He stopped and turned on the stairs to gaze up at me.

“Why do you think that?”

“She’s been getting weird text messages, and last night someone took aim at her with a car. She’s just a normal chick. Goes to school, lives out in the burbs, kinda by Dovie and Bax. She even lives at home. This is not a girl who should be feeling threatened and scared. It doesn’t have a place in the kind of life she’s got going on.”

Concern flashed across his face. “She got a wound-up ex or something you can look into?”

I shrugged because I didn’t know if the pissed off TA or legion of spurned suitors really counted as being wound up enough to be dangerous.

“I don’t know. I have a guy who owes me a favor or six keeping an eye on her for a minute, but I don’t like it. It doesn’t add up to me, and that means it’s going to bug me until I get it all figured out.”

“You need to be looking out for yourself. Add a pretty girl in the mix and you end up with a weak spot anyone from a million miles away can see. Just ask my brother.”

“I dunno, Titus. Bax got wrapped up in Dovie and suddenly cared enough to take on the entire world for her. Seems to me that when you add a pretty girl into the mix, that’s when you give a dangerous man something to really be dangerous for.”

He tilted his head to the side. “Maybe. If you get any solid info—a name, a number, a license plate on the car—give me a holler and I’ll see if I can run anything down for you.”

I told him thank you and watched him disappear into the bowels of the garage. I was sure he was making a mental note of all the plates on the cars so he could run them against any that were reported as stolen. Titus was a good man, but he was a cop first. He might let Bax and me slide without any hard proof, but if we ever gave him a reason to, he would have no issue putting both Bax and me behind bars, and I knew that in his mind he would be doing it for our own good.

I trudged to the shower of doom and decided after a restless night full of sexual frustration that it was going to be ice cubes and not fire today. The way my neck creaked and cracked really did give testimony to the fact that maybe I should look into getting a bed for the place. And the truth of the matter was, I knew, just knew, things with Brysen and me were far from over and I didn’t want to be the schmuck trying to put the moves on her in a place that had one chair, a foldout couch, and only a bottle of Scotch in the freezer. She deserved better than that. I could offer her better than that, but then what? She would leave and I would have to pretend like I wasn’t living this life where I was constantly on the alert, constantly thinking twenty moves ahead.

Really, one of the reasons I was living so sparsely, so unfettered, was because I knew what it was like to lose everything. I had had all the opulence, all the material things that any one person could want in order to live a materialistic and wasteful life. Losing that hadn’t hurt nearly as much as realizing that the family, the illusion that provided it all, was just made of smoke and mirrors. My dad was an attempted murderer and his hands were just as filthy as my own. My mom . . . well, I didn’t know how complacent she was about everything, and I made a conscious effort not to really find out. I still had one parent I could stand to be in the same room with, not that my father allowed it. Ever since he had disowned me, my contact with either one of them had been limited to a few one-word text messages.

When you didn’t have much, losing it didn’t seem that bad.

I got dressed for the day, shoved a stale bagel in my face for some energy, and made my way down to the garage floor. I wanted to swing by Nassir’s and see what his take on the bodies was. If we had a common enemy, we needed to put our heads together and figure out who it might be. Plus it was fight night this weekend and I wanted to know what the odds on his fighters were. Nassir never did anything as simple as let two equally matched men go at each other; he always had a trick up his sleeve to make things more interesting, and now that we were in business together, I had to know just what those tricks were so I could make sure the lines and the odds on each fighter paid out to the highest potential.

Bax was talking to one of the legitimate mechanics that he had working for him. The actual garage operation since he took over had become a viable moneymaking venture. No one knew old muscle cars like Bax, and the product he was cranking out was unparalleled in quality. He didn’t need to be helping me out on the side like he was, but I was grateful he did.

He tilted his chin at me and his dark eyes flashed. “You see Titus?”

“Yeah, and now I’m going to go and talk to Nassir.”