Page 5 of Lover Forbidden (The Black Dagger Brotherhood #23)

The Otto Building

Corner of Market Street and Sixteenth Avenue

The guy’s down a quart. Look at him. Don’t say nothin’, don’t talk to nobody. He’s a goddamn—”

“ Stop .” Bob Knolls, proud LiUNA member and foreman of this particular Wabash Construction Company site, shot a glare over his thermos of hot chocolate. “Just cut it with that language, okay. It’s offensive.”

“Oh, ’scuse me, word police.” Petey McCord, resident shift-prick, bristled on the other side of the picnic table and spoke up even louder over the din of a jackhammer. “Didn’t know you were so fucking sensitive—”

The winter wind barreling up from the river hung a left directly over the break area, the chain-link fence rattling, the mesh panels flapping against their ties.

The only good news was that the shit cut Petey off, although one thing everybody had learned over the last month was that the asshole of this particular job wouldn’t be down for long.

As the commentary started up again, Bob put his palm forward—and wondered why he couldn’t be the type of foreman who ruled with an iron hammer. Fist. Whatever.

“What the fuck do you care so much about him, Petey? Clock your time, cash your check, live your fucking life —”

“—over there, workin’ through the break and makin’ us look bad—”

Bob curled up a fist and slammed it down. “Leave Big D alone.”

The other guys jerked to attention, even the ones at the neighboring tables, all kinds of would-ya-look-at-that faces lifting from lunch boxes and travel mugs.

Hard to know whether they were surprised by the particularly nasty edge of Petey’s bitching or if it was that their go-with-the-flow foreman was actually doing something about it.

And meanwhile, that jackhammer droned on.

Bob got back to his hot chocolate because it was the only thing keeping him warm at this point.

Goddamn, he hated eating out in the cold, and it was ridiculous that OSHA standards required them to be outdoors to protect their lungs.

Yeah, ’cuz pneumonia was better than a little chemical exposure here and there.

At least the arctic chill was an improvement over the hot months when you couldn’t drink enough to keep up with the sweat—

“Big D,” Petey mimicked as he tore into his sub like he was chewing off an animal leg. “Fucking Frankenstein motherfucker. Oh, sorry , am I allowed to use that f-word? Wouldn’t want to offend anybody. Or Dick himself, over there.”

“His name is Dev,” Bob muttered.

Instead of doing something else with a fist—like coldcocking the smartass and losing his own job and benefits—Bob set into his wife’s meatloaf sandwich and thought, God bless that woman .

As he chewed, he couldn’t decide if the fact that opening his lunch box was the highlight of his work night was a good or bad commentary on his life.

Better to have the home thing going right, he decided. You could always find another job.

As the tone and volume of that asphalt assault got higher and even louder, Bob shifted his eyes over the field of dumpsters, construction equipment, and debris.

In the noon-bright glare of the cage lights, real-name Devlin was bearing down on the jackhammer like the piece of equipment better get him to the center of the earth or he was going to throw the hunk of crap into the Hudson.

Steam rose off a set of weight-lifter-worthy bare arms, his reflective bib and t-shirt all that he was wearing—unlike the rest of them, who were so layered, they were basically human Gobstoppers.

And yeah, okay, fine. Big D’s intensity was a little weird, and the never-taking-a-breather stuff on shift was pretty stupid.

The collective bargaining agreement for the union guaranteed you two fifteen-minute breaks as well as a thirty-minute lunch, but if you didn’t take them, it wasn’t like you got overtime.

Still, the guy rarely sat down, and not because he was some tweaking kind of drug user.

He just seemed to want to work, and between that drive and all his strength, he could do in an hour what three regular guys took half a shift to get done.

Which was why motormouth with the slurs had a problem with him.

Not that Big D cared. He just ducked his head and—

The jackhammer’s engine got cut, and Big D easily put it aside.

Then he bent down and picked up a chunk of sidewalk the size of a car hood.

As he walked off with the load, he might as well have been strolling through a park, and when he tossed the section over the lip of a dumpster, there was no grunting, no groaning—

“Hey, Dick! You know we got a lift for that shit!” Petey called out.

Bob went back to his sandwich with a grim fixation.

The skyscraper they were renovating was a hundred years old and had last been updated about four decades ago—so they were in the total demo stage of things, ripping and tearing out every square inch of carpeting, all of the cubicle walls, and any fixture there was down to the faucets and toilets in the bathrooms and every goddamn fluorescent ceiling bar that had ever been made.

Of course they were behind schedule, but he wasn’t allowed to let Dev stay inside and keep cranking.

