“The guy with the broken neck is a kid who lost his ass on a Texas A&M game a week ago. When I went to collect, he lost his shit and pulled a gun at a party full of people near the university. I took off before the cops showed up. The second guy got handsy with Honor over at Spanky’s, and the last I saw of him, Chuck had given him a very clear lesson on why that was a bad idea. He was still breathing when I left. Bleeding and missing some teeth, but most definitely breathing.”
I moved the gruesome images to the side and looked at the file underneath. Both men had been found within hours of each other, both behind different clubs that Nassir ran out of warehouses. I whistled out through my teeth and shut the top of the folder. Titus’s blue gaze was steady and focused on me.
“You don’t think I had anything to do with this?”
I asked it, but really it was a statement of fact. If he thought I was involved, then this conversation would have involved handcuffs not coffee.
“No, but I knew about the gun and the party, and the guy from the club tried to come in and press charges, but we took one look at the dancer’s face and sent him on his way. Plus Nassir is a lot of things, but a dumb-ass isn’t one of them. Leaving not one, but two bodies behind your own club isn’t something he would ever do. What it tells me is someone is trying to send you guys a message . . . one you’d best pay attention to. A few cars go missing, some money changes hands, all that is easy to overlook. Bodies start falling, people start dying, and that gets a lot harder for the law to ignore.”
I nodded numbly in agreement and rubbed the back of my neck with my hand.
“Any word on who might be trying to communicate this particular message?”
He shrugged. “Who knows? Someone trying to test the limits of whatever kind of agreement you’ve worked out with Nassir? Someone angling to get you both out of the way? Someone with a grudge who thinks they can set you up? In this place, the suspects are always too numerous to name, so you better be playing the game to win.”
Well, losing wasn’t an option, and I only ever played to win. I got to my feet and stretched my arms up over my head. I groaned out loud when I heard my spine crack all the way down. Titus rolled his eyes at me.
“Why are you still living in this place?”
“Because I feel comfortable here.”
I was never going back to the palatial mansion my parents owned on the Hill. I wasn’t going to pretend like what I did had a place in the quiet burb like Bax and Dovie, and living in a run-down apartment was no different from crashing at the loft. Plus the security was better here.
“How can you be comfortable? You don’t even have any furniture. What do you do when you bring a girl over? Tell her to give you five minutes to get a rubber on and pull the bed out of the couch? Not even you have that much game, pretty boy.”
He was wrong. I had more than enough game to sell that and anything else I wanted to pretty much any chick who came along. The problem was there hadn’t been anyone in longer than I wanted to admit that I was interested in trying to sell anything to. Except for Brysen, and with her, man, I didn’t need a bed, didn’t need much of anything to get the mood going. Just the flutter of her eyelashes and the way her pretty mouth pouted and curled and I was ready to make things happen on the drop of a dime. If her phone hadn’t rung yesterday, there was a good chance I would have christened my bathroom floor in the most spectacular manner.
I snorted at him and reached for the pair of jeans I had discarded the night before.
“Why do you care where I’m crashing? Bax is playing domestic house cat, he has a good life and a good girl. Are you trying to turn me into your pet project now that your little brother has his life all figured out?”
He swore at me and stalked to the opening that led to the hallway over the garage. He looked at me over his shoulder with a scowl.
“I know you aren’t a bad dude, Race. Your life got fucked, but that’s not anything different than happened to the rest of us. Yeah, it had to do with the choices you made, but I respect that you were doing what you felt like you had to do in order to keep your sister safe. I just wonder how long you can be a guy with dirty hands who still claims to want to live a clean life.”
I didn’t know the answer to that, didn’t really know that it was possible either, but I was going to give it my best shot to make it happen.
“I wash my hands when I get home, Titus.”
He barked out a bitter-sounding laugh. “I wish it was that easy.”
I followed him to the top of the stairs and asked as an afterthought, “What would you do if you had a friend you thought might be being stalked?”