Prohibited (Tulsa City Sinners #1)

4. Ryan

Chapter four

Ryan

The water ran pink inside the white porcelain basin as Ryan scrubbed the blood from his hands. He stared at himself in the mirror while he did, not recognizing the face that gazed back at him. The flat, cold look on his face. The way his eyes burned. Blood flecked his face, his throat, his bare chest.

He felt strange, separated from himself. But there was rest and comfort in the certainty that he had only just begun to set things right for Tommy. Sandy Barnes was only one piece of the puzzle.

He’d held out surprisingly long for such a pathetic, double crossing piece of shit. Obviously, he was more afraid of Walter Stanley than he was of a man standing in front of him with a switchblade, ready to take him apart piece by piece until he got the answers he wanted.

That said plenty about the kind of man Walter Stanley was. Ryan had heard things about him, about what a ruthless bastard he was. He was from St. Louis, a small-time scumbag who’d dragged his rotten carcass down to Tulsa after Ryan and Tommy had started up their bootlegging scheme and wasted no time carving into their territory one business at a time. Stanley had been become a fucking hive of bees in his bonnet.

He wasn’t remotely surprised that he was behind this.

This. Tommy’s death.

A cramp of agony seized his heart so hard that it took his breath away. Somewhere in the frenzy of violence that had overtaken him, he’d managed to somehow forget that Tommy was dead.

Dead.

He froze for a moment, hot water running over his hands while he tried to take in a breath, tried to steel himself against the tsunami that crashed into him.

Tommy was dead and he was alive and that was an equation that did not add up to reality.

Rage boiled in the center of him, black as tar and just as foul. Sandy Barnes had fucking sold him out. Well, he’d cut Sandy Barnes’ fucking ears off while he screamed like a rabbit. He should have taken his eyes too.

But no amount of suffering he inflicted on Sandy could undo what had been done. And it also could not recant the name that he’d given up just after Walter Stanley’s: Evelyn Colter. The words had come tumbling out of Sandy’s mouth in a panicked squeal. And Ryan made him repeat himself twice.

The name battered into him, taking the breath from his lungs every time he thought about her. Evelyn, Evelyn, Evelyn .

Evelyn Whitlocke when he knew her. But the same woman nonetheless. The papers had gone completely mad for the marriage of two members of Tulsa’s aristocracy, both living the high, glamorous life in New York City.

He’d burned the paper out of sheer, blind jealousy when it came around a couple of years ago and he figured that would be the last he’d ever hear of her until her obituary came up in the paper.

Then, rumors the last couple of months. Her name being repeated alongside Walter Stanley’s, a development that made him far angrier than he might have ever admitted, but he said nothing to anyone. What should he care who she was fucking now? Of course she would choose a man who had become their mortal enemy.

He tried not to think about her, ever, but sometimes he failed. Especially on long, lonely nights when he’d had too much applejack and he ached for the innocent, blissful nights they spent together among the rose bushes and the crepe myrtles.

The memories came at him now, fast and hard, a break in a dam that he couldn’t hold.

Hot nights and hotter kisses. Summer lust burning them both up until everything imploded.

After all this time, this was how she came back into his life?

Alex had just stood there and watched with his arms folded, one hand thoughtfully stroking his chin while he watched Ryan carve the truth out of Barnes. His blue eyes snapping with a cold fire, body vibrating with barely contained ecstasy.

It wasn’t lost on Ryan, the irony of one of his mistakes surfacing while he faced down another.

Now, one of those mistakes leaned against the wall next to Ryan, watching him while Ryan wet a hand towel and scrubbed at the splatters of blood across his face and his chest, bare because he’d stripped down to keep himself tidy while he made a mess. He tried not to see Alex studying him out of the corner of his eyes, tried not to feel a strange fire coiling in his belly.

Grief made men do crazy things, think crazy things. That was all.

The heat of his righteous anger drew back some, like a tide of lava, and a cold core grew in him while he thought about what he’d done to Barnes. He didn’t get off on cutting into people like Alex. A part of him was repulsed, choking on the sounds that Barnes had made. Crying like a baby by the time Ryan put a bag over his head and knocked back the hammer of his revolver.

Another part of him felt like a god. It wasn’t a sexual pleasure, but that barbaric innate human inclination for violence bred into his bones by virtue of his species. Those two parts at war in him. The soft side that shuddered at the thought of human suffering. And the other part, the part that thrived on it.

Maybe he was just fucked up. Maybe he was just as fucked up as Alex .

This wasn’t the first time he’d killed a man and it certainly wasn’t going to be the last. The things he had seen and done in the War swarmed up to the forefront of his mind. It all became a confused jumble. Sandy Barnes. Nameless Germans. Screaming. Pieces missing. Ryan’s finger pulling the trigger. Ryan’s hand holding the knife. Blood everywhere. The smell of death. Scorched flesh.

Screaming.

The sound of a match being lit startled him out of the sucking cesspool of darkness threatening to drown him.

Alex laughed softly and touched the match to the end of his cigarette. He lingered close by, voice low and purring as a lover’s.

“Impressive” he said. He inhaled deeply on his cigarette and released the air in a long ribbon of smoke.

“Shut up, Alex.” He twisted the hand towel, forcing the excess water out of it and then set it aside.

One white finger came out and stroked his shoulder. “You missed a spot.”