The rule was, when it was break time, everyone had to vacate whatever level they were on and come out here into the open air as a group.

Big D had started working the jackhammer on the sidewalk just this week, and he’d already made it about a quarter of the way down the building’s block. After he was finished? Well, he could start on the front entrance’s stone stairs if he wanted to—

“Yo, Big D!” Petey shouted over again. “How ’bout you bend over some more. You look like you want a fucking date!”

As the nitpick continued, a couple of the guys grumbled and looked over pointedly. At Bob.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said under his breath. “I got it.”

Except before he could figure out his next move, Petey shot to his feet and marched away from the break area, a greasy string bean on a bad-idea mission.

Toward Big D.

Bob polished off the last of his sandwich and extricated himself from the bench.

As he jacked up his insulated work pants, he was reminded of why he hadn’t really wanted to become foreman.

Too bad the pay was so much better, and it looked like tonight he was going to be forced to earn the extra ten bucks an hour.

“Can we not do this—”

The wind whipped around again, caught a drywall bucket, and sent the damn thing right into his shin. As he cursed and hobbled, Petey stepped in front of Big D while the other man headed back for the jackhammer.

“Say somethin’,” Petey barked. “Fuck, speak wouldya!” Big D just stared down at the guy. Like all the noise at his feet was a walkie-talkie that had been dropped.

“That’s it? You just gonna look at me? That’s all you got, you motherfuckin’—”

As the slur was dropped for a second time, what happened next was something that Bob would replay for the rest of his life:

Big D still didn’t respond, so Petey palmed up and punched the guy right on the pecs. The double strike was like a toddler tantruming a brick wall.

And that’s when Big D, the strong, silent type, finally reacted.

That heavy right arm snapped out and he grabbed Petey’s throat like a rope.

The lift that followed wasn’t exactly a surprise, but when was the last time anybody’d seen a full-ass grown man dangling from a fist grip, with his work boots clapping together as if they approved of the find-out after all the fuckin’ around?

Bob hurried his own Timberlands up, but he had to dodge another tumbleweed bucket, a flag of netting that had torn off one of the pedestrian barriers, and something that could have been a panel of particle board—or might have been a fantastical flying beast, because this shit was surely some kind of screwed-up fever dream.

By the time he got to the problem, Petey was clawing desperately at the hand around his neck, his jowls all basset-hound bunched up, his already ruddy face barn red and getting worse.

Bob tried to put some authority into his voice: “Hey, Big D, how about you put him down—”

His voice dried up as the guy’s head cranked toward him. Those eyes… so unremarkable before… had a soulless gleam to them that made them unforgettable: There was nothing behind the ice-cold stare. Not a scrap of humanity, and no recognition, either.

And as the other dozen or so guys on shift came over from the picnic tables, Bob stopped them with a glare. A pile-on might be a good solution in another situation. In this one? He was worried that Big D might snap Petey’s fucking neck and then get to work on the rest of them.

“Hey, D,” he said in what he hoped was a reasonable tone, “let’s put him down, ’kay? You don’t want to go to jail over him. He’s not worth it. Plus he’s sorry, ain’t you, Petey.”

Petey did what he could do to nod as tears welled and started to fall from his bulging eyes. Whether that was emotion or the precursor to him going empty-socket, it was impossible to know.

“You hear me, Big D?” Bob took out his cell phone and waved it in the guy’s general direction. “If you hurt him, I’ma have to call the police. So let’s not escalate this—”

Petey’s eyes rolled back in his head, only the whites showing, and his boots abruptly stopped kicking.

“Devlin, you gotta let him down!” The wind was so loud, Bob had to shout over it. And then there was the alarm that had started to scream in his own head. “Come on, man! You want to go to jail for the rest of your l—”

The metal-on-metal creaking was the kind of sound that, after twenty years working construction, you instantly knew meant two things: One, it was something big. And two, gravity had a helluva hold on whatever the hell it was.

So a different kind of danger had just shown up to the chat.

And it was on such a scale that everyone, even Big D, looked to the roof of the building next door.

It was that goddamn purple billboard, the one with that brunette’s face on it and some stupid logo. The vicious wind had caught the panels, turned them into a sail—and was in the process of peeling the bitch right off its support scaffolding.

Bob did a quick trajectory check. The gusts were going to take it away from the construction site and the bib’d-up, hard-hatted men who were standing around watching the show.

That was the good news. The bad news? Those people clustered around the glow of that club Bathe’s entrance were fucked.

Not his problem, though.

Bob went back to what was his issue: “Put him down, Dev. Or I’m calling the police.”