Vendetta Road

by Christine Feehan

  Ice was well aware Savage had been burned more than once. He was a twisted son of a bitch thanks to their schooling and the instructors who loved to torture children. None of them were supposed to survive, and out of two hundred and eighty-seven, only eighteen had. They’d banded together, working on strengthening their psychic and physical assets, and had begun to kill off those assaulting them. They had just been children, with no guidance other than Czar, a child himself, and they’d made their own rules and lived by their own code, relying completely on one another. They were still doing it.

  Maestro and Ice finished rolling up the two bodies, and they washed off in the deep sink at one end of the room, then peeled off their gloves to add them to the burn pile.

  “What made you do it, Ice? Can’t be because she knows how to suck dick,” Maestro said. He sat on the table eating an apple as they waited to use the shower.

  “You mean marrying Soleil?” Ice knew exactly what he meant. “Had to.”

  “You knock her up when you gave her an orgasm? Hottest thing I’ve seen in a long while, by the way. Your woman is fuckin’ gorgeous.”

  “She is, isn’t she? And hot as hell.” Ice knew Maestro was looking for something to hang on to. They all were. They were drowning, trying to fit into a world they didn’t understand. The rules didn’t make sense. They’d been raised on violence. It wasn’t like they could just stop what was second nature—no, make that first.

  Ice tried to explain. “She makes my cock hard as a fuckin’ rock. Titanium. I look at her and I’m there. I don’t have to have three women suckin’ my dick, one after another, while I tell the damn thing to cooperate. I’m not thinking, Maestro. I’m just feeling. It’s terrifying, but holy fuck, I never felt anything like that in my life. I’m not giving that up.”

  “A lifetime is a long time,” Maestro pointed out. “What if you can’t live with her? What if every time she opens her mouth you want to strangle her?”

  “I’ll shove my cock down her throat and then she’ll be nice and quiet,” Ice said with a little smirk. The smile faded. It was get-real time. “She got rid of them.”

  Maestro raised an eyebrow. “Rid of what?”

  Ice leaned against the wall and drank down the rest of his water. “Wanted to blow my fuckin’ head off, Maestro. Every hour of every day. Demons were eating me alive. Couldn’t stop the memories anymore, and they got inside my head and ate their way to my gut. Nothing I tried helped. Lately, I even thought about forcing the cops to do me, but . . .” He shook his head. “The nightmares were getting so bad sometimes I couldn’t always tell reality from my past. I was really afraid of hurting someone. I stopped going to Czar and Blythe’s house so often because I didn’t trust myself.”

  He watched Maestro’s face. The man didn’t blink but continued watching him.

  “You know what I need a lot of the time to even contemplate having sex. We’re all fucked the hell up. Not one of us is what would be considered normal.” He glanced at the door Savage had disappeared behind. “He’s the worst of us. How the hell is he going to find someone who’d take him on? Or you? Or me?”

  “You just got married, brother.”

  Ice reached for her. She was inside him, wrapped tightly around his organs. His heart. Maybe his damn soul if he had one. He let himself smile. She was there. She wasn’t going anyplace. “She took the demons away. All of them. I didn’t feel a fuckin’ thing but good. Paradise, man. She let me do whatever I needed. She didn’t flinch when she realized she’d had her first orgasm in a bar in front of my club. And when her mouth was around my cock and I was so close and needed her to keep going, that bitch coming to look down on her because she was fuckin’ jealous, Soleil kept going instead of quitting. She took me all the way. All the fuckin’ way, Maestro. It was a thing of beauty. Never thought I could have it all, but she makes me believe it’s possible.”

  Maestro heaved a sigh. “I hope you’re right, Ice, but maybe she really was as drunk as fuck. I didn’t think so. I thought she was playing you. Getting you drunk. We all did. We thought it was funny that both of you were looking to do the other. But then you really went through with it. What’s going to happen tomorrow morning when you have to face each other entirely sober?”

  “I’m taking her back to Caspar with us.” Ice made it a statement. “I have to keep her. She’s my salvation.”

