I wrapped my arms around myself, suddenly more scared of myself and my feelings for whateverthiswas.
But no matter what I felt, I had to return tomorrow. I could only wonder, would I face the god or the monster?
ChapterTen
THE BADASS
“What’s wrong, boss?”
I jerked up at Javier’s question. He’d turned from the security monitors to face me.
“What? Nothing.”
This morning we'd already worked security details for the high roller guests that would show up tonight, as well as helped track down a woman’s miniature schnauzer that got loose in the hotel. Everything was perfectly ordinary. Except today I felt zero satisfaction in bringing order to the ongoings of Sinopolis.
Javier’s serene eyes studied me closely. With a closed mouth he licked his teeth, causing the small mustache on his upper lip to push out for a moment. Javier was born in Mexico, but his parents managed to get into the US when he was five years old. He never lost his accent though.
More often than not, Javier had a steadying silence about him. It was that steadying silence that got me through our tour in Afghanistan. It was his strong, silent presence that gave me a modicum of strength when Rashon passed and I still had to take care of my toddler. Javier showed up at my door every morning, made breakfast for us, and watched Jamal until I could pull myself out of bed, which for several months, was never before eleven am.
“You steady?” he asked.
It was our code. When shit got rough, too rough, we checked in. The code was sacred and unbreakable. No lies, no bullshit.
Was I steady? After yesterday, seeing Xander like that...it shook me. I could admit that.
Because he scared the shit out of you with his god-likeness?
I’d seen it before. Grim and the other gods all had one. I’d personally seen my boss transform into a massive jackal monster to fight off other gods. So, this should not be that big of a deal.
But it was.
I’d seen Xander completely out of control. I saw his pain, his power, his misery, and it shook me to my core. That’s why he was caged.
No surprise when I got home, my neighbor emerged to inform me we’d experienced yet another brownout. She was getting sick and tired of it and went out to buy a generator right then.
My insides quaked as I stepped inside my dark, hot house. Without the A/C the Vegas night heat seeped inside.
How many times had I also been inconvenienced by the brownouts since moving to this area?
But now I knew what the cause of them were. Xander’s suffering.
Of course, I’d been terrified of him. Grim was scary but Xander was beyond, what with his power beating on me, trying to sear the flesh away from my bones. The pain had robbed him of all sense and he was an animal.
My fingers slowly curled into my palm as I thought of how long I held his cold, dead hand. I wanted him to wake up. I needed him to wake up.
What if that had been the last blow that took him out?
I realized I knew too little about him. The god I was killing nightly.
I’d wanted to keep things professional, but was I really just trying to protect myself from emotionally attaching to Xander?
The way he groaned out my name in a plea, begging me to kill him, still tore at me.
What had I really gotten myself into? I decided then and there I was going to find the fuck out.
“I’m steady,” I finally said to Javier.
He nodded, accepting my answer and the amount of time it took to consider before answering.
