They hop to it, producing some sort of a rug from somewhere, and begin to wrap the man in it. I’ve never seen a dead body before, and like a car wreck, I can’t seem to pull my eyes away from this one until he’s covered with the rug, and the two men are moving him past me and out the door. It’s only then that I try to pull away from Hunter and follow them, but he has a tight grip on me, and I wish I’d made my move before. I wish I’d driven my heel into his toes and made a break for it. But he is stronger than me, and it seems he’s pretty determined to keep me in the room.
When the body is gone, Hunter locks the door, probably just to give him a few seconds on me should I try to make a break for it again, and loosens his grip on my arm, but only slightly. He no longer has his hand on my mouth, and he’s about to regret that decision.
“What the actual fuck?” I blurt out, my eyes wide as I oscillate between looking at Hunter and the girl in the room.
“Calm down,” Hunter hisses. “I guess no one has told you the truth about what goes on here at Club Limelight, huh?”
“The truth?” I ask him. My eyes go to the door again, but he steps between me and the only exit, and I sure as hell am not inching one step closer to the blood on the wall. “I thought this was a goddamn club, not a cover-up for a murder…place!” I sound stupid, but I don’t care, and I see him biting back a vicious laugh. His face contorts as he fights to compose himself.
“It’s not a murder place,” he says, his voice so fucking calm it just makes me angry. But maybe that bodes well for me not being his next victim. My stomach rolls over. It hasn’t even occurred to me what a murderer might do to a witness whose only worth is delivering shots and cocktails to drunken patrons. Was there a bullet in this room with my name on it, too? Hunter studies me with cold, calculating eyes. Perhaps he’s wondering the same thing about bullets and the risk of letting me leave this room. “Tell me your name.”
I don’t want to tell him, but the brown-haired girl I’ve never met supplies it for him. “Meghan,” she says, and my eyes dart back to her.
“Meghan,” Hunter says, and I flinch slightly as my belly tightens at the sound of my name on his lips. But the smell of blood reminds me that I have got to fucking focus. “They call me The Fixer for a reason, doll. I fix things. In this instance, that asshole committed a lot of wrongs against a bunch of people, namely me, and I was… fixing it.”
“But—you killed him,” I remind him. “He was dead—as a fucking doornail!”
“He deserved what he got, sweetheart. Believe me, I gave him plenty of chances to spare himself,” he pauses and lets his dark stare slide to the gory wall. “But he chose the option that left him swimming with the fishes.”
I try to process everything he is telling me as he goes on about how he only kills bad guys, people who deserve it, and that he does everything within his power to keep from having to kill, but sometimes it happens, and it’s his job to solve problems for his clients, and then he says something about the gold keys, and I’m lost.
He doesn’t see how screwed up this is. He’s justifying it. He thinks I should understand.
I need to get out of here. I need to go to the police. Fuck working here. It’s bound to make me an accessory to a crime—or, worse, dead and rolled up in a rug. I shudder.
“Calm down, Meg,” he says in a tone that makes my body want to obey.
The other woman leaves the room, and now it’s just him and me, with my heart beating out of my chest.
“Time to go. I need to get the cleaners in here.”
My eyes go back to the stain on the wall, and I taste the bile rising up in the back of my throat. “How can you do that?” I ask, wishing I could just shut up and nod and get out of here, but my mouth has a way of betraying me. “How can you just blow some guy’s brains out? How can you just kill someone? I don’t get it!”
He shakes his head and says, “I don’t expect you to.”
“I mean, really, Hunter, what the fuck?” I ask, which makes that rich chuckle escape his perfect pink lips, but I don’t find him funny, and at the moment, I don’t think he’s cute. “No, really!” I shout. Cue the hysteria. It’s hard to draw a breath. I can feel my pulse in my fingertips. “What the actual fuck?”
CHAPTER5
HUNTER
The last expression I should be wearing is a smirk, but I can’t help it as I take Meghan in. She’s standing before me, wearing a short black skirt, a green button-down that makes her eyes glow as it hugs every inch of her, and heels that could have done some damage had she chosen to introduce me to the spike on the back when she was trying to get away from me earlier.
We are all alone in the room, other than the lingering essence spilled from Jonathan’s head onto the wall…and I need to get my mind out of the gutter. Rules are rules, and I need to stop checking her out or else I’m going to be tempted to break one of my most important ones—never get involved with employees. No matter how fucking hot they are.
“Listen, sweetie,” I say, taking a step toward the waitress. She instinctively backs away from me, running into the wall, and the way she pulls her arms in close to her body makes me think she’s not the kind of girl who likes to be called sweetie. She folds her arms beneath her chest and stares up at me, one eye slightly narrowed in defiance.
Sweetie is definitely not the right word for her. No, Meg is more of a firecracker than a glass of sweet tea. They’re both nice on a hot summer night, but only one causes an explosion.
“You like the people you work with here, don’t you, swee—Meg?” I ask, changing my tactics. We are all professionals here, after all, aren’t we?
Her green eyes are wild again for a moment as she searches her brain for the proper response to my question, and I see a vague answer as she nods her head. I continue. “If I were you, I wouldn’t think about going to tell anyone about any of this. I would just let it go, like the good girl I can see you clearly are. After all, you’re part of the Club Limelight family now, and we take care of our own. That means we take care of you, and you take care of us. Got it?” I give her a pointed look and also turn on my best smolder because it never hurts to be irresistible, and watch her go over her options in her mind. I don’t know if she’s been working here long enough for the loyalty card to work, but that’s all I’ve got right now.
That and the smolder…
“But…why did you—” she begins, and I know we’re about to play another round of twenty questions.
Boring.