Ranger (Jericho’s Boys #4)

1. Seven

Seven Symanski lingered on the darkened uptown streets, standing outside Lorenzo Conti’s apartment building for so long the doorman looked two seconds away from calling the police.

Seven didn’t blame him. It was late and Seven was acting a little suspicious even by his own standards. But he was just…stuck.

He pulled his phone out for the hundredth time, reading over their text exchange.

Seven

It’s Seven. We met the other day. I was just wondering if you were available?

His response had come within five minutes.

Law Daddy

Depends on what you have in mind. If you mean professionally, no, I’m off the clock. If you mean personally, ask me nicely like a good boy and I might tell you.

Seven had gotten hard just from some words on the screen. He blamed his long shitty day and his vulnerable state for his response.

Seven

Are you busy, Daddy?

Law Daddy

Not too busy for you, brat baby. Why?

Seven

I was kind of hoping to see you.

Law Daddy

Kind of hoping? Is that how you ask for something?

Seven

Can I see you again? Tonight, I mean.

Law Daddy

Like a date or do you want to play?

Seven’s heart had plummeted into his stomach. He hadn’t had any agenda at all when he first sent the message. He’d just wanted someone to make him forget his shitty day for a while.

You are receiving a collect call from…Stanley Symanski…an inmate at Greengate Correctional Facility. To accept this call, press one. To decline, hang up now. This call may be monitored and recorded.

He’d pressed one. It had all been downhill from there. He should have known. It would have been less painful to slam his balls in a car door than talk to his sperm donor.

He shook thoughts of his father away. Fuck him. He was done giving his dad any more of his energy. If his mom wanted to keep letting him tie her in knots, that was their business. Seven was done. So fucking done.

Seven

I wanna play.

Please.

Law Daddy

Okay, brat baby. Let’s play. I’m dropping a pin to my place. Top floor. The doorman will let you up. But if you come, I’m not letting you go before sunrise. Pack accordingly.

He’d practically given himself whiplash with how fast he’d moved to obey, so he wasn’t sure why he was hesitating now.

Okay, that wasn’t entirely true. He hesitated because he knew if he went up there they would have sex, and Seven—for all his talk—had only had sex with three other people, two of whom he’d never even learned their names.

None of which he’d ever “played” with, whatever the hell that meant.

All his encounters had been quick and dirty, fumbling around in the dark and then disappearing before his partner had removed the condom.

This…wasn’t that.

Enzo had probably fucked hundreds of people; Seven could see it in his demeanor.

He’d even heard Jericho say his brother owned a sex club.

A public one. Seven knew they existed. He wasn’t naive, but he didn’t know anyone who owned one.

Well, Asa and Zane had their very own sex dungeon, but that was just private, weird, rich people shit.

Wasn’t it?

Was that what Enzo was into? Whips and chains? Spanking? The idea had Seven’s blood pumping a little faster. He wasn’t opposed to it. He knew he liked letting someone else take control. Or he would, if he found someone he could trust.

It was clear just from their brief interaction that Enzo was used to controlling a room.

He probably walked into every place like he owned it.

He sat in a way that took up space. He didn’t think twice about doing bad things to bad people for good reason.

He was, for all intents and purposes, a criminal.

But so was Seven.

On paper, Seven’s charges made him seem far more dangerous than Enzo.

Seven had killed people. Tortured them. He’d beaten up gang members, broken their kneecaps, helped Jericho dangle someone off the roof of a six-story building once without even breaking a sweat.

He’d watched his loved ones—those he’d chosen as his family—do things to the human body that would have scarred most people for life and then gone out for beer and chicken wings.

Yet now, he was out there cowering on the corner over one sexy-as-fuck, terrifyingly confident attorney.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

The thing was, Seven did the violent stuff because it was necessary…

not because he wanted to. When he was younger, Felix used to call him his soft boy.

Anytime someone picked on him, anytime his father hit him or rejected him or just made him feel like shit, he would cry and Felix would hold him and pet him and tell him that sometimes people were just shitty and it had nothing to do with him.

It only took a few years for Seven to build an iron shell around his softest parts, to learn to hide his pain beneath ten layers of sarcasm, to detach his conscience from his actions.

