10. Ethan
Chapter 10
Ethan
“ I knew I recognized her!” Ace whispers across the table as I watch Denver walk away. She climbs into the back of a sleek, black limo car, and the man Ace had called Ranger follows.
The rest of the restaurant slowly returns to their conversations, whispered confusion and excitement rising around us.
I run a hand down my face, terror mounting inside of me. “I shouldn’t have let her leave.”
“You think you could stop her?” Ace asks. “Do you know who that guy is?”
No, I have no idea, and I don’t fucking care. He’s clearly dangerous and has some kind of hold over Denver, and I don’t like it.
“How do you know who he is?” Sebastian asks.
“I listen to true crime,” Ace says, shrugging.
Zeke swats his arm. “Fucking tell us, then.”
“Ranger Luxe is a gangster,” Ace says, glancing around as the words leave his mouth. “Drugs, guns, everything. He isn’t someone you mess with.”
My throat is dry, but I’m not sure I can stomach drinking to quench it. All I can picture is how Denver had looked at Ranger, a mixture of fear and frustration in her expression. “How is Denver involved with him?”
Ace says, “Ranger worked with her dad, Nico DeLuca. Big-time Italian mobster.”
“Like… the mafia?” Zeke whispers excitedly.
Ace nods. “Nico and Ranger were business partners and ran San Francisco together. Denver’s dad was as scary as Ranger, but he died in a car accident a few years back and left Ranger everything.”
Sebastian stares in abject horror. “Even his daughter?”
Ace’s shrug is anything but casual, and he casts me an apologetic glance. “I don’t think so, but photos started popping up of Denver and Ranger after her dad died. Everyone assumed they were dating, but then she married Wyatt Ledger. You’ve really never heard of Deluxe?”
“Deluxe?” I sit forward.
Ace nods again. “That’s what the media call her.”
The nickname that had spurred her into a rage when I’d said it. I pinch the bridge of my nose, a headache building.
“Are you okay?” Sebastian asks quietly.
No, I’m not okay. I’m grappling desperately with who Denver supposedly is. It has to be exaggerated. She has fire, sure, but she isn’t danger adjacent. Except, she is, isn’t she?
“How did her husband die?” Sebastian asks, and I whip my head to look at my friend. “She told me this morning that he’d died. I was going to mention it when we were alone.”
Dead. Not divorced, not separated.
“Well…” Ace chews his lip. “Everyone thinks Denver did it.”
“Not a fucking chance,” I cut out the words before I can process them.
I may not know her that well, but I’ve been alone with her, and despite fearing she might tear me apart with words, she isn’t a murderer.
“I agree with Ethan,” Sebastian says. “I’ve met criminals in the ER. Murderers, rapists, dangerous people… she isn’t one of them.”
Ace shrugs, somewhat noncommittally. “Well, he was killed in a carjacking a few months ago.”
“When? Before she came here?” I ask.
“I’m not sure about the dates. No one is,” he says. “All people know is Wyatt Ledger got shot in the head, and then the media couldn’t find Denver. She could have been grieving, though?—”
“Or on a flight,” Zeke offers, raising his brows. “Running.”
Fuck. It looks that way. If her husband was murdered and then Denver left San Francisco, she looks guilty, doesn’t she? If I’d been on the outside looking in, that’s what I’d think.
But I’m not on the outside. I’m firmly within this mess, paddling in it like a fucking idiot.
“What if Ranger killed her husband because he was jealous?” Zeke asks. “Ethan, you can’t go near her.”
I squeeze my jaw. “It was a carjacking.”
“Yeah.” Ace scoffs out a laugh. “What carjacker shoots a guy in the forehead?”
I stand. “I don’t care why Denver’s here or what happened to her husband. I care that she’s alone with Ranger, and she said she didn’t have a choice.” I throw money on the table for the food. “I’m going to check on her.”
The entire walk back to the hotel, I struggle to breathe. My phone is burning a hole in my pocket with the urge to search whether what Ace was saying was true, but it feels like a betrayal to trust the internet over Denver.
I’d love to say she’s given me no reason to question her, but there are several bullets and a lie to the police that say otherwise. I mean, technically, it wasn’t a lie; I just left out valuable information, like who the hell I’d almost beaten half-to-death, but I doubt that distinction matters much. It’s one thing to lie to protect a woman I hardly know; it’s another if my lie is attached to a criminal organization.
The black limo car is outside the hotel, and a man is leaning against the hood, smoking a cigarette, his suit at odds with the vacationers around him. He eyes me as I pass.
When I reach Denver’s door, I pause. This Ranger guy is clearly still here, but I have no other way to contact her. I don’t even have her number.
Fuck it. I knock.
Wesson barks excitedly when Denver opens the door.
“Ethan.” She glances back into the room and steps into the hall, closing the door behind her. “You can’t be here.”
“I was worried.” The corridor is cast in shadows, but her gray eyes are still bright. Despite the dangerous man waiting in her room, the pull to her is too great, and I cup the back of her neck. “Are you okay?”
