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“Speaking of Willow…”
Ransom’s voice trails off, and I glare at him, still pissed about what I saw when I walked into his room.
Vic nods, picking up the thread of our brother’s thought. “What do we do about her?”
“We can’t let her go,” I say. “That fucker who’s hunting her is still out there somewhere, and we don’t know how good of a liar this Carl asshole was.” I jerk my head toward the man’s face on the screen. “If whoever that is finds out Willow was there that night…”
I don’t have to finish that sentence for either of them. There’s a good chance she’ll be tortured for information about us, and if the unknown man is as skilled as he looks, he’s probably turned torture into an art form.
“So we just keep her here?” Vic asks. He sounds uneasy, and I can tell he doesn’t like the idea. He’s gotten attached to Willow in his own way, I think, but he was a lot more comfortable watching her from afar than he is with having her right up in our business like this.
That makes fucking two of us.
“If it was up to me, she’d be dead already,” I point out, scowling.
Ransom rolls his eyes. “Give it up, Mal. She straight up called you out on that last night. We haven’t killed her by now, so it’s clearly not an option. We need to stop bringing it up, and you”—he cocks a brow at me—“need to stop waving guns in her face. It scares her.”
“She’s not as fragile as she looks,” I shoot back, remembering the way she stepped right up to the barrel of my gun last night, and the way her eyes flashed as she dared me to pull the trigger.
“That’s beside the point,” Vic cuts in, getting us back on track. “The question is, can we afford to keep her here, living with us indefinitely? We’ll have another job from X at some point. What will we do with her then? Bring her with us? Our lives aren’t meant to have someone like her in them.”
“What choice do we have, though?” Ransom argues, scrubbing a hand through his messy brown hair. “We’re not gonna kill her, and we need to keep her close, so where else can she go?”
Right. That’s the main fucking problem, isn’t it?
I’m with Vic in that I don’t want her here, so deep in our shit. But she has to stay. It’s dangerous for her out there, and dangerous for us to let her go free and risk this mystery man tracking her down.
And although I barely allow the thought to form in my mind, there’s some part of me that doesn’t want to let her go. That wants to keep her here, now that we have her under our roof.
“He’s right.” I nod sharply. “She’s the last link someone could use to connect us to Nikolai’s death. We can’t risk it.”
“Okay. So she stays with us.” Ransom looks pleased, and the grin on his face makes my shoulders tighten up.
“We need to lay down some ground rules then,” I say.
“Like what?”
“She’s a distraction. We’ve got shit to do, things to be focusing on, and we can’t afford to let her throw us off more than she already has. So we have to agree that none of us are going to fuck her.”
I say it for all of us, but I look at Ransom as I speak. He’s the one with her in his bed, after all. The one she likes best.
Vic turns around in his chair, facing the two of us, his eyes serious. “Agreed.”
“Yeah, okay.” Ransom shrugs and nods, looking a bit disgruntled.
I nod too, cementing our agreement.
With that settled, we move on to other business. Ransom agrees to take point on our upcoming deal with the Donovan gang, which is where we need to be putting our focus right now. All the shit with Nikolai and whoever’s looking for answers aside, we still have to keep our shop running.
But even as I try to focus on what’s coming next, looking ahead to the future and laying out plans, my mind is still on the beautiful blonde waif down the hall.
30
WILLOW
I pacein Ransom’s room, feeling awkward and anxious. I’m not sure I would’ve wanted to be part of whatever little meeting they’re having, especially if it involved talking about killing people. My nerves feel a little too raw right now to handle much more of that.
But still, the way Malice brushed me off made irritation flare in my chest. He can be so hot and cold sometimes, and it makes it hard to get a read on him. I can’t tell if he likes me or hates me or wants to… I don’t even know what.
