On the Edge of Love (Mama's Brood Book 1) (3 page)

“He killed four men before we could get to him,” Coen informed the bartender.

“Well, that does account for the amount of blood soaked into him,” the bartender said, tossing a key to the big man.

Sabrina turned to see him walk toward the back of the bar and exit through a riveted steel door. She sighed.

“You’re next,” Chief said, sliding a glass of clear liquid across the bar to her.

“I’m sorry,” she said, pushing back the glass. “I don’t drink.”

“Me neither. It’s water. And I meant you’re next in line for the bathroom.”

“Thank you.”

She lifted the glass to her mouth and gulped the cool water, careful of her split lip.

“So you’ve found yourself in a bad situation.”

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” she mumbled, head down, both hands wrapped around the cold glass.

“That’s why you’re here, Sabrina. So we can all understand what Kragen wants with you.”

“Who’s Kragen?”

Bride hissed with what sounded like irritation.

Chief frowned at her. “She deserves to know the name of the man hunting her down. The more information she has, the more she can help us and herself.”

Bride rolled her eyes, shrugged, and knocked back another shot.

“She drinks enough to make up for the both of us.” The bartender smiled at Sabrina, holding out his hand. “I’m Terry.”

“Sabrina,” she said, introducing herself formally.

The front door of the bar opened, and Terry saluted the three figures that entered.

“Firewater would be good ’bout now, ol’ man,” Big Country said.

“One day you’re going to get enough of courting those fire spirits, boy.”

“Since that day hasn’t come yet, make it a double.”

Sabrina heard the three advance as Terry reached beneath the bar and pulled out a mason jar with clear liquid inside. He unscrewed the lid and poured two single shots so carefully the alcohol could’ve been acid.

Juarez beat Big Country to the first glass and inhaled the shot. And paid for it. His eyes teared, and he fell to the floor, grabbing at his throat as if invisible fingers were choking him to death. It was at least two minutes before he was able to fight himself free of what she presumed to be the fire spirits’ wrath and sit up, inhaling and exhaling one deep full breath. Everyone stood around and watched—Sabrina mainly out of surprise, the others in humor.

“Where’s Mama?” Big Country asked as he stepped over Juarez and took the second shot of firewater, downing it smoothly before shaking his head in disgust at Juarez.

“Diablo,” came Juarez’s hoarse whisper as he used a bar stool to stand.

“She’s in the dungeon with Price,” Terry answered.

“Why y’all hanging around up here?”

“Getting acquainted.”

Juarez stood next to Sabrina, glaring down at her as if his display of anger would reclaim some of his pride. “You don’t seem worth kidnapping.”

Asshole, she thought, but she wouldn’t say it, not if she wanted to continue to appear the frightened rabbit ready to bolt to the nearest hidey-hole. Instead she bit the inside of her lip so hard tears filled her eyes, blurring her vision. “I don‘t know why anyone would want to kidnap me. He’s right; I’m nobody,” she said, warm tears spilling down her cheeks.

“Don’t go taking anything Juarez says as something worth listening to,” Big Country said.

She forced more tears out as she held her hands over her face.

She heard Bride stand, making a sound of disgust as she walked away. “Stupid ass,” she muttered. Sabrina thought the other woman was speaking of her until she heard Juarez say, “Hey, I’m just calling it how I see it.”

She heard the metal door open and close, and for at least five heartbeats no sound distracted her from the raspy voice of Bobby Blue Bland singing in the background. As she cupped her face in her palms, she could feel the swelling around her right eye. Shit. She hoped it didn’t swell itself shut. Aside from the aesthetic detractor, it would hinder her ability to see when she decided to run away.

Unnerved by the lack of banter and the silence, she looked up and saw all the men were facing the back door. Expecting to see Bride, she turned and saw that Bride had exited the room. The one person Sabrina never wanted to encounter again was standing there. The fact that the blood was gone, that his hard muscled chest was bare, scarred, that his powerful legs were in a pair of loose-fitting blue jeans and his manly feet were bare, didn’t make her want to see him more. Especially not when he had a knife in his hand bigger than the one he’d left the room with.

“She’s crying,” the big man, Zeus, said.

Sabrina wiped the tears off her face, then wiped her hands on her jeans to try and erase any evidence of her tears. The way he said it, eyes burning, face and voice emotionless, made her fear that tears might trigger his homicidal tendencies.

