“God,” she huffed out before turning silent.
“How are you?” I asked, needing that information more than anything else.
She was quick to give me a tongue lashing over that. “No, King… just no. You don’t get to ask me that anymore.”
Before I got a word in, she continued, “Look, you made your choice the other day, and you didn’t choose me. So please tell Mace and his friend to go home. Every time I see them, it makes me think of you, and I have other things I need to concentrate on at the moment.” She paused before adding a little less harshly, “Please.”
I stood. “Put Mace back on.”
“You’ll tell him to go?”
“Lily,” I growled, “put him on.”
She grumbled something I couldn’t make out, and then after some rustling, Mace came back on the line, “Yeah?”
“Stay put, brother. We’re not pulling out yet.” No fucking way were we pulling out. I’d go over there and make that clear to her myself.
“Done.”
I ended the call and headed into my office to grab my shit.
Zane met me in the hallway. “I have some good news for you for once.”
“You found Brant?”
“No, still nothing there. This is about Don and Kree. She’s safe now. We got Don to drop the parenting order.”
I scrubbed my hand over my face, still not happy with the outcome he’d worked. We were moving closer to me putting that bullet in Don’s head. “That’s a temporary fix.”
“No, it’s permanent.”
“How do you know that?”
His nostrils flared. “Fuck, King, you’re not gonna be happy until he’s dead, are you?”
“You’ve got that right. She’s your cousin for fuck’s sake. Do you really wanna leave her out there vulnerable as fuck while that cunt is still breathing?”
“No, but we’ve always known that you and I handle shit differently. Murder isn’t an option in my toolbox.”
“It should be. When it’s family, it fucking should be.” If it wasn’t Zane I was dealing with here, I’d go around him and take care of this myself, but I had history with him and respected him enough not to.
“Don’s gotten himself in some shit, owes money he can’t afford to repay, so my guys have taken care of that in return for him staying away from Kree.”
“You’re fucking kidding me, right? A man like Don doesn’t just walk away from his woman and kids. He’s the kind to show up with a fucking 9mm and end all their lives so no one else can have her.”
His phone sounded with a text. Glancing down at it, he said, “I’m keeping an eye on him, King. I’ll keep you updated.” Meeting my gaze again, he said with some force, “Restrain yourself from doing whatever the fuck it is you’re thinking of doing. There’s other shit at play here that I don’t have time to go into. But it’s the kind of shit that, if you put a bullet in Don’s head, you’ll cause worse problems for Kree.”
As he walked away from me, I made a mental note to get Griff to do some of our own digging on this. I wasn’t happy with Zane’s plan. Far fucking from it. And there was no way I’d put Kree back out there with the way things stood.
Half an hour later, I pulled up outside Lily’s mother’s house. Mace sat down the street right where I’d told him to stay. I hadn’t heard from him since our last conversation, and there was no sign of Lily, so I figured he’d managed to handle her. However, as I exited my ute, she came barrelling out of the house, rushing at me like a bull to a red flag. He may have dealt with her, but I’d be the one handling her.
I traced my gaze over her body, because hell, she wore a fucking skimpy black robe that barely covered her ass. I had to fight like fuck not to reach out and undo it. My imagination went wild thinking about what it hid.
“I thought you were going to call Mace home!”
I found her eyes. They screamed the wild storm raging through her. She was a beautiful hurricane I couldn’t walk away from. Lily was passion and calm all rolled into one. I needed the calm to centre me, but it was the fire I craved in a woman. Beauty never spoke to me long enough to keep my attention. Fire did, though, and she blazed with it.
I was here to re-claim her.