by Brook Wilder
“Like I give a fuck about that. He could be marrying the fucking Queen of England and I still wouldn’t let anyone interfere in Enrique’s business!”
The name shuttered through Christian.
“You’re with Enrique?”
“Hah! Well you should tell your boss that he should care,” Craig continued in a taunting voice. “He’s not marrying the Queen of England, He’s marrying Enrique’s girl, Melody!”
There was a moment of silence that filled with a tension so thick that Christian could hardly draw a breath, and not for the first time that night he wanted to punch Craig. Hard. In the face. What the fuck was he thinking? Starting a fight with these assholes.
He watched shock and then anger flare across their faces a moment before the one who’d been doing all the talking leapt forward, fist raised.
Christian dodged the punch, grateful to see that the waitress had taken advantage of the confusion to get to safety behind the bar. He dragged Craig away from the fray and towards the door.
“Come on, best man. We got to get the fuck out of here.”
He could already hear sirens blaring in the distance.
He could feel Enrique’s men’s glares burning in to his back long after they had left the club and he was on his way home, having dropped a very drunk Craig off at his place.
He didn’t know what the hell would come of tonight, but he knew it wouldn’t be good. Enrique knew now, if he didn’t before. He knew that Christian had his woman and that they were getting married.
Christian sucked in a deep breath as he walked inside and flipped on the lights, still shaky from the adrenaline of the short-lived fight. He knew he wasn’t going to get a wink of sleep that night. He had a big day ahead of him in the morning. He just hoped they’d all survive it.
Chapter 13
Nerves were like butterflies in her stomach. Oh, who the hell was she kidding? Melody was pretty sure they weren’t butterflies at all. More like piranhas. Hungry piranhas.
She wrapped her arms tighter around herself and hugged tightly, trying to keep them contained, at least for the moment. There wasn’t anything else she could do. She was practically strapped down to the chair at the salon in town as Bianca, Stella, and the hairstylist fussed around her. Roberta was busy scanning through the rack of dated fashion magazines at the back of the salon.
It was the morning of her wedding. Gah, that still sounded so bizarre to her own ears. She couldn’t be talking about herself. Melody Sloane couldn’t be getting married in six hours. But she was. She knew she was. She just had to keep reminding herself that it was all temporary.
Panic tried to rear its ugly head, but she forced it down. She’d had a lot to think about after Christian’s visit. His plan was a good one. Get married. Skip town. Get divorced. Each would go on with their own life as if none of this had ever happened.
There were a few sticky points to the plan of course. One, she had no money. And two… well, the second one all came down to a name. Enrique.
Just thinking about him sent a shiver of trepidation down her spine. She should feel safe, shouldn’t she? She was about as protected from him as she could be while she was still in the state of Texas.
Hub had announced to the entire Devil’s Martyrs crew that she was off limits, now that she was with Christian, and he told her that he would make sure Enrique couldn’t get his hands on her.
Of course, he’d said that not out of any sense of caring about her. She was his bargaining chip and he didn’t want to lose his leverage. She understood. Even still, she’d slept better the last two nights in Bianca’s guest room than she’d had in nearly a year.
Her nerves came back. Her life would change again after today. And she still felt like she was being pulled by an undertow with nothing to hold on to, paddling as hard as she could with the current just pulling her along, wherever it wanted to take her.
Melody threw back her shoulders and tilted her chin up in answer. It was her life damnit! It was about time she took control back. Starting…tomorrow. She sat back with a sigh. Tomorrow couldn’t come soon enough.
“Would you stop fidgeting around, hun? I’m going to get mascara all over your cheek now,” Bianca grumbled under her breath.
Melody had to force herself to stay still as Bianca swiped more makeup on her face and the hair stylist tugged on her long dark brown curls at the back of her head.
Stella watched everything with the critical eye of a general. She was the one who’d insisted that Melody go get her hair and makeup done at the salon in town, before the wedding. Melody had tried to protest. It was closer to Enrique than she’d been all week and the thought made her nervous.
She knew he pretty much stayed close to his palatial home on the outskirts of the neutral territory, only venturing out for work or when he had…something to take care of. Or someone. Melody swallowed hard, blocking out the image that rose in her mind’s eye at that last one. She knew exactly how Enrique ‘took care’ of people. Ruthlessly. Violently. Without mercy.
“Okay, hun. I think I’m just about done with the makeup,” Bianca said with an approving nod as she stepped back.
Melody was grateful for the distraction from the dark track her thoughts had been travelling on. She just hoped she didn’t look too much like a clown. She felt like she was wearing enough makeup on her face to qualify. But the stylist still wouldn’t let her turn around and face the mirror, telling her to stay still just a little longer while she perfected the hairdo.
