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“Where’s your manager? I'll have your job for this. He’ll hear about how you let my good business walk out this door all over the fact that you refuse to honor your store’s own goddamn word.”
His voice rises to a pitch that makes my skin crawl, and I force myself to maintain eye contact, even though all I want to do is crawl under the counter and hide. I’m supposed to be in the pharmacy right now, doing paperwork, filling prescriptions, and getting spare snippets of time to work on my research paper, not dealing with this.
“Like I said, sir, I’m the ranking member of the floor staff who is here, and the coupon clearly says —”
A heavy slap on the counter makes my jaw click shut. My eyes dart to his free hand and I see it’s clenched in a fist. Old habits take over and I feel myself shrinking; he looms over me and it’s all I can do to suppress a whimper. It doesn’t matter that Maggie’s here; it doesn’t matter that this guy isn’t Jay; in the reflection of his dark eyes, I see myself as the girl that I used to be. “I don’t give a goddamn what the date says. Key it in.”
“I can’t, I’ll —” My voice wavers. I really can’t key it in. The code’s so old it probably won’t work, for one thing, and the last thing I want to do is risk my job to give some old guy a half-off discount on his snacks and wine.
“Don’t make me say it again.” He raises his fist.
“Hey, buddy, you really don’t want to do that,” says a calm baritone that feels like a weighted blanket around my shaky shoulders. I look toward the source and see a towering man in a cut-off leather jacket standing in line behind the coupon guy.
The man turns on him. “This is none of your business. I’m warning you. Back off.”
My eyes see something stuck in the back of the older man’s pants, and then they go wide; he’s armed.
The new guy cocks his head, making his medium-length dark hair rustle, and his piercing blue eyes narrow, but his lips turn upward in a smile.
“I know what you have on you. The model, the caliber, the accuracy, the range, the reload time. Hell, I could tell you at what distance I could use what you have stuffed down the back of your pants to put a hole in a man’s head in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Syria, and in Columbia. You want to know what? It’s different in each place, because you have to account for things like humidity, elevation, and just how fucking tired you are, because fighting insurgents, terrorists, and doing dark ops against drug cartels all make you different kinds of tired. But that’s all beside the point. What you really want to know is that I can move faster than you could even put a hand on that gun, and the second I make a move on you is the second you regret every decision in your life that led you to this point.”
“I don’t… I wouldn’t…” the older man stammers.
I’m frozen in place, staring, as the man in the cut-off leather jacket smiles at the older guy like he’s doing nothing more than telling him about how his favorite team won last night’s game. It’s terrifying, mesmerizing, and almost enough to distract me from how my eyes really like to linger on him.
“No, you won’t. Because you’re smarter than that. What you’re going to do is take out your wallet, pay the actual price for your stuff, and keep your mouth shut except to say the words ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘thank you, ma’am.’ Do you understand me?”
The older man nods, takes his wallet out, and pays his bill and mumbles an apology. I smile at him as I hand him his change.
“Have a good night,” I say.
A relieved sigh leaves my lips as the older man leaves.
Casually, the guy in leather unloads his shopping cart onto the belt. Almost mechanically, I scan his things, and it isn’t until partway through ringing up his order that I notice how strange it is. There’s baby powder, diapers, a bottle of whiskey, a motorcycle magazine, a coloring book, crayons, and then he puts about three different bottles of cough medicine on the counter.
“So, have any plans for tonight?” I say, more curious about what he’s doing with all this weird stuff than anything else. My hands are still a little shaky, but they’re quickly calming; something about being next to him makes me feel more myself.
“Just a regular night.”
“Oh? With all this?”
“With all this.”
“So, are you new in town? I haven’t seen you around,” I say.
“Passing through.”
“From where?”
My eyes must be more expressive than I intend, and whatever they give off, he doesn’t like — because something dark and frightening flashes in his piercing eyes. A wave of cold washes over me, and I shiver. It becomes imminently clear that the man in front of me isn’t just my guardian angel from a threatening customer. He could be so much more… and so much worse. His posture changes, and his voice turns icy cold; the danger I felt from that older man is nothing compared to what I feel right now.
“Keep asking questions, and you’ll find out just how dangerous curiosity can be.”
Chapter Three
Hunter
Even as those words leave my lips, I know they’re a mistake. They haven’t even sunk in on the cute cashier before I understand the depth of just how much of an asshole I’m being. Threatening the cashier I just rescued from that old jackass? What the fuck is wrong with me? Am I a gigantic asshole, or just wildly on edge because there’s a drug gang out to kill me and my nephew, and my baby nephew also happens to have a cold and hasn’t let me sleep for the last few days?
