Chapter 20
CHAPTER
TWENTY
Ghost
Sometimes words were inefficient. Sometimes words just couldn’t convey the amount of shit you stepped into.
Sometimes you had to show, not tell.
My eyes swept over Rett’s scarlet cheeks just once, reaffirming he wasn’t hurt, and then all of my well-honed instincts shifted to the fool with his fist in the air. I took a step forward, and the man holding Rett dropped him and stepped back.
As if that would somehow erase what I’d just seen.
I kept my eyes leveled on him, memorizing every detail while silently closing the distance between us. Tension crowded the air, giving him a sample of the hell he’d just unleashed, and I watched his throat bob as his eyes tried to avoid mine.
But it didn’t matter where his eyes ultimately settled because there was no avoiding me.
“This doesn’t involve you, man,” he said.
I kept shrinking the distance between us, staring unblinking… resigned to what was about to go down.
He raised a knife, and I knew immediately that he’d pulled it on Pip, and that just would not do.
His arm arched through the air, and Pip gasped.
I caught his wrist and twisted, the bones breaking with a loud snap.
The knife fell from his crippled fingers, body sagging in pain.
I caught him by the scruff of his neck, squeezing hard enough to make him wheeze.
“Let me go, man! I’m sorry!”
I slammed him into the door frame face first. Blood splattered the dirty white wood instantly, and he dropped with a wail. He hit the ground and rolled, and I noticed a knife—if you could call it that—sticking out of his back. Using my foot, I pinned him down and glanced at Pip with an arched brow.
“It was all I had.” His voice was plaintive, bordering on a whine.
It only made my instinct that much more murderous.
The seams on the shirt this asshole was wearing ripped and stretched when I picked him up by the back of it, body hovering over the ground. He grunted and tried to plant his feet, so I dropped him on his already busted face.
“Unngh,” he grunted, pushing up onto his palms.
“Ghost,” Pip called, scrambling up only to drop again with a little whimper. His hand cradled his knee, and I realized he was hurt.
My foot shot out, toe jamming into the ribs of the fucker on the floor, but before he could fall, I shoved him down and slammed my palm into the knife sticking out of his back. He arched and let out a cry that my ears didn’t even bother to hear.
Dragging him up by his greasy hair, I buried my fist in his gut, and when he doubled over and puked cereal all over the carpet, I let him fall in it.
“You really should have checked who he belongs to first,” I told him as he rolled in his own mess.
“You’re dead for this!” he spat. Frankly, the butter knife in his back masquerading as a weapon was scarier.
“Not if I kill you first.” I spoke quietly, but it was loud enough to bring a hush over the room.
“Go ahead and do it. You have no idea who I am. You’ll never have peace again.”
I made a tsking sound and hauled him off the floor so he could stare into my cold but utterly calm eyes. “If I wanted peace, I wouldn’t be here.”
Fear flickered over his face, feeding the savage inside me. That first taste was always the most potent, when someone finally realized they were far outmatched and nothing they did would change the outcome of their situation.
“You don’t even have a weapon,” he argued, one last puny attempt.
“I am the weapon.”
He exploded into motion, nearly knocking into Pip who was still favoring his knee.
I mean, it was like he wanted to die. Dumbass.
Snatching him away from Pip, I dragged him toward Hazard’s apartment.
One well-aimed kick had the busted door giving way.
Normally, I would have just killed him right there.
There was no point in dragging it out. Death always wins.
But the idea of Pip seeing what I was truly capable of left me with a cold, uncomfortable twist in my stomach.
Death does not belong around my little pipgeek.
“Ghost,” Pip called, struggling to stand.
“Wait there,” I ordered.
He didn’t listen because does he frickin’ ever? And the hall filled with another pitiful whimper. The sound of him in pain was yet another weakness, and I turned.
The asshole on death row used that moment to pull free of my grip. I lunged, and he slammed his boot into my midsection before rushing up and launching himself out a broken window.
Have I mentioned the entire building should have just been condemned?
Fucking disgraceful.
I thought about following, just tossing him off the fire escape to finish the job, but that required leaving Pip alone, and we’ve all seen what happens when I do that.
I mean, I gotta ask, How was he even still alive?
If I didn’t believe in miracles before, I sure as hell do now.
“Ghost.” Rett gasped, leaning against the busted door frame.
