The Devil's Scars (The Road Devils MC Book 1)

by Marysol James

  Scars entered the room, everyone shuffled over to clear a path for him to get to the front of the room next to Wolf, who was standing at the head of the table. Wolf nodded at him, Scars nodded back. Despite the fact that there were almost thirty men in leather cuts in the room, it was completely silent, save for some shuffling of boots on the floor, a cleared throat here and there, some rustling of clothing.

  Scars stood then, massive hands in his jeans pockets, and waited. Just waited for whatever the fuck it was that demanded a full club turn-out on such short notice. It had been almost four months since Wolf had last demanded everyone come to Church – the MC slang for a mandatory club meeting – and at that infamous meeting, he’d publicly announced the banishment of several members who’d been secretly talking to Dawson for ages. Scars still internally grimaced when he recalled the overflowing humiliation and rage at that meeting.

  “OK,” Wolf said abruptly, and literally, to a man, they stopped breathing. “We got a problem. A fuckin’ big one.”

  He reached behind him, and Scars saw a small cardboard box sitting on the top shelf of the cabinet. Wolf set the box on the table, and they all looked at it. It was about the size of a magazine, plain brown, unmarked with any kind of stamp, no label or address or name.

  “Arrow found this tonight, when he was lockin’ up Blue Dragon,” Wolf said. “It was sittin’ right in front of the back storage room door. The one leadin’ out to the dumpster and private lot.”

  Everyone nodded, still staring fixedly at the box.

  “He opened it up, thinkin’ it might be somethin’ for the parlor that got misdelivered to the back door somehow. Zoe ordered a bunch of supplies last-minute and in a rush, and they’ve been arrivin’ all week at all hours. The boys at the garage and the bar have accepted delivery on the parlor’s behalf more than once.” Wolf narrowed his gray eyes. “But it ain’t for the parlor. I don’t fuckin’ know what it’s for – but we got a message, boys. A serious one.”

  He picked up the box, turned to Scars, held it out. Curious, Scars looked inside, and his stomach jumped when he saw the contents.

  “Fuck, Wolf,” he said softly. “Is it real?”

  “Yeah.” Wolf faced his brothers again, carefully tipped up the box on its side so everyone could see, but not so far that anything fell out. “It’s a finger.”

  Dark murmurs greeted both the grisly sight and Wolf’s words. Nobody was all that freaked out by a ripped-off, bloody and jagged finger sitting in a box, if truth be told. Hell, they’d all seen and done far worse things in terms of mutilation to a human body. The former Enforcers – Ice, Cain, and the Baylor twins, Dux and Drake – had barely blinked at the finger, naturally, but even the boys who’d rarely been sent out to take out rivals and enemies weren’t squeamish.

  No… this wasn’t about the rather mild (for an ex-one-percenter MC) gore factor. What had the blood running cold in their veins was that it was a middle finger. Worse, a woman’s middle finger.

  “At first I thought it might be Zee’s,” Wolf said, raising his voice above the babble, and the men shut up immediately. “But she doesn’t wear nail polish at all. Ever. Besides, I talked to her after the box arrived, real casual, and she’s fine.”

  A sigh of relief went around the room.

  “So. Who’s usin’ a woman’s finger to tell us ‘fuck you’, do you think, Scars?” Wolf asked softly, in that dangerous tone that every man recognized from the old days. “Who’s comin’ to mind?”

  “Oh, hey, Prez,” Scars said, a bit alarmed. “I agree that he’s the obvious suspect, but we all know him. This is not Dawson’s style. He’d never do it himself, and he’d never sign off on it, either.”

  “You think?”

  “I really do.” Scars was firm; he thought lots of bad shit about Dawson, naturally, but he wasn’t about to start blaming the idiot for everything, as tempting as it was. “Now… I’m not so sure about some of his boys, mind you.”

  “You think one of his crew might have done this behind his back?”

  “Maybe. We don’t know all of the guys over there, but the guys that we do know – our former brothers – have already demonstrated a lack of loyalty to their President. If they can fuck you over, why wouldn’t they do the same to Dawson?”

