Page 97 of Hard to Love
One side of his mouth quirking up, he leaned against the doorjamb. “She came in here asking the same thing.”
Alex barreled into Ruben, backing him up like an offensive lineman mowing down the defense. “She has nothing to do with all this. Let her go.”
“Nobody’s keeping her. She’s sitting in the kitchen.” Ruben stepped aside so quickly that Alex stumbled and hit the hallway wall with his shoulder. He threw out his hand to catch himself, and red rivulets ran down the beige wall.
When he swung around the doorway into the other room, Alex’s lungs almost exploded. There Greer was, sitting at Ruben’s table chatting with Nicolás and sampling a bowl of posole. “What the fuck, Greer?”
She vaulted from her chair and rushed over to him. “What did you do to your hand?”
“What are you doing here?”
She went to the sink and wet a paper towel as if she sat in Ruben’s kitchen every damn day of her life. When she returned, she bent her head over his hand and dabbed at the cuts, pausing once to pick a glass sliver from his knuckle. “Delivering a message.”
Alex bent close to her ear. “I want you to get out of here. You don’t realize how dangerous this is.”
She looked up, her blue eyes full of ice and fire. “You came here. I thought we were a team.”
“I told you that wouldn’t work out.”
“Because you gave up. Gave up on Prophecy. Gave up on me. Gave up on yourself.”
He couldn’t look her in the eye, because she was right. But that was the only way he knew to solve this whole fucked-up mess. To stay away from the people he cared about. So instead of responding, he turned to Ruben. “You let her out of here, and I’ll give you any damn thing you want.”
Ruben plucked at the hair on his chin. “Anything?”
Alex swallowed the lump of fear and suspicion wedged sideways in his throat. Whatever deal Ruben wanted to make, it wouldn’t be good. But it would ensure Greer’s safety. “Yeah.”
“Then I want what your girlfriend brought in that bag.” He pointed to a grocery sack between Greer and Nicolás. “I want you to finish the tat you started before you ran out on the Tejanos.” He paused, ran a hand over the back of his neck, and finally said, “And I want one other thing.”
“What?”
“Money and ink first,” he said.
Alex shot a hard look at his brother. “Clear all that shit off the table.”
Nicolás’s lips drew into a teenager’s you-ain’t-the-boss-of-me sneer, but he slowly got up and started moving bowls and spoons to the counter.
“Tell your boys to get my stuff out of the car,” Alex told Ruben.
Ruben yelled instructions down the hall and pulled his shirt over his head. The designs on his body made Alex almost as sick as the ones on his own did. He’d designed and inked every single one. And the ornate Tejanos Pintados tat that was supposed to span Ruben’s back was only halfway done.
“Why didn’t you have someone else finish that?”
“Because you’re the best.”
Ruben’s simple explanation did nothing for Alex’s ego. He had been the best. And he’d designed that swirling script for Ruben with the intent that every Tejanos member would eventually be inked the same way. Just the thought of finishing that thing—something Ruben proclaimed so fucking much pride in, something that had killed Javi, something that could kill Greer—made Alex want to hang his head over the sink and heave.
But he swallowed that down too.
“Nicolás,” he snapped, “get some soap.”
“Alcohol,” Ruben corrected.
Rather than going for the isopropyl, his brother pulled a bottle of eighty proof out of a cabinet. That would do. It wasn’t ideal for tattoo sterilization, but Alex no longer cared about the quality of his work, just that it got done.
“On the table,” he said to Ruben.
“You still as good as you were?”
