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“Here’s your refill. Can I get you anything else?”
“We’re fine,” I tell the waitress, my eyes still on Toi. She’s staring out the window, effectively ignoring me.
“Here’s your ticket then, sugar. You pay up front,” she says, putting the slip on the table.
“Toi—”
“Is this what being with you is going to be like?” she asks, her voice soft and tender.
She looks so genuinely upset that I can’t stand it. Without thinking about it I get up and walk to her chair and then pull her up. I sit down in her seat and fix her on my lap. Because her seat is fixed so my back would be to the entrance, I scoot it, angling it to the side, and pushing the empty chair that was there a few feet over.
“Talk to me, Dragonfly.”
“Marcum, people are staring,” she complains, her body tense in my arms.
“I’m not fucking you, Toi. I’m holding you. Let them stare. I don’t give a fuck about any of them, only you. Now talk to me.”
“I’d say no, but it wouldn’t matter,” she responds.
“What are you talking about?”
“You. You just bulldoze in where you’re not wanted and takeover.” She starts coughing from straining her voice. I grab her soda off of the table and hand it to her.
She grudgingly takes a drink. When her coughing subsides, she lays her head against my chest, almost as if she’s too tired to argue further.
“Toi, I’m just trying to take care of you.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“You were doing such a good job of it before.”
“I don’t like doctors, Marcum, and it may surprise you, but I don’t really want this surgery.”
“It could help heal you, Toi,” I answer with a sigh. I don’t understand why she’s being so stubborn about this.
“I don’t think I’m broken.”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it. I would want you if you could never speak.”
“It doesn’t sound like it. If me not being able to speak normally bothers you…”
She stops, breathing deep and taking another drink and I know it’s because it pains her. Which should be a reason she jumps at this damn surgery. If I live for a hundred more years, I doubt I will ever understand a woman.
“Toi—”
“If it bothers you, then you should just leave me here and let me live my life—alone.”
I have a lot to say about that and none of it is good. I’m about to get into it with her—yet again—over the same damn shit, when the bell to the front of the diner makes a noise. It’s habit, but I look up on instinct. What I see sends warning bells churning through me.
“Well, look what we have here. If it’s not Marcum. Funny seeing you on this side of the county. You slumming it today, old man?”
“Toi, honey. You sit in the chair beside me. You don’t look at these motherfuckers, just look at me. You understand?”
“Marcum—”
“Just do it, honey. I’ll explain later.”
I sit Toi in her own chair right beside me. I don’t know what’s going on, but I do know it’s no coincidence that three of the main members of Retribution just walked into a diner where I’m eating.
I lean back in my chair like I’m the most relaxed motherfucker on the planet.
It’s show time.48Toi“Hound, fancy seeing you here,” Marcum says.
Until this moment, I haven’t been paying attention. I was too pissed that Marcum was wanting to stare at him and not talk. It has been a while, so I didn’t recognize the voice of the man that yelled at Marcum either. But I know the name and when he responds I definitely know that voice.
“There’s not a damn thing fancy about this place. Mind if Graves and I join you?”
“Would it matter if I did?” Marcum asks.
“Not a fucking bit,” Hound answers.
“I thought so.”
I know Marcum asked me not to look at Hound, but that order pissed me off. Honestly everything he’s done today has pissed me off. Marcum has a way of taking over my life and telling me how things are going to be. His testosterone levels have to be sky high, but I’m kind of sick of his caveman ways. Plus, I know Hound. He’s one of the few friends my father had I liked. Liked in a distant kind of way, because that look in his eyes was a little too intense and Hound is not my type, and he may not know it—but I’m definitely not his.
“Toi, baby girl, is that you?”
I feel Marcum go stiff beside me and I feel the air thicken. I clear my throat and look at Hound—which is a completely stupid name, but short for Hell Hound, which from everything I heard fits him. He’s sexy in a deadly kind of way. His head is shaved, but he has this beard that covers the lower part of his face. He has the deepest blue eyes that I’ve ever seen; and when he looks at me, he scares me at times. There’s this huge tattoo on his neck of a black skull. It’s surrounded by ornate black plumes that remind me of smoke, but it’s the eerie red-orange eyes, nose and mouth of the skull that make it look… kind of creepy.
