by Alexa Rynn
“And we will,” Blaze said calmly. “When we’re prepared and when we’re armed with the right team. If we walk in there with a bunch of pussy’s we’ll be on our own anyway.”
“All I need is you,” Cutter told him.
Blaze patted him on the shoulder. “Ride or die.”
“Oh, don’t get all emotional on me now.” Cutter patted him on the shoulder roughly but after a second he laughed and nodded, “ride or die.”
I couldn’t help the small smile that was forming on my face. It was a pretty sweet scene, reminded me of the relationship I had with my sister. Of course, neither one of us would be considered as dangerous as Cutter nor Blaze was.
Cutter reached down and hit the light on his phone. “I have like four missed calls from Heather, she probably wants to pick up right where we left off.” He tossed his phone into Blaze’s lap. “I really don’t want to deal with her, she brought up the M word.”
Blaze let out a low whistle. “She’s still on the whole where’s Mom train, huh?” I could hear the clicking of electronic buttons on the screen as Blaze unlocked Cutter’s phone.
“That bitch isn’t my mother,” Cutter hissed.
A shiver raced up and down my arms. I’d never thought to ask Cutter about his mother. I guess I had just assumed that things didn’t work out with Cutter’s father and her and they still kept in touch. I should have known better than to assume anything when it came to Cutter’s life.
“Of course, she isn’t.” Blaze held the phone to his ear. “The word mother implies that she actually did something for you in your life.”
Cutter didn't answer him and Blaze didn’t press it.
Another reason I was sure he was a real best friend.
“Heather,” Blaze suddenly sounded detached and professional. “You rang?” There was a pause on Blaze’s end of the line. “I’m aware that you called your brother but I’m the one calling you back so why don’t you tell me what it is that you want?”
I rolled my eyes the way I always seemed to do when I had to watch Blaze and Heather interact with one another. How long were they going to do this for? It was clear even to me that the two of them belonged together.
“What does it matter where your brother is?” He glanced at Cutter. “He’s in the middle of something very important and can’t make it to the phone. The damn president of the United States couldn’t even reach him right now, that’s how tied up he is.”
Cutter cracked up at this, enjoying Blaze’s attitude toward his sister.
“No, Heather, no pun intended.”
The thought of Heather walking in on me while I was tied up on her brother’s bed raced through my mind and I felt myself flush. What was I, a running joke between the brotherhood now?
Cutter scowled, seconding my motion.
“Just tell me what you want,” Blaze howled, the playfulness gone from his voice. “I’m not yelling at you, you’re calling me names and we’re kind of busy over here, we don’t have the time for your back and forth.”
“Tell her to stop being a baby,” Cutter laughed, speeding up on the busy street he was cruising down. A light turned yellow in the distance and Cutter sped up, not wanting to wait for it to change green again. A few people honked as he zoomed through but Cutter seemed unconcerned.
“Okay, Heather, bye!” Blaze shouted, threatening to hang up.
Blaze didn’t say anything for a second and then he shot Cutter a confused look. “Where’s Grace? Heather can’t find her.”
Crap. Crap. Crap.
“She’s down in the bar like I told her.”
Blaze shook his head. “She’s not there, the bartender said she never came back down after she chased you out of there.”
“She didn’t chase me out,” Cutter pointed out. “She was worried. Tell Heather she’s in our room then.”
“Your brother says she’s in their room,” he paused. “You might want to knock first, I’m not sure if he tied her up or not before he left.”
Ugh, so juvenile. Why was Heather even looking for me in the first place? Why couldn’t she mind her own business? She had probably come back to insult me even more since the last time she had seen me she had pretty much called me her brother’s whore.
“She’s not in your room, either.”
“Of course, she’s in our room, that’s where I told her to go.” He grabbed the phone from Blaze and shoved it up to his ear. “She’s either in our room or down at the bar, check again then call me back.” He hit the end button on his phone and tossed it onto the dash.
Cutter accelerated.
“I’m sure she’s there something.” Blaze caught his phone as it slid down the dashboard and almost crashed onto the floor. “No one is stupid enough to walk into Red Sin territory and take her. And she’s not stupid enough to leave with everything going on.”
Go ahead and call me stupid.
Cutter didn’t say anything, turning over the information in his mind. His phone started vibrating and before Blaze had even had a chance to pick up Cutter sighed and switched lanes, getting ready to turn around. “Where the fuck is she?”
Blaze picked up without even saying hello. “We’re on our way back.”
Cutter slammed on his breaks to avoid hitting a truck in front of him and my body landed with a long thump on the other side of the car. Blaze reached under his seat, revealing a gun within seconds and turning it on me with fury in his eyes.
“It’s me! It’s me!” I cried desperately, holding my hands up in the air while trying to sit my body upright again at the same time. “Don’t shoot at me!”
Blaze let out a sigh of relief. “Never mind.” He hit the end button.
Cutter swerved the car over onto the side of the road and slammed down on the breaks. “Grace!” He turned around, anger written all over his face. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
I knew it sounded crazy but I honestly didn’t think I was going to get caught. Now that I had I wasn’t sure what the heck to do. I pretended to look around the car, trying my best to plaster a puzzled expression on my face. “Is this not my car? I could have sworn that it was.”
