Page 21 of Smoke

I scream and throw my phone onto the bed.

My bedroom door bursts open.

I scream again, half-expecting it to be Kane, already making good on his threat.

“What the fuck are you doing up here? You got customers asking for you,” Omen barks.

Fuck. “I-I… I’m on my period,” I lie. “What the fuck are you doing in my apartment? How did you even get in?”

He towers over me, his eyes narrowing. “I made copies of your keys. We each have one. I came up here looking for you.”

“Are you joking? You can’t just make copies of my keys without asking me. Fucking hell. I have no fucking privacy anymore,” I yell as I push past him.

He stalks after me. “You should’ve thought about that before you did what you did. Now you gotta put up with us. Those are called consequences.”

I snicker as I sprint down the stairs, back toward the bar. “That’s rich coming from a criminal.”

He grabs my arm before I make it into the bar, and swings me around to face him. “No body, no crime, mama.” He pushes me flush against the wall. “I did that for you. You’re only a criminal if you get caught.”

I take a deep breath and curse myself for getting wet again. He’s hot as fuck though. Like one of the sexiest men I’ve ever seen in real life. “Thank you, Omen. Would you like me to say it every day?”

He squeezes my arm harder. “Yeah. Maybe I do.”

I swallow hard and pray he doesn’t notice my lip quivering. Crammed inside this tight little space between the stairs and the door, our bodies are so fucking close together, I can feel his breath on my face.

“Can I go back to work now?”

He glares down at me for another thirty seconds before releasing my arm. “Next time, let one of us know where you’re going. It does no one any good if the bar gets robbed while you’re changing your tampon.”

I roll my eyes and snicker again. “Yeah, okay. I’ll make a mental note.”

I shirk past him and head into a barrage of angry voices caroling for more drinks. As I refill everyone’s orders and serve some new people who wandered in, I can’t help but notice Omen’s eyes on me. He watches my every move. It’s unnerving and a turn on at the same time.

The rest of the night goes by fast. I get a nice big burst of customers for happy hour and then another rush from the after-dinner crowd. By ten pm, I’m down to just a few regulars and Omen.

He perches on the corner of the bar, his head buried in his laptop. “Quit staring. If you got something to say, say it.”

I wipe the bar down next to him, scrubbing at the sticky ring marks the bottles made on the wood. “You look so fucking serious all the time. Ever smile or have fun?”

He arches an eyebrow but never lifts his gaze from the screen. “Not when I’m working. I’ve got a lot of security footage to watch.”

“Is that something you do on the regular?” I have cameras here too, but I don’t look at them unless I have a reason to.

He sighs and turns the laptop around so I can see the screen. “We had a break in the other night. Not the first one either. But dude knows where our cameras are, so he hides his face.”

I snicker. “You sure it’s a he?”

Omen glares at me, making eye contact for the first time. “No. But this is personal. And you’re the only unhinged woman we know. You the culprit, Cherry?”

“Obviously not, Om. Let me watch the video,” I snap.

The footage is grainy, but I can tell that it’s a pretty big guy, about Scar’s size, wearing a black hoodie and black pants. He keeps his back to the camera the whole time. He’s probably wearing a mask too. At least that’s what I’d do.

The guy runs at one of their semi-trucks and shoves a knife in the front tire. It takes him a few minutes to rip through the thick rubber. But he manages to flatten it along with the rest of them in a matter of minutes.

Then the guy picks something off the ground and chucks it through the window, shattering it. “What the fuck?”

“He’s throwing bricks. We have tons of them lying around for our scales,” Omen quips.