Chapter 4
Chapter
Four
Dante
F uck.
What the actual fuck’s Julien thinking, letting her in here? The omega who slammed me hard in the guts with a feral need to rut and mark as mine even standing outside a fucking car?
I sip my drink calmly. Only the dip in Reaper’s gaze to the way my fingers tighten a fraction says he understands my inner state.
Reap always knows.
I flick a glance at him and that scarred, cursed angel of a face is, as always, carved from rock. But I note the slightest lift of the corner of his mouth.
Asshole.
The sultry music of Pandora’s beats and winds around us. I need to get downstairs, but…
Fuck .
I didn’t know she was here, not until gardenias and sex scent fucking metaphorically bloomed like crazy in Pandora’s Box. I smelled the girl—and she is a girl, about twenty, maybe twenty-one, if I’m lucky—right before she walked in.
She doesn’t just poison and perfume the air with her compelling scent.
It’s physically her.
To make matters worse?
She’s gorgeous.
Long dark hair, pale skin, a perfect mouth beneath the shadowed brim of a hat. I know she has dark eyes that can burn a soul to the ground.
I swallow. She’s in an old leather jacket that’s too big, a floral shapeless dress that somehow is beguiling, and Docs or something similar on her feet, with white frilly socks peeking over the edge. Oh, Jesus fucking wept.
She looks like innocence personified. An angel walking this corrupt earth.
The girl’s playing dress up and tempting all the fucking fates.
She looks, from head to toe and in the way her essence spreads everywhere, like the titular girl on the club’s door.
And just as dangerous.
Julien didn’t know. He probably still has no idea what he let in. Fucking betas. He’s lucky I value him in the Unholy Trinity. Otherwise, I might be inclined to bathe the floor in fresh blood.
I take a swallow of my whiskey. The place is low-key busy. It’s still too early for the big crowd. I’ve got business to deal with in our offices down below the second level. Fuck, I’ve even got a meeting in an hour, and yet…
Here I am.
Like I’ve been welded to the spot.
The girl clutches her bag as she tries and fails not to look like a fresh sacrifice.
She will be, if any low-life alpha gets his hands on her. I don’t need trouble in this club .
Some of our other places? Couldn’t give a fuck. But this is our HQ, the space that transforms from bar to club, and for the chosen? A speakeasy of fallen class and velvet sleaze on the lower level.
But up here, this early, the club is meant to be trouble free.
The girl’s the embodiment of the word trouble .
If I can’t stop staring, then… Shit.
From her scent, the way it winds tight around my cock, and the way that Reap watches her with his deadly, flat gaze, the one hiding his hunger, I can tell she’s about to go into heat.
She’s started. Not full on, but close enough. Stronger than the night I stopped the cops. Tomorrow, it’ll crash and burn her and send even the most disciplined alpha into a feral tailspin.
Luckily, I’m more than disciplined. As is Reaper. Knight? I’m not so sure. If Reaper is the soul-damaged killer, and I’m the conscienceless criminal, a ruler of Starlight’s underworld, then Knight’s the twisted heart.
She could wrap him up around her little fucking finger.
Then again, Knight’s pretty but as tough as us in his way. We’re the parts that click together to form an unstoppable, formidable front.
We’re the Unholy Trinity and we rule the world outside of society, outside of the Council.
“Don’t make me make you talk, Reap,” I say. “It’s tiresome.”
He utters a small, low growl, and this time I smile. “She’s clean.”
There’s something in the way he says it that catches my attention. I keep my gaze on the girl which isn’t hard. Or maybe it’s too fucking hard.
Just watching the creature, I have the overwhelming urge to rut. That’s what makes it difficult to be around her.
“How?” I ask.
He was given the name Reaper because between us three, he is the most likely to bring death. Of course I know his real name, and he knows mine and Knight’s, but the three of us shed our old selves decades ago. We have been reborn as the monsters we are today.
Deadly. Cruel. Powerful.
Reap and I go back years. To times I’d prefer not to remember. Times I refuse to forget. I like to keep those times, the lessons learned, right at the edges.
“I followed her to the Hollows,” he grumbles out.
