Looking up at her, Michael grinned. “Hey.”
Faith’s heart thudded heavily in her chest. A whole night in his arms. No screwing in Dante. It was going to be the best night of her life. “Hey.” She realized she hadn’t heard his bike come up the drive. “Where’s your bike? We should put it in the garage. My dad has Sherlock checking on me.”
“He said. I parked a couple streets over.” Standing, he came to her and put his hand on her cheek. “You sure this is a good idea?”
“The house is ours tonight. I want to have a normal night with you and feel what it’s like to be totally naked and sleep together. It’s a perfect idea.”
“Okay. I want that, too. I love you.” Smiling, he brought his other hand up to her face. Holding her the way he so often did, he bent down and kissed her.
~oOo~
“Do you have any clothes in your drawers?”
“Hmm?” Feeling happy and cozy, settled on Michael’s chest, tracing her finger along the tattoo over his heart, Faith left her eyes at half-mast. She’d been right. The night before had been the best night ever. To be comfortable and to be able to go slow and feel each other—it was almost like last night was their real first time. Times—plural. She smiled.
They’d only had one weird moment, when she’d tried to go down on him. Of course, she’d never done anything like it before, but she’d wanted to try. His reaction had been nearly violent, shoving her away. She’d thought at first he didn’t want her to do it because he didn’t think she’d be any good. But it had seemed more like something was going on with him.
He wouldn’t talk about it, though, and she didn’t push. She wanted everything to be good and happy while they had this chance. They’d gotten past that awkward spell and kept on with their good and happy night.
“There’s clothes all over the place. What’s in your drawers?”
“More clothes.” She waved lazily around her room. “That’s the stuff I wear most. No point putting it away if I’m just gonna put it on again in a couple of days.”
He bent his head so he could see her face on his chest. “You’re a slob.”
Her mother said that all the time, so Faith gave Michael the same answer. “No. I’m efficient.”
Laughing, he kissed her forehead. God, she loved this peaceful relaxation. She didn’t want it to end.
“What’s this mean?” She traced the Japanese character on his chest again.
“It’s kanji. It means strength—I think like the perseverance kind of strength, not like muscles. I hope that’s what it means, anyway.”
“I like it. I like your muscles, too, though.” She moved her hand down and caressed the ridges of his belly and then over to one of the really amazing muscles that slanted over his hips. As she touched him, his cock filled out and raised the covers.
She wanted this to be her life every single day.
But he groaned and grabbed her hand. “I gotta get going, babe. I was supposed to be on shift at the shop almost two hours ago. They’re gonna start looking for me.”
He’d never called her ‘babe’ before. She liked it. “Can’t you just bail for the day? I don’t want this to be over.”
“I don’t, either. But we can’t have people wondering where I am. Not with Blue and your mom both gone.”
He was calmer than he usually was, by far, but Faith knew he had a clear, short limit to how much control he had. Especially when it was something he really wanted. So she raised up and kissed him, sliding her leg between his. After a few seconds, he grunted and rolled over on top of her.
But then he lifted his mouth away. “We have to stop. You have to let me stop. I have to go. And we’re out of condoms.”
Reaching between them, she put her hand around him, running her thumb over his tip. The first time she’d touched him, she’d been surprised by how velvety the skin was there. He shivered and tensed at her touch.
“You could pull out. Like you do sometimes.” She spread her legs, settling him fully between them.
“God, Faith. I can’t…you know I can’t…” He was shaking with the effort to resist. It gave her a sense of power that she liked. She didn’t understand it, but it was erotic in some way. Still holding him, she flexed her hips.
And he gave up.
~oOo~
Michael was still resting on her, panting, and she still had her arms and legs wrapped around him when Faith heard the sharp click of a gun being cocked.
He heard it, too; his body became iron.
“Oh, Demon. The trouble you’re in. You get off my daughter right now. You move slow, or I will give her a brain facial. Trust me, I know what I’m doing with this thing.”
Faith’s mother was home. She couldn’t be—she wasn’t supposed to be home until after dinner! Like six hours from now, at the earliest! They always stopped at a restaurant for steak and lobster as the grand finale.
Michael lifted his head and looked down at her, and Faith saw an abyss of sorrow in his eyes. I’m sorry, he mouthed.
But it wasn’t his fault. It was hers. If she’d let him leave when he’d wanted to, he’d have been on his way to the shop right now. If she’d let him leave even earlier, when he’d wanted to be on time for work, he’d have been up to his elbows in bike parts by now. This was her, not him.
She shook her head, trying to say that when her tongue wouldn’t work to make words.
“Move now, Demon. Right now.”
He got up, slowly, carefully, sparing a chance to brush her cheek with his finger. Then he stood up and turned from her, facing her mother, unaware of, or unconcerned by, his nakedness. “Margot, I—”
“Shut up. You got nothing I want to hear.” She looked him up and down. “Holy hell. No condom? Are you shitting me?” Her eyes moved to Faith and locked on her belly, which was still sticky with his semen. “Look at you. Covered in come like the whore you are.”
