Werewolf Wedding(58)

And on top of that, all my old stuff was still there, stacked neatly in boxes beside my shower. Which was now a full, tiled, glass-door shower. This is a guy who gets me. I might love the new hotness but damn if I can’t get attached to some old junky tools. It was hard – really hard – to keep my cool. I couldn’t believe this stuff. It was all brand new, all properly assembled, and all... from Jake. Absently, I placed a hand on the letter in my pocket.

“You must have some bills from all this new shit,” Dane said dismissively. “Guess you must make decent money off this stupid junk.” He prodded a half-finished commission, a model of a little kid sitting on a bench in half-size, with the toe of his boot. “How much does something like this cost?”

The one he was prodding was about two grand in materials and six in labor. But I’d done it for cost plus a thousand. I was a sucker for the cute old woman who wanted it. The statue was of one of her grandkids, she was giving it to him as a keepsake and I couldn’t bear to turn her away with charging too much.

“I probably don’t charge as much as I should,” I said, noticing my voice was a little hollow in my throat. “I could probably get ten for that.”

“And how long would it take?”

I shrugged. “I work on a lot of them at once, I just finish when I finish. If I sat down and just went at it, probably a couple of weeks if I was really on top of things.”

He laughed. Of course he did. Every single cruel chuckle, every obnoxious warble of his voice made me hate him more. If I needed any more convincing that I was doing the right thing, by the end of our first session, all questions were gone.

To his credit, Dane sat mostly still for the majority of our first few hours, long enough for me to get a good part of the clay model done. Luckily I only had to do a little bit of reconfiguring on the face. Somehow that arm had stuck where I’d glued it. Small blessings count for a lot when you don’t have any big ones.

By the early evening, he was getting antsy. He kept getting up for a drink or for a snack, or to grab at me, or make some ugly joke about my life, or his mother, or Jake. He was just the distilled essence of obnoxious male posturing. If this plan was going to work on anything, it was going to work on him.

About the time the sun went down, I couldn’t take anymore. “If you want, you can just leave me here and I’ll work for a while longer. If I’m gonna get this thing done in time, I’ll need to work some late nights.”

“Don’t you need me to model... or whatever? I mean, seems like you’d need me here to be awesome so you could see how awesome to make the statue.”

“Er,” I had to bite my tongue for about the thousandth time. “I think I have enough awesome. It’s all modeled, which is really all I need you for. See? I’ll call when I’m done?”

He was already up and heading towards the door. “Call a cab,” he said, throwing a few twenties on the floor. “I want this thing done. I’m gonna make my brother look like such a damn idiot when this is all said and done. Stay all night if you have to, sleep here, it doesn’t matter.”

Something wasn’t right. Dane was not at all the trusting type.

“Why aren’t you making me come with you? I asked. Aren’t you afraid your brother might try something?”

He snickered at that, just like he had at everything else. “Not even Jake is that stupid,” he said. “He’s well aware that if he tries anything funny – such as playing rescue – I won’t hesitate for a moment to take my right revenge. I’ll kill him and I’ll kill you. Insults aren’t things wolves bear lightly.”

I’d never heard him that serious, or that grave. Dane was normally so obnoxiously flippant that it was hard to take anything he said with any kind of seriousness at all. But that? I had a feeling it wasn’t the first time he’d killed someone over a slight.

“You wouldn’t do that,” I said, “would you?”

“Oh yeah,” was his answer. “Just try me. He wouldn’t be the first, and neither of you would be particularly memorable. Let me make sure this is clear, dear Delilah,” he said mockingly, “you don’t mean a damn thing to me. I want you because I like the way you look, and because I want to hurt my brother. He doesn’t mean anything to me either – he’s just a bump in the road on my way to power. Get it?”

I had no idea how to respond. Never in my life had I been so soundly put in my place, not even by shitty boyfriends or, I dunno, cops who pulled me over and gave me a ticket and a longwinded moral lecture.

“I, uh,” I stammered, and then trailed off.

“Good,” he said. “I like your mouth better when it’s closed. Don’t make me regret this. By the way, that stands after he’s gone, too. You disappoint me, just once? I’ll replace you in a second. If you think I won’t, just try me.”

Something told me that he was not, in fact, posturing. For once. But no amount of mean spirited threats was going to break my resolve. I looked at him, studying his face. I knew he had pain there, hidden behind the cocky, smug exterior. I knew he was hurting deep down inside, but I also knew that he would just as soon die as he would come out and say anything about it.

Swallowing hard, I felt myself nodding. “Okay,” I said, my voice a hollow echo in my own skull. “I won’t... I won’t disappoint you.”