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There’s a moment of silence between us, our eyes searching each other’s faces.
She takes a moment and sucks in a deep breath. “My past is complicated, Python.” She pauses for a moment, giggling lightly. “Python. What a name. It feels so weird to even be calling you that.”
“My birth name is Manuel. Manuel Taylor,” I tell her, giving her information I don’t willingly hand out so easily.
“Manuel?” She raises her brows. “Are you Latino?”
I nod. “Yeah. My mom was Mexican. My father was white.”
Astra takes a good, hard look at me. “I would’ve never been able to tell.”
I chuckle. “Yeah, not a lot of people can.”
Astra takes a sip of her drink. “Is that why you’re in Mexico?”
I shrug. “Not really. The club needed an enforcer, and Razor is a good friend of mine. It was an opportunity, and I took it.”
I keep my eyes lingering on her, raking up and down her body, ogling over the gorgeousness that she is.
“Astra, come over here.” Oakleigh waves her over, inviting her to join the conversation she’s having with Rosa.
I walk around the bar and opt to take a seat in front of it, slowly nursing my beer as I scroll on my phone.
Oakleigh’s voice is chirpy as ever, showing how far she’s come from the depressed state Razor found her in.
I don’t know too much about it because I wasn’t here yet, but he filled me in on a few details.
All I can say is if Razor hadn’t rolled through Los Angeles when he did, who knows what would have happened to her.
The music gets a little louder and I glance back to see Lashes at the Bluetooth stereo.
Shaking my head, I return to my beer, listening closely to what the ladies are discussing.
“Really?” Oakleigh seems surprised. “You don’t have any family here?”
Astra laughs nervously, showing how uncomfortable she is. “No, I don’t.”
Rosa’s the next one to speak up. “So you came down here all by yourself?”
I peek over at them and notice Astra’s body language changing.
She’s tensing up, so this is obviously something she’s not keen on discussing.
Still, she answers them. “Yeah, I did. I was married and things were changing very quickly. He was unfaithful, I caught him in the act, and he became extremely violent with me.” Astra pauses and pulls back some of her hair, revealing a scar you’d never be able to tell was there. “After I caught him cheating and confronted him, he followed me, cornered me in an alley, and pushed me. I hit a dumpster and cracked my head open.”
I clench my jaw at her words.
Anyone claiming to be a man who puts his hands on a woman isn’t a man at all.
They’re little boys with power complex issues.
“Wow, I’m so sorry you went through that,” Rosa immediately says, her voice soft and reassuring.
Astra shrugs and laughs lightly. “Hey, it’s okay. You live, and you learn, right?”
Oakleigh’s quiet for a few moments and finally speaks up. “You left the States after that, then?”
I take a sip of my beer, and Astra swallows hard. “Yeah, it was a wake-up call for me. A sign that I didn’t need to be trapped in corporate America and that I needed to get as far away from him as possible.”