  “Hmmmm.” Wolf stared at the finger. “We need to get some intel, guys.”

  Kansas and Cole looked up, even as everyone looked over at them. In the previous incarnation of The Road Devils, they’d been the guys who collected any info the Prez asked for. They’d had the contacts, the charm, and the smarts to cajole, tease, coax whatever they’d needed to know out of people… and then they’d had Ice, Cain, Dux, and Drake if they’d needed a different form of persuasion to get people to cooperate and talk.

  “Where do we begin?” Kansas asked, all business. Like he’d never stopped being the main information-gatherer for the MC. “With the owner of the finger, or with who sent it?”

  “The sender,” Wolf said without any hesitation. “Take the box, check the cameras around the businesses, check vehicles and plates. And everyone here – you think if you saw anybody around the back door of Blue Dragon, or anyone who you see now was maybe sketchy, even if you didn’t think much about it at the time. Anythin’ that you think of, no matter how small, you tell Scars, Kansas, and Cole. Am I bein’ clear?”

  Everyone nodded.

  “Prez?” Saint said, clearly hesitant. “A question?”

  “Yeah?” Wolf nailed the man with his famous ferocious glower. “Shoot.”

  “Do we – do we tell Zee about this? I mean… this box showed up at the tattoo place, right? Not Satan’s or the garage, so do you think… well. Do you think she needs to know?”

  “No.” Wolf snapped the word, and the other men all nodded again, accepting the President’s decision without question. “This ain’t got nothin’ to do with Zee. The box showed up at the parlor back door because it’s the only one with no real foot traffic and no camera at all, which pisses me off now, so Jinx, you get on that. But anyway, how could anyone drop a box off at Satan’s, with all the comin’ and goin’? Or the garage, which is nothin’ but huge windows facin’ every direction? Nah… whoever it was didn’t even walk up to the parlor front door, they snuck around back. This ain’t about Blue Dragon, or its staff, or Zee. It’s about gettin’ us the message without bein’ found out.”

  Scars listened to Wolf, his stomach tight with worry. Yeah, OK, what Wolf was saying made sense, on every level – but something wasn’t sitting right with Scars. A part of him wasn’t so sure that the choice of location was totally unimportant. After all, the person could have couriered the box to the clubhouse, right, put Wolf’s name on it, and had it delivered direct to the President’s desk.

  So why the roundabout delivery, why risk discovery, just to leave a box on the ground where it could have been damaged or destroyed, maybe carried off by mountain animals? They came down around the clubhouse sometimes, and went through the bar dumpsters for food, so it wasn’t totally unheard of.

  Maybe – just maybe – the woman’s finger was intended to be received by the only woman who worked at the tattoo place? Maybe this had something to do with Zoe’s arrival back in Denver? The timing was a bit worrying, after all, seeing as she’d shown up barely two weeks before, went on a supply ordering spree… and suddenly weird packages were appearing at the door of the business she managed? Packages with woman’s body parts?

  Yeah, I don’t know. Fuck. Am I paranoid? Am I not paranoid enough? Maybe?

  Then again, if Scars was thinking about timing, he had to take into consideration the fact that he and Wolf had just been to The Blood Crew’s clubhouse that very goddamn week. It was their first face-to-face with Dawson since he’d stabbed them in the back, and wasn’t it more likely that the box had something to do with that meeting than Zoe Parish?

  He didn’t know. He just
knew that he didn’t like it. He didn’t like thinking about some guy sneaking around the place that Zoe worked, watching and waiting, then getting so damn close to her, without her knowing. Without anyone knowing.

  Because there’s something else, isn’t there? Well, two something else’s.

  First, Scars was furious that someone had gotten that close to Zoe. Wolf had charged him with keeping an eye on her, and even though he suspected that the box had been dropped off while Zoe had already been home with Keira, that didn’t make Scars feel much better, or any less guilty. If somebody was skulking around Zoe’s place of work and leaving mangled body parts, then Scars needed to step the hell up.

