Page 22 of Fire
“An apartment in Grant Park burned down last night.”
“And?” I ask, already knowing the answer isn’t going to be good.
“Evan used to live there before Cash and Johnny made him move apartments.”
“Are we sure faulty electrical coding didn’t cause the fire?”
“According to Eli, who hacked the arson investigator’s initial report, they found C4 at the scene.”
Fuck. Grave and I both know what that means. It was the Reivers who started the fire. Explosives aren’t typically used to start fires. Most arsonists use accelerants, but Digger and Hawk insisted on using C4 along with gasoline when they ordered a building or a house torched. The resulting explosion was always more dramatic, and it became a signature warning to their enemies not to fuck with them.
“Luckily for the people who used to live there, Evan’s old apartments were scheduled to be renovated to condos, and the owners kicked out all the old tenants.” Grave chuckles. “It’s the one fucking time gentrification was a good thing. And lucky for Evan, whoever burned it down was a fucking idiot and had the wrong address. Though maybe you could have caught the bastards in the act.”
I think back to what I was doing last night and realize if the Reivers hadn’t had the wrong address, I wouldn’t have caught them. I was too busy fucking Evan to have noticed someone setting a fire until too late. Evan and a lot of innocent people would have died last night because I messed up and decided to be Evan’s lover and not his bodyguard.
“I gotta go,” I tell Grave and hang up the phone. Throwing on my clothes, I go out to the fire escape. I take out my spare cigarette. This time, I smoke it, and when it’s gone, I want another one. Hell, I want a whole carton, which, as soon as I can, I know I’ll be buying one.
Without another cigarette to distract me, the dream I had last night comes back in technicolor and at full force.
I was back at the Reivers clubhouse in the cage, fighting in the culling. A packed clubhouse surrounds me, full of bloodthirsty bastards eager to see me die. I’ve survived nineteen one-minute rounds with some of the best fighters in the club and their weapon of choice. I’m broken, bloody, and barely alive, but I have one more round to survive to be free of the Reivers forever, and I know it will be my hardest. The twentieth fighter in the Culling is chosen to guarantee maximum punishment. It’s usually the Reiver with the biggest grudge against the member being culled or the club’s best fighter.
It had been Monty Beket with a brazing torch as the twentieth man in the cage that night, but in my dream, it’s not Monty walking through the cage’s door.
It’s Evan. He looks up at me, obviously scared, but then he gives me that same half-smile as when he opened his door to me the first time.
“I won’t fight him,” I shout to Digger, who, typical of the sick fucker that he is, always acts as the announcer-slash-referee of any cage match at the clubhouse.
He shrugs casually. “Then you die.”
“I don’t care.”
He smiles at me. “After you watch what we do to him first.”
Pure, uncut terror overtakes me. I’d walked into a cage prepared to die, hell, expecting to die. To never have to wear the Reivers cut again, death was an acceptable stake to bear and a deserved penance for ever putting it on in the first place. But Evan? He didn’t deserve to be touched by their evil. I have to protect him. I can’t let them hurt him.
We have to escape. I look at the chained and padlocked door of the cage and then around at the crowds who chant for the twentieth round to begin. There is no way out of this.
“Fight him, or I’ll throw him out into the crowd. They’re hungry for blood.” His deceptively handsome face breaks into a chilling smile. “They’ll tear him apart.”
I have no choice. I have to ensure Evan doesn’t go through what they would do to him. I walk up to him, and he sees the tears streaming down my face.
He reaches up and puts his hand on my cheek, that same half smile on his lips as when we met. “Luca, I’m here. It’s going to be okay.”
I bend down to kiss him, my hands going around his neck as I taste the sweetness of his lips. I pull back and meet his amber eyes. “I’m sorry,” I whisper. Then, like the killer I am, I twist his neck hard and feel his body go limp against me. He slumps to the ground, his beautiful eyes staring blankly up at me as Digger announces me as the winner.
That’s when I’d woken up, broken and destroyed. When I’d seen Evan kneeling in front of me, I’d pulled him into my arms, needing desperately to feel his heartbeat against me to know he was truly safe.
I’m not sure I would have ever been able to let him go, but when he’d started kissing my neck, he’d awakened a fire that incinerated my nightmare. Touching him, kissing him, watching him take my cock in his mouth, and then edging him as I made him admit how perfect he is will forever be burned into me as one of the sweetest moments of my life.
It can’t happen again.
I call Grave back and make the necessary arrangements. Then I go into the apartment and find Evan just waking up as I enter.
He’s stretching, then he turns to me and smiles—not that careful smile he’d given me before, but one that reaches his eyes and shows his teeth. “Good morning,” he says, then looks at the clock with the same surprise I had. “Or good afternoon.” There’sa smokiness in his amber eyes, acknowledging why he slept so late with a hint that he’d like to do it again.
Every part of me wants to take the last fifteen minutes back. I want to pick Evan up and carry him to his bedroom, do all the things to him I’ve wanted to since I first saw him, and make him tell me again how perfect he is.
But I can’t. I already admitted to Grave how in over my head I am with Evan.
