Knife & Flesh (The Night Horde SoCal Book 4) Read online

  “I had fun hanging out with her tonight. She’s sharp.” Trick’s voice was right at her ear, low and gentle.

  “She is. Thank you for…everything. You did so much.”

  He shrugged and led her to the bathroom. “Like I said, it was fun. I’m glad you’re doing better.”

  The bathroom setup in this apartment was unusual, but convenient for a space that had to be shared. The tub and toilet were enclosed in a little room, and then outside that, in a space with a doorway but no door, was the sink, in a long counter with cabinets underneath. A plate-glass mirror took up the wall above the counter, and a row of dressing-room bulb lights stretched above that.

  The bathroom boxes were stacked on the counter. Juliana flipped the switch and then hissed and, by instinct when pain seared her eyes, turned her head into Trick’s chest, away from the light. She felt him hit the switch again, darkening the room, and then his arms were around her.

  “Do you need the light?”

  “I need to find the Vicodin bottle. It’s not the only pill bottle.”

  “If you don’t mind me going through it, tell me which box, and I’ll find it while you pee in the dark. I’ll get some ice, too.”

  After a moment during which she tried to make her throbbing brain remember if there was anything in the box she wouldn’t want him to see, she gave up and nodded. “Smaller box on top. Thanks.”

  A few minutes later, she was settled back in bed with a makeshift ice bag made of a towel knotted around a handful of ice cubes. She’d had her Vicodin and a glass of water—the nausea was abating, finally—and Trick pulled the comforter back over her. He was tucking her in, too.

  “I’m gonna stick around, if that’s okay. I’ll stretch out on your sofa again. I’d like to see you up and about before I go.”

  She nodded, and it finally occurred to her to wonder at the coincidence of a man she knew—a little—finding her on her kitchen floor. They’d just moved into this apartment that very day. “How are you here? Where did you come from?”

  He smiled and reached out to push a strand of hair from her eyes. “I live here—upstairs, on the other side. I was getting my mail, and Lucie came out and asked for help.”

  “That’s crazy, that you were there right then.”

  “Yeah. Kismet.”

  She didn’t know about that, but she was too tired to think about it.

  ~oOo~

  “What do you think, mija? Where should we put it?” Juliana held up the wall hanging she and Lucie had just made: a stretched canvas, painted midnight blue, with tiny, battery-operated string lights pushed through to make the constellation Libra, Lucie’s zodiac sign.

  Lucie studied it seriously, her hands on her hips. “Over my books.”

  “That’s a perfect place. Okay, let’s get the tools.”

  It was Sunday afternoon, and she was feeling much better. Her head was still sore, but only from the swelling. The horrible headache was gone, and her vision was steady. Her tummy, too. If she turned too quickly, she still got whoopsy, but otherwise, she was doing okay. She hadn’t needed a hospital.

  Trick had left them after breakfast on Saturday morning, pulling his black leather vest—he’d called it something else, but she couldn’t remember what—over his bare chest. They hadn’t seen or heard from him since. For the best.

  He’d looked really good. His eyes were blue, she’d been right about that, but they had an unusual ring of gold just rimming his pupils. The way he looked, the way he’d acted, the way he’d taken care of them—all of it had Juliana in a turmoil. She wanted him, she’d been attracted to him since she’d met him, and unless things had changed, she knew he wanted her. But she did not want him in her life. Or Lucie’s life—even though her daughter was crushing, too.

  She knew who the Night Horde were. They had a strange reputation—everybody knew they were criminals, but hardly anybody seemed to think they were the bad guys. People were afraid of them, but they thought of them when they had trouble they didn’t want the police or a lawyer to take care of. And nobody seemed to know what it was they did that made them criminals. They just were.

  Juliana had an idea, though. Working as a paralegal in a multi-division law firm, she’d heard their name come up occasionally. They were clients of one of the criminal law specialists in her firm. Though she worked in the immigration law division—and was studying to become an immigration attorney herself—the paralegals and secretaries gossiped, and the criminal division had the best gossip. They weren’t supposed to talk about cases or clients, of course, but as long as it stayed in the office, nobody seemed to mind.

  What she wanted for Lucie, and for herself, was not a criminal. She wanted a man she knew would come home every evening. A man who could be counted on. Who was loving and gentle. Who would take care of them.

  Her marbles were clearly still a little loose, because she now had a voice in her head that said that Trick was all of those things. But that patch on his back shouted to her that he was not.

  Besides, it was nuts to be thinking of him like that. She barely knew him. Maybe all he wanted was a tumble. She knew about the Horde’s reputation for women and sex, too. She wasn’t a woman who tumbled. She was a mother.

