The Sins that Ruin (Obsidian Knights Secret Society #3)

2. Scarlett

TWO

Fury bubbles up in my chest and throat, scalding my insides from the pit of my stomach.

If I have to damn well be here, the man who didn’t have the balls to acknowledge me when I showed up at his sex den should be, too.

But instead, the fucker’s making me wait. This time at a completely different location than that club.

I almost didn’t come to Rafe’s, the bar on Avenue D that this JM decided to send me to, because I don’t like being pushed around, and this is fucking textbook manipulation.

But I’m here for family and family always, always comes first.

The place is dark, muted in tone and music, and it’s full of high-back plush booths and Formica tables where people are huddled around, doing… I take a quick look around, trying not to scrunch up my nose… whatever people like to do in places like this.

Unlike the serene beauty of Orchid Lane’s foyer that hides its rotten underbelly, this one’s pure modern-day dive. There’s no layer of anything remotely respectable. At least the other place had that fa?ade going for it.

“Here you go.” The bartender places a glass of red wine in front of me and takes my twenty. When he returns with the change, he leans on the bar.

He looks intimidating—muscular, covered in tattoos with a pierced nose, lip, and brow, and one of those mullets he’s paired with a beard. But his gaze is friendly and more curious than predatory. “What the fuck brings you here?”

“Change of scenery?”

“There’s a story…” He half smiles, pours himself a whiskey, then one for me. He pushes it over. “Slow night. On me.”

“Thanks.” I take the shot and knock it back. “And let’s just say if there’s a story, I don’t know it, yet.”

“A woman of mystery.” He laughs and walks down the length of the bar to serve someone else.

I breathe a sigh of relief.

Right now, I’m not good company. I cross my legs under the bar and check the time on my phone. There’s no number on the card that the gorgeous blonde at Orchid Lane gave me. Just the Orchid Lane logo on the front and the address to this place on the back.

She told me he’d be here ten minutes ago.

I don’t wait for people, not people like this… So if there’d been a number for this JM, I’d have called him and told him so.

I let out a sharp sigh.

If the situation wasn’t dire, I’d have walked.

If this wasn’t about family, I wouldn’t even be here.

But Dad’s in trouble.

If he’s in trouble, then so’s Uncle Grant. And that means danger for all of us. For Amelia. I can take care of me, but Amelia’s only fifteen, so here I am, waiting to see a man I know nothing about except he’s supposed to be a powerful man. Someone who can help.

A shiver runs down my spine, white-hot, like a gaze sears into me, one with purpose, one with dangerous intent.

I take a breath. Of course I’m being watched. It’s a bar.

The bartender returns and puts a bottle of beer in front of me, a slight sneer on his face. “Dude in the fuckin’ corner wanted me to give you this.”

I eye the beer, but as much as I want to look over my shoulder, I don’t. I have enough experience to know looking at whoever bought it is as much of an invite to join as taking the drink.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” he says. “You don’t send beer to a girl with class.”

“Who said I have class?”

“You’re class, and I’m not hitting on you. Just stating a fact.” He shrugs.

I smile despite myself. “The beer’s yours.”

“You’re right, I don’t have class.” The bartender grins, taps my glass with the bottle, then turns, raises it, and gives the finger to the buyer. “Let me know if you need an ear. I know there’s a story.” He wanders off again.

I pick up my wineglass and take a sip as I mumble to myself, “Class, that’s me.”

For most of my life I thought I came from a respectable family, a very moneyed one, and though they didn’t need to step in and save a small shipping company when I was in my teens, my dad and uncle did just that, which also meant securing jobs on a cross-dock warehouse system in Queens.

It wasn’t until I overheard a few conversations here and there between Dad and Uncle Grant that I realized they might not be as respectable as I thought. I never asked questions because… well, I really don’t want to know the answers. Why would I? It’s not my business. I have my own inheritance from my mother, and I’m not about to go into shipping or cargo in any way.

I bake. And I want to turn my hobby into a business of my own. When and if I ever grow that nerve.

But not being completely on the up-and-up means I need to take any and all threats seriously.

Not that there were any.

Until now.

Or, should I say, that I’ve known of. Not outside the usual things that happen to the rich and powerful. I guess there are always opportunists trying to make a buck, but they’ve sheltered me from it.

But whatever this is feels… wrong.

And… Shit. I’m angry. Scared. Because there have been too many worried, low-voiced arguments, too many moments of cut-short conversations. Then there was the sudden, added security and Dad trying to get me to come back home.

That’s when I found the written threats. In a drawer in the home office that’s usually locked. I do part-time work for the shipping company, sending out invoices, answering emails, and basic scheduling. It’s low-level stuff, general appointments and social engagements as well as some meetings with potential clients, so I don’t need to get into the safe or anything locked. I don’t have a key, but one day there was an invoice marked highly sensitive on the desk, and when I noticed the drawer wasn’t locked, I opened it to file the invoice and found them.

Threats about me.

About Amelia.

About Dad.

And I started piecing things together.

The night when Dad was almost run off the road. Amelia was with him, too.

The stranger who tried to grab Amelia. She said when her friend shouted, the man apologized and said he’d mistaken her for his kid.

Strange packages.

The calls to the office that hang up when I answer.

Dad and Grant arguing about accidents at work.

