Page 73 of Let the Game Begin (Kiss Me Like You Love Me #1)

“Try to move and we’ll bash your face in.” Xavier whispered to one of them, who immediately paled and didn’t move another muscle. We were stronger, more dangerous, and much bigger bastards than them, and finally, they understood that, too.

“You sure about this?” Alexia asked, looking into my eyes.

She didn’t want to obey me, that much was clear.

I was going overboard, and even the Krew knew it, but I didn’t care if I hurt people, just like no one had cared about me when I was the victim in the situation.

Still, I tried for a moment to consider the possible consequences of my actions.

As I did so, my right hand began to shake and my heartbeat throbbed in my temples.

“I can feel you, you know? Pounding so hard.”

I could hear Selene’s voice echoing around in my head. I could see her ocean eyes, scrutinizing my chest in search of the heart I didn’t have because it had long ago sunk into the abyss.

What would she think if she could see me now? Would she have been disgusted? Afraid? Would she pity me?

Suddenly, I wasn’t sure about what I’d told Alexia to do. I wasn’t sure about anything, actually. I remained motionless for a few seconds, frozen in thought, until my arms decided, seemingly by themselves, to release the guy. He fell to the ground, naked from the waist down.

Alexia instinctively took a step back and gave me a relieved look, as if to let me know that I had done the right thing. But even though I had spared Wes, I wasn’t sure whether or not to feel good about it.

“Hand over your phones. Now,” I demanded. I knew that Carter got up to all sorts of shit and his friends loved to record it. I knew I’d find something worth blackmailing him over in there.

Terrified, the two other guys gave their phones to Xavier and Luke. I crouched down and felt the pockets of Wes’s jeans while he was still on the ground, staring off into space.

I avoiding glancing at his naked body and took the thing I was interested in, rising back up to my feet.

“Get dressed. Your little cock hanging out in plain sight is making me nauseous.” I slipped his phone into the inside pocket of my jacket and looked down at him from on high, noting as he eyes dropped in shame.

Wes didn’t have anything to say now. He’d quit acting like the leader. Now, he was just a guy who had encountered a bigger monster than himself.

Once I had what I needed, I turned my back on all of them and headed for home, alone.

***

The day after our assault on The Royal, I headed over to Xavier’s tattoo parlor. For two years he’d managed to own and operate it by himself. Xavier was the oldest of all of us, despite his frequent immaturity and tendency to act without thinking things through.

“Easy, man,” Luke huffed. He lay stomach-down on the table, his jeans pulled up over his calf, which was at Xavier’s mercy as he concentrated on giving him a tattoo.

“Stop whining like a bitch!” Xavier scolded him, irritated.

I’d snuck into the shop without announcing myself, like I always did, and neither of them had noticed my presence. Then, I pulled back the black curtain that divided me from them and made my entrance.

“You know I saw you come in, right?” Xavier grumbled, continuing to jab Luke’s skin. Luke had surrendered by that point, resting his forehead on his flexed forearms.

“And I smelled your body wash,” Luke added before lifting his face and wrinkling his nose. “How much of that shit do you use?”

“It’s true, you do smell like a high-priced prostitute,” Xavier sneered, pausing for a moment to look at me. He was wearing black gloves and held the tattoo gun in one hand.

I gave them both a hard look, not particularly entertained by their musings.

No one knew why I was such a freak about hygiene or why I had an obsessive compulsion to shower, least of all these two, who immediately realized I wasn’t in the mood to deal with their bullshit.

Appropriately, Xavier went back to his work, and Luke went back to enduring the pain.

I moved closer to them and sat down on a stool, bending one knee.

I looked around, bored, as Luke continued to mumble complaints at Xavier.

I examined the dark walls, splattered with red paint; the sterilization tools; and needles of various types and sizes—shaders, round, flat, and otherwise.

I concentrated on the sound of the gun as the needle repeatedly pierced Luke’s reddened skin.

It was his second tattoo, and he’d chosen a thorny skull.

“It barely hurts on the calf; I don’t know what you’re crying about,” Xavier said, continuing to follow along the lines of the design he’d stenciled on.

When I got the toki on my bicep at sixteen, I didn’t feel much pain.

Probably because I was so excited about getting my first tattoo that I didn’t even notice.

The pain I experienced when I got the pikorua on my left flank, however, I remembered vividly.

It had felt like the needle was sticking all the way into my bones.

“You need to send me all the material you get off Carter’s friends,” I told them.

“You know that everyone is going to know what we did, right? They all recognized us at that party,” Luke cut in, gritting his teeth while Xavier continued to labor over his calf.

“So what? They also know we’re the Krew,” a female voice responded.

A second later, Alexia shoved aside the black curtain and advanced on us.

She was wearing another short leather skirt and teetering atop a pair of knee-high boots.

Xavier shot her a quick look then immediately returned to concentrating.

