“I love you, vovó.”
Her grandmother could only nod as those ancient eyes of hers steamed up. “Come, you’ll catch the dead of a cold.”
“The sun is warm.”
“Not warm enough.” Her grandmother stepped back and motioned. “You must eat.”
As Sola entered the house, she froze.
Without looking, she knew that Assail had come down the stairs and was staring at her.
Shit, she wasn’t sure she could leave him behind.
After having been sequestered in his room for the last couple days, Trez found the world to be a stretch for the senses, like having a strobe light in his face and a pair of speakers up to each ear: Getting onto the Northway to head into downtown Caldwell, he found himself putting his sunglasses on and turning off the radio—
From out of nowhere, some dumb shit did a two-lane sweep and cut him the hell off.
“Watch where you’re going!” he shouted into the windshield, pounding on his horn.
For a split second, he hoped the guy behind the wheel of the Dodge Charger decided to go road rage back at him. He wanted to hit something. Shit, it would probably be good practice for his meeting with s’Ex. Mr. Charger, however, just took his overload of testosterone and his pencil-size dick off at the next exit, jogging in front of a minivan and a pickup truck in the process.
“Asshole.”
With any luck, the bastard would drive off into a ditch with no seat belt on.
About ten minutes later, Trez peeled off from the sixty-mile-an-hour-ers and entered a maze of one-ways. Confronted by all the traffic lights and the stop signs, his brain cramped up and he forgot the way to the condo—
When a horn sounded behind him, he locked his molars and hit the gas. In the end, he was forced to pilot around by tracking the Commodore’s twenty-story-plus height, gradually zeroing in on the high rise and finding the ramp that led down into the parking garage. As he descended, he got his pass out from the visor, swiped it through the reader, and proceeded to one of their two reserved spots.
The elevator ride up took fifty years and then he was stepping off onto the carpet runner. Their condo was down a little and he used its main door, not the service one, letting himself in with his copper key.
As he came into the kitchen, he saw two mugs on the counter, an already open bag of Cape Cod potato chips, and the coffeepot half-full.
He paused over an open GQ. He’d already gone through it. “Nice jacket,” he murmured as he shut the mag.
No reason to will on any lamps. The day was bright and sunny and all the glass let in plenty of light—
The towering black shape that arrived on the terrace was a harbinger of doom if he’d ever seen one.
Striding over, Trez opened the door by hand and stepped outside, closing things up behind him.
s’Ex’s voice from under the executioner’s hood was mildly amused. “Your brother invited me in.”
“I’m not my brother.”
“Yes. We’ve noticed.” As the queen’s hatchet man crossed his arms over his chest, his massive forearms bunched up even under the folds of fabric. “To what do you owe the honor of my presence?”
The fact that it was freezing cold out seemed appropriate. “I don’t want you to f**k with my parents.”
“Then you need to come back. That’s it.” The executioner leaned in. “Don’t tell me you called me all this way in hopes of negotiating. Did you. Surely you are not that stupid.”
Trez bared his fangs, but then dialed shit back. “There’s something you want. Everyone has a price.”
The executioner reached up and slowly took off that hood. The face behind the folds of black cloth was handsome as sin … and had eyes with all the warmth of winter granite.
“Why would I risk my own life for your parents? If I disobey an order, there are consequences—and none of you are worth them.”
“You can talk to the queen. She listens to you.”
“Assuming that is true, and I’m not saying it is, why would I do that for you?”
“Because there’s something you want.”
“Since you seem to know everything, what exactly do you think that is,” the executioner said in a bored tone.
“You’re stuck there as much as any of them are. I remember what that’s like—and I can assure you, life on this side of those walls is so much better.”
“Which is why you look like shit, then?”
“Think about it. I can get you anything on the outside. Anything.”
The executioner’s eyes narrowed. “Sparing them is not going to save you.”
“Killing them isn’t going to bring me back. And that’s why you’d do it, right? So go to the queen, tell her you’ve spoken to me directly—and I don’t care whether you kill them. Then suggest that she strip them of everything they’ve been given—the quarters they live in, the clothes and jewels they’ve bought with the bounty they received, the food in their cupboards. Everything. That will make the queen whole again. She’ll have lost nothing, be out nothing—”
“Bullshit. She doesn’t have a half for her daughter. All that ‘restitution’ doesn’t solve the fact that the princess has no mate.”
“It’s not going to be me. I’m telling you right now. You guys can f**k my father and mother up, you can threaten me with bodily harm, you can trash my house—”
“What if I just take you now?”
Trez outed the gun he’d shoved in his waistband at the small of his back. He didn’t point it at s’Ex. He put it right under his own chin.
“If you try to, I’ll pull this trigger. Then you have a dead body, and unless that daughter of hers is a sick bitch, she ain’t gonna want me then.”
s’Ex went inanimately still. “You’re out of your f**king mind.”
“Anything you want on the outside, s’Ex. You take care of this for me, and I’ll take care of you.”
As the queen’s executioner considered the deal, Trez breathed smoothly, and thought of the only two people who really mattered. Selena … Jesus Christ, he wanted her, but he was no good for the likes of that Chosen. Hell, even if this flier of a negotiation worked, he was still going to be a pimp, and there was no changing his past.
And then there was iAm.
The idea of losing his brother was … he couldn’t even put it into thought. But the male was going to be better off without him if he couldn’t fix this problem.