“Zeth!” The outraged yell finally stays my hands. Julio waits beside Sloane, eyes wide with disbelief. “The woman is fine! You’re fucking gonna kill one of my best men over a fucking bruise?”
“I’ll kill him for daring to breathe the same air as her,” I gasp, my chest heaving. “I’ll kill him just for looking at her wrong.”
Julio just shakes his head, astonished. He gestures one of his other men toward Andreas, still reeling from what I’ve done. “Get him to the basement.” He turns and walks slowly back inside the villa, leaving me and Sloane outside. Alone with fourteen armed and very angry Mexicans.
We didn’t speak with Julio last night. The man seemed totally shell-shocked from my arrival, the gunshots, and then Zeth nearly bludgeoning someone to death with his bare hands. He’d immediately vanished, leaving Zeth to drag me through the sporadically lit hallways of the Spanish-style villa, toward a bedroom that smelled distinctly like him. He’d shoved me inside, followed after, locked the door and then placed a chair beneath the handle like in the movies. Following that he’d ripped off his clothes down to his boxers, angrily throwing them onto the ground, climbed into the huge king-sized bed in the center of the room and promptly fallen straight to sleep.
Turns out he was mad at me.
I’d slept in the wingback chair by the window, although barely, and woken way earlier than Zeth due to the piercing shafts of sunlight spearing over the top of the compound wall and directly into the bedroom. Since then I’ve been waiting, stiff and cold, for the dark shape of a man to wake. Dreading it. With his eyes closed and hand softly flexed inwards as he breathes deeply in and then out, he looks so vulnerable and harmless. The lines of him don’t soften in the slightest with his unconsciousness; his muscles are still strongly carved out of his belly and chest, arms and back, but they aren’t primed to damage anyone right now, which makes him seem less dangerous. I’m too scared to wake him. I just sit, waiting, hoping that he wakes up in a better mood than he fell asleep in.
I’m also hoping Lacey is okay. She knew I wasn’t going to take her with me. God knows how, but she didn’t bat an eyelash when I said she was going stay with my folks for the night. Two at the most. The relief on her face had actually been very obvious when I said it wasn’t safe for her to come. She’d only grown concerned when she’d followed me into my parents’ place and seen the religious paraphernalia all over the walls: crucifixes, icons of the Virgin Mary and cherub-faced depictions of Jesus blessing the masses. Her face had grown pale, although she’d swallowed stiffly and sat herself down, folding her hands in her lap and eyeing my father suspiciously. I don’t know what’s happened to make her react that way, but it’s clearly something very bad. I’m hoping she’s not going to be more traumatized when I pick her up than she was when I left her there.
I’m still thinking about this when, at around seven thirty, Zeth sits bolt upright in the bed, gasping. His eyes scan the room, locate me, and the next thing I know I’m being physically lifted and am being thrown onto the bed on the other side of the room. I let out a small yelp as Zeth’s hand sails, clenched into a scuffed-knuckled fist, down toward my face. He manages to catch himself in time, letting out a choked shout.
“Fuck!” he shouts. He lets me go, rolling away from me on the bed. The only thing I can do is place my hands over my frantically beating heart and try and suck some air into my lungs. My whole body starts shaking, jittering uncontrollably where he leaves me curled on the bed. He hurls himself across the other side of the room and presses his back against the wall, momentarily cupping his hands over his face, drawing in long, uneven breaths of his own.
“Fuck,” he says again, almost too quietly for me to hear this time. I sit silently, trying to figure out what the hell just happened. Eventually Zeth lowers his hands and fixes a darkly unimpressed stare on me. “You’re the worst thing that could have happened,” he growls at me.
The statement is so ironic that I almost choke. “Says you! Fuck you, Zeth.”
“Yeah, fuck me,” he agrees. He pushes away from the wall and prowls forward, approaching the bed. I kick back against the rumpled covers, trying to keep a safe distance between us. “You have no idea how complicated you’ve made things. Why the fuck did you come here?”
I feel ridiculous and more than a little betrayed by my own body when my eyes start to prick. “I didn’t exactly have much choice. Your friends, Charlie’s men, broke into my place and tried to kidnap your—” I stop myself just in time. Zeth’s reached the bed now, and has climbed up on his hands and knees, inching closer. His brows furrow. “They tried to kidnap Lacey,” I tell him. “And there’s no way I’m leading that kind of craziness to my friends or to my workplace. To a job that means more than anything to me. I’ve jeopardized everything I’ve worked so hard for so I can get the girl you dumped on me out of Seattle and you’re mad at me for it!” A single tear of frustration races down my cheek, dripping onto my bent knee.