21. Dingo
TWENTY-ONE
DINGO
Living with girls wasn’t that hard. Hell, I had a sister and a brother. I knew what it was like to share space with siblings, even thoughts of a different gender. Jackal had a sister, too. So, if any of us should be taking to this, it should have been us.
So why was it Coyote who seemed to be the most comfortable as he strode around the place, avoiding the bitch’s piercing gaze and smiling to himself like he had a bunch of secrets he didn’t feel like sharing, and Jackal and I who seemed to be so close to an edge that we might fall off if we sneezed in the wrong direction?
Fucking bullshit.
I wasn’t about to let someone make me uncomfortable in my own home. With a grunt of aggravation, I yanked my wet shirt over my head and tossed it into the corner of the room, drying my hands on the dishtowel hanging from the stove.
“Let’s get a few things straight, sweetheart.”
Her head swiveled from where she’d been studying Jackal’s sprawled form on the couch to meet my gaze, her eyes blown wide in incredulity. “Excuse me?”
“You living here doesn’t change anything for us. We’ll do what we want, when we want, however we want. You’re in our space, not the other way around. We share chores and responsibilities here, and that includes you, too.”
“I don’t think you understood the gist of our arrangement, Dingo,” she said flippantly, uncrossing her legs to switch positions. I caught a glimpse of her very bare pussy as she turned to me and smiled. “I’m nobody’s maid, either. So you guys can do you, and I’ll do me.” Her hand flipped the gun she still held, those blue eyes pretending to admire the grip with interest. “If anyone has any complaints, open office hours for these hands are dawn to dusk.”
Jackal snorted from the other side of the room. “You’re hilarious, kitten. Could you even take us in a fight if you didn’t have a gun and knockout gas?”
“If you’re lucky, you’ll never have to find out, “ she retorted, sticking her tongue out at him. “But you’re welcome to test your theory anytime, Jackal.”
I doubted it was a good idea to let the two of them have a go at each other any time soon. “Okay now, kids, let’s calm down and get serious.” I tossed around a few questions burning in the back of my mind, and somehow settled on a completely random one. “Any food allergies we need to know about?”
“Why? Planning on poisoning me with dinner?”
Another snort left Jackal’s nose, this one a bit more on the sarcastic side. “Please. If we were going to take you out, it wouldn’t be with poison. That’s the Commandos’ schtick.”
She perked up instantly, moving from the counter in a flash to slide onto the couch and sit atop Jackal like he was a chair. “Who are they?”
He grumbled, shoving her to the floor with a disgruntled sniff. “I’m not part of the couch, bitch. Find another seat.”
I couldn’t hold back my barking laughter when she slid right back up onto his lap and threw her arms around his neck, putting him in a chokehold he couldn’t get out of.
“Let me ask you again. Who are the Commandos?”
“Get off me and I’ll tell you.” He stared pointedly at her bare stomach, then shifted in his seat and cleared his throat. “Or stay there, and we can discuss the first thing that pops up.”
I nearly choked when she stuck her finger in her throat and mimed a gagging motion. “No, thank you. Once was enough for me. And I’d rather not talk about that again, if I can help it.”
The pretty blush on her cheeks said otherwise as she nearly jumped off Jackal to get away from that ticking time bomb.
“So does that mean we’re supposed to pretend we haven’t tasted you, sweetheart?”
“Stop calling me those names.” Sitting in the far corner of the couch, hands crossed under her chest, face scrunched up like a toddler mid temper tantrum, she looked fucking adorable. It only made me want to tease her more, so I did.
“What names? Sweetheart? Kitten?” I abandoned the kitchen in search of a new source of entertainment—our new member. Our leader, as she styled herself. “What if we started calling you master instead? Would that make you happy?”
“Don’t you fucking give her ideas,” Jackal growled, but I saw the smile spread unwittingly on her lips as she ducked her head and mumbled in dissent.
“Shut up, asshole,” she returned, obviously done with me and my taunts.
From the kitchen, Coyote cleared his throat and held up two different meats—steak in one hand, chicken in the other. Those of us who’d lived with him long enough knew what he was trying to ask—which one?—but Ivy was new here. So I decided to give her a little nudge.
“Oh, neither of those meats will do, Coyote. Obviously, we’re expected to carve ourselves up so this maneater here can dine on our flesh tonight.”
Her gaze swiveled to the kitchen, where Coyote’s face was fighting off a fit of uncharacteristic giggles at her expression. “I’m not a cannibal, you fuckstick. Steak is fine.”
“How do you like it?” I prodded, nodding to the man in the kitchen.
“She likes it bloody and screaming in pain,” Jackal offered slyly, his eyebrow quirked in anticipation of her reaction. “If you’d paid attention today, you would know that.”
