Page 73 of Bulletproof

“Because I was stroking off, and I can masturbate whenever I fuckin’ want, Mr. Liron,” I told him, looking around the table, making full eye contact with every single man there, ensuring that they were all excruciatingly uncomfortable. “I’ve been alone for a long time, and so when I finally go out to a club, hell yeah, I’m gonna jack off. I can stand in back of one of the rooms and watch two hot guys fuck, and then I can jizz all over the wall if I want to … and, God, I really wanted to.”

He squinted at me, Eddie squirmed in his seat, and the guy on the other side of Cristo looked away, embarrassed. The most important thing of all though was that Adan let go of Sam.

“Shall I call you when I splatter on my shower wall too?”

I had Agent Calhoun ready to crawl out of his skin; the others were looking anywhere but at me. Adan replaced his gun in his holster and looked across the pub. It was like watching something embarrassing on TV that made you squirm and want to get up and leave the room, but they were all stuck there with me.

“You’re lying,” Cristo said flatly. “You fucked someone in the back of that club, and there was someone with you last night when I called, and since you don’t fuck around—or say you don’t—I think it was your detective.”

I just stood there.

“And if your detective is at a club where I am, we have a problem.”

I pointed at Sam. “Well, I can assure you that ain’t him. I have a picture on my phone if you’d like to see what the real Sam Kage actually looks like.”

Calling him out was dangerous, but it was the only hand I had to play.

“Or, like I said, let’s bust into the police department files and pull him up. It’s a cool picture in his uniform, with the hat and all.”

If he asked me for my phone, he’d look weak. If he checked the police database, he’d tip his hand about knowing someone who could do that for him. Either way, he had not thought this inquisition all the way through. He had acted on impulse, and now he was in over his head.

And of course, he could just shoot me and send Dane fish wrapped in butcher paper, but if he did that, there would be repercussions, and he knew that too. I wasn’t anybody special, but I wasn’t some nameless drifter either.

And Sam was a whole other story. If he was a police officer, Cristo did not want that kind of heat. If he wasn’t, and Sam was just a guy trying to make a drug deal with him or whatever they were doing, that was bad juju as well. If word got around that you killed people wanting to go into business with you … that would be bad for his wallet. Both options were horrible and put him squarely between a rock and a hard place.

Cristo was perceptive enough about me to know that I was made loyal, so he’d deduced my story—my original one about screwing a stranger at the club—was a lie. And he was right. The problem was that when he cornered me, he wasn’t ready. So, I had agreed that I had told him a lie and then given him a new one even more plausible than the first. And now he was screwed because it was his word against mine that I was lying, and as it stood, with my brutal masturbatory confession and his floundering, I looked like the guy telling the truth. I sounded credible, and he just sounded petty and jealous.

“Ask you a question?”

“Certainly,” he said tightly, and I could tell, underneath the calm, he was furious with how this was playing out.

“Why him?” I pointed at Sam. “Why not him?” I pointed at Agent Calhoun. “Or anyone else for that matter?”

“Jace,” he said, pointing at Sam, “was at the club last night.”

“So were a lot of people. How many other guys did you beat up?”

“I—”

“And since we’ve concluded this isn’t Detective Kage, can I go now?” I asked as petulantly as I could. “Because my brother is expecting me at his office in the morning.”

“Fuck you, Jory! You told me you fucked someone at that⁠—”

“I wanted you to think I did because I didn’t want to fuck you!” I yelled back at him, my raised voice carrying so that family or not, friends or not, paid to be there or not … people were looking. “You wanna fuck me so bad that you’re tellin’ me my ass looks good, well, fuck you! I don’t bend and spread for any man but mine, and now because you’re a paranoid piece of shit, you’re beating up random people! Do the people you do business with know you’re a complete fuckin’ psychopath?”

He rose so fast that his chair fell over, slamming to the floor. “You fucked him,” he said, pointing at Sam. “I know you did, or why would you have lied?”

“I didn’t fuck anybody, but I lied because even though you’re having a really hard time wrapping your brain around it, I don’t wanna sleep with you!”

It was loud—really, really loud—and shrieky and as over the top as I could make it, and, oh God, I wanted to crawl under the covers on my bed, and I wasn’t even the one on the receiving end of the volume. I was going to make this bad for him because it was the only way to save Sam. Nothing else mattered.

Cristo’s ego had gotten the better of him, and he was standing there, yelling at me, letting all his associates know it, letting the whole pub know it. Like Sam and Dane always said, I could try the patience of a saint, and as Cristo Liron was not at all a saint, I drove him right over the edge.

Normally, I never meant to make someone else crazy, but I had purposely baited the man, and he was hooked. And he didn’t know me well enough yet to know that in a pinch, crazily enough, my brain actually kicked in. It was why I had never ever blown Sam’s cover. Even seeing the man hurt, I had not.

“Jor—”

“Are you done questioning me about blowing my load in clubs now? Or would you like to humiliate me some more, Mr. Liron?” I asked him, making my voice as surly as I could manage.