  Maestro shook his head. “Face it, Ice, you’re not exactly Mr. Romance. You look like it, and the ladies think you are. They want to be with you, but you’re not called Ice because you’re sweet. That woman doesn’t have a clue you’re cold and calculating and you’re going to rule her life.”

  Ice shrugged. “Doesn’t always work that way in the end. Look at Reaper. He’s a cold, scary son of a bitch. Anya’s got him wrapped around her little finger. And Breezy with Steele. He might be nuts when it comes to knowing where she is every minute, but she still gets her way in almost everything.” He looked at Maestro. “What about you? What kind of woman do you need?”

  Maestro avoided his eyes. He jumped from the table and walked across to the blacked-out window, as if he could see outside. “One who makes my cock work all on its own. I’d be happy with that.”

  “Yeah, wouldn’t we all,” Savage said, coming out of the bathroom. He carried a plastic bag with his bloody clothes in it. “Just once I’d like to be close to a woman and have my cock go on full alert without me forcing it to.”

  “We’re talking about what we want in a woman,” Maestro said. “I’m not sure, beyond fucking her twenty-four seven, Ice knows what he’s going to do with his brand-new wife.”

  Savage sent Ice a small smirk. “Sounds good. Keep her busy, especially her mouth. She won’t say anything to annoy you. Me, I want obedience. The others say that, but they don’t mean it. I would have to have it. And she’d better stick damn close to me.”

  Maestro nodded. “I like certain things from a woman. If she were mine, I’d expect them. Not going to get what I need from someone I pick up.”

  Savage raised an eyebrow. “I do. When I need it. When the rage is so built up, I’m going to fuckin’ kill someone. I get what I need. I find a willing woman to give it to me. Lay it out, so there’s no mistakes. She knows what she’s getting into.” He gave a half smile that never reached his eyes. “She never comes back. There’s no going there twice. Fortunately, it isn’t all the time.” He shrugged his shoulders. “You reach a place where you know you’re so fucked up there’s no redemption. No way out, and you accept it. I can’t change what they did to me. I’ve tried. It’s not happening. So, I live with it same as everyone else.”

  Maestro headed for the shower. “Sometimes, Savage, that living doesn’t feel like I’m alive. Czar brought feral jungle cats to civilization and expected us to be tame. There’s no taming us. Sometimes I need shit like this just to breathe.” He indicated the dead bodies rolled in the tarps. “How fucked up is that?”

  Savage watched him disappear behind the shower door. “We have to clean that drain,” he reminded Ice. “The thing is, Ice, you don’t need this fucked-up shit. You can get it out by beating the shit out of an opponent. Maestro, he’s more like I am, although just cutting that fucker’s throat would have satisfied him. He has to know he’s making a difference for some little kid. Me, I need to make them suffer for what they did. To me. To you. To everyone I care about. To all those kids out there we haven’t found yet.”

  Ice hadn’t heard the man talk so much in his life. Savage tended to sit back, watchful, lost in the shadows. When he came out of them, he’d explode out and annihilate anyone in his path. Savage was a very scary man and the best to have on their side.

  “This woman really does it for you?” Savage asked.

  Ice thought it over. Soleil’s laughter warmed him when he thought nothing could. She moved something inside him, things he thought were dead or never there in the first place. She brough
t out his desire to be better. She chased his demons away. She was gorgeous, willing, and seemed to be able to put up with his proclivity to expose her body to others. That aroused him unbelievably. And she was the best lay he’d ever had in his life.

  “Yeah, Savage. She does it for me. I want a chance with her. I may make a mess of everything because I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, but I want that chance.”

  Savage shrugged. “Then the rest of us will make certain you have it.”

  That warmed him. Savage meant it. His brothers would surround him, take his back the way they always did. They’d help him find a way to keep her. He had Lana and Alena to help him. Anya was still with Reaper, and Steele had Breezy. If they could do it, he could.

  “Things get dicey, I can always go to Blythe for help,” Ice said.

