Chapter Five. Eshe #4
“Is that my shit?” he growls, and it’s so delicious as it rolls over my bare skin that I almost forget what he’s talking about. “Is that my chain around your neck?”
“Oh.” I grin, brushing my fingers across the thick rope chain with the axe-shaped pendant that I happened to pilfer from his apartment the last time I visited. When he wasn’t home. “Yeah. It’s so nice. And I feel so much closer to you when I wear it.”
Fury darkens his face, and I read my painful death in those eyes. If he only knew how that makes my pussy weep, he’d probably go around smiling like Pennywise the Clown when near me.
Flashing one last smile, I don’t wait for him to make the first move.
For two years, I’ve watched and waited. Finally touching and tasting him earlier was like breaking the seal on a dam already plagued with cracks and fissures.
Now there’s no shutting off this thirst, this unquenchable hunger for more.
There’s no locking it away again now that I’ve had his hard, disfigured flesh under my fingers and his blood on my tongue.
While I have a reputation for being cold and interminably patient, with him, not so much.
With a flurry of jabs, cross punches, and side kicks, I attack, not holding back.
He blocks me with a blur of motion, using my momentum against me by grabbing my wrist and flinging me against the wall.
Wind whistles past my ear as his fist crashes into the space where my face was, crushing the drywall.
Oh goodie. He’s not holding back.
That’s so fucking hot.
Slipping to his side, I deliver a backfist to his temple, slightly turning his head away from me long enough to knee him in the gut twice.
I’m not fast enough to dodge the elbow he sends flying back toward me, and it slams into my mouth, gouging my teeth into the soft flesh of my inner lip.
Blood floods my tongue, and I grin at him, catching the narrowing of his eyes seconds before he whirls around and we face off against each other.
With not a little bit of satisfaction, I notice the line of crimson trickle down from his cheekbone where my ring must’ve cut him.
This time we charge at each other, and when we clash, it’s like a clap of thunder in the room.
I rain down blows center mass and at his throat.
Again, he blocks them, returning punch for punch.
Bobbing and dodging each one, I latch on to his arm and, sharply twisting, flip him over my shoulder.
His huge body slams onto the floor, and I swear the whole damn house shudders.
Before I can drop on top of him, my arm crossed over my chest to crash into his windpipe, he pulls his hips up, flattening his hands by his ears, then uncoils that big body and lands on his toes.
Well. Damn.
My momentary distraction costs me.
His boot lands in the center of my chest, piledriving the air from my lungs and flipping me over my couch.
Pain radiates through me as my back and tailbone slam into the floor.
For a second, I’m stunned. But just for a second.
Because he’s leaping over the couch, and at the last moment, I roll, just missing his feet landing on top of me.
Gritting my teeth against the pain, I dart to the side and grip the outer edges of the coffee table.
Picking it up, I swing it like a Louisville Slugger.
The wood doesn’t crack when it strikes his back, but it stuns him enough that he lists to the side.
Dropping the table, I run a couple of steps, kick my rear foot, and land a flying punch to his jaw.
The power of the impact sings up my arm like a discordant melody, but my gratification at his head snapping back is extremely short-lived as he cuffs my wrist and tosses me across the room.
He stares at me, those cold, narrowed eyes promising me death.
And I stare right back.
I flick my gaze to my Glock on the shelf in back of him.
His goes to the gun behind me.
For a long moment, we don’t move.
And then we’re in motion at the same time, in a race to see who can grab their weapon first and fastest.
“Do it,” I invite with a bloodstained smile.
And I even lean into the barrel pointed at my forehead.
The gun in my hand doesn’t waver, trained at his head.
“Go ahead. We can go together on the count of three. Or…” I slowly draw my Glock back and raise my other hand, palm out in a temporary white flag.
“You can hear me out and then try to kill me later?”
He hikes a dark eyebrow.
I frown. “Yeah, mu’fucka, I said ‘try.’” Shaking my head, I tsk-tsk. “I swear, the shit is true. Give you an inch, you try to take a mile. I still got your dick on my breath, but don’t think I’ma let you punk me. I got another coffee table and bullet with your name on it.”
He mugs me, but after a long, tense moment, he eventually lowers his arm, taking the gun with him. I notice he doesn’t put the safety back on. Smart man. Neither do I.
