J.R. Ward the Black Dagger Brotherhood Novels 5-8 - J. R. Ward [242]
The guy was so shell-shocked, he didn’t argue as he was frog-marched toward the door.
Rehv slammed his bloodied fist into the desk again to get everyone’s attention.
The Moors halted and so did the meat. The human was the only one who looked over his shoulder, and there was absolute terror in his eyes.
“One. Last. Thing.” Rehv smiled tightly, keeping his sharp canines to himself. “If Chrissy quits, I’m going to assume its because you forced her to, and I will come after you for my pecuniary losses.” Rehv leaned forward. “And bear in mind, I don’t need the money, but I’m a sadist, so I get a hard-on hurting people. Next time, I’ll be taking my piece out of your hide, not your wallet or what’s parked in your driveway. Keys? Trez?”
The Moor crammed his hand into the back pocket of the guy’s Z Brands and tossed over a key chain.
“Don’t worry about getting me the title,” Rehv said as he caught it. “Where your Ass-cura is ending up, we don’t need paperwork to transfer ownership. Bye for now.”
As the door shut behind the drama, Rehv glanced at the key ring. The tag hanging off of it read, SUNY NEW PALTZ.
“What?” he said without looking up.
Xhex’s voice was low, seeping out from the dark corner of the office, where she always watched fun and games go down. “If he does it one more time, I want to take care of it.”
Rehv fisted the keys and leaned back in his chair. Even if he said no, if Chrissy got cracked again his chief of security would probably roll out a beat-down anyway. Xhex was not like his other employees. Xhex wasn’t like anybody.
Well, that wasn’t entirely true. She was like him. Half symphath.
Or half sociopath, as was the case.
“You watch the girl,” he said to her. “If that sonofabitch gets busy with his class ring again, we’ll do a coin toss for who gets to fuck him up.”
“I watch all your girls.” Xhex walked over to the door, moving with smooth power. She was built like a male, tall and muscular, but she wasn’t coarse. In spite of her Annie Lennox haircut and her tight body, she wasn’t some bulky she-male bitchsicle in her standard uniform of black muscle shirt and black leathers. No, Xhex was lethal in the elegant way of a blade: quick, decisive, sleek.
And like all daggers she loved drawing blood.
“It’s the first Tuesday of the month,” she said as she put her hand on the door.
As if he didn’t know. “I’m leaving in a half hour.”
The door opened and closed, the sound of the club on the other side flaring, then getting cut off.
Rehv lifted his palm. The blood flow was already stopping, and the hole would be closed in another twenty minutes. By midnight nothing would show of the penetration.
He thought of the moment when he’d impaled himself. To feel nothing of your body was an odd kind of paralysis. Although you moved, you didn’t recognize the weight of the clothes on your back or whether your shoes were too tight or if the ground beneath your feet was uneven or slippery.
He missed his body, but either he took the dopamine and dealt with the side effects or he tangoed with his evil side. And that was one MMA fight he wasn’t sure he could win.
Rehv palmed his cane and carefully eased himself up out of his chair. As a result of his numbness, balance was a bitch and gravity wasn’t his friend, so the trip over to the panel on the wall took longer than it should have. When he got over to it, he placed his palm on a raised square and a door-sized panel slid back, all Star Trek and shit.
The black bedroom-and-bath suite that was revealed was one of his three crash pads, and for some reason it had the best shower. Probably because with only a couple hundred square feet, the whole place could go tropical just by running the damn thing.
And when you were cold all the time, that was a serious value-add.