Zero Hour (Gypsy Brothers #8)

by Lili St. Germain

  ZERO HOUR

  Copyright©2015 by Lili Saint Germain

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance it bears to reality is entirely coincidental.

  Produced by Lili Saint Germain at Lili Saint Germain Publishing.

  All rights reserved.

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  NOTE

  QUOTE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  OTHER BOOKS

  BEFORE YOU BEGIN!

  You’re reading this book because you’ve read the Gypsy Brothers series. Did you know Lili also released a novella called ALTERNATE which has chapters from Dornan, Jase and Elliot’s point of view?

  It’s highly recommended (but not essential) that you read ALTERNATE before this book.

  DOWNLOAD IT HERE FOR FREE

  It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood.

  - MacBeth, SHAKESPEARE

  CHAPTER ONE

  JULIETTE

  There’s a storm coming.

  I know this even before I open my eyes and gulp at the air, my gaze glued to the ceiling as I try to catch my breath. I know this even as I turn my head to the right and press shaking fingers against his stubbled cheek, as I look into the eyes of the son and realize they’re not his father’s.

  “Hey,” Jase whispers gently, his voice devoid of that throaty rasp he gets when he’s been asleep. His dark brown eyes are bloodshot, and I can tell he’s barely rested. I feel selfish, because I managed to get a couple of hours, and he’s gotten none. Again.

  I soften as he presses those full, lush lips to my fingers. “Good morning.”

  I am safe. Dornan is dead. Jase is with me. It’s my mantra, words that I repeat over and over.

  I am safe.

  Dornan is dead.

  Jase is with me.

  The second and third are true, but the first is a lie. We’re no safer than we were the day we were born into the Gypsy Brothers Motorcycle Club, pawns in a war we knew nothing about yet were created because of. There’s Jase, conceived in some illicit tryst, born in secret, hundreds of miles away from our fathers. His mother was smart; she likely hightailed it out of L.A. the day she peed on the stick and it gave her two lines. And then me, daughter of the President of the Gypsy Brothers, born and cradled in the very arms of evil himself. Dornan Ross. He wasn’t my daddy, but he was the first person who ever held me, the first person who ever touched me apart from the doctor who caught me as my mother farewelled me into the world and then pretty much abandoned me.

  Our beginnings couldn’t have been more different, but our blood meant we ended up in exactly the same place: here.

  But my bones don’t lie, and they tell me there’s a storm brewing outside. I squeeze Jase’s hand once, certain I won’t be getting any more sleep today.

  He pulls his hand away and turns away from me, moving into a sitting position on his side of the bed. “I’m taking a shower,” he says, getting up and going into the bathroom.

  I watch, silently, as he closes the door.

  The lock clicks over on the other side and I flinch.

  He’s locking me out.

  He’s never done that before.

  It’s probably nothing personal, I try to assuage myself. Everyone needs their time alone.

  I hear the water come on, the glass shower door clink shut, and I watch the door.

  It feels personal.

  He’s locking me out.

  He’s pushing me away.

  I can’t say I blame him.

  Honestly, after all the shit that’s gone down?

  I’m surprised he’s still here at all.

  CHAPTER TWO

  JASE

  Jase …. The baby … It’s yours.

  I don’t sleep anymore. Was never great at sleeping anyway, but now, sleep is something I rarely do.

  It’s too late to stop the contractions.

  Juliette fights sleep just as much as me, but she’s been through more than I have. Her body—and her mind—are closer to breaking point than mine. She’s still recovering from the torture and the mental abuse my father rained down on her in the three months she vanished, the three months when I fought to find her.

  I still can’t believe I was such an ass. After the way we fought, I assumed she’d left, and my father’s cryptic excuse that she’d left town should have alerted me. But I was hurting. She broke my fucking heart, showed up like a ghost, made me fall in love with her all over again, and then she walked out and went back to him. And she had my baby inside her when she did it. Neither of us knew, and that’s the worst part of all. If she’d stayed. If I’d found her sooner. Maybe our daughter would be here with us.

  I know why she went back to Dornan after he woke up from his coma. I’d been on my own quest for vengeance for three blood-fueled years, since my father let me out of the cage he’d locked me in the day Juliette died. The day I was forced to watch as my father and my brothers almost killed her. And the birth. It’s been eight months since we lost the baby, six since she shot and killed Dornan. We had a brief respite in Colorado after shit went down in Furnace Creek, but it wasn’t long before the Cartel closed ranks and came baying for our blood. We ran to New York, then Virginia, and now we’re holed up in a shitty walk-up in Miami, not because we don’t have money but because we’re trying to blend in. They keep finding us in the expensive boltholes, so we thought we’d change tacks and sandwich ourselves in the seediest part of town, amongst the pimps and the drug dealers. I shaved my hair off, military-short, and let my clean-shaven face morph into a three-day stubble; Juliette’s hair is still long, because I refused to let her cut it short just to try and evade them, but it’s bright red now. She jokes that it makes her look like a hooker, but her smile fades too quickly when she says it, and I know she’s completely fucking confused about who she is and how she fits into this world.

