Avery

by Addison Jane

  “Fuck,” I cursed, feeling my balls begin to tighten.

  It never fucking took long with this woman.

  Her touch made me want to come.

  Her voice.

  Her fucking smell.

  There was something about her I’d never found in other women. Maybe it was how I fucking got off on seeing her happy, seeing her in utter bliss. I fucking loved it. She deserved that shit more than she thought she did, and I loved being the one to help her get there.

  “I wanna come. Please make me come, Shotgun,” she pleaded, needing it so desperately but not quite able to get herself over that hurdle.

  I forced her forward, this time, her hips pressed into the counter, lifting one of her legs onto it as well. Then I grabbed a fistful of her hair, pulling it back just hard enough to create that bite she fucking loved as I pounded my cock hard and fast inside her.

  She pinched at her nipple with one hand while the other was braced on the counter.

  “Yes! Oh, God…” She groaned loudly as her orgasm hit her hard, and she struggled to hold herself up, a wave of satisfaction and bliss sweeping through her. Her pussy pulsated, strangling my cock as I pounded harder and faster. The tension in my balls built fast, and I could feel them tightening, ready to explode.

  “Fuck!” I gasped and slammed forward with one last, powerful thrust, filling her with cum. “Damn,” I growled as my whole body shuddered, shockwaves from her orgasm still tightening around my length and drawing every fucking thing out of me, refusing to let go.

  When the shudder going up my spine finally eased, and I stopped hearing my heart racing in my ears, I lowered her leg to the floor and slipped out of her. My lips trailed down her neck, my hands holding her hips because her body was still unsteady.

  But the best kind of fucking unsteady.

  She turned her head and grabbed the back of my neck, pulling me forward so she could claim my mouth. Her tongue ran along the seam of my lips, begging for entrance, and I happily obliged. I had no doubt she could taste herself on my tongue as we battled inside my mouth, but she never complained. Her kiss grew deeper as she explored.

  A smirk on my face, I finally took a step back, brushing my hand over my forehead, my skin covered in a light sheen of sweat. “That’s a sexy shot.” I chuckled, folding my arms across my chest as I took in her ass cheeks highlighted with my handprints and cum dripping down her legs. “Fucking sexy.”

  “You made the mess,” she noted, nodding to said mess. “You clean it up.”

  “I touch you now while I’m still slightly hard, and we are fucking. Again. All over this fucking place.”

  She grinned, turning around and leaning back against the bar. “Oh… promises, promises.”

  Fuck.

  AVERY

  Life was quickly becoming something I didn’t recognize.

  But God, did I love it.

  Gage was growing, learning, and developing every day, but so was Shotgun. The two of them were teaching each other, and it was starting to seem like Adrian and I were there to watch or help along the way. And that was how it should be.

  Between school, work, and being a surrogate mom to that precious baby boy, Shotgun was lucky if he got even a moment of my attention. He was now the second most important man in my life.

  I shuffled into class like a zombie, wishing I’d opted to stay home today.

  Adulting was hard.

  Doing the right thing for my education, even harder.

  “Okay, I’m going to send Harper and Jake up the rows with these buckets, and you are going to turn your phone off and place it inside one of those buckets—” The groans from the fifty or so people in the lecture theater were loud and annoying. “If you do not want to place your phone into the bucket, you may leave. Now!” Mr. Singer pointed to the door to emphasize his point, and to my surprise, at least six people got up and walked out, their precious phones clutched in their sweaty palms.

  When the door was shut behind them, and the two buckets full of our only contact to the outside world, my foot began to tap nervously.

  “Our guest today is someone who works deep within the criminology field and has brought along some evidence and real crime scene photos,” Mr. Singer explains, walking over to the door. “The reason you can’t have your phones is because these photos are a part of a real police investigation and cannot, under any circumstances, be seen by the public or anyone outside this room. Are we understood?”

  A chorus of understanding and also excitement swept through the lecture theater, and Mr. Singer pushed the door open, allowing my worst nightmare to step inside.

  My foot bounced as Garrett Drake walked across the front of the room. His suit was tidy, but I quickly noted the handful of wrinkles showing he hadn’t had it pressed for the occasion. The same with the sprinkle of dark hair that decorated his usually clean-cut and polished jawline.

  The man wasn’t the same polished human he once had been.

  Austin breathing down his neck, desperate for any kind of something that could put him away. Shotgun with men asking questions around town, trying to figure out just where the hell he could be hiding Emma’s sister, Thayleah.

  The spotlight was on him.

  He was on the back foot.

  And you know how I knew why? Because instead of sitting back and letting them search, he’d let his ego win, and now he was here, in my class, determined to take a dig at me because that was how he was going to get at Shotgun.

  He would see it as a win.

  And men like him had to fucking win.

  Though, just that thought made my stomach sink as I realized I was the target here.

  Should I leave?

  Not give him the opportunity?

  Kid was sitting in the parking lot waiting for me.

  Did I go get him?

  He’d asked the teacher to remove anything I could have contacted someone with for a reason.

