SMOKE STORMED BACK INTO THE makeshift room, narrowly resisting the urge to kick the bucket they used as a form of water torture to the other side of the room. He shook his head trying to clear the sound of his blood pounding in his ears. He pulled at his shirt—the thing was suffocating—the room felt hot, hotter now than it had when he was breaking a sweat trying to break the dipshit he had strapped to the metal table. He left Gia standing outside, but he knew without turning around that she was going to march her happy little ass into this room like she had every right to be here.

And she did.

That was what fucked with Smoke the most.

He wasn’t one to tell someone how to live their life, but when the stench of death filled his nostrils the farther he got into the room, the more he knew Gia didn’t belong here. Her hands were clean. He didn’t let her soil her hands helping him bury the body they found in Tres Bella’s at the beginning of this war. All she did was hold the doors open for him, and he reluctantly let her drive him to the burial ground of his choosing.

God, that seemed like a lifetime ago.

He wanted better for her. She deserved better than a man so acquainted with death and destruction it wrapped around him like a second skin. It was one of the reasons he pushed her away to begin with.

Smoke felt the energy shift in the room. The buzzing in his head quieted and he was no longer suffocating, but he felt heat lick up his spine, making his body hard. He was aware of Gia the moment she entered the room. He heard the subtle shift in her breath—it was so faint he would have missed it if he hadn’t been so attuned with her. He braced himself as he turned around to face her and still his body wavered.

Gia was still in her all-black attire, but her hair had started come undone. There was no breeze in the room, no windows. The stench of death and bodily fluids stalled and seeped into the pores of the walls and their clothes, but seeing her felt like a breath of fresh air—his fallen angel looking out of place and somehow at home in Smoke’s little torture chamber.

The silence stretched between them and never had it sounded so loud. Gia looked at him with something close to a challenge in her eyes—waiting for him to either say or do something that would cause her claws to come out. He wasn’t sure which way that pendulum would fall—there were too many sensations coursing through his body, and he didn’t have the strength to figure it out and settle on one. He couldn’t be sure which option would satisfy him and not push him over the edge.

The sound of the bastard wheezing pulled Smoke’s attention away from his maddening temptation. He looked down at the bloody mess and watched as the asshole shifted to get a better look at Gia. The dipshit smiled a broken-tooth grin—his body battered in all the fun places, and yet the jackass had the energy still to leer at Gia like she was a snack—nourishment to get him through another session with Smoke.

The little fuck’s lips moved, deciding he was going to be Chatty Cathy now, but he couldn’t string two words together when Smoke was beating the shit out of him. The garbled sounds the dick was making snapped something inside of Smoke. He walked the short distance to the soon-to-be corpse, desperate to pluck his remaining good eye out for being ballsy enough to think he had any power left in here. Gia wasn’t one of the countless women Boris had locked up and used to keep his men’s dicks wet. Smoke would kill anybody—friend, foe, every single fucking person on this planet—whoever got the crazy idea to touch Gia the way those women they’d been rescuing were touched.

“Ah, ah, ah, mi amigo.” Chito grabbed Smoke’s arm, holding him back. It was on the tip of Smoke’s tongue to tell him to fuck off, but he caught the look in Gia’s eyes—caught the smirk teasing her deliciously plump lips. The pointed look she gave him only added to his need to hurt the broken body in front of him.

Maybe it was wishful thinking in his haze-filled mind, but he could have sworn she was silently asking Smoke to kill the man in front of him.

Maybe he was a blind man desperate to see what he wanted to see when it came to Gia, but he heard it. He heard the go-ahead that never left her lips.

Kill him for me.

And it almost knocked the breath from his lungs because how could this woman who had been a soft spot for him since he stepped foot in New York understand his violence?

The light he sought out in her might not have been the sunshine he assumed it was but the light of a moon filling his darkness.

The energy in the room was charged, and if it wasn’t for Chito’s hand wrapped around his bicep, Smoke would have vibrated off of his feet. He needed to get a grip on himself and his emotions, whatever this was he had with Gia, under control. It was making him lose his edge—or maybe pushing himself closer to it.

“Puta bonita.” The words barely registered with Smoke. He didn’t even catch the whole sentence, but he caught the two words that renewed his need to cut the asshole’s tongue from his mouth.

Pretty whore. It was directed at Gia like she was one of the women Boris passed around, and Smoke’s body moved on its own. He shoved Chito off of him and took two steps—intent on choking the bastard.

