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“Who is it?” I asked when Coach looked out the window as the car parked.
“Erion Kadare,” he said, glancing back at us.
It was Crow who pushed a gun into my hand before I even moved a step.
Not sure why he was there, I didn’t go out guns blazing, tucking it into my waistband instead.
Erion waited until I was outside before he climbed out of the car, looking a little more haggard than he’d been a few hours before.
His shirt was dirty, his knuckles ripped open.
And when he lifted his arm to raise a cigarette to his lips, there was dried blood all over his hands, crusted under his nails.
Like he hadn’t even bothered to try to clean any of it off.
“What the fuck is this?” I asked, glancing at someone sitting slumped in his backseat.
“That is Donny Something-Or-Other,” Erion said, taking a long drag.
“Should that mean something to me?” I asked, glancing at him again to make sure he wasn’t familiar. He wasn’t. But I did notice gauze wrapped around his hand with a dip where a finger should have been. Likely had been not long ago.
“Probably not. Well, your girl might know the name.”
“She’s too fucking battered to give a blow-by-blow of the events tonight.”
To that, he nodded. Not really showing any reaction to that. Not like the rest of us had.
Ice water, that was what was running through that man’s veins.
“Erion, the fuck is going on?” I asked.
“Oh, shit is moving and shaking. Mainly because I’m shaking ‘em up,” he said, taking another long draw, then crushing the butt under his bloody shoe.
“You’re fucking covered in blood.”
“No shit?” he asked, then let out a lazy smirk.
“I don’t have fucking time for games, Erion. Why are you here?”
“To let you know that you can go ahead and lower your alert level. Figure you jacked it up to red after you got your girl back. And after a body went missing,” he went on.
“You took the body?” I asked, stiffening. “What the fuck for?”
“Yeah, I took him. Nice work, by the way,” he said, nodding his approval. “You’re welcome for cleaning up that fucking bloodbath, too.”
“Erion, explanations,” I demanded.
“Figure it’s kind of two-fold. On one side, I’m partly to blame for why she’s all busted the fuck up. I won’t pretend to really give a shit about her. Or anyone. But I don’t like my shit blowing back on people who aren’t involved. On the other side, this whole thing helped me out.”
“How?”
“Well, seems like Donny here and our dearly departed Chet decided to try to puff their chests and show the bosses that they are major players. They jacked some heroin off a street gang. Likely thinking it was low-hanging fruit. But I was locked up with one of those bastards. They’re ruthless. They got wind, picked up Donny, and started pulling off body parts while waiting for Chet to get the drugs back to them.”
That made sense.
Chet, desperate, picked up Nyx to try to torture the location out of her.
Erion felt… if notguilt—because I wasn’t sure he was capable of that—but something like responsibility for her not being able to hand half of it back.
