Grocery shopping was meditative for me. And it was being ruined by some asshole with a gun.
I would’ve been pissed off had I not been paralyzed with fear.
“I have cash,” I whispered, my voice scratchy as I stared at the parking lot, wishing for this to be the moment when a police cruiser drove in. For anyone to drive in.
“I don’t want your fuckin’ cash,” the man with the gun hissed in my ear, his grip tightening around my hip.
His breath smelled like mint, and he had a hint of an accent. Spanish, maybe. If I survived this, I’d need all the details I could glean. I didn’t dare try to turn to see his face, but I glanced down and glimpsed snakeskin cowboy boots on the outsides of my bright pink, spike-heeled, ankle boots. If I had to fight, I might’ve been able to bring my heel down on those boots, hopefully piercing through the flesh.
But we weren’t there yet.
I took a breath. Then another. “What do you want then?” I asked evenly.
My past flashed before my eyes with his hand at my hip, with his breath at my neck, the gun giving him power he didn’t deserve. Another man taking away my agency, claiming the ability to damage me forever.
If he tried to take me, communicated for a moment that he had intentions of taking more things that weren’t his, I’d fight. To the death.
“We want you to give your boyfriend a message,” he hissed.
Confusion cut through my terror. “My boyfriend?” I repeated.
“Don’t play dumb, bitch.” The gun pressed into my temple harder now.
Bile crept up my throat.
“We know you’re a Sons whore,” he spat, mouth at my ear.
My teeth sank into the flesh of my lip hard enough to dry blood. I forced myself to stay silent, to not correct him on that statement. This obviously had something to do with the Sons of Templar, they were the reason for the gun at my head, but it was likely they were also the reason that the gun hadn’t been fired.
“You need to tell them to back off the Segadores Sombríos, or we will finish what Fernandez started.” His lips went to my neck, his breath hot and rancid.
My knees threatened to buckle.
“And, baby, we’ll make you wish you were dead before we kill you,” he whispered.
I prepared myself to lift my foot, to spear it into his boot no matter the consequences. But then his lips left my neck, and I calmed ever so slightly. “You turn around before you hear my car leave this lot, I’ll come back and spray your brains all over the concrete.”
Then the weight of the gun was gone from my temple, and there was the low click of his boots against the concrete. The ones that he’d promised would be covered with my brains if I turned.
“I don’t know how serious he was about that part,” I told Swiss, back in the Sons of Templar clubroom after wrenching myself from the flashback that I’d sunk in to while telling him what happened. “I quite like my brains inside my skull and being alive in general, so I didn’t turn. But he was driving a 2019 Chevrolet Camaro Yenko. What insecure assholes with small dicks tend to drive, in my opinion.”
Swiss, who had been doing the brooding badass stare thing in varying degrees throughout my recount of what happened, smirked. Just a little.
“You noticed the make, model and year of the car the man who had just threatened your life was driving?” he clarified. His voice was low and husky with a hint of teasing to it, but it was mostly still low and deadly.
It relaxed me ever so slightly, so I smiled weakly. “I know cars. My dad taught me.”
Thinking of my father made me feel prickly and wrong. Inexplicably, I wanted my father. Which was crazy since not once in the past ten years had I thought of him fondly. Fuck, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever thought of him fondly past seven years old when I realized what kind of man my father was. But I loved him. Even after all these years, even after everything he’d done, I loved him. But I had to do so from a distance, because if I let my father too close to me, I’d get burned. Like flying too close to the sun or something.
But in that moment, his presence, the smell of cheap cigarettes, cheaper whisky and some Old Spice, would’ve calmed my thundering heart in a situation so foreign and uncertain.
“What the fuck is going on?”
Thoughts of my father dissipated, and my attention went from dark eyes to frosty, icy ones. Ones that belonged to a beautiful, pale, furious face.
Hades was standing mere feet from us, presumably having walked in from the hallway behind him. His eyes flit between me and Swiss. More accurately, Swiss’s hand which was still on my chin. Swiss saw this, too, and no doubt felt the fury rippling through the air, telling us that everything about Hades was dangerous right now. My stomach dropped and goosebumps peppered my skin from the intensity of it all.