Murder and Mayhem (18 page)

Rook at least had the decency to fake a little bit of shame in his expression. “Yeah, well… it wasn’t on purpose. I… fuck, Mon—Dante, this is too damned hard.”

“Then do something easier on you. Tell me how a kid who grew up on the carnival circuit ended up selling dolls on Hollywood Boulevard.” Dante prodded him lightly. “Tell me
something
, Rook Stevens. It can be about you grandfather or, hell, why you gave Charlene a job. Just between you and me. It goes no further than this room.”

“Dude, I think I’d rather go to jail,” Rook ground out, turning around so his back was to Dante’s chest again. “Seriously. And for your information, they’re called
action figures
. Not dolls.”

What Montoya—Dante—wanted was worse than standing on the edge of a high-rise with only a thin steel braid stopping him from becoming a splatter on the street below. He didn’t
share
. Sex was something to have and be done with, like eating a pot of ramen over the sink so he didn’t have to do dishes.

And much like gulping down hot noodles, the idea of
talking
about things to a cop—even one whose dick had been inside of him—gave Rook heartburn.

The problem with Dante Montoya was that he was
good
. Not the tiptoe through the forest, sing to forest animals kind of good, but a more brutally real, honest-to-God, throw himself into the line of fire for someone he didn’t know kind. Rook didn’t have it in him to even understand that kind of good, yet there he was, cuddled up against a white knight as if they were starring in a Hallmark commercial for Valentine’s Day.

“Think less. Talk more, Stevens.” Dante nudged Rook’s shoulder with his chin.

“Why is it I have to call you Dante and you can still call me Stevens?”

“Because I have a gun.”

“Nice.”

Dante snorted. “Anything. This is a trust thing. If we’re going to be—”

“Tangled,” Rook interrupted. “If we’re going to call this fucking mess anything, it’s going to be tangled. We’ll ride this out for as long as it takes us. Then we walk it off, right?”

Dante was silent behind him, and Rook swallowed the prickly anxiety rolling up his throat. The cop finally sighed and hitched Rook even closer, molding his body against Rook’s back until there was barely enough space between them for air to move.

“There’s a lot of things I don’t understand about you,
cuervo
. I get that your mother wasn’t—”

“Around? Sober?” he suggested quickly and tried to remember the last time he’d actually spoken to Beanie. “
So
many words to choose from.”

“I was going to say maternal.” Dante’s hands were moving again, a soothing caress over his belly. “I don’t want to put words in your mouth.”

“Dude, there are so many words to describe Beanie—Beatrice. Stupid’s one. That’s the one I come up with the most, you know?” He thought back on the day when he’d first seen the mansion his mother called home. “She went off to join the goddamned circus because she didn’t want to finish up high school. How screwed up is that? But that’s Beanie. She’d get this brilliant idea about making jam—which she doesn’t know how to make—come up with this soupy, fruity crap but won’t have anything to put it in. Typical Beanie.”

Dante stopped his stroking, and Rook wrinkled his nose, hating that he missed the touch.

“I take it you aren’t close, then?”

“You have to see someone more than a few times a year to get close to them, right?” Rook asked. “What kind of stupid bitch walks away from being rich just because she can’t keep her legs together or a thought in her head? That’s my mother for you. Don’t know what surprises me more. That she had me or that I’m the only one she’s had.”

He’d finally gotten to Montoya, because Dante’s breath stopped, and his chest jerked beneath Rook’s shoulder blades.
Mothers
were important to Montoya—or at least his mother. He added that bit of information next to the uncle Dante spoke of earlier.

“She didn’t have you to think about then. When she left home,” Dante replied. “You walk away from things easily enough. Maybe that’s where you get it from?”

A small cut with a knife, not deep enough to do serious damage, but Dante’s smooth response was sharp enough to prick Rook’s temper. He shoved the irritation aside, hating that his walls crumbled so easily when Dante touched them.

Maybe he was beyond soft. Spending the past few years as legitimately as he could was wearing down his defenses. Gone were the days when he could callously walk by something or someone, not caring if they were bleeding out or crying at his feet. The world was a hard place, and he’d learned long ago that suckling at its stone teat would only leave his mouth raw.

Then why did Dante’s touch unsettle him so much? And why did he hate himself for not reaching out to Archibald to tell him where he was?