Smoke didn’t make it far before Chito was back in his line of sight, shoving at him. “Calmate.” Chito pushed him further back. “You can’t kill him yet. Ethan needs to make that call.”

Smoke looked down at him and snarled. “Ethan isn’t my boss. I don’t answer to him.”

“No, but we are in this together. I would think my input has some merit.” Smoke could hear the amusement in Ethan’s voice as he and his men trickled into the room, flanking Gia like bodyguards. Smoke had no clue why the image they presented rankled his nerves, but Chito’s third shove had him gritting his teeth hard enough he was positive they were going to break.

“¿Estás bien? Or do you need to be escorted out, Smoke?” Ethan’s tone was one of authority. It made Smoke’s jaw tick, and his hands clenched into fists with the urge to deck him again.

Ethan wasn’t above him; they were working together for a common goal, and being treated like a subordinate instead of an equal grated on Smoke’s already fired-up temper. He checked himself though, more out of his respect and need to find Sofia rather than Ethan’s need to be seen as the figurehead.

“I’m good. The floor is yours.” Smoke gave him a two-finger salute as he took several steps back, trying and failing miserably to get his anger and aggression under control.

Every day was a losing battle with him. He was unable to control the outcomes of these raids, add on his heartbreak from seeing his pres and friend, Carter, laid up with wires and machines hooked up to him to keep him breathing, and sprinkle in Gia’s blatant defiance to play with the boys and he was going to develop an aneurysm right before his mind finally snapped. Things that should have calmed him were no longer working, and he desperately wanted to lash out at someone—anyone really.

Working over Boris’ schmucks should have been the outlet he needed. It used to work all the time when Carter sent him to handle club business, but now working over the ones they kept alive to interrogate for information wasn’t the release he needed it to be.

That’s because you’re no longer following your ritual to keep you sane.

The taunt made him silently curse.

His ritual.

The one Carter had made sure Smoke kept in place to placate the monsters he had crawling around in his head. It was what Smoked used to keep himself on the relatively good side of the line he liked to dance on.

He’d beat someone to a pulp or kill them, depending on the slight, and he’d bury the violence in the bottom of a bottle and wet pussy. His clubhouse had enough bunnies to keep his dick wet, but being here had left him in short supply and his hand was no longer cutting it.

Are you sure that’s the only reason?

A low rumble vibrated through Smoke’s chest, his agitation spiking the longer he stayed in the room with Gia. He watched her again, waiting for any signs that she was cracking, but her gaze stayed on him, locked in a challenge that made him want to fucking throttle her. He never in his life wanted to simultaneously strangle and fuck a woman until Gia. She smashed the neat box he had put her in with a sledgehammer, and he was scrambling, trying to figure out how to put that box back together.

“¿Estás bien?” Chito chuckled before stepping in front of him again. The two had formed an unlikely friendship—though the word friendship was a stretch. He didn’t know what to call someone he went on raids with, making sure they both came back alive.

Smoke grunted his response, and Chito’s smile widened. “Estás tenso.” Chito kept his voice low, but he did nothing to mask the humor that laced his words. “You’ve been looking to tear through something since we started working on this pendejo, and you haven’t relaxed at all no matter how much blood he loses.”

“No shit, Chito,” Smoke grumbled. “This dipshit hasn’t given us what we want. It’s been weeks since Sofia was taken. Time is running out.”

“Claro que sí.” Chito waved his hand in front of Smoke before stepping to the side. “I’m sure that’s exactly what the reasoning is, and it has nothing to do with la nena.”

Smoke had a rebuttal on the tip of his tongue, but he swallowed it when the rest of Ethan’s men filed into the room with Nico trailing behind, keeping his head low.

Everything came to a head at once. Whatever small control Smoke thought he had evaporated as soon as he watched recognition filter across Nico’s face when he got a good look at who was lying on the metal table.

Nico knew him, which meant at one point he was one of Nico’s and Bebo’s men.

“You sure you saw Bebo shoot Nico?” Smoke looked down at Gia. They watched Bebo slink out of a burning Griselda’s and into a waiting car with Boris in the passenger seat.

The fire department showed up as soon as Smoke got the ringing in his ears to stop long enough to make the phone call, and the firefighters were in there now looking for bodies.

He had to stop Gia from bulldozing her way in—her need to find her little sister alive seeped off of her, and Smoke hated that he couldn’t offer her anything but his arms around her body.

