Borrowed Souls (Soul Charmer #1)(10)
“One sec, Mike,” he said, without looking back. Mike didn’t move a muscle. Derek frowned, and started to open his mouth. He was pissed she hadn’t stayed put, she knew, and he was about to tell her so. But then he looked over her shoulder, his eyes narrowing to slits as he noticed the man who’d accosted her. “We’ll deal with him in a second.” The growl in his voice was unmistakable. Mike heard it too; he twitched.
“Um, hey, gimme a pen,” Mike said to the bartender. Once it was delivered, he scratched an address onto a cocktail napkin—the first Callie had seen in this place. He passed it to Derek. “We good?”
Derek held up the napkin to read it, then grunted at him. Mike must have understood its meaning because, faster than Callie thought was humanly possible, he’d slipped away from the bar and ducked out the front door.
Derek stuffed the napkin in his jacket pocket. What other secrets lined that leather? Mafia addresses? Soul IOUs? Dirty secrets about every snitch in town? In that moment, it all seemed plausible. Derek stepped around her, taking a step away, and when she didn’t immediately follow, he murmured, “This will just take a sec.”
He crossed the decrepit floor in four long strides. His speed startled the bearded cretin, who wagged a beer bottle in Callie’s direction as she turned back to their table and caught the man’s gaze. Derek didn’t bother with niceties—not that Callie would have heard them over the din in the bar anyway. Derek jerked a thumb over his shoulder, presumably toward her. The biker shrugged. All’s not fair in The Fall, though. Nothing is harmless or without consequence. Derek’s fist shot up and out so fast, Callie wasn’t completely sure she’d even seen the punch. But the biker stumbled backward to plant his ass on the table, hands cradling his nose. Derek took a half step toward him, and the biker nodded fervently.
Derek lifted his chin in response and returned to Callie’s side. He took hold of her upper arm, and spoke into her ear. “Now’s probably a good time to bail.”
She shook her head in agreement, distracted both by the sudden violence and by how giant Derek’s hand was wrapped around her upper arm. She wasn’t a fragile thing, normally. But with a hand the size of Texas—one that’d just put a large, nasty man in his place—holding her steady and guiding her out of the bar, she was starting to reconsider her frailty.
—— CHAPTER FOUR ——
Callie’s throat tightened, each slow-motion swallow enflaming her panic. Fiery sparks pricked her lungs. Her brain was being goddamn ridiculous, and there wasn’t an easy fix. Her palms hadn’t dried since leaving The Fall. Derek’s presence helped at the time. Now they were alone, on his bike, and Callie was having second thoughts that she was all that much safer in his care. Was trading up to the bigger predator really an improvement? It was easy to forget that Derek worked for the Soul Charmer, and the Soul Charmer’s goons couldn’t be good guys. They were the kind of men who punched people in the face without fear of repercussions. They made threats and people obeyed.
Callie had just seen it up close and personal.
The shit she did for Josh. He’d dug himself in deep this time, and she was side-stepping scorpions to rescue him.
It might have been the oxygen deprivation, but she couldn’t decide if she was terrified or thrilled. As scary as the whole situation was, she couldn’t help admitting that being on the side that didn’t cower, the side of power, provided enough of a rush to open her airways. She didn’t feel safe. Not even a little. But the strength of being linked to Derek (even if technically he was linked to the Charmer) offered to galvanize her insides. If she’d let it.
The price of doing so might be more than she was willing to pay. She was already an indentured servant for two weeks. She was severely lacking in goods to trade. Now she was sitting in a stranger’s apartment with a strange man she’d only met a few hours earlier, and she had no idea what they were doing here, other than waiting for the owner to return. So why was she kind of okay with it?
Derek toed at a black smudge on the floor with his boot.
“How long ‘til he comes back?” she asked. Not soon enough.
“Tough to say.” His eyes stayed glued to the floor.
“That’s not very helpful.”
He looked up at that. A wry smile played at the corner of his mouth. “Why should I be helpful for free?”
“Are you suggesting you’ll only help the Soul Charmer then?” Irritation and humor both tugged at her.
“Not necessarily. I get paid in all sorts of ways.” What the hell does that mean? she thought. It sounded too close to sexual.
She slapped an open palm against the top of the table between them and instantly regretted it. The Formica looked as though the last time it was clean was when it came out of the factory. In 1953. “Gross,” she said to both Derek and the dirt and dust smeared on her hand.
His chuckle melted some of her ire, which was frustrating in its own way. “You’re too easy, you know that?”
She’d expected to still find humor in his eyes when she met his gaze, but there was none. Instead his brows furrowed as though he was attempting to peer into her skull and see the moving cogs. Could he see the cobwebs, too? The bits of tar and dust her brain had gathered from years of taking care of her mom and her brother in the shit part of town? No. Of course not. The Soul Charmer had granted Derek the skills to reclaim untethered souls, not X-ray vision.