Sancte Diaboli

I roll the tip between my thumb and index finger. “What do you want to know?” I kept her a secret from them for as long as I could. Lucan didn’t spill shit about shit. Even when everything went down, he still didn’t spill any details about Saint. He could have. The truce between him and Hector had cracked open. He didn’t have to keep Saint a secret, but he did. Even during his final minutes on this earth. Never thought much about that until now. “How about we start with how you know and what you know?”

Bishop swaps glances with Nate. Bishop and I haven’t been seeing eye-to-eye much lately, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t take a bullet for the fool. He exhales and leans forward. “Dad told us. Said we had to keep her safe.”

My brows knit together as I take another hit of the ganja. “She is always fucking safe.”

“We know that now,” Nate murmurs, resting back in his chair. “We didn’t when we found out. So, tell us her story.”

Blood rushes to the surface. “I was seven, or six. Seven, I think, when she arrived. Barely old enough to hold a knife and fork, but fuck if you put a nine in my hand I would have shot any motherfucker that came near her.”

Bishop snickers. “So she’s your Madison?”

“Fuck no,” I dismiss him. “Never went near her with that intent. She just—I don’t know. I needed to protect her. Always felt this fucking need to protect her.”

The silence was almost loud enough to dance through the room with a pair of fucking pointe slippers on.

“All right, well, I won’t ask questions about whatever it is that’s going on between the two of you. It obviously has some history on it.”

I grit my teeth. You could fucking say that.

“There’s a problem with this…” Cash murmurs, his finger working his upper lip. He’s grown his hair out a lot, with it now needing to be tied into a pretty little bun.

“And what’s that?” I run my tongue over my teeth before baring them like a fucking wolf.

“Well, there’s a color that we have to call, you know, to let others know that she’s off-limits. So I’ll ask since no one else has the balls to do it. Are you go

A menacing chuckle rocked through me while leaning back in my chair and keeping my eyes on his. Locked on his pretty blues, I don’t falter until the blacks of mine drown his. “I’m not calling red on her because it’s not like that.”

“Then she’s going to be fair game if she starts hanging around like I fear she may be. I mean, we all know what happened with—” Cash pauses when a loud click cracks through the air.

My eyes shoot straight to the head of the table where Bishop has his Desert Eagle pressed right against Cash’s temple.

Cash doesn’t unlock his eyes from mine, though his smirk is cocky enough for Bishop to see.

My lip curves up, because I already know why he’s landed himself in shit.

“—say her fucking name, motherfucker, and King or no King, your brains will be sprayed over the walls.” Bishop is bluffing, he wouldn’t actually kill a King. That’s never happened, with the exception of Lucan.

I can’t hold in my laughter, and my head hits the back of the chair as I flash a god-honest authentic smile right at Cash. “Ahhh, you were saying?”

Cash rolls his eyes. “You know what happened to she who shall not be named and Tillie. No one called it on them for a while. There were almost two ‘throuples’ that happened. It’s in our history books that this happens.”

There’s another long stretch of silence before I start flicking that same Zippo around between my fingers. “No one will touch Saint,” I say with calm assertion.

“You know this?” Cash fires back, and I have to stop myself from reaching over the table, latching on to his throat, and tearing it straight from his spine.

“Fact, I know it.”

“How so?”

My lip curls. “Because fucking with a girl who is owned by me is far scarier than fucking with someone who has been drowned in the blood of her lover.” I pause, tilting my head while keeping my eyes trained on his. “Care to test that theory?”

Cash blows out a loud inhale of breath, flopping backward onto his chair and shaking his head. “I swear to fuck, you’re all crazy.”

“And you’re not?” I quirk a brow.

Cash winks. “Not that crazy. I’m sure you’re right…” We all relax a little when Bishop tucks away his gat. Trigger-happy Bishop. He’s just like the old Bishop, only more wounded.

“That still leaves one thing,” Bishop says from the head of the table. “She needs to know about me and Tillie. About Hector, Brantley. It’s safer for her to know, and on top of that, we have outside threats that will most likely be after her if it has gotten out that after all this time, Hector had himself a little” —deep breath and then slowly through gritted teeth—“Swan.”