Chapter 29 Malice
MALICE
My jaw clenches, and irritation buzzes under my skin like a hive of pissed off bees.
Seeing Willow and Ransom gazing at each other like that, their bodies so close together, her face tilted up toward his, makes me want to hit something.
Ransom has always been the most easy-going of the three of us, and it figures that he’s charmed his way right into Willow’s heart.
I should probably be glad about that, since it will make her more willing to stay here like we need her to—but instead, it rankles something deep inside me, making me think of all the times she’s looked at me with fear or loathing.
“Let’s go.” I jerk my head down the hallway. “You need to see what Vic found.”
Ransom’s expression turned serious the moment I mentioned Carl, and he nods. “Coming.”
He grips Willow’s shoulder lightly, as if he’s about to steer her out the bedroom door and bring her with us, but I fold my arms, stopping them both with my glare.
That hot, prickling feeling of jealousy fills my stomach again, and I shake my head decisively.
Maybe I’m being an asshole and lashing out unfairly, but at the moment, I don’t fucking care.
“You stay right where you are,” I grit out, jerking my chin at Willow. “You’re not our fucking roommate. You’re not one of us, and you don’t get to sit in on our meetings.”
Her eyes flash with surprise and hurt, and she glares at me like she hates me.
Her mouth presses into a thin line, and I’m filled with the overwhelming and irrational desire to kiss that goddamned frown off her face.
To toss her down on Ransom’s bed and make her scream my name until she can’t pretend to hate me anymore.
She’s under my skin somehow, and I don’t want her there. I fucking hate it.
“It’s alright,” Ransom reassures her. “Like I said last night, there are some things it’s probably safer for you not to know. We’ll handle this. Just make yourself at home, okay? I’ll be back.”
He gestures around his room, and I clench my hands into fists as I catch the grateful look she shoots him. The only time she’s ever looked at me like that is after I helped her get that money back from her cunt of an adoptive mother—and of course, I immediately fucked it up by lashing out at her.
Fuck it. It’s better this way. The more she hates me, the easier it will be to keep telling myself I hate her too.
With a noise that’s barely more than a grunt, I jerk my chin at Ransom.
He follows me out of the room, leaving Willow staring after both of us.
I can feel him shooting a sidelong glance at me as we walk, but I ignore it.
He probably knows what’s got me in such a pissy mood, and if he doesn’t, there’s no way in fucking hell I’m going to tell him.
Vic is waiting for us when we step into his room, parked in his usual spot in front of the bank of screens on his desk, deep in hacker mode.
A lot of the time, he’s pretty detached and withdrawn, but he comes alive in a different way when he’s dealing with this stuff.
It’s the only time he’s more animated, and some of his tics and little habits fall away when he’s on the computer.
As if translating his thoughts into ones and zeros helps him relax.
Ransom and I take our usual places behind him, flanking his chair on each side, and Vic glances over his shoulder.
“I was able to get a picture of the guy who’s been poking into Nikolai’s death,” he says. “A newly installed security camera at the laundromat across the street picked him up when he went to Sapphire to see Carl, so we have a face now.”
“Just a face?” Ransom asks.
Vic presses a few buttons on his keyboard and brings the picture up.
Ransom and I both peer at it, but I can already tell it’s not someone we know.
The guy looks brutal and menacing, definitely not one of the bottom feeder criminals who fuck around in Detroit.
This is someone a lot more powerful than that.
“I don’t know who he is,” my twin admits. “I’ve run him through a few databases I hacked into, but there are no matches.”
I blow out a breath through my nose, stepping away from the desk a little. “So we’ve got half a lead.”
“Better than nothing,” Ransom murmurs. “We still need to figure out who the fuck this guy is, but at least we have a face.”
“And Carl was the last living person who knew that Willow was at the brothel that night,” Victor points out. “Which means that whoever this man is, his lead just dried up. That buys us some time to get more information. I’ll do whatever digging I can.”
“Speaking of Willow…”
Ransom’s voice trails off, and I glare at him, still pissed about what I saw when I walked into his room.
Vic nods, picking up the thread of our brother’s thought. “What do we do about her?”
“We can’t let her go,” I say. “That fucker who’s hunting her is still out there somewhere, and we don’t know how good of a liar this Carl asshole was.” I jerk my head toward the man’s face on the screen. “If whoever that is finds out Willow was there that night…”
I don’t have to finish that sentence for either of them. There’s a good chance she’ll be tortured for information about us, and if the unknown man is as skilled as he looks, he’s probably turned torture into an art form.
“So we just keep her here?” Vic asks. He sounds uneasy, and I can tell he doesn’t like the idea. He’s gotten attached to Willow in his own way, I think, but he was a lot more comfortable watching her from afar than he is with having her right up in our business like this.
That makes fucking two of us.
“If it was up to me, she’d be dead already,” I point out, scowling.
Ransom rolls his eyes. “Give it up, Mal. She straight up called you out on that last night. We haven’t killed her by now, so it’s clearly not an option. We need to stop bringing it up, and you”—he cocks a brow at me—“need to stop waving guns in her face. It scares her.”
“She’s not as fragile as she looks,” I shoot back, remembering the way she stepped right up to the barrel of my gun last night, and the way her eyes flashed as she dared me to pull the trigger.
“That’s beside the point,” Vic cuts in, getting us back on track. “The question is, can we afford to keep her here, living with us indefinitely? We’ll have another job from X at some point. What will we do with her then? Bring her with us? Our lives aren’t meant to have someone like her in them.”
“What choice do we have, though?” Ransom argues, scrubbing a hand through his messy brown hair. “We’re not gonna kill her, and we need to keep her close, so where else can she go?”
Right. That’s the main fucking problem, isn’t it?
I’m with Vic in that I don’t want her here, so deep in our shit. But she has to stay. It’s dangerous for her out there, and dangerous for us to let her go free and risk this mystery man tracking her down.
And although I barely allow the thought to form in my mind, there’s some part of me that doesn’t want to let her go. That wants to keep her here, now that we have her under our roof.
“He’s right.” I nod sharply. “She’s the last link someone could use to connect us to Nikolai’s death. We can’t risk it.”
“Okay. So she stays with us.” Ransom looks pleased, and the grin on his face makes my shoulders tighten up.
“We need to lay down some ground rules then,” I say.
“Like what?”
“She’s a distraction. We’ve got shit to do, things to be focusing on, and we can’t afford to let her throw us off more than she already has. So we have to agree that none of us are going to fuck her.”
I say it for all of us, but I look at Ransom as I speak. He’s the one with her in his bed, after all. The one she likes best.
Vic turns around in his chair, facing the two of us, his eyes serious. “Agreed.”
“Yeah, okay.” Ransom shrugs and nods, looking a bit disgruntled.
I nod too, cementing our agreement.
With that settled, we move on to other business. Ransom agrees to take point on our upcoming deal with the Donovan gang, which is where we need to be putting our focus right now. All the shit with Nikolai and whoever’s looking for answers aside, we still have to keep our shop running.
But even as I try to focus on what’s coming next, looking ahead to the future and laying out plans, my mind is still on the beautiful blonde waif down the hall.