12. Threx Worst-Case Scenario
twelve
Threx: Worst-Case Scenario
The burn in my knuckles broke across the rocky surface of Wolfe’s cheek.
“This is all your fucking fault!” I pounded, crawling into the backseat to break everything inside of him. His face. His nose. His fucking soul!
The picture they snapped was of her in the alley behind the club, and though you could barely see her face, I could tell by the flush in her eyes why she was there.
This wasn’t about her ties to me, but to him.
A clear warning that when we fuck with someone Karsten cares about, he’s all too happy to return the favor.
“Threx!” Nathem shouted, but he might as well have been on the other side of the goddamn universe because I didn’t give two shits about his pleas. “Neither of you can save her if you’re dead.”
“You fucked her in public after Karsten’s son was hit?” I howled. “What the hell were you thinking?”
The answer was he wasn’t. He never did when it came to her, and that made his love dangerous. I slammed my fist into his chest until I felt bone, hating the way Wolfe didn’t flinch. He was a machine built for violence and repaid the favor by landing a clean punch to my throat.
I gagged, laughing through the sting, and head-butted him hard.
“And now those fuckers think she’s someone you care about.” I hauled him up by the collar, grinding my pain into the side of his temple.
“She IS someone I care about!” he broke, and whatever was holding him together slumped between my fingers.
“Yeah?” I paused, searching the black in his pupils for a sane moment. “On a scale of one to ten, how much?”
Wolfe’s eyes flashed, and the air blistered between us.
Did he really think I didn’t know all the ways he liked to play with my woman?
That somehow the way she yearned to be dragged under, reborn, and pulled apart had escaped me, while my entire being formed around her?
Of course, she craved intensity. Thirsted for pain.
Daphne desired the type of darkness you could taste but never run from.
“Who do you think taught her body how to want all those dark, violent things?” I asked, pinning him against the back seat with my weight. Wolfe didn’t flinch when my forearm smashed his windpipe. “She let you in for one reason and one reason only.”
“Yeah? And what’s that?” Wolfe’s eyes darkened.
“Because you are the only one who’s ever gotten close to giving her what she wants most,” I growled between us, the mask sticking in my mouth. “Me.”
“That’s only half true,” he spat a bloodied clot onto my face, not giving me an inch.
In all the years he’d loved her, he had never once tried to compete with me. I think I provided the safety latch to his emotional tether to her, the thing he used to feel human and discard whenever he had to be everything but.
“And I get that she’s your fucking world, Threx, but she is also mine. We will fix this.” He grabbed my collar, pulling me closer. “Together.”
We’ll see.
I snarled, shifting my weight back into the seat next to Nathem, who looked like he was about to kill us both.
“There they are,” he said, pointing ahead to the gold Ford Escape keeping its distance. It was already ten, but the weather painted everything in midnight.
“That is definitely one of Karsten’s cars,” I grumbled, making a face at the crew’s color choices.
“How many?” Wolfe asked, cracking his nose back into place and dropping the window.
“Two, I think,” Nathem answered.
“Good,” he muttered with a scowl, “I like options. Alert Rinley and the rest of the crew for cleanup,” he ordered, taking a shot at the tires in front of us and watching them blow.
I did not even hear gunshots anymore or feel the pressure of the trigger under my finger. Daphne could make my heart do stupid, sick things that the stench of death no longer could. It was a symptom of losing it all and a side effect of the Underworld.
We held on as Nathem hit the brakes to avoid the blowback, and there was a curious satisfaction in the way a car spun out of control. It was what my insides felt like: tires and the gravel earth whirling on all sides.
“Who wants to be the bait?” Wolfe asked, leaning over to see if either of them had the balls to step outside. No one moved, which meant they needed something to empty their magazines on before we dragged them out to die.
“I will,” Nathem decided through a yawn, fixing his vest and reaching for the door. “You two play nice, unless you want Blade taking the lead on this shit.”
I stared into his uneven eyes and nodded. No one with a shred of sanity wanted that. Daph once took him to an escape room, and after getting the safe code wrong twice, he blasted it open with a sawed-off he had shoved in his pants. We don’t take him out in public if we can help it.
There were a few quiet moments before the orange light of gunfire tore through the industrial strip, pinging off God knows what.
“What time does her plane leave?” Wolfe asked from the back seat.
I glanced at my phone, hitting her picture in the corner.
