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"The end game is you forget Bethany existed. You don't even breathe in the vicinity of her. You stay the fuck away from my woman and you can go ahead and keep doing your dirtbag shit."
He actually nodded at that, accepting it as, well, fair.
It was right then that I knew he wasn't just a doctor. No normal person reacted like that to the situation. He must have come from crime, had parents involved in shit, grown up on the wrong side of the law.
It was the only explanation.
"Fair enough."
"Well, we'll see what Luce has to say about that."
That was the last thing Pagan said before he started swinging, before blood started flying every-fucking-where.
My eyes drifted over to Edison, my brows drawn together. But he had no answers for me either as he shrugged and shook his head.
It wasn't until twenty minutes later, Pagan being a little harder to pull away from the bloody, mangled mess that was his victim than Edison had been, that we walked back out to the street, moving fast because we only had so much time to get to Sunny before either his father or brother could warn him of us.
"Who the fuck is Luce?" Edison asked as soon as we were inside the SUV, me throwing it into reverse and heading down toward a crummier part of town that Sunny apparently liked to call home.
Pagan reached into his pocket, pulling out a cigarette and a lighter, rolling the window down slightly and taking a long pull before answering. "I guess the right term for him would be 'vigilante'," he said casually.
"Vigilante? In Navesink Bank? How has no one else heard of him?"
"Must be fucking deaf, man," he said, shrugging. "Jstorm and Alex talk about him. Them and their dark web shit. Apparently there is some underground fan club for him. Lucifer's Lovers or some stupid shit like that. Some crazy broad writes Luce fanfic porn. Kinda hot shit actually." He took another long drag of his cigarette as if that wasn't perhaps the most important news we had heard all day.
A vigilante in the area?
That was huge.
Reign needed to fucking know about that.
We didn't know what his opinions might be on arms dealers who supplied other big bad guys.
"Lucifer?" Edison scoffed.
"You talk like you know him," I added.
"I know enough."
That was the end of the conversation.
And it was wholly unlike Pagan.
He was always almost too open about everything.
It wasn't like him to clam up about something, especially such a juicy topic.
As soon as we were done with the Andrews family, as soon as I showed my woman that she was safe with me, that she was cherished, that I had every intention of being there for her for the foreseeable future, yeah, after all that... I needed to figure out who the fuck this Luce guy was.
Sunny's house was really just a step up from a shack size-wise. In fact, his goddamn detached garage was twice the size of the house itself.
"Weird," Pagan mumbled as we drove past, taking in the dark wood shakes, the dirty windows, the muscle car in the driveway that wasn't a driveway, but just a place he drove up on and wore down to dirt eventually.
We pulled up the next street and moved in from the back, a line of woods being the only thing behind the house.
"Something is odd here," Edison said, making me let out a sigh of relief.
I had thought I was being paranoid.
Something definitely felt off to me as well.
Pagan, being Pagan, didn't think of things like that as he would literally charge into a any damn situation without regard for the consequences.
"It's a three man organization. Not like you're walking into an ambush," Pagan reasoned though, shrugging.
And, well, that was true.
Maybe he had been tipped off.
Maybe he was waiting.
But it was still just him.
And there were three of us.
I also had the advantage of righteous anger on my side.
With that, we moved forward.
Pagan, sensing the pulsing anxiety between me and Edison, got there first and before Edison could even reach for his lock pick set, he landed a boot to the center of the door, making it explode inward. He moved back a step, extending one arm to the entrance and doing a small bow.
I almost wanted to laugh.
But my mind was on other things in that moment.
Like Bethany's perfect fucking face bruised and swollen. Like her blood-filled eye. Like the bands around her throat and the soreness I knew she felt there. Like the pain in her scalp.
Like the fear he instilled in her.
Like the fact that he had almost taken her away from me.
Rage was a hot thing, working through my veins and organs until I was sweating despite the cold weather as I stormed inside.
The blow to the back of my head was enough to make me double forward on a curse, my vision jumping in and out for one excruciating moment before I whirred around in time to catch sight of a fist before it landed a stroke to my temple that would have knocked me cold.
