Page 9 of Brutal
DELANEY
I shove through the club doors and into the night. Cold air hits my face, and I keep walking. One block. Half a block more. Past the waiting town cars lined up at the curb, past two women laughing beneath the awning of the building next door, past a man lighting a cigar. I don’t stop until I’m half a block away.
Then I brace one hand against cool stone and drag in a breath.
Another.
And another.
This is ridiculous.
I’m not breathless because I climbed stairs or because I drank too much.
I’m breathless because Samson Vexley looked at me with those gorgeous amber eyes, and for one humiliating moment I forgot why I was there.
Amber. Like the whiskey flowing all night in thick crystal tumblers at the bar. Honeyed and dangerous and beautiful enough to make a woman stupid.
I close my eyes and tip my head back. “Get it together,” I mutter.
I went there to observe. To see one of Arthur Vexley’s sons in his natural habitat of power and money and everything in excess.
I expected arrogance. Carelessness. Something coarse under the polish.
Instead I found…
I’m not sure what.
That’s what unsettles me.
He’s tall with unruly dark hair brushed back from a hard and ruthless—though breathtakingly handsome—face. His tailored black jacket stretched across his broad shoulders like it was made for battle instead of nightlife.
He stood in the middle of all that noise and liquor like none of it could touch him. Like he allowed the room to exist around him. Like he could break it with one hand if he so desired.
And when he looked at me, I had the appalling sensation that he wasn’t seeing what I wanted him to see. He was measuring for weakness.
My pulse trips again at the memory, and fury flares hot under my skin.
At him.
At myself.
At the simple fact that I noticed the shape of his mouth—God, his lips are full and kissable—while I was supposed to be studying him in his element.
A cab drives by. Somewhere farther down the block, a siren rises and fades.
I push away from the wall and start toward the subway. I replay every word, every glance, every shift in Samson Vexley’s posture.
He gave away nothing.
There has to be something I’m missing.
He watched the room without looking like he was watching it. He didn’t drink much. He didn’t lean. He didn’t fidget. He didn’t waste motion. Men with real power rarely do. Men who have used their hands for ugly things learn not to move without reason.
Samson Vexley is his father’s weapon. The oldest son. The one sent when a signature isn’t enough, when a warning needs a body attached to it.
Arthur Vexley built an empire by swallowing weaker men whole, and everybody in this city knows it even if nobody says it.
Real estate. Development. Acquisitions. Shell companies. Political donations. Quiet settlements.
