27. Dax
DAX
Dear Diary,
The price of being near her is pretending I don’t want to kill him.
Istood behind the reception desk in my shop, Reaper beside me, his partner, X, across from us, flipping through the example book the other guys and I had created to show off our styles. He pointed at a traditional snake I’d completed a while back, blood dripping from its fangs.
“Ooh, this! Because this is exactly what I look like when I’m out on the ice in my mascot costume. Sharp. Focused. Deadly. I really just spell out intimidation to the other team, just like this snake does.”
Reaper screwed up his face. “X, your costume has a sparkly cape…”
X glared at him. “I’m a snake with sequined scales! Sequins are manly, Levi!”
“I guess maybe you blind them? Sequin light in the eye could be very painful,” I offered, trying to help the guy out.
I’d seen him skating, or more like stumbling, around the ice in his handmade viper costume that had once been described as more sparkly dildo than vicious predator.
X sighed. “I could just get the team logo tattooed on my ass, I guess. Do you think that’s too much for our first season together?”
“Yes,” Reaper and I said in unison.
My phone buzzed, and I left the two of them debating over X’s next tattoo to answer it. I didn’t know the number, but that wasn’t unusual. People shared my number around with friends who wanted work done. It was just as common for me to get a call as it was for the shop to take one.
“Dax?” a man on the other end questioned after I said hello.
“Speaking.”
“Good, good. It’s Carlos Guerra calling.”
I turned away, walking farther out of earshot of the rest of the guys, busy with machines running, ink being pressed into skin. I curled my fingers around the phone so hard I was surprised it didn’t crack. “What can I do for you, Mr. Guerra?”
He chuckled into the phone. “No need to be so formal. Carlos is fine. I’m calling to invite you to a party I’m having. Tonight. At my house. I believe you know where it is?”
A prickle of awareness spread across the back of my neck. That statement had sounded an awful lot like a sly reminder he knew I’d been at his house.
Which meant he knew I’d spoken to Nyah that day.
I hoped like hell it didn’t also mean he knew what Nyah and I had done in the bathroom at the hockey rink, or in the back seat of my car after the fights.
I forced my voice to sound as normal as possible. “I do. I don’t think I can—”
“I won’t take no for an answer, son. We’re going to have a great time. There’re people I want you to meet. People who can do things for your career and make you a lot of money.”
“I have a career, sir. I’m a tattoo artist.”
But Carlos wasn’t having it. “Son, you’re a fighter. I saw it in you the minute I stepped inside that warehouse. That’s where you’re going to make your millions. Not tattooing in Saint View where people can’t even afford to pay you a living wage.”
I bristled at that. Fuck him and his money. “I’m really proud of the business I’ve built,” I argued, probably stupidly, but I couldn’t stop myself. The shop had been my entire fucking life, until Nyah had walked into it.
And now that she was gone, it was all I had left.
Fighting was something I’d done for sport, and now it was something I did because it distracted me from the gaping hole she’d left in my heart when she’d walked away.
“Of course you are,” Carlos coaxed. “But Dax, I want you at this party tonight. You agreed to come last we spoke.”
“You didn’t mention a party. You mentioned five K.”
“And you’ll get it. Plus canapes.”
I paused, but I already knew what I was going to say. There was no other response. I had a feeling if I’d said no, Carlos would have found a way to make me say yes.
No matter what he wanted me to do tonight, it was a chance to see Nyah. “Fine. Five K when I walk through the doors. You want me to fight, whatever. I’ll fight.”
Carlos clucked his tongue. “Good choice, son. Good choice. I’ll see you at eight. And, Dax?”
I waited.
“Wear a suit.”
Ipulled into the Guerras’ circular driveway at nine. A man in a suit stepped up to my door before I could even get my fingers to the handle and opened it for me.
“I’ll park your car, sir.”
Nobody ever called me sir, and it was unsettling.
But I handed him the key fob and let him take the wheel.
I trailed behind a few other stragglers who’d also shown up fashionably late.
Two giant peacocks elegantly wandered the gardens, their giant fanned-out tails glinting beneath the lights shining out from the house.
Inside, Carlos was nowhere to be seen, but I wandered through the foyer, following the sounds of the party that was clearly taking place out back. I sucked in a breath, the scene spread out in front of me like something out of The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.