  We’re a sorry-looking pair. I won’t sleep, she won’t eat, and between the two of us, we fit in to Biscayne Boulevard’s worst apartment block just fine.

  It’s my fault our baby died, Julz said, after we left the hospital empty-handed.

  It is. It’s not. You didn’t know any better. Why didn’t you just tell me what he’d done to you?

  All the things I didn’t say.

  There’s only so long a person can operate on autopilot, pulling together the pieces of charred wreckage and escaping one last time before the big one hits. There are only so many places you can hide before you just plain run out of dark corners to cower in.

  I’m not a coward. I don’t hide.
But here, now?

  I don’t know what else to do to keep her safe.

  She’s right here beside me, but I can feel her slipping away. I’m losing her. I’m losing us. I don’t know what to do. It’s like being trapped in a three-by-three cell all over again. It’s like being held under water and deciding when to take that first gasp of water that’s going to make you drown. It’s like holding hands, both your palms slicked with your collective blood, in a fucking nightmare that never ends.

  Sometimes, when I’m really tired, I see things. I see him. In the corner of my eye, Dornan Ross looms, even though he’s dead and buried. I don’t tell Julz what I see, because she’ll probably start to see him as well.

  Shit, she probably already does.

  Sometimes, I can’t tell if I’m starting to become him. My father. Dornan. The way I am, the things I’ve done—they make Juliette’s sins look like child’s play.

  Of course, I’d never tell her that. I’ll never tell her the things I’ve done.

  It doesn’t mean she won’t find out anyway.

  A girl. It’s a girl. Barely as long as an envelope in my open palms.

  My daughter. I still remember the way my tears fell onto her tiny little face as she lived and died all in one breath.

  I miss her.

  CHAPTER THREE

  JULIETTE

  As soon as Jase is out of the bathroom, his bare chest still covered in glistening beads of water, I pounce on him.

  Yeah. I’m that desperate.

  He attempts a small smile as he tries to push past me, to the small duffel bag that holds his clothes.

  I don’t let him. I lean down and suck his nipple into my mouth, smiling as his cock reacts when my teeth brush against his sensitive skin.

  “Julz,” he breathes, his cock swelling against my belly. The way he says my name doesn’t make me melt, though. It makes me swallow away tears and kiss him harder so he won’t talk anymore. The way he says my name, it’s like he doesn’t want to be here with me at all. I hear his internal struggle. I see his frustration. I feel the rage that rolls off him in waves, the rage I thought I’d only ever see in Dornan. I was wrong. It’s in the boy I love, too, like a poison in his bloodstream. He’s so angry. He’s so angry at me for the things I’ve done, and he thinks I can’t see it, but I can. Even when he makes love to me, he’s angry.

  Before I can reach up to kiss him again, Jase takes my wrists and spins me around, kicking at my ankles to open my legs wider. I’m already soaked just at the thought of him inside me, and my breath hitches in my throat as his fingers pull my panties to the side and slide along my wet pussy.

  He pushes me down so my face is against the mattress, my ass in the air and slams his cock into me in one excruciating motion that hurts and burns and almost makes me come. We have sex right there, me bent over the side of the bed and Jase fucking me from behind, hard and fast and carnal, and it’s the only fifteen minutes of the day that I feel anything except broken and afraid.

  I’m such a fucking stereotype. After he pulls out and comes over my back and my ass, he leaves me alone on the bed, naked and marked. I wait until he leaves the room, and then I bury my face in the comforter and cry.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  JASE

  It makes me sick to my stomach that I don’t want to touch Julz. It’s almost torturous having to fuck her, because I simultaneously want to push her away and fuck her until she’s crying. I can’t reconcile the way I want to consume her and reject her all at once. Well, I can, actually.

  I still haven’t told her about what happened after she ‘died’, after Elliot whisked her away from the hospital in Los Angeles and hid her in Nebraska six-and-change years ago. Still haven’t told her the things my father made me do, the perverted things I’d come to enjoy. She thinks I’m good inside.

  She’s deluded.

  The girl’s smart, though. She knows there’s something dark inside me that wants to come out. She keeps asking me to tell her, with that soft throaty whisper and those endless green eyes tilted up at me. She wants to know all the secrets that fester inside me, but if I ever, ever told her, she’d know that I was worse than my father ever was.

  They say the apple never falls far from the tree, and I’d say this apple never fucking fell, period. I’m the shiny apple that might’ve looked the best on the surface—different to the rest of them, full of promise that there was another way—but they broke me. They made me worse than any of them could ever be.

  I hurt people. I hurt women.

  I killed people.

  And that’s not even the worst of it.