“Juarez was just being an asshole,” Big Country said.

She pressed closer to the bar when the blade streaked by, embedding in Juarez’s shoulder.

“Son of a
bitch
,” Juarez shouted, both in anger and in pain.

Zeus had another knife in his hand and walked toward Juarez unhurried, loose. Images of the gritty warehouse floor strewn with bloody bodies flashed through her mind. Juarez was going to fall to the big man’s blade like those warehouse men. Terry and the others tried to talk to Zeus rationally, Coen and Big Country reaching for their guns when words didn’t seem to penetrate.

Acting on guilt-inspired instinct, Sabrina threw herself at Zeus, hugging him to her, hoping she didn’t get cut up or shot in the back for her efforts.

Zeus stopped, and she wrapped her arms tighter around his back, resting her head on his massive chest. His heart beat strong and steady, none of the rapid hammering that came from strong emotion. His skin was warm, feverish even, but he’d just showered, she remembered. He smelled clean, not the rancid smell of someone who walked so closely with death. Nothing about his scent would alert the senses that some inhuman entity dwelled within him. But she knew. Every cell of her body had objected to even acknowledging his existence; yet here she was molding her body against his to save someone else. Self-sacrifice was, until this moment, foreign to her. Guilt was not.

Having interpreted her actions as only a sick individual would, Zeus’s hand gripped her ass and pressed her against a rapidly growing erection. Shocked, she looked up, and he was watching her, his mouth tilted up on one side. Jesus, was this him happy? She struggled to free herself from his hold.

“Be still,” he ordered, and she froze, his voice having a Medusa-like effect.

Fast and agile, he turned her around to face the others. Two weapons were pointed toward them. Lynx helped to support Juarez, while Terry grinned behind the bar.

She didn’t see what was so funny, but apparently a necessary skill of bartending was being able to maintain a jovial attitude. She wasn’t feeling jovial. She had been beaten, kidnapped, had possibly escaped rape and murder at the hands of the very man she was shielding, and for her efforts she may get shot by the ones who had claimed to want to protect her. Whatever she had done to piss off the spirits of good fortune must have been some kind of bad for them to abandon her so completely.

“Zeus, put the knife down and let Sabrina go,” Coen said. His voice was hard, demanding obedience. Unfortunately crazy people didn’t respond well to the rational demands of others.

The big man pulled her tighter against him. The finality of that one action made her want to cry. If two men with guns trained on him didn’t convince Zeus to let her go, it felt like nothing would: not her rejection, not her eventual escape attempt, not anything. If she succeeded at eluding the Brood, the man responsible for her kidnapping, even Ernesto, who she was sure was still searching for her, she had a bad feeling it would be near impossible to hide from Zeus. He would be the genie and she the bottle he always returned to, or the demon ever bound to the one it possessed. She had fought so hard to make a seminormal life for herself, and this big fuck was threatening all of it.

She would
not
cry.

He was big, he was crazy, but she was a survivor. She would fight, even if the outcome resulted in her losing.

Sabrina tilted her head back and looked Zeus straight in the eye. “I’m not yours.”

One side of his mouth tilted in what she was coming to identify as humor. On him it held none of the lightness of the emotion, more a dark caricature, a primitive display on par with a beast baring its teeth at an opponent.

“Until I’m done with you, you are. You ran to me, makes you mine.”

In what fucking backward world was that true? She’d run to him to prevent mayhem. She already felt bad enough that her little playacting had resulted in Juarez taking a blade; she didn’t want it to be the reason for his death, for any of their deaths.

“She ran to me for protection,” he said, looking back toward Coen and the others. “Anyone touches her, hurts her, makes her cry…well.”

Coen looked over to Big Country, apparently coming to some agreement, because at the same time they lowered their guns.

Terry whistled. “You’ve gone and done it, sister. Sure you don’t drink?”

“Rum, overproof, Haitian if you have it,” she ordered, not fully believing even an alcoholic haze would diminish the fact that she may have just been claimed by a sociopath.

Zeus guided her to the bar stool farthest from the others and walked back to the grouping of men. He reached out and freed his black-hilted blade from Juarez’s chest. “This is also mine. I was nice enough to let you touch it, but like the woman, I’ll keep it.”

