Lust Meter System: Conquering Beauties

Chapter 261: A Crush

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Liam pushed through the front door of the shop and stepped out onto the pavement.

The afternoon was warm and unhurried, the street doing what streets did at this hour, people moving past with somewhere to be, a woman pushing a stroller on the far side, two guys leaning against a wall sharing something between them, a food cart on the corner with steam rising from it and a small queue that had formed without anyone deciding to form it.

He had his jacket on and his hands in his pockets and he was already thinking about his next move when he heard the engine.

Not moving. Just sitting.

A black SUV was parked directly in front of the shop, taking up the space like it had always been there and had no plans to leave.

Large and expensive, the kind of vehicle that cost more than most people made in several years and knew it.

The windows were tinted completely black, every panel of bodywork clean and unmarked, the whole thing sitting on the street with the specific confidence of something that didn’t need to announce itself because its presence already said everything.

Liam looked at it.

Then the window came down.

Stiles was in the back seat, his green suit sitting precisely on his shoulders the way it always did, his hair exactly as Liam remembered it, white on top and light green underneath, the two colors sitting against each other like a deliberate statement.

He had a small smile on his face that carried the quality of someone who had been waiting and found the wait perfectly acceptable.

"Liam," he said. "Good afternoon."

Liam stood on the pavement and looked at him.

He didn’t say anything immediately.

He just looked, his hands still in his pockets, his expression doing the quiet calculating thing it did when he was deciding how much of a situation he was actually dealing with.

"If you stare any harder," Stiles said, his smile not moving, "I’m going to start thinking you like me."

"I’m thinking you have a crush on me," Liam said. "Since you genuinely cannot seem to leave me alone."

Something in Stiles’s smile shifted, became more genuine, like the answer had landed somewhere it found genuinely satisfying. "You might be right about that," he said. "But I know someone who has it significantly worse than I do."

Liam’s eyebrow went up.

Stiles looked at him with the expression of someone holding something interesting and fully aware that they were holding it.

He let the silence sit for exactly the right amount of time. "If you want to know more," he said, "you can get in. I’ll show you."

"I’m not doing that," Liam said.

He turned and started walking.

The car door opened behind him. He heard it open and heard the specific sound of expensive shoes finding pavement, unhurried, the footsteps of someone who had been through enough of these conversations to know that walking away was just one of the stages and not necessarily the final one.

"Won’t you like to know who your secret admirer is?" Stiles said.

Liam kept walking, his pace unchanged. "I’m not interested in following a man who apparently has a crush on me to go and meet another person who also apparently has a crush on me. No offense."

A pause from behind him. Long enough that Liam could picture the expression on Stiles’s face without turning around.

"When you put it like that," Stiles said, "it does sound a bit strange."

"Yeah," Liam said. "It does."

"Fair enough." The footsteps kept pace with him, easy and consistent, not hurrying to catch up, just maintaining the distance. "I understand completely. But you should really come with me. Otherwise Elena, Kelly—"

Liam stopped.

He turned around.

The distance between them closed faster than it had any right to, Liam crossing the pavement in three steps and getting his hand around Stiles’s throat before Stiles had fully registered the movement.

His grip closed firm and deliberate and he looked at Stiles from close range, close enough that there was nothing between them except his hand and Stiles’s expression which had not changed into fear or surprise or anything that resembled either.

Stiles just looked at him. Calm and present.

Like this was simply the next part of a conversation he had already mapped out.

Something appeared at Liam’s temple.

Cold. Specific. The barrel of a Desert Eagle pressing against the side of his head with no introduction.

The red suit had materialized from somewhere to Liam’s left, silent and immediate, standing there with the gun steady and his pale grey eyes carrying absolutely nothing readable in them.

"Let him go," the red suit said. Flat. No performance in it.

Liam looked at him sideways without moving his head. He took in the position, the angle of the gun, the distance, the expression behind it.

Then he looked back at Stiles.

His grip tightened.

"If you go anywhere near them," Liam said, his voice coming out low and completely level, the kind of level that had nothing to do with being calm, "or if anything happens to any of them. I will kill you."

