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Gage comes walking in when he hears us arrive, and all three of them look surprised. I could kid myself that they’re surprised River’s back so soon or something, but I know none of them expected her to come walking in with me.
“What happened?” Ash asks, glancing between the two of us with that damn coin still flicking over his fingers faster than the eye can track.
River lets out a breath and drops into a chair at the table. She puts her hands on the wood, and I wonder if anyone else notices that they’re shaking.
Her nail polish glints under the light as her fingers slowly curl into fists, and she glares down at the wood of the table before she finally speaks.
“I fucking missed him,” she says hoarsely. “I had the perfect shot all lined up, and I fucking missed him.”
Suddenly, her eyes flash up and find me.
A spark of… something goes up my spine, and she finishes the rest of the story without looking away.
“The fucker spilled his water, and Diego—the cartel guy—ended up getting in the way of my shot. I dropped him instead of Ivan. He had a few guys there with him as backup, and they caught sight of me on the roof. Ivan’s paranoid ass ran for cover, so I couldn’t get another shot at him, and I had to run for my fucking life.”
She swallows hard, not looking away from me. “There were three of them, and they caught me in an alley. There was no fucking way I was going to be able to fight them all off, but then… Priest showed up.”
I can tell she’s looking at me because she’s waiting for me to chime in with something helpful. Something that will add to the story or explain why I was there in the first place.
But I don’t say anything.
I don’t know why I did what I did, so I don’t have anything to add.
“Priest killed the guys who were about to take me out, and we drove away,” River says, finishing up her story.
Ash and Knox are busy paying attention to her, but River’s eyes are still boring into me, and I can feel Gage looking at me too. They both have the same question, I’m willing to bet.
I glance at Gage, reading it there in his eyes.
We talked about this before, down in the basement. About how it was for the best to let River take the fall for killing Ivan. How it would keep us out of trouble with the rest of the criminal underworld, and get her out of our hair at the same time.
And I agreed with him at the time. River is fucking trouble, and it was for the best that we do things Gage’s way. But for some reason, when it came time to go through with it… I couldn’t. It didn’t sit right with me.
I wasn’t willing to let her take the fall for the attempt on Ivan’s life.
I wasn’t willing to let her die trying to kill him.
Gage narrows his eyes and tips his head a little to one side, and I can see the moment he realizes it. We both know what was said down in the basement, the conversation fresh in both of our minds. At no point did we discuss me following her on her mission to play hero or whatever the fuck I thought I was doing.
My friend is clearly processing it all, and I can’t tell from his expression what he thinks about my actions. He’s almost as good as I am at hiding his feelings behind a mask when he wants to.
He gives me one last considering look and then turns his focus back to River.
“Did any of Ivan’s guys get hurt?” he asks her.
She shakes her head, her silver hair shifting over her shoulders. “No. They all ran to keep Ivan safe.”
He nods at that. “Well, it’s not as bad as it could have been, then. Since you killed this cartel guy, and Priest took out the others, Ivan will probably thinktheywere the target, not him. So at least he won’t be after whoever did it, and he won’t think he needs to ramp up his own protection too much.”
That makes sense. It’s the only silver lining in this whole fucking mess.
“We’ll have to keep our eyes open,” Knox points out with a savage grin. “In case anyone else comes sniffing around looking for revenge. If the cartel finds out who killed their guy, it could be trouble.”
“You look way too happy about that, Knox,” Ash groans, flipping the coin into the air with a flick of his thumb and then catching it.
Knox just shrugs, his dark eyes gleaming. “I like trouble.”
“We don’t want this kind of trouble,” Gage insists in a hard voice. “Hopefully no one else saw anything and no one can pin it on you. Or trace it back to us.” He glances between me and River.
My jaw tightens in irritation.
Everything this woman does just spreads. Her first fucking entrance into our lives was by killing a guy in the alley outside our club, and now we might be dragged into some feud with a fucking cartel. Everywhere she goes, she just brings trouble.
No.
That’s not it.
She’sthe trouble. She’s like a poison, this silver-haired woman. Like a disease. She’s infecting our lives little by little.
Infectingus.