“I’m going to kill you, you fucking—”

Zeus punched Juarez where he’d been wounded, eliciting another shout of pain, then hit him square in the face, knocking the smaller man unconscious. Only Lynx’s supporting arm stopped him from falling to the wooden floor in an undignified heap.

“Welcome to the Brood,” Terry said, sliding two filled shot glasses her way.

To hell with that, she thought, tossing back the rum. Yes, she’d wanted to be a part of a family since losing her mother and sister, but this one was definitely not it. She was getting the hell out of Dodge as soon as humanly possible. She looked at Zeus, who had knelt to wipe his blade on Juarez’s pant leg. Sooner if she was able.

“What’s happened?” Price asked from the opening of the metal door at the back of the room. His voice sounded weary as he passed a hand backward, then forward over his closely cropped head.

Eyes wide with feigned innocence, Big Country and Coen pointed blaming fingers at Zeus. They seemed happy not to be the ones at fault, which let her know they probably got into their own fair share of trouble.

“He threw his blade at Juarez again. He didn’t miss this time,” Coen said.

“Had my own blade,” Zeus said rising. “And I didn’t miss the last time.”

“You were supposed to leave your blades in your room, Zeus.”

“I tried, but they stick to me like skin.” He responded with that strange Zeus smile. It quickly faded. Undiluted crazy. “You may not see it, but I’ll always have a blade on me, even if I have to pull one out of the crack of my ass to get it.”

“Lord, let’s hope I never have to see that,” Coen muttered.

“You know first aid?” Price asked Sabrina, apparently fed up with conversing with Zeus.

There was no reason to lie. If they knew her name was Sabrina Samora, they probably knew everything about her since she’d resurrected herself in New Orleans. “Yeah, I was an EMT in another life.”

“Big Country, bring Juarez down to the clean room. She can get cleaned up and take care of Juarez after.”

“Uh-uh,” Zeus said.

“Uh-uh what?”

“She won’t be patching him up. Can’t touch him.”

Price pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. “Why can’t she touch him?”

“Because then I’d have to kill him, and for some reason you all seem to want him alive.”

“I’ll patch him up, Boss,” Lynx offered. “Shouldn’t be long. I’ll meet up with everyone in the living room when I’m done.”

Sabrina could see Price was fighting to hold on to his patience. She didn’t imagine it was a character trait that came naturally to him. Price gave everyone in the room a hard look and nodded. “Mama’s living room in fifteen minutes. Coen, take her to the bathroom so she can attend to herself.”

Price frowned when the rest of the men looked at Zeus, fingers seeking the safeties on their weapons.

She hopped off the bar stool. “Maybe Coen and Zeus can watch the door while I shower and change. Having the two of them would really make me feel a lot safer.”

“Really?” Price looked at her as if the events of the night had cracked her egg clean through.

No, not really
, she wanted to scream. “Yes,” she said, glancing at Zeus, who watched her, eyes and face expressionless.

Price shrugged and left in the direction he had come.

“I’ll lock up the bar and meet you all downstairs,” Terry said, hitting a switch that made the dim lights in the front window of the bar go dark.

Big Country and Lynx lifted Juarez and headed toward the metal door. “You know, you might want to refine your wooing skills, Hoss,” Big Country said to Zeus. “In my experience the ladies tend to run from violent men carrying weapons.”

“You would know,” Lynx said, shifting Juarez’s deadweight.

“Big Country’s experience only extends to prostitutes, so he’s in no position to give advice on ladies,” Coen said.

“Ladies of the night.” Big Country grinned back at them.

The two men maneuvered Juarez through the door, and Coen waved Sabrina forward, trailing behind them. Sabrina walked, then paused, looking back to see Zeus directly behind her. She frowned at him to mask her agitation.

“Don’t run on me,” he warned. “Not unless you want to know what it feels like to get caught.”

She barely maintained her composure as she followed Coen through the metal door and down a stairwell engulfed in a red haze of darkness. She felt like she was walking into hell with the devil at her back.

At the bottom of the stairwell they reached a hard, glossy floor, possibly polished concrete or limestone. The walls of the hallway were a dove-gray color, and every five feet black flame-shaped sconces radiated red light. After about forty feet they came on another hallway that ran perpendicular to the one they’d walked down. Big Country and his group went right and disappeared through the first door they came upon. Coen veered left and stopped at the door there.