Page 142

Paulie looks worse than I expected, tied to a chair in the center of one of the back rooms of one of the Grecos’ older warehouses, underneath a single hanging lightbulb that covers him in a sickly yellow glow.

His face is a mix of purples, blues, and reds, shiny and wrecked. Both his eyes are swollen shut; he’s stripped down to his underwear and covered in impact marks and cuts.

Quillan stands nearby, shirtless, his shoulder-length dark hair tied back in a short ponytail. His knuckles are red and split, yet his face is irritatingly cheerful.

Mathias is against the far wall, watching everything without moving much. He’s clean in his pressed charcoal suit, white shirt open at the collar where he loosened it before coming down here. Hands in his pockets now that things have started.

He doesn’t get his hands dirty unless he has to.

From what I hear from the subs they’ve been with at the club, his taste for voyeurism extends into several aspects of his life.

Mathias looks at me as I enter. His gaze moves over my body, up my face, down to my hands, then back to my eyes. Checking for tells, maybe. Checking whether I’ve been somewhere else first.

Nothing in his expression changes.

“Thought I had the day,” I say.

“You did,” he answers simply. “Things changed.”

I glance at Paulie. He lifts his head with visible effort when he hears my voice, though I doubt he can see much of anything. “What’d he do?”

Quillan says, “The fucker arranged the whole thing.”

“We confirmed Paulie recruited Milo for the job and fed him information to hit the storage site,” Mathias explains, his voice flat. “Milo brought Wade in because Paulie said he needed another body. Paulie intended to take his cut after the fact while keeping his name completely outside it.”

I look at Paulie again through what remains of his face. “That right?”

He says nothing.

Doesn’t matter anyway. Mathias wouldn’t have me here if he weren’t sure. Mathias doesn’t guess about men who cost him money; he knows things first, or he doesn’t move at all.

“So you need him gone.”

Quillan smiles. “Bingo.”

I side-eye him. His pupils are wide enough that the color is gone from his irises, and there’s a fine tremor in his right hand that he keeps curling into a fist to hide. “You high or something?”

Quillan looks at me like I’ve asked whether water is wet, then glances down at himself as though the answer might be written somewhere across his bare chest. He’s sweating in the cold of the warehouse, a sheen over his collarbones. “No.”

Mathias speaks from the wall. “Yes.”

Quillan twists around. “I am not.” He sounds scandalized.

“You’ve been grinding your teeth for the last forty minutes,” Mathias replies.

“I grind my teeth normally.”

“No, you don’t.”

Quillan thinks about this for a second, then gives an unconcerned shrug that answers my question better than either of them did. “Maybe a little.”

I look at Mathias.

He looks back at me with the long-suffering expression of a man who has spent over three decades being required to acknowledge that this is, biologically speaking, his younger brother, even if only through their shared father.

“What’d he take?” I ask.

Mathias lifts one shoulder. “Enough of something that I decided letting him burn it off down here was the best choice.”