You’ll let me in,” he sneers at me. “You won’t do anything to me. Because this is the real world, and police will lock you behind bars. Now, let me in that place and give me the girl with the blue hair to play with. I like her fire.”