“I wasn’t going to say anything but I feel I have to.” His shoulders rose as he asked, “Why are you with him?”
I’d known he wasn’t happy about something but I hadn’t expected it to be my personal life. It was made more awkward since I had no desire to answer and I didn’t think he’d take the hint of silence.
“I appreciate your concern, but this isn’t something I’m open to discussing.” I lifted a case of oatmeal, the sides denting as I forced it into a spot it didn’t really want to fit into. If I went back to work, maybe he would too.
He didn’t.
“I feel as if I know you, and I don’t think he deserves you. I might not have been in the office that long but I’ve heard the stories.”
And there he went, jabbing full force, right into my soft spot. This is why animals in the wild don’t sleep on their backs. There’s always some asshole walking around and ready to poke them in the gut.
I shoved up the sleeves of my long shirt as his words clicked into place. They gave the sense of something more detailed than the office gossip. “What exactly is it that makes you feel you know me so well?”
“Paddy used to talk about you, the way you could do things. Sometimes I feel I know you better than myself.”
The looks he’d given me in the past, as if there had been a familiarity between us I hadn’t been a party to, now made more sense. “You’re new here, and I do like you. But you need to butt out.” And I needed to start sleeping on my stomach.
He slammed a fist down on the bench. “And watch while he uses you?”
“If by use, you mean be the only one who has stood by me, no matter what was going down and what it could cost him, then he can use me all he wants.” I dropped the box in my hand and left the garage, heading for the shower and perhaps the only place left to get some peace.
Fate wasn’t in the bedroom when I got in there, which was a good thing with the way I was feeling. I knew where my loyalties lay and would defend him to Knox all day long. He’d bailed me out of enough situations to more than deserve defense but it didn’t quiet my own doubts.
I never reached my haven. Fate strolled into the bedroom, pulling his shirt off as he did, looking as if he’d had the same destination in mind.
“You getting in the shower?” he asked.
“Yes.” I turned my back on him. Logically, I knew I shouldn’t let what Knox said affect how I was feeling right now, but when did logic ever factor into feelings? If I could handle this logically, I wouldn’t feel anything for Fate at all. I wouldn’t be worried about ending up in a puddle of emotional muck while he walked away, finding a new shiny toy. Unfortunately, I couldn’t shut off my feelings when it came to him and Knox’s words were ricocheting around my brain, trying their best to do maximum damage.
Fate’s arm came up and blocked the bathroom, more teasing then serious. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong.” When he didn’t move, I shrugged and redirected toward the dresser, pretending I needed something from within.
“Now I know it’s something,” he said, remaining in place.
“I just want to get in the shower.” I shuffled through the drawer searching for some article of clothing that didn’t exist.
“Are you mad because of last night?”
It was another poke in an already sore belly that had me finally spewing my complaints. “I work with you, I sleep in the same room with you, same bed. Sometimes it’s a little hard to face the other people in this house when everybody knows you tried to get rid of me. I do have some pride. Or at least I used to.”
The playfulness was gone in a blink. “Who cares what anyone thinks?”
“Maybe we need to change sleeping arrangements.”
“Why? You plan on moving into Knox’s room?”
I rested an elbow on the dresser and put my forehead on my palm. “No.”
“That’s where this is coming from though. Isn’t it? What did he say to you? You were fine when you went into the garage. He goes in and now you’re not.”
“This has nothing to do with him.”
“It shouldn’t but that doesn’t seem to be the case.”
My back still to him, I heard his movements to the door and I wished I’d kept my mouth shut. This was what I got for starting to talk again.
Being closer, I moved in front of it before he got there
He stopped short when I wouldn’t get out of the way. “Move.”
“Why?” The look on his face said it was to go punch Knox in the gut but I was hoping I was wrong.
“Because I’m going to punch Knox in his mouth so that he learns to keep it shut.”
I’d almost had it right.
“You can’t hit him. He’s on our side.”
“He’s on someone’s side but it’s not mine.” He stood there, staring me down, trying to physically intimidate me out of the doorway.
I shook my head.
His hands went to my waist and lifted me out of the way and deposited me to the side. What the hell? Why let me think I had a chance in blocking him?
He stormed down the hall, and I ran after him.
“Where’s Knox?” he asked, pausing briefly in the living room to ask Murphy, who was sitting on the couch.
Murphy hooked a finger towards the garage. Fate took off in that direction, now both Murphy and I following him.
He threw the door open. “What did you say to her?”
He didn’t wait for a reply, and I wondered why he even asked because he decked him a second later.
Knox was lying on his back as I ran to grab Fate’s arm to make sure he didn’t continue beating on him but stopped dead. It sounded like a bomb was exploding.
The fight was forgotten as a threat from beyond loomed. The walls of the house were still shaking as we all raced outside as quickly as the garage door would open.
“Don’t go beyond the twenty feet,” Fate yelled, even as he himself did.
I was too stunned to move immediately. Every single house surrounding us was in flames, five in total. My hand covered the scream I wanted to release as I reminded myself we were the last occupied house on the block. The twenty feet radius was clear as the flames came close enough to lick the boundary in places but didn’t touch so much as a blade of grass within that distance.