Blaze shot Cutter a look.
A look that said, hey, she’s your property, you deal with her.
“I thought I left an earring in here…”
“Save it, Grace,” Cutter barked. “You snuck in the car and followed me? What could you possibly have been thinking?” He threw the car into park and turned his body toward me. His eyes were black, drained with any type of positive emotion.
What was I thinking? What did he think I was thinking? I cared about him! “I was thinking that you wouldn’t tell me anything about what was going on! I was thinking that I care about you. Cutter!”
He sighed. “I appreciate that you care about me, Grace, but you can’t be here. You aren’t even supposed to be out of the room, let alone coming along to a committee meeting.”
“You keep putting yourself in dangerous situations, Grace.” Blaze added. “You want to be a part of this life? You have to play by the rules we lay out for you.”
Who the fuck was Blaze to tell me what kind of rules I did or didn’t have to follow? I looked at Cutter for help but he was just nodding like Blaze had a point.
Maybe he did, but I didn’t care.
And I definitely didn’t want to hear it.
“Fine, you’re right. I’m just a big idiot who doesn’t know right from wrong.” I swung open the back door. “Since I’m such a little girl who can’t handle the rules I guess I shouldn’t be here at all!” I jumped out of the car and slammed the door shut behind me.
I took off down the road on foot.
“Good job on deciding to keep her,” I heard Blaze remind him smugly.
The driver side door swung open and I heard Cutter’s boots behind me, he caught up easily. “Grace.” He grabbed me by the arm and swung my body around, stopping me from going any further. “You can’t be doing stuff like this, especially no
t right now.”
We were halfway into the middle of the road and cars started swerving off to the left in order to pass by without hitting us but I didn’t even care, all I cared about was Cutter.
“What was I supposed to do? Sit back in that room and worry about you all damn night, Cutter? And the night after that, too? I don’t want you to do all of this for me!”
“You don’t have a choice, Grace!” Cutter moved closer to me. “What the hell would I have done if we were going to meet someone dangerous? Someone who wouldn’t hesitate to kill you just to get to me! None of this is up to you, I’m a big boy and I make my own choices.”
I looked down at the ground. I hated feeling this way. “I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t have followed you. I was just so worried. I didn’t… I don’t know what I would do if anything happened to you.”
“You don’t have to be sorry, Grace.” He shrugged. “The truth is that I’m not used to having someone worry about me like this, it’s always just been me and my brothers. But if you want to be with me, and I think you do, then you need to accept that most of the shit that goes on with me you have no say in. And it might annoy you that I’m so overbearing but that’s the way you have to be in my life, it’s the only way to keep people safe.”
A guy slammed on his breaks in the middle of the road and honked his horn loudly. “GET OUT OF THE MIDDLE OF THE DAMN ROAD!” He inched his car a little closer to us.
“I know,” I told him. “This is all just so new to me.”
“This kind of thing can’t happen again. You need to control yourself.”
The guy swung his door open now. “HELLO! I SAID MOVE IT! YOU’RE HOLDING UP TRAFFIC HERE!” He was halfway out of his car, looking at us like we had lost our minds.
I felt like he was always telling me that the things I was doing couldn’t happen, that I needed to control myself. I thought that I was but apparently I was doing a pretty shitty job.
“Promise me,” Cutter told me. “Promise me you’ll listen to me from now on when I tell you to stay some place, it’s not your job to save me or to keep me out of danger.”
“It’s not your job to do that for me, either!”
He shook his head, annoyed. “It’s different.”
“It’s not.”
“Promise me, Grace.”
“HEY!” The guy screamed, getting out of the car fully. “TAKE YOUR BITCH AND GET HER OUT OF THE DAMN ROAD! SOME OF US ARE TRYING TO GET THE FUCK HOME!”
Cutter rolled his head around and dug into his jacket, emerging a second later with a different gun than the one I saw him put in his waistband back in his room. “What the fuck did you say to me?” Cutter walked toward him, holding the gun in the air and waving it back and forth like it was a toy.
The man shrank back. “Nothing, I didn’t say anything.”
“Good,” Cutter snapped. “Then get back in the fucking car and wait patiently.” He pointed at the door with his pistol. “Didn’t your parents teach you any manners?”
The guy walked backward to his car and opened the door, slowly climbing in. He looked like he was on the verge of tears. If Cutter noticed he didn’t show it, turning his attention back toward me instead.
“I need you to promise me, Grace.”
I looked up into his perfect dark eyes. “I promise, Cutter.”
I leaned into him and stood on my tippy toes. I always forgot how much taller he was than me until I was this close to him, trying desperately to cover his lips with mine.
Cutter moved closer to me and then pulled back suddenly. “Ugh, fuck.” He pulled his gun out of his pocket and let a round off on the guy’s tire that had gotten out of the car seconds before, flattening it within seconds. “Put down the fucking phone,” Cutter called out.
The man hit the end button right away, possibly hanging up on the 911 operator, if the call had managed to go through. He shook his head, startled, and then threw his cell phone out his car window in a panic.
