Chapter 14
Loche
“Okay.” Ever half-yawned, waving at her friend before she backed out of her driveway.
When Malachi pulled into the gas station, I made the last-minute decision to go with Ever and Katy, partly to spend time with Ever and partly to avoid the disappointed glare from Malachi and the ribbing from Cole and Nix.
The raid on the factory had resulted in around twenty arrests, from what Katy had reported seeing on social media, and would most likely be the end of our fights for a couple of weeks while everyone regrouped.
We knew something like this had happened before and could happen again, which was why we only carried what was absolutely necessary with us.
Our phones were left in Malachi’s van, and no one brought identification with them aside from Malachi, and that was only because he drove us.
The only things we carried with us were the clothes on our backs and whatever we were wearing during our matches.
It sucked to lose my spare gym bag, but at least I wasn’t spending the night behind bars.
“Where to?” Ever asked, trying to play it cool. She was obviously hoping I would just word-vomit my address for her to look up online when she got home to track down a list of the residents.
“Head toward downtown. I’ll tell you where to go when we get there.”
Ever merged onto the highway. She didn’t know where Loche lived, and with Nix and me residing in the largest complex in town, discovering my identity wouldn’t be easy—but I knew any crumb of information I gave Ever would be too much.
“After tonight, I think I know more about your friends than I do you. Except for your large friend in the blue mask, that is. Yet, that was by design, wasn’t it?”
Shit. Katy must have seen my signal to Nix.
“What else would you like to know about me?”
“Your name.”
“Nice try”
“Okay, then, your driver’s license number.”
I laughed. “If you held a gun to my head, I don’t think I could give you that.”
“Really? You really should know that.” She sighed. “Favorite color?”
“Green.”
“Why green?”
It’s kind of my last name, but I can’t tell you that yet.
“Nature. It reminds me of the trips my grandfather used to take me on as a kid. The lake where he liked to fish was surrounded by pine trees, like we were floating in a pool of jade.”
“See? That’s the kind of information I’ve been trying to get out of you. Do you still fish? Were you good at it?”
I never want to see another fucking fish again, actually.
“I was terrible at it. The worms creeped me out, so I made my grandpa bait the hook for me until he refused to do it. Needless to say, we didn’t fish much after that. But we still went camping from time to time.”
“Is that why you have those tattoos?”
I nodded. “Yeah. Some of my best memories are up north in the forests of evergreens. What about you? What was your childhood like?”
Ever grew silent as she stared at the highway ahead of us. I hadn’t heard much about Ever’s childhood from the bits and pieces of the conversations I’d caught between her and Shelby. Based on her demeanor now, it seemed to be a question I should have avoided like the plague.
“We’re talking about you, not me. Tell me more about yourself.”
“I’m really not worth getting to know, Ever.”
And that was the second thing I shouldn’t have said to Ever tonight.
My hand flew up to the oh, shit handle when she braked hard and swerved from the passing lane to the drive lane and over to the shoulder, her journey to there narrated by a smattering of horns.
On the shoulder, she threw her vehicle into park and turned her head to glare at me.
Maybe I would have been safer with Malachi, after all.
“Am I being grounded?” I asked, doing my best to mask my voice, even though I was kind of scared shitless with the way Ever was looking at me and knowing she probably had some sort of sharp, pointy object in the vehicle with us.
“Don’t be cute, V. I’m not moving this car again until we have a conversation. About you, about tonight. I don’t really care. You don’t even need to show me your face tonight, but damnit, V, I need something. Anything to level the playing field between us—if that’s even possible.”
I nodded. What if I did reveal myself to her tonight?
She and Loche seemed to be getting along better, and by better, I mean she’d stopped scowling every time she saw me, cutting back to every other time she saw me.
That was progress, right? She seemed to really enjoy me as V.
At least, in the bedroom, anyway. Maybe, just maybe, she wouldn’t freak out when she found out who V really was.
“V or should I say Vengeance?”
I smiled. “How did you find me?”
“Jem should have a career as a professional stalker—or a private investigator. A private investigator is probably more legal.”
“Who’s Jem?”
“Katy’s roommate, and a friend of mine now, too. She found you on TikTok. Someone posted one of your fights.”
