“You look like a yeti,” Giulia says, giving my cunt a dirty look, as if it’s something distasteful to be tolerated. “My son deserves better. You’re getting waxed.” She continues out the door, letting it slam shut behind her.
I give the servant girls a dark look.
“If you touch me down there, I will kill you,” I warn them. I have limits, and they’re being tested. This is one place that I make a stand. My body, my choice. I snatch a silk robe off the back of a chair and storm into the bathroom, putting my back up against the door and closing my eyes.
What happens after the wedding, I’m not sure.
The only thing I know for certain is that things are going to change around here. Three months of living in this prison, and it’ll all end tomorrow. One way or another.
Grey and I lie close that night, taking turns pressing our mouths to one another’s ear so that we can talk without being overheard. If anyone were to watch, it might seem like we were fucking. The thing is, I clearly have some twisted sense of loyalty. Sleeping with Grey feels like … betraying the club? How ridiculous is that, to care what the club thinks when they’d kill me on sight?
Beast would kill me on sight. Crown would kill me on sight. Grainger would probably happily kill me on sight. Even Sin would …
I push the thoughts aside.
“We can have a good life, Gidge,” Grey tells me, putting his hand on the curve of my waist. My body likes the heat of it, and it’s been so long since I … well, I can’t even masturbate here. There’s no privacy, and I’m a red-blooded woman with needs. Maybe I should just do it, fuck Grey Wolfe? Why not? He’s going to be my husband tomorrow. And if we don’t fuck on our wedding night—and trust me, people will be watching—then I likely won’t live to see another sunrise.
I tell myself that I’m just going to do it. That tomorrow, after the wedding, I’ll sleep with him.
My heart lurches in my chest, but I put my hand over the top of his anyway. I made my decision when I screwed Sin and stole his keys, when I Tasered Crown, when I took off with his bike and crashed it.
It’s over.
I have to accept that.
“Okay, Grey,” I tell him, because it really is the best choice. Marry him. Take over his empire. I could have power here—eventually. That is, if Giulia doesn’t kill me first. “Let’s make a pact, okay? No matter what happens, you have my back, and I have yours.”
He smiles at me and leans in, pressing a light kiss to my lips, like a promise for tomorrow.
“Deal,” he says, and then, when I try to turn over, he moves his hand to my face and holds me there. Even though it’s pitch-black, I can see the reflection of the moon in his pale irises. “For all my faults, I never lie. I will have your back, Gidge, no matter what.”
I cover his hand with mine and close my eyes; that’s how we end up falling asleep.
Together.
I can’t shake the feeling of wrongness when I wake up that morning.
The sun slants through the stained-glass windows above our head, and I can hear the distant sound of birds chirping. Still, even with all that peacefulness, I feel uneasy, almost sick to my stomach.
Sharing an espresso and tangling our bare feet together under the table doesn’t help either.
When Grey gets up to leave, I follow him.
“Be careful today,” I tell him as he hesitates in the doorway and looks back at me. He smiles, reaching up to brush some hair behind my ear.
“It’s a wedding, not a war,” he says with a chuckle. “We’ve got this, Gidge.”
I watch him go, that sense of foreboding filling me as Giulia’s servants pour into the room and start their primping and plucking. My brows are tweezed, makeup expertly applied, hair coiffed. I dress myself in the lingerie that Giulia selected—which, if you think about it, is weird as fuck—and then allow the girls to put me into the jewel-encrusted poof that serves as a wedding dress.
If I were to get married of my own free will, I’d wear a white leather jacket. That would be my dress.
The thought goes as quickly as it comes, a fraction of a wish leftover from a life I can never lead, one that I thought I hated. But the more I let myself think about it, as I’m tucked and tied into my dress, I realize that it wasn’t that I hated the life … I just hated being a second-class citizen within it.
I want to ride a bike, I think with a longing that burns. I want that smell of leather and motor oil, of hot pavement and weed, booze and sweat and bullshit.
