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Dom shoved his brother off in revulsion and backpedaled. “You cut my face. Threatened to kill my boyfriend. Threatened to kill me. How could you think that I’d want anything to do with you?”
“I had to do those things, John. In order to save you. To bring you back to me.” James reached out with his empty hand, but there was no forgetting that he still held a gun in the other. “If I didn’t do those things, if I hadn’t pushed you, we wouldn’t be standing right here, right now. You’d be dead. My crew and I would have those jeweled handbags and headed to a nice tropical vacation. But you pull this awesome con!” He threw his arms up in the air and howled, sending the chilling sound up to bounce off the ceiling and down to them again. “Seriously, a work of art. So impressed.” He brought his hand to his lips and made a kissing sound. “Bravo.”
“You’re insane,” Dom muttered, shaking his head.
“And now, we’ll just slip out of town together. You shed this silly life here, and we’ll get back down to business. We won’t need a pack like my old one. We’ll operate, just the two of us again. We’ll tear the world apart. No one will ever be able to catch us.”
“No! This is my life. I love my life. I love the people I work with and protecting good people. I love Abe Stephens. There is nothing you can say that would make me walk away from that. I’ve got everything I’ve ever wanted here.”
James’s expression slowly morphed from one of disbelief to rage. Dom knew he couldn’t understand why Dom would choose this life over the one they’d had, but he didn’t care. James started to lift the gun back toward Dom. There was no talking his way around the gun this time, which was just fine with Dom. He was done talking.
Lunging forward, Dom grabbed James’s wrist, wrenching it at a key pressure point. James screamed in pain, his fingers loosening so that the gun clattered to the concrete floor. Dom kicked it, sending it skidding away from them. James took advantage of his distracted gaze, punching Dom with his free hand and snapping his head around.
Dom released James and backed up a couple of steps. He had no idea if his brother had picked up any fighting skills over the years beyond his usual street brawler style, but he knew to expect the man to fight dirty. James didn’t care about fighting fair. Just winning.
With his hands balled into fists in front of his face, James stalked after Dom. They circled each other, moving into the large, open space in the center of the old warehouse. There were a few broken pallets that once held raw materials for the old mill, but the machinery had been sold off and moved out years ago. The light through the windows was waning, and soon they’d be fighting in the dark if Dom didn’t settle this with James quickly.
Dom’s right hand shot out, his fingers flicking. The feint wasn’t intended to actually make contact, but rather to check his brother’s reaction. Did he swing? Block? Retreat?
James batted Dom’s hand away and took a wide swing. Not the trained response that Dom had worried about. He could work with that. Dom sent out two more flicker punches in James’s line of sight, the last one flicking the tip of his nose.
A snarl of frustration rumbled in the back of James’s throat. Dom almost chuckled at how easily annoyed James had become. Of course, he might also be stewing about the fact that Dom totally played him with Abe and Trent.
Dom started to lead with his right hand again. James was already reacting, his hands loosening as he prepared to bat Dom’s hand away. Instead, Dom ducked low, delivering a hard blow to James’s midsection, just under his ribs, with his left. He followed with a right to James’s chin, knocking him stumbling backward. James quickly backpedaled, putting more space between them. Dom followed, looking to end the fight quickly.
But James caught him off guard by diving to his side and rolling back up to his feet nearly a yard away. And when he came up this time, he looked decidedly more prepared than he had when they first squared off.
“What’s wrong, John?” James taunted. “Did you think I just sat on my ass when you disappeared?”
“You preferred to settle things with a gun, last I remember. Not much of a hands-on kind of guy,” Dom said.
James chuckled low. “For you, I’ll make an exception.”
Dom wanted to charge the fucker again, but he had to play it cautiously. He didn’t know his brother’s moves, and he didn’t know if he had any more weapons on him. This time he’d brought his own gun, but he wasn’t going to pull it on a supposedly unarmed man. Besides, he really wanted to knock the shit out of his brother before the cops finally arrived. For now, he was content to keep him talking.