“God, I fucking hate you. This crap you’re—” Rook winced as Dante’s nails flicked over his chest. “There’s nothing to tell you. I grew up, did some jobs, then got sick of it. So I opened up a shop. There you go.”

“I’m assuming you got the money for your place off of those jobs you did,” Dante surmised. “And before you bitch, we agreed nothing said here would be used against you. Or I agreed. Besides, the case we had against you was thrown out. Both of them.”

“Yeah, your partner really fucked that up.” He grimaced. “Sorry. That came out wrong.”

“No, it’s true. Vince screwed up.” Dante leaned away, pulling Rook down onto his back. “I’m going to be honest,
cuervo
, I wanted to nail you and the guys you ran with so badly I could taste it. Vince knew he was living on borrowed time, I guess. Maybe he thought he had nothing to lose, but he did.”

“He should have taken care of you at least.” His hair was in his face, and Rook pushed it aside, only to have it slither back. Dante gently brushed it away, another one of his secretive, wise smiles plastered on his rugged face. “Don’t look at me like that. You’re the one who’s all family this and friends that. Fucker should have had your back.”

He’d been out of the state when Dante’s former partner said he discovered a stash of stolen items in Rook’s trailer at the carnival’s winter spot. The fallout had been ugly, played out on a stage where Rook couldn’t see the players, but he could hear the whispering and the shouting, rumors reaching him through a loose network of people. There’d been news of the older cop’s shameful dismissal and how the younger detective almost lost his balls over it.

At the time he’d thought about paybacks, karmas, and bitches, but seeing Dante ache ruffled a darkness Rook didn’t know he had inside.

The sorrow in Dante’s face hurt. His eyes bled pain, and Rook needed to get away from the raw outpour of betrayal and confusion rolling off Dante’s body.

“Yeah, he should have. But I understand why he did it. Don’t agree with it, but that’s what it is.” Dante leaned over, touching his nose to Rook’s. “What about you? Who did you depend on, then betrayed you? Because no one is born as cynical and bitter as you are. Who was your Vince?”

“No one’s ever had my back, Montoya. No one. And I don’t expect that to change. Ever,” Rook shot back, shoving Dante away with a hard push. “Right now I’m going to get some more sleep. Then I’m talking to Pigeon about you so I can say I’m done with this.”

“We’re not done with this, Rook, and I don’t know if we’ll ever be
done
with this,” Dante said softly as he rolled over onto his back. “You were right the first time. You and I? We’re tangled. So whether you like it or not, I’ll be here. Because God knows, someone needs to take care of you. Especially since you’re doing such a shitty job of taking care of yourself.”

Anguish forced Rook to emerge from the depths of his sleep. His thoughts were fragmented, minnows scattered before the ravenous hunger pursuing him, and his lungs burned as he fought to catch his breath beneath the rippling agonies rolling under his skin and through his bones. There wasn’t enough oxygen in the air, and Rook fought to surface the rest of the way, anything to shed the coat of thorns he seemed to be wearing.

Opening his eyes made it worse.

There was glass in the light. Sliver wide and razor sharp, each drop of sun dug down into his eyes, twisting farther in until his brain couldn’t absorb any more pain.

Then he blinked, and the agony began anew.

“Come on,
cuervo
. I need you to wake up the rest of the way. I want to get some meds in you before I leave.”

Rook knew the voice calling to him. He loved that voice—Dante’s voice. Its rum-dark pour smoothed away some of the dry roughness on his soul, and Rook forced himself to lift his hand to his face to rub at the prickly sand in his eyes.

“He’s not going to die, is he,
mijo
?”

That
was definitely not Dante Montoya. And Rook shoved himself off the sleepy cliff he’d been walking to plunge into full consciousness. He struck the hard, flat surface of awareness with a clattering headache and a realization there wasn’t a single inch of skin on his body that was left untouched by pain. Even the faint dusting of hair on his arms crinkled in distress, but as soon as he shook off one ache, two more took its place.

Sitting up was an exercise in futility. Nothing in his body moved as it should have, and Rook wondered if Dante had somehow fucked his spine loose, leaving him an unresponsive sack of meat and bones on the hotel’s expensive sheets.

“Let me help you. Don’t try to move without someone helping you up. Not until after you take a painkiller.”