“I just need to pee.” I slip into the bathroom before I really lose myself, my mind spinning in a million different directions.
I remember that night that seems so long ago, the one where I took four outlaws into myself and said goodbye to the very last scrap of my innocence, and I crave it with a desperation that makes me quiver. The need is so intense that I end up sitting on the bathroom floor with my head in my hands. I didn’t just sleep with four outlaws because I was a broken girl with too much pain.
I slept with them because I was an old soul trapped in the body of a bird with clipped wings. I slept with them because there was something in each of them that I liked. That … if I let myself think too hard about it, that I loved.
I only ever wished for them to love me back.
“Fuck.” I stand up and punch the mirror as hard as I can, breaking the glass, making my knuckles bleed. The red stains the lace at the end of my sleeve, but there isn’t much I can do about it now. When I head back into the bedroom that I’ve been sharing with Grey for the past several months, Giulia gives a tsk-tsking sound as she looks me over.
“You animal,” she says, but even though the insult is light, the derisiveness cuts straight through me. “Take the sleeves up and give her the lace gloves instead.”
I stand there like a statue, refusing to react even when the pins of the seamstress get stuck in my skin. It’s not enough blood to stain, so what does it matter anyway?
The girls finish in record time, and a sea of mafia creeps in tuxedos show up to escort me to the chapel. One of them even has an Uzi hanging around his neck. I ignore it all, falling into myself, and doing my best to remember that I make smart choices—even if they’re difficult ones. Becoming the bride to the heir of the Grey Wolfe Mafia is not a place I thought I’d ever find myself, but it does give me the leverage necessary to punish Cat. To punish the Don. To find the goons he sent to do the deed and punish them, too. That’s the important thing to remember.
I’m doing this for my sisters.
The Don is waiting outside the doors to the chapel, looking dapper in his tailcoat, like he’s on his way to a white tie event. His shoes are as shiny as his hair, but his smile is like a machete, swung with careless ease straight toward my heart.
“Hello, my darling daughter-in-law,” he purrs, watching apathetically as the servant girls connect the flowing train to my dress. It weighs me down, all of those crystals, all of that lace. I can barely stand the feel of it. “Since your father isn’t here to give you away, I thought it might be nice if I took his place.”
As I stare at him, that anger builds into a crescendo inside of me. I’d like nothing more than to kill this man. Instead, I hear myself saying, “that’d be nice, thank you.”
He reaches out and cups the side of my face, but not in a loving way. There’s a careful control to his movements that says he’s used to getting what he wants, that he’s used to submission and obeisance. I let him think that’s what he’s getting as he hooks his arm with mine and we wait for the live orchestra to start playing Canon in D Major.
How is this even my life? I think as the stained-glass doors in front of us are pulled wide, revealing a glittering sea of modern-day criminal courtiers, the upper crust of the underworld. Arguably so much more powerful than those that at least pretend to play by the rules. The only rules here are the ones set by greed and want and power. If you have the latter, you can satisfy the former, have whatever you want. Bleed whoever you want.
This will be okay, I tell myself. This is going to be fine. If it were any other mafia man standing up there—like Ivan Wolfe for example—I would come up with a different plan. But even if I found a place to run to, even if the mafia were that sloppy and I was that lucky, I can’t risk Grey’s life when I gave up everything I had to save it in the first place.
On either side of us, wealthy and powerful families fill the wooden pews, watching with slitted eyes and pursing their venomous mouths as they size me up, test my mettle, and plan their calculated bites. The club—despite its lack of refinement—is just like this, so I’m used to it. Politics, violence, and power. That’s what it all comes down to.
The Don escorts me down the aisle as I lift my eyes up to the steep pitch of the roof, the murals on the ceiling, and the impenetrable stone walls. Sconces flicker from them, casting a strange, almost ethereal light over the procession while the priest watches us, draped in white robes with a crimson sash, like a manifestation of the Catholic God.