Her eyes shine as she nods. “I am. He would never hurt me.”
“Are you sure?”
Her silence has my gut lurching, but my heart slows when she places her palms on my chest. “I promise. He was worried about… about what happened.”
How is it possible that she radiates such calm while simultaneously being a force of nature? I can’t decide what to do around her—brace for impact or enjoy the ride. Either way, I pull her closer.
“You really can’t be here while Ranger is,” she says quietly. “He’s only staying tonight?—”
The jealousy that roars through me has me tensing my jaw so tight my molars grind together. “Denver?—”
“I’m not sleeping with him.”
Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck .
She doesn’t owe me an explanation. I’m nothing to her. We haven’t even been on a date. We’d spent hours asking each other pointless questions, but does that really mean anything?
The answer to that question hits me harder than the jealousy.
Denver touches my face. “Just avoid him. If you see him, just walk away, okay?”
She pulls from me, and I don’t look as the door to her room opens and shuts.
I spend the rest of the afternoon in my room. Sebastian tried to encourage me to join them at the pool, but I told him I needed to think. Truthfully, I’d lay on the couch and stare at the ceiling, watching the shadows move across the room until I can’t resist it anymore and give in to my curiosity.
I google Denver’s name, and fall down a virtual rabbit hole of their lives. Photos, videos, fan accounts, gossip websites—everything comes up Deluxe. She and Ranger seem to be celebrities of the underworld, hounded by paparazzi, with accounts praising Denver’s outfit choices, discussing the kind of coffee she drinks and her day-to-day routine.
My heart stalls when photos of Denver show her pregnant. Heavily pregnant. In most of them, she’s with Ranger, security flanking them, though she seems unfazed by the armed men around her. In one photo, she’s eating ice cream, and Ranger has an arm around her waist, whispering in her ear, and she’s grinning around the spoon.
Denver never mentioned having a kid. From the night we spent talking and scrolling through our phones, I never once spotted a photo of a child, either.
I keep scrolling and find photos of her and her husband. Wyatt Ledger. He’s around my age, or at least he was before he died. With short brown hair and a full beard, most of the photos with Denver show them holding hands, or he has his arms around her. They seem happy, and in the only wedding photo I can find, Wyatt is gazing at Denver like he’s won the lottery.
The story of his death has endless theories. He worked for Ranger for years and then, three months ago, was killed in a carjacking. He’d been shot in the head left on the side of the road, but that doesn’t seem to be the story anymore. The story is how he was cheating on Denver, sleeping with numerous women, with dozens of tapes being leaked on the internet.
My thumb hovers over the play button of one of the videos. One I shouldn’t fucking press.
But I do.
Most of the picture is blurred, the camera clearly hidden, so not much can be seen, but everything can be heard.
“—around her, anyway,” a male voice says.
A woman responds, “She seems nice.”
“She isn’t.”
“Hasn’t she been through a lot, though? Losing the baby ? —”
Wyatt’s laugh is cold. “She’s better off never being a mother.”
I close the footage.
Denver lost her child. And by the looks of it, very far along. And her husband was not only cheating but talking about her like that?
The threads echo my feelings. Most people are in favor of Wyatt dying—claiming that if Denver did it, then good on her. Others chime in about vigilante justice benefiting no one, and while Wyatt was clearly a piece of shit, he didn’t deserve to be murdered.
I keep searching.
The articles about Ranger describe him as a businessman who gives to charity and worked his way up from nothing to everything. The unofficial side of the internet tells things differently. Ranger Luxe is a criminal. A gangster. He’s a killer, a drug dealer, and is linked to numerous unsolved crimes over the last few years alone.
The last thread I find focuses on Denver and Ranger’s relationship. There are photos of them taken by paparazzi over the years, a Denver in her early twenties by Ranger’s side, doing everyday things: getting coffee, going to the movies, going on vacation. One photo, though, seems to be a fan favorite.
In it, Denver and Ranger are standing outside a coffee shop. Ranger is leaning against a wall, hands in his pockets, and Denver is in front of him, grinning. She’s close, a teasing smile on her face. What makes the photo significant is that Ranger is smiling in it. A warm smile, a smile that reaches his eyes.
I haven’t seen a single other photo of Ranger smiling like that, not even a hint of it. The head of a criminal empire has a heart, and it clearly belongs to Denver.
The date on the photo is before she married Wyatt, and then pictures of Ranger and Denver lessen over time. It seems Wyatt replaced Ranger until the day he died.
A knock interrupts my reading.
I sit up, staring at the door, knowing who it is.
Avoid him. That’s what Denver said. But curiosity paired with jealousy has me opening the door to Ranger Luxe.
The devil existed, and he’d knocked on my door.
Dressed in pants and a shirt, his tie the same endless black as his eyes, Ranger Luxe considers me. His frame almost fills the doorway, and I wonder why he’d knocked when he could have shouldered the door down and made an impression.
