How sweet the sound…
CHAD
Chad sat with his ears wide open, listening out for the deejay to call on a certain ‘Blood’ to the stage.
After Nadia’s report thirty minutes ago, he’d believed every word of it, but he’d wanted to make her think she was paranoid. Because, well, that’s just how he operated.
On a serious fucking note, though, ever since he’d gained custody of his little cousin Alina, who was worth a staggering $12 billion, a ton of hits had been coming after his head. Sure as shit, he’d landed himself in someone’s cross hairs. Needless to say, he wasn’t an easy ass to fuck. He was as straight as they came, tighter than a newborn, untouched, which meant they’d have to grease the hell up in order to be able to bend his inflexible ass over and fuck him. If they wanted him dead, they needed to send smarter men than the ones they’d been sending to assassinate him, because every sloppy idiot who came after him wound up dead.
Rubbing his forehead, Chad sighed. Tired of this shit.
He couldn’t believe his whole life in San Francisco was being uprooted. He’d fled there to escape the evil, bloody mess that used to be his life back in Russia. He’d started a new,normallife. Found some new,normalfriends.
But now all the bad was following him there like a plague of locusts, thick and black, like a fucking funeral blanket.
It’s been a year since he’d been targeted, almost leading him to believe the son of a slut who wanted him dead had given up. But now Nadia was alerting him about this strange new chick who called herself Blood. And based upon everything Nadia had described, the subtlety, the nuances, this one was trained. She’d gotten as far asinsidehis club, disguised as a stripper, right under his nose, undetected. Unlike the others before her, she wasn’t sloppy.
She was patient.
The muffled sound of the deejay calling up a certain ‘Blood’ onstage had Chad shooting up from his chair and striding over to the one-way glass that overlooked the majority of the club, including the stage.
Hands crossed over his chest, he waited to see this Flawless-Dangerous Blood.
A silhouette of a girl he evaluated to be around five feet seven inches without her heels walked out onstage with long, confident strides, as though she were on a runway, not in a strip club. And as the club lights danced across her body, it was like she owned every soul in the fucking club. Everyone, customers and dancers alike, stopped whatever they were doing and looked toward the stage.
Unbelievable.
This girl had to be one helluva dancer to command the crowd like that.
Swinging up on the pole, she climbed all the way to the top, almost touching the ceiling, and then she began toperformto The Glitch Mob’sOur Demons.
Chad had traveled around the world and seen some amazing pole swingers before, but this performance had him stunned. Whoever she was, she was boss at working a pole. Mastered it.
As the song ended, melding into another, she abandoned the pole and sashayed to the front of the stage, tipped her head up, and looked straight at him.
Ah, okay…the glass was one-way, so she wasn’t exactly looking at him, but…she was staring right in his direction. Like she knew he was there watching her.
With her face tipped up in the light, unhidden in shades of darkness, eyes staring at what he knew she couldn’t see, recognition hit him.
Holy. Fuck.
Two things happened. His cock swelled solid hard in an instant, damn well aching. And his heart bulldozed through his ribcage, crashing through his chest with a traumatizing force.
He was both balls-achingly aroused, and shocked clean out of his skin.
And Chad had seen it all, so it took a fuck lot to shock him.
If he’d had any doubts about her being a threat, those doubts shattered right then.
Because that girl was there, in his club, for one reason only: to kill him.
And he didn’t believe this was Alina-related either, nor that she was sent. He believed she was there of her own accord.
For revenge.
Maybe she wasn’t expecting him to recognize her, now that she was all grown and curvaceous and fucking beautiful. Or else she would’ve better disguised herself.
Wrong move.
Chad might have forgotten the faces of the people he’d killed in his short life. But he never, ever, forgot the faces of the people he let live.
Uh-huh, he agreed, this girl was “physically flawless”. And judging by the way she was staring up at his one-way glass, she was daringly dangerous.
But she wasn’t ‘Blood’.
Hewas Blood.
Her? Her name was Jhay.
Jhay Byrd.