The other two came at him, one with a gun that he disarmed in seconds while breaking the guy’s wrist, and choking the other man with an arm wrapped around his neck.
The man passed out.
Taking the gun he’d divested the leader of, Tristan Caine shot him right on the knee caps, on both of them, the sound of the gun loud in the barn. Morana watched in silence, swallowing down her nerves, as he sat down on his haunches in front of the bleeding man, and tilted his head to the side casually, his hands draped lazily over his knees.
“Where’s Doug?” Tristan Caine asked again.
The man blubbered in pain, cursing everything to hell and back. “Don’t know, man.”
Tristan Caine pushed the gun into the wound and the man screamed so loudly Morana felt herself flinch.
“Don’t know, I swear,” the man blubbered. “Swear. Just know he visits the Saturn backroom every Saturday. That’s all I know. I swear.”
It was Saturday.
Tristan Caine considered him for a second, then nodded, dropping the gun beside the man and standing up.
Without a care in the world, he walked towards the door, a few steps from where Morana was hiding, her blood rushing to her head, looking at him in awe. It wasn't just awed because of how quickly and smoothly he’d handled four big armed men without a weapon on himself, or at how casual he was about walking away from an injured man with a gun by his side.
She was in awe because watching him, right at that moment, she understood exactly who he was.
The Predator.
Always the hunter, never the hunted. He could not be hunted. He could not be tamed. He could not be destroyed. That kind of unbreakable aura was so, so tempting to her.
She should have been disgusted. She should have been exasperated. She should have been horrified. But she was enthralled because she could remember every single time she’d seen her father shoot a man; she could remember the way the blood spurted from the flesh, coating itself on his fingers as he’d tortured a man. Growing up the way she had, she’d seen men make others bleed, seen them covered in blood, seen them bathe in it.
To her, as horrifying as it was, it wasn’t the presence of blood that was odd.
The fact that Tristan Caine had extracted information from a man, made him bleed but hadn’t let that blood even touch him was odd.
Morana looked at his hands from her hidin
g place, looked at him as he made a phone call and spoke too quietly for her to hear, only one thought going through her head after witnessing the scene she had, in contrast to the countless others in her memory.
His hands - his big, rough hands that touched her so intimately - were clean.
Saturn.
She’d heard about the place of course, but never really seen it. Never wanted to see it.
It was a casino in East Shadow Port that was frequented by many mobsters – like a neutral ground for members of different families to hold a meeting in her father’s territory. As far as she knew, every city had one Saturn – and that casino served only one purpose, to let men meet without shedding blood in other’s territories. On the face of it, Saturn, like every other casino, was flashy – all the glitter an invitation for innocent tourists and civilians to spend their money and try their luck in.
After knowing where Tristan Caine would be headed, Morana had made a quick stop on the way at a boutique. Buying herself the first flashy dress she saw – a very silver, very short number that showed way more skin than she was comfortable showing. But she was pressed for time, so she changed in the dressing room and ran out to her car, stashing the silver heels on the seat beside her.
Pressing down on the accelerator to get to the casino quickly, she cursed her need to wear a dress to get inside the place because that meant no gun. No gun meant bad things. She even slept with a gun - at least when she wasn’t drifting off to sleep on strange couches.
Morana inhaled deeply, eyeing the dark SUV where it was parked innocently, and pulled her own car into the lot.
It was already getting darker outside, the sun fading away to give room to the moon, the air chilly as she crossed the lot to the main door, shivers racing down her spine, not entirely due to the cold.
The guard looked up as she approached, eyeing her in a way that was all too familiar, thanks to her father and his choice of dinner companions. It was exactly what she needed at the moment. Her spine straightened, her teeth gritting as she passed the guard by, wishing for the hundredth time she’d had her gun instead of the small butterfly knife in her bra.
Clenching her jaw, she cleared her mind of everything but getting to the back room, so she could spy in peace and entered the casino.
Bright lights and a plethora of colors assaulted her eyelids, the sound of music and laughter drifting about everywhere, along with the voices of the dealers and the slot machines pinging.
Morana stood still for a moment, fisting her hands beside her, taking it all in. She wasn’t used to such crowds, and her experiences with such a large number of people had not always been the best. No. She preferred her computer and her solitude, maybe a few people.