Bianca had brought in the photograph that had captured Melody’s attention the night they were planning out details for the upcoming wedding and shown it to the stylist. Melody had just sat there, in silence, letting the others decide for her. It seemed easier than arguing.
And it doesn’t matter, she thought to herself, sinking into the reminder that this was just a farce.
It was all an act. It was all temporary. A few days, maybe a week at most, pretending to be the happy new Mrs. Mires. Then she would be on her way, to a new life.
Melody clung to that as her hair was finally finished. The older women fussed around her as they walked her towards the backroom of the otherwise empty salon, to where her dress was hanging, pressed and altered and ready for her.
Just five more hours. There was an internal clock, counting down the time until the wedding and there was nothing she could do to stop it. It was there, in her mind, like the timer of a bomb winding down towards detonation.
It was a perfect analogy for how she felt. She was blowing up her old life. After today, she’d never be able to go back to the way things were, not that she wanted to. She just prayed the wedding itself wouldn’t be nearly as destructive. That some remnants of herself, her real self, would remain.
Melody had almost forgotten who she was with Enrique. He’d squashed the real Melody, shaping her instead into the person that he wanted her to be. Demanded that she be.
Enough of the morose thoughts.
Melody shook her head, chastising herself softly as the door was closed behind her. There in front of her, hanging from a thickly padded hanger, was her wedding dress.
Melody stared at it for a long time, before finally stepping close enough to touch it. The entire body of the gown looked like it was cut from one single piece of shimmering cream silk that fell in graceful folds to the ground. There was a collar of matching cream lace around the top that would flutter over her shoulders and a lace veil that Bianca had gotten from somewhere.
She took the dress off the hanger and started to put it on, feeling much more like she was donning some sort of battle armor than a silk wedding dress.
It took her a few minutes of wrestling with the delicate fabric to get it into place and she was able to only get about half of the tiny buttons running up the back fastened together before deciding she was going to need help.
“Hey, Bianca? Can you give me a hand?” Melody asked, poking her head out of the door.
But Bianca wasn’t there. None
of the women that she thought of as her ‘bridal party’ were there.
“What the hell?” she muttered, stepping out of the back room of the salon and walking towards the front, careful to hold the hem of the dress up off the floor. “Bianca?”
She walked down the short hall towards the front and, as she got closer, she could hear the sound of the stylist’s voice.
“I’m sorry. We’re closed at the moment. For a wedding.”
“That’s exactly why I’m here,” a new and eerily familiar feminine voice said.
Melody must not have been able to hear the chime of the door opening from the back. Melody walked around the corner and her eyes widened in shock.
“Amanda?!”
Everyone turned towards her, including Amanda Alvarez. A friend, but more importantly, Enrique’s cousin.
Amanda own green eyes widened as they landed on Melody, taking in the hair, the makeup, and the dress.
“Oh my god, Melody. It’s true!” Amanda gasped. “You really are marrying that Devil’s Martyrs scum!”
“Hey! You watch what you say…”
“I won’t hear that kind of talk…”
“Now you just stop right there, missy!”
Bianca, Roberta, and Stella all seemed to talk at once, their words exploding one on top of the other until Melody couldn’t make out what they were saying at all.
“Enough! Enough guys, it’s okay. She’s a friend,” Melody interrupted, hastily walking forward. Well, as hastily as she could in the snug fitting dress.
The older women reluctantly fell silent as Melody stopped in front of the blonde.
“Amanda, how did you…? How did you know I was here? Does Enrique…?”
“No! He doesn’t know where you are, Melody. I wouldn’t tell him,” Amanda said hastily.
She was one of the few people that had seen the aftermath of one of Enrique’s rages. The bruises. The blood. More than a few times, Amanda had helped patch her up, taking care of her for a few days whenever Enrique would disappear afterward. Amanda had been one of the only friends Enrique had permitted her to keep, because she was his cousin. But in the back of her mind, Melody knew where the other woman’s loyalties truly lay, and it wasn’t with her.
“Then how did you find out where I was?”
“As soon as I heard the rumor that you were getting married, I knew I had to see if it was true. Everybody knows that it’s today; the word got out last night. There’s not that many places you could go to get ready so…” Amanda shrugged with a grin. “I’d already checked the other two salons in town.”
Melody just shook her head, forcing a smile to her face, but inside she was churning with painful fear.
“Promise me you won’t tell him where I am, Amanda,” Melody begged quietly.
Amanda just gave her a long look.
“Why are you doing this? You know he’s going to go crazy.”
Melody felt Bianca’s sharp glare on her back, but she wasn’t about to admit that she was being forced into it.