“Did you search her place?” It’s too much of a coincidence.
He hands me a photo. The wind’s knocked from me as I stare. “Elias Enver?”
Reaper nods.
I can’t look away. I haven’t thought of this man in twenty years.
Oh. Shit. My hand jerks. “That baby?”
“The name on the mail is Roth. First name?—”
“I’m not interested.” Even if I was, the moment I find out why she walked in here and if she’s a part of something to trap us, her ass is out the door. “Does she live alone?”
“No one else was there.”
Maybe this girl is the baby, maybe not. The man who saved both our asses when we were young might be her father, but it doesn’t change shit. Just haven’t thought about him in forever.
“You think he went back into the fold?” I ask, downing my drink.
Reaper’s frown is almost not there and yet it radiates, enough so that the waitress we hired a few weeks earlier, one who wants desperately to bang him, pivots in her path to us and heads to the back of the room.
I make a note to find a place at one of our other establishments for her. Someplace more reputable, I decide, because she lacks the fortitude of a real Trinity girl. She’s just a beta, one who’ll end up moving on in a few years, and she’ll be doing so without a taste of any of us.
Darcy glances at me from where she leans against a wall, chatting up a patron in preparation for a Darcy shakedown. But I don’t need her, not yet. I glance in the other waitress’s direction and her expression says everything.
Darcy, with her razor cut blond hair and touch me if you want to die air, looks slightly smug, like she knows the other girl doesn’t fit this particular Trinity establishment.
“No,” Reap finally says. “Not Elias. He was like us.”
Was. He thinks the man’s dead.
“So, she’s gone to them?” I ask, rubbing a hand over my unshaven chin.
The girl takes off her hat and slides it into her bag. Not on the bar, but in the bag, like it matters. And I wish she’d left the thing on. Her glow’s brighter, more compelling now.
Reaper shifts. “No.”
“No, you don’t think so, or no, you know?”
“No.”
Fucking Reaper…
He doesn’t have proof, just what I told him and who was trying to shake her down.
“Want me to talk to the two cops?” he asks.
“Andy and Harry are greedy, pliable assholes we can use. Within parameters,” I say, picking up my fresh drink the bartender sets down without me asking. “And if you talk?—”
“Words, Dante.”
I almost laugh. He uses them sparingly, when he needs to, and when he wants to. But asking Reaper to have a chat is a waste of his real skill sets. Besides, those two will talk, and then tattle.
“Save them,” I say.
We have cops on our payroll. These aren’t. They’d love to be, but they’re Council cops. Council fucking people are weak, they can turn. And no matter if they’re Council business people, or Council criminals or Council cops, they take information to the Council.
I’ll use them.
Never trust them.
Never take one into the tight web of even the lowest-level Trinity family.
It’s not that we live outside the law, it’s that we have a code, our own morals.
And trust? Fucking paramount.
“How did you find her place?”
“It was easy. I followed my nose. Her scent is a beacon.” Reaper stares at her. “Fucking flowers everywhere.”
I’m about to say something when I do the math. He followed her when she left. So, he couldn’t go in and be here when she arrived. Not unless…
“Reap, when?—”
“She was easy to find.”
He searched her out on his own, before tonight.
“She could still be Council,” I say.
I heard the cops get her name and sometimes that’s all it takes to turn someone because I know where she was coming from. The Hollows.
If she has contacts, then she might have information. The Council doesn’t care about those who’ve slipped through the cracks and ended up there. They care about those who sell certain drugs, identities. Places to disappear to.
She’s a young omega.
The Council’s gotta be drooling over her.
Because she smells untouched.
I want to touch her.
I need to touch her, mark her, rut her, breed her.
Fuck. No. I don’t. I don’t want any of that. And the last? Not ever. With anyone.
We’re a pack without the norms. There are three alphas. No omega to fuck things up .
We control the dark corners of this city. It’s perfect.
So, if she’s clean of the Council stench and influence, and unmarked, she can leave here that way. We don’t want or need her.
I just want to know why the fuck she walked in through my door when she’s about to go into heat.
