Zeus was playing with him.
“’Course.” He nodded sagely. “Get that, Hiccough, you gotta think ’bout your business. What’s loyalty if you don’t have any cash to back it up, right?”
“Right.” Hiccough jumped on his chance to agree with Zeus. “Knew you’d understand.”
Zeus nodded slowly as if he was distracted then called, “Lou, bring me another whiskey. Hiccough, you want somethin’?”
He nodded like a bobblehead. “Beer would be great.”
Zeus tipped his chin at me and when I hesitated, Mute nodded from beside me. I didn’t want to get close to the guy but I quickly poured the drinks and made my way over to them. Hiccough was facing away so he didn’t see me until I was beside him, planting his drink on the table. He looked up to smile at me or maybe thank me but then caught sight of my face, the faint scratch the falling brick from the bullet had made across my cheek, and froze.
Before he could do anything else, Bat and Buck were hemming him in and Cy was tugging me out of the closing circle. Zeus’s mighty hand went slamming down on top of Hiccough’s and he tugged it forcibly in his grip while he began to talk, and as he began to talk, he took that wicked knife in his other hand and worked it slowly into the back of the other man’s hand.
“You think you can go behind my back and make a deal with the fuckin’ Nightstalkers and I won’t know about it? Think you can come into my house, the business of my brothers and scare one of our fuckin’ girls, Hiccough? I don’t fuckin’ think so.”
Hiccough whimpered and tried to pull back his hand as Zeus opened a flap of skin, held it to the blade with his thumb and slowly began to pull it back over the length of his hand like he was skinning an apple.
“Now, my boys are going to take you to the fun farm to ask you a few questions about the motherfuckin’ Nightstalkers and if you answer correctly, you’ll be free to go back to your pathetic fuckin’ life. If you don’t, I have ’bout twenty pigs who haven’t eaten dinner yet.” Zeus’s grin was wide and manic as he ripped the last bit of skin and let go of Hiccough’s hand with a flourish that had blood spraying across the table.
Hiccough was howling and whimpering now, and I was struck dumb with shock at what I’d witnessed. Zeus wiped his bloody blade on either side of Hiccough’s cheek to clean it.
I’d always known Zeus was a monster, but this made it an irrefutable fact.
I didn’t have time to process it because the brothers around me were moving, two of them carting a sobbing Hiccough between them out the back while Nova pulled out a fucking handkerchief and cleaned the blood off the table with it before putting it back in his jeans pocket.
“Meet you there,” Zeus told his brothers then turned to look at me.
I turned on my heel and fled behind the bar. It wasn’t that I was scared of him—though I was—it was that I needed the space to think about what I’d seen and how it made me feel.
Mostly, I wondered if it was wrong that I felt vengeance burn like the satisfying heat of whiskey down my throat and in my gut; that I loved the look of that fucker’s fear because it so accurately mimicked my own when his friend had leveled a gun at my face.
I was thinking these thoughts as the club emptied out, leaving Zeus and I alone.
A predator and his prey in one big cage.
“Lou, look at me.”
His voice settled over me like a cloud of marijuana smoke, sweet and heady enough to make me forget myself.
I looked at him.
He stood at the entrance to the bar, blocking my exit. I watched as he prowled toward me and I instinctively backed up until my ass hit the opposite end. His grin shone in the shadows cast by his wild mass of hair.
“You scared, little girl?”
He leaned into me, looming so close that I could feel tingles erupt over my skin just from the proximity and the threat of his touch.
“No.” I swallowed thickly.
“Do you know why I wanted you to see that shit?”
I dragged a deep breath into my lungs, caught the forest and smoke scent of him and forgot to breathe again. “To scare me.”
“To show you. This is me. This is the monster you’re so desperate to make your own. There’s no goin’ into this with eyes closed shut, Lou. I’m the kinda man, someone wrongs you, I cause him the equivalent in pain. I’m a man of loyalty and vengeance, violence and sex. Won’t make apologies for it and won’t have you romanticizin’ it. I’m an outlaw and this is an outlaw’s life. You sure you still want that?”