Stiles stood there with Liam’s hand at his throat and a gun pointed at Liam’s head and looked back at him with something in his expression that was not fear and not amusement but lived in the space between the two where most people never went.

He held the look for a moment. Then something shifted in it, something that looked almost like satisfaction.

"That," Stiles said, his voice slightly compressed by the grip but still entirely present, "is exactly what I like to see."

Liam looked at him for one more second.

Then he released his grip and stepped back.

Stiles straightened his collar with two fingers, the movement unhurried and precise, and the red suit lowered the Desert Eagle without being asked and stepped back to wherever he had come from.

"I was simply going to say," Stiles said, clearing his throat once, his voice returning to its usual quality like the last thirty seconds had been a minor administrative matter, "that the people around you would miss you if something happened. That was all I was going to say."

"They won’t have to miss me," Liam said. "Because nothing is happening. And I’m not going anywhere with you."

He turned and walked.

"Your admirer is reluctant," Stiles called after him, his voice carrying down the pavement with no effort, the voice of someone who had learned long ago that volume was rarely necessary. "If you don’t come to them now they’ll come find you themselves."

Liam turned his head just enough to look back at him over his shoulder, still walking, his pace unchanged. "Then they can come," he said.

He faced forward and kept going.

The sound of the SUV door closing reached him half a block later.

’Who is he talking about,’ he thought, walking. ’Someone reluctant. Someone who knows me.’ He turned it over briefly then let it go. ’I’ll deal with it when it has a face.’

Twenty minutes later the base came into view and Liam felt something shift in him the way it always did when he came back here, something that wasn’t quite comfort and wasn’t quite alertness but lived somewhere between the two and was specific to this place.

He pushed through the entrance.

The space had changed since he last saw it. Not dramatically but in the way places changed when they were being used properly, the specific kind of lived-in adjustment that happened when an operation found its rhythm and settled into it.

More people than before, moving with the low continuous energy of something that had learned how to run itself.

New faces mixed in with the familiar ones, conversations happening in small clusters, movement that had purpose without being rushed.

Shay saw him before he got halfway across the floor.

He came over the way Shay always moved, that easy unhurried walk that looked casual but covered ground quickly, his hands loose at his sides, and stopped in front of Liam with a look on his face that carried genuine warmth sitting comfortably underneath the composed surface of it.

"Long time," Shay said.

"Long time," Liam said back.

They dapped up properly. One hand gripping the other, the free hand going briefly to the shoulder, held there for a moment before releasing.

The greeting of two people who had been through enough together for the gesture to carry actual weight rather than just being something hands did.

They walked while they talked, moving through the base at an easy pace, the conversation finding its own shape as they went.

Shay pointed things out as they passed, new faces and what they brought, how certain things had been reorganized, where money was moving and where it wasn’t, the general texture of the operation over the weeks Liam had been gone.

"It’s expanded," Liam said, looking around at the floor, at the faces he didn’t recognize yet.

"It has," Shay said. "Things have been moving. We’ve been careful about who we let close but the overall picture is solid." He glanced at Liam sideways. "You would have approved of most of the calls."

"Good," Liam said.

They kept walking.

Shay was quiet for a moment, the kind of quiet that meant he was deciding how to frame something rather than having nothing to say.

"There’s one thing," he said eventually. His voice changed texture slightly.

Not worry exactly. More the specific low-grade exhaustion of someone who has dealt with the same recurring problem enough times that talking about it had started to feel redundant. "There’s a group. The Cluster Gang. They’ve been—"

"Shay."

The voice cut across the floor from the far side, one of the newer faces jogging toward them with his expression tight and his eyes already on Shay before he finished crossing the distance.

"It’s the Cluster Gang," he said, stopping in front of them. "Again."

Shay stopped walking.

He looked at the ceiling for exactly one second. The specific look of a man who had asked the universe a question and received the answer he expected and found it no less irritating for having expected it.

Then he looked at Liam.

Liam looked back at him.

"That," Shay said, "is what I mean."

Liam looked at the guy who had delivered the news. Then at Shay. Then at the direction the guy had come from.

"Okay," Liam said.

"Let’s go," Shay said.