I whirled, shaking thoughts of referring myself into the third person out of my head. I was already half crazy, I so didn’t need to go full Charlie Sheen.
I glared at the owner of the voice.
“Yeah, I know how to kill someone. I’m not in kindergarten,” I snapped, then regarded him, tilting my head and holding my scowl. “You didn’t feel like, I don’t know, helping me?”
Gage looked at me, then at the two bodies at my feet, with a blank, unblinking gaze.
“You didn’t exactly need help,” he replied, digging in his pocket. “And I’m rather attached to my balls. Don’t like the thought of you ripping them out because I decided to get all chivalrous and help you kill a man. Feminism and all that.”
He put his smoke between his lips, the flicking of his Zippo replacing the quietness of death that hung in the air. I’d quickly gotten used to that, though it didn’t mean I liked it. Death was ugly, whichever way you spun it. Killing someone evil didn’t make you good. It did exactly the opposite. Murder was murder.
Gage wasn’t wrong. Him helping me would’ve been the most annoying thing he could’ve done, apart from just being here in general. Any other man in my brother’s club would’ve rode in, guns blazing, testosterone overdosing, determined to save the girl they saw as their little sister.
Not Gage.
He was the exception to the rule.
He was the exception to a lot of rules.
I took the smoke he offered me, even though I didn’t particularly want it.
I needed it.
Just like after getting laid, you needed a smoke after killing someone. A bowl of pasta wouldn’t go astray either. Neither would an orgasm. But I wasn’t looking to Gage for that. Even if he did brave the ‘no touch’ rule Cade had plastered all over me, I didn’t think even I had enough kink in me to handle all of that.
Murder, sex, and food. The basis of life. They all worked together in some kind of twisted threesome.
“You found me,” I observed, taking a long and unpleasant inhale.
He grunted in agreement.
If it was anyone else, I would’ve been surprised. In regular circumstances, I excelled at hiding my tracks. My most recent exit had been under more than regular circumstances; therefore, I more than excelled at hiding my tracks.
But like I said, Gage was an exception to a lot of rules.
“You going to tell my brother where I am?” I asked, blowing out another plume of smoke while wiping my knife on the thighs of my jeans.
Gage regarded me, and I squirmed under his gaze. He was one of the very few people who made me uncomfortable when he looked at me. His glassy stare always seemed to push right through whatever mask or costume I was wearing at the time and see the ugly truth. Gage lived the ugly truth, his past dark and twisted and full of things that would even give me nightmares. I didn’t even know the details—I could just tell. A piece inside that had fallen off, been ripped out. And they may operate the same by appearances, but there was something wrong in there.
The kind of wrong that Jeffery Dahmer and Charles Manson had. But Gage channeled his in different directions. Not the ‘right’ ones, by far, but what was right anyway?
“No,” he said in answer.
That time I was surprised. “No?” I repeated, dropping my smoke and crushing it amongst the blood and dirt at my feet. “You came all this way, to this shithole in the middle of the jungle, spent all this time on what I can only assume is my brother’s request, and now you say you’re not going to tell him? Bullshit.”
Gage didn’t move, didn’t blink. Like a shark. Except if sharks stopped moving, they died. I didn’t know of anything that could kill Gage.
“Your brother didn’t send me.”
“Yeah,” I spat sarcastically.
He shrugged. “Believe what you want.” His tone communicated the fact that he couldn’t care either way. “I was curious.”
I gaped at him. “You came to Venezuela, in the middle of rebel-owned territory, dirtied your boots, just because you were curious?”
The corner of Gage’s mouth turned up, the closest he’d come to a smile. “In case you hadn’t noticed, haven’t had much cause to get my boots or my hands dirty with all this straight-and-narrow stuff we’ve got going on.” He glanced down to where a trail of blood had pooled at the toe of his motorcycle boots. “I like getting dirty.”
It was comical how uncomical that statement was coming out of his mouth. It wasn’t sexual. Not by a long shot. It was cold and calculated.
I crossed my arms and his glance flickered for a second to my chest, where I’d unintentionally pushed up my boobs. It only stayed there for a moment, then moved up to my eyes, uninterested.