“Hey.”
I flinch when a warm hand settles over my forearm, and it takes everything I have not to grasp the slender wrist it’s attached to and break it.
“It’s just up ahead,” Darcy says. Her face gives nothing away, but she quickly removes her hand from me and uses it to point to what appears to be a detached garage a few feet away. “There’s an apartment upstairs. Mack calls it the guesthouse—”
I come to a stop, jarring the woman dangling over my shoulder. Narrowed, my eyes trail from the building’s single door up to the windows along the upper level.
“It’s safe,” Darcy insists. “Trust me. He makes the people hedoesn’tlike sleep in the Kennel.” Shuddering, she glances over her shoulder at the building that houses the arena. “Come on. I’ll show you inside.”
I don’t attempt to follow when she prances forward, her hips swinging, her blond hair bouncing over her shoulders. Her fingers grasp the knob of the door, but she hesitates before pulling it open.
“It’s been five years, Dante...” She tilts her head, watching me through her lashes. “Don’t tell me you’ve stopped trusting me already.”
There’s a bitter challenge hidden in her soft tone. I don’t know how to classify what we had before. Friendship? Emotions other than hate rarely make a mark on my psyche, but I can’t resist the part of me that grudgingly steps forward when she finally opens the door, and I follow her inside.
The bottom level sports a few motorcycles and crates of tools and equipment. A rickety staircase along the wall leads to an upper level where a battered door separates a narrow apartment from the rest of the structure.
The small place reeks of stale cigarette smoke and booze.There’s a narrow kitchen across from a stained couch I’d consider using as a toilet before I ever sat on it. Down a short hallway is a cramped bathroom and then a room barely large enough to fit the king-sized bed shoved inside it. Slipping past me, Darcy perches herself on the end of the mattress, running her hands along the plain, black comforter.
“It almost feels like old times,” she says softly. “You kicking Mack’s ass in front of a packed house. He was vicious, even back then...but the skanks who’d hunt you down after were worse.” She laughs and eyes me with a playful shrug. “You rarely went off with one of them though. Back then, you used to only fight for money.”
I don’t bother to answer the question in her tone. I approach the bed instead and toss Stacatto’s woman down onto it. Her fingers fly out in search of stability. The pale skin of her stomach is bared; her sweater rode up far enough to reveal the jagged edges of an N and T. After shoving her onto her back, I wrench the hem down.
“She’s pretty,” Darcy says, propping her hand beneath her chin. “She’s foreign, too. She wasn’t speakin’ English the whole time. Was it Spanish?”
I shrug without giving her an answer, but I can’t help the part of me that wonders just what the little bitch said. She isn’t talking now. She’s staring straight up at the ceiling, her pupils pinpricks, her breathing heavy and slowed. There’s sweat glistening over her forehead, and her lips are slightly parted. She looks dead.
I know that look. As Mack suspected, the little princess is liking the high. Only God knows if Stacatto drugged her at all, but I doubt it. She’s swept away on the burning wave of dope, locked inside her own private cocoon, safe from the pain. For now. The first high is always the sweetest—the cruel benchmark addicts spend every high after that attempting to chase. You can never reach that bar again. It’s why Mack chose his initial dose carefully, knowing just how much of the hook to bait. He couldhave sold her out to ten men tonight and it wouldn’t have mattered. She’d still crave the next fix.
“I need to sleep.” I grit the words out while staring down at my hands, which are covered in Mack’s blood and my own. Adrenaline’s still flooding my system—I’m too fucking wired to sleep, but Darcy takes the hint.
“It was good to see you, Dante,” she says, rising to her feet. Then she surprises me by stepping forward, placing her hand once again along my swelling cheek. “I know I’m not... I know I’m not someone like Arno. But I was your friend too. And Parish...” She breaks off and stares at the floor, pulling her hand away.
A good man might let her wallow, but I can’t help but state the obvious. “If she was your friend, then why are you fucking the man whoreallykilled her?”
Stacatto may have been the lethal bullet, but Mack’s the one who loaded that gun six years ago when he coaxed a seventeen-year-old Rish into getting high that very first time.
Darcy doesn’t appreciate the reminder. Her eyes flash, and I see the hint of the woman Mack has turned her into. She may shiver at the thought of the Kennel, but screwing the alpha means she can’t ignore what puts food on her table.
“Don’t attackme, Dante,” she says. “The last time I checked, I wasn’t sleeping with some guy named Vincent Stacatto.”
She leaves, her lips pursed, her eyes blazing, bitter and angry. But I don’t miss the way her hand flies out to gently brush my shoulder on her way past.
“Night.”
“Night,” I force myself to reply. Seconds later, I hear the door open and then quietly click shut, but the sound has the impact of a gunshot.
Exhaling, I take up the spot Darcy left, keeping my back turned to Stacatto’s woman. Her breathing taints the air, a slow, raspy melody. I shouldn’t give a damn about what thoughts mightcross her mind in the morning when she comes down from the high. I shouldn’t give a damn as to what might happen if she craves it again—and shewillcrave it again. A life of cruelty leaves an almost irresistible itch for something to take the edge off the pain.
Cocking my head, I turn to look at her and snap my fingers once. It takes a second for her eyes to focus and crawl in the direction of my hand.
“Hey.” I snap again and reach for her when her eyes start to turn vacant.
She ignores me though, and no one’s home when I snatch her knife from my pocket and wipe that asshole Sammy’s blood off on my jeans. Then I jab the edge of it into the flat of her palm, pressing deep enough to break the skin. Blood wells up when I start to cut, sawing a single jagged line about an inch long in the center of her hand. The pain barely wakes her up, but she’s back again, watching me with hollow eyes.
“It feels good now,” I tell her, knowing she can probably process only about half of the words I say. “But it won’t last. It never does.”
A low sound buzzes from her throat. Words? A tattered laugh? I can’t tell. Whatever it is trails off when I stand and reach for the buckle of my jeans. I tug them down while I circle the bed to stand directly beside her, my hips positioned above her head so that she can’t miss a single fucking detail. I shed my boxers next, feeling what Mack must have felt when he stepped into the ring, prepared to face an old foe with newly learned tricks up his sleeve.