And then a few nights before, someone ran into me while waiting on the subway, and if it wasn’t for a man who grabbed me, I might have gone headfirst in front of the oncoming A train.

Last night, Uncle Grant told Dad that someone called JM could help us. The cost didn’t matter. Until they worked out who was threatening the family, they needed the kind of help JM could provide.

Owner of Orchid Lane.

A powerful, non-affiliated man.

Not mafia.

And… I let out a shaky breath and take a big gulp of my wine.

I have money.

This is for my family. So I took it upon myself to find this guy JM.

“Five more minutes,” I mutter.

There’s a very thin line between need and pushover, and I’m coming dangerously close to that line. I faced one visit to Orchid Lane; I can handle another. The lower levels, the blonde told me, were members only, hard-core. I can deal with a kink-heavy, sexually free bar. No one was actually fucking, but there was a lot of naked flesh. And?—

“Seat taken?”

The tone’s low and dark and beguiling. It’s the type that can be velvet sex or latex and whips. Layered with erotic promise. That’s what the voice is. And I’m aware of a hint of a scent in the air around it. It’s dark and boozy with a hedonistic edge. Like leather and unlit cigars, like the most complex sugared rum. The kind of scent that could lean toward comfort or toward heat and thrills in dark places.

I swallow. Hard. But I don’t look.

“I’m waiting for someone.”

The man pauses and I’m aware of the burn of his gaze. It’s familiar and intimate, and I know this is who’s been watching me.

“You know,” he murmurs, leaning in a little, the heat of his body lighting me up where he almost touches, down my right side, along my cheek. “It’s polite to look at the person you’re speaking to.”

“You’re speaking to me, not the other way around.”

And inexplicably I throb deep between my thighs like my body’s answering a call only it can hear.

“Now that’s a lie. You’re talking now.”

Irritation at the smug note with the warm center makes me turn to give him a piece of my mind. But that vanishes the moment my gaze hits the vivid, wicked green of his eyes.

The man is beautiful. Blond hair, green eyes, and a mouth that’s wide and full, lips that look like they could do the most depraved things to you and lift you straight to a certain kind of heaven.

He holds a ringed finger up to the bartender. When the guy arrives, he orders a Macallan 18.

“I’m waiting for someone.” The moment the words leave my lips, they hang like a lie in the air.

They make me feel absurd and I don’t know why.

He merely raises a brow. “And a man leaves someone like you alone?”

“Maybe I’m early.”

“He should be earlier.” The hot blond god waits for my response and my skin pricks and tingles like nerve endings popping.

“Maybe he’s busy.”

“Maybe,” the man says, “he is. But I’m here, so can I get you a drink?”

I hold up my wine. “I have one.”

The man slides a finger up along the outside of my arm, and then he slips it around at my elbow and down to my inner wrist. The skin on the inside of my arm is super sensitive. I put down the glass with a wobble, his touch sending sparks of fire everywhere.

When he reaches my inner wrist he circles it, his thumb drawing patterns that make my libido skip and soar.

But I tamp that all down. The man might have the eyes of the devil, the kind that offer wicked delights, but I’m not interested. I can’t be, not now, and anyway, there’s something about him that lurks beneath that beat of attraction, like a flash of warning that rubs my senses the wrong way.

This man’s dangerous.

And even if he isn’t, I don’t have the bandwidth for flirting.

Not when I’m on a mission.

“As I said, I’m waiting for someone.”

The smile that touches his lips is cocky and controlled. He releases me and leans back in the high-back stool. The fingers of both strong hands are ringed. He picks up his glass and lifts it to sip, and I catch the complex smoky notes of the whiskey as he does so.

“What if I’m that someone?”

A bright shot of heat slashes through my senses, and I force myself to stay stiff-backed, outwardly calm.

I look at him and try to picture him as a crime lord, the owner of a sex club. And I can’t. In my head, this JM is old and fat, a man of power who can command others to his bidding. Who can protect. Who can, I hope, find out who’s threatening my father.

This man is young—older than me, maybe by ten years, but still young for his type of reputation—and the kind of gorgeous that says life comes easy. Why the hell would a man who looked like him be running a sex club? He looks the type to be shaking women off him. Hot, gorgeous women.

Everything in me goes still.

So why is he here, flirting with me?

“I don’t know,” I say. “Are you?”

The smile shifts into predator territory.

“Do you want me to be?”

My breath’s caught in my lungs and can’t find a way out. I stare at him.

“Now there’s the deer,” he murmurs, not bothering to move in as he takes a sip of his drink. He’s taking up too much room, too much air, and maybe that’s why I can’t breathe. “Trapped. In my headlights.”

He pauses. Out of the corner of my eye, the bartender polishes a glass, clearly focused on our exchange. But something tells me if the blond god did anything, the friendly bartender wouldn’t lift a finger.

They don’t look at each other. There wasn’t a hint of them knowing each other when he ordered. But somehow, I know. The man next to me is in charge and the other one knows it.

My breath rushes as my body throbs with a need I don’t understand.

“Question is,” he says, “what are you going to do now?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I think I’m going to leave.”

I get up on quivering legs, but all he does is rake over the length of my body with his smoldering gaze, then shrug. “Your choice, Scarlett.”

My blood goes hot then cold at his acknowledgement of my name. “Who are you?”

“I think you already know the answer to that question.” He leans toward me, his breath hot against my face. “Don’t you?”