Her Name Is Knight(Nena Knight #1)(20)

“Real talk, you nearly caused a war, Nena, a war I can’t have right now. I’m trying to get this money up, not lose lives.”

She took a seat next to him, choosing the chair with its back to the wall. She preferred to minimize her blind spots.

“You already have plenty of money.”

He snorted. “Could always use more.”

She analyzed him. “You could give up selling the drugs and guns. There are other ways to become wealthy. Better ways.”

Keigel scratched his perfectly groomed beard. “Maybe when I grow up.” He cracked a wry smile.

The corners of her mouth held a whisper of amusement, and she relaxed just a degree, waiting patiently for what she knew was coming next.

He leaned in, placing his elbows on his knees, matching Nena’s look of seriousness. “Real talk, what happened last night?”

She pursed her lips. Nothing much. Nena swallowed. Just met an interesting girl and her father. Turns out I’m supposed to kill him.

“What are you thinking about, kid?” he asked, narrowing his eyes. “Your face just got all dreamy.”

Nena blinked, ignoring him even though she was older than his twenty-five years by six. “The night might have taken some unexpected turns.”

She cleared her throat and her mind of all things Baxter.

“Talk to the Flushes. They encroached on your territory, which means two things. First, they disrespected you by starting trouble on your turf. Second, they would have left a body, and a young one at that. That’s police attention.” She shrugged. “Sounds like whatever woman clipped them—that was the word you used, yes?—did you a favor.”

Keigel’s look was begrudging. “Well, dude she let live says otherwise.”

“Of course.” She hadn’t let him live. He’d already been running away by the time she’d killed the second one, but that was inconsequential.

What else would the Flush say? That one woman had taken out all three with no backup? Her lips curved into a tiny smirk. Actually, she wished he would say it.

“They want retaliation.” Keigel looked at her firmly. “And the one dude who survived describes a woman who looks a lot like you.”

It wasn’t Nena’s concern. It was Keigel’s. He had to figure out how to clean this up. If it were left to Nena, she’d order a dispatch of the whole crooked Flush crew for the simple fact they liked to prey on the unprotected, something she and the Tribe vowed to disallow.

She studied him. Keigel needed to start thinking on another level if he wanted to continue in the Tribe’s good graces. People joined the Tribe because they wanted to, not because they were forced. And to do so, they needed to be aligned with the Tribe’s beliefs. Keigel dealt drugs, and while the Tribe didn’t believe in peddling poison to their own people, they didn’t stop him from doing it either. They allowed him free rein to do as he pleased in his little Miami world. Because he was under Nena’s protection, he was under the Tribe’s as well. That was their gift to him.

Maybe one day, Keigel would move beyond wanting to only make fast money and seek more for himself and the people in his territories, find a greater cause to fight for. Nena could only hope. But right now, Keigel served a purpose for her. She needed to be able to move freely about this area of the city. She needed to be like a ghost to do her dispatching and Tribe business unencumbered, and Keigel kept the other, smaller gangs in check so she could do so.

“I’m sure all she did was remind them they were on your turf, especially after they said, ‘Fuck Keigel.’”

His jaw tightened, and his eyes went flat. Keigel could be a clown, rough around the edges even, but he knew what respect should look like and demanded it.

“Don’t tell me that.”

“If I were you, I would make a clear statement. You’re chief around here. Send a clear message. Let them know they owe you for causing trouble and bringing it to your turf. You won’t have any more problems from them or any of the others if you do that. They owe you.” She kept her voice even. “And you owe the woman for taking care of those idiot would-be rapists.”

He pulled a face. “How do you figure that?”

“She put you in the perfect position to affirm your authority over your territories. Who knows, maybe they’ll be scared now, thinking you have some secret killer to take them all out. Maybe they’ll all fall in line now, hmm?”

They had an understanding, Keigel and Nena. No one messed with the quiet woman who lived alone at the corner house in the neighborhood. The woman who came and went as she pleased, looked like a goddess, and was lethal as hell—Keigel’s words, not hers. Keigel would clean up the mess with the Flushes. He’d send a message like she recommended. And he’d do it because he had no plans to end up like them, taken down in a dirty-ass alley. There wasn’t a need to tell him the girl was the child of a federal attorney.

Nena sighed, begging her mind not to think about Cortland Baxter, how he’d looked at her when she’d brought Georgia home, and how she wanted him to look at her like that again. The feeling was unsettling. Her hands, she realized, were trembling, and so she folded them into her lap, where Keigel wouldn’t mistake her emotion.

Nena had thought she would never want a man to look at her with the interest and the want that Cortland had looked at her with the other night. She didn’t want it, love, a relationship, did she? Was it even possible for her after all she’d endured?