by Malcom, Anne
I sank to the bathroom floor.
Another horrific memory in the vicinity of a shower.
“Cute?” Hades repeated, his voice a low baritone, one shocking me out of my emotional self-flagellation. It was a voice you could almost taste. I imagined it would be bitter, musky, addictive. Deadly.
Because this man was deadly. I’d only seen him from afar up until now. He had tattoos covering every inch of his skin, including the corners of his face and his forehead. He had dark features but skin almost as pale as mine. His jet-black hair was inky, silky and brushing his shoulders.
And the muscles.
Don’t even get me started.
Muscles were a given around here. Especially since all the older members were murdered and the club consisted of mostly new patches.
But muscles weren’t what made him dangerous.
There was something about him that made me steer well clear while sober, even though he did his best to separate himself from civilians, I’d observed that when I caught glimpses of him, glimpses were all I got. There was something about him. Like a snake, the deadliest one that could kill you within seconds.
I nodded. “Yes, I find you very cute,” I continued. “In a, ‘I’ll kill you and your whole family without blinking type of way.’”
He stared at me. His face was empty.
It was chilling.
Or it would’ve been had tequila not been burning in my belly. And had I not already been chilled by the grave before.
I’d had sex with a dead man earlier today.
And it had made me feel more alive than ever before.
I was craving more of the grave.
Hence the tequila and talking to a man who might’ve been death himself. Or the Devil’s bestie.
I glanced down at his cut. At the patch that read ‘Enforcer.’ “Ah,” I said. “So your actual job is to kill people without blinking.” I nodded, more to myself than to him. “Makes sense. Snakes kill the best. Effective. Don’t notice them until they’re sinking their teeth into you. And by then, it’s too late.”
I tried to shrug, forgetting that my elbow on the bar was the thing holding me up and it slipped into dead air.
I would’ve taken a header right into Hades’ crotch had a firm grip not caught me.
My entire body—drunk or not—reacted. It was the snake. Not sinking its teeth in. But there was no way to touch a snake without being seconds away from fangs sinking into your skin.
My eyes met black irises.
“Careful,” Hades murmured. “Fallin’ down around here, people don’t tend to get up lately.”
I stared at him, trying to understand whether it was a threat or a warning. Or just some stupid badass shit these bikers said to make them seem more badass.
I didn’t get the opportunity to come to a conclusion. Because another set of hands fastened around my bare shoulders, wrenching me back out of the snake’s grasp.
I reacted to those hands too.
Though they didn’t belong to a deadly snake, the venom from the contact entered my bloodstream too.
My stool swiveled so I was face to face with Liam. No, Jagger.
He was mad.
And with that simple eye contact that was so far from simple, I realized that I was mad too.
Furious.
“Do not do it, say it or swear it,” I hissed at him.
He blinked once, the only ripple in his fury. “Come again?”
I straightened, my body relaxing when Hades was no longer touching me. No matter how attractive he was, there was no way his grip felt comforting.
“Do not come here with that look, that testosterone and that misplaced sense of authority over me,” I snapped. “I’m imagining that you’re going to attempt to drag me away, lecture me about getting drunk, talking to snakes and pretty much doing whatever is outside your approved actions for women you fuck. Here’s a newsflash from Caroline Hargrave, right on the ground...fuck you.” I gave him a hand gesture communicating the same message for good measure.
I would’ve sworn I’d seen Hades smile from my peripheral, but of course that was wrong, snakes couldn’t smile.
Liam did not smile.
His face emptied, with a blankness that was chilling.
“I’m not going to attempt to drag you anywhere,” he said, voice flat.
And then, before I could react, he struck.
Maybe there was more than one snake around here.
The glass I was drinking from toppled to the ground with a smash that made no one in the room jump. Glasses breaking were a soundtrack in the clubhouse just as much as ACDC was.
No one blinked at the fact that I was being dragged across the room, kicking and screaming, by a stone-faced biker capable of murder.
A few of them clapped.
Claw grinned.
Swiss raised his beer.
Most of them barely noticed.
As if men dragged women around the place all the time in these places.
Savages. All of them.
I screamed at the common room in general before Liam thrust me into his bedroom, slamming the newly repaired door. Some prospect had done it earlier today.
“You’re drunk,” he hissed.
“That’s usually the desired effect while drinking tequila,” I snapped. My eyes ran over him and I was ashamed at the hunger that prickled the bottom of my stomach, merging with the fury in a cocktail that somehow wasn’t displeasing as it should’ve been.
“You’re not drunk,” I continued, doing my best to ignore my body’s traitorous reactions. “Or high,” I shot it at him because I wanted to hurt him. Shame him. It was cruel.
And it worked.
“No, I’m painfully fuckin’ sober.” Something moved in his eyes, something from last night, that vulnerability that broke me.
I sucked in a ragged breath. “You’re not drunk, therefore you arguably have all of your facilities available to you, which means you should’ve known that dragging a woman bodily is not fucking okay,” I continued my voice almost a shrill scream.
Liam advanced with wild eyes.
