Thicker Than Blood (Thicker Than Blood #1)(61)
A thick stripe of gray ran through his hair, making me wonder if he’d placed it there intentionally. But the closer he came, the more obvious it was that it was natural. With a toothpick jammed between his two front teeth, his scowl deepened as he closed in on us, and I briefly wondered if we should just say screw it and run.
The woman beside him was less imposing, yet her very presence seemed to suck all the air out of the room, making her seem even more frightening than him. She was slight with a slim waist, heavily tattooed arms, and chin-length hair that had been dyed a bright pink. Someone of her size and stature shouldn’t have seemed so daunting, yet there was something off about her, something that suggested a raw edginess, as if a sleeping violence lurked just beneath her surface.
We were watching them and they were watching us, while this woman hung off her man like a leech, her nose ring twinkling each time she made the slightest of movements.
Several tense moments ticked slowly by, and just when I thought I couldn’t take another second of the silence, when I was feeling as if I was suffocating under this tiny woman’s hard gaze—not the man’s, because his eyes hadn’t left Alex—Leisel spoke up, shocking the hell out of everyone in the room.
“I don’t know about you, but I would really like to sit down,” she said with a shrug. She let out a nervous laugh, trying to be brave, attempting to break the ice on this awkward situation we’d found ourselves in.
“We’ve been walking all day, avoiding the infected,” she continued. “I swear, it’s like there’s a damn apocalypse going on out there.” She offered another soft laugh, her gaze darting over to mine.
Trying not to gape at her audacity and her bad attempt at a joke, I wondered about how strangely calm she seemed, when here I was, feeling as if I might vomit from anxiety.
Even stranger was the man, who’d since begun to smile at Leisel’s nervous twittering. His smile widened until he plucked the toothpick from between his teeth and grinned from ear to ear. Suddenly, his grin became a full-bellied barking sort of laugh that left all three of us shifting uncomfortably.
Looking perplexed and more than a little annoyed, the pink-haired woman glared up at her man. When he noticed her eyes on him, the man turned to face her, and after seeing the look of confused disdain twisting her features, his smile quickly fell away.
“Come. Sit the f*ck down,” he said, his voice full of gravel, his original snarl once again firmly in place. Together, although the woman was clearly leading the show, the couple started for the sofas.
Alex looked first at me, then at Leisel, his eyes burning with questions that he didn’t dare voice. Not here, not yet. Shrugging ever so slightly, he headed for the sofas as well, leaving Leisel and me little choice but to follow him.
Like lambs sent to the slaughter, one by one we took a seat, Leisel on Alex’s left, and me on his right. I didn’t like the seating arrangement, sure that Leisel should be in the middle, protected by both of us. But this place, this world, it wasn’t our reality. It was their reality, this new world where men lorded over women as if we were property. I could only assume we were seated like this because Alex sensed this, and was acting accordingly.
Seconds ticked by, one by one, and still no one spoke until Alex finally broke the silence. “We, uh, helped two of your men escape a horde of infected. In return—”
“Jeffers,” the man said, interrupting Alex, then tucked his toothpick back in place.
“What?” Alex asked.
“His name is Jeffers,” the woman explained, her voice thick with an accent I didn’t recognize. “And I’m Liv.”
Suddenly she grinned at me and inched her way closer to Jeffers. Draping a long skinny leg over his thick muscular one, a little too much thigh and the noticeable curve of her backside revealed in the process, she arched into him and darted her tongue out, stroking a long, leisurely lick up the length of Jeffers’s neck. It was all very vulgar, the act reminding me of a dog pissing on a tree, marking its territory. Instantly, I concluded that I didn’t like her.
“You been living in the wild this whole time?” Jeffers asked, his brow puckered.
“Yeah,” Alex muttered. “Anyway…Jeffers…we helped two of your men—”
“The three of you?” Jeffers looked at Leisel and me, his eyes narrowing.
Alex nodded, clearly annoyed at the interruption. “Yeah, the three of us helped two of your men. They were trapped inside a barn, the whole place was crawling with infected, and we—”
“Rescued them?” Liv offered, lifting one thin eyebrow. Her sly gaze landed on Jeffers. “You hear that, baby? These three wild rats rescued two of your boys.”
Turning toward me, she grinned again. “Who was it? The men you rescued? What were their names?”
Liv’s tone had become challenging. She ran her tongue across her lower lip, every so often biting down on it. I couldn’t tell if she just disliked me as much as I did her, and she was toying with me because of it, or if this was all some odd attempt at flirting with me. All I knew was that I didn’t trust her. Not at all.
“Bryce,” I answered with hesitation, my gaze on her steely and hard. “And Mike.”
Her body still draped across Jeffers, Liv started to laugh, a sharp, short, mocking laugh that sent gooseflesh pebbling up and down my arms. “Jeffers, baby,” she cooed, a little too sweetly. “These ladies rescued two of your boys. Meaning we have a couple of badass bitches ripe for the taking, don’t we?”