“Medium,” she mumbled, rolling her eyes. “I don’t eat raw meat.”
“No, right, you just fuck it,” I supplied, my grin so wide I was about to break my face in half with my mouth. “Or was I dreaming the way you came off the table and had to jam your tongue down—mmfffmfmfmfm.”
Her hand slammed over my mouth with the force of a fist to the jaw, and I fell backward on the couch, taking her with me in a last-ditch attempt to gain the upper hand. As I’d hoped, her skirt flew up and bared her pantiless ass to Jackal, who suddenly looked like he was in immediate need of relief.
Coyote, from his vantage point in the kitchen, just growled as he slapped the steak in his hand down on the hot skillet, sending oil flying everywhere because it was too fucking hot. His eyes were on the shapely curve of Ivy’s ass if I was right about his line of sight.
The reddening of the tips of his ears said I was.
“I’m going to go take a shower and tend to these new burns I have,” Jackal mumbled, sliding off the couch like a human slinky. In seconds, the degenerate had hidden himself behind a locked door, putting up literal and figurative walls between him and the woman who’d invaded his space.
That left me and Coyote.
With Ivy.
Yay.
I had grown tired of toying with her, so when she pulled away, feigning disgust, I let her go, watching as she retreated to the relative safety of the armchair a few extra feet away from me.
If she thought she was the only one here who could play games, she had another thing coming.
“Where do you plan to sleep tonight, sweetheart?” I asked, knowing full well her options were limited. I could guess where she planned to sleep—or rather, not sleep, as I suspected would be the answer. She didn’t trust us to stick to our word. And I mean, realistically, who could blame her?
“I don’t,” she offered simply, licking her lips as the scent of perfectly seasoned steak wafted through the room. “I can’t trust you heathens to not try and kill me in my sleep.”
Coyote grunted in the kitchen but seemed to be back to his old, wordless self, moving around a cutting board with a dangerous affinity. He held a knife like the Blackwood brothers did, with skill and precision, every cut perfect and measured. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was taking lessons from those butchers on the side.
“You can’t go without sleep forever,” I pointed out, a frown drawing my brows together. “Or do you just plan to pass out standing up, holding that fucking pistol in your hand?”
She glanced down at the gun in question and shrugged. “I didn’t think it that far ahead, honestly.”
A moment of vulnerability in an otherwise invulnerable woman. I had the feeling tonight, she’d surprised herself just as much as she had us.
The sun had begun to crest the horizon, shining through the kitchen window like it did every morning. Ivy, though, threw her hand up and shielded her face, as if it burned to look at.
“Oh, no, don’t tell me you’re a vampire.”
Her jaw hung open, and then she burst into a fit of laughter, nearly falling out of the chair as she clutched her stomach and wheezed.
“Oh, my go—hahaha, fucking hell, that was a good one, I—hahahahahaha, ow, my side hurts.” She brought the gun up and pressed it to my temple, all the joking gone from her body as she rose from the floor like an elegant viper, poised to strike. “Don’t do that again.”
“What,” I asked cooly, even though the gun at my head had me a little worried. “Make you laugh?”
“Act like we’re friends.” Her pout deepened, and I wondered if she even knew what a friend was. “I don’t need any more friends. Especially not you three.”
“Sure thing, sweetheart,” I muttered, already angry at myself for even trying. Clearly, she wanted nothing to do with us as people. To her, we were just a means to an end, scum that deserved to die for something we’d done to a bad man .
My jaw dropped, pieces coming together one by one all of a sudden.
“Coyote.”
In the middle of switching a finished steak from his pan to the cutting board on the counter, the man hesitated, his eyes resembling those of a deer in the headlights of a car at night. He was paralyzed and confused, unsure whether to stay or run.
“Jackal’s room. Now.” I turned to Ivy again, narrowing my eyes. “Watch the stove so nothing burns.”
“I told you I’m not your cook—” she started to protest, but the words were lost behind me as I dragged my brother in arms into our third’s bedroom, locking the door behind us to keep prying ears as far away as possible.
Jackal strode out of his bathroom as soon as we walked in, not a stitch on him, save for a towel wrapped around his head. And that didn’t help much, all things considered. He realized he wasn’t alone and did one of those slow blinks, taking in the scene before him with a puzzled frown.
“What the fuck are you two doing in here?”
Coyote just looked away, but I couldn’t. My brain was stuck on his state of undress. I hadn’t actually thought he was going to take a fucking shower for real.
“Why the hell are you starkers, mate?”
Now, both Jackal and Coyote looked at me like I was the weird one. “Woah, wow, where did that thick accent come from all of a sudden?” Jackal eyed me from top to toe, taken aback by my heavy accent. “You ain’t talked like that in years.”