Michael took a long stride toward Margot. “Don’t call her that.”
She tightened her aim again, right on his chest. “I told you to shut up. Your whore there is definitely not a concern of yours anymore. She is my problem. You, on the other hand, are not my problem. You are Blue’s problem. I think you’d be smarter to think about that. Get your goddamn clothes on and get out of my house.”
As he grabbed his jeans, he turned and looked down at Faith, who was still so stunned and afraid that she hadn’t moved at all. He pulled the cover over her bare body. “I love you,” he said, clearly and without hesitation. “I love you.”
Before she could answer, the air in the room broke apart with explosive noise, and Faith reflexively curled into a ball.
Her mother had fired the gun into the ceiling.
“Next one goes into your head. Get out. Dress in the yard.”
Michael grabbed his clothes and left. Margot followed him out, her little Smith & Wesson apparently trained on him the whole way.
When Faith was alone in her room, still too much in shock to think clearly or feel fully, she got up and cleaned herself up. She was closing her jeans when her mother came back and stood in the doorway, her arms crossed under her augmented chest. She looked angry, but surprisingly calm. When Faith thought about this moment later, she would decide that there was a hint of satisfaction in her anger.
“Do you have any fucking idea what you’ve done to that boy? What your father will do? And the club? You probably killed him, you little slut. How long have you been fucking him?”
Faith didn’t answer. She was too busy grappling with the reality of the consequences they’d—she’d—set in motion. It was her fault. Hers. He’d tried to avoid her. She’d sought him out, again and again. Even now, today, he’d tried to leave, and she’d pulled him back. This was her fault. Whatever happened next, she had done it.
She wrapped her arms around herself and pinched at the skin above her elbows.
No. Her father loved her. She would talk to him, make him understand that she loved Michael, that he loved her. She
would make him see, and they wouldn’t have to hide anymore.
It would be okay.
~oOo~
Her father did not understand. It was not okay.
Her mother had been right. He had put Michael’s life on the table, but he’d lost that vote. Then he had demanded his patch. He’d lost that vote, too, but with only one vote against him. Faith didn’t know whose, but she thought it might have been Hoosier, because Blue was almost as angry at the President as he was at Michael.
They were sending Michael away. The vote that had passed was to send him to the Nomads. He was leaving.
But not before Blue was granted his right to vengeance.
And now Faith was standing in the bike shop, late at night, her mother’s hands gripping her shoulders, her long, manicured nails digging like claws into her skin. The whole club—all the patches, and Bibi, Margot, and Faith, too—were arrayed around the large, industrial space in something like a circle. In the middle stood Michael, shirtless, strung between two support poles, his arms splayed and chained high above his head, but his feet on the ground.
Thus exposed and unable to defend himself, Michael kept his feet for a long time while Blue, with both hands wrapped with lengths of chain, beat him. He punched and punched, and when his arms grew tired, he unwrapped the chains from his hands and used one length as a whip. He beat him until Michael finally lost consciousness, his legs sagging.
Until then, he kept his eyes on Faith. Even when Blue shouted at him to quit looking at her, even when the blows landed on his face, he came right back to her. He blinked blood away to see her. He made no sound but that forced out by the expulsion of his breath on impact of each body blow, and he looked at her.
She wanted to look at him, too, to hold his eyes with her own, but he was so hurt. Her father, her daddy, was hurting him so much, and she couldn’t bear it. So she tried to look away, but her mother wouldn’t let her. She whispered in her ear to watch what she’d done, to see it. And she watched.
“Daddy, stop! Please stop! Daddy, please! Don’t hurt him! Stop!”
She screamed and screamed, but her father ignored her. Until Michael was unconscious, and Fat Jack finally stepped up and put his hand on Blue’s cocked arm.
“Enough, brother. You lost the vote to end him. You need to stop before you do.”
The room then was quiet. All the men were somber. Blue dropped the chain and turned to face Margot and Faith. He was spattered with Michael’s blood. He looked at Faith first, his eyes sad.
“Daddy…” Faith wailed.
He looked away, to her mother. “Get her the fuck out of here. I don’t want her back here ever again.”
Then he stalked away toward the clubhouse.
Faith tried to go to Michael, but Margot yanked her back. “Don’t be stupid. You’ve done enough. You are never seeing Demon again. You come with me right now.”
Dusty and Hoosier were taking Michael down. The last thing Faith saw before her mother dragged her out of the building was his body landing on the floor in a lifeless heap.
CHAPTER TEN
Demon rode and rode, Kota’s blood drying on his skin. As long as he was moving, he could focus on his bike eating up the asphalt under him, the way his headlight made the reflective stripes flash and glow. He could watch that, and feel the wind, and not think. He couldn’t think. The thoughts in his head would kill him.