I was glad I hadn’t undressed completely and my knife was still at my ankle when I spotted them. Five of Malokin’s guys were about fifty feet from us. Fate spotted them at the same moment and took off.
Disregarding his warning, I sprinted off right behind him.
They ran as soon as they saw us coming and I was amazed at how much speed I was getting from my legs. I overtook Fate after the first block and launched myself on the closest target a couple minutes after.
We fell to the ground and skin shredded on pavement. He rolled on top of me but I quickly managed to get the better position. My knife going up and under his ribs seconds later.
I was back on my feet and looking for my next target as Knox was breaking the neck of one and Fate had another pinned to the ground. Murphy hadn’t caught up to us yet.
I ran ahead, looking for the other two, but they were gone. Knox joined me but without any luck.
When we circled back around, Fate had one guy with his back on the ground. Murphy was beside him, having finally caught up.
“Where is he?” Fate demanded the guy as he held him by the throat.
“Fuck off,” the guy said through broken teeth.
“I will kill you.”
“Do it.” The guy meant it. He’d rather be dead than disclose anything on Malokin. I couldn’t say I was surprised.
Fate, obviously believing him as well, grabbed the guy’s head and smashed it against the asphalt below him. Considering what I knew about Malokin, it was about as good an ending as he was going to get.
He stood and the four of us looked around. The rest of the house’s inhabitants were standing on the lawn taking in the chaos.
And then I noticed the house in front of us, its walls still in flames except for one. Upon it, a message charred into its surface.
Almost even
We wouldn’t be almost anything after he found out we’d just killed three more of his guys.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
My eyes shot to the clock on the side table. Four a.m.; I’d only been asleep for an hour but I knew I wasn’t the only one having trouble sleeping after watching the houses around us burn to the ground. After Fate had lectured the Jinxes for over an hour about getting drunk on the job, we’d all sat around the living room scrambling for a new plan. No one had come up with one. It hadn’t been a good night by any standard.
Now here I was with clammy skin, throbbing pain and still no plan. The pain, which had started at the tattoo and worked its way down my leg, was now climbing through my chest until I feared I was having a heart attack, except that was supposed to be impossible.
I tried to keep my body still so I wouldn’t have to answer any questions from Fate, who lay beside me. I must have finally fallen asleep last night while he was showering because I didn’t remember him getting into bed. Any talk of separate rooms, along with further mention of the Knox incident, was as gone as the houses that had burned down. Still, he was way over on the other side and the gap between us felt a lot larger than a few feet.
“Karma?”
I should’ve known he’d wake up just when I wanted him to sleep. I answered the question I knew was inevitable. “It’s the tattoo.”
There was pause a before he spoke again and I could imagine the pieces falling into place in his head, like they had for me. He had less information but he had more knowledge. This wasn’t just the tattoo and it wasn’t getting better.
“How often is this happening?”
I tried to think back to when it had first started. It was hard to pin down time and frequency on something so sporadic. Falling short of a concrete answer, I came up with the next best thing I could. “I guess you could say just enough to remind me there’s something wrong whenever I start to forget.”
“Show me,” he said as he moved over to my side of the bed and started tugging the covers out of the way.
I pushed down the shorts I sometimes wore to sleep, knowing exactly what he’d find, and what Lars had found as well. “It looks the same. It always looks the same.” I didn’t need to look at it to know.
“What’s it feel like?” he asked, prodding the area that now lit up the bedroom with a warm glow.
“Most of the time? Normal.”
“And the not normal times?” he asked, leaning too close to me with a too knowing stare.
“A stabbing pain that radiates.”
“So badly that you can’t walk,” he said, obviously remembering the time he’d witnessed it act up.
Fate rose abruptly, startling me with the burst of action. He was on his feet throwing on pants as I still lay abed. “We’re getting it out.”
It wasn’t a question or a suggestion.
“We don’t know if it’s doing anything bad,” I said, rolling onto my side and watching him.
“It radiates pain that is getting progressively worse. Sounds perfectly healthy to me.” He threw me a look that said don’t act stupid before the shirt he was putting on covered his face. He moved next to open one of the drawers I’d taken over and tossed a shirt and a pair of jeans at me. “Get dressed.”
I propped myself up on one arm, thinking of the merits of removing it and the main reason I didn’t want to. It was the sticking point that made me hope that every time it hurt, it would end up working out. “I don’t want to be cut off. I don’t want to think that this is it for me. I don’t want to walk this Earth forever.”
“Is this existence that bad?” he asked.
I sensed he was taking it as a personal insult. It was a ridiculous notion since I’d be walking this Earth alone. Not once in all the time we’d been together had he mentioned deeper emotions and it wasn’t for lack of opportunity.
“Forget it,” he said with an edge in his voice. “It doesn’t matter. It’s got to come out. Cutty will do it.”
I gathered my hair up into a ponytail, realizing I wasn’t going to be adding any hours to the sleep count tonight. He wasn’t going to let this go. “Cutty does stitches. How the hell is he going to handle this? It’s a little different.”
