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Lenny sounded bored. Almost annoyed. It was clear from his tone he wasn’t happy to be here. That it was a major inconvenience.
Not the sort of tone Diesel St. Crow would take kindly to.
“Have you nothing for me, then?” Diesel pressed, his hard stare unwavering on Lenny Ace.
Lenny had the decency to look confused at the question. “Should I?”
Diesel bristled, and I thought he was going to end this meeting right here and now in a hail of gunfire, but then the atmosphere around him shifted. The switch reminded me of something—someone—else, and I glanced at Corvus, finding the same practiced restraint in his features and stature.
“You have nothing to prove your man’s death is on us,” Lenny continued when Diesel didn’t give him the courtesy of a reply.
“And you have nothing to prove it wasn’t,” Diesel continued, and it took me a moment to realize they were continuing the conversation from all that time ago at the warehouse. About the guy The Crows found dead in Thorn Valley…with an A carved into his chest?
I didn’t know the particulars. Only what I picked up on from my bug and what I’d heard since.
“It was probably Devon,” someone else behind Lenny piped up. “He was always a loose cannon.”
Lenny turned his head slowly, and the look in his eyes promised a slow death to the man who spoke if he said another word.
He shut up.
“Convenient then, since he’s buried on the spot where he tried to shoot Corvus and can’t defend himself,” I couldn’t help saying.
Lenny’s blue-eyed gaze found me for the first time since they entered, analyzing me from the top down.
“Who the fuck is this?”
“That’s not your concern,” Diesel replied. “And I didn’t ask you here tonight to talk about Randy, though I still think there’s something to be spoken to about his death.”
“Then what did you ask me here for?”
The Aces tensed behind their leader, anticipating a fight.
I could feel it, too. Like electricity in the air that I could taste if I just flicked my tongue out to touch it. My blood hummed with it. With the possibility that tonight, I might kill a man. And fuck if I wasn’t looking forward to it. That inner darkness thirsting for violence.
Rook made a low sound in his throat next to me, and I inched my hand to move to the side, brushing my knuckles with his, feeling a static shock. His dark eyes gleamed in the low light, and I knew he was feeling it, too.
“One of your men is out to get my boys.”
A dark laugh rattled out of Lenny’s chest as he shook his head, dropping it to pinch the bridge of his nose like something Diesel said was funny.
I didn’t find it fucking funny.
My fingers flinched, pulling away from Rook’s to hover at my side, ready to spring for a blade.
“You’re paranoid, old man,” Lenny said, sighing. “No one is messing with you. No one is after your sons. At least, not my crew. I’d start looking to your enemies, there is where you’ll find—”
“Maybe you didn’t hear me,” Diesel interrupted Lenny. “One of your men is out to get my fucking sons. It wasn’t a question. It isn’t a suspicion. It’s a fact.”
Lenny’s lips pressed tight. “If you truly believed that, we wouldn’t be talking right now.”
“The only reason we are is because I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt, Lenny. I’m not making your insides your outsides right now because I recognize it might be one of your men acting independently and not on your command.”
“Diesel—”
“I’m not finished. Either you have something to do with it and you have a death wish, or one of your men, someone you trust, is working an angle without your knowledge.”
Lenny’s face was growing redder by the second. Unlike Diesel, he was wholly unable to keep his emotions from playing on his face. And right now, he was angry. Feeling disrespected. I had an urge to push him a little more to see how he might react.
