43. Lex
43
LEX
J uliet’s eyes are locked on mine. The blood on one of her hands is quickly drying, but I bring them up anyway, watching her oh so carefully. She doesn’t fight me, doesn’t resist as I press her palm to my cheek and turn my face into the evidence of her wound.
It’s still warm as it slides over my skin, her blood marking me almost like a warrior of old before he goes into battle. The tiniest of breaths shudders from her, but her fingers curl anyway, the tips grazing against my own skin as I slowly pull her away once more.
A small sound escapes her that I’m not even sure she’s aware of, but we’re almost out of time anyway. As much as I want to stay here with her, to give her another piece of my soul as if she doesn’t already have the entire fucking thing, I have my brothers to think about. Gio is off gathering the men who took her, leading them to one place, and Nolan is bound to be here any moment.
“Lex…”
I cup her cheek as she breathes my name like it’s more prayer than curse. “What I wouldn’t give to have you saying that while I’m balls deep in the best pussy I’ve ever fucking had,” I whisper.
She blinks. I can’t help it, though. Being inside her is always on my mind. Ever since that first time when I watched her grind herself against my cock and ride herself to orgasm without ever letting myself taste that little piece of heaven. She should get used to it because I know for damn sure that I’ll likely feel the same in fifty or even seventy years. I want to crawl into her skin, mold our bodies together until there is no separation and she doesn’t remember a time when I wasn’t a part of her.
My phone buzzes in my pocket with an incoming call. I withdraw it and after a quick glance at the caller ID, I answer it. “Lex.”
“I’m nearly to your location,” Nolan states. “What’s the status?”
“I’ve got Juliet,” I reply. “Gio’s rounding up the vermin .” The last word comes out coated in disgust, and I wrap a hand around the back of Juliet’s nape and pull her against my chest as I peer around the tree and towards the field of broken and abandoned train cars.
“I’ve got help enroute.”
“We don’t need it,” I tell him. “They won’t make it out of this alive.”
Juliet tips her head back, but she doesn’t pull away from me—not even when I make it clear to Nolan that I have no intention of walking away tonight. There will be blood tonight. Hers on my face, theirs on my fucking hands.
Nolan’s voice is tight when he replies. “There’s more, Lex. I…” His words end on a frustrated growl and I can hear the rumble of a car engine—more than one in the distance. “We need to talk, after all this,” Nolan finally says. “You and me.”
“Fine. After .”
A light shines into the darkness over the train cars and then flickers. Once. Twice. Three times.
“I’m here,” Nolan says.
“Good, Gio’s ready.”
“Juliet?”
I look down to the woman in question at Nolan’s request. “What’ll it be, baby?” I ask her. “Are you staying here or coming?”
“I thought you wanted me to stay here,” she says.
I did—still do, honestly. I know I might lose control with the men who took her from us, from me .
There are demons inside me and they crave freedom. They want to maim, to kill, to defend, and protect. But I fear that those demons of mine will scare her away, that this darkness of mine will be the last thing she sees before she disappears from my sight forever. My fingers clench against her nape as if I’m instinctively trying to lock her in place.
“I want eyes on you at all times,” I tell her. It’s the truth. “But I don’t want you to fear me.”
Full, pouty pink lips part, and Juliet leans her head back. “I don’t fear you, Lex.”
But she could. It would only take one step into my secret room for her to know the truth. All of this trust she’s giving me now could all vanish in an instant if she knew who I really am. The pictures. The stolen trinkets. The… secrets I’ve kept for and from her. I swallow roughly around a dry throat.
“You come with me, and you won’t be able to walk away—not from me and not from them,” I warn her.
“Because I’ll watch you kill them?”
“Yes.” And so much more. I’m going to torture those men. Slowly. Painfully. I’m going to rip them apart piece by piece and enjoy every single second.
“I think I can handle it, Lex,” she says, rising onto her toes as she stretches her face towards mine. I freeze for a moment before automatically dipping my head as her lips graze my jawline. My cock hardens inside my pants. Fuck. “I’m pretty sure I can handle you.”
She has no idea what she’s in for, but I have no intention of letting her go even if she regrets her choice later. My phone buzzes again and the light in the sky flickers, flashing over the tops of the trees before disappearing into the clouds above.
“Come on.” I don’t give myself any more time to second guess myself, I haul Juliet after me and instead of leading her away from the yard of abandoned train cars, I lead her towards it.
* * *
JULIET
I remain quiet as instead of away from the train car graveyard, Lex leads me towards it. My hand is tucked against his. The sound of a sobbing man gets louder and I know we’re getting close. My fingers clench around Lex’s palm as the first words other than ours lift into the night and reach towards us.
“—don’t know, we were just h-hired t-to—” The hard smack of something hitting flesh is followed by a loud crack and a scream.
Lex and I round the final train car with a dark swath of graffiti spray-painted down its side that almost makes it look as if the big car is bleeding. My feet slow to a stop, and Lex doesn’t force me to keep walking as I take in the scene before me. Several yards away, the blacked-out van that my kidnappers had used to take me away from the parking lot sits with its back door slung open.
I don’t remember anything slamming into me as the driver had spun us all over the place, forcing not just me to roll around in the back, but his companions as well. They must have had it locked down, though, because now I see the half open black duffle bag as well as the twine and other tools sitting in the back. My eyes land on the hammer sticking out of the duffle’s zipper.
“Baby?” Lex squeezes my hand, but I pull away, turning my gaze to the rest of the clearing in the train’s graveyard.
There are four figures under the moonlight. Three kneeling assholes with their ski masks removed, bleeding and glaring at a cold-faced fourth.
Gio.
Jesus … fuck.