Whatever she is, her scent is unlike anything I’ve ever smelled. And Reaper? The way he watches her, like he’s preparing to take down his prey, feels the same.
“Her scent is soaked into the bones of her apartment. It surrounds the place.” Reaper lifts his eyes from her and glances at Mason, who’s one of our bartenders. A beer appears and Reap takes it, gaze settling back on the omega. “She’s toxic.”
“Toxic?”
“I hunt. Never smelled anything so strong, so alluring.” He lifts the bottle and takes a swig. “Toxic.”
“The apartment’s clean, too?”
He rubs a hand over his haphazardly shaved head. And the move is telling. Though we’ve only been back in contact a few years, I fucking trust him. Others might not. Knight’s on the fence, but Knight’s the kind of guy who won’t judge until he needs to. He trusts me. That’s enough.
And I’m more than aware this dangerous man I’m standing with will fucking gut you without blinking, but he’s also loyal. To me. To the Unholy Trinity. To Knight.
“Didn’t have long in there.”
“But?” I prompt.
“She’s not working for the Council,” he says. “But she’ll be on their radar.”
Meaning: young, untouched, omega.
Unregistered or she’d have been knocked up and pushing out some unworthy alpha’s fucking spawn by now.
I set my glass down and watch as the girl picks up a drink, her second already. The purse of her lips when she takes a swallow tells me she’s not usually a drinker. But already there’s a ripple in the energy of the club, the alphas in here picking up her radiating scent. And it makes the air taut, electric. Someone’s gonna make a fucking move. Maybe a few.
Darcy catches my eye with a frown. Her mark’s no doubt given up whatever information she hit him for—I’ll find out later—because he’s back with his little crew.
She looks at the fucking omega, and then me and Reaper, like she sees trouble.
I just raise a brow. She does too, and then picks up some glasses and sashays across the room to the door where Julien is, before handing the big mountain of a man a drink.
He squeezes her ass.
The only man known to do that and live.
“There’s a difference between working for them and being an unsuspecting plant,” I say. “They’ve done it before.”
A few outlier alphas in shady businesses, like us, have been roped in by an omega, and suddenly, they’re on the Council’s stockpile.
The fucking Council sees it as the natural order, a way of keeping things clean, organized, fair.
It’s control, pure and simple, a way to keep everyone under their thumb, their sway.
And I don’t like it.
Just like I don’t like this coincidence of her walking in here.
“One other thing.” Reaper’s words send a chill through me.
I wait.
“She spoke to someone. No, he spoke to her. Like a warning.”
“What did he say?” I ask.
“I don’t know. Wasn’t close enough to hear. But body language doesn’t lie.”
I turn to him.
“I’m pretty fucking sure it was Ghost,” Reap finishes.
Fuck.
“That lying, piece of shit prick is back,” I mutter, “and sniffing around?”
“First I saw of him in ages.”
“I’ll make sure our people keep on the lookout.” I check my watch. “I need to take care of some things, then I have a meeting.”
Reaper’s gaze is back on the girl. A muscle in his jaw ticks and there’s a vibration of violence around him. He wants her, too. But he wants to do damage.
Not to her. He’s fucked in the head, but he doesn’t abuse women. But yeah, he wants to cause damage out in the world.
“Let off some of that pent up energy. Talk to some people, get the low down on Council moves.”
“Talk?” He takes another sip of beer. Arches a brow.
“Talk.”
This time he smiles for real. “No mention of her.”
“I want to know what new plans are in place.”
“Talk…how?” he asks.
“Your choice.”
He looks at me. “Speaking my fucking language now, Dante.”
“Send Knight up before you go.”
He nods. “Dante?”
“Yeah?”
He sets his bottle down. “Be careful. That omega’s fucking trouble.”
He’s preaching to the choir.
While I wait, I watch her, how she tries to make herself small, the way she orders a third drink. Cheap, below bottom shelf, liquor. That’s what she’s buying.
She’s poor and watching her money. There’s a haunted look in her eyes; the pinched aura around her speaks of pain, sadness, fear.
My head says there’s something’s going on with the girl .
