Better When He's Brave

“That’s one of the reasons I need to finish rebuilding my club. We always tried to keep Spanky’s clean. Right now just the bar is handling anything we need filtered through legitimate means. We can find another avenue for that while you’re here, but only if you take up the reins. Unless you agree to do this, then the only other place I have for you is up on that stage, are we clear? And you have to see the job through to the end, not just until I put a slug in the Irishman.”

I fidgeted nervously. When people called Nassir ruthless they weren’t kidding. He had a way of maneuvering people and situations so that he got the exact outcome he was after. I felt like there was zero wiggle room for me if I agreed to do this. There was far more responsibility involved than I had been expecting when I planned on asking him to put me to work. I didn’t know anything about managing a strip club or how to work with fierce strippers forged in the fire of this brutal city. I didn’t know how Titus would react to me working for Nassir. He made it clear he wasn’t a fan of the guy’s business practices and ability to skate around those pesky little things like laws and regulations. But then again, it wasn’t like I had any other option on the horizon. I was just waiting for the showdown with Conner, so I might as well help some other ladies out until judgment day found me.

“If you can keep it legal, all of it aboveboard, so that Titus doesn’t have any reason to doubt me, then I’m in.”

Race chuckled and patted me so hard on the back I almost fell over while Nassir studied me hard.

“The cop’s opinion matters that much?”

I tilted my chin up and made sure all three of them could see how serious I was when I replied, “It’s the only thing that matters.”

Chuck laughed from behind me. “Welcome to the family, pretty girl. This should be interesting.”

Interesting was probably the simplest thing it was going to be. No matter what I did I just seemed to sink deeper and deeper into the grip of this city. At least I was smart enough to know struggling against it only made the hold tighter. Like Keelyn was soon going to figure out, once you came back here you did it knowing you were staying forever, and there was a weird kind of peace in that knowledge. I was going to die trying to protect my home or my home was eventually going to kill me. It was the same for all of us, which made us exactly what Chuck said—a family. The most dysfunctional one ever, but still we all had the same fate that tied us together.

Lucky us.

Chapter 16

Titus

I JERKED AWAKE AS my fist, which was propping up my head, slipped away from under my chin. I had drifted off while sitting in Bax’s hospital room after having a fast and furious text argument with him since he couldn’t adequately tell me to fuck off through the pins and wires still holding his jaw shut. Dovie hadn’t left his side since the night he had forced her to go home. The reason I was there now was that she needed to run home and clean up the house a bit because Bax was getting released tomorrow. He was supposed to have been released two weeks earlier but had had a setback when one of the multiple screws holding his shattered ankle together had broken and he developed a nasty staph infection. He ended up requiring more surgery and more time laid up in recovery. He demanded that Dovie spend the night in a real bed, that she rest, and when she went to argue he agreed to text me and ask me to stay with him until he was sprung loose the next day. It was kind of cute, my ultra-badass brother acquiescing because he cared so much about the spunky redhead. Dovie didn’t want him to be alone, so he texted and I showed up to stay with him. As soon as she left Bax proceeded to chew me out for not helping him keep her away. It took me a second to recognize that he was scared, really scared for her well-being and thought she would be safer away from him and me and the whole mess with Roark. He was trying to push her away for her own protection, but she was too smart and too stubborn to go.

We went back and forth, back and forth, until he wore himself out and fell into a fitful slumber. After he was asleep I watched him for a while, stunned at how different he looked. Bax had always been big and built like a truck; now he almost looked frail. His face had thinned out dramatically, the black star inked by his eye now looking huge and ominous on the suddenly sharp planes of his face. His collarbone protruded under the neck of his hospital gown and all the bulk across his shoulders and arms had drastically thinned out. If it wasn’t for the tattoo on his face and the perpetual sneer that twisted his mouth even in sleep, he’d have looked like any other starving kid from the streets. He hadn’t been so close to being “Shane” instead of “Bax” since he was a little kid. It made me realize that he wasn’t just scared for Dovie, he was terrified he wouldn’t be able to take care of her in his current condition. He was terrified of failing her, so of course he was trying to get her to go. Thank God she never would.

I took a seat next to the bed and turned it all over in my head. Bax was trying everything to keep Dovie safe, even if she wasn’t playing along. The opposite side of that coin was the way I had dangled Reeve out in front of Conner from the very beginning. It made me cringe to think about the way I dropped her right into the lion’s den every day when I took her to Spanky’s and left her out there in the Point to fend for herself. She kissed me good-bye, swung those long legs out of the car, and pranced into the strip club like she didn’t have a care in the world or a giant bull’s-eye painted on her back . . . and I let her. What kind of man did that make me?

I knew I cared about her, knew this thing between us no longer had a rapidly approaching expiration date and was going to last beyond a showdown with Roark. She was in me. Deep down inside the same cage where I kept the monster and she seemed happy to be there, so how could I live with myself knowing I was willingly putting her at risk every single day? How had my little brother that never cared about anyone but himself turned into an honorable man trying to do right by his woman and I ended up the opposite? When had my world turned upside down and how come I hadn’t done anything to stop it?