Ryan grabbed him by the wrist, causing Alex’s face to shut down and his eyes to narrow into cold slits.

“Don’t,” Ryan said, voice deadly quiet. “Save it for Lindsay.”

“Lindsay.” Alex smiled, looking amused. “You can see why he wasn’t invited to this meeting.” He pulled his arm free with no resistance from Ryan and then pushed away from the wall. He paced into the center of the large black and white bathroom. Spare, but elegant. Sufficient for the patrons of the Crystal, should they need to relieve themselves, vomit, or fuck someone over the sink. “He does have a tendency to put a damper on the more fun things in life.”

It was true, Lindsay objected to the… messier jobs. He’d always been compassionate. Clear headed. Stubborn. He may have been a thief and a criminal, but he had his own code of conduct. Ryan admired him for it, had always valued Lindsay for his ability to balance the rest of them out. There were times when they might have run as mad as a pack of wild dogs if he hadn’t been there to reel them in. But it was also incredibly obnoxious at times. Because sometimes, things needed to be done in the name of justice He and Lindsay simply didn’t see eye to eye on what those things were at times.

“You’re the one I have to rely on to be practical now,” Alex said, narrowing his eyes at the bathroom floor.

Now that Tommy was dead.

Ryan looked at Alex’s profile in the bathroom mirror and his stomach folded in on itself. It felt strange to be here with Alex. Without Tommy. Alex’s eyes following him, always. This strange, intense fascination. He’d done his best to ignore it the last two years. Now it stood in the room, as big an elephant as Tommy’s absence.

His mother was dead. His grandfather. Tommy.

And this is all he was left with from his broken family.

At least they had a common goal to work toward, as they had always done. And they had the same idea as to how they were going to go about it .

“Barnes proved useful,” Alex said. He turned in a circle, eyes skipping across the checkered black and white tile that crowned the ceiling. “And now we can hit Stanley where it hurts.”

“Evelyn Colter.” Just saying her name out loud caused his stomach to twist so hard he had to put his hands on either side of the sink for a moment. Ryan finally turned off the water and reached for a dry towel. The cotton dragged the water from his hands, his face, and his chest. He turned toward Alex and ignored the way his eyes flickered over his chest and his stomach.

“What about her?” Alex finally met his eyes, interest lighting his face.

“You heard him. They used her as a decoy.” Ryan picked up his undershirt and turned away to pull it over his head. The clean fabric against his skin made him feel anchored back to reality in a way. It drew a breath of release from him.

“Yes,” Alex said, eyes narrowing with interest.

“She’s been running around with Stanley the last six months, it’s the talk of the town. He used her to help set us up. ‘Some rich lady,’ that’s what Sandy said when he came to us about the meeting. Stanley used her to make him think everything was going the way it should so they could catch him off guard. She’s an accessory to Tommy’s murder,” Ryan said, the word murder nearly getting caught in his throat.

“Go on.” Alex crossed his arms, moving a touch closer .

“She stood there and watched him kill Tommy. She participated in the ambush.” Ryan’s voice was calm, steady. He could have been talking about anything. Nothing about his tone betrayed the sickness he felt in his stomach when he thought about it. Tommy’s death. Her involvement. Nothing could have prepared him for that. Nothing. “So obviously, she’s our angle. We get our hands on her, we get Stanley by the balls.”

“Kidnapping.” Alex tilted his head slightly to the side, watching Ryan with hooded eyes. “You want to kidnap her?”

“That is exactly what I want to do.” Ryan pulled his shirt on and began to button it with slow, careful fingers. “She’ll know enough about Stanley that we can probably get him from a few more angles. A guy like Stanley is bound to get careless around women. He thinks they’re beneath him.”

“I don’t doubt that.” Alex stepped over to the toilet and sent his cigarette butt into it with a flick.

“And, to sweeten the deal, she is the wife of the heir to a fortune.” Ryan finished buttoning his shirt and pulled his jacket on, shrugging it into place. “So, if we play our cards right, we’ll hit triple bingo: she’ll tell us what we want to know about Stanley, we blackmail her husband, and we hit Stanley where it hurts.”

Alex smiled, a radiant beatific smile that would have made him look like an angel if his eyes weren’t so empty. “You’re a lot more clever than I give you credit for sometimes, Ryan.”

“I was going to say the same thing about you. ”

“So, we’re going to snatch up this sweet dame and send her husband and Stanley both pieces of her fingers?” The smile on Alex’s face turned dark. Predatory. “That’s exceptionally awful. Even for me.”

Ryan snorted. “Yeah, right. Sweet. Not a word I would have ever used to describe her.”

“You know her?” Alex narrowed his eyes at Ryan. “Couldn’t that complicate things?”

“I was a gardener at her rich daddy’s mansion years ago.” Ryan huffed a humorless laugh. “Water under the bridge.”

Alex stared at him a moment longer. Then he turned away.

“So what’s your plan?” Alex put his hands behind his back and planted his feet as Ryan turned to look at him. “We abduct her. Cut her up like a buttery foie gras. Extract information from her by whatever means necessary.”

“Yes.” Ryan nodded impatiently, folding his arms.

“And then what?” Anticipation lit Alex’s face.

Ryan looked back at him, blue eyes glowing unnaturally with righteous anger. “And then we kill her.”