Killing didn’t bother him anymore. The screams of his victims rolled off him.

But when it came to things like this, like one-on-one interactions with other boys—well, men—Seven was still that soft boy.

That was the problem. Everyone wanted the fake him, not the real one. But he couldn’t trust anyone with the real him. He had no idea what Enzo had in store for him once he got upstairs, but he also knew he wouldn’t say no. He wouldn’t refuse, no matter what he wanted. And that scared him a little.

He was tempted to call his friends. But they would all say the same thing. Go home. Save it for a day when he wasn’t drowning in his daddy issues. But Stanley Symanski was hardly a father, despite his many, many children. Was it any wonder Seven kept looking for a new one? A better one?

God, he was so fucked up. Freud would have a field day with him.

Fuck it.

He slung his bag over his shoulder and entered the building, locking eyes with the doorman to let him know he wasn’t casing the place. He made it to the two sleek-looking elevators before he remembered that he was supposed to have the doorman let him up.

When he stepped off the elevator, the doorman was smirking, looking at him expectantly.

“Um, I think you’re supposed to let me up?” Seven mumbled, thrusting his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans.

“You’re here to see Mr. Conti.”

It wasn’t a question.

Seven nodded. “Yeah. How’d you know?”

The doorman’s gaze swept over him, and he didn’t even bother hiding his judgmental expression. “Lucky guess. Swipe the card over the keypad, then hit the button for the penthouse. That’s the button that says P,” he said, giving him a tight smile.

Seven was too nervous to even say something snarky, instead walking away on wobbly legs.

Once inside, he wiped his sweaty palms on his jeans before following the doorman’s instructions.

The elevator lurched into motion, as clumsy as his own stuttering heartbeat, leaving him staring at his own panicked reflection.

Why did all these swanky places have mirrored walls?

Why did rich folks like looking at themselves so much?

Maybe he should have dressed in something better than jeans and a hoodie, but he didn’t want to look like he was trying too hard, even if he was. Even if he’d scrubbed every inch of his body like he was covering up a crime scene.

The elevator came to an abrupt stop, then dinged. He expected to find a small hallway and a closed door, but instead was spit out directly into Lorenzo Conti’s actual apartment. Well, penthouse.

No matter how many times Seven had pictured Enzo’s place on the way over, he was in no way prepared for what he found.

Freckles and Jericho lived in a penthouse.

It looked like a huge apartment with overpriced, overstuffed furniture.

But this? This was a cathedral. The apartment sprawled out over hundreds of feet in either direction, and the glass wall in front of him spanned two floors before curving to become part of the roof.

There was a huge orange couch directly in front of him, which he assumed meant this was the living room. It was all he could see without leaving the elevator; the soles of his shoes had melted to the floor.

He stood, frozen, gaze darting around the parts of the apartment actually in his eyeline. What had he been thinking?

He should just go.

He reached for the button to the lobby when Enzo sauntered into the living room looking like pure, unadulterated sin in a pair of fitted black track pants, which were slung low on his hips, and a black tank top that showed off every single inch of colorful ink that spanned his perfect body, starting from under his beard and ending at his fingertips.

He had a towel in one hand and his phone in the other. He gave no indication that he’d noted Seven’s arrival as he spoke abruptly to whoever was on the other line.

“No, we’re not waiving privilege, not even partially. If they want those internal memos, they can issue a subpoena and we’ll fight it.”

Seven’s ears burned. Should he be listening to this?

Technically, this was all privileged information.

He should definitely go. But he didn’t. Instead, he stood there, mouth dry as he watched Enzo’s well-muscled arm lift to run the towel over his damp chestnut hair before settling the fabric around his shoulders.

“I don’t care what outside counsel is saying, we’re controlling the narrative, Drucilla. Client doesn’t move, doesn’t speak, doesn’t so much as blink without clearance from our office. You know this.”

Enzo glanced out the glass window then froze. He’d finally noticed Seven standing stock still in the reflection. He turned, a knowing smirk breaking across his face, taking him from dark and dangerous to hot and rich in the blink of an eye.

He took in Seven’s statue-like pose before he crooked his finger, beckoning him inside, making no attempt to hide the way his eyes roved Seven’s body from head-to-toe.