  “Yeah, you might want to be careful there,” Savage advised. “She might not approve of getting a woman drunk, seducing her and marrying her, fucking her and then leaving her on your wedding night so you can go fuck up some bastards. She’s not going to understand you did all that with the best of intentions because you need the woman.”

  “Shit, put like that, you got a point.” Ice couldn’t help his guilty grin.

  “Blythe doesn’t understand what they turned us into. She looks at us the same way she does those kids of hers,” Savage observed. “She thinks we can be saved.”

  “I love that about her,” Ice said.

  Savage nodded. “I do too, but I’m just saying be careful.” He looked around the room, indicating their talk was over. “We’ve got work to do. We can start, and when Maestro vacates the shower, you go in and then clean up in there.”

  Ice nodded. He wanted to get back to his woman and wake her up himself.

  It took another two hours of hard work to clean up the mess and remove every bit of evidence that anyone had ever been in the warehouse. They had to burn their clothes as well as the bodies. Fortunately, the club they’d paid to “borrow” the space from had a nice deal going with one of the local crematoriums.

  They were careful. They’d learned to pay attention to the smallest detail. Growing up, if one missed a detail, that meant death for them—or another child. They’d learned that the hard way. They’d spent their teenage years and early twenties as assassins for their country. They’d been considered expendable and had been given impossible assignments, but the training they’d been given as children, trying to survive in an environment of rape and torture, had stood them in good stead. They’d learned how to survive, and whenever possible, one of their brothers or sisters had taken their back.

  It had been Czar who’d brought them together and given them hope. He’d been a child himself. He’d seen the dead and dying and knew hope was the only answer, that and banding together. They’d learned to trust one another implicitly—and they still did. They didn’t work so well independent of one another. Ice knew that they were somehow woven together, and that was what made them work. That sustained them. Apart, there was no way to survive.

  Czar had brought them to Sea Haven to find his wife, Blythe, and they’d made the decision to settle in the nearby town of Caspar. They’d bought up a good deal of the properties and were slowly bringing the place back to life, but they didn’t fit in most places. They would never fit in what was considered normal civilization. They didn’t know or understand the bullshit rules of society.

  Still, they had a great clubhouse and places to live. Their lives were better in some ways. Ice was certain his was going to be getting a whole lot better if he just got over this one last little hump. He had to get his woman on the back of his bike and get her to his home, where he could find a way to convince her to stay with him.

  NINE

  Soleil had the most delicious, erotic dreams she could possibly imagine. She was used to having sexy dreams, but these were beyond the scope of her imagination, making her want to blush. She’d been woken up four times by the hottest man, with the most amazing body, blue eyes and three intriguing tattooed teardrops dripping down one side of his face. He knew exactly what he was doing with his hands, his mouth and that gorgeous cock of his.

  She stretched, arms over her head, and her body protested. Sinfully. Deliciously. Achingly. All in a good way. She’d never felt that before waking. She wasn’t a morning person at all. She didn’t like getting up to face empty days. Most mornings she covered her head and tried to stay in bed as long as possible, but her body felt different. Everything felt different. So alive.

  She pried her eyes open, just enough to look out. A window faced her, and it was definitely morning—or maybe afternoon. She’d practically lived her entire life in hotels, the most luxurious hotels around the world. This was not one of them. She blinked, trying to change what she was seeing into what she knew her reality to be.

  Water running in the shower was the first sound Soleil actually cataloged, then voices and the roar of a motorcycle. Her body felt so relaxed and sated she almost turned back over and went to sleep, but then images began to seep in as awareness blossomed, little bits and pieces floating into her mind.

  That gorgeous man with the teardrops dripping down his face. Crystalline blue eyes. Hair, thick and wild, so blond it was almost platinum. A body to die for. His mouth between her legs. Bending her over a pool table.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered aloud. She chanted it as more images drove through her brain. It didn’t matter that she tried to stop them, the floodgates opened. Kneeling on the floor of a shop, the most amazing cock in her mouth. Looking up at him as she knelt, and her entire body going into the most amazing sensations she’d ever experienced. His body moving in hers.

