that he wouldn’t do in front of you. Trust me; I’d rather have almost anyone else after my ass.”
Again, I didn’t know what to say, so I just agreed. “I wouldn’t want Edward gunning for me, either.”
“All that, and you’re going to concentrate on just that part?” Bernardo said.
I looked at him and shrugged. “What else do you want me to say?”
“God, you really are a guy, I mean you look like a girl, but that is such a guy thing. You ignore all the emotional shit and grab onto that Edward is dangerous. Shit, Anita.”
“Are you always this much of a pussy?” Nicky said.
Bernardo glared at him and set his shoulders, moving slightly forward. People think that fights begin with frowns, or shouts, but they don’t. They begin in much smaller body cues, the human version of dogs raising their hackles, but the dogs know what it means, and so do most men.
Nicky smiled, which was another way to egg the other man on. It was escalating the fight without most women realizing what he’d done, but I wasn’t most women.
“Nicky,” I said, “don’t.”
He looked at me, his face trying for innocent and failing.
Bernardo moved a little closer, and I stepped between them. “We are not fighting over stupid shit,” I said.
“You’re not my boss, not yet,” Bernardo said.
“I don’t know what you mean by the whole ‘not yet’ comment, but I do know we are not wasting time having a pissing contest.”
“Bernardo’s new,” Lisandro said. “You haven’t told Nicky that he can’t fight him for real, and Nicky’s been spoiling for a real fight for a while.”
“I don’t know what you mean by a real fight. Nicky spars with the rest of the guards.”
“Sparring isn’t real,” Lisandro said.
I turned and looked at Nicky. “What have I missed?”
“Don’t know what you mean,” Nicky said.
“Why would you want to fight Bernardo for real?”
Nicky just looked at me.
“Answer my question, Nicky.”
He frowned, sighed, and answered, because he had to; if I made it a direct question he had no choice but to answer me. “I don’t hurt people now because no one’s paying me to do it, and you’ve told me I’m not allowed to kill anyone who belongs to you even if they start the fight. You’ve got some very tough people working for you. I could kill them, but if I can’t kill them, they could hurt me, badly, so I don’t fight.”
“You spar,” I said.
He looked out past the cars, as if he were counting to ten. “It’s not the same thing, Anita. It’s so not the same thing.”
“Are you saying that you want to fight Bernardo so you can hurt or kill him?”
“I want to hurt someone, yeah.” His big hands folded into fists and a tightness ran across his shoulders and upper body like a coiled spring waiting for the switch to release all that pent-up power.
“Why?” I asked.
Nicky gave me a look that wasn’t friendly. It was the look you see sometimes in the zoo from the beasts behind the bars. No matter how much land they have to run in, how many toys they have to play with, there’s always one big cat that seems to remember running free, and knows no matter how big the cage is, it’s still a cage, and he wants out. Nicky’s lion filled his one good eye with amber, and then he blinked and it was back to his human color, but I knew it had been there, his lion peeking out from the cage that I’d forged for it; a cage that it, and Nicky, resented. How had I not seen it? I hadn’t wanted to see it, hadn’t wanted to understand that no matter how tame he seemed, Nicky was still the sociopath that I’d met a year ago. I hadn’t changed him; I’d just broken him to my will. Crap.
Nicky hung his head enough that the long triangle of bangs spilled forward from his face, so that the scars over the other eye socket showed stark in the sunlight. He didn’t actually like to show the scars much, so I knew he was just too upset to care. His entire body posture had changed, no longer belligerent, no longer violence waiting to happen, but something softer.
“You feel bad now, and I can feel it. You’re a little sad. I know you feel bad for what you did to me, Anita. I don’t want you to feel bad.” He raised his face and looked at me. There was something of pain in his face, a frowning effort to understand what he was feeling.
I reached out to him, and he moved closer so I could touch his face. He nestled his cheek against my small hand, and he let out a breath; something hard and unpleasant went out of him. He was my Nicky again, or what I’d begun to think of as mine. He pressed his hand against mine, pressing it closer against his face. “God,” he whispered.
“That was creepy,” Bernardo said.
“You have tamed him like a pet cat,” Olaf said.
Nicky and I both turned to him, and the tension was just back in Nicky. His beast vibrated like heat down my hand and arm. He kept my hand pressed to his face as he glared at Olaf. It’s hard to be tough when you’re cuddling, but it didn’t seem to occur to Nicky to let go of me, or maybe the desire to be near me was stronger than his desire to look tough?
“I heard you had reformed Nick, a good woman reforming a bad man, but it’s not that at all. Nick had to make you feel better. He could not abide you being even a little sad.” Olaf looked at me, and there was something I’d never seen on his face before, a soft horror.
“Do the two of you know each other?” I asked again.
Nicky moved my hand from his face and held it. I wondered, had it bothered him that I hadn’t touched him more when he first got to town? He was looking at Olaf; even as he began to rub his thumb across my knuckles, he was staring at the other man.
“
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means,” Olaf said, “that we know each other’s work. Jacob’s pride of werelions had a reputation in some circles for handling things that other mercenaries would not attempt. They were as good as their reputation until they came up against you, Anita.”
I wondered how much Olaf actually knew about what Nicky’s people had tried to do last summer, and how badly they’d failed.
“Did you truly kill Silas with a blade?” Olaf asked, and that said he knew some real details.
Truth was I’d only hurt him with a blade, and then he’d knocked me unconscious and damn near killed me. I’d gotten another chance at him with a blade only after he got shot by somebody else. I don’t know how much I would have shared, but Nicky answered for me. “Yeah, she did.”
“Silas was good with a blade. That you killed him with one is impressive,” Olaf said.
I squeezed Nicky’s hand; he squeezed back. Was he telling me to just agree? “It wasn’t as easy as it sounds,” I said. Nicky squeezed my hand again, and that was yes, enough. He didn’t want me to overshare with Olaf. Probably the smart thing to do, so I did it; I could be taught.
“Then it must have been difficult indeed, because I worked once with Silas before he joined Jacob’s lions. He would not have been an easy kill before he became a werelion. You are better than you have shown me.”
“Didn’t Anita just break your wrist? How much better does she have to show you?” Lisandro said.
Olaf moved his head to look at the other man. He just looked at him, but apparently it was his signature cave-deep look. Lisandro gave him cold eyes back, and it was a stare that would have given a lot of people pause, but Olaf wasn’t most people, and neither was Lisandro. “Save the scary stares for the civilians.”
Someone’s phone began to go off. It took me a few seconds to realize it was mine. The song was “Bad to the Bone,” by George Thorogood. I’d managed to figure out how to get the song “Wild Boys” off as my main ring tone, but Nathaniel had chosen a lot of individual ring tones; I hadn’t caught them all yet. Nicky didn’t seem to want to let go of my hand so I could get the phone. That answered the question about whether it had bothered him that he hadn’t had more attention when I first saw him.
“Yeah,” I said, when I finally answered the phone; I admit it was something of a snarl.
“Anita?” It was Edward’s voice, but he made my name a question.
