Page 32 of Blood We Steal

“If you want any chance of getting through it, stay in line and stay out of my way. Now is not the time for chaos, and I won’t tolerate it. If you have a problem with that, kill yourself now and save me the trouble.”

I watched, saw the men calculating, waited for the first one to object. That objection never came.

Rubin nodded. “Good. Now we will divide up the supplies equitably and ensure that everyone is taken care of.”

“Taken care of how?” one of the men said. He was burly, with a bald head and a long sandy-brown beard. He was talking to Rubin, though he was looking at me.

I didn’t acknowledge him. It was the kind of thing he’d feed on, and I was not on the menu.

“What is your name?” Rubin asked.

“Davis,” the man said, squaring up straight and turning his body toward Rubin as he looked at me.

“Davis, if you have a question, ask it directly,” Rubin said.

“Sure,” Davis said, his eyes still glued to me. He blew me a kiss and then finally looked at Rubin. “I just want to know what kind of benefits I’m getting if I’m with your program. Is your whore free to fuck? And if not free, how much?”

Rubin’s expression didn’t change as he walked toward the kitchen. The man leaning on the peaches shrank away, and Rubin picked up the can and walked back toward me. He stopped in front of Davis, lightly tossed the can to test its weight, and then smashed Davis in the head with it.

Davis stumbled, but before he could react, Rubin hit him again. And again and again. I heard his skull crack, then heard the fragments crunch, heard Rubin grunt from the exertion until what had been Davis’s head looked more like a used eraser.

The body that had been Davis slumped down to the floor, his limbs twitching before he finally went still. The men looked at the corpse then at Rubin, surprise and fear almost uniform on their faces.

The men had agreed they knew who Rubin was, but that hadn’t been true. They’d maybe known a name, heard a few stories. But now they knew.

Rubin dropped the can and didn’t look at it as it rolled away. He turned to face the remaining men. “Does anyone else have questions?”

The room was completely quiet.

“Good.” Rubin looked at Lorik, who’d followed with Damian and Besnik. “Let’s clean up these bodies. Start with his.”

FIFTEEN

Rubin

“We have most of the block clean,” Besnik said a few hours later.

“Good, I’ll come take a look,” I responded, but I was barely paying attention to him.

The men had done a decent job of cleaning up some of the mess, and after I made an example of Davis, there had been no other issues. I didn’t expect any, though I would keep my eyes open.

I’d known I’d have to kill at least one of them, potentially more, but I wouldn’t be hasty. Violence was a tool like everything else. Deployed too soon, it would backfire. Deployed too late would be, well, too late. Davis had given me the perfect opportunity, and I should have been as pleased as I could be given the circumstances.

But I was preoccupied with Simone. As aware as I’d been of Davis, I’d been watching her response.

She hadn’t flinched at Davis’s words or my violence.

She’d stepped over the bloody can of peaches and headed to the kitchen without looking back. She was just doing as she’d been told, exactly like I wanted her to. Her lack of reaction was simply a part of what had made her good at her job. Still…I wondered what was behind that and made it an entire thirty-five minutes before going to her in the kitchen.

She’d found a cheap brown clipboard somewhere and held it in her grasp, staring intently at the metal shelves. She was completely preoccupied, and I got to watch her for a moment without her knowing.

She looked engaged, satisfied, looked like the woman I’d been fascinated with for years—and the one who had betrayed me.

I would never say that Simone was nervous. Not exactly. But with every second, I could feel her calculation. I hadn’t thought it was cunning at first. Just figured she was unfamiliar with me and my world. That calculation was smart and had served her well, given that she had managed to come from where she’d come from and make it out relatively unscathed.

Yet another way she had proven me a fool. Because she was calculating, had been all the time, and I had missed it.

But at this moment, she wasn’t calculating. Something that she proved when she looked over at me and smiled. It was so fucking luminous, it made my chest ache. She tapped the cheap pen with a clear barrel against the clipboard.