He rode until there was nothing around him but California desert: rocks, scrub, hard-packed soil, and the sparse, spiny trees known as Joshua trees. One of the homes he’d been in as a kid—not the worst one, by a long shot—had been run by a church. He knew who Joshua was in the Bible. The tree was supposed to have been named after him because it looked like Joshua raising his arms in prayer. Demon didn’t see it. Diaz had once told him that he’d been taught the tree was called a desert dagger. He liked that name better.
Whatever anybody called them, Demon liked the trees. They were ugly and lonely, and they grew where things didn’t.
There was a spot he knew, not far off the road, where a loose group of those trees clustered around a big, flat rock. He’d found the place years ago, shortly after he’d come back home, when he’d pulled off the road to take a piss and had seen the sun setting, silhouetting the trees and the rock in fire. Sitting on the rock had made him feel calm.
When he’d been struggling to find a tether after years of being the psycho Nomad who got called in to tear shit up, he’d come out here, after a long, silent ride, and just sit where no one could provoke him, no one could hurt him, and he couldn’t hurt anyone. He’d sit on the rock, look out at the horizon through the spindly foliage, and wait until he was calm, however long that took.
He hadn’t headed toward that rock on this night with any sense of doing so. He’d just ridden, seeking solitude, striving for distance, trying to get far away from people he loved before he could do any more damage, before he could see them finally know him for what he really was, before he could see the love they had change to disgust.
Faith had been there. Oh, fuck. Faith had seen it all.
When he dismounted, he took his Glock out of his saddlebag. It was a risk, carrying an unregistered weapon when he was trying to stay clean, but with Dora Vega and her Águilas cartel stomping on the Castillos, and the Dirty Rats gunning for the Horde, the risk was greater lately to be unarmed.
Not that he thought anybody would come up on him tonight, in the dark desert. That wasn’t why he had his Glock.
He walked through the desert daggers and climbed onto the rock, facing west, even though the sun had set long ago. He set his gun on his lap and stared into the night. And then he thought.
It was a clear, late-winter night, with a bright half-moon, and he was far enough from the massive glow of SoCal civilization that the stars even made it through. The sky was huge and the horizon far. In a place like this, miles from any other soul, Demon could almost believe that his own soul wasn’t a ruin.
But it was. He was a ruin. Everything in his life was a ruin. Only yesterday—even earlier on this day, in fact—he’d been letting himself think that he could have what he wanted. Now, it was all gone. Kota had exposed his worst secret. But more than that, he’d let Faith see him become the animal that lurked inside him.
And he’d lost Tucker. What he’d done to Kota before had kept him from his son. He’d never get custody now. They’d probably even take him from Hoosier and Bibi. Unless he wasn’t around. If he wasn’t around, maybe Hoosier and Bibi could keep him. Demon trusted them with everything. Tucker would grow up happy with them. He couldn’t doom his son to repeat his own childhood.
That childhood was clamoring to be remembered now in ways Demon never allowed. He kept all of it as far back as he could, locked up. But he knew that his problems, the way he couldn’t keep control, the way he couldn’t stop even when he knew he should, the weird ways he saw things, all of that was his old shit leaking out the sides of the box he tried to keep locked.
In sixteen years as a ward of the state, Michael, the boy that Demon had been, had been used like that in four different placements. He’d been five and in a family placement the first time. The man had used his hands, his fingers. He had also taught Michael how to give a blowjob.
That placement had only lasted a couple of months. Though the man had told him never to tell about their secret ‘fun,’ when Michael got expelled from kindergarten for beating up another boy, he’d told the woman what was happening. She’d slapped him hard and sent him back to the state. He didn’t tell anybody else. He hadn’t wanted to get hit again.
When he was seven, he lived in a small group home, run by a husband and wife. The woman worked the night shift. That man had liked to be jacked off while he watched television. He’d sat with his arm around Michael and curled his fingers in his hair, moaning and whispering how beautiful he was.
The man who’d scarred him with a cigar had been a supervisor at an institutional group home. Michael was there three year
s, from nine to twelve. By the time he left that placement, on his way to his first stint in juvie, he’d been taught just about all of it. That man had liked to put the boys on each other and watch. Boys who got hard got to be tops. Boys who didn’t…Michael never did.
His first stint in juvie, a guard took a shine to him.
By the time he got out, when he was thirteen, no one was ever going to touch him again and live.
Which was why he’d done a second stint in juvie and aged out of the system behind bars. But no one touched him anymore.
It had taken him all those years to grow strong enough in body and spirit to stop it. Resistance had meant more pain and fear and loss—beatings and shame, dislocation and deprivation. When he was so small, that fear had been greater than the fear of what had been done. More than that, after a while, he had begun to understand the things that had happened as simply his life. He’d never accepted it, but he had come to expect it.
Shadow & Soul (The Night Horde SoCal Book 2) Page 16