  After she hammered anchors into the wall above Lucie’s bookcase and hung the new wall hanging up, she turned it on, flipping a toggle switch she’d screwed to the bottom, and they stood back and appreciated it: bright stars in a midnight sky.

  “It’s pretty, Mami. That’s Libra. Like me.”

  “Yep. We did a good job. And I think we’re all moved in now. This is home.” Juliana hated mess and clutter, so as soon as she’d felt able, before she’d felt able, really, she’d unpacked everything and found it a home. There were a few decorating things she still had in mind, but for now, they were totally moved in, two days after the truck had pulled away.

  She didn’t think it was the concussion making her stomach roll at the thought of this move. This apartment wasn’t as nice as the little rented house they’d moved from, but this complex was gated. She hoped that was enough security.

  Lucie slid her little hand into Juliana’s. “I already have a friend, too. Can we go see Trick? He lives upstairs. He says his house is just like our house but backwards. Like Opposite Day.”

  Maybe it was security that she had a biker nearby, too. They could be friends. Right? She didn’t need to think about him as somebody to get involved with romantically. They could just be friends. Good friends, even. That would be okay.

  “We need to go to the market, Lulu, but after that, we can go up and see if he’s home.”

  “We can buy him a flower for thank you. Like you did for Miss Chrissy.”

  She grinned at the thought of handing Trick a bouquet of pink Gerbera daisies and baby’s breath. Adjusting her daughter’s ponytail, she said, “Sure, mija. A flower for thank you.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  “You sound like you’re looking to pimp me out.” Trick leaned into his refrigerator and pulled out a couple of bottles of Shock Top. He handed one to Connor and then twisted the top off the other, pushing the fridge door closed with his elbow. “That’s fucked up, Con.”

  “I’m not pimping you out. There’s no expectation. I’m just telling you what is. She’s asking for you. I think she likes you.”

  Walking past his friend, Trick went to the living room and sat down on his futon. Connor followed, dropping into the chrome and faux-leather armchair. For a few moments, they didn’t talk. Then Connor added, “She is hot.”

  “Fuck you. I’m not fucking La Zorra. The woman cuts people who piss her off into sections. If I go to the meet, you’re asking me to fuck her or reject her. Why is that on me? I’m nobody in the club. Not an officer. Just a soldier. I haven’t offed any more of her enemies, so she doesn’t need to ‘thank’ me again. There’s no reason I should be at that meet. Can’t Hooj just tell her no—at the club level?”

  “That’s the plan. Like I said, there’s no
talk of asking you to do this. I’m just running the option by you, in case you want it.”

  Connor should have known better. They were close; he knew Trick better than anyone. He knew his taste in women, his worldview, just about everything. Not everything, but nearly. Trick hated that his friend would even ask.

  “The answer is no. I know she paid for my grandfather’s house, but if she thought she was buying me with that, then I’ll figure out how to pay her the money back.”

  Connor lifted an eyebrow. He knew Trick had the money to pay her back, probably a couple of times over. He also knew that Trick didn’t use that money. He lived off what he made designing bikes. “Understood. Just thought it was your right to refuse.”

  Trick set his aggravation aside. There was a lot Connor didn’t know about what had been going on in his head lately, or the depth of his antipathy toward La Zorra because of it. Connor thought only that he was giving him a chance to make up his own mind on the matter.

  Dora Vega, the cartel queen they worked with, had contracted the Horde for a hit on Allen Cartwright, the L.A. County District Attorney, nearly a year ago. Trick, a former Army sniper, had done the job, and he’d done it cleanly. The case was still open, but so far there hadn’t been any light on her or the Horde for it, and at this point, Trick felt like any faint trail they might have left had grown ice cold. He could relax. He’d run the job through his head thousands of times, and he hadn’t made a mistake. He’d sacrificed his dreads to that job, so he could blend in as he’d made his way to the top of a skyscraper hundreds of meters away from the target.

  Since that hit, Trick was struggling with shit he’d thought he’d dealt with and shipped off long ago. Sighting on that poor bastard’s head had dredged up years of memories. Right then, set up on that rooftop, stretched out on his belly, looking through the sight of the M25, gauging the environment so he could set his shot, everything around him had turned bright and brown. The sounds had changed, no longer the bright, brassy noise of the midday American city but the dark, tangled sounds of the warzone. The man in his sight had been hatless, his thinning hair styled in a businessman’s neat haircut, and he’d been wearing a suit—a sedate navy pinstripe and a red tie. Trick had known all that, but what he’d seen in the crosshairs was the keffiyeh of a Taliban soldier.

  That flashback had augured a full-on reprise of his first years out of the service.

