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“I’m sorry. Really, I clearly didn’t think it through.”
“And then you poison one of the bikers?” she asked, throwing a hand up. “What the fuck was that?”
A moment of insanity, it seemed.
“I have no excuse for that one. I don’t know what came over me.”
“You’re really fucking lucky he didn’t have any serious damage, or they would have turned over every rock in this town to track you down.”
“I swear he only got the smallest trace of poison,” I assured her.
“Ah, Earth to Morg. Any bit of poison is not okay when you’re using it against guys as dangerous as that. I mean… for fuck’s sake. Crow is a goddamn psychopath.”
“Crow,” I repeated, and suddenly both the bird and the man flashed across my mind’s eye. And, yeah, I could see it. The name was really fitting.
“Yeah. Crow. I mean, they don’t talk directly to me about the shit they do. But the guys get a little loud when they’re hammered and I hear shit. Like how Crow plucked some guy’s eye out once. And did worse over in Nevada when they were ambushed a while back. You don’t fuck with him.”
“I didn’t know,” I admitted.
“No, of course not. How could you, when you live out here like you’ve come down with leprosy and been banished. When is the last time you even came to town before last night?” she asked.
That was a good question.
I avoided it as much as I could.
“Right before winter, I guess,” I admitted.
I’d gone to stock up on the stuff that I couldn’t grow, or couldn’t grow enough of to get me through the cooler months.
Rice, pasta, flour, tea.
And, yeah, chocolate. A lot of chocolate. I could go without a lot of luxuries, but chocolate was not one of them.
“God, Morg. That can’t be healthy. You know, like, for your mental health and shit,” Nyx insisted, shaking her head as she looked around my place.
“Being out here is for my mental health,” I insisted. “I don’t like the noise and craziness of town. It’s overwhelming.”
“Maybe it is overwhelming because you have become a hermit,” she suggested. “Humans are communal, whether we all like that or not. We are meant to be around other humans.”
“Maybe I would be willing to be. If humans didn’t suck,” I added, shrugging.
“Well, I can’t really argue with that point. But, yeah, the bikers have become a big deal in this town. The same way you wouldn’t fuck with the Murphy family or the Novikoffs, you don’t fuck with them.”
I didn’t say it to her, but the thing was, I would fuck with them. The Irish mafia and the Russian Bratva. I would. If a woman came to me, telling me the trauma she’d endured at their hands. I would. I would end them just as easily as I would end any normal guy.
That probably meant I was crazy.
And maybe the seclusion did have something to do with that.
But, in a way, it felt necessary that I didn’t draw a line in the sand at criminal empires. If anything, they needed someone like me to be willing to hold them accountable because they were often above the law, untouchable.
A woman shouldn’t have to live in fear just because a guy had enough money to grease the palms of the cops or judges or juries. Or because they had a lot of security around them.
There were ways around that.
And I always wanted to be an advocate for all women, regardless of how bad the man was that she’d gotten involved with.
But Nyx was too entwined with that world to understand.
She worked at the Irish mob bar. She was best friends with the Irish mob little sister. She hung out at the Bratva pool hall. And who knew what other connections she had?
“It was a misstep. It won’t happen again,” I assured her. “And I owe you for covering for me. You shouldn’t have had to do that.”
“It’s fine. Look, I mostly support what you do. So I would be a hypocrite if I gave you too much shit about it, right? But maybe you can give me some of that youth cream as thanks,” she said, giving me a mischievous little smile.
“Oh, now we get to the real reason you are here,” I said, shaking my head at her. “What? Are you putting it on three times a day? What I gave you last time should have lasted you almost a year.”
“Yeah, well, what can I say? I like looking young. I would bathe in that shit if I could. Which is why you should be bottling it and selling it. For like twenty dollars a jar. Or more. People would pay it.”
She’d been saying exactly that since I gave her the first jar a few years ago. I’d considered it, too. But creating my own lotion or skincare or whatever business was a big undertaking. One that could mean getting licenses and dealing with inspections. Not to mention finding places to sell it.