Dante emerged out of the watery background, coming into focus in startling detail. A light scruff darkened his jaw, and as he sat down on the bed, light from the window struck Dante’s face, casting shadows from his long lashes onto his cheeks.

“I’m going to help you sit up. No fighting me.”

“Fighting you? Shouldn’t have fucked you,” he grumbled at the man he’d let have him a few hours before. “You broke me.”

“You were broken when I got you.” Dante wedged his arm under Rook’s shoulders, lifting him up. “And if you remember, I told you… it was a bad idea. The fucking.
You
are not a bad idea,
cuervo
.”

Sitting up was almost as big a mistake as opening his eyes. Sure enough, his spine wasn’t having any of Rook’s upright nonsense, and his shoulders seemed to be on crooked. Straightening himself out only made things worse, and Rook nearly toppled forward, saved at the last second by a judicious block of Dante’s hand on his chest.

“
Mijo
, what do you need me to do?”

Somewhere out in the fuzzy ether beyond the bed, another man spoke up, reminding Rook they weren’t alone. He got the impression of a shimmer of colors and a white smile before the man ghosted back out of his sight.

“Water would be nice, tío. He needs to take some meds. Warm would be better on his stomach, but I think you’d have to run it through the coffeemaker for that.” Dante spoke to the murmuring outline at the end of the bed.

“That I can do. And once we’re done drugging him, you can tell me why you broke him.”

Rook liked the censure in the man’s voice, a barbed sting in his sweet, rolling tenor.

Waiting until the man’s blurry shape faded out of his sight, Rook said softly, “If you’re thinking of getting up a threesome, you’re shit out of luck, Montoya. I don’t play the
guess-whose-dick-is-in-you
game.”

“Let’s get a few things straight,
mocoso
. That is my Uncle Manny. I called him here so you wouldn’t be alone while I go interview a few people about the murders at your place.” Dante sat down on the bed, then eased a pillow behind Rook’s shoulders. “And secondly, I don’t share. If you have a problem with that, then… well, get over it. As long as we’re doing… what we’re doing, there will be only you and me. Got it?”

“Sure you don’t have a class ring or something you want to give me?” Rook tried going for a sneer, but his face didn’t seem to work properly. His belly, however, pitched a fit, and Rook rubbed at his stomach. “Who thought this was a good idea?”

“We both did. Last night. This morning, I’m beginning to reconsider my actions.”

“Too late now.” His skin began crawling again, sending off little pings to his brain, and Rook sighed. “Really, just kill me the rest of the way.”

“Maybe later,” Dante promised. “Not in front of my uncle. He gets squeamish around blood. Just like you.”

“Low blow, Montoya. Very low blow.” The room slowly got clearer, and Rook spotted the plump older Mexican man coming toward him. “Your uncle, huh?”

There wasn’t any question about Dante’s blood tie to the older Latino. Even with his impossibly black hair and rounder face, the man’s features held a strong resemblance to the cop Rook ached for. Where Dante’s clothes ran to practical and earthy hues, Manny preferred a more vivid palette—one that included dark red pants and a yellow T-shirt stretched over his slightly rounded belly. The clash of maroon and buttercup was startling, and Rook wondered how out of it he’d been if the man’s loud clothes hadn’t woken him up as soon as Manny walked into the hotel room.

“Yes. My favorite uncle.” The hard edge to Dante’s tone was definitely a warning for Rook to behave. “
Tío
, this is Rook. Pain in the ass, this is my tío, Manny. He’ll be staying with you because he’s a very nice guy. Try not to be too much of an asshole while I’m gone.”

“I can see where you get your smile, ’Toya.” There was a tiny spark of satisfaction when Manny preened a bit, squaring his shoulders before handing Dante a mug. “Looks better on him too.”

“Ah, Dante said to watch out around you because you’d charm my wallet out of my pocket.” Manny’s grin was a near echo of his nephew’s. A bit softer around the edges and without the sexual aggression Rook swore Dante saved up just for him. “You take your medication and sleep. I brought a book.”

“Hell, you could probably dance on the bed. Pills knock me the fuck out.” Rook picked up one of the two pills Dante held out on his palm. “One only. I want to wake up at some point this week. Fuck, even my tongue hurts.”