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“Wait here.”
My eyes track him as he stalks across the room, skirting the many obstacles in his path with an ease I never could. I guess he must be the one responsible for the small piles of broken pieces of tables and chairs, but he has a long day ahead of him if he’s doing this all on his own.
He doesn’t leave me long to wait, which considering how tightly strung my nerves are, if he’d taken longer than the two minutes it does, I would’ve made a run for it.
In his hand is a white envelope that he hasn’t sealed, and because he hasn’t, I can tell that the notes he’s stuffed in it are far too many for barely ten hours of work.
He holds the envelope toward me, but I make no move to take it even though it’s one of the two reasons that brought me here.
“Here.” He thrusts it closer to my face.
I recoil, and his hand halts a few inches away.
In the silence that follows, I keep my focus on the envelope, not on the sound of my heart pounding hard against my chest.
It’s okay. He’s not trying to hurt you. He’s just giving you money. Take it and go.
I lick my dry lips. “That’s too much money,” I tell the envelope in his hand.
From what I can tell, it’s all twenties and fifties. Maybe even a hundred or two. If there are less than three hundred dollars stuffed in that envelope, I’d be surprised.
“Take it.”
I lift my gaze from the envelope to his eyes. “It’s too much. I can’t.”
He doesn’t repeat himself, but I feel his order bearing down on me.
After a long moment, I take the envelope from him, bracing myself for him to try to touch me the way Kade did. I needn’t have worried because he goes out of his way to avoid making any contact, pulling his hand away so quickly that I nearly drop it.
Spinning around, he stalks back to the bar and his empty glass. I watch him refill it from the decanter of whiskey or scotch when I should be running toward the nearest bus station because now Nathan knows where I am, it’s only a matter of time before he comes back.
“Do you need help?”
His back tenses a second before he lifts the glass to his mouth and downs the contents. “With what?”
“Cleaning the place. If it’s just you, I can—”
“I don’t need help.” His voice is curt. Not rude, but I get the message loud and clear. I’m not wanted here. Maybe I never was.
Nodding, even though he has his back to me, I turn. “Okay then, thanks for the money and the job. I’m sorry about…” My voice trails off because if I keep going… well, he doesn’t need to know about Nathan, about me, or any of that.
When he reaches for the bottle, I turn to leave.
Two steps later, I summon the courage to say what I came here to say and force myself to stop. “You shouldn’t be mad at him.”
I speak with my eyes on the doorway, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel Dariel’s eyes probe my back. “Mad at who?”
“Kade,” I say. “I don’t know why he didn’t tell you why he attacked… that guy, but it was because of me. He was protecting me. Don’t punish him for something that wasn’t his fault.”
If someone had wrecked Rylan’s home the way Kade wreaked destruction on this bar, they wouldn’t have survived Rylan’s rage. That Dariel hasn’t killed Kade already makes me believe that just maybe he isn’t a leader as bad as Rylan.
I hope.
That or he just hasn’t thought up a cruel enough punishment yet.
“You’ve not even been here a week. What makes you think you know anything about Kade?”
I peer over my shoulder and meet his green stare. He’s refilled his glass, but he isn’t drinking. His face might appear as if he’d been carved from stone, but not his eyes. They’re just as sad as the picture on Aden’s wall. “I don’t know.”
