Page 24 of Absinthe Dreams
“I didn’t know you’d been shot, let alone that you still knew your doctor. When was that?” she asked him.
“About three years back,” he answered, leaning back and shifting in his seat. “And it’s not like we stayed in touch.”
I was suddenly the center of attention at the table, and couldn’t help but laugh a bit nervously. I was drawing breath to attempt to stammer out some kind of a lie or explanation that didn’t sound quite as wild as the truth of it, when I was saved by a masculine, “Yo!” from the other side of the ironwork railing surrounding the café’s patio.
Cor didn’t even bother to try and suppress her squeal of delight at the sight of two more brothers on the other side of the patio surround. She leaped to her feet and, flinging herself pasttables to lift herself up on the edge of the fence to press her lips against the taller man’s.
He was lean, tall, and fit in a wiry sort of way, while the shorter man beside him with the tattooed bald head was just about as wide through the shoulders as he was tall. My daddy would have said “built like a brick shithouse” –and the comparison was as good of one as any.
He was so musclebound that he could barely cross his arms over the engine-grease-stained white tank and leather vest he wore over it.
Alina rose to her feet and drifted in the terrifyingly tattooed man’s direction. Even though he wasn’t nearly as tall as the man beside him, he was still much taller than her, but he bowed in her direction like she was his whole world and brushed his lips against her proffered ones.
I swallowed hard and felt my blood turn to ice in my veins when the bald man with the tattooed scalp’s eyes turned from Alina’s face, and his alien eyes fixed across the short expanse of patio onto mine.
They were darker than the night itself – and I do mean wall-to-wall darkness. Like he wore some kind of contact lenses that covered not just his iris, but his sclera as well. I felt a shiver tick down my spine, my bones rattling against one another like someone tickling down some off-key piano keys.
“That would be LaCroix, and the tall one is Hex,” Chainsaw said from across from me. I couldn’t seem to tear my eyes away from LaCroix – their president. I mean, I knew the rules. You weren’t supposed to stare, but LaCroix made it really damn hard not to.
It wasn’t a flamboyant thing, though. It was a predatory thing. When you were a citizen and essentially cannon fodder to a brotherhood like this, you were stupid to not have that prey instinct and hyper-vigilance.
Whereas I’d felt perfectly fine in Chainsaw and Bennie’s company, suddenly, I worried internally that perhaps contacting Chainsaw like I had, had been a bad idea.
I’d done my level best to leave this kind of life behind, after all. Looking at LaCroix, I was reminded why club life was a hard life.
Too late now,I thought.
CHAPTER TEN
Chainsaw…
Her expression was one of stone, her clear green eyes keen as she looked over at LaCroix and Alina, quietly discussing something as they looked back our way.
The boys had been filled in as much as I could via our own sort of pseudo-language we used via text. They knew something was up, that I was with a woman, and that I needed a short church meeting. That was about it.
Meeting up here this morning was exactly what it was. Bennie had been helping the girls at the shop, Hex and Lacroix had dropped theirs off, and it was the plan that I get over here and meet up with Bennie and them, so Bennie wasn’t watching the three of them solo.
While I hadn’t been late, I wasn’t exactly on time. I was supposed to meet them at the shop, not the café, but Bennie had assured me I was all good to take a few extra minutes. That things were good.
We tried to keep to crowded public places with the girls – it was safer, but not foolproof. We knew how Ruth thought, and we knew he would avoid a big public scene for right now. Collateral damage wasn’t the way to go in this war. It would only bring inthe feds. But that didn’t mean they wouldn’t resort to that kind of trouble the longer things dragged out.
LaCroix and Genesis locked eyes across the expanse of tables, chairs, and citizens between them, and her careful mask slipped. I could see the fear in her eyes, and it wasn’t a bad one, but a healthy one. She knew danger when she saw it, and her experience growing up in the life and as a doctor probably pegged LaCroix for the dangerous, and more than slightly unhinged motherfucker that he was.
When she did tear her eyes from LaCroix’s blacked-out inked ones, it was to drift to Hex’s, and her mask of polite professionalism locked immediately back into place. They studied each other a moment, and she saw it – that Hex was even more dangerous – that he was the real brains behind just about everything that we did.
“You good?” I asked her, and she tore her green gaze from my brothers’ and put it back on me, which I took a sort of silent satisfaction in. I liked her eyes on me.
“Of course,” she said mildly. “Why wouldn’t I be?” I winked at her, and she blushed slightly as she recognized that she’d been caught.
“Just checking in,” I said mildly.
“All good here,” she lied, and her smile brightened to the point I couldn’t be sure if it was disingenuous or not.
She was good. I had to give her that.
I turned and caught Bennie’s eye, who gave me some chin in a nod that said, so far, he saw it, too, and he approved.
That was good to know.