“Hey?” she picked up after a single ring. “Did you send Kade to stand guard outside my window?” Her voice went quiet, as if she were squinting in the dark.
Shit. She was probably trying to sleep before she had to leave for the airport, but I needed to hear her voice.
“There’s some shit going down with the club. Just roll with it,” I said through the mask.
“Are you okay?” The bed shifted under her with a predictable squeak. “Are you geared up? I can barely hear you.”
“Just checking on you, Daph,” I breathed.
“What about Wolfe?”
I cleared my throat, watching the way his eyes sparkled in the rearview.
“He’s fine. Get some rest, all right? Big day tomorrow.”
“Yeah, right. I can’t sleep worth shit,” she said through a shaky laugh. “Every time I try, all I hear is Hungry Eyes.”
“You mean that song from the movie where they grind all over each other?”
She smiled. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it in the way she breathed.
“Dirty Dancing,” she corrected. “Your favorite!”
Yeah. That fucking movie. It was the one thing she grabbed from her shitty little life before we disappeared out of her window forever.
“I’ve got to go,” I said, watching Nathem creep closer to the idling car. “Text me when you get to the airport.”
The last bursts of gunfire cracked in the distance, and Wolfe moved into the night air.
“Should I ask Kade to come in? I feel bad he’s just standing out there.”
“No,” Wolfe and I growled in unison.
“Fine,” she yawned through a laugh. “But you’re an asshole. Be safe, okay?”
“Kay,” I agreed, and dropped the call.
“You didn’t answer me,” Wolfe said, passing me a rolled-up set of knives that I tucked into my back pocket. “What time does her plane leave?”
“Five,” I breathed low, wanting to hit him until all the pain went away.
“Did you see the list?” Jessie came up behind us when we shut the car door, but Blade lingered, flanking Wolfe in case Karsten’s men showed up with backup. I nodded, picking up the pace. “They don’t seem to be aware of her identity yet.”
“Well then, let’s find out how much they do know,” I said, throwing my fist through the driver’s window and dragging the piece of shit into the rain.
I stared at him, but I didn’t see him. He was faceless.
Soulless. Not a real person. Because none of us were.
If we had pulses, then how would we sleep at night?
“Driving a little close tonight, aren’t we?” I dropped him on the pavement, watching his skull bounce off the wet rock. “Bring the other one around.” I motioned to Blade, who dragged a big fucker to my side and let him go with a plop.
“Shit,” he breathed, holding his stomach in pain.
“Honestly,” Wolfe glared. “Go for a run sometime.”
“I fuck enough. I don’t need to run.” He made a face.
Shit. Here it comes.
“Just ask your sister!” Blade smiled, and Wolfe punched him right in the dick.
The two of Karsten’s men watched us like we were amateurs, and I loved that for them.
“Which one are we going to play with?” I tossed a glance at Wolfe, who had a talent for pinpointing the soft ones.
It was the same intuition that allowed him to pick up on the dark things in Daphne’s head.
He paid attention to nonverbal cues, and for those who did not bet on psychology, it almost looked like magic.
“Him.” He pointed to the half-shaven driver, and I smiled.
Nathem didn’t think about the hot barrel or the way the other man would look with a hole through the center of his chest. He just walked right over to him and nodded at Blade to clean it up.
“You’re coming with me.” I knelt low, removing my belt, and strapped it around the alive one’s neck.
“Getting hard?” I asked, tossing a glance at Wolfe because I wanted him to know I’d seen the puckers of skin along her neckline when she led me from the shower.
So not only had my fearless leader fucked her in the alley, he’d collared my girl there, too.
Wolfe’s eyes darkened, but he knew better than to press me.
In fact, of anyone in our club, Wolfe did not fuck with me.
We were on different sides of the same coin, and if a line were ever drawn, he would lose Daphne forever.
That, I did not give a shit about. Let him.
This was all his goddamn fault, and he knew it.
I dragged the quiet one behind me by his throat, impressed by the way he kept still. It wasn’t bravery. Hell, it wasn’t even loyalty. We all belonged to something, but in the shadows, the real roulette we played was with ourselves. He understood we just needed to know what was worth dying for.
“String him up and pull down his pants,” I nodded to Nathem, who did as he was told, creating an X shape on the brick wall in the form of a body.
I withdrew, sitting on a crate behind me to get a better look at him. The way his silence breathed made me wonder how much we could get from something so resolved. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe Wolfe didn’t have the magic tonight, and he was just like everyone else.