Zeb…

I was tired as fuck and didn’t want to ride to the club, but when the Pres asked you to come, you went. I always thought it was kind of funny, Dragon’s way. He asked, he didn’t order us about like most blokes would if they were in his position. I pulled up outside and backed into my space, the party pretty well over by this time. Usually, everyone was passed out or off fuckin’ by now, so you can imagine my surprise when D. met me practically right inside the door.

“Hey, where’s the fire at, eh?” I asked and lost my easy smile when his didn’t appear right away.

“Asleep in my room. Sit down,” he said, and waved me into a chair across from his. “I know you been on your feet all night.” I nodded and sank down, wondering what it was he had called me in for. He pushed a folded piece of paper across the table at me and said, “Tell me what you make of that.”

“Looks to me like it’s a letter,” I said, scowling at the typed face of it. “What’s it got to do with me?”

“Nothing, yet.”

“I’m thankfully not up on the way your prison system works, but I take it this Silas Grable gettin’ out early ain’t a good thing?”

“Not where Tiffany Dempsey is concerned.” I watched Dragon knock back a shot of tequila.

“Who is she?”

“Stripper down at Sugars. A nice girl. I told her if she ever needed anything to look us up, never thought she’d come to me with something like this. Then again, I probably shoulda guessed it was something like this.”

“Makes you say that?”

“Come see for yourself, but try not to wake her. She’s had a tough night.”

He pushed to his feet and I followed him back to his room where he opened the door, a rectangle of light from the hall behind us spilling inside. I moved in and looked down at the girl sleeping in one of his tee shirts. Well, passed out was more like it, judging by the half-empty bottle on the bedside table, but given the wicked nasty scar along her upturned cheek, I couldn’t say I blamed her for that.

“He do that?” I asked quiet-like and Dragon nodded.

“When you came here, you said you were down to lead a different kind of life. One where your people could be proud of you again. I think you might be meant for this particular task for a few reasons.”

“Yeah?” I asked.

“Yeah. I’ll leave you two to get acquainted,” he said and finally gave me an order. “Don’t wake her up.”

I stepped back and dropped into the chair against the wall and he shut us both into the dark. I thought about it, and reached up, pulling on the chain to the lamp over the old recliner. I was in Dragon’s reading chair, an old mountain of paperbacks on a low table beside it. I didn’t pay the books no mind, wondering instead what the crafty old bastard was up to. I took in her features while she slept.

She was a pretty girl. The ugly that marred her cheek was the kind of flaw that, for some reason, at least to me, made her more beautiful, not less. Like God had made something too perfect, and life or fate or whatever had to mark it, make it just that little bit less so, so that a mere mortal man like me could believe she was real.

Of course, this was all before she opened her mouth. Who knew what she was like personality-wise? Some women were only pretty on the outside and no amount of that pretty could make up for what kind of ugly they had going on their insides. Still, real men didn’t treat women this way. Leastways, not the way I’d been raised, no matter if they were good women or not. I also couldn’t judge what I didn’t know.

The room started to fill with natural light and I sighed and rubbed my eyes. I was tired, it had been a long night, and I could use some sleep myself, but Dragon had had me park it here for a reason. I couldn’t deny the view was nice. My eyes kept straying over that lovely face, framed in straight, glossy, dark brown hair, her dark lashes long and forming perfect crescents on her cheeks.

I turned over what Dragon had said in my head and thought that this maybe was some kind of a test. I trusted the man, I trusted all of these men, and if he said the lady needed help, then she needed help. Likewise, I’d been climbing pretty steady out of the hole I’d dug for myself. Granted, I could never go back home to New Zealand, not unless some gang bosses back home died first and even then, I couldn’t say my family would welcome me with open arms. I’d fucked that up. Been young and headstrong, and had to come here to my uncle in America, only I fell right back into old habits, had burned that bridge, too. Now I was here with a new family, determined not to fuck up again.

So, with a sigh, I settled in and got comfortable dozing in the chair, resting my eyes and waiting for her to wake up.