RACHEL
“Okay, so I know it’s really bad of me to tell you this, and it’s like eavesdropping but not—”
I rubbed my forehead where a headache had stopped brewing and had decided to take up permanent residence inside my skull. “What is it, Lily?”
“When I was packing Rex’s things up last night—by the way, how do men pack so light? It’s a miracle—”
“Lily, stay on track, please? I have a killer migraine.”
She clucked her tongue. “Guess you can’t have any of the good meds.”
“No, Giulia’s already shared the joys of children’s acetaminophen with me,” I grumbled. “What do you need from me?”
“I put Rex’s things in the kitchen, but I couldn’t resist bringing this to you.” She pushed a box at me. A small box. A jewelry box. “It’s what you think it is,” she whispered.
I blinked at her. “You found this with Rex’s belongings?”
Her head bobbed up and down. “With his socks. I wish he and Link had gone to the same school of laundry folding. It’s a good thing we have maids—”
“Lily!” I half-barked. “Please, honey. Migraine, remember?”
“Sorry,” she said with a wince. “I’m just excited. Open it!”
“You haven’t?”
“I peeped,” she admitted. “The second I saw the solitaire, I knew what it was and didn’t open it anymore. I shouldn’t have looked in the first place but I was super curious.”
“Rex was going to propose last night,” I rasped, trying to reconcile that with what had actually happened.
She released a soft snort. “Looks like it. I mean, he’s not seeing anyone else, is he?”
No. He wasn’t.
So what was all that bullcrap about brands?
I palmed the box, brain whirring with what this might mean.
“Old Ladies don’t have to be wives, do they?” Lily asked quietly.
“No. They don’t.”
Apparently, my confusion was obvious because she asked, “Has he asked to brand you?”
“The opposite.”
“I’m not sure what the opposite of that is.”
“He says I can’t talk about it until I’m ready to accept what it entails.”
Her lips twitched. “I think Rex believes his own press sometimes.”
“Gee, ya think?” I mocked, but I was smiling too. “He gets all wrapped up in his role that he doesn’t see the forest for the trees.”
“Where did he go last night?”
“LA.”
“Why?”
I hedged, “Business.”
“Club business?”
“Personal business.” I fudged the truth. “It’s to do with Bear’s will.”
Her eyes widened. “Oh. Sorry for asking.”
“It’s okay. I didn’t tell you anything that I wouldn’t tell the club.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t? I know there are a lot of mutterings going on right now.”
I reared back at that, which did nothing for my head. “Mutterings?”
“Men bitching about where he is. Asking when he’s coming back. Link says Nyx is keeping things under control but he doesn’t have Rex’s finesse.”
“Nyx and finesse are alien concepts. He’s a sledgehammer to the skull, not just a fist.”
“Rex is a knife to the heart,” she agreed. “So maybe don’t mention anything? I know people are on edge about Bear too.”
“What about him?”
“His funeral. They want to put him to rest. Bear was popular.”
“You don’t need to tell me, Lily,” I drawled then immediately regretted it when her cheeks flushed.
“Sorry, I forgot my place.”
“Your place? This isn’t a Dickens novel. I’m sorry I’m in a pissy mood. I just didn’t need to—” I sighed.
The ring.
These so-called mutterings at the club.
It was too much.
Much too much.
“I get it. Sorry,” she repeated with another wince. “I got caught up on all the gossip with Tiff this morning and I wanted to keep you in the loop.”
Her words resonated deeply with me because, to her, I was the First Lady, even if Rex hadn’t branded me yet.
“Thank you, Lily,” I said rawly.
Her smile was genuine. “Apparently, Kendra left in the middle of the night.”
“That cat got kicked out?”
“Tiff doesn’t know, but Kendra’s motel room’s empty.
” She shrugged. “Unless Giulia killed her and buried the body with all her worldly possessions, of course. I don’t think she could manage that with the size of her bump right now though.
So I’m thinking she just took off. Maybe being puked on was the final straw? ”
I couldn’t stop myself from grinning at that, and Lily and I shared our amusement in a show of female solidarity.
I’d learned over the years that some clubwhores weren’t all bad. Then, you got one like Kendra who epitomized every ounce of scum in the world.
It made it even harder to accept that that same woman was Rex’s half-sister. Bear’s daughter.
Not that I could tell Lily that.
Not that I could tell anyone that.
It was Rex’s secret to share, if he ever wanted to.
Even as I was wondering how the hell Bear had let his daughter become a clubwhore, Lily was saying, “Anyway, those ideas I was talking about last night?”
“Ugh, we just finished one fundraiser. I need a break before I contemplate the next one.” When her face fell, I rubbed my brow tiredly.