  The first man I ever killed was John Portland, and I cried as I pulled the trigger. Yeah, I was a stupid kid and he begged me to do it, and yeah, it was a mercy killing, but it doesn’t matter. Point is, his life was the first one I took—I killed Juliette’s father, for Christ’s sake—and after I ended his life with a single bullet, delivered in the dark in a dirty basement, I didn’t stop.

  I couldn’t stop.

  The second person I ever killed wasn’t a mercy killing. It was a cop. I killed a cop because my father handed me a gun and said it was me or him, and I chose him. I always chose them.

  I was a fucking coward. A lovesick, blood-fueled fucking coward.

  The last person I killed was Donny, my last surviving brother, and that was eight months ago. I ripped his fucking eyeball out before I butchered him, and the one single thing that stopped me from dismembering him was knowing that Juliette was watching me. Her screams broke through my haze of red, as I took Donny’s own knife and sunk it into his flesh, again and again, so deep it hit bone more than once. I severed the tendons that made his arms work, so he was putty underneath me. I straddled my own brother and thrust upon him the vengeful punishment that they all deserved. For Julz. For my mother. For everything.

  I killed him, and I haven’t killed since.

  I’m hungry. My palms are itching. It’s torture.

  I don’t know how long I’m going to last before I have to draw blood again.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  JULIETTE

  I feel like I’m losing Jase.

  He goes away and leaves me here with Elliot, and I don’t know where he’s going. Since the Cartel found us in Colorado, they found Elliot and his family, too. We’ve all been moving and running, keeping our heads low and our guns drawn until we can figure this shit out. The DEA makes all sorts of promises about arresting Julian, Emilio’s brother and the new kingpin of this whole operation, but they keep stalling. They need more evidence. They need a stronger case. In the meantime, Elliot’s dragging his ex-girlfriend and his little girl around the country, holing up in a different place every week or two. His little daughter is so freaked out, she’ll barely speak. Elliot’s a wreck, and Amy seems to be the only one holding it together. She’s a psychologist, so maybe she’s got some kind of technique to avoiding freaking the fuck out that the rest of us lack.

  We’re all just sitting ducks, or at least that’s what it feels like. If we do anything, the DEA notices.

  The DEA is keeping us waiting, feeding us empty promises while they continue to remind us what we owe them. Testimony in court. They say Jase and I will get immunity for the things we’ve done, so long as we testify against the Cartel and the Gypsy Brothers, but is it really that simple? Will it really be a case of us just telling our stories and then being given a free pass? The way Tommy tells it¸ the people in charge of the case are pissed that I started killing them all off. They’re pissed that Dornan’s sons and his father Emilio are dead, and they’re even more pissed that Tommy turned a blind eye back in Furnace Creek and gave me the time I needed to shoot Dornan dead once and for all. Tommy’s been kicked off the case and reassigned to an undercover gig somewhere on the west coast, Elliot’s being blackmailed to work for the DEA, and Jase and I have the strangest feeling that we’re being set up by the very people who claim to want to help us. It’s the one thing we can talk about without averte
d eyes and misunderstandings. Figuring out what the DEA want with us, and how we’re all going to get out of this alive and intact. We can’t talk about Dornan … can’t talk about the baby we lost … but we can talk about the fucking Drug Enforcement Agency until our faces go numb.

  The DEA says they need more evidence before they can arrest Emilio’s brother, Julian Ross, and bring him to trial. But I’m not so sure that’s what they need.

  What they need is a drum of gasoline and a match. What they need is to trap every goddamned Gypsy Brother and Il Sangue Cartel member inside the clubhouse and set fire to the fucking place. How else will any of us ever be safe? We might be standing now, but it’s only a matter of time before they find us and kill us, piece by piece. It’s the thing that keeps me awake at night: not if, but when. When are they going to find us?

  What are they going to do to us when they do?

  I might have survived what Dornan did to me, but I was different then. Younger. Stupider. I’ve had too much time to think since I got out of the cage he locked me in. I’ve lost our daughter. I’ve caused so many people to be living in real fear of being cut down at any moment.

  I’m the reason Elliot’s grandmother was murdered. Dornan might’ve used his hands to beat her to death, but it was because of me and the things I did to his sons and his club.

  Mostly, though, I’ve had too much time to sit and think about my vengeance. How it’s a false victory, because it never ends, not really. There’s always going to be somebody else who wants their pound of flesh. I could have stayed dead, stayed in Nebraska and cheered the fuck up and maybe convinced Elliot to stay with me. I could have been a normal person. And instead I’ve created a war that spans countries and families for generations, a war paid for in lives and blood. Terrifyingly, a war where every side believes they’re doing the right thing, because nobody can remember anymore where it all began. Who threw the first stone. Who fired the first bullet.

  Who stole the first heart they weren’t supposed to steal.

  Yeah, I think about revenge a lot. When I’m thinking of the way the light dimmed in Dornan’s dying eyes and the way he said you killed my sons. How beautiful it was, and how hollow.