Cutter laughed and put his arm around me, like it was a show.
Blaze jumped out of the car and looked at the scene before him. “Ugh, really, Cutter? You couldn’t have controlled yourself for just a few more minutes?” He shook his head at the huge line of traffic forming behind the man now and his smashed cell phone in the middle of the street. “You just had to keep the girl, didn’t you?”
Cutter looked at me and smirked. “I think you’re growing on him.”
Blaze looked like he wanted to strangle me.
Definitely.
Chapter Three
CUTTER
“I never thought I would see the day,” Blaze said as we climbed out of the car and headed across the gravel parking lot toward the front door of the warehouse where we held our committee meetings.
“The day that what?” I glanced at the screen of my phone, no new texts. Ace was supposed to text me as soon as he got Grace back to the bar safely. She had tried to assure me that she would let me know herself but I wasn’t taking any chances. Clearly, she couldn’t be completely trusted to do exactly what I told her to do yet.
“The day that my best friend got all soft and mushy on me,” Blaze said, putting extra emphases on the words soft and mushy. “Oh, Grace,” he mimicked, “what are you doing here? How could you follow me? I love you so much.”
“Don’t start.” I rolled my eyes and shoved my phone into my pocket. “It’s not like that.” Even though it kind of was. Hell, I never thought I’d find a girl who could keep my attention for longer than a night. It was pretty crazy to anyone who knew me, especially someone like Blaze who’d known me my whole life.
“Oh, it’s definitely like that.” He kicked a piece of rock and it went flying across the parking lot. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m not hating on you for it, I’m actually really happy for you… I just never thought I’d see the day.”
“Are you done?”
“I mean, I’m not saying that I was worried, but some other people were starting to think that you might, you know, swing the other way if you catch my drift.” He nudged me in the shoulder suggestively.
“Yeah, right.” I laughed loudly and shoved him across the parking lot. “Get the fuck out of here.” The idea was laughable and he knew it, I got more pussy than half of the brothers combined.
Since Grace that all just seemed less important, though.
Blaze regained his footing and brushed me off. “Okay, okay, I’m done.”
“Good,” I told him. “We have more important things to think about.”
“For sure,” he said.
Silence.
The sound of our feet on the stones played back and forth.
More silence.
Blaze started humming softly. “Grace and Cutter sitting in a tree…”
“Seriously?”
“First comes love, then comes marriage…”
“Stop it.”
“Then comes baby in the baby carriage…”
I swung the door to the warehouse open and smacked him in the chest with it. “Tell you what, you stay out here and keep up your little American Idol audition, I’m going to go inside with the real men and handle some business.” I walked inside and slammed the door shut behind me.
Blaze opened it two seconds later, laughing. “No, no, wait, Cutter, please! I want to be a real man, too!” He caught up with me and ran his hand over my hair, messing it up. “You’re so cute when you’re mad. I bet Grace loves when you're mad cause you're just so darn cute, doesn’t she?”
“Have I told you today how much I can’t stand your annoying ass?”
Blaze grinned. “Love you, too, brother.”
I shook my head as we neared my father’s office but smiled in spite of myself. No matter what the fuck was going on around me being around Blaze always mellowed me the fuck out. I worried too damn much and somehow my best friend had a way of reminding me that everything tended to work out the way I wanted it to eventually.
The second I opened the door I knew som
ething was wrong. My father’s whole composure was different, professional and hard. He was on guard and the fact instantly put me on guard as well.
“Dad.” I reached to my side, resting my hand on my gun off impulse.
“Son,” My father said with a tight smile. “I was wondering when you would get here.” His eyes shot to the other side of the room for the briefest of seconds.
I felt Blaze tense next to me.
I glimpsed to the other side of the room and put my hand back down to my side, leaving my piece in my waistband. I could tell without even talking to him that whoever was with my father was a fed.
He had dirty pig written all over him.
“Cutter,” the man said, crossing the room and holding his hand out to me. “I’m detective Lance Shepard, it’s a pleasure to finally meet you.” There was a smile on his face but the look in his eyes told me that he thought I was slime.
I glanced down at his hand without touching it. “Nice to finally meet?”
He pulled his hand back and shot me a phony smile. “I feel like I’ve been hearing about you for so long, it’s just nice to finally put a face with a name, that’s all.” His eyes went over to Blaze. “And you must be Blaze.” He stuck his hand out again. “Detective Lance Shepard.”
What a piece of crap.
Blaze took his hand happily.
I rolled my eyes. He could be so fucking polite sometimes. “He heard you the first time,” I growled. “What can we do for you today, detective?” I smiled just as sweetly at him.
“Just wanted to introduce myself.” He ran a hand through his light thinning hair and pushed his thick-framed glasses back up on his nose. “I was in the area, checking out the neighborhood and figured I would drop by.”
I scoffed. The warehouse was in the middle of nowhere, not surrounded by very many other houses or buildings, I honestly doubted that he just happened to be in the damn neighborhood.
“And why, exactly, would you need to stop by?” These cops were all the same, thought if they stopped by and made their presence known that everyone would fall over themselves with fear, not wanting to do anything to tip them off.
