She was trying to kill me.
Or send me to jail.
Or have me lose one of my bars.
There was a motive to the shit she pulled.
There had to be.
When she sat down at the bar and ordered a shot for herself and the bartender, I tried my best not to tell my bartender to fuck off.
‘Hey, Cole. Our customers can’t knee a guy in the balls and then come drink here. We should be kicking her out.’ I eyed Cole for good measure.
He held up his hands. ‘You got her, boss? I’ll let you take over making her drink or throwing her out.’
I nodded, and he winked at Katie before stalking off to go help the few others that were out here on a weeknight.
I shook my head at the little tornado sitting in front of me. ‘Why are you at my bar stirring up shit?’
‘I’m not. Little Georgie was supposed to be out of town.’
When she didn’t offer any further explanation, I went around the bar to pour her shot. She wanted a rum, some of the strongest I had on the shelves. If she wanted to get drunk, I didn’t care about her enough to stop her.
I slid her the shot, and she curled her glossed lips at me. ‘You’re not going to have one with me?’
I shook my head.
‘Come on. I make it a rule to never drink alone.’
I shrugged. ‘Not worth it to me.’
She sighed and shoved some of her unruly curls away from her high cheekbones. ‘I’m buying. One shot’s not going to set you back.’
I laughed. ‘You’re not buying either of them.’
She glanced Cole’s way. ‘He always makes me pay.’
‘Good. He should.’ I lifted a shoulder and spun one of the dark rings on my finger. “We don’t hand out free drinks at Heathen’s Bar.”
She blew a raspberry and stood up on the footrest of her stool to lean over my bar. She grabbed a shot glass and the bottle from me. “Lay off him and the other bartenders. Girls flock to a bar where they get free drinks, not one where the owner has a stick up his ass and makes everyone pay.”
My temper immediately flared. She knew just the button to press. “I’m not worried about people flocking to my bar.”
“Right, because you don’t make your money off Heathen’s Bar anyway,” she mumbled and wrinkled her nose as if the way I really made money disgusted her.
“And you don’t make your money whipping up coffee drinks either.” Every now and then, Katie made her way back to a little coffee shop that she’d taken a job at during her time in college. She was barely a barista and yet every guy waited in line to get a coffee from her on the rare occasion I stopped by. I wasn’t proud to admit I knew because, over the years, I’d kept tabs on her. In my defense, the woman had purposely crossed my path over and over again.
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Mario needs me. You basically have us starting at ground zero because you had to confront Georgie for no reason other than to show him who was the bigger man.”
“I was showing him he shouldn’t physically harm you.”
“You and I both know I can handle myself.” She poured another shot and slammed the bottle down on the bar so hard the liquor sloshed over the rim.
“Can you now?”
Her grip on the bar was tight, her olive knuckles turning a paler hue. Katie was fumbling with the idea that she may not have been able to handle her latest victim. “Don’t question my place in the family, Rome. I know what I’m doing and have handled myself since the day Mario brought me in.”
“Do Bastian and Mario know you’re actually seeing Georgie?” I asked the question because Bastian had finally stepped into Mario’s shoes and was heading up the Chicago Family.
She had a death wish, and just looking at her in her next-to-nothing black dress, I wondered if my dick had one too. I constantly had to remind myself how she was bad news, how she’d been tied to my dead ex-fiancée, how I didn’t need distractions, especially ones I might end up caring about. Yet she sat there unmoved, constantly trying to irritate the man who chose murder as his job within the family.
My little Cleopatra was just as fucked in the head as I was.
“Bastian has nothing to do with this. We needed intel, and I told Mario I would get it.”
“By fucking someone who’s going to throw you around?”
“It was barely throwing around,” she snapped at me. Then she slammed her shot back and winced as she swallowed it. I watched her neck bob as the liquid burned her throat. “Look, I gave my word I would get the information. Just remember your place, Rome. It’s not worrying about me.”
