“You’re not doin’ this alone,” Zeus growled, and if I hadn’t known him so well, I might have trembled at the cold fury in his tone.
“Don’t make me,” I countered with a one-shoulder shrug.
We stared at each other, two predators locked over one prey, neither willing to concede to the other. I’d never thrown down like that with Zeus, and the strength it took to look such a powerful man in the eyes and defy him astounded me.
But I did it.
I did it shaking and nauseated, hating him and hating myself because I couldn’t reconcile my need to please him with my need to save him.
“No, Lila,” he said finally, softly, anger blurred at the edges with grief as he worked his mind around the problem. “Love you like my own kid, so I can’t sanction this shit. I need you to get me, to hear me when I say no. You do this, you die. Guaranteed. Don’t need another death on our hands, girl. Only been three years, we’re still recoverin’ from Mute. Let’s keep this family whole.”
“It’s not whole. Not with you in here,” I argued.
“Lila,” he said firmly, a period punctuated on this conversation. “No.”
I rolled my lips under my teeth in a struggle to accept his decision. “They won’t rest until they take everything from us. You know how I know that, Z? Because they’re like Ignacio. And Ignacio sure as fuck didn’t stop until he’d taken everything from me in the pursuit of his own selfish agenda. Mute is gone, and you’re in here. They’ve taken more than enough from us.”
I ached with the egregious wrong of it, and I was furious because my role models––Diogo and Dane, Zeus and Nova––they’d never let such wrongs done to their loved ones go unchecked.
So why would I?
Just because I was a woman? Because I was softer, weaker, less pure of intention?
Hell fucking no.
I tipped my chin up and locked eyes with Zeus Garro, one of the biggest, baddest motherfuckers in North America’s criminal underworld, and I threw down. “One more thing happens to us because of Javier and Irina Ventura, I’m telling you right now, I’m doing it, Zeus. And I love you, but I don’t give a fuck what you say.”
Zeus glowered at me, thick fingers curled into his palms, mouth a hard-set line. “’S club business, Lila. I’ll say it one more time, you do somethin’ half-baked, you die, you’re puttin’ that on me, yeah? You stay safe, and you stay sane. No. Fuckin’. Vendetta. Plan.”
I stared down at my naked hand, clenched into a fist, then splayed it on the table, aware that it looked utterly bare without my engagement ring on it.
“Fine,” I replied softly, not looking at him as I stood up. “But my promise still stands. One more thing, I’m going at them.”
He said something else, but I was already putting the phone in the cradle and walking away. It hurt to leave him like that, a good man trying to protect me, spreading himself too thin because he had too many people to look after while behind fucking bars.
He didn’t get it like I did that sometimes sacrifices had to be made.
And I was all too willing to make one myself.
* * *
* * *
Three weeks later, on the eve of his wedding to the love of his life, King Kyle Garro was shot and plummeted to his death over the cliffs at Entrance Bay.
Like I’d said, the kind of love he shared with his partner, Cress?
She died, too, even while she breathed.
A walking zombie.
So we were down another two. Two souls I’d known and loved for over half my life.
Zeus wasn’t surprised when I appeared before the plexiglass partition for the first time since my last visit a week after King’s death.
He was already sitting there in that toxic orange jumpsuit that looked likely to split at the seams from his bulk, head tipped down, gaze in the bowl of his big, scarred hands cupped together like he was scrying the lines of his palms for answers.
He didn’t look up until I was seated, the phone to my ear, waiting.
When he did, there were tears in his eyes, but they smoldered, illustrating his scalding, furious grief.
His hand shook as he reached for the plastic phone, and I thought he might break it as he white knuckled it in his fingers.
“One more thing,” I whispered into the receiver.
Not an ‘I told you so’.
Never.
Instead, another promise.
That I would take down the Venturas if it was the last thing I did.
I would do it for him, for Nova, for Harleigh Rose and Cressida.
For Loulou and her babies.
For the biker babes so they could be safe and their men could stay alive.
I would do it for the Booths so they wouldn’t know the pain of losing a son the way Zeus did.