I stop near the edge of the dais, waiting as Alvise hands me over to Grey. He takes my hand and leads me up the few steps to stand in front of the pulpit, and then carefully, almost reverently, lifts the veil to reveal my face.
That’s when I smell it. It’s a smell that used to put me to sleep and then, later, frightened me to my core. It’s a smell that, at times, has turned me on. Made me act like a fool. Made me take four horsemen to my bed. Leather and motor oil.
I lean in toward Grey, just like he did to me the other day, putting my lips up against his ear as my fingers fist in the front of his suit. My knuckles, despite the bandages applied by the servant girls, are bleeding just enough to stain his dress shirt. That’s an omen if I’ve ever seen one, a promise of violence on the horizon like a bloodred sunrise.
“Grey, run,” I breathe, and then I’m pushing him back and a million things are happening all at once.
A single bullet whizzes down the aisle and hits the priest right between the eyes. His gaze widens just before he slumps to the floor at my feet, blood spattering the bottom of my dress. Crimson oozes from the wound in his skull as Grey kicks open a wooden panel on the front of a pipe organ and crawls through, dragging it closed behind him.
I look up, redirecting my gaze down the aisle just in time to see …
“Crown,” I whisper, remembering what he said to me that night. That fateful night that rearranged everything about who I was and what I thought I wanted. “I’m a straight shooter.” What a double entendre if I’ve ever heard one. Straight shooter, plays by the rules. Straight shooter, can nail a priest between the eyes from fifty feet away.
He’s not alone.
Daybreakers pour into the room like a disease, tainting the pretty church and all its glittering occupants. See, that was the wrongness that I felt this morning, the dark cloud of the club rolling across the landscape like a blight.
Bullets fly between the two groups as I stand there in my white dress with its silly train, the lace veil resting against the coiled perfection of my dark hair. My lips are gently parted, the smell of gunpowder and blood a familiar, almost comforting scent, like childhood, like home.
How fucked up is that?
How … much do I care?
I look to the right to see several of the mafia goons holding open a trapdoor in the floor. The Don, his wife, Ivan, and a good dozen of the most important Grey Wolfe alumni crawl through it before it’s slammed shut and locked. Another guard takes position over the top of it, aiming his Uzi toward the back of the room and the emerging cloud of devils.
A shot takes him in the neck, spraying blood from his carotid. It splatters me, hot and acrid, ruining my makeup as I blink through it and watch him hit the ground at my feet. The man’s body is still warm, still twitching in its death throes as I bend down and take the strap from his neck, putting it over my own.
For a minute there, I can’t decide which side to fight on: the side of the mafia or the side of the club.
The club is here to exact their revenge. More specifically, they’re probably here to kill me. The mafia, on the other hand, is a family I’m supposed to be marrying into, a tool that I can turn on itself, severing all the heads of this awful chimera that’s become my life.
My eyes lift up, searching for Crown amongst the carnage. I see him in the back, brutal, ruthless. He smashes a mafia man’s face in with the butt of his gun. He’s not the only one either. Beast is there, too, so covered in blood that I hardly recognize him. Sin … he’s holding an assault rifle, mowing down the guards in the rear balcony.
The only person I don’t see—besides my father—is Cade Grainger.
I look back at the fleeing wedding guests.
Even though it takes me some time, I guess I’m a club daughter after all.
I aim the Uzi into the fleeing crowd of luxury and jewels, and I start to fire. It’s easy to tell who’s who. The Grey Wolfe Mafia is dressed in their finest, in tuxes and dresses and diamonds. The club … well, the club is dressed in denim and leather, and flying colors.
My bullets spray the audience, and I find myself thankful beyond thankful that there are no children here. Any adult I see is culpable, is a part of this, benefits from its blood and poison. I become lost in that, in the bloodshed and the death, until someone grabs my arm.
I startle, swinging the gun their way, but stop when I see who it is that’s touching me. I might’ve known, just from the rough feel of his fingers through the elbow-length gloves I’m wearing, that it was Grainger. Goddamn motherfucking Grainger.
His umber eyes catch mine, and a million things pass between us.