“Mario may have brought you in, but I killed Jimmy. We watched him bleed out together. The man you’d tied yourself to had been lying to the family for years. You think I need to remember my place, but you stepped into the family with your judgment—”
“Exactly on point. I knew he was trash the moment he slid between my legs, but I pinned him there long enough to find a way to step over him and be a part of this family, didn’t I?”
My jaw tightened, and I sighed. “Katalina, you looked at Jimmy like he was your savior and lover when no one else was watching. So I’m not ever going to say your judgment was on point. That man should never have slept with you when you were that young.”
Her slate eyes shimmered like wet metal for just a moment before she glanced away from me. “Foster care was much worse. Everyone’s got a story, Rome. Honestly, mine is one of the better ones.” She picked at a crack in the bar like she was annoyed with it, like it was a chink in her armor she couldn’t always cover up. Armor that was marred with experience and bruised by wear and tear.
“We both know that’s not true.” The way her stare went far away, I almost reached for her hand. I fisted my own instead and thought of all the ways a man that took advantage of children deserved to die. “I should have waterboarded Jimmy and Marvin for at least an hour.”
A laugh full of sadness and maybe a little shock burst from her. Katie would never tell her story to me. We weren’t close enough, but I knew that the men she’d been with had sex-trafficked women for years, that they knew how to torture a woman or a little gray-eyed girl.
“Well, I’ll be honest,” she said. “Georgie ain’t got nothing on Jimmy. That’s for sure. And I’m furious because I’ve barely got anything on him thanks to you. Next time you want to wave your manhood around and be pissy about nothing, do it somewhere else. Everything I do, I do with awareness, Rome.”
I blew out a breath at her quick redirection of the conversation. She was small, pint-size, vulnerable. But I had to remember she’d danced with some of the most sadistic gang members out there. Her size was a jarring contrast to what she was capable of. Maybe it was her vulnerability that pulled men in, and maybe I was a sucker for it too.
I hated that she’d slithered into the family, hated that she’d intertwined herself in my life and I couldn’t disentangle her.
Yet I knew she’d just been a kid trying to survive, a girl taken complete advantage of.
I knew but couldn’t get her to know it too. She liked to remind me that her actions were consensual always and that she made conscious decisions.
She narrowed her gray eyes at me, as if trying to find the reason for my poor mood.
I came around the bar to sit next to her. “Do you know I could have spared Jimmy? I consider it a lot. Maybe my ex had decided to sleep with him. Maybe he deserved one more chance.” I stopped for a second, not sure I wanted to say the next words. “You know what I kept picturing, though? You with him. The way you looked at him like he was your damn world and really he’d just created a world for you so fucked up you thought it was where you belonged, by his side. Did you know that he was sleeping with three other girls who were underage?”
Her eyes didn’t widen; her muscles didn’t tense. She wasn’t at all surprised as I confessed all I knew about that dead boyfriend of hers. Mario would always give me a rundown of the victim, always make sure I knew I was doing justice rather than murder. Most of them I didn’t care about. I would have followed through with it even if I didn’t have the background. It was a way for Mario to try to save my soul, but I’d lost it long ago.
“Jimmy was the first man I slept with, Rome. Sure, I’d fooled around with kids, but he was different.” She sighed. “He gave me money to make my father comfortable. No one else offered that. He loved me in his own way, I think. I was naïve and loved him a little too. I can admit that. It doesn’t make me stupid, and it’s ridiculous to think I haven’t learned, that I wasn’t learning when I was with him.”
“Is it, though? They’re all just as bad. You know Georgie’s rap sheet. You’re still getting yourself into shit situations.”
“I’m aware. Mario doesn’t send me in blindly.”
“And still you slept with him?”
She laughed and then grabbed the bottle to pour more liquid into her shot glass. “We really doing this whole exchange? I don’t want to know who you sleep with in your free time.”
“Because who I sleep with isn’t a part of my job.”
She banged down the bottle to cut me off. “I don’t sleep with men for money, Rome.”
I tsked at her lie. “You’ve been Mario’s bait for years now. You think they don’t share some of your escapades with me? I have to know in order to do my job right.”
