Page 35 of The Kings of Kearny

I thanked Annie before turning to walk toward the wide bank of elevators set into the far wall. The guard crowded into one with me, and I had a sinking suspicion that something bad was about to happen.

After four years of near-constant deployments to war zones, I’d learned to trust my gut, and right now my instincts were screaming that this man posed a threat to me. Between the immediate response over the walkie-talkie, the lack of a name tag, and the way he’d hustled me away from reception when I started asking questions about Dr. Perez, I was dead sure there was more going on at Magnolia than just a single shady employee.

“Why are you following me up?” I asked the guard, proud that my voice was steady. My pulse pounded in my ears, and adrenaline coursed through my veins, readying me for the fight my body thought was coming.

“I’m making sure you don’t cause any trouble,” he said. “I heard about the unrest your boy toy caused yesterday, and I’m not as soft as Hank. Just because you got a pretty face, it doesn’t mean I’m going to fall for your bullshit.”

“Who’s going to guard the front door in your absence?” I asked. I didnotwant him in here with me. “My boy toy can just wander in now.”

He nodded his head to the right. I looked through the still-open elevator doors and saw two other men in guard uniforms stalking toward the front of the building to take over for him. I didn’t recognize them either. Warning sirens blared inside me. I was friendly by nature, and I asked a lot of questions. Not only could I have told you every person who worked the security detail at Magnolia, but I could tell you who among them was married and which ones didn’t like their in-laws. One new security guard, I could buy. But three? Just after finding out something illegal might be going on here? And with Dr. Perez suddenly MIA? Nope. That was too many coincidences for comfort.

The last fly on this shit sandwich was that the guards’ uniforms didn’t fit them right. Every other guard I’d spoken with in the past had theirs tailored to form. The smaller of the two men heading toward the lobby shifted, his too-tight camel-colored shirtsleeve rising just enough to reveal a dark slash on his arm. I homed in on it, frowning. It was the bottom edge of a tattoo. I couldn’t see much of it, just enough to register that it was square. Almost like a... like a playing card.

Oh God.

His sleeve shifted again, inching up, and I sucked in a breath. A littleJpeeked out from the bottom right corner.

Fuck. This was so much worse than I could have imagined.

The Kings’ biggest rivals, the Jokers, heavily featured playing cards in their club. The gang’s emblem was one, with the quintessential joker standing out in base relief in the center of it. The guard had a Joker tattoo. I wanted to be wrong. I wanted it to be anything but what it was, but I’d seen one of these tattoos before, and it was seared into my memory.

The elevator doors started to close. Jakob said some of the Jokers had family members in residence at Magnolia. Had those bikers seen an opening while visiting them? A way to sneak drugs into Kearny through the nursing home and make the Kings look weak?

Even though a large part of me was desperate to get out of the elevator, I stayed where I was. I had to get to Gran. There was something seriously wrong going on here, and I’d be damned if she got caught up in it. This guard was hell-bent on sticking with me, and if I got out, he’d just climb into another elevator with me or follow me up the stairs, and any delay might give someone else time to reach Gran before I did.

I slid to the corner as the doors shut, putting space between me and the “guard.” My heart pounded against my rib cage. I was trapped in a tiny enclosed space with a man who not only thought that Jakob was my boyfriend but who might also be in a rival gang. I’d heard all sorts of terrible stories about the violence committed against friends and family members of the Kings as payback or a warning, and as he turned toward me, I worried I was about to be next.

“Jakob Larson, huh?” he said.

I hadn’t said Jakob’s full name in front of him, yet he knew it. Shit, I really didn’t want to be right about this.

“What about him?” I asked.

“Just wondering what you see in the guy.”

I shrugged. Maybe if I made it seem like nothing was going on between us, I wouldn’t register as important enough to hurt or harass. “Who said I see anything in the guy?”

The guard looked at me, grinning. “You called him your boyfriend.”

I held his gaze. “That was only to get him in here.”

The smile fled from his face, replaced by a cold, flat expression that raised the hair on the back of my neck. “So you were lying?”

I dropped all pretenses and let my own crazy shine through. I’d faced down a Russian surface-to-air missile and lived to tell the tale. I’d spent four years of my life, flying with the best, raining down death and destruction from the motherfucking sky. One asshole in an elevator was nothing to me.

“I was lying,” I said.

We moved at the same time. I slid left as he shot forward, and instead of taking his fist to the face, I stepped clear of it. He hadn’t been expecting it, and before he could stop himself, he rammed his knuckles straight into the unforgiving steel wall of the elevator.

The thing about training in hand-to-hand combat every day for years on end is that you get good at reading people. This guy might have been big, but he wasn’t as well trained as I was. I realized that right before he lunged at me, when he dropped his right shoulder, projecting his punch.

I hadn’t been lying to Jakob earlier. I was a vicious fighter. Most of the time I kept my temper on a tight leash, but when someone tried to hurt me, I let it run wild, and all those months of pent-up rage usually came roaring out.

The man howled when his fist hit the wall, the sound of his pain echoing around us in the closed space. I slipped past him into the hole that opened up in his wake. I had a split second to make a decision before he recovered. By default, a big meaty bastard like him could take a punch better than most. If he saw the blow coming and flexed just before it hit, there was little hope of doing any real damage to him. All that muscle would act as a shock absorber. I had to hit him where he had the least amount of padding. His joints. His face. Places where skin slicked over bone with very little muscle or cartilage in between. Those were my best bets if I wanted to get out of here unscathed.

I braced myself on my right leg, thanking God when it held, and kicked out at him with my left. Hard. My foot took him in the back of the knee. His leg folded forward, and thanks to the unexpected shift, he crumpled sideways toward the wall. He caught himself on the handrail and tried to pull himself up, but I hammered a kick to his ribs. He rocked toward me, trying to shield them from another blow on instinct. It was an amateur move, proof that he wasn’t used to this kind of no-holds-barred fight. I stepped up and kneed him in the face, picturing my leg driving through his skull so that I hit with as much force as I could muster. I felt bone crunch on impact, and when he toppled backward, blood spurted from his ruined nose.

He bounced off the floor, dazed, and didn’t get up. Barely five seconds had passed since he first swung at me. I was still fast.

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