The one that I catch on and hold tight to is this: relief.
He’s relieved to see me? Why? So he can strangle me himself, punish me for stealing Crown’s bike and freeing a hostage and running into the arms of the mafia?
He doesn’t look angry though. Instead, his face is drawn and tired, that scowling mouth of his pressed into a thin line.
Grainger doesn’t bother to take the gun from me, dragging me toward a door to the left of the pulpit and yanking me through. He slams it closed behind him and then turns to look at me.
I want to say something, anything really. It’s been three months since we’ve seen each other, but it may as well have been a minute. It may as well have been years. Time seems both meaningless and like an impossible chasm, all at the same time.
In a surprising move, he puts his hands on my hips and I gasp, letting go of the Uzi and letting it hang from the strap on my neck. Grainger lifts me up to sit on the edge of a table that’s pressed to the wall, knocking candles and other religious paraphernalia all across the floor. This must be a thing for us, this sacrilegious lust that taints the whole world filthy.
I quoted the Bible to him the first time we slept together. The second time, was in a church. The fourth time is here, at my fancy Catholic wedding.
One of Reba’s oft-repeated quotes floats to the forefront of my mind: So put to death the sinful, earthly things lurking within you. Have nothing to do with sexual immorality, impurity, lust, and evil desires. Don’t be greedy, for a greedy person is an idolater, worshipping the things of this world.
And oh. Oh, how I want to be an idolater, worshipping Grainger and everything about him that I hate so damn much.
He shoves the white layers of my dress up, like too much frosting on a cake, cursing as he does so. When he finds the lingerie underneath, he stills and lifts his eyes to mine. He moves his tattooed hands to his belt and undoes it, freeing his cock as I wrap my legs around his waist. Grainger pushes the lacy scrap of my panties aside and drives into me like he’s on a mission.
It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever felt.
My arms wrap his n
eck as he presses his face to the side of my neck, brushing stubble against the softness of my throat.
“You forgot to shave,” I whisper, which is such a bizarre thing to notice or say in a moment like that.
Even though my dress is splattered with blood, and crimson is leaking underneath the door, it doesn’t matter. Grainger fucks me hard into the side of the table, denting the wall as the sound of gunshots and screaming echoes from inside the chapel.
“How many times did you fuck that mafia brat?” he whispers back, licking the side of my neck as his familiar black pepper and vanilla scent surrounds me in a cloud, simultaneously soothing me and waking me up all at the same time. That’s me and Grainger right there, a dichotomous mix of opposing things. Dare I say … love-hate? “How many, huh?” he growls, ripping the panties clean off me.
He pumps his hips hard into me, and I revel in the hot, full feeling of his cock inside of me. I’ve missed this so much. I’ve missed him so much, even if I could hardly allow myself to admit it. The logical part of me, the bit that knows I’m about to die, tries to push back, tells me to run, to take this opportunity to shoot Grainger and use that trapdoor in the chapel before it’s too late.
The thing is, this pull between us is so strong, so irresistible, a dessert that I never should’ve sampled. He’s too old for me. He’s too wrong for me. He’s an asshole. And yet I want him in a way that I’ve never wanted anything else. Tainted me filthy, this bitch.
“Shut the fuck up,” I murmur, pressing my mouth to his so hard that his lip rings dig into my skin. He surprises me by kissing me back with such passion, such fervor. This right here feels like a marriage, like a dirty communion under god’s watchful eye. I’m a heathen, a hedonistic lush, a dirty biker girl with questionable morals and blood under her fingernails.
Grainger cups my ass cheeks in his hands, squeezing hard and rutting me like an animal. The friction of his pelvis against my clit does all sorts of right things for me. Besides, it’s been months since I’ve had satisfaction whatsoever. It doesn’t take long for me to feel the orgasm creeping up on me like an animal in the night.
I Am Dressed in Sin: A Reverse Harem Age Gap Romance (Death By Daybreak Motorcycle Club Book 2) Page 6
