Page 7 of Fallen Rook

While I looked like a Magic Mike fan favorite, all sculpted, tan muscles and floppy, thick hair, he looked like a goddamn Hollywood star. With a preppy haircut, translucent sapphire eyes, lean, athletic form, and a stoically indestructible air about him. He was almost my height, and I had a slight obsession with his popped-collar peacoat and suit combo. He dressed his age—which I’d put somewhere in his mid to late thirties—and always looked put together. Not just physically. Internally. Everything-lly.

I stood upright, still dizzy. I was used to being around corpses, and Cash’s lifeless body lying between us didn’t faze me. It did, however, throw me off that someone was trying to out me. And that the person to kill Cash was a federal agent tasked with bringing me down.

“Clean this up.” Tom pointed at Cash like he was a flaming bag of dogshit I’d left at his doorstep.

“Way ahead of you, buddy.” My thumbs were already flying over my phone screen, ordering my soldiers to get rid of the body. No one was going to think twice about the location being outside of a gay club. As the Camorra’s enforcer, I visited anywhere and everywhere to deliver the organization’s message. “Done.” I pocketed my phone.

It was a little too late to feign innocence and claim I had no idea what cleaning up a body looked like.

Tom continued looking put off by my existence. Loaded silence unfurled between us.

“So, ah…why’d you do it?” I took off my hat and pushed my fingers through my hair.

“As I said,” Tom uttered slowly through clenched teeth, “he was a threat to a member of the public.”

“You could’ve just arrested him.”

“He was armed and ready to shoot.”

“Injure him, then.” I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful, but I also couldn’t understand his behavior. And if he was so sure of the way he handled it, why did he ask me to get rid of the body?

Tom’s scowl deepened. “Do you have a problem with how I handled the situation, Ferrante?”

“No!” I was sweating, and I didn’t even know why. “It was just…out of character, that’s all.”

“You don’t know my character.”

Yeah, no shit. He was a mystery wrapped in an enigma. No matter how much me and my brothers tried to learn about his life, about his weaknesses, to get him to flip and become a dirty fed, we always ended up at square one. The man was an island, robotic to his core, with disturbingly dead eyes and a reputation to match. Without a family, a life, a home.

My working theory was that he went back to his recharging station after his workday was over.

“Thank you,” I spluttered again.

He just stared at me like I imagined Satan did a second before he sucked his victim’s soul dry.

Why was he still here?

Why was I?

An unfamiliar notion tore at my chest. I felt more vulnerable than I did ten minutes ago, with my cock in a stranger’s mouth and a gun pressed against a major artery.

“Are you gay?” I blurted out.

I felt my cheeks burning. Okay, that was weird. I wasn’t really the blushing type. But I guess nothing was normal about tonight.

He gave me another imperturbable, wry stare. “Bi.”

I mulled it over in my head. To think of him as a sexual being was strange. He was always just SSA Rothwell to me. My hot, cranky stalker whom I spotted behind bushes and building every now and again, like my own, screwed-up Where’s Waldo?.

“Cool, man.” I flashed him one of my panty-dropping grins. “I don’t know what I am.”

“An idiot,” he deadpanned.

I’d never seen this man smile. Doubted he was capable of such bodily function.

My fingers twitched to hug him in gratitude, but I had a feeling he’d break every bone in my body if I tried.

“That’s…um, not unwarranted, I guess. Considering the current circumstances. Well, thanks again,” I said a third time, trying to figure out if this was an elaborate FBI trap. I didn’t think it was. He’d literally killed someone. Put his career and reputation—maybe even freedom—on the line. For me. No one had ever done that before.