  “Forensic Pathology,” he spoke loudly, his eyes scanning the room. Looking for something, and I knew just what. Me. When his eyes finally caught mine, his flat eyes lit up, and he flicked his computer open, the screen that took up almost the entire lecture room wall. “I recommend, if you have a weak stomach, you either look away or exit the room because this is not going to be pretty.”

  Another four people scurried from the room, while a few others opted to simply face the rear of the class.

  I should have done either.

  I should have known that asshole had something up his fucking sleeve.

  The picture lit up—the gasp that left my mouth came out like a sob.

  Eyes turned to me, some sympathetic, thinking I was shocked by a picture of the dead body.

  The skin pale.

  The lips blue.

  The damage to their skin.

  The slice across the throat.

  All things I’d seen before.

  In person.

  Oh, Micah.

  “Let me tell you about this case…”

  The icy sensation started in the pit of my belly, working its way outward. I almost welcomed it for a moment, this numbing feeling flooding through my body as he flicked through another picture, then another and another, each more gruesome than the last.

  My sister’s body pulled apart on this table.

  Cut open.

  Her organs casually lying beside her.

  All for what? So they could check her appendix and say, ‘Well, it wasn’t that. It was probably the way her boss gutted her like a fucking fish.’

  Hadn’t she been through fucking enough?

  Hadn’t she suffered enough already?

  The tears that trickled down my cheeks were silent. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of more than that. Fuck no. Not even when my insides were twisting, my lips zipped tightly to keep the vomit from escaping as I watched a video of some bastard walking through my sister’s crime scene.

  The police talking through what happened.

  How she’d tried t
o leave.

  How she’d run, but he’d caught her like a game of cat and mouse.

  And just to slap me in the fucking face—one cop noting the way she was dressed and how maybe she had tempted and teased him too much.

  I pressed my fist to my mouth, bile hitting my tongue before I could force it back down.

  They didn’t fucking know.

  And that bastard didn’t get to judge her because she simply trusted a man not to kill her.

  Though none of that had anything to do with his job, in particular. I could tell my fellow students found it fascinating, their eyes wide and focused on every gory damn detail. Especially when Garrett moved on, explaining how she died, how he would have determined her death had the case been his, and also other evidence he could identify that could have aided the police with their investigation and helped them put the suspect away.

  “The police don’t just want to know how someone died. They want to know whether there are other things that have happened which they can use to charge the offender with. For example, they would have wanted to know, was she beaten?” he explained.

  Yes.

  “Was she raped?”

  Yes.

  His eyes came to rest right with me. “Had she still been alive when he slit her throat and let her bleed out on the floor?”

  Also fucking yes.

  And the joy in his face told me he fucking knew that too.

  I needed to get out, my heart racing and my clammy hands no longer able to hold my damn pencil, but as I began to throw my shit together haphazardly, his slideshow changed—a new image lighting up the screen.

  This one I didn’t recognize.

  Not at first.

  The body lay face down, the image was much older and grainier. The carpet on the floor was dated and stained with a pool of blood. The décor around kind of bland and boring, desperately in need of a bit of color.

  “This crime was one I’ve looked into, one I found interest in,” Garrett rambled, pacing around the front of the room. He paused at the computer, zooming in on the body, and as things began to focus in a little more, I noticed the Brothers by Blood MC logo on the back of the man’s club cut. “You see, this crime was deemed self-defense… yet a lot of the crime scene evidence pointed toward the opposite. This is where a forensic pathologist can be important. We can look for things like defensive wounds. Of which there were none found.”

  The way he looked across the room at me was so fucking high and mighty.

  The I know your secret look, getting kind of fucking old.

  I knew who that man was, and I knew why Shotgun had shot him.

  “Excuse me.”

  My voice was loud.

  It didn’t shake.

  Or cower.

  Despite the way my body wanted to break down. How it wanted to give in and just crawl back inside the deep dark hole that was losing Micah. But instead, I stood, Garrett’s eyes lighting up as he eagerly moved closer to me, delighted he’d drawn me so far into his game that I’d put my hand up, now willing to play.

  “Weren’t you just released from prison for beating your wife almost to death last year?”

  The smug look dropped from his face instantly, his lip curling when a wave of whispers moved through the crowded room, even Mr. Singer’s eyes growing wider as he took a step back, putting distance between him and Garrett.

  “Aren’t you also a suspect in her murder, given she was slaughtered less than twenty-four hours after you were released from prison.”

  “All right, all right!” Mr. Singer finally called, trying to calm the class while Garrett Drake glared at me, the tension in the room so fucking thick you could carve it with a knife.

  “What do you think those forensic reports will say?” I called over the commotion.

  “Enough!” Mr. Singer bellowed.

  I knew I’d pushed a button—the big red one—the one that said don’t push.

  Oops.

  SHOTGUN

  “What kind of doctor is he again?”

  “A pathologist,” Auron answered, leaning back into the hard wooden bench that sat in front of the hospital’s main entrance. The medical board of the hospital was meeting with Garrett today to determine whether he was getting his job back. The boys and I figured we would meet him outside after, let him know we were the reason he wasn’t.

