AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Instead, I locked gazes with Maite and nodded.
I trustedher, despite the nickname of Sketch my father had given her. She was oblivious to my skepticism of Onyx, getting straight to the work in front of her.
Marking the newest member of thePredatorswith our distinguishing ink.
This was usually a big deal—room full of people, lots of shots, music, the works.
A celebration.
But I wasn’t really feeling that.
Because of theotherink that marked him.
There was one I found especially noteworthy—a ring of thorns around his bicep. Paranoia pulled my attention to the precision of the lines, the depth and richness of it, even in all black.
Somethingtold me I should be careful –verycareful – of a man with a tattoo like that.
He… scared me.
Just on the other side of the wall, the music from the bar was pounding. I latched onto the beat, using it as a kind of soothing exercise. It was early afternoon, probably too early for a bar full of people, but this was Vegas, after all.
Land of the fucking tourists.
I bobbed my head along with the music anyway, relaxing my shoulders, my hands, trying to almost disappear into my place in the shadows, to continue my silent observation. Beside me, Keira leaned in my direction to ask in a whisper, “YousureI shouldn’t grab just—”
“Fuck off, Keira. Don’t you have somewhere else you could be?”
She did not.
“He’s quite handsome, isn’t he?”
As if I didn’t already know, my eyes left Keira and went to his face, as if to check again.
Fuck.
He was looking at me.
“If you scowl at me any harder, you might ruin that pretty face,” he said, and I blinked hard, my hand instinctively moving to the gun at my waist.
“Damn.” Onyx chuckled. “You shoot niggas just for talking to you?”
“I’d need a much better reason than general idiocy to shoot you,” I told him, crossing my arms. “Consider yourself lucky.”
He smirked. “Am I, though?”
I rolled my eyes but didn’t answer.
If Ididshoot him, nobody except my president had the authority to address it, and I didn’t want Brandon on my damn neck about it.
Ihatedexplaining myself.
As such, I stayed where I was and kept scowling, letting my gun stay holstered, for now.
Only for now.
My eyes drifted to that ring of thorns on his bicep, the perceived symbol of that offending duality that wouldn’t let me relax. He was immersed in ink, actually. Dozens of colorful pictures decorating the landscape of his deep caramel skin. They told the story of a life filled to the brim with experiences, with travel, of loss grieved and instigated.
Those thorns, though…