  They did some wack shit in the Horde, violent and bloody, but nothing like what he’d seen and done in Afghanistan. He’d told no one, not even Connor, that the nightmares were back, and the flashbacks. He was keeping an even keel, but there were days when he was managing it by the skin of his teeth.

  So no, he was not interested in fucking the woman who had brought that back to him.

  Dora was grateful for a job well done and, though she’d paid the club handsomely—seven figures handsome—she had also bought Trick’s pappoús’s little house in Santorini. His grandparents had lost the house during an economic catastrophe in Greece, and within a year of their displacement, his grandmother had died. Now, because of La Zorra, his grandfather was back in that old cottage, talking with his beloved wife, whose spirit, he insisted, had never left it.

  Trick was grateful, more grateful than he could say, for the kind thing Dora had done. But that didn’t mean he was willing to be whored out to her. In fact, the simple thought of it, that she might think she had some kind of right to him, made his skin itch. Even if he’d been attracted to her, that would have cooled him off.

  “I refuse. I’ll be happy if I’m never in the same place with her again.”

  ~oOo~

  After Connor left, Trick took a shower, his second of the day. His skin was still crawling with the notion that Dora Vega wanted him for some kind of boy toy, and thinking about her now always brought the feeling of the desert on him, the way sweat and sand made a constant film on every part of the body, even those parts that were covered by layers of gear. So he showered and scrubbed, and when he felt clean and calm again, he toweled off and pulled on a pair of board shorts. He thought about getting into the pool; the chlorine was good for making him feel clean and nowhere near Afghanistan, but it was the weekend, and he could hear that it was busy. He wasn’t in the mood for people.

  Instead, he did a couple of shots of whiskey and chased them with a fresh beer that he swallowed down while he was still standing in the open door of the fridge. Then he got another, put on some music, and went back to his office.

  As his day job, if that was what it was, he was the lead designer at Virtuoso Cycles. Though the mainstay of their work was contract customizations of stock bikes, as well as repair and maintenance jobs, Trick designed bikes from scratch. Sometimes he did a commission job, but for the most part, he did his own work for his own inspiration. The one-of-a-kind bikes he built sold for tidy sums, but they sold slowly. His chief value to the business was good press. He had a case of awards, including one from Sturgis a couple of years back.

  Hoosier had given him the title of ‘lead designer,’ but the truth was only he designed bikes. Everybody else did mods. Which was fine—his own bike was a modded V-Rod. But changing out a stock exhaust or installing wider wheels wasn’t design. Demon got closer to actual design than the rest of his brothers; he’d rebuild and reconfigure any part of the bike, digging all the way in, so his stock customizations often looked like freely designed bikes. The Night Rod he rode was one such: though it was all readily available mods, Demon’s ride was noticeably unique.

  Trick had just finished a project a week or so ago, and he’d been dry since. None of his old sketches excited him, and nothing new had sprung from his fingers yet. But he found time every day he was home to at least sit at his drafting table and sketch. Inspiration rarely struck unless a pencil was in his hand.

  His sketches always looked the same at first, starting with the basics: two wheels, the engine, the seat. There was little give in those details; change those up too much, and you were no longer designing a motorcycle. Physics dictated that the engine couldn’t be repositioned too much; same with the seat. In the same way that physiology dictated the human form, and a sketch of a person started with the same series of shapes, so did physics demand a certain conformity.

  Some designers, he knew, started with the interior specs: what kind of engine, what kind of power, what design would support the guts. Trick’s approach was more aesthetic: he started with the look, then tailored the guts to it. Often, his finished work looked more like a sculpture than a motorcycle, but everything he’d ever done was roadworthy and street-legal.

  And the art pieces won the awards.

  The afternoon was getting dusky, and the natural light from the uncovered window over his drafting table had started to dim. Still casting about for an idea that would take him to his next project, but having spent a few peaceful hours not thinking about things that shredded his head, Trick dropped his pencil in its space in the organizer at the back of his table and went to wash his hands. He tended to wipe his fingers over his sketches as he drew and thought, so his hands were always black with soft graphite after a session with his sketchpads.

  His stomach rumbled, and he realized that he hadn’t eaten…yet today. Just the beers with Connor and the whiskey and beers later. Laughing to himself, he went to grab his phone out of the dock and call the Thai place down the street. They delivered. Trick could cook, but he wasn’t in the mood.

  Before he could dial, there was a light knock on his door. He didn’t get visitors he wasn’t expecting, so he set his phone down and pulled his Glock from a shelf, then checked the peephole.

  Juliana and Lucie.

  His heart rate hadn’t changed at the knock, even though he’d picked up his gun; that had been more reflex than anything, the caution of a man who’d live most of his life with enemies. But seeing those girls standing on the other side of his door made his pulse quicken a little.