  Second – and this was the one to be careful about – Scars had feelings for the woman. Yeah, he was still good and pissed about what she’d said to him in her kitchen, and he intended to give her some space, but maybe he was jumping to conclusions just because he cared about her. Maybe he was seeing threats to Zoe personally where there were none – because Scars knew that if anything happened to her, he’d never forgive himself.

  So maybe Wolf was right after all: maybe this damn box had nothing at all to do with Zoe. Maybe Scars was looking into the shadows and seeing fanged, clawed monsters, when really, what was standing there was a rock. Or a kangaroo. Or a stack of crates of vodka.

  But who the fuck did the finger belong to, then?

  “So,” Wolf said, his growl cutting into Scars’ confused thoughts. “We find out who sent the box, we find the poor woman who they’re probably holdin’, definitely hurtin’.”

  “Any chance she’s already dead?” Scars asked softly. “That they took the finger off a corpse?”

  Wolf nodded at Viking, who ambled up to the head of the table. He reached into his jeans pocket, fished out a pair of nitrile gloves from the tattoo parlor, snapped them on. Gently, carefully, he picked up the slim finger and held it up to the light, squinting at the severed nerve endings, the coagulated blood. He shook his head, his mouth angry and grim under his wild beard.

  “She was alive when they took her finger,” he said, setting it back in the box. “No doubt.”

  “Goddammit,” Wolf said, letting his temper get the better of him, just for a few seconds. “That’s not what I wanted to hear, man. Not that I want a dead girl out there, but you know what I mean.”

  “I know.” Viking sighed, pulled off the gloves. “I wish that I could smell formaldehyde or something chemical, and then I could say that this asshole – or these assholes – maybe raided a medical school autopsy room, but I can’t. Until about four hours ago, this was attached to a living, breathing woman.”

  “Wait,” Scars said, stunned, but confident that Viking was right. After all, the man’s medical and forensics background hadn’t failed any of The Road Devils yet. “Four hours?”

  “Yeah,” Viking replied. “No more than that.”

  “Jesus fuck,” Scars said, horrified, though also secretly relieved, because that meant that when this sick prick had dropped off the box, Zoe had definitely been home, safe and sound. Scars had followed her home and made sure of it. “But that’s good, in a way, for a sense of time. We need to look at all our security cam stuff going back no more than a few hours.”

  “No,” Cole corrected him. “We’ll need to look back way farther, since no way this guy did this important of a drop cold. He’d have for sure done some scouting, and we might get lucky and see someone or a vehicle that shows up a lot over a few weeks, for short periods of time. But yeah… we start with the past four hours.”

  “So get to it,” Wolf ordered him, including Kansas in the command. “Now. Take anythin’ and everythin’ you need. Rebel, keep ‘em fed and watered, whatever they want. Everyone else, guard duty needs to be set up around all our buildings. Scars, you set up the rotations, make sure we’re covered 24/7. Shifts organized perfectly, no holes or fuck-ups.”

  “Yeah, Prez. Gotcha. Consider it done.”

  Here Wolf paused, shot a look of steel around the room. “All of you… watch Zee. Arrow, Saint, Vikin’, you clap eyes on her when she’s at work, everyone else, watch her when she’s wanderin’ around the grounds, goin’ for lunch at Satan’s and all that. Ice and Cain, you’re the protective detail. Silver, you got security cams on your place, so we’re good there.”

  “Yeah, and they’re active,” Silver said. “I haven’t been watching the footage, because why would I, but I can take a look, if you want.”

  “I want,” Wolf said flatly. “Let’s make totally sure that this fucker hasn’t been stalkin’ Zee, maybe even just for fun.”

  “OK, I’ll go through it all tonight,” Silver said. “Let Scars know if anything looks off.”

  “Fuckin’-A. And everyone? Eyes in the back of your heads, you feel me? You all know what to do. Christ knows we’ve done it enough times before.” Wolf glared around the room, clearly enraged that they were back here, again… back to living like criminals waiting for a raid on the clubhouse that peppered them with bullets, or for a rival MC to start taking out their members over coffee in a public diner. “Full fuckin’ alert here, at home, at Curves, when you go grocery shoppin’, everywhere. You never relax, not for a second. We don’t know what any of this means yet, and until we do, we’re workin’ on the theory that it means bad trouble and danger. The fuckin’ coward hid in the shadows to deliver what he had to say to us, so that’s where we need to start understandin’ we are. In the shadows.”

