Chapter 20
Bear
M y damn stomach was going to ruin me faster than my dick was. I’d walked in with every intention of laying down the law. And that witchy woman had food ready. Hot food. Fresh off the stove. It sapped the vinegar right out of me.
Worse ? She’d been trapped outside with that asshole, or some other asshole I’d pissed off lately, who’d been sniffing in my lawn and laying down booby traps. Fucker .
I picked up the caltrop I’d tossed down.
“ I think Sketch has a metal detector.” He bought one for his son a while back. It had to be somewhere in his junk pile.
“ That would be helpful.” Rose picked at her food. I made sure she was eating it before I took another delicious bite.
Relying solely on her body language, something was still bothering her. Sure , having Carl creeping around was bad, but the tension in her shoulders and the way she wouldn’t look me in the eye went beyond what she’d already relayed. “ Anything else I should know?”
She set her fork down with a choked sigh. “ He killed two animals.”
I didn’t realize I’d slammed my hands on the table as I jolted up from my chair. But I must have done it, or knocked the table, hard. Her beer tipped over and left a spilled trail of foam right to the edge where she caught it.
To remedy my outburst, I grabbed a towel from the rail by the sink and helped Rose clean up the mess. Her hands were shaking too much to do more than make the mess worse.
I caught one. “ Hey . I’m sorry.”
Hell , her whole body shook.
Now I’ve been known to make grown men piss their pants. It’s just the way I’m built. And the image I’ve cultivated. With probably a good helping of very real actions propping up all the rumors of my violence. But I’m not the same guy around women.
Except , I’d pulled a gun on her. Pulled a knife on her, too. Hell . She had to be scared as fuck of me by now.
Was she scared of me last weekend? Was that why she slept with me? Fear ?
My stomach went sour.
“ Rose ?”
It took her at least two tries to meet my eyes. As she did, her spine straightened. Her exhale was shaky. “ We really need a damp washcloth so the table isn’t sticky.”
“ Let’s forget about the table for a minute and talk about this.” I pulled her arm up. She fought me a little, making a fist as I brought her arm into view.
“ You caught me by surprise. That’s all.”
“ That’s not all, and you know it.”
Her nostrils flared.
“ Do you know that when you lie, your chin goes down? It’s almost as if your brain is saying, dig in . And that? Is one hell of a tell, woman. It means you’ve had to lie often.”
The hard focus she stabbed me with told me a lot more than words. Roishin Black did not like anyone knowing her secrets. I recognized that trait because I guarded mine just as fiercely.
I tried again. “ Why are you shaking?”
“ I’m not shaking anymore.”
And she wasn’t. She’d controlled it or squashed it. The white knuckles of her tiny fist gave me a clue. “ No , now you’re pissed off.”
She tugged harder to try to extract herself from my grip. Cute , but ineffective. I smiled. Maybe it was time to broach another mystery Roishin Black hid. “ Carl says you stole money from him.”
Her struggling ceased abruptly. “ When did you talk to Carl ?”
“ I didn’t. He sent Fish with the message.” I noted that she didn’t deny it.
Something shifted by her eyes. The anger or maybe the fear was gone. Whatever had changed morphed her face from unguarded to a careful mask. The same one she wore that first night at Carl’s .
Odd .
I hated it because I knew my window of insight was gone.
To knock her off balance again, I pulled her fist to my lips and kissed it. “ Keep your secrets, witch, but tell me everything that happened in my yard. And I’ll know if you leave anything out because I’ve got cameras covering both mine and Jackson’s house.” I loosened my grip on her arm.
Her hand slipped free. “ We need to clean this up first.”
“ No , eat and talk, then clean up. I’m not negotiating here.”
“ Are you going to blow up again?”
“ I might. I might not. Was that the worst of it?”
She tilted her head from one side to the other, releasing tension. Then thought about my question. “ Probably .”
I motioned to the chairs. “ Okay . Let’s hash this out.”
A few minutes later, I interrupted again. “ What kind of spell did you cast?”
Roishin stared at her half-eaten plate. “ A curse. I called on the Gods to avenge the deaths of its creatures and banish his evil intent from your land. I used a mirror so, it would, in theory, return the harm he intended for us back on him.”
Sevenfold . Something whispered in my thoughts. Another whisper, this one I recognized as my own sarcastic and paranoid self reminded me that Carl getting in trouble could be awful for the club.
“ You shouldn’t do that shit.”
“ Are you telling me or ordering me?”
“ Would you listen either way?”
“ No .”
I threw my hands up in the air. “ I can’t fucking win.” This was exactly why I was single. No pussy is good enough to deal with the bullshit.
“ At least this way you won’t be targeted by a fucking lunatic.”
“ We .”
“ You ,” she fired back.
“ No , woman. We . We’re in this together. Whatever game Carl’s playing, he’s targeting both of us. You know that, right?”
Her mouth clamped shut.
“ My yard, your woo-woo, and Carl’s seeded a little crop of distrust. And I wonder why that is? Hum ?”
Rose’s face was blank.
“ Don’t you know why?”
She blinked. “ No . If I knew… well, he wouldn’t be doing it anymore.”
