Lover Avenged (Black Dagger Brotherhood #7)(30)

As he sat down, Xhex came into the office, her gray eyes sharp. After she closed the door, she leaned back against it, better than any Master Lock when it came to keeping cheating sports bookies inside and prying eyes outside.

“It was a lie, a total lie—”

“You don’t like to sing?” Rehv leaned back in his chair, his numbed-out body finding a familiar position behind his black desk. “That wasn’t you popping a little Tony B for the crowd at Sal’s the other night?”

The bookie frowned. “Well, yeah…I got me some pipes.”

Rehv nodded at iAm, who was, as always, stone-faced. Guy never showed emotion, except when it came to a perfect cappuccino. Then you got a little bit of the bliss out of him. “My partner over here…he said you sang real well. Real crowd-pleaser. What did he sing, iAm.” iAm’s voice was all James Earl Jones, low and gorgeous. “‘Three Coins in the Fountain.’”

The bookie did a well-you-know jack-up of his slacks. “I got range. I got rhythm.”

“So you’re a tenor like good ol’ Mr. Bennett, huh?” Rehv shrugged out of his sable. “Tenors are my favorite.”

“Yeah.” The bookie glanced at the Moors. “Look, you mind telling me what this is about?”

“I want you to sing for me.”

“You mean, like, for a party? ’Cuz I’d do anything for you, you know that, boss. All you had to do was ask…I mean, this weren’t necessary.”

“Not for a party, although all four of us will enjoy hearing the performance. It’s to repay me for what you skinned off last month.”

The bookie’s face drooped. “I didn’t skin—”

“Yeah, you did. See, iAm is a fantastic accountant. Every week, you give him your reports. How much in on what teams and which spreads. Do you think no one does the math? Based on the games last month, you should have paid in—what was the figure, iAm?”

“One hundred seventy-eight thousand four hundred eighty-two.”

“What he said.” Rehv nodded a quick thanks to iAm. “But instead you came in at…What was it?”

“One hundred thirty thousand nine eighty-two,” iAm shot back.

The bookie started in immediately. “He’s wrong. He’s added—”

Rehv shook his head. “Guess what the difference is—not that you don’t already know. iAm?”

“Forty-seven thousand five hundred.”

“Which happens to be twenty-five grand on a ninety percent vig. Isn’t that right, iAm?” As the Moor nodded once, Rehv punched his cane into the floor and got to his feet. “Which in turn is the courtesy rate charged by the Caldie mob. Trez then went and did a little digging, and what did you find?”

“My boy Mike says he loaned twenty-five large to this guy right before the Rose Bowl.”

Rehv left his cane on the chair and came around the desk, keeping one hand on the surface to steady himself. The Moors stepped back into position, crowding the bookie, holding his upper arms again.

Rehv stopped right in front of the guy. “And so I ask you once more, did you think no one was going to double-check the math?”

“Reverend, boss…please, I was going to pay you back—”

“Yeah, you are going to make good on it. And you’re paying my vig for f*cktards who try to play me. One hundred and fifty percent due at the end of this month or your wife’s going to see you mailed back to her in pieces. Oh, and you’re fired.”

The guy burst into tears, and they weren’t the crocodile kind. These were real, the sort that made the man’s nose run and his eyes puff up. “Please…they were going to hurt me—”

Rehv snapped his hand out and clamped on between the guy’s legs. The poodle yelp told him that even though he couldn’t feel anything, the bookie could, and the pressure was in the right spot.

“I don’t like being stolen from,” Rehv said into the man’s ear. “Cranks my shit right out. And if you think what the mob was going to do to you was bad, I will guarantee you that I am capable of worse. Now…I want you to sing for me, motherf*cker.”

Rehv twisted hard and the guy screamed for all he was worth, the sound loud and high, echoing in the low-ceilinged room. When the shriek began to trail off because the bookie had exhausted his air supply, Rehv relented and gave him a chance to refresh those pipes with some gasping. And then it was—

The second scream was louder and higher than the first, proving that vocalists did do better after a little warm-up.

The bookie jerked and jangled in the hold of the Moors, and Rehv kept at it, his symphath side watching raptly, like this was the best show on television.

It took about nine minutes until the guy lost consciousness.

After it was lights-out, Rehv let go and returned to his chair. One nod and Trez and iAm took the human through the back way, into the alley, where the cold would revive him eventually.

As they left, Rehv had a sudden image of Ehlena balancing all those boxes of dopamine in her arms as she came into the exam room. What would she think of him if she knew what he did to keep his business running? What would she say if she knew that, when he told a bookie he either paid up or his wife got FedEx packages that leaked blood on her doorstep, it wasn’t a threat? What would she do if she knew that he was fully prepared to do the slice-and-dice himself or order Xhex, Trez, or iAm to do it for him?