Better When He's Bold

My spine snapped straight and I felt my teeth grind together. “What?” There was no missing the surprise and irritation lacing the single word.

He smirked at me and told Titus to pop open the hood of the sedan.

“She said she needs to sell it so she can get an apartment for her and her sister due to the fact her dad is a worthless fuck and whatnot. I told her she needed to talk to you about that stuff, because the only place she can find with what she would make on selling the BMW would be crap.”

“She’s not moving into the slums with her sister.” Hell no she wasn’t.

“I told her that was what you were going to say. I think she’s pretty badass for just trying to figure out a crap situation and being willing to sacrifice. She looks a little too fancy to be the type to get her hands dirty. Glad I was wrong about that if she’s going to be in this with you. Blood is hard to wash off. It stains.”

“Jesus, Bax.” Titus growled the words.

Bax just lifted a shoulder and let it fall. “It’s the truth.”

“Hanging out with the two of you isn’t any good for my blood pressure or my career.” Titus’s voice indicated he wasn’t joking.

I narrowed my eyes at my friend. “Is that what you tell Dovie? The blood is hard to wash off?”

His dark gaze was like looking into a bottomless pit. There was no end and there was no light.

“Your sister knows all about how hard it is to get blood off, Race. She sees it every time she gets dressed and covers up that scar Novak left on her chest. She sees it every time I come home from somewhere I shouldn’t have been and she doesn’t want to ask me where I was at because she knows the answer will scare her. Blood is just part of living this life, and Brysen needs to know that if she’s here to stay.”

I didn’t know if she was here to stay but I had no trouble admitting to myself that I wanted her to be. I knew coming home to her after all the ugly stuff that surrounded me all day long was one surefire way to keep my head in the game. Having something to lose like her love . . . it was a huge motivation to make sure I kept the parts of me that were still just Race intact. With her I didn’t have to be Race the bookie, Race the loan shark, Race the enforcer, I just got to be a regular guy concerned about making a regular girl happy.

“Shouldn’t the goal be to keep the blood away from the people you care about?”

I didn’t think he heard me at first because his head was buried inside the engine compartment of the sedan. When he leaned back, he was grinning at his brother.

“That’s a V-10. Who dropped that in there and did the work to make this junker able to handle all the torque it puts out?”

A shadow crossed over Titus’s face. “Gus.”

Bax’s dark eyes went even darker.

Gus was the man who had been a father figure to Bax. He had owned the garage and given me a place to hide out when I came back to exact my revenge on Novak. He had also run Novak’s chop shop for him, so when the now-deceased gangster had found out about the crafty mechanic’s betrayal, he had had Gus murdered. Right in front of me. While Benny and the rest of his boys had beaten me, broke my leg, smashed my head over and over again into the concrete until I couldn’t see through the blood in my eyes or the blackness flooding my mind, I had somehow still managed to make out one of Novak’s goons pointing a shotgun at Gus and blowing a hole right through the middle of him.

Bax made a noise low in his throat and ran a hand over his face. He closed the hood to the sedan and dug out a smoke. He pointed it at me.

“That’s exactly why it’s better to get the ones you care about used to the blood, Race. Even if they know about it, about how this place works, bad things will happen no matter who the gatekeeper happens to be.”

This conversation was depressing and I was already bummed out because of my car. I walked away after telling Bax he better not even think about helping Brysen get rid of her car as the brothers started talking about engines and horsepower like death and blood weren’t major topics of interest to either of them. I mean, I knew logically that dealing with things like the loss of someone you admired and respected, and losing them well before their time, was just a brutal part of the reality of living in this place, but not even taking a minute to acknowledge how much that sucked was hard for me to get my head around.

Maybe it was because I had actually watched Gus die, maybe it was because I still had a bunch of guilt swirling around that the only reason Novak had set his sights on the mechanic was because of me, but thinking about him and the reasons why the garage was now Bax’s made me depressed and brought up a bunch of bitter memories lingering behind everything else I was dealing with.