Tainted Kiss (Tainted Knights 1)

“Kale, wait up.” Jace jogged after me, catching up before I hit the street. “The girls left in Kin’s Rover. Can you give me a ride?”

“Hurry up,” was all I said.

The valet seemed to take for-fucking-ever to bring my car around. For a minute, I thought about grabbing a cab, but the kid drove up with my car right then. As soon as he had the car in front of me, I was jumping in.

Jace had barely shut his door before I was pulling into traffic, cutting off three different cars as I cut across multiple lanes so I could head toward Jenna’s apartment. The apartment Gray, Jace, and Kassa shared, as well as Lucy and Harris’s apartment were both in the same building as Jenna’s, so I knew exactly where I was going.

The closer I got, the colder I seemed to grow. Something was wrong. I knew it. I could feel it. Santana wouldn’t just leave without telling me. She would have waited for me. She would have l

eft with me.

Muttering curses under my breath, I ran two red lights back to back, thankful there weren’t any cops around to pull me over.

“Holy shit, Kale!” Jace yelled as I practically drifted through the next turn.

Angry car horns shouted at me from either side, but I kept going like I hadn’t nearly been taken out by some guy in a lifted truck with wheels as tall as my car.

“What the fuck? Goddammit, man, I want to get home in one piece, not in a body bag.”

“Ask Kin if Santana is okay,” I commanded.

I was still a mile away, but it might as well have been fifty. I felt like I was driving through quicksand. I couldn’t get there fast enough.

“We’ll be there in less than a minute. You can ask her yourself.”

“Too long,” I muttered. “I need to know now.”

Blasting me with a round of curses, Jace shot Kin a quick text. Two seconds later, his phone announced an answering text. I shot my friend a quick glance as I started to slow down for the last turn, but his face had clouded over as he read what was on his screen.

“Well?”

Jace blew out a frustrated breath. “Santana doesn’t want to see you.”

The coldness was starting to encase my heart now.

“Why?” I gritted out.

“She didn’t say, and knowing my girl, she won’t tell me shit. Kin is fiercely loyal, you know that. If you did something to Santana, she’s liable to kick your ass.”

“I haven’t done anything to her. She was fine when I left her with your girl to do that fucking song Harris wanted us to do. Kassa and Kin were taking care of her for me. I’m clueless as to what happened between then and now.”

I barely touched the brake as I pulled into the garage for Jace’s building. Finding a spot, I parked and barely turned the car off before I was running for the elevators, Jace right behind me.

“I don’t know what to tell you, man. Something happened, and now Santana is upset. The girls are closing ranks, and you’ll have an entire wall of pissed off chicks standing between you and your girl.”

The elevator was taking too fucking long, but I knew it would be quicker than running up all those flights of stairs to Jenna’s apartment.

As soon as the elevator doors opened, I pushed inside. Grandma June would have whipped my ass with a wooden spoon for not telling the older couple I was sorry, but I was blind, deaf, and dumb to anything that didn’t involve getting to Santana.

Less than a minute later, the doors opened on Jenna’s floor, and I jogged down the corridor until I reached her apartment. Holding my finger down on the doorbell with one hand, I pounded my fist on the door with the other. A full minute passed before I could actually feel someone looking at me through the peephole.

Jace kept back a few steps, as if he wasn’t willing to take the explosion that was bound to happen when the door opened.

I glared at the little hole. “Let me in. Now.”

“Fuck off, Kale,” Angie’s sassy voice called through the door. “Santana doesn’t want to see you, so you’re not getting in.”

“Why?” I demanded, trying and failing to keep the desperation out of my voice. “Why doesn’t she want to see me? I need to know what happened. What the hell have I done, Angie?”