Page 21 of Gatsby's Starlet
Dirty blond hair fell across his forehead, and when he stepped forward the fading light caught the sharp green-gold color of his hazel eyes. Scars marked his skin—one pale line curving along his jaw and down his neck where someone had tried and failed to kill him, another disappearing beneath the collar of his shirt toward his shoulder.
They didn’t weaken his appearance. If anything they made him look harder. Like a man who had already survived something most people wouldn’t.
He stepped down from the doorway and walked toward us, and the men scattered around the yard watched him the way people watch lightning gathering on the horizon.
Ruby straightened beside me. “Drago.”
He stopped a few feet away. His eyes landed on her first and lingered there, studying her in silence. Ruby lifted her chin slightly beneath that look, like she was waiting for something she had chased for a long time. But Drago’s gaze hardened withsomething that looked suspiciously like disappointment before his attention moved to me.
Slow.
Curious.
He tilted his head slightly as he studied my face, and when he spoke his voice was calm and rough. “You’re the one getting close to the Devil’s House tech man.”
He watched my reaction carefully as I nodded.
“Does he trust you yet?”
Before I could answer, Ruby spoke quickly beside me. “He does. Like I told you, she’s exactly the type of woman he’d notice.”
Drago glanced at her but didn’t comment.
Kane shrugged casually, resting one hand against the seat of the motorcycle. “She’s got the kind of face men like trusting,” he said easily. “All innocence and soft eyes and that sweet little dress.” His gaze slid back to me again. Slow. Possessive. “And when this whole thing’s finished,” Kane added with lazy certainty, “I might just keep her for myself.”
Ruby shot him an irritated look.
But Kane only smiled.
And the way Drago watched the exchange, calm, unreadable, faintly amused, made something deep in my chest twist with quiet certainty. I had stepped into something dangerous. And the men standing around me weren’t just using me to get to their enemy. One of them had already decided I belonged to him.
Drago studied me for another moment before flicking the cigarette into the dirt and crushing it beneath the heel of his boot, the motion deliberate and unhurried as if nothing about this meeting required urgency.
“Inside,” he said simply. The word wasn’t loud, but the men around the yard moved as though it carried weight.
Ruby didn’t hesitate. She turned toward the building immediately, smiling back at me over her shoulder in a way that made it clear she believed I had just passed some kind of test I hadn’t even realized I was taking. Drago fell into step beside her, already speaking quietly to her in a voice too low for me to hear, and I followed a few paces behind them with the uneasy awareness that Kane had shifted from his motorcycle and was walking close enough behind me that I could feel the warmth of him at my back.
The door opened into a rush of noise.
Music thudded somewhere deeper inside the building, the heavy bass vibrating faintly through the floorboards while voices overlapped in rough laughter and loud arguments that sounded one bad mood away from turning into a fight. The smell hit me first, beer, cigarette smoke, sweat, motor oil, and something sharp beneath it all that burned the back of my throat, and the inside of the clubhouse looked nothing like the quiet clearing outside.
Men crowded the room in loose groups, some leaning heavily against the bar while others sprawled across battered couches that had clearly survived more than one brawl. Several women moved through the room wearing tight shorts, skimpy tops, and makeup thick enough to be visible from across the room, their laughter loud and careless as they carried drinks or draped themselves across whichever biker happened to catch their attention.
Someone whistled when we walked in.
A bottle clinked loudly against the bar.
My stomach tightened.
Drago didn’t slow.
He moved through the room the way a storm moves across open water, inevitable, unchallenged, while the noise shifted slightly around him as people noticed him passing. Ruby stayedclose beside him, practically glowing with excitement, and when they reached the stairs that led to the upper level he stopped and turned toward her.
“Come upstairs,” he said.
Ruby’s reaction was immediate. Her eyes lit so quickly it almost hurt to watch, and she shot me a quick glance over her shoulder. “I’ll be back.” Then she followed him up the stairs without hesitation. Just like that. Gone.
The moment they disappeared around the landing the room seemed to grow louder, the music heavier, the laughter rougher, and I suddenly became painfully aware that I was standing in the middle of a biker clubhouse with absolutely no idea how to behave in a place like this.