“Fate is funny sometimes,” she finally answered with as much of a smile as she could muster. “You never know what’s going to happen, or who you’re going to meet. Sometimes, fate has a way of working out.”
Hah, yeah, and sometimes fate has a way of leaving you bruised and broken, abandoned on the side of a highway in the desert outside of a gang hideout. Sometimes, fate’s a bitch.
But Melody kept those last thoughts to herself, struggling to keep them off of her face as Amanda gave her a tearful hug, telling her how happy she was for her and how much she wanted to be there for the wedding.
“You should have a friend there,” she said, and Melody agreed despite Bianca’s look of warning.
With a sunny smile that she didn’t feel, Melody turned to the group of waiting women to finish getting ready.
All too soon, Bianca announced that it was time to go to the chapel, that it was almost time for the wedding to start. Melody swallowed hard, feeling that bomb tick away inside her, and she knew there was no going back after this. God, she just hoped she survived the blast.
Chapter 14
Christian shifted from foot to foot as he stood at the front of the aisle. Well, ‘aisle’ was a bit of an overstatement. He was standing in front of the old park gazebo that they were using as a makeshift chapel and Hub and a few of the other guys from the crew had moved some park benches into rows to use as pews.
There were more people filling them than he expected. Although, to be honest, he wasn’t really sure what he’d expected, but it wasn’t this. Most of the Devil’s Martyrs crew was sitting in front of him, waiting.
Even Bones, the gang’s president, had shown up. He was sitting in the front row with his normally stern expression on his face, but he’d given Christian a nod as if to say that he really understood what was going on and knew what he was doing for the crew to get back at Enrique.
For the crew, Christian thought and nearly snorted out loud. If he only knew. Christian had devoted his entire life for the crew. He’d done everything they’d ever asked of him, gone far beyond boundaries he’d sworn to himself that he would never cross for the crew.
No, this moment, his decision to go through with the marriage, sure as hell wasn’t for the crew. It was for selfish reasons. It was for himself. And it was for Melody.
After the wedding, with Hub off his back and thinking he was safely under control, Christian could finally do what he’d dreamed of doing for years. He could leave. And he would take Melody with him, take her as far away from this shithole way of life as he could. And then they would part ways, live happily ever after as they each rode off into their own sunsets.
Christian was so distracted by his plans for the future that he didn’t notice the sudden hush that fell over the normally rowdy crowd.
Craig was standing next to him, still looking green around the edges and wincing whenever anyone said something too loud, which for him at the moment was anything above a whisper.
“Will everyone please stand?” Thor, one of the members of the Devil’s Martyrs crew who also happened to be ordained in Texas, said roughly.
Craig squeezed his eyes shut, obviously fighting against his hangover.
The words jostled Christian out of his daydreams and he came tumbling back to reality. The doors to the park building opened and Melody walked out, and he fell even harder.
All he could do was stare as the music and the whispers faded away. The woman walking towards him was an angel. There was no other way to describe her. Her long glossy dark hair was curled, with half of it pulled up in some sort of intricate knot. The rest had been left loose to tease her shoulders.
The dress she was wearing looked like it was out of some old movie set and Christian had no idea where she’d gotten it from. The only thing he could focus on was the way the silky fabric hugged her lush curves like a second skin, emphasizing the swell of her chest, down the dip of her waist, and then flared again at the curve of her hips in a perfect hourglass that had him drooling.
He quickly ran a hand across his chin, just to make sure he wasn’t standing in front of everyone in the entire gang and making a complete fool of himself.
But still, he couldn’t look away. Melody stared resolutely ahead, and he willed her luminous dark eyes to meet his. When they finally did, an electric shock like a bolt of lightning zapped through him, rooting him to the ground where he stood.
In her eyes, he could read all of her thoughts. All of her emotions. Her fear, her worry that she was making a terrible mistake. But there, just there beyond the edge of desperation, he could see it flickering weakly, a candle nearly guttered by a hard merciless life but still burning. Hope.
Christian sent her a smile. He prayed it was reassuring. He couldn’t tell, he was trembling so badly. He tried to get a hand on his nerves as Melody came to stand before him. Hell, he knew this whole thing was a sham. A fake. A play to put on for his father, for the crew. For Enrique.
But, when she held out her hands and he took them in his own, he was sure that nothing had ever felt more real. In that moment, it was like everything else had disappeared and they were the only two people left in the world.
Just one man, and one woman, and the electric shock of her skin sliding against his, sending his thoughts straight into the gutter.
Christian hardly heard a word that Thor said as the big, muscular, Viking-looking man read the vows. He knew that he answered appropriately, and so did Melody, and then Thor was telling him to kiss the bride. And, damn it, that was all he wanted to do, but not here. Not in front of his crew and everyone that had forced her down this path.
