Do I want him to stop? No. I do not. But I can’t let him do all these things to me on this table, in the middle of the art room, despite how badly I ache for it. It will eventually make it to Tim’s ears, and he will be out for blood. Both mine and Maddox’s. Me, I’m not highly worried about. But I can’t bear the thought of my actions inadvertently hurting Maddox.

With a sigh, I give into impulse and run my hand through his thick mane. “You say you’re bad for me but you’re always looking out for me.”

He snorts. “Side effect of stupidity, I guess.”

I smile and bring his head close to gently kiss the corner of his mouth. “Thank you.”

“For?”

“Every time you’ve been there. Now…”

He sighs heavily. “I can’t promise you anything, Aylee.”

“Good, because I’m not expecting anything. Let’s not define what this is. We’ll just let it take its course.”

He slowly showers me with a different set of kisses from his abundant arsenal of sexual mastery. I live for how he parts my lips, live for the decisive way he dips his tongue inside my mouth and strokes it so softly against mine. He kisses me like I’m the best thing he’s ever had in his mouth and wants nothing more than to savor my taste.

Chapter 19

Maddox

It’s been nonstop these last few days. No fucking free time whatsoever. Dro has me busy working. At the moment, I’ve got both my SIG and Glock in the waistband of my jeans. And another semiautomatic tuck inside my left boot. That one will probably be a little harder to reach but I’m confident in knowing I’ll have my target on the ground long before he can fire back at me. There’s seven of us in the tiny basement of the small Chinese restaurant on Fayette St. Everyone is on edge. It’s hotter than the Devil’s ass down here and there’s not one of us who isn’t sweating balls. But we’re all playing it cool right now because everyone here is a little trigger-happy. I know I sure as hell am. We’re not on our territory. The seedy Chinese restaurant belongs to a good friend of Deacon. It’s supposed to be neutral territory but nonetheless, I’m feeling edgy as fuck. I’m pretty sure Dro is too, that’s why Willkie and I are standing behind him on one side of the green felt poker table. I’m thinking we’re the only ones he trusts enough to have his back if shit goes sideways because neither of us would hesitate to put a bullet in someone. We’re outnumbered by one, but I still like our chances.

On the other side of the table, the buyer Deacon set Dro up with stands with his three muscles flanking him. We’ve been here ten minutes now and so far everything’s gone according to plan. But ever the pessimist, I’m ready for something to go wrong.

It’s a simple gun run. The buyer has brought a tote bag of cash. One hundred large to be precise, enough for the three black duffel bags on the table filled with a wide variety of rifles, semiautomatics, and ammo.

“What do you have for me?” His voice is thick with an accent.

“Why don’t you take a look?” Dro offers.

The buyer, a short, bulldog-looking motherfucker with a receding hairline and the fashion sense of an eighties pimp, gives a signal with his gold ring-adorned left hand. The muscles in three piece suits each step forward to inspect the merchandise. They’re thorough, checking triggers, muzzles, magazine wells, front and rear sights, and the frames of each gun. When they finish, they interact in a language I can only assume to be Russian before finally acknowledging a silent Droski.

“We’ll take this and whatever other shipment you receive in the future,” he says, “pay him.” While one of muscles removes the bags of weapons from the table, another one empties out the black leather tote bag onto the table. The third fucker still stands behind the pudgy buyer, just to his right. “Eighty grand as we agreed on.”

“Hold the fuck up. What do you mean eighty grand? We’re talking hundred large here, man.”

The bulldog scowls, his jowl moving like a pendulum as he speaks, “That’s not what I agreed on with Deacon.”

“I don’t give a fuck what you and he worked out. My price is set. Hundred grand or nothing.”

It happens quickly. Not sure who draws first, but in a blink of an eye everyone has a gun aimed and loaded on one another. I’ve got the Glock in my left hand trained on one of the meatheads, while the SIG in my right hand is aiming at the buyer. It’s a tense few minutes in which we all play a game of chicken. See who will flinch first. The dumbbell I have my Glock on is either dumber than shit or he’s got balls of steel as he boldly reaches down for one of the gun-filled duffel bags he’s set at his side. I say it’s the former. Following my first and only instinct, I squeeze the trigger and shoot. The bullet slices through the air and grazes its mark. He hollers, “Motherfucker,” and immediately hunches over with his hand pressing against his chest. It’s bleeding but that’s nothing considering I could’ve done worse.

“The next one is going between your eyes,” I say, calmly. But now I’ve got a bullet with my name on it as muscle number two aims my way, ready to shoot.

“Enough!” the buyer barks. In rapid-fire Russian he speaks to his men and they lower their guns seconds later. “This was a simple misunderstanding. We will have no more bloodshed. I’m sure you and I can work out some other arrangement, Droski. Perhaps over a few rounds of drinks and some good company?”

“You pay me the rest of my money and we’ll talk further business.”

“Of course, of course.”

The buyer sends muscle number three to his car. He returns shortly after with—what do you know? Exactly the twenty grand that was missing. Everything after goes as smoothly as one would expect a gun run to go.

***

A few hours later, I’m in the shower. I’m bone tired.  For days, Dro’s had me running around the whole damn city collecting money owed to him by his dealers. When I wasn’t doing that, I was working double-duty at his garage. Stripping the parts from stolen cars and putting them in cars that needed to be fixed so we could jack up the total amount of parts and labor on oblivious customers.

I’ve also been purposely fucking as many girls as I can get my hands on, not only because the site is growing faster than I anticipated, but it’s been my futile attempt at getting Aylee out of my head. After what happened with Noah on Monday, I’ve been running as fast as I can from her, from the memories that have become even more persistent since Noah said what he did about Dad and our mother. About how I was going to turn out like that abusive prick.

Thinking about it gets my blood boiling. How the fuck could that self-righteous little shit say that bullshit to me, knowing all too fucking well the mutual hell we grew up in? I’ve made shit decisions but I’m not a shitty person. I’ve protected him, something that bastard never did, so how could he condemn me to being anything like the monster who raped us of our innocence without even a thought as to how it would affect me?

Because I know he might be right.

I am smug and self-centered, and have violent tendencies just like he did. But I accepted my fate a long time ago. These thoughts are like a bucket of ice water down my back. The realization that Noah could be right, even in the smallest degree, makes me feel like I’m going to be fucking ill. I’m a caged, beat-up animal that no one wants. So I attack. But it wasn’t always that way. I wasn’t always such a miserable rejectee. Our mom loved me, and she was the sweetest woman anyone could ever meet. Years of battling her own depression had made her reserved and so she’d kept mostly to herself. But she’d loved big and she loved hard and that inevitably had been her downfall. She’d fallen for a waste of human skin who’d exploited her kind heart, fed her pills, took advantage of her lack of close friendships, and manipulated her until he became her entire world. He killed her spirit. Robbed her of life years before she blasted that bullet through her head.