My body’s too full of a throbbing need to be bothered to work it out.
Her scent winds around me as I breathe in and my cock throbs. It wants that virgin.
Is she a fucking virgin? She must be. That’s why she smells so much sweeter. No one’s had her yet. I fucking hate virgins. They piss me off. I like a girl who knows how to please.
The omega turns.
She looks at me and suddenly the bar goes airless. Her gaze wraps around my cock and pulls. It licks against my skin. Whispers in gardenia-scented words.
And I’m hit with the vision of me pushing back the silk of her long dark hair, exposing her throat, and sinking my teeth in, right at her jugular, as I fuck her so hard I knot.
I want to control her, have her under my command, have her give me a blowjob. And fuck me, I want to explore every inch of her as she does every single thing I want, hold every pose, each position.
I want to edge her, fuck her ass. I want to own her in such a way that she can’t see straight, that her body answers just to me. I want to bring her beyond regular edging and keep her there, consistently about to come and denying her that pleasure.
Not until I decide to push.
“Dante.”
Oh. Fuck. I blink, turn away from her and shift further into the side of the bar, where the darkness pools deep. It leads down to our private sanctum, to the workings of our operations.
“What’s that aroma, man?” Knight glances around and it doesn’t take him long to zero in on her.
For the first time since the three of us formed the Unholy Trinity, I want to snap another alpha’s neck for thinking the same thoughts I’m thinking. That I know he’s thinking.
“Oh, shit,” he says. “It’s not even my birthday. ”
I narrow my eyes, and deliberately say his real name. His eyes narrow, too. He hates it when I use his name. “She’s not for us. Reaper has the details on her, but our favorite Council cops shook her down the other night, and?—”
“Oh, I see now why you were late to the meetup. Holy fuck. Sorry, not sorry, but shit. Look at her.”
“Knight. You’re not fifteen.”
He sighs, rubs his eyes, and the playfulness subsides. It’s his schtick. “I’m working on this idea for here, or another club, and—” He stops, the sharpness of his gaze hits me. “You’ve got that meeting. The info on the guy’s on your tablet. Read it first, but he’s good to go. I highlighted the parts where, if needs be, we can twist him for more of a safety net.” He pivots. “You want me to get her history?”
I almost say yes. If anyone can, it’s Knight. He’s got the rich, college kid look down. And though he’s, what? Early thirties? He looks late twenties or younger, at a glance.
He’s a chameleon wrapped in the fuzzy disguise of seeming harmlessness.
Knight’s anything but harmless.
He’s a true alpha, and he’s loyal. Better yet, he’s not just our tech guy, it’s like he’s got a magic touch with it. Me? I can use a tablet, phone, computer. Him? He could take down the government. Give him enough time? Maybe even the Council.
“Keep an eye on her.” I look at him. “At a distance.”
He puts his tablet on the bar. “I can work and watch, Dante.”
“Watch. Operative word.”
He salutes and his impulsive ways need to be dampened here.
I lean in. “She’s a fucking omega. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you. We don’t need to be tied down. Beyond that, I don’t know if she’s trustworthy, so eyes only.”
Thing is, it’s not just his eyes on her. Men of all kinds have their gazes drawn her way, and my head starts going places. Dirty, filthy places. If there is a way to bottle up her magic and pour it out on the club, we’d have a goldmine…
“No one else touches her,” I amend. “And I mean eyes only with you.”
“Heard you the first time, man.”
“I’m going to go and prep for the meeting.” With that, I head down.
I have time. I could stay, but she’s like a glitch, a hook in my brain.
And the things I want to do with her? They keep fucking expanding, getting wilder, hotter. It pisses me off. It fills my head. Worse, it kicks my denial kink into gear.
I want to have her in front of me, her on display, me edging her and not giving in for either of us, stretching the moment out until it’s almost too much. And then slamming into her.
Yeah, it fucking pisses me off.
If she’s a Council trap to hook the Unholy Trinity, it’s not going to work.
We don’t give in to their bullshit. Or any of their little traps they’ve put out over the years.
But fuck, if this girl has been sent here…
I’ll destroy her.