Page 9 of The Kings of Kearny

He looked between Jakob and me. “So. You two.”

“Us two,” Jakob said.

Bikers, loquacious people.

“Must be new,” Daniel said. “Hadn’t heard anything about you.”

Jakob shrugged. “Krista’s a private person.”

Which implied that this wasn’t a new thing and that we wanted to keep it a secret. And Jakob just told the man with the most power in town about it. If I knew anything about people in power, it’s that they reveled in lording it over the rest of us. It made them terrible secret keepers because, in their need to put themselves above others, they’d often use people they deemed as inferior to them as stepping-stones. It was all too easy to see Daniel telling his other enforcers about this just to show off the fact that he, the king, had known about us while they had no idea. I had a sinking feeling that come this time tomorrow, everyone in Kearny would be gossiping about Jakob and me.

Daniel’s grin gained a sharp edge, like a shark smelling blood in the water. His dark eyes shifted to mine. “You should come by sometime for dinner. Eva would love to have another set of hands in the kitchen.”

Eva was his wife—a tall, striking woman of Armenian and Mexican descent that I’d only ever glimpsed through a crowd. I was tempted to tell him I didn’t cook even though I was a whiz around a stove. Offhand comments like his always drove me bugfuck, an assumption of “womanly duties” that men like him were prone to making. The subliminal message was: come to my house and cook me dinner while I sit on my ass and do nothing. Because penis.

Don’t be an idiot,I told myself. I needed to be in this man’s good graces if I wanted to keep my job, and even though it killed a small part of me to do it, I smiled at him. “I’d like that.”

It was only when Jakob’s arm relaxed around me that I realized it had stiffened again.

Daniel’s gaze shifted to his enforcer. “What happened to your face?”

I looked up. Jakob had taken Rob’s punch to the left cheek, and even though he’d iced it, it looked more swollen than it had outside and was starting to take on a sickly-looking puce hue.

“Micky and Rob got into it again,” Jakob said.

Daniel swore. “They trash the place?”

Jakob shook his head. “It broke up before anything started.”

His face evidence to the contrary.

“Good,” Daniel said, rising from his throne. He drained the rest of his beer and set it down on the table. “I’ll leave you two lovebirds alone.”

He shot me a wink as he left that made me want to puke.

I tried to step away from Jakob when the door closed behind Daniel, but his arm tightened around me, holding me in place. We stayed there for several minutes, listening to Daniel’s boots echo in the stairwell. Only when the door to the building slammed behind him did Jakob drop his arm from my shoulder and push off the counter.

I watched him as he moved toward the door, quieter than a man his size had any right to be. The frame was cracked like Daniel had barged in with brute force, but there was a series of locks higher up that could only be latched from the inside, and those were still intact. Jakob flicked them into place. For good measure, he wedged a chair against the knob.

“Get comfortable,” he said, turning back to me. “You’re staying here tonight.”

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