Make You Burn by Megan Crane Read Free Book Online

everywhere he looked, he saw remnants of that cunt of a storm that had crushed this place and him, too, ten years ago. The genteel decay that had always marked this fanciful place, built pretty to hide too many secrets and the dark, lush embrace of the waiting bayou beyond, was far more obvious now. Whole blocks were razed in some places while many of the buildings that still stood were missing big chunks, and entire neighborhoods all these years later were almost unrecognizable to a man who had once had the whole of the Crescent City mapped out in his head like the tattoos on his own flesh.
    She was broken and she was beautiful, his high-class Creole whore of a hometown. Creeping vines and streetcar poetry, cracks in the sidewalks and zydeco in the thick air. This was home.
    The taxi pulled up outside their destination and Ajax growled at Sophie when she tried to pay for it. She sniffed in reply, and he let that go, too. He climbed out after her and waited while she stopped and glared ahead of them at the building that housed the morgue.
    “It’s okay,” he said, and he didn’t know what to do with the urge to comfort her that worked its way through him then. He’d never felt anything like it before.
    “I didn’t ask you to come here and pretend to give a shit about me,” she snapped back at him. Of course she did. “You’re here for my father, as always. I don’t need to be patronized.”
    And Ajax was at a fucking morgue with the daughter of the man he’d respected the most in the world, so he sucked that the fuck up.
    But when she marched forward like a force of nature only to stop dead yet again, this time with her hand on the door and that lost look on her face again, he’d had enough. He pulled her away from the entrance and he turned her to face him with his hands on her shoulders, his fingers brushing against the tips of those delicate wings inked deep into her skin.
    “You got something you need to prove with this?”
    “Of course I don’t have anything to prove and could you
please
not be such a
dick
for even one second—”
    “Why the fuck do you want to go in there and see this shit?” he demanded, his voice harder than it should have been, scraping out of him and into the afternoon around them. “What the hell is that gonna do? He wouldn’t want you anywhere near him like this and you know it.” He gripped her harder, tugged her closer. “You know it.”
    “He’s my father.” Her voice cracked, but she kept her chin high and she was looking at him hard, like she was afraid she’d break down if she looked away or gave herself a break. “I’m his daughter. I…have to identity him. I owe him that.”
    “I’m his second-in-command,” Ajax said gruffly, like the soldier he hadn’t been in a long time, and he didn’t understand what was happening here. That sheen in her green eyes that was doing shit to his head. That thing wrapped tight around him, pulling hard, making his ribs ache. He couldn’t remember ever standing around with a woman he badly wanted to fuck, feeling something else entirely. He didn’t like it. “This my job. Let me do it.”

Chapter 4
    He walked differently when he came out of the morgue, Sophie thought. Straighter, maybe, like he’d taken a few hits in there. Harder, like they still hurt.
    She pushed off the side of the building where she’d been waiting and met him, and she hadn’t truly understood until that moment how much she’d been holding out that tiny, wistful kernel of hope that the police had been mistaken. That this was all a big misunderstanding and her dad was off on a bender somewhere, too lost in cheap bourbon and loose women to bother calling home. It wouldn’t have been the first time.
    But Ajax looked at her, his face utterly expressionless. His mouth was a tough, stern line and there was an awful gleam in his blue eyes. And Sophie understood that there was no escaping this.
    It was happening. It was real.
    Lombards didn’t cry—in