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I was doing a slow nod, because step one went well and that worried me. Where was the fight I expected?
“Uh, yeah. Hold on. This box…”
I let the words die on my tongue.
She reached for it when I froze. Fuck. I didn’t freeze. I didn’t have the sense to feel nervous. Except, well, shit.
“And this one? Another tracker?” she said, opening the lid.
“It’s, uh, not really. More like a very real, very obvious mark that you are taken.”
This time, as she opened it and looked down on a ring, her eyes flicked between me and the ring over and over.
“Okay, and?” she said, sounding impatient, and that might have been exactly the attitude I needed to snap out of whatever the hell this was.
“Well, and, woman, for fuck’s sake. Will you marry me? Be part of this fucked up family not just by some stupid tattoo? Be part of my family? Stay with me until death, and even then you own my soul for eternity.”
The silence that followed made a damn boulder drop in my stomach.
“Why do you look like I’d actually say no? Like I'd let you tattoo my ass and then say ‘nope, sorry, I’m not legally marrying you’? You are seriously dumber than you look.”
She got up and practically crawled into my lap.
“Put the ring on my finger, Xander. I was yours the second I saw you. Not because you scared Ripple. Not because you killed a few bad men. Not because you can make me come by just looking at me. But because, for some fucked up little reason, you gave me a reason to live again. So yes, my dark demon. I will marry you, on one condition,” she said and put her finger over my mouth before I could speak. “Take me to bed and give me a damn orgasm. It’s been days, and you haven’t touched me, and seeing you show up like that? All scary like? A girl has needs, Crash.”
I forgot about that damn ring for the moment with the way she looked at me.
“I’m sure the doctor will clear you,” I said and claimed her mouth like I'd been dreaming about doing for days. “Fuck, Sparky. I thought you’d never ask.
THIRTY-TWO
epilogue
Zeiden
This wasn’t the masked event the Spectors put on. This wasn’t anything like Enigma. And it wasn’t going well either.
“Well, Cali nailed it,” I said to X.
The masks all matched. Stupid little blue and white things. The thing was, just to get the mask and the invite, we had to donate a disgusting amount of money that would be held for auction items. Bidding starts somewhere in the twenty grand category. And for what? A luxury getaway?
“I don’t think we are going to find what we need here. Not like this,” I said to Cas and X.
This was just getting frustrating. Every damn angle was a dead end. Every time I thought I had some kind of lead, it fizzled or, worse, ended in a dead body. Not that I gave a shit about the bodies. Politics needed to be cleaned out from time to time. The issue was, they were fucking with the infrastructure the Spectors had so carefully bought, lied, and stole to build.
“I need to get some air,” I said and turned away. No one here would have thought some gang lords or whatever they wanted to call us would be here. This was elite shit. I’d grown tired of watching the champagne flow and five-thousand-dollar winebottles emptied by the caseload. This wasn’t us. We weren’t born from money, and that part was obvious. There was the new money side, the old money, and the bastards like us who had money that no one could quite pinpoint. And for that, we were either being ignored or being slyly interrogated by the wives of the rich, powerful, and unethically married.
“Don’t go far. The vultures know there’s mysterious new meat, and, Zeid you look good in a tux,” X said to me and laughed at his own joke.
“Speak for yourself. Not one of these high-class low-standard wives gives a shit that Cali is on your arm,” I flipped him off. “I just need a second.”
I walked away without another word.
I’d thrown every bit of my energy into the business and into the business of knowing what was happening to our connections. We had deals that would die without the right backers, and unfortunately, those backers were being picked off.
And that fight? It was the damn knife to my side. What could have happened if we weren’t paranoid bastards? Why couldn’t I figure this out? I was the smart one. I figured out the things.
The doors to the private balcony were already open as I stepped outside. I hated this lifestyle. I couldn’t wait to get home and get out of this tux.