You know, when Kieran said this place had been ransacked, he wasn’t kidding. Between us, he could be a little dramatic.
I swept Pip into my arms, cradling him close. “What hurts, baby?” I murmured, choosing to ignore the B-word that just tumbled out of my mouth.
He pressed his face into the hollow of my neck and inhaled. “Nothing now.”
You know the problem with cotton candy? It melts quickly in humid conditions. And right about then, my chest felt more humid than a mouth breather in a face mask.
“Sweet talk won’t make me forget what I just saw,” I grumped.
“He broke into my house,” he said as though that would clear up everything.
“And you stabbed him with a butter knife so dull it’s basically a tiny canoe paddle,” I retorted to let him know his explanation was non grata around here. “Seriously, what is it with you using random utensils as weapons?”
“I almost got away.”
“In my world, almost means dead.”
“Were you really going to kill him?” Pip asked.
“Yes.”
He said nothing, and I started to feel a little bad. Like maybe he might be mad about it.
“I was gonna do it in the other room.” I amended as if that made it better.
It did make it better, dammit.
“You don’t even know him or what was going on,” Pip said.
“So?”
“So what if he wasn’t in the wrong?”
Oh, his audacity was doing cardio today. Was he for real right now?
I passed by his blood-splattered doorjamb and stepped into the apartment he’d denied me entrance to less than an hour ago.
My feet stopped when I thought of something. “You said he broke in here?”
Rett nodded, blond hair tickling my chin. “Was waiting when I walked in.”
Rage so strong swept through me that my entire body tensed. I should never have left. If I had just walked in without asking, none of this would have happened.
This was on me.
My options were impossible. Stay and risk him being hurt because of me. Leave and risk him being hurt because I wasn’t here to protect him.
These thoughts made my brain feel like a Rubik’s Cube. An impossible puzzle in 3D.
This is exactly why I never get involved.
Too late, the heckler hiding in my brain countered.
Thinks he’s funny. Really, he’s just an asshole.
A light touch drew my attention to where Rett was doodling a small circle across my chest. Feeling my attention, he looked up, hitting me hard with those wide, silver-hued peepers. “What if I wasn’t the victim back there?”
“You will never be anybody’s victim because I’d burn this city down first.”
“But what if—”
I made a sound, cutting him off, nerves humming with something dark and intense. “No what-ifs. It doesn’t matter. You are off-limits to anyone who causes you harm.” His lips parted, but I cut him off again. “Even if you harm them first.”
His lower lip disappeared into his mouth while his eyes gleamed with something I didn’t recognize but became drunk on anyway.
The pull this pint-sized human had on me was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. Even with the distance between us, it had always been there. A silent ache, an insistent tug on a piece of me no longer mine.
His head dropped back against my bicep, that soft fucking stare spearing me to my core.
“I’d kill for you,” I whispered.
“Would you live for me too?”
My heart dropped hard enough to bruise, the ache blooming like a flower after a storm. How he found beauty in destruction—my destruction—I might never understand, but maybe I didn’t want to. At least not while he was looking at me like I was his entire universe and nothing else mattered.
I fused our lips with reckless abandon, retracing my steps to kick the door closed, and swirled my tongue possessively around his.
All those nights of imagining him, two years’ worth of distance, only to come back and find him threatened—not once but twice—created an urgency not even my strong will could deny.
The tease from the alley only made it more potent, proof that trying to pretend I wasn’t absolutely gone for him was just a waste of time.
Especially when I’d already wasted too much.
I didn’t bother looking for the bedroom, not when the couch was right there. I sat with him in my lap, our lips not breaking at all as he scrambled to straddle my lap. My cock was rigid against his ass. The way he wiggled fit it between his cheeks just right.
I grunted and kissed deeper, grabbing for his shirt, and ripped it down the center. He gasped when I shoved the tattered fabric off his body and tugged him closer so we were skin to skin. His ass fit perfectly in my palms, and I squeezed him through his pants while driving my hips upward.
His whimper broke the kiss, his wet lips smearing to my cheek and over my jaw. I tilted my head, wanting more of that sweet glide against my skin, and he gave it willingly, licking and sucking down my throat and across my collarbone.
Our bodies rutted impatiently, and I sat up away from the cushions, wrapping both arms around him and latching on to the skin at the top of his shoulder. He arched and whined, reaching between us to tug at my sweats.
“Please, Hiro.” He panted. “Please.”