  She groaned, turned over onto her back again and flung one arm up to cover her eyes, trying to push away reality. She’d done some stupid things in her life, but this . . . She would have to call Kevin and confess. He would tell her what to do. This was on her. Completely on her.

  What had she done? Guilt assailed her. She’d seduced a very sweet man because he was perfect. Everything she’d ever wanted. She’d trapped him into marriage. She’d gotten him drunk. She’d seduced him in every way a woman could. Deliberately. Boldly. It didn’t matter that he’d been attempting to do the same to her; she knew she had made a choice to keep him for selfish reasons, and she would have to confess to him and let him go. The thought made her want to cry. She’d have to call Kevin and make this right for Ice.

  It suddenly came to her that she didn’t have Kevin. He was gone. An accident . . . She had a fiancé . . .

  “Oh my God,” she whispered again. Only this time it wasn’t about whatever insanity she’d done after meeting the hottest, sweetest man in the world. That she’d take responsibility for. This was about Winston and his pack of rabid killers out to murder her.

  She sat up, dropping her head in her hands, pushing at the hair spilling around her face and down her back. She lifted her head and met piercing blue eyes. Crystalline eyes. Her heart clenched hard. Those eyes held amusement, although he wasn’t smiling. He just sat in a chair opposite the bed and stared at her.

  Something wasn’t quite right. He didn’t feel right. She was certain she’d connected to him in a way she’d never connected with anyone, yet she didn’t feel that way now. She just felt awkward. What did one say to a man they’d spent the night with? Not just spent the night but had the most amazing, mind-blowing sex ever with? She forced herself to focus because no matter how hard she tried to make this man the one who had given her that very first orgasm, and then a hundred more, something wasn’t right.

  He didn’t have those three teardrops dripping from his eye. The drops were tattoos. One couldn’t just get rid of them so easily. A chill went through her. This wasn’t the same man. They were twins. She stared at him in horror.

  “Oh my God.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  She became aware that she didn’t
have a stitch on. Not one. The blankets were pooled around her waist and her breasts were very much on display. She knew because she looked down. There were smudges on her breasts. Red marks. Faint strawberries. She yanked the blankets up to her chin.

  “Who are you? I didn’t . . .” She gestured, unsure what to say. What to ask. “Not both of you.” That would be the most humiliating thing she could imagine.

  He drew back. “I wouldn’t ever touch my brother’s wife.”

  For a moment her brain froze. Her body froze. She couldn’t move or think. She just stared at him. It was all true. She’d really done that despicable act. The worst thing a woman could do to a man. She’d trapped him into marriage.

  “Nice wedding in the chapel. Party at the bar. Pictures. Ice couldn’t keep his hands off you or you him. I didn’t think the two of you were going to make it to your room before the official consummation.”

  He sounded totally amused. He was laughing at her, and she couldn’t blame him. She lifted up her left hand and sure enough, there was a ring. It was laminated paper with a very intricate drawing, but it was there. She remembered the ring he’d slipped on her finger and she wanted to cry. She loved that silly ring. That he’d thought to do that for her.

  He’d bought her a dress worth nearly twenty thousand dollars. She’d let him do that. All that money. The chapel. A party with a wedding cake. She’d really done it. She’d gotten him drunk enough that he’d signed her prenup and married her.

  His twin sat there thinking it was a huge joke when poor sweet Ice had been taken such advantage of. She dropped her pounding head into her hands. Her head hurt so badly, but she knew she hadn’t gotten drunk. Tipsy, maybe, but not drunk. She couldn’t even claim drinking as an excuse for her behavior. Fear for her life, maybe, but not alcohol. Guilt overwhelmed her. She didn’t have Kevin to sort things out.

  She peeked through her fingers, her gaze searching the room. There was a leather jacket over the back of a chair. It said “Torpedo Ink” on it and had a tree, skulls and ravens on it. Ice had that same tree, skulls and ravens tattooed on his back. She’d traced every bit of it with her tongue. It was beautiful on him. Not only had she married a stranger, she’d married a biker. Because when she screwed up, she didn’t do it by halves.