She tried to shake it off, but he didn’t let her go. Instead, he dragged her backward, toward him, and bent low to speak directly in her ear. Francesca’s hand came up to push him away, a wince crossing her expressive face as the vampire tightened his grip.
Claws dug into her bare, freckled shoulder. The light brushed over her skin, following the divots created by the vampire’s fingers. The flesh around the tips of his claws paled with the pressure he exerted — just shy of drawing blood.
Luis didn’t plan it, and he certainly didn’t consider who the hand might belong to when he slipped the knife from his back pocket and threw it without breaking his stride.
The thud of it landing squarely in one Malachi’s men’s eye sockets was felt all around the room. Silence fell as he slumped backward, fingers still twitching on Francesca’s delicate shoulder.
“That’ll do it,” Tomas muttered under his breath.
Malachi elbowed his way through the crowd. His face had gone puce beneath his tattoos. “MotherfuckingAmauris! You’re like rabid fucking dogs! Do you have any idea how much money I’ll owe his family now? It’s not enough for you to be thieves, is it? You have to be fucking uncivilized, too!”
Luis continued on his path toward the lounge. Maxine was out of her seat and had pulled a white-faced Francesca aside by the time he made it to her. “I don’t care,” he replied to the irate vampire. “He was hurting her.”
Avoiding looking at Francesca, he angled his body so she wouldn’t see what he did next.
Luis stooped over the corpse and, with a small amount of force, extracted the knife. It was purely good luck that the eye came with it.
Holding it casually aloft so the crowd could see it, he — and his souvenir — made eye contact with everyone in the crowd. “Make better choices than him,” he warned, handing the knife to the dead man’s boss.
“It’s against the rules for a contestant to kill another outside the ring,” Malachi hissed, jabbing the knife and eye at Easton,who stood behind the lounge with a sweaty, slack-jawed sort of look. “He should be disqualified!”
“The handsy one wasn’t a contestant,” Milo drawled.
Ignoring the argument that erupted all around them, Luis crouched down in front of Francesca, who gripped Maxine’s gloved hand like her life depended on it. Chest seizing, he whispered, “Are you all right, kitten?”
Her eyes were so wide he could see the whites all around her honey brown irises. “You killed a man.”
Aware that they were being observed, he replied, “No one here is safe from me, Frankie. And if they touch you, they won’t be safe outside, either.”
Slowly raising his hand to brush a small splatter of blood from her cheek, he braced himself for her flinch.
She didn’t.
Francesca held his stare as he wiped the still warm blood from the swell of her silky cheek. Leaning in closer, he breathed, “I’m sorry I scared you.”But this is how things are done.
He could hear his father’s voice saying the same thing as clearly as he had the day he watched his first death — an Amauri traitor who’d been stealing money from the family accounts. Albert had brought his son, just turned thirteen, to the warehouse they used for that sort of thing.
He didn’t hear the gunshot in his dreams anymore, but he did see the explosion of gray matter and shards of bone streaking across the wall.
It was the first time Luis truly grasped what it was his father, a reserved man lucky enough to play a part in his mothers’ lives, did for the family. He had learned a valuable lesson that day: for an Amauri, violence was an inevitability, and the only way to survive what it took from you was to compartmentalize.
His father went home to his anchors and his sons, never speaking of the blood he lost and took. He didn’t share muchof himself with any of them, good or bad, and Luis had quickly adopted the same survival strategy. If he locked certain things away, he never needed to touch the parts of himself that suffered.
But some part of the thirteen year old boy still existed in him, and that boy howled with the injustice of seeing innocence stolen from Francesca the same way it’d been ripped from him.
Dropping his hand, he firmly instructed Maxine, “Take her someplace quiet. I’ll find her in a minute.”
The redhead vampire surged into his personal space with a fierce hiss. “Haven’t you caused her enough trauma? She doesn’t want anything to do with you.”
Francesca gently pushed at her friend’s shoulder. “Max…”
“She can tell me that herself,” he snapped. Gesturing sharply toward the doors, he added, “And you’re the one who’s supposed to be looking out for her here. Maybe you should explain to her why you let that piece of shit grab her, huh?”
Standing up abruptly from the lounge, Maxine argued, “If you’d given me a second to react before you chose tomurdera man, I would’ve handled it!”
The crowd pushed in. Arguments popped all around them like firecrackers. Growing more and more agitated by the threat of violence breaking out so close to Francesca, Luis grasped her elbow and helped her stand. “Get her out,” he growled, steering his girl away from the lounge and the dead man sprawled over the back.
He waited until Maxine took her hand and began shouldering her way through the arguing vampires before he released her. Francesca turned her head to cast him a look over her shoulder.