“I’m not sure now. I was trying to get to Nat, and I saw the gun, but maybe he had it on my sister instead. We can ask her when they find her.” The conviction in her voice told Smoke there could be no other outcome. It was clear Bebo had fucked them over, but the verdict was still out on Nico.

Smoke lunged for Nico amidst the shouts around him. The only thing Smoke could see was Nico bleeding out next to the man he’d been torturing. They were in this fucked up shit because of Nico’s little friend. He was as responsible for the Council’s downfall as Bebo was, and a nagging voice Smoke couldn’t quiet, wondered if Nico was another rat waiting to hit the Council with the final blow.

A red haze fell over Smoke’s eyes as he mentally picked apart Nico. He’d start with his toes and work his way up till there was nothing left but blood and bones. Smoke reached out, intent on wrapping his hands around Nico’s neck when Gia stepped in front of him to cut him off.

Smoke’s mind registered her presence a second too late and he barreled right into her, almost knocking her on her ass. He gripped her arms to keep her steady, his touch rougher than he wanted going by the gasp that left her lips, and now that red haze over his eyes morphed into something else—something far more intimate.

Gone was Nico’s death and in its place filtered in all the times he spent sleeping in her bed—his body wrapped around hers easily as if he belonged there with her. He was a light sleeper, but when he wasn’t watching over her, he fell into the best sleep he’d gotten all his life. She had given him a safe space to let down his armor and while those memories were enough to bring him to his knees, nothing knocked the wind out from under him more than the night they shared their first kiss.

Smoke mentally groaned as he watched as something sparked behind her bright eyes. He swore he could still taste her—feel her soft lips pressed against his. If he closed his eyes, he could still hear the little noises she made in the back of her throat when she wanted more of his taste and his touch.

He took a deep breath trying to calm the fire that burned idly in his body. All he ended up doing was inhaling Gia’s lavender scent. Any other time he welcomed the calmness it invoked, but that calmness was nowhere to be found. It stoked the flames of his aggression, and he could hear something breaking around him.

“You seem a little agitated today, Smoke.” Gia’s voice came out like a taunt, and his entire body went ridge. He felt his cock twitch when her lips pulled up into a smirk. “Maybe even a little emotional,” she whispered to him.

The energy in the room sparked to life the longer Smoke held on to Gia. He was so tuned in to her he completely blocked out the stench of death that coated the air and ignored the other men in the room. His need to bury his fist into Nico’s face momentarily forgotten and in its place took his need to bury his cock in Gia. She was angry with him, he could practically taste it. She looked ready to tear his head off, and it made him harder for her.

“If you can’t keep a level head or focus on the task at hand,” she stepped closer to him, and anticipation coiled in his gut. He didn’t know whether she was going to kiss him or deck him, and he couldn’t decide which he wanted to happen more.

“Maybe you should sit this out, Smoke.” She tapped her finger against his chin, and he snapped at her, nipping at her skin. He watched, satisfied when her eyes widened and that small gasp she let out kissed his skin, making him fight not to beg for a taste of her.

He was coming undone, unraveling at her feet with an ease that scared the shit out of him.

Smoke wanted to push her up against a hard surface and kiss her pouty lips. At the same time he wanted to haul her over his knee and take his palm to her ass for driving him crazy, for being here amongst this chaos. She was supposed to be his light—his good girl he couldn’t have—and watching her size him up like she could take him on and not break a sweat made his cock ache. Watching her kill as effectively as he killed and watching her stand in this pit of body parts and blood without flinching was fucking with his head, and he couldn’t tell if it was good or bad yet.

He leaned down while he pulled her closer to him, desperate for skin-to-skin contact. “My head hasn’t been level in a long time, and it’s only gotten worse since I met you. If you’ve forgotten, I am the wild card. The hothead. I shoot first and ask questions later,” he murmured, fighting the urge to kiss her.

“Every time I see Nico I’m going to want to punch him in his throat. You know that,” he taunted, squeezing his grip on her arms harder. He heard the whisper in his mind to proceed with caution and not to push Gia because she’d push back twice as hard, and he might not like the results.

And still his lips moved, eager to rile her up and see if this hard worn facade would fade because he no longer wanted to be the only one burning, the only one who was affected by the storm that was stirring between them. “There was no need to put yourself in between me and Nico, Gia. We’re in a warehouse full of men.” Her eyes narrowed further; she knew what was coming. “If you wanted to get close to me—wanted me to touch you—all you had to do was ask. I’d gladly accommodate you, sunshine.”