“Pardon the fuck out of me, my good sir,” I mocked in a high-society British voice, “but I don’t stop to filter out my accent and slang when my brain is firing a fucking million miles a second.” I turned to Coyote with a scowl, grabbing him by the collar of his shirt to haul him forward. “This fucker here best start talking, because I want the reason he got us into this mess, and I want it now.” I shoved Coyote back, then jabbed my pointer finger in Jackal’s chest. “And you’re going to make him, or I’ll kick your ass next.”
“You ain’t kicking anyone’s ass, ya banana bender,” he tossed back, shoving my chest pointedly, dick still swinging free. “But you’re welcome to try.”
“Put some fucken pants on, mate; that fucken trouser snake’s staring me in the eye, and it’s unnerving,” I sputtered, turning away pointedly.
When I turned back, Coyote had taken a seat on the end of Jackal’s bed, and his buddy posted up right next to him, thankfully wearing a pair of sweatpants that clung low to his hips.
At least he’d covered his fucking cock.
Fucking uncivilized assholes I lived with, man.
“You have something to tell us, Coyote? Like why you decided to bargain our lives with her? And why you’re not fighting any of this?”
He hung his head, hands balled into fists on his knees. “Because?—”
A knock sounded at the door, accompanied by an annoying ass voice demanding to know what we were plotting in here.
“Boy’s meeting, no girls allowed, sorry. It’s a circle jerk; you wouldn’t wanna join anyway.”
I turned back to the guys and put my hands on my hips, staring daggers into them without another word. Finally, Coyote cleared his throat, hands wringing in his lap, and opened that seldom-used mouth to explain.
“She doesn’t know.”
That wasn’t really an explanation.
“What do you mean?” I jerked my thumb back at the door to the commons. “You mean her? What doesn’t she know?”
“About her father.”
If my eyes rolled any further into the back of my head, they might get permanently lodged there. “Obviously, she’s delusional. We’ve never killed an innocent. And I’m sure whatever her father did, he deserved?—”
“Danny Cullough.”
I knew Coyote committed all our kills to memory, but I didn’t, so it took me a minute to place the name. Once I did, though, it still left questions unanswered.
“So what about him? He was a trafficker. Jackal linked him to his sister’s death, and we broke into his house and killed him in his front yard. No witnesses. Dead of night.” I waved my hand in a circle, waiting for more. Hoping for something I’d missed. “What makes that special?”
He heaved a sigh that deflated him like a leaking balloon. “She saw us.”
Well, fuck. “I don’t remember anyone being around?—”
“Through the window.”
“Coyote, you’re just imagining things, man. There was nobody there, we made sure of it?—”
“I saw her,” he insisted, shooting up from the bed to grip my arms as he shook me gently. “She doesn’t know.” His face fell, and he released me with a huff, turning to Jackal for assistance, reassurance, something that I wasn’t able to give him because I couldn’t read well enough between the lines to figure him out.
“She wouldn’t believe us even if we did tell her,” Jackal started, understanding dawning in his eyes. “And she would hate us for it, when she finally saw the truth.”
Ah, there was the rub. “You like her, don’t you, Coyote?”
His silence said enough.
“Well,” Jackal said, rubbing his palms together. “I’ll just give her his file, clear things up, and she can be on her way. Who cares if she hates us, right? She was planning to kill us a couple hours ago.” He stood, but Coyote reached out and yanked him back down to the bed. “Hey, bro, what gives?”
“Don’t.” His eyes were pleading, begging the closest thing to a family he’d had since he was five. “Please. ”
“Aw, hell,” I muttered, already mentally preparing myself for the next however long it took for her to learn the truth on her own, or decide it wasn’t important, or kill us, whichever she landed on in the end. “Why couldn’t you have picked an easier woman to fall for, mate?”
“We did this,” he mumbled slowly, eyes on his hands like they were still covered in the blood of her father. “We hurt her.”
“And you just expect us to roll over and play good dog for her because you have an attack of conscience? It was an accident. And he was a bad man.”
Jackal frowned. “He must’ve put up a hell of a front at home for her to idolize him this much. To seek trained killers out for revenge all these years later.”
“Don’t tell me you’re about to start feeling sorry for her, too. You, the asshole who doesn’t live with regrets.” I already knew from how his lips curled in a frown that I’d lost him, too. “Aw, fuck you guys,” I growled, feeling the walls close in around me. “This is a whole lotta bullshit, you know that?”
“He gave her his word, man,” Jackal pointed out. “We owe him that much, at least.”
Of course the only thing that would trump his devil-may-care attitude was his buddy, Coyote. “Fine,” I said, throwing my hands in the air. “But someone has to tell her eventually. And when that time comes, it’s not gonna be me.”