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Pop!
The sound was so unexpected, she jumped. But it was just the bag of Combos in his hand, the pressure of the grip he had made causing a breach of its structure, brown nuggets falling to the floor between his bare feet as a waft of cheese bloomed in the suddenly tense air.
And then he just sat there on the end of the bed, breathing.
“Perhaps I should have told you previously.” She looked down—and wished she could return to mere minutes before. But this collision had been inevitable, ever since the first flare of their attraction. “I just did not know how… to tell you. Or explain the—”
“I only need to know one thing,” he said in a low voice.
Rahvyn took a deep breath and swallowed past the lump in her throat. “Yes, I am afraid the… breaching… was complete.”
When he made no response, she put the soda and the chips back on the tray. “Shall I go?” She glanced toward the door, which seemed a great distance away. “Yes, I believe I should go—”
“Is the motherfucker still alive. Because I will destroy him with my bare hands.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Now, this was more what he had in mind.
Not in terms of interior decor, Lash thought as he glanced around the shitty apartment. When it came to Architectural Digest standards, the current environs were on par with that shitty walk-up.
But as he considered the lineup of fresh meat before him, there was an improvement with regard to manpower.
“Man, what the hell, you not washin’? You stank.”
As the olfactory conclusion was announced to the collective, Lash stayed behind Mr. Mouthy and Silent Bob, as he had come to think of them, the latter a reference to the movie, not because the fucker’s name was Bob. His two slayers were standing in front of him, and the group of young human men they’d called together were typical punks, unremarkable except for the strength that came not with training or discipline, but rather the sloppy confidence of youth.
He would take it, however. Any night of the week.
“Fuck you,” Mouthy said to the one who had the fussy nose. “So you want to work or not. You want to chill in this shithole or—”
“Hey, fuck you. I pay twelve hundred a month for this.”
Did everything have to start with “fuck,” Lash wondered. Then again, he wasn’t inducting them for their vocabulary, and frankly, it was—to take an f-page from their book—fucking ridiculous to talk about smelling anything bad. The couch over there was so stained, it was impossible to tell what color it had started out as. Red? Blue? And who would have thought that that would be the subject of any debate. The rest of the rank rathole was no better, the wall-to-wall carpeting raw from tread traffic, stained like the sofa, peeling up in the corners. Likewise, the windows were so dirty, it was like there were privacy curtains over the panes, and through an archway, the kitchen had more flies than a cow pasture.
And the sonofabitch—sorry, “fucker”—had the nerve to criticize anything?
“So who the fuck is he,” one of the lineup asked.
Lash stared at the man. He was short and stocky, with narrow hips badly balanced by heavy shoulders and a thick neck, like the guy only worked out the top half of himself at the gym. Up on his head, his hair was dark and floppy, his eyes dark, the shadows under them dark, his brows and lashes dark.
Depending on his answer, that was all going to change. Over time, lessers lost their pigmentation, everything turning pale.
“You talkin’ or what?” the stumpy one asked with the kind of cockiness that came with being a prick by nature.
And being armed under that leather jacket.
They were all armed, bulges under coats, in ass pockets—but then they had things to protect. There were drugs under wraps on the chipped table in the corner, a couple different piles of white powders, along with dusty scales and crumpled bills, solving a mystery that required little, if any, sleuthing. Lash had gotten a gander at the display before they’d pulled a tarp over the setup after Mouthy had knocked on the door with the butt of a shotgun and not waited for an answer. As he’d busted in, the punks had scrambled to attention all around the room, their drug-addled minds trying to catch up with the surprise visitors. Meanwhile, Mouthy had taken control, something that was easy when you had a double-barrel on your side of persuasion, and some kind of relationship with the infiltrated.
“I asked you a question,” Stump said as he jabbed a forefinger at Lash. “You’re gonna fucking answer me—”
“He don’t have to talk,” Mouthy cut in. “You want to dick around here or be a part of something bigger. You want more? Or you want this shit.”
