Repo (The Henchmen MC 4)

"Hey babe," Reign greeted me, noticing us first. He'd half-turned from the bar, giving me a chin jerk. "You're on the gates overnight."

I felt myself falter, crashing back into K whose hands settled on my shoulders as I watched Reign turn back away from me, falling back into conversation. "Um..." I said, looking at Repo who gave me a small smile and a shrug as he moved over toward the bar to talk to his brothers.

"Don't look a gift horse in the mouth, love," K said, squeezing my shoulders then stepping away from me. "I can't stay long. I need to get back to work, get a new phone situation squared away, and see a Russian about another Russian."

I felt myself nod tightly. I knew that was going to happen. I wasn't K's only case. He had a lot of girls he needed to keep tabs on and while Shelly could hold down the fort for a limited amount of time in an emergency, she had a life and K's girls needed to hear from him to feel safe. That was the way I felt too. I needed to know he was still on the job to feel like I could breathe, to keep the faith.

And, well, my case was closed.

Or all but.

Ruslan wasn't an issue.

Viktor was on his way to being no one's issue anymore but some Russian dude back in the motherland.

My life was mine again.

I was pretty sure that was what was absolutely freaking terrifying me.

It was easy to be Maisy, the girl with the con mom, the amazing, but dead grandmother, the ex-boyfriend who almost got her locked up for his crimes, the employee who had been way too trusting of her bosses. She was easy. Clueless, naive, effortless to take advantage of, but easy.

And Maze, the girl with no past who was a hardass and cold and distant and secretive and wholly incapable of trusting anyone, who questioned every minute little God damn thing. Yeah, she was easy too.

But this person left in the wake of it all?

I had no idea who the hell she even was, but I was pretty sure there was nothing easy about her.

If the night and morning in the hotel room with Repo/Rye was anything to go by, it wasn't going to be easy to reconcile both sides of me. Because that was the case now. I wasn't Maisy and I wasn't Maze; I was a hybrid of both those women. I was someone who could be soft and sweet and emotional like I had been in my life before. But I was also someone who knew she could make a full grown man unconscious in seconds if she needed to. I had thicker skin and sharper edges.

My immediate instinct when I threw my arms around K and then Repo when I first saw them was to cry. Legit, that was the knee-jerk reaction. I wanted to let all the stress and worry and fear burst out of me in one big, ugly show of emotion. That was the soft side of me. But I had pulled it together and tried to joke around, pulling out my thick skin and keeping it together.

Then after being lulled to sleep with some seriously amazing sex that was deeply akin to actual lovemaking and waking up in Repo's arms to find that he too had fallen asleep, well, the thick skin thinned out and Repo woke up suddenly to the loud hitch in my breath as the tears streamed down hot and relentless.

"Honey, hey, what's the matter?" he'd asked, reaching out and wiping the wet from my cheeks as his eyes slowly cleared of sleep.

But I just face planted into his chest and let it all out.

Then, later in the shower, wishy-washy emotions all exorcised, Repo and I had went at each other like animals, like a battle, like survival of the fittest. There was nothing even remotely like lovemaking about the way we fucked, hair-pulling, skin-biting, ass-slapping, airway-constricting.

The Maisy I used to be would have been horrified by the violence of it.

But Maze thrived on it.

So, yeah, to say the least... my little personal identity crisis was an issue.

Especially because I had decided to keep trying to get my patch. I knew it was a long shot if it was even possible at all. But I wasn't a quitter. I wanted to prove it to them that I could take whatever they threw at me and handle it.

I also wanted needed to prove that to myself as well.

But was the new hybrid me going to be badass enough to pull it off? And was it going to change things that Repo and I were now openly... um... dating? Fucking? I wasn't entirely sure what we were. He'd claimed me. So I guess that meant more than fucking. Repo didn't exactly suffer from communication issues, so the fact that things were slightly hazy were either because I was over-thinking them or because he was waiting to clarify them when he saw how I was going to handle the whole situation.