The man in front of me is not a man I recognize. I always thought it odd that Giovanni Vargas was known as the heir of Silverwood’s most notorious crime lord and yet, he’d always acted so nonchalant. I see it now in the blood staining his hands, reaching all the way up to his elbows. The droplets on his cheek as he glares daggers at the three men before him.
A sex god turned killer, that’s what he is.
In his hands is a long cylindrical piece of metal—likely something either pulled from the back of his victim’s own van or scrap metal from the yard around us. Gio turns and though I want to step away from the fury blazing in his eyes, I don’t.
A hand touches my back, making me jump. “It’s alright, baby,” Lex soothes. “You know he’d never hurt you.”
Do I know that, though?
“Took you long enough,” Gio says, directing the words to Lex.
“I wasn’t sure if I should bring her or not.”
Gio glances at me. A prickle of awareness crawls through me as his gaze spans down my face and to my throat and then the rest of me. His already frowning mouth deepens into a scowl.
Without a word, he turns and brings the metal pole up and whacks it across the face of the man closest to him. My eyes widen and Lex releases some low hum in the back of his throat. “Not that I mind you beating the shit out of him, but was there a reason for that one?” he asks.
Gio glowers down at the man whimpering underneath him while the other two scoot away from him on their knees. It takes me a moment to realize why they’re moving so slow—Gio has bound not just their hands but their legs too. “She has a fucking bruise on her face!”
I do? I reach up and touch my jaw and then farther up, wincing when I realize the skin under one eye is slightly tender. I don’t remember them hitting me. Maybe it’d happened when we’d been rolling around in the back as I’d fought against them.
“We didn’t?—”
Whack! Shock ripples through me as Gio doesn’t let the man to his right finish his sentence. There’s no warning. One moment, G is standing over the middle one—a man with a short crop of dark hair and a beard—and the next he’s swinging the pole like a bat. It clocks kidnapper number two in the jaw, sending the man sprawling across the tracks.
Lex merely chuckles, and as I gape between the two of them—one laughing at the sheer brutality, while the other merely dispenses it as if it’s his favorite pastime—white, faded headlights dance down a dirt path behind us, glinting on broken glass embedded in the ground.
Lex’s laughter cuts off and he reaches for me, snatching me back and pushing me behind him. A moment later, the engine turns off—though the lights remain on, washing over the clearing—and the door pops open. Lex relaxes.
“Juliet?” It’s Nolan’s voice that echoes into the night at the footsteps that approach.
Not giving the others the chance to answer for me, I step out from behind Lex. “I’m here.”
Nolan pauses about ten feet away. There’s a black strap of a bag hung over his shoulder, and he keeps it there with one hand. He’s changed out of his football uniform which makes me realize that neither Gio nor Lex have. They look like All-American jocks, splattered in dirt and blood while Nolan stands there, the exact opposite. They are the facade. He is the reality.
Dark jeans. Dark t-shirt. Colors that can hide the violent nature of what’s going to happen tonight. And I know what’s going to happen. It’s clear in the way Gio stands over my kidnappers, barely breaking a sweat as he clutches the metal pole in his grip as if he wants to start swinging it again.
Nolan starts walking again. “Are you okay?”
“I—” have no fucking clue how to answer that question. When the world had faded in the back of that van, I honestly wasn’t sure if I’d ever wake up again.
Now, not only am I awake and alive, but I’m not alone out here, facing three men intent on killing me for fuck knows why.
“I’m … dealing,” I finally surmise. “I’m alive.”
Cinnamon eyes move over my face and down. “She got away on her own,” Lex informs him.
Nolan smirks as he stops in front of me. “Of course she did.”
“ She is standing right here,” I say, as if they need the reminder. “And she doesn’t like being talked about like she’s not.”
A loud, wet cough splutters into the night and all three of us—Nolan, Lex, and I—turn towards the sound. My jaw drops at what I see.
Gio has dropped the metal pole and withdrawn a pocket knife—from where, I don’t fucking know, since I didn’t think football pants had pockets. Now, however, that knife is sunk deep into the middle man’s throat. Without giving the man another second, he rips it free and blood splashes across the ground.
His body falls to the dirt with a deadened thud.
“The fuck!” The other two kidnappers scream and squirm, one of them falling over onto his side as he tries to wriggle away, looking more like a worm than a human man at the sudden outpouring of violence from the Scorpion King I least expected it from.
“Juliet.” I whip back to Nolan and freeze. My head still throbs with pain, but it warns me against my next actions.
There’s a voice inside all of us that cautions us against danger, and right now, it’s screaming at me. It wants me to turn away from the men surrounding me, to run from them, to flee and keep running until they forget I ever existed.
Behind that little voice, though, there’s another one. And as I look down to what Nolan now holds in his hand, it grows louder.
“Do you want to finish this or do you want us to?” he asks.
I’ve never held a gun before, but my eyes are locked on the one in his hand now and my fingers itch to close around it.
“P-please, we-we were paid! It was just a fucking job!”
“Lex?” I glance towards Gio as he casually turns towards us and flips the knife in his hand up and down. Over and over again, the silver end glints from the car’s headlights. He catches it as easily as if he were tossing a football, and Lex steps around Nolan and me to head his way. “Your turn?” G sounds like he’s asking rather than telling, and when Lex gets close, he holds out the knife.
I knew it the night they helped me hide my own crime. My attacker’s body had disappeared and they hadn’t even seemed to care that I killed someone. I’d told myself it was because he was a monster, someone who meant to rape me. That was why. He’d deserved what I did to him.
Now, I have to wonder if it wasn’t that at all, and one question spirals through my mind.
Who the fuck are the Scorpion Kings?