Make You Burn Read Online Free PDF Page B

ideas.
    “Pucker up, princess,” he was saying into the phone. “You either have a skull on your back or you don’t. Which is it?” He listened with obvious impatience. “Then I better see your ass tomorrow. The end.”
    He finished the call and set the phone down on the tabletop, never shifting his gaze from Sophie, who swallowed hard. She needed her bravado back, clearly. She’d washed it down the drain, or maybe he’d dry-fucked it out of her against that damned wall, and—
    “You okay?”
    Ajax’s voice was a rough caress, as edgy as it was oddly soothing. Sophie felt wide open again. Vulnerable. She frowned at him, then down at her bare feet. She didn’t understand why her toes were curling into the polished wood floor of this comfortable apartment she’d grown up in and should have felt at ease in, no matter who else was here.
    It had always been perfectly comfortable before. Her father’s matter-of-fact, masculine approach to furnishing was in evidence everywhere, from the big, solid furniture to the vintage motorcycle posters on the wall. When it had become clear that her dad wasn’t down with his little girl getting her own place, Sophie had tried to pretty this one up a little bit. She’d contributed the frames around the posters, the plants in the window boxes, the brightly patterned area rug on the floor that Priest had always laughed at and called
fucking girly as shit
. She knew the history of every single item in the big living room that fed into the long, open kitchen. She knew the squeak in the door that led outside and the sound different feet made on the external metal stairs leading down to the Priory in the courtyard or up to the converted attic space that made up the apartment’s sprawling second level. She could wander this place in the dark, blindfolded, and never so much as trip.
    But it wasn’t comfortable now.
    “What are you doing up here?” she asked Ajax.
    He tapped the back of his phone with one long finger and confirmed her fears.
    “Calling the brothers back for the funeral. The ones I can find, anyway. Not that most of them answer their goddamn phones.”
    Her father would have considered any follow-up questions crossing that line over into his sacred “club business,” which meant it was none of hers. Yet one more rule of a world she hated and wanted nowhere near hers. But Ajax wasn’t her father.
    “That’s how you talk to the brothers? I thought you were the VP. I’d have thought that required more politics than profanity.”
    His mouth curved slightly at that, like he thought she was funny. “Anyone step up and take my position?”
    “I wasn’t aware I was supposed to take notes on club hierarchy.” He only stared at her. Sophie sighed. “I don’t think so, no.”
    “Then I’m still VP.” He nodded at his phone. “And that’s not how I talk to everyone. I left a couple of friendly fucking messages. That’s how I talk to a whiny little bitch who has convenient memory loss about where his loyalties lie.” A pause. “You probably know him as Prince.”
    She did know Prince—or she had. He and Ajax were two of the four Deacons who had disappeared around the time of Katrina, and her father’s beloved club had never been the same since. She shouldn’t care either way. The club was her life and not her life at the same time. The club was all around her and she’d been raised to respect it if not accept it, and yet none of it was hers.
    Except the bar. The Priory, where she’d been working since before she turned eighteen. She’d been running it since she was twenty-three. And the buildings arranged around this courtyard, which were, taken altogether, her childhood home. Priest had always told her she belonged right here, with him. Right where she started and right where he’d raised her himself.
    Gotta be Lombards in the Quarter, Sophie,
he’d said.
Always have been, always will be.
    She’d believed him. It was why she was still here, despite the