Page 381 of Romeo

“Mostly Mac’s.”

I stared at his mouth until he sighed.

“Some of it’s mine.”

“Jasper.”

“He looks like shit,” Gator said from somewhere behind Angel.

Jasper’s eyes narrowed. “Thank you, cousin.”

“Just tryin’ to be helpful.”

“You could start by shuttin’ the fuck up.”

“That ain’t really one of my gifts.”

The exchange should not have helped. It did. Something about Gator being ridiculous while there was a dead man on the floor and my father standing in the doorway made the world feel fractionally less tilted. Maybe that was what people like him did. They wedged humor into the cracks because otherwise all the ugly things would have nowhere to go.

Angel looked toward Gator. “Any more?”

The question changed him. The uncertainty I had seen when he looked at me disappeared, replaced by the man I suspected everyone else knew. His shoulders settled. His attention sharpened. He looked like someone who had spent a very long time being dangerous and had never once apologized for it.

Gator shook his head. “Just the four.”

I looked toward the open doorway, then back at him. Something in the way he said it made the answer feel unfinished. “They’re dead?”

Gator rubbed a hand over his beard. “They came into my bayou armed and huntin’ Romeo’s wife, Chère. They weren’t leavin’ it.”

My gaze shifted toward Jasper, but he didn’t look surprised. Neither did any of the men surrounding us. Apparently, there were questions I was better off not asking, but unfortunately, I had never been particularly good at leaving those alone. “What are you going to do with them?”

Gator glanced toward Thore.

Thore shrugged. “Feed ’em to the gators.”

I stared at him.

Jasper muttered, “For fuck’s sake.”

Gator sighed. “Man really needs to learn there are some things you don’t explain.”

“They won’t be found,” Angel said, and somehow his calm certainty ended the conversation more effectively than anything else could have.

I looked at Mac’s body again and remembered Rosewood. Nash had squeezed my shoulder as I turned toward the door, and before I reached it, Mac’s gaze had landed on me. He hadn’t moved or said anything. His attention had simply settled there, cold and direct enough that the back of my neck had prickled. I had wondered then if I was imagining the threat because of everything else happening around me, but every instinct I possessed had told me I didn’t want to stay around long enough to find out.

Now I stared at the same man lying dead on the cabin floor and wondered what that look had meant.

“He looked at me like that before,” I said quietly.

Jasper turned toward me. “In Rosewood?”

I nodded. “I thought maybe I was imagining it.”

His thumb moved once across the back of my hand. Neither of us tried to turn that odd look into an answer we didn’t have. Whatever Mac had known then, if he had known anything at all, had died with him.

Gator moved farther into the cabin. “We need to get y’all outta here.”

Jasper nodded immediately. “Yeah.”