Rev It Up (Black Knights Inc. #3)(23)
Slowly at first, and low to the ground, a dark shadow disengaged from the blackness of the corner and slipped inch by inch into the golden circle of light cast by the crackling fire.
“Holy shit,” he hissed at the same time Shell blew out a shaky breath that ruffled the hair on the back of his neck and sent chills down his spine. Then she burst into the kind of laughter brought on by equal parts relief and hysteria.
He swung around to look at her, his stupid heart hammering like he’d been shacked in a closed-out wave. “It’s not funny,” he managed to growl as he shoved the gun back into his waistband, though, in all honesty, it kinda was.
“I know it’s not,” she chuckled, swaying from side-to-side with Franklin, who, somehow, despite everything that’d happened in the last two minutes, was still dead to the world. Jake figured the damn kid might’ve slept through a nuclear blast. “But can you imagine the look on Frank’s face if he came out here to discover we’d mistaken his cat for a killer and filled the poor thing full of holes?”
He glanced down at the cat in question. The thing was butt ugly and, completely oblivious to the chaos it’d created and the closeness with which it’d come to losing one of its nine lives, was winding its rather rotund form around and between Shell’s legs while simultaneously staring up at her with adoring yellow eyes.
He opened his mouth to tell her the stupid cat and Boss would’ve deserved it when, inexplicably and seemingly from nowhere, an entirely different urge overcame him.
He grabbed her, sleeping boy and all, and pulled her to him, sealing their lips in one fell swoop.
***
Vanessa fidgeted, glancing around at the hard faces of the Knights. They were gathered at the conference table on the second floor of the shop, waiting to see what information Rock could get out of the guy who’d been hired to kill them.
Guy who’d been hired to kill them…
Okay, and the whole situation suddenly felt all too real. No longer could she pretend the price on her head was nothing more than an amorphous threat, because the proof that someone was willing to pay good money to see her dead was sitting down in the interrogation room being questioned by Rock.
A sick feeling bubbled in the bottom of her stomach, and the bratwurst she had for dinner was suddenly threatening to give a return performance.
Just when she opened her mouth to break the strained silence, a sharp slap, like someone slamming their hand down on a table, echoed from below.
Wild Bill winced. “So he’s moved on to step two.”
“Huh?” she asked, swallowing the acid that inched up the back of her throat.
Someone’s willing to pay good money to see me dead…
The thought kept spinning through her head until she thought she’d go completely insane and her baked potato decided to jump in line behind the bratwurst.
“The first step in any interrogation is to try to win over the suspect with friendliness,” Angel, the ex-Mossad agent who’d come to work for BKI around the same time she had, said in his raspy voice. “When that doesn’t work, you move on to threats of physical pain and the fear that evokes.”
She turned to Boss. “Will Rock really beat the information out of him?”
“Hell, no,” Boss grumbled, his fingers tightening around the steaming cup of coffee in his hands. “We don’t stoop to the level of our enemies.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake!” Becky threw her hands in the air. “Would everybody stop pulling the whole oogedy-boogedy say-nothing but mean-everything black-ops bullshit here and just tell the poor woman the truth. She’s a Knight now, and she’s gonna find out eventually anyway.”
“What? What am I going to find out?” She nervously glanced around at the group.
Becky made no attempt to hide her exasperation at Boss before turning to enlighten her. “Rock is an expert interrogator. He can get anything out of anyone because he has this crazy ability to get inside of your head.”
What the huh?
“Ozzie says Rock is like Spock,” Becky went on and, oh great, a Star Trek analogy from Ozzie, the king of all things sci-fi. How appropriate. “He can totally rock that whole Vulcan mind meld thing.” Vulcan mind meld. Uh-huh. She said that as if it were a real thing.
The sound of Rock’s cowboy boots clomping up the metal risers stopped all conversation around the conference table cold.
“So?” Boss asked when Rock topped the last riser.
“So.” He whipped a chair around backward, straddling the seat. When he draped his tattooed forearms over the back, she noticed the hard muscles in his biceps, exposed by the short sleeves of his Green Day T-shirt, twitching fitfully.
He doesn’t like doing it, she realized.
Whatever freaky skill he’d been taught, doing so got him all jammed-up, and not in a good way. Of course, she could totally understand how unsettling it must be to go snooping around in someone’s head looking for weaknesses only to turn around and use those weaknesses against them.
“Shogun,” Rock said as he shook his head and blew out a tired breath, “whose real name is Larry Marrow, doesn’t have enough sense to pour piss out of a boot. The stupid fils de pute thought if he said anythin’ about Johnny and the price on our heads, I’d kill him. No matter how often I told him I wasn’t gonna kill him, that I just wanted him to answer my questions, he didn’t believe me.”