I laughed, hard. “ Woman? —”
“ Stop calling me that. My name is Roishin .”
I licked my lips. “ No , it ain’t. It’s Rose .
Technically , Mary - Rose .” Skinner did a lot of digging for me in the last couple of days.
And I never even had to ask. He was so paranoid that Rose was selling us out, he practically moved into second-floor office space we all dubbed “the geek lodge.”
Through gritted teeth she hissed, “ Never call me that.”
“ Why ?”
That face was back.
“ Fine . But when your jealous ex-boyfriend escalates his bullshit, we are in this together.”
“ He’s not my jealous ex-boyfriend.”
Her chin didn’t go down. Huh . But Skinner had photo proof. “ Ex -lover?”
This time, she dug in, readying for the lie, but with bravado, her chin went back up as she looked me in the eye. “ Love had nothing to do with it.”
In a way, she was right. Teenagers get those feelings all twisted up and call it love. But it’s just hormones and sex. At least she wasn’t lying to herself about it now. Some women never get over their first crush.
“ Whatever you call it, Carl’s got a case of jealousy.”
She stared at me like I was an alien. Then burst out laughing. She laughed so long, she had to wipe her eyes.
“ It ain’t funny, Rose .”
“ No , it totally is. Carl doesn’t love me. He’s not jealous.”
“ Bet you twenty K he is.” I would be.
Her eyes went a little wider.
That’s right, I have details of your crime, woman .
She waved a hand through the air. “ The amount doesn’t matter. You’re wrong.”
I snorted. “ Gimme one good reason why.”
“ Carl only loves himself.”
She hadn’t even hesitated. Damn . And double-damn-it, that tracked with everything I knew about Carl . “ Then it’s jealousy because he’s not number one.”
She shook her head. But it soon stilled. “ There may be a small amount of truth in that, but not nearly enough to drive him to mess with you like this. He’s playing a game. One he wants you to get visibly upset with me about. Then , when I? —”
She cut herself off abruptly.
“ When you, what?”
The plate of food got shoved out of the way. “ When I return at the end of the month, and am found dead, that public display of anger will bury you.”
“ That’s twisted.”
“ That’s Carl . He finds more pleasure in killing people by proxy than sex ever brought him. But god forbid he ever gets his own hands dirty.”
“ Then how is he going to kill you?”
“ I’m sure I’m the exception.”
I leaned in. Rose was candidly introspective. I softened my tone. “ Why would that be?”
She looked me directly in the eye. “ Because I’ve played this game with him before, and I lived long enough to walk away.”
I stayed awake for hours after we cleaned up dinner and the mess on the table. It started innocently enough, scrubbing through the camera footage until I pinpointed the moment Carl walked into the yard.
Sure , by that point I’d gotten a little caught up watching Rose wipe my house down from ceiling to floor. Her ass looked good pointed at my cameras.
By the time I did watch Carl set the scene, then toss those damn spikes into my yard, I was fuming.
Rose entered, barely missing one of those damn things.
And her tears? Fuck me, those hurt.
I scrubbed through Jackson’s footage to make sure Carl hadn’t fucked with him, and came up empty. Which was a disappointment. If he had, I’d have full justification to take him out permanently.
Turning back to my feed, I noted when the sun set and the infrared system switched on. Rose knelt in the dark for so long I thought the feed froze. But the random flash from a bug flying past the lens proved it worked just fine.
She stumbled as she finally got up. I stopped the playback and noted the time. I’d just arrived at the club and sat down for a shot. It drove home the vulnerability of her situation. She’d been dealing with this all by herself.
While I debated on whether to take Shauna up on her offer.
What if I had?
What if Carl had come back?
Why hadn’t he come back? Was Rose right? Did Carl want me to do his dirty work?
I dialed Skinner and had him download the feed from the timestamps I gave him. “ Do me a favor and translate that for me?” I’d picked out the part where Rose chanted something in Latin .
“ You know, I have real work to do.”
“ Yeah , but this is the kind of stuff you enjoy.”
He ran the recording back. “ Carl’s woman is a freak. What do you see in her?”
Did I dare answer that? Maybe I could give him a little hint. “ She’s like me. Twisted .”
He swore and tapped away, trying to decode her spell. Finally , he sent me a file.
“ I think that’s what it says. I ran the audio through a translator, then back through a text translator. The sheer fact she knows Latin should be a huge red flag, brother.”
A chuckle escaped me. “ Hickey would love it.”
“ Well , I don’t,” he fired back. “ She’s a menace.”
A compliment. I scanned the translation. Interesting and fairly spot-on her description. She didn’t lie to me at least. “ I wouldn’t have her any other way.”
“ You’re playing with fire.”
Now that brought a full smile to my face. “ Like I said, ‘wouldn’t have her any other way.” Then I hung up on him and wiped the feed so he couldn’t get nosy and discover Carl in my backyard.
He’d tell Wolf , who’d tell Jackson , who’d insist I take that motherfucker out. I had other plans for Carl Wingren .
If he wanted to play games with me, I’d play games with him. But first? I had a witch to bed.