“Are you going to invite me in?”
“Is this like a vampire thing?” I ask, jealousy and stupidity ruling my tongue. And maybe a bit of disbelief, too.
Gangsters, murderers, mobsters, the mafia—they all feel so far removed from reality. Movies and books can’t be accurate, can they? Men like Ranger exist, sure, but they don’t take bullets and keep moving, nor are they untouchable. They walk around with an air of confidence because sometimes that’s stronger than a shield. Even I know that.
This guy might have a reputation, but he’s also human. And he can bleed like one, too.
Ranger arches a brow, looking torn between boredom and amusement, but doesn’t respond. Instead, he places a hand on my chest and moves me aside before striding into my room.
I close the door with a snap. Ranger doesn’t even flinch.
“Sebastian not home?”
I pause my steps, a little alarmed that he knows my friend’s name. “No.”
“Shame.” Ranger stands in the kitchenette, making the space look smaller. He’s like a black hole of a man, swallowing everything around him.
I take tentative steps into the living area, keeping enough space between us to at least give myself the illusion of safety, but I may as well be circling an open space with a fucking lion.
Ranger opens the refrigerator, and I frown. “What are you doing?”
“Ah.” Ranger closes the refrigerator door again and faces me. He’s holding a bottle of beer. “This is interesting.”
Anxiety nips at my neck. “Is it?”
“I should say so.” He twists off the cap and takes a swig before placing it on the counter. “Why would an alcoholic have beer in his room?”
Everything within me freezes. The lack of sound becomes a buzz, a chime, a shout and screaming metal?—
“Can’t you feel it, Ethan?”
Ranger raises his brows as if confused by my silence. Dipping his hand into his inside suit pocket, he withdraws his phone and reads from it. “Ethan Defender, thirty-two, veterinarian, lives at 1182 Foresters Avenue in the great state of California, and a big fan of Jack Daniels.” A grin spreads across his face. “Or was vodka more your thing?”
I steady my breathing. “No, you were right about the Jack.”
Ranger’s grin widens. “My dad was the same. He never met a bottle he couldn’t polish off. Even as a kid, I understood how weak that was. Shackled to his vices.” He considers the beer, twisting it on the counter, the glass grinding against the marble. “But it taught me how important control is.”
“Is that what you do with Denver? Control her?”
Dark eyes snap up to meet mine. It’s a stupid, challenging question, but my skin is crawling with the urge to fight. If I can’t use my fists, I’ll use my words.
Ranger tilts his head like the lion has decided its meal isn’t worth the blood that would stain its claws. “Was NA a need, too? Or did you decide if you were giving up alcohol, you might as well avoid drugs, too?”
I clench my fists at my sides. The thirst to hit Ranger is stronger than the one telling me to finish the beer.
“No smart-ass answer this time?” Ranger asks. I remain quiet. Anything I say will end in bloodshed. If I hit Ranger once, I won’t stop until one of us is dead. “I suppose it doesn’t matter either way. I only came here to say two things. The first is thank you.”
I almost topple the fuck over. “For what?”
“For saving her,” Ranger says simply, stepping around the counter. “I’m not too proud a man to be grateful when necessary. You kept her alive, and it’s the only reason your heart is still beating.”
“Thanks, I guess.”
Ranger closes the space between us. Though he has only two inches on me, it’s such an unfamiliar sensation to have someone taller than me that I might as well be on my knees.
Ranger grins. I think of all the men who have that smile burned into their memory before a bullet tore through wherever memories were stored.
“You know, Ethan, I clawed my way up in this world because there were two things I wanted more than anything—money and power. Money meant food, power meant respect, and nothing was more important than getting to the position I hold now.” Just as quickly as it appeared, his smile vanishes. Eyes like pits of darkness, a grave of which I’d never claw out of, stare down at me. “Until her.” That control Ranger spoke of slips. A slither of obsession appears in his eyes, one that I recognize all too well. “Denver is my beginning, my middle, and my end. There is nothing I would not do for her, because of her, with her. I was forged in hell, and she is my fucking salvation. So, if you touch her again, Ethan, I won’t just kill you. I’ll make sure everyone knows how you died—with whiskey in your gut and a needle in your arm.”
When I used to box, I was taught never to underestimate my opponent. Arrogance meant getting knocked on your ass. It was smarter to know exactly who was about to hit you and what they were capable of.
But that doesn’t mean I’m smart enough to keep my mouth shut around that potential threat.
“It sounds like you have a vice of your own, Ranger,” I say, hoping the indifference in my voice masks my growing unease.
Ranger’s shadowed demeanor vanishes, and he smirks. “I guess I do.” He steps away, and I blink quickly, releasing a breath. Ranger returns to the kitchenette, picks up the beer, and slams the base onto the counter. Suds climb up the bottleneck and drip down the glass, spreading across the kitchen counter and onto the floor. “You’ll be able to clean that up, right?”
He strides from the room like a lightning-encased shadow, and the wall trembles when he closes the door behind him.