“Shit. People aren’t supposed to be recording the fights, let alone posting them on social media. There are supposed to be people there preventing that from happening. Malachi is going to be pissed.”
“Yeah, and don’t even get me started on all the questions I have about Malachi.”
“Please don’t spread it around that there’s a priest in town who’s engaging in an illegal fighting ring. We all keep our identities secret for more than just the obvious felony charge.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything. Have I called the cops on you yet? Aside from that one time.”
“Why haven’t you?”
“Because, as absolutely fucked as it sounds, having you around was comforting. It is comforting. Intuition often tells you when something isn’t right, when you should be afraid. My intuition never told me that about you.”
“Maybe that means I’ve finally been forgiven for my past, then.
We all have pasts—my teammates and I. Some of us worse than others.
Fate brought us together at the gym, of all places.
We would take turns with the punching bag and got to talking, becoming friends and eventually forming our team and other pursuits. ”
“What kinds of other pursuits?”
If Malachi wasn’t going to kill me before, he was now.
I owed her something, but if I were being honest, the something I was giving her was a selfish something. A something that would test the waters. This something would tell me more about Ever than I’d learned so far.
“We don’t just beat people up inside a ring. We do it on the outside, too.”
Ever sucked in a breath. Fuck, this was it. This was when she kicked me out of her car on the side of the highway. “What do you mean?”
“Sometimes, as you know, the justice system may fail to do its job. People who have no business walking the streets are set free to do just that, leaving their victims living in fear. When asked, we take care of that, or at least we try to.”
“You kill people?”
I looked over at Ever, expecting her face to be contorted in horror, but found not even a hint of shock or an ounce of disgust. Interesting.
“No, we don’t kill them. We put the fear of God into them, so they may think twice about touching the women they’ve hurt again, or any woman or person again, for that matter.
Except, the last time I went out, I lost control of myself.
The guy I throttled is still in the hospital.
He’s going to recover, but he’s also going to be feeling the long-lasting impacts. ”
I waited for her response, receiving nothing but silence. It was a lot to process, hearing the man who’s been stalking you for over a year is also a hired hitman sans the hit part.
“Ever?” I searched her face in the light of the dashboard, unable to decipher what was going through her head. “I bet you regret wanting to get to know me better now.”
“Oh my God.”
And there it was. The disgust I was waiting for. It was all over now.
“You really are a superhero, aren’t you?” she whispered softly.
I beg your finest fucking pardon?
My head whipped back to see a tear falling from the corner of her eye. Instinctively, I reached out to wipe it away from her cheek with the tip of my exposed thumb from the fingerless gloves I wore during matches.
“We’re not superheroes. We’re just a group of guys who deliver vigilante justice that people otherwise wouldn’t have received.”
“Name a superhero who isn’t a vigilante.” She unfastened her seatbelt, pushing it aside.
“What—what are you doing?”
Ever climbed over the center console, positioning herself so that she straddled my lap, placing one of her knees next to each of my thighs.
Her hand reached down between the bottom of the seat and the door, finding the buttons that repositioned the seat, moving it to a reclining position, roughly a forty-five-degree angle.
Seat positioned where she wanted it, she unbuckled my seatbelt.
“I don’t know whether to be turned on or terrified,” I said, sucking in a breath when her hand grazed my erection over my shorts.
“I think you know exactly which one you are.”
“Pretty sure I can be both.”
“Afraid of a little girl, are you?”
“You’re far from being a little girl, Ever Moore.
Have you forgotten that I’ve been watching you?
I know you could kick my ass if you really wanted to, but you don’t want to, do you?
Hell, I’m sure you have a knife under your seat you could be holding to my throat to make me tell you everything you’ve ever wanted to know about me. ”
“You’re wrong. My car knife is in the center console within arm’s reach of me right now, if I choose to reach for it.”
“Car knife?”
“Yeah, you know, a car knife. Some girls have a car chapstick, a purse chapstick, a desk chapstick. I happen to have a car knife, a purse knife, a bed knife, and, well, I won’t bore you with the locations of the other ones.”
“Why don’t you reach for it, then? End this game between us?”
“Because maybe I like the idea of the hunter becoming the hunted.”
“You’re not afraid of me anymore?”