“Hey, Neil,” she greeted me with a wicked smile. I looked her up and down, admiring her body and paying special attention to her ass, which was the part of her I liked best.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, meeting her eyes again.

“Lynn has a fever. I’m filling in to help out with client appointments.”

Lynn was a friend of Xavier’s, one of the rare girls he didn’t sleep with because she was anything but the easy type. And also because she was a bit butch and would punch anyone who dared to touch her without her consent.

Alexia approached her pseudo-boyfriend and folded her arms over her chest, watching him admiringly as he continued Luke’s tattoo. Xavier hated to talk while he worked, and he could get really focused when he wasn’t high. Honestly, when he was sober, he was a pretty calm person.

“Why are you over here? You should be waiting for calls,” he scolded her. He treated Alexia like a friend and like a sex partner, but never like a woman he actually wanted.

I had no room to judge since I regularly did much worse, but Alexia had obviously been in love with him for years. We all knew it. We all could see it, except for him, apparently.

“I like to watch you work,” she admitted, sounding sickeningly sweet. I was surprised by her tone; she wasn’t usually like that.

“And I don’t like you hovering around,” he snapped back.

They had a strange relationship.

They’d been sleeping together for years, but ever since Alexia had started fucking me as well, something had changed with Xavier. She’d chosen to be with me. Usually neither he nor I cared about sharing a woman, but ever since then, Xavier seemed to be nursing a strange grudge against me.

I was still hoping I was wrong about that.

“You’re a dick. As usual. I have no idea why I’m here helping you.” Alexia stalked off angrily, but Xavier just kept working without batting an eye.

“What’s your problem? You need to stop treating her that way.” Luke was always trying to restore harmony to our group’s sick dynamics. I rarely argued with him, but lately women had become a problem between us.

“It’s how she deserves to be treated.” Xavier gave me an ambiguous but not remotely friendly look before sighing and continuing with the tattoo.

Immediately, I felt a distinct tension in the air, a feeling that Luke only confirmed when he cleared his throat to very obviously draw our attention elsewhere.

He started talking about Carter and his friends and what we’d done, but I knew he was just trying to avoid the impending fight between me and Xavier.

I could already feel my nerves lighting up.

Something wasn’t right, and I was likely the problem.

I tried to keep my mouth shut—I needed to keep my mouth shut—but…

“What the fuck is going on?” I snapped defensively, because that was how I was feeling. I couldn’t pretend that everything was fine. I’d always had the balls to face a situation head-on before, and I wasn’t going to turn aside now.

Luke stopped chattering, and Xavier stopped tattooing. They both knew not to lie to me, I hated it when they schemed behind my back.

“Nothing,” Luke answered immediately.

“Nothing?” I smiled mockingly, getting up off the stool. “I’ve known you two long for that. You can’t bullshit me.” I underscored the message by staring them both in the eyes.

This was how it always happened.

As soon as I got their backs against the wall, they turned into punk kids incapable of fighting back.

“Nothing, man, seriously. Don’t stress about it.” Xavier gave me a fake smile and returned to his work. Luke, by contrast, sighed and looked worried about my reaction.

I would have liked to probe their elusive behavior more fully, but I decided to let it go for the moment. If I’d really wanted to, I could have made them spill their guts with my fists, but I would rather avoid that if I could.

“Do you get what I’m saying? I don’t give a shit what’s going on with you, just send me the stuff that I need. After all, that’s what I came here for,” I told them shortly. I headed toward the curtain to leave but a calendar hanging on the wall caught my attention.

The twenty-fifth of the month was circled thickly in red.

I frowned and looked at it. I couldn’t say why, but I suddenly felt an uncharacteristic curiosity about that number.

Acting on instinct, I lifted up the calendar page and saw the twenty-fifth was also circled on the previous month. In fact, all the months were like that.

“It’s the day my mother died,” Xavier said, though I hadn’t asked him anything. I didn’t like sticking my nose in other people’s business the same way I didn’t allow other people to snoop around in my shit.

“She died on November twenty-fifth, twenty years ago now.” He set down his gun and stood, peeling off his gloves.

He wasn’t finished talking, but I had no interest in hearing his story, despite having heard various rumors about it.

Allegedly, he saw his father stab his mother to death.

But I was firmly convinced that admitting certain things aloud meant crossing a boundary that couldn’t be uncrossed.

If Xavier or Luke told me about their lives, then sooner or later they were going to expect me to talk about mine as well.

“Okay, I’m going,” I said shortly. “We’ll see each other later.”

And that was how I left, as insensitive and uninterested as I could possibly be. I had good reasons for behaving like that, though.

Each member of the Krew came from a disastrous background.

Each one of us had suffered somehow. Each of us carried a deep hurt inside.

Each of us was fighting an unending battle with ourselves.

I shared a lot of things with the Krew: my perverted thoughts, my sexual desires, my questionable habits, even my women.

But there was something that I would never share with any of them, a part of myself that I guarded jealously: my soul.