I scuttled back, even the fearlessness offered by tequila was trumped with a man that was sobriety, a hangover, sex, heartbreak, and death all in one.
“What’s not fucking okay is my woman leaning across a bar, breathing the same air as a man without a soul or morals to trouble him,” he hissed, his breath hot and minty on my face.
“This whole fucking club has neither a soul nor morals,” I threw the words at him even though I didn’t believe them. “And distinguishing the damned members from the redeemed isn’t something that I’m spending my time doing.”
“We’re all damned,” he replied immediately.
“You ensured that,” I spat.
He flinched, but I didn’t notice. I was ready to unleash everything that I’d been holding onto. All my anger. I wanted to make it physical and fucking beat him with it.
“You were a coward,” I hissed. “Not coming home to us because you were scared. You’re a fucking coward now too.”
“I know,” he agreed.
I blinked, losing a little bit of my fuel.
He continued to advance. “I’m a coward. Not because I was afraid of coming home. But afraid of not having a home after what I’d become. You are my home, Peaches.” He stopped just shy of my body, not touching me.
“You were my North Star, my fucking guiding light, every day, every hour, every fucking moment. From the day I left you, ‘til that night in the alley.”
The words were as effective as a punch to the chest at winding me.
All of those words I’d wanted to fling fell flat.
I stared at him.
I devoured him with my eyes, need pulsating through my core. I itched to rip his clothes off, to fuck all of my pain into him.
“If I were an honorable man, I’d walk out that door,” he rasped, hands clenched beside him, staring beyond me to the door.
Sile
nced pulsated between us, as though it were a living thing. It scratched at my skin, tore at the flesh. My thighs clenched at my carnal response to the pain.
To Liam.
“I’m no longer an honorable man,” he finished.
“Thank god,” I breathed.
I don’t know who moved first. But I know I ran to him, jumped on him.
I know he caught me.
Then he kissed me.
Then he unraveled me.
* * *
It was late.
I was sober.
Kind of.
Because if I was completely sober, I wouldn’t have spoken into the darkness, with Liam’s arms around me, his breathing and tight body telling me he wasn’t sleeping either.
“I was afraid that I would miss you my entire life,” I whispered against his chest. “That I’d always be broken.” I traced the lines of ink and scars.
“You won’t have to miss me again,” he promised. “I’m not going anywhere.”
I didn’t look at him. “Yes, I’ll always miss you, whatever happens here.”
“Jesus,” he croaked out. “Can you stop talking like that?”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like I’m...”
“Dead?” I finished for him.
He flinched.
“It’s a hard habit to break,” I whispered. I stared into the night. “I want to know it all,” I continued. “I need to know it all.”
His entire body tightened.
“But I can’t,” I finished. “Not now. For whatever reason. Because I’m weak. Because I’m selfish. Because I need to pretend that I have Liam with me in the place I’m being held prisoner.”
His hands went to my hair, ran through the curls that were coming back after getting it chemically straightened. He didn’t speak for a long time. “I’m selfish too,” he said, voice a rasp. “Because I don’t want you to be let go. I fuckin’ want to be your jailer. Want to make sure you can’t leave this. Me. I want it and I convince myself it’s for the club.”
I froze.“You want me to be a prisoner with you?”
He moved me so I was on top of him, straddling him. I let out a gasp as his cock rubbed against my naked skin. “I want you any way I can have you.”
And he did have me.
Every way he could.
Chapter Fifteen
I thought I’d escaped successfully. Well, with a reasonably deep gash in my arm from scaling the wall and making an ungraceful plummet to the earth, but in the grand scheme of things, scraping your arm while escaping from an outlaw MC’s compound is the absolute best-case scenario.
I should’ve known better than to hope, in my world at least, there is no such thing as a best-case scenario.
The barrel of the gun pointed at me should’ve been what stopped me.
It wasn’t.
It was him.
Carving a figure out of the moonlight, his body a shadow, his soul one too.
I hadn’t seen him since I woke up alone in the morning. My body was bruised, so was everything inside me. Sleeping with him had changed everything and at the same time changed nothing.
The fact he was standing here pointing a gun at me as I tried to escape his club proved that.
I gritted my teeth. “You gonna shoot me?”
The gun didn’t lower.
“You can’t leave. You know fuckin’ better than that.” His voice was a whisper. But whispers in the moonlight were screams. “You know what happens if you try and leave here without our permission.”
I laughed. The sound was cold and ugly. “Without your permission? I’m guessing the only way I leave with your permission is in a body bag.”
The flinch was tiny. I only caught it because I was staring at him so intently. Eating him up, even though he had nothing to offer me but bitter memories and rancid reality.
“Jesus, Caroline,” he gritted out. “Get back inside.”
Something in his tone, the danger in it, the death in it, had something visceral inside me almost instinctively obeying. But I held firm. “No,” I said.
There was a long pause. “Don’t make me throw you over my fuckin’ shoulder.”
It wasn’t a threat.
Another part of me, driven by instinct, a dark carnal instinct craved that. Craved the touch of this familiar stranger. Craved it more than my next breath.
