Bad Little Bride

“Does she know he’s recording her?” Mino teases from where he’s lounging across the room, eyes boring into the side of my head as I stare at my bride through the screen on my phone.

“I told her I’m always watching. This would come as no shock to her.”

“So that’s a no, then?”

The humor in his tone has my eyes lifting, and I raise a brow. “Are you going to sit there and worry about me and my wife or are we going to go over the Brayshaw shit?”

“You mean, am I going to brief you for the hundredth time since they first came to town on everything I found before you even let them within twenty miles of our tiny dancer?”

My expression doesn’t change and Mino chuckles.

My second grins, sitting forward until he’s resting his elbows on his knees. “Small town in California, named after the family themselves. Maddoc, Captain, and Royce are brothers and took over when their dad went to prison. They just went through some kind of power struggle between them and another founding family of their town and came out on top, but not before a whole bunch of shit went down. The girl, Raven, changed everything from what I can tell. They run sort of like the Greysons do, but their founding families aren’t as involved as the union is. We’re all connected, but the ties are loose. They’re there, but they’re loose.”

I frown, watching as my wife laughs with Katana, and something settles within me.

She’s a diamond. Hard cuts and sharp edges, but there’s this softness to her, a rare glimmer she doesn’t like to show but can’t hide, at least not from me.

I can’t believe you’re mine, Little Bride.

I look up, meeting Mino’s stare. “So you’re saying we can trust them?”

“I’m saying if we’re forced to, chances are they won’t try to kill us after.”

I scoff, shaking my head, because damn. “So basically, we treat this like any other issue, only bet on ourselves?”

“Pretty much, yeah, but since Bastian trusts them enough not to steal his sister back from that tattooed fucker, it might not hurt to play nicer than we normally would.”

“I’ll play nice when they give us some actual information.”

Mino nods. “Why do you think they aren’t telling us everything?”

“Because subtlety isn’t our specialty, and they know it. We find out the Mitchells are scheming against us, outside of what we already know, we feed him to the tiger. When we feed him to the tiger, he’ll try to run—he’ll fail, but they don’t know that.”

“And they can’t risk him slipping away.”

“Exactly.”

Mino narrows his eyes. “So, what’s with the frown?”

Propping my phone up on my computer, I dig into the drawer and pull out the file I have on the Mitchells, my eyes popping up at the screen as Geraldo, the guard I assigned to Boston for the day, climbs from the car, Francisco, Katana’s guard, right behind him. The girls file out next, and I settle some when I see they’re at one of her father’s restaurants—exactly where she said she’d be going—his men scattered all around outside and doubling at the sight of their princess, just as he assured me they would.

Their princess, my queen.

Picking up the phone, I tap on the mic button. “Her ring is on her finger, yes?” I speak into the com in his ear.

Geraldo lifts his hand straight into the view camera hidden in the button of his suit jacket, feigning looking at his watch—his sign for yes, sir.

“Good. Leave Francisco out front with the rest of the Revenaw guards. You go inside with the girls. She goes to the restroom, you go too. Not a split second out of sight, understood?”

He adjusts the strap on his watch for a second yes, sir.

“That’s my wife, Geraldo,” I tell him before turning the mic off and lifting my head.

Mino’s lips are pressed together, and I glare.

“What?”

“Nothing, except this whole husband and wife thing is supposed to be a secret, right? Yet you’ve told three people in the last two days. All men you’ve had guarding her.”

“Which is exactly why I told them. It was either that or tell them I’d skin them alive before cutting them up based on the number of family they have and mailing each one a small commemorative piece. I chose the first, making the second part obvious.”

Mino throws his head back and laughs before pulling out the same folder I’m opening from the pile of shit at his side. “Okay, back to this Brayshaw shit.”

I skim over the Mitchells’ family line, noting his most recent deals and the active contracts we could track down, trying to work through my newest thought. “The first time they came here, they asked about Philip, but after that, they never said his name again, and this last time, when the blond one spoke—what was his name?”

“Captain.”

I nod. “Captain said the man he was looking for.” I meet Mino’s frown. “Why would he not say Philip when they’d already dropped his name?”

Mino’s frown slowly doubles. “Because it’s not about Philip or the Mitchells at all,” he comes to the only conclusion. “He’s just the connection to the person they’re really after.” His eyes snap to the file, and he starts flipping page after page, head shaking as he does. “But who is that? Who did he sign a contract with before they showed up?”

“There was only one new contract the entire month.”

Mino stills, his eyes slowly rising to meet mine. “Yours.”

I nod, holding his gaze. “Mine.”

The dinner I took Boston to wasn’t only to show the Mitchells their desire for my wife would get them nowhere, because she was already mine. That was simply the bonus to the business meeting that night. The Mitchells found out someone was trying to upsell their products to fluff their own pockets. Much to Gorgio’s displeasure, he couldn’t find the answer on his own, so he asked me to do it for him.

My specialty might be in security detail, in finding and hiding all tangible things, so my initial reaction was to decline. That, and no part of me believed I was the only person who could help him with his little job, especially when the first photo of Boston and I together had surfaced only the day before that night. He wanted to see if the tabloid was true as much as I wanted to prove it was.

We both used the opportunity for personal gain, but at the end of the night, when he offered me the contract, I signed it, knowing I had men I could toss at his little problem without doing any of the work. I’d hurt his pride, take his money, and squash his son’s dreams of marrying my wife all with one signature.

And I did all that, delivering them the name of the dumbass bottom-feeder who pissed them off not two days later.

“But what about your contract could they possibly be interested in, if anything?”

“I don’t know, but it would be stupid to assume it’s a coincidence. The bigger question, though, is why do they seem so interested in getting what they want from my wife instead of me?”

“Because they know something we don’t,” Mino mutters as if that part fell to the back of his mind for a moment. “Does this mean we can’t trust Bastian’s word on his little friends?”

I sigh, looking back at my wife, smiling and chatting with Katana, before meeting his stare once more. “It means we can’t trust anyone.”