“Just a heads-up,” I say, poking the corner of my mouth and wincing at the soreness. Peeping the blood dotting my fingertip, I wipe it across my hip. “Abena knows you didn’t get the job done. I’d watch your back for the next little while. She’s a vindictive li’l bitch when she doesn’t get her way.”
He doesn’t utter a word, but something quick and cold flashes in those silver eyes. And I’m reminded of a rabid wolf in the wild with its prey caught in its sights. There’s death there. Death and pain.
I cock my head. “Oooh. You already figured that out. What happened?” I pop up a finger. “Lemme guess. She had somebody waiting on you when you got home.”
“How do you know that?” he growls, his voice like a rusty old engine.
It sends shivers racing down my spine on feet of pure fire. Just remembering how that serrated voice demanded I lick his blood and do it a-fucking-gain has my pussy leaking into the seat of my underwear.
“Know what?”
“That she was waiting for me.” Menace rolls off him as he steps toward me, and I swear, a part of me does fucking snow angels in all that beautiful hate. “Do you know the location of my house?”
Of course I do. Like I said, the better question would be what don’t I know about him. But common sense and a strong sense of self-preservation urge me to keep that question to myself. Still … where’s the fun in that?
“Sure do.”
“And did you tell your aunt where I stayed?” he asks, that voice somehow becoming deeper, rougher … deadlier.
I ball my face up, offended. “Hell nah. You might want to weed out the rat in your circle for whoever delivered that info to her. But it wasn’t me. I wouldn’t give that ho a cold, much less intel.”
I squint at him as anger crawls through me.
Not so much at his accusation as the thought of someone betraying him.
I mean, yeah, we still got beef—he did try to kill me as recently as two minutes ago—but he’s mine.
Doesn’t matter if he or anyone else knows it.
And whoever gave him up to Abena now got more than the Huntsman on their ass.
They got me, and they might want to start going to altar call now to pray that he finds them before I do.
Because he has a reputation for quick, emotionless kills.
Me? Not so much. I’m all about taking my time and emoting.
“Now, how did I know she was waiting on you? I didn’t.
Well, not for sure. It was a guess because that’s what she does.
Ambushes people where they’re most comfortable to catch them with their guard down.
Mainly because she’s a fucking bum bitch and coward.
But…” I tilt my head. “I am shocked that she actually showed up to handle the deed herself.”
He grunts, and in that monosyllabic note, I read, As the fuck if.
“Oh, of course.” I nod. “She just showed up to gloat. Abena did the same shit with my mother, y’know. Couldn’t resist wallowing in her handiwork even though she didn’t have enough pussy to pull the trigger herself.”
My tone is light, but inside … inside, the rage and hatred for my aunt coil and rattle like a venomous snake. They’ve seeped into my veins, my blood, for so long that my organs pump them throughout my body, giving me breath, giving me life.
“She had my mother—her sister—murdered. I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors.
It’s like the worst-kept secret that no one will admit out loud even though we all know it’s true.
She had my mother gunned down in the street like a sick dog in Mwuaji territory, where she should’ve been safest. And then, moments later, Abena happened to show up, standing over her body. ”
That night is branded into my head; there’s no escaping it.
I still wake up with the pop of those shots ringing in my head.
The harsh scent of cordite in my nose even though I know it’s impossible for me to have smelled it with the distance separating me from my mother.
Can still feel the rain dampened air on my face.
Can still see Abena’s slim hand tremble as it covered her mouth that was wide in horror and disbelief …
But her eyes … her eyes told a different story.
There wasn’t terror or shock darkening that wide gaze.
Then, I was too numb myself to dissect the emotion.
Only days later, while standing across from her over Ma’s elegant and majestically adorned body in her glass casket, did I decipher what I’d glimpsed in her dark eyes:
Triumph.
That’s when I knew two things beyond a shadow of a doubt.
One, she’d had my mother—her sister, our queen—murdered so she could supplant her as ruler of the Mwuaji.
And two, I would one day kill her.
“That doesn’t have shit to do with me,” he says, his dispassionate words and tone tearing me from the past. Part of me wants to go for his throat for it. “All I care about is that she tried that shit with me. And for that she’s going to die. Both of you are.”