Killing enthusiasm like that was a foolish move on my part.
Myopic too. “How about this… You create a game plan, bring it to me so I can check it over, and we work from there?”
“Sounds great,” she declared, beaming a megawatt smile at me. “I’ll liaise with your events organizer. You don’t have to do a thing!”
She proceeded to go off on a tangent about the charities and the parties, and why fresh flowers as table settings were a poor environmental choice…
By the time she stopped talking, my head was banging and I was relieved when, full steam ahead, she retreated from my office and left me in peace.
Not that I got to enjoy it for long.
Shortly after, Nyx stormed in, demanding, “Can we talk, Rach?”
This was the last conversation I needed to be having.
Sighing, I eyed the bruising on his jaw. “Sure. We should get our stories straight about last night anyway. You worked on that with Harlow?”
Nyx grunted. “Yeah.”
“You picked up the cage and your bike from the pound?”
“I did.”
“Who went with you?”
He stomped forward and took a seat where Lily had just been perched. Unlike her, he seemed to fill up the space with his size—his glower alone was bigger than Texas.
I arched a brow at him. “You’d think you’d spent the night in jail from that expression of yours.”
That didn’t lighten him up any as he snapped, “We got a rideshare to the city, okay?”
I tried not to laugh.
First Rex, now Nyx?
Clearly not a happy bunny—and that I was unsure if it was about needing to take a rideshare to cover their tracks or about last night’s situation was a testament to how bewildering his priorities were—Nyx ground out, “I killed that fucker, Rachel. More than that, I was found standing over the goddamn body and Harlow was discovered watching me do it. Why the fuck aren’t I being sent up? ”
“Is that a complaint I hear?”
“No, it’s a demand to know what the hell’s going on.”
I tapped my nails against the desk and murmured, “Funny how you’re the one demanding to know what’s going on when, from my side of the table, you need to be answering my questions.”
“What do you want to know?”
“How about you tell me why I had an impromptu meeting with Aidan O’Donnelly Sr. last night, huh?”
“O’Donnelly Sr.?” Nyx’s eyes rounded. “The Five Pointer?”
“The Five Pointer,” I retorted, putting the stress on the appropriate word in that label.
“I knew I’d come to his attention,” he muttered, scratching his stubbled chin. “But I don’t get why he approached me this way.”
That latter part was mumbled mostly under his breath.
Unluckily for him, I had great hearing.
“You sound confused.”
“I am.”
“Not angry, is what I meant,” I rasped.
He shrugged. “Home, ain’t I?”
I gritted my teeth. “What’s going on, Nyx?”
“Around Christmas, I started getting some calls, a couple texts.” He heaved a sigh. “It was always from Unknown Sender or Unknown so I never put much weight behind it. Then, one day, I got a picture of a bag of bones with a text: ‘To incinerate or not to incinerate, that is the question.’”
“A bag of bones?”
He hummed. “Kevin.”
Aghast, I demanded, “O’Donnelly Sr. was behind the theft of the body from the morgue?”
“Apparently. He said he took my problems away, and I was curious about what I was being fed. I didn’t see any harm in meeting up with him.”
Now he was calm, he was starting to piss me off.
When I thought about how he’d fucked up my evening, how Rex had been able to use him as an excuse to keep me on the East Coast, I could have throttled him.
“You didn’t see any harm in meeting up with a stranger?
” I seethed after he just stared back at me and didn’t run for the hills.
“A stranger who turned out to be the head of the Irish Mob? A stranger who, in fact, trapped you into getting arrested just so he could show you how much control he has over precincts and over measly things like homicide cases?”
“Yeah.”
“Fuck, Nyx. I know you’re a man of few words, but that’s beyond a joke. According to him, he’s got a list of perverts who need to die.
“He already knew about the promises you made to your family. He thinks they castrated you when they forced you to make that promise.”
His scowl was immediate. “How the hell did that get back to him?”
“We have a bunch of men who cluck harder than hens in a coop, Nyx. Half the criminal underworld probably knows about your ‘castration.’”
That had him snorting. “Castrating—”
“Giulia told me she thinks you’re not coping well,” I butted in before he could be dismissive.
“I ain’t.”
“Reassuring.” I exhaled. “The fact you went there, period, tells me there’s something going on with you that you aren’t telling me.”
“Temptation…” He grunted. “The temptation was strong, but I went there with good intentions.”
I scowled at him. “Nothing about last night came from the angle of good intentions.”
“Unknown, well, O’Donnelly talked a good game, but I wanted to…” He rubbed his eyes. “You know, before, Mav used to find me my kills. It worked out fine. I got to appease the beast, a fucker died, everything was good.