Page 30 of Femme Fatale
Joker shrugged. “Your funeral, Prez.”
I was about to close the meeting when the door swung open and every eye in the room locked on the six-foot-four wall of menace standing in the entry.
Zeke Smalls wore a leather jacket that probably cost more than my first bike, and he filled the doorway as if it were a coffin built just for him. His gaze cut straight through the testosterone and old vendettas and landed on me.
Nobody said a word. Joker flicked her blade open. Spade eased a hand to her holster.
Zeke ignored them, stepped inside, and only then did I realize how much air he displaced. He moved with the slow certainty of a man who could break a neck before breakfast and still have time for coffee.
He walked right up to the table and set a battered manila folder in front of me. “You want to kill my father?” he said, voice low, not a question. “You’d need better intel than that.”
I looked at the folder. It was thick, stained with something dark, and held together by a rubber band.
“What’s in it?” I asked, matching his tone.
“Schedules. Payoffs. Times when his security was weakest. I even put in his dry-cleaning receipts.” He looked at me with thatbone-deep exhaustion, but there was something else there. It was wild and sad and maybe a little bit free.
Joker eyed him. “Why are you helping us?”
He met her glare. “Because he’s already dead. He just didn’t know it yet.”
Spade spat into a cup. “We’re supposed to trust you now?”
Zeke turned, and his voice dropped another octave. “Trust me or don’t. But you only get one shot at this. If you fuck it up, you’ll all be fertilizer by Thursday.”
Nines slid the folder closer and started scanning the contents, her fingers dancing over the keyboard. “It checks out,” she said, almost surprised. “He’s not lying.”
I watched Zeke, the way his jaw tensed and his eyes flicked to the exit every few seconds. He was ready to run or to kill, depending on what we’d do next.
“Why not just kill him yourself?” I asked.
He smiled, slow and ugly. “Because I’m not like him.”
I picked up the folder, leafed through the pages. Everything we needed was there: security rotations, blueprints, payoffs, even a couple of blackmail letters. The work of a lifetime, handed over to someone he barely knew.
He stared at me. “You want to do this? I can help. But once we start, there’s no going back.”
The others looked to me, waiting. Even Joker, who never waited for anything.
I stood and squared up to Zeke. “You’re in,” I said. “But you answer to me. You cross us, and I bury you myself.”
He nodded, once. “That’s fair.”
He stepped back, hands in his pockets, but the tension stayed. Our eyes locked, sealing our destiny. He wanted me as much as I wanted him. We both wanted the pain to go away. Unfortunately, his father was the source of our pain.
The room exhaled. I looked at my officers, the only family I had left, and for the first time since the casino went down, I felt like we might actually win.
“We hit him tomorrow night.”
Zeke lingered after the others filtered out, the room still thick with what-if and maybe. I opened the door between church and my club bedroom. I wasn’t sure I’d ever see the inside of Buck’s house, now my house, again. I looked back at Zeke.
Zeke followed, closing the door behind him, and that’s when our lips collided.
His body was emaculate, tanned, covered in ink, his muscles lean but intense. His hand moved between my legs.
Then we crashed onto the bed, bouncing like teenagers, rolling over tangled sheets and each other’s limbs. His mouth never left mine, and the way he kissed with teeth meant he was fighting sadistic.
There was a moment where he pulled away, face inches from mine. I saw the raw edge of fear in his eyes and wanted to take it personally, but knew better. He’d spent a lifetime learning how to keep pain out of his face, but tonight he wore it for me, on purpose. An offering, maybe. I took it, raked my hands through his hair, and bit his shoulder because I needed to mark him in some way that would outlast the next twenty-four hours.