“He’ll know.”
My stall tactic not working, I realized I was going to have to keep pursuing my true argument and probably the real reason I never wanted anyone to know it was a problem. I didn’t want this to be it. “I still haven’t agreed to do it.”
“I’m with Fate,” an old gravelly voice declared.
I snapped my head towards Paddy, who was standing in the middle of the room.
Fate turned his full attention to him, both fists clenched as if he were struggling to maintain his temper. “Popping into my bedroom is off limits.”
“Fine,” Paddy said, all of a sudden making use of his cane as if he were too weak to stand on his own.
“Were you spying on us?” I asked, finding the timing to be a bit more than coincidental.
“Absolutely not!” He lifted and banged his cane to the ground before quickly moving back to the subject of the tattoo, or more accurately, the piece of him that resided there. “But it has to come out. I fear it was a grave mistake and I need it back.”
“Can you take it back?” Fate asked.
“And will I be cut off forever when you do?” I added.
He shrugged and looked at both of us. “I don’t know.” He walked over to the opposite edge of the bed I was sitting on and looked like the old man he appeared to be for a minute. “When I gave you a piece of me, I did it in part thinking it would make you stronger, more able to help with this Malokin situation. It was never supposed to grow.”
Paddy rolled up his sleeve to the place he’d pull off the chunk of himself he’d donated to me. It had been a pinch, unnoticeable after he’d done it and his skin had sealed back up. Now, a large chunk of flesh was missing, like he’d suffered some accident and lost part of the muscle from his arm.
“This is the thing of it, what I am, what I’m comprised of, likes to stay together in one unit. This I knew. It’s the same with the four. We like to be close, or used to, but we wouldn’t drain each other.
“What I didn’t realize was how strong you would be. I figured if there were a pull, it would be exerted from me and I could control it. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, you pulling from me. I didn’t even believe it was happening at first. I thought it was Malokin somehow, but then…” His eyes went to mine and I knew he was thinking back to the day at Kitty’s. “I realized it was you,” he finished, cutting off what I believed he’d meant to say.
He slowly got to his feet again and this time I almost believed he did need the cane. “If we leave it in you, I’m not sure what will happen.”
“Can you get it out?” I asked, feeling like I was quickly losing any other options.
“I don’t think I should,” Paddy said.
“Why? You put it there, just suck it back out somehow. Do whatever it is you can do?” If it was going to happen, I wanted it done as quickly as possible so I didn’t have any time to dwell on the implications of the loss.
“If you’re already draining me from a distance. It’s not wise.” He stood and moved across the room, putting some distance between us, as if the thought of me having such power unnerved him.
Fate stepped forward, blocking my view of Paddy. “I won’t have one of your three do it,” Fate said, talking about Fia, Fith and Farrah.
“Surely you’d feel comfortable with Fith?”
“Why would I possibly trust him?”
“Well, considering—”
“No. Cutty will have to do it.” He turned to me again. “Get dressed.”
I didn’t bother arguing. I already had my clothes in hand and was already heading to the bathroom.
&
nbsp; Chapter Thirty
An hour later, we walked into Lars’s closed tattoo shop, Fate’s hand firmly wrapped around mine. I’d given up on my rule to keep all affection to a minimum once I realized I was not only possibly dying, I was killing Paddy along with me. It didn’t matter that he’d been the catalyst. I was sucking him dry and it was a hard thing to live with. Hurting Paddy was unintended, but so were lots of other things, like giving someone the flu. It still felt like shit.
“Hey,” Lars said as we walked in. I smiled even as I noticed he seemed more uptight than he had been the other night. Cutty was there as well. Paddy, who had said he’d meet us here, was flipping through tattoo books as if he were contemplating getting a piece done. I wouldn’t have been surprised by anything he did.
Then I saw her—Lars’s guest—the one they called Faith. I wouldn’t have missed her. She still had patches of her human karma clinging to her new form. It was as if the brightest sunlight I’d ever seen was filtering through the leaves of a tree while she sat under it on a spring day. I’d never seen anything like it. And the smell. I breathed deep and started walking towards her, before Lars stepped in my way aggressively and pissed me off. All I wanted to do right now was get near some good karma. It was like a steak dinner complete with a chocolate cake desert when I hadn’t eaten in weeks.
“You can’t hurt her.” He was deadly serious. I could see it in the set of his mouth, the way his eyes stared me down. He’d take me out before he’d let me touch her.
I looked over at Fate, not from fear but annoyance. I didn’t fear any of his men because I trusted Fate to always have my back. Still, it would’ve been nice to get some help to move the hulking form out of my way.
Fate shrugged a silent response I read to mean yeah, I know he’s all out of whack but just let him get it out of his system.
I shook my head, patience wearing thin tonight.
“I don’t want to hurt her. I just want to say hello and introduce myself.” And maybe stand close enough to get the stench of the bad karma I’m surrounded by constantly off of me, even if it was only for a precious few minutes. I needed this before they started digging into me.
Fated: Karma Series, Book Three Page 20