  Slate frowned, peeking around the pillar he was leaning against. “I’m gonna need a little more than that, brother.”

  “There are many paths to pathology, but pathologists are generally the doctors who diagnose. They are the ones who study your medical tests, like blood, fluid, or biopsies, and detect any kind of disease or abnormality and what it is so it can be treated.” Auron’s ability to pull this kind of information from the depths of somewhere in his brain always astounded me, though it was usually just a bunch of words I didn’t understand. This time, though, I was hearing him, connecting the dots and placing the information into the back of my mind in case I needed it later. Anything I could use to get one up on this fucker.

  “And this is important?” Slate confirmed.

  The way Auron’s brow knotted gave me the answer I needed even without the explanation—yes, pathology is important, and Auron believed Slate was an idiot for asking, though none of the rest of us wanted to admit we were wondering the same thing. Just a lot quieter.

  “Yes. Without pathology, you would say, hey doctor, what’s wrong with me. And they would respond, I don’t know.” I snorted, catching my laughter in my hand and trying to cover it with a cough.

  “So, he thinks he’s God,” Shake murmured. “He’s the one who looks at your shit and says, oh yeah, you have cancer, and it’s bad. You’re gonna die. Or like, oh no, you’re clear, today you still get to live!”

  Auron grinned, though it seemed more like a teacher would give a kindergartener when they got the answer correct, but in a roundabout kind of way only small children can offer explanations. Small children and apparently, Shake. “Yes, something in that ballpark, though our friend Garrett’s records show he has also worked in forensic pathology.”

  No one said anything.

  We simply waited until Auron realized we still didn’t fucking get it.

  “Oh, like medical examiners.”

  Still nothing.

  “They do post-mortems and determine the cause of death in unexplained circumstances.”

  And there it was.

  “Awesome.” Shake chuckled, shoving away from the hospital wall. “Not just a psychopath, but a psychopath who knows exactly how to get away with murder.”

  It was no joke. This guy was prepared, he was practically fucking trained in how to kill and not get caught. “I know I’m not the only one wondering now just ho—”

  “How many women he’s killed,” Mix cut in, his lip curled. “I bet you’re right. I bet he’s gotten away with it so many times at this point, he thinks he’s untouchable. But there is one bonus.”

  “I need fucking something.” I groaned, squaring my shoulders and shifting my feet.

  “Men like Garrett, who always get away with shit, often start to make mistakes later on in their criminal careers,” he explained with a smile. “They start to get too cocky, too confident, and they fuck up.”

  Those cracks were already starting to show, his ego leading him to Avery’s criminology class today, despite my warning to stay the fuck away.

  He should have known better.

  Because the little pushes I was giving before, making sure he knew the club was there, following him, watching his every move, those were nothing compared to the push he was about to get. It could just be the shove that sends him over the edge.

  “Could be sooner than we think,” I noted, nodding at the ruffled looking Garrett as he stepped off the elevator and walked straight toward us, his eyes down, his mouth moving. “Hard day?” I called as he stepped out of the sliding doors.

  His head jerked up, his foot catching on a crack in the concrete a
nd almost sending him tumbling to the floor.

  Shake managed to catch him before he fell flat on his face. “Woah there, buddy.” Shake grins, dusting off Garrett’s jacket while the guy was still flustered and confused as to why most of the club he was starting a war with were there taunting him.

  “Meeting didn’t go quite how you expected it to go?” I questioned, stepping around in front of him as he shoved Shake away and fought to get his shit under control.

  “How di…” he answered trailing off, his eyes flicking from one person to the next before landing on me and narrowing dramatically. “Ah… I should have known you were the type of man to shove your dick in everything. First… my wife. Now… my personal life. Though, I am impressed your reach is that far. You have to know who is the one holding the cards here, right?”

  “Because you have Thayleah?”

  Garrett was careful, looking around before he outed himself. “This is a big show and tell for someone who doesn’t even know if the person he’s looking for is still breathing.”

  It was meant to shock me.

  Meant to throw me back onto the backfoot, so he felt like he had some space to breathe.

  But I was learning fast.

  “I know she is because your ego is far too fucking big to keep that to yourself and not rub it in my face.”

  His cackle of laughter had me screwing up my nose, the man who was caught off guard a second ago, finding his feet again. “Then what was the point of this, Shotgun? For you to let me know you have a heads-up on my schedule? To try and make me panic because this one hospital values some fucking group of guys who can ride motorcycles and asks for donations occasionally? That’s a joke, and this…” he sweeps his hand across the spread of my brothers, who now stand behind me, “… this is a joke.”

  “A joke,” I repeated while shaking my head.

  “Pathetic,” he spat.

  I nodded, fighting a smile as I turned to walk away. “I get it. Making it so you don’t have a job to come back to, that’s amateur hour, right? Come on, boys, let’s go back to the drawing board…” I paused, reaching into my club cut and pulling a piece of paper from my pocket. “Oh, shit, I almost forgot to give you this.” I held it out, though it took him a few seconds of examining the faces in front of him to actually take the folded paper from my hand and unfold it.