My panties were damp.
My blood was hot.
But I held fast.
“You can drag me back in by my fucking hair, I’ll just find another way to get out,” I told him. And it was the truth. Not just because I wanted him to tug at my hair, hurt me. Like he had last night. Because that pain distracted me from the other, deeper stuff. The stuff that was packed into his midnight stare.
“You got a death wish, Caroline?” he asked. It crawled against my skin, the way he worded that, the promise of death still etched into my presence here, if I put one foot—or more accurately two feet and two arms—out of line, I’d be signing my own death warrant.
I didn’t think that the flimsy friendships I’d made with the men here would change that. Or even the more solid friendships with Macy and (kind of) Scarlett.
Women had a lot more sway than the men in the club liked to admit, but they couldn’t go so far as to stop the club from punishing rats.
Maybe Hansen might hear me out if anyone but Liam found me, maybe not.
Fuck, I didn’t even know if Liam finding me was a good thing. I felt pockets of safety with him, like traveling in a plane with almost constant turbulence. Those fleeting patches of clean air gave you a false sense of safety that you weren’t about to plummet to your death.
Everything with Liam was rough air.
The plummet was inevitable.
“No,” I ground out the response to his question. Because I didn’t have a death wish, not even in my darkest of moments did I wish myself dead. “This is nothing to do with death and everything about life.”
Another pause.
There was a question in it.
I may know nothing about Jagger, apart from the fact he was prone to violence, fits of rage, he fucked like the devil, and was a complete stranger.
But I knew everything about Liam. And that small pause was Liam.
It had irritated me when we were together. The way he’d never actually ask me questions, he’d just wait, stare at me, will me into answering. That had been where I got my most effective interview tactic.
A lot had changed since then.
Everything, in fact.
Apart from this one small thing.
“Kate is pregnant,” I said finally unable to take the silence between us. Unable to breathe around it. I paused, thinking of the phone call I’d gotten while playing poker with Claw. “Well, she’s not pregnant anymore.” I called up the picture in my mind of my wrinkly, tiny nephew, the one I’d looked at after banishing myself to ‘my’ room. After seeing it, it took me about two seconds to decide to risk my life in order to meet my nephew. “She’s a mom now. And I’m an aunt. And he’s just under month premature. He’s okay. Kate’s okay. And for once, unlike with other milestones in my family’s life, I’m not on the other side of the world, causing them all worry. I’m not hiding away from their happiness so I have to fake my own.” I paused. I knew I’d have to fake a lot of things no matter what. My happiness was to be determined.
I sucked in a breath as if an inhale and exhale could banish reality.
“You can force me back in there.” I nodded to the clubhouse. “But I’ll just find another way out. I’m going to see my family, to be with them. I’m sure you don’t understand what that means since you abandoned yours, but mine still mean everything to me.”
I was telling myself that was the reason I was risking my life for this escape was for them. For my family, for my sister, so I didn’t miss out on another milestone like I had routinely done for the past fifteen years.
Anniversaries, birthdays, new jobs, new bo
yfriends and girlfriends, weddings. I’d missed most of it because I couldn’t stand my family moving on while I couldn’t. Or maybe I cared about them too much to show them how little I’d moved on, because then they couldn’t at all.
Now I had the chance to make it right.
Or make it a little better.
To hold my nephew.
That’s why I was escaping.
I wasn’t risking death to escape from Liam and the new truth between us. The new nearness amidst the distance. To escape my need for him.
A grip on my arm jerked me back into a present I could never escape.
“Let go of me,” I said through gritted teeth as Liam began to drag me.
“Not a chance.”
I didn’t fight, though the grip was painful. He wasn’t dragging me back into the club, as promised, he was dragging me out.
Jagger
He wasn’t sure if the decision was made by his cock, his heart or his soul. But he didn’t have the latter two, and his cock had been telling him to do exactly what Caroline invited—drag her back into the clubhouse by the hair, fuck her until she passed out and lock her in his room until he figured out how the fuck to control her.
But his head told him that that was crossing the line. Whatever was left of the fucking line. It was making sure that Caroline would never trust him, never stop hating him.
As it was, he knew the chances of her not hating him were slim. Even if she didn’t hate him, there was no way she would forgive him.
Some things were unforgivable.
What he’d done was unforgivable.
To her.
And now to his club.
Who he abandoned tonight.
And he’d been dreading this fucking phone call, but he had to answer it, he owed his best friend and his president that.
“Where the fuck are you?” Hansen demanded. “We have the Russians coming. We’ve got runs to make. Oh, and we’re in the middle of a fucking war with Miguel Fernandez.”
Jagger gritted his teeth, looking up at the motel room he’d rented after he’d stopped at a Walmart to get Caroline and him the shit they’d need for the almost twenty-hour ride. He had to convince her they needed to stop, because he could ride for a long time, but he was fucked. And also, because the closer he got to Castle Springs, the more he felt like he was going to lose it. He was riding back into the town that he promised himself he’d never return to as the man he was now.
