you.”
He was silent for a moment, and I was going to let him go, but I was enjoying the lifeline to normal.
“Listen,” he said finally. “I know you left home young, but it’s still hard to lose one of your folks, so yeah, that sucks.”
I didn’t tell him that if either of my parents were dead, the surviving one would never reach out to me. And if they somehow died together, I would never know unless, for some reason, it showed up in the news. My brothers would not inform me. I simply wasn’t on their radar. I was dead to them, and I’d made my peace with that years ago. Whatever this was had nothing to do with my biological family, and in fact, the only thing I could think of was that one of my clients at Torus had passed, and I was racking my brain trying to think of who it could be.
“Thanks, Loc,” I said after a moment.
He coughed softly. “You’re gonna come back, aren’t you?”
It was a surprise that he cared, and the sound in his voice, uncertainty along with a slight tremble, was comforting. I had not had a family in years. When I was a policeman, I had trouble bonding with others because I was so focused on doing everything right that I had no time to let my guard down and simply be myself. The guys at Torus were the closest thing to a family that I had. And now, out of the blue, Locryn was showing me something, a peek behind the mask, and it meant a lot.
“Croy?”
“Sorry,” I rasped, hearing how thick with gravel my voice sounded. “Yes, I’m coming back. Have no doubt.”
“Good,” he said bluntly, and I could hear his armor going back on before there was an evil chuckle that told me he was back to normal. “So what, you havin’ fun in Vegas?”
“It’s snowing here; did you know?”
“No shit,” he sounded surprised.
I grunted.
His laughter sounded really good.
After they all changed for dinner—I didn’t have to, as I was already in a suit—we ate at Wolfgang Puck’s Cut in the Venetian. I’d never had a better steak, but for what it cost, it should have been nothing short of spectacular. I’d been to other restaurants and eaten meals that totaled in the thousands, just as this one did, but it was always for business, entertaining others to get something in return. The bill was footed as a corporate expense, a transaction to impress or to be in the good graces of another. This was different. This was Brig pulling out his personal credit card and plopping it down like it was nothing. That kind of excess, even though I’d been born into it, always seemed obscene.
After dinner, we went to a club and had bottle service under a heated tent on the roof lounge, looking out over the Strip. No one ventured far from the warmth, and I suspected the temperature being less desert and more tundra kept people from standing at the railing to look down over the crowds below. The tight space and milling people made it hard to keep track of who was trying to sit near Brig and his group, and who was merely walking by. I was on the lookout, though, so the man who detoured around the back of the couch did not escape my scrutiny. He glanced at the others, Brig’s friends, with their heads down, absorbed in their social media accounts, oblivious to all else around them, and then darted close, coming up behind the son of the multibillionaire.
I was already moving when he slipped his hand into the breast of his suit jacket, reaching, I was certain, for a gun. With so many people around, I couldn’t, in good conscience, draw my Glock. Pulling my weapon and drawing his fire put innocent people in harm’s way.
Vaulting over the back of the couch, I landed on the low table that surprisingly took my weight. Cocktails and champagne and wine bottles scattered and splashed, and while the screams, yelling, and swearing were a distraction—I didn’t know if they were from surprise or injury—I had a singular focus. I led with my head, pile-driving straight into the man’s sternum with all of my weight behind it. I heard the breath heave from his lungs as his back hit the floor, forced out by the blow, and his hand fell from beneath his jacket, palm empty, but that didn’t deter me. Our