She winced, like me knowing her secrets physically wounded her. Her voice was small but strong when she glared up at me and replied, “What you think you know about me isn’t truth just because Mario says it is. I sleep with who I want, when I want, because I want. If it gets me off to control Georgie and his dick, then I do it. If I did that with the last guy, so what? I’m the best at this. I bring in the evidence and the information so that you can bring them to justice. You think I was a little innocent doll when I walked into that room with Jimmy years ago? You think he really was my world?”
I didn’t answer her. I watched her body tense, her short breaths, the way she ran a hand through that mess of curls. She hid most of her vulnerability from everyone, but I searched out those little movements that gave it away. She’d struggled with something saying those words, I just didn’t know what.
Her gray eyes were hard as stone when she glanced back up at me, all vulnerability gone. “Jimmy was going to die by your hand or mine. Mario let you have him first, but remember he slept soundly next to me. Every. Single. Night.”
I fisted my hand on the bar.
She glanced at it, knowing she’d hit a nerve. “I knew the exact time he would wake up to call his four, not three, other women. I knew where they all lived. I knew everything. When he held a gun to my forehead the night before his death, I quivered under the barrel, but on the inside, I was laughing, Rome.” Her smile was as bright as a wolf’s on a dark night. “I’d emptied the bullets out of it earlier that day.”
I recalled how she’d laughed when she pulled the trigger in front of all of us the night she took her blood oath years ago. She was Cleopatra in sheep’s clothing.
She downed her shot and stood from the bar with dignity. I almost withered under her stare. She was a whole head and a half shorter than me, tiny in every place. She made a man want to protect her, but then she morphed into a vicious siren, ready to devour those who did.
She didn’t need protecting, and it made me want to protect her even more.
Or strangle her, depending on the day.
“One day, you’re going to encounter someone you can’t handle, Kate-Bait.”
“And what? You’ll swoop in to eliminate him?” she asked condescendingly.
“Don’t be so sure I or anyone else will be able to rescue you, doll.”
She scoffed and shoved back her hair. “Worry about saving yourself, Rome. I’ve never needed a knight to come rescue me. I ride in on my own damn horse, and if it happens to buck me off and disappear, I can walk out—guns blazing—on my own.”
She turned to leave. I should have let her go. I should have held my damn breath when she passed so I didn’t smell the scent of her that I was addicted to.
My hand shot out and gripped her elbow, yanking her close enough for me to whisper in her ear. “You’re not with anyone anymore tonight.”
She licked her full lips and glanced down at mine. “So?”
“So stay for a few.” I didn’t know why I was inviting her, didn’t know why I wanted her to stay.
“Probably not a good idea for anyone to see us hanging together as if we enjoy each other’s company or something,” she offered up as a reason.
“Who?” I shot back. “Our friends? You introduced me to all of them.”
“Oh my God,” she grumbled and pushed away from the bar. “I don’t have time to bicker with you.”
She glanced around as if racking her brain for the most ridiculous option she could come up with. “I’m going to go down the street to Crowned Ink.”
“No the fuck you aren’t,” I blurted. “How much have you had to drink?”
It wasn’t my business what she did on late nights by herself, but her walking ten blocks in the damn dark to a tattoo parlor seemed to be asking for more trouble than even I could ignore.
“I’ve had enough to know that the tattoo I’m about to get won’t hurt that bad.” She winked at me and sauntered toward the front door. Without looking over her shoulder, she asked, “You coming, Rome?”
I let out a string of curses as I went after her. The woman was more trouble than I ever wanted to be associated with—and I killed people for the mob.
Why the fuck was I following her in the dead of the night?
“You’re asking for a problem tonight, Katalina.” I growled her full name. It rolled off my tongue like an intoxicating drug, one I was scared I would never want to quit.
Her long nails, painted some dark color, waved at me as I caught up to her. “Don’t follow me, then. I don’t mind walking alone.”
“I don’t mind you walking alone either. In daylight,” I spat back.
“I’m carrying and have a few tricks up my sleeve.” She shrugged as we rounded the corner. One street light flickered in the night.
I had a chain and a trick up my sleeve too, but I was sure none of it would save me from the one thing I was in danger of.
Her.