There were people everywhere, each one dressed to the nines in fancy suits that probably cost more than my house had, and dresses that showed more skin than you saw on the beach. Plunging necklines, high-cut splits, and jewels sparkling on fingers or around throats.
“Fuck me,” I muttered, pulling at the open neck of the white shirt I’d found at the back of my closet. I hadn’t worn it in years, my normal wardrobe consisting mostly of jeans and vintage tees that were more often than not stained with ink or paint.
The black pants clung to my ass more than I wanted them to, though I had figured that’s what tailored pants were supposed to do, and I just wasn’t used to them.
As I passed people, I got the impression they were talking about me, which only made hot embarrassment flush across my skin. I knew I didn’t belong here. My mother was the hired help, and it was like it was branded across the back of my shirt.
When someone stopped me and asked when the hors d’oeuvres were being served, I knew I fit in better with the waitstaff than with Carlos’s expensive friends.
I gazed around for my mother. Maybe I could escape into the kitchen and help her, because surely she was working here tonight.
But Carlos raised a hand from the other side of the sparkling blue pool, fairy lights strung over the top. “Dax! Come here.”
I’d been summoned and none too quietly. I muttered, “Excuse me, please,” and dodged people standing around in groups, glasses of champagne in their hands.
Everyone watched me go, since Carlos had turned it into a spectacle.
I got the impression these people hung on his every word. If he’d told them all to take their clothes off and jump in the pool, I suspected they would have done it without a second thought.
Whatever kept the man happy.
I probably needed to take a leaf out of their books.
I reached his side, and he offered me his hand, shaking mine vigorously.
“You made it. I was beginning to wonder where you were. People I personally invite to my parties don’t normally keep me waiting.”
I didn’t miss the sharp look in his eye, nor the tone. It was masked as disappointment, but beneath that, a warning. That this was the last time I’d do that or next time he wouldn’t be so generous.
“My apologies,” I said, more for the people around us who were no doubt eavesdropping, more than for Carlos himself, since we both knew the game we were playing. “I had to close my shop to be here, and I had a client who was having trouble choosing between tattooing his stomach or his ass.”
Carlos raised an eyebrow.
A few of the people around me tittered with laughter, confirming they were indeed listening in, hoping for some gossip or to find out the reason Carlos had singled out the one man here who didn’t fit.
Carlos acted like I hadn’t just made a social faux pas and reached behind him. “Dax, I’d like you to meet my fiancée, Nyah Matish.”
Nyah trotted out from behind him in heels that were too tall for her to walk comfortably in.
I hadn’t even realized it was her, standing behind him with her back to me, drinking and talking with a group of people I didn’t know.
She glanced up, one hand wrapped around Carlos’s, and her gaze met mine.
It didn’t matter how many times I’d looked at this woman. How many times I’d seen her in clothes or without. Every time stopped me in my tracks.
It wasn’t only that she was beautiful. It wasn’t that her dress clung to the curve of her hips and the swell of her tits, both more pronounced than I remembered from when we’d dated.
It was that unnamable thing that had my entire body screaming to touch her. To hold her. To pick her up and carry her out of here and shout, “Mine!” at anyone who even thought about trying to stop me.
It was that my heart beat too fast when she was around and I didn’t want it to stop.
Yet all I could see was the way she held another man’s hand.
His thumb stroked over the back of it in what was probably supposed to be affectionate but was clearly possessive to me.
My mouth dried. “We’ve met,” I said to Carlos. “You know that.”
Carlos laughed. “Oh, of course you have! You dated.” Carlos put his arm around Nyah’s shoulders and drew her closer to him.
But he didn’t lower his voice at all when he said, “Dax told me you wouldn’t put out for him, so he lost interest. That’s true, isn’t it, sweetheart?
You’re keeping your virgin pussy pure and clean for our wedding night, aren’t you? ”
Mortification twisted Nyah’s expression, but she nodded obediently. “Of course, my love.”
He turned to her and made a show of kissing her mouth, pressing his tongue past her lips, one hand sliding up her side to squeeze her boob, barely covered by the deep-red satin of her dress.
All while I had to watch.
Jealousy burned through me, the ache deep and raw, but I said nothing, made no move, forced my expression to remain neutral.
Eventually, when Carlos realized I wasn’t going to react to the way he pawed at her, he pulled his mouth away from hers and leaned in conspiratorially, acting like he and I were the best of friends. “I’ve fingered her, checked she’s still tight. She was as wet as Niagara Falls for me.”