  Everyone nodded again, because really, what else was there to say? A finger in a box wasn’t a birthday greeting, or a ‘hey, love ya, you MC scamps!’ message. It was bad news, is what it was, and to a man, they knew how to act now, how to observe others in their environment, how to move around a world of shadows.

  They knew how to live like men in the cross-hairs… because that’s where they’d lived for a long, long time. It was the life that Wolf had dragged them out of, despite the clawing hands that didn’t want them to leave.

  And yet, here they were. Back in the cross-hairs life.

  Again.

  Chapter Eleven

  One week later

  “C’mon, Zee… just one drink over at Satan’s. Pretty please, sweet cheeks? Hell, I’ll even spring for it, seeing as it’s payday today and all.”

  Saint grinned at Zoe, his sky-blue eyes dancing and almost angelic under that tangle of blond hair – but the man was no angel, and definitely no saint. Zoe had been working with him for going on a month now, and he had real, actual groupies. Long-legged, curvy-hipped, large-breasted, heavily-made-up, drop-dead-stunning groupies. They blew up his cell phone most days with texts, and he had a different one meeting him over at Satan’s most nights.

  Despite his unapologetic womanizing, though, she had to admit she liked the guy. She wasn’t immune to his honey-sweet charm and teasing after all, and she found herself grinning back.

  “Yeah, OK.” She saved the order form that she was working on, and shut the office laptop. “Quick one, maybe. Maria can stay a bit later tonight, she said, but I need to check ’til what time. I don’t think an hour would be a major problem, though.”

  “She said maybe yes!” Saint hollered over his shoulder into the main room behind him. From her desk, Zoe heard the laughter, and she shook her head.

  Yeah, Saint, Arrow and Viking were always trying to get her to join them for a drink, and hang out after her shift, and just generally loosen up and ‘have a fuckin’ life, Zee!’. She’d resisted, mostly because she’d been genuinely worried about them not respecting her if they saw her relaxed and casual and maybe even a bit tipsy, out of her managerial role… but damned if she hadn’t been wrong about that.

  To nothing but her eternal shock, they were good guys. They worked hard. They were skilled at their art. They took it seriously, they listened to Zoe, they pulled their weight, they had her back. Not once had any of them shown up late or hungover; no
t once had they treated her like a dumb bimbo who got the job because she was Wolf’s friend and had tits.

  In fact, when a customer had put his hand on Zoe’s ass when she’d turned around to grab a deeper green for his tattoo, Arrow had pounded him into the floor. He’d then stood over the hapless man, arms hanging at his sides, long black hair wild with rage, large black eyes spitting fire.

  “You don’t fucking touch her!” Arrow had thundered as blood had dripped off the idiot’s chin onto the parlor floor. “You never fucking touch a woman unless she says it’s OK! Now get the fuck out of here before I cave your nose into your goddamn skull!”

  The idiot had scrambled to his feet and shot out the door, pausing only to throw some cash on the reception desk as he’d bolted past. Zoe had watched him go – his tattoo less than half done – then she’d turned to look up at Arrow.

  “You good, honey?” he’d asked roughly, as the other men had watched. “He didn’t hurt you?”

  “Noooo,” she’d said, still staring at his angry face. “Ummm… thanks. I mean, it was under control and you didn’t have to do that but… thank you.”

  “Fuck that, Zee,” Arrow had said. “Of course I did. I’m sure you can take down an asshole like that on your own, no white knight required, but why should you have to deal with that kind of shit at all? Nah, honey… when you’re here, we got your back, and it makes no difference to any of us if you can handle things like the badass that you clearly are. We’re gonna step in, whether you ask or not.”

  She’d glanced around then, and had been a bit touched to see both Viking and Saint nodding in agreement. That was the second that she’d realized – fully and for real – that she needed to drop her guard. Not totally, because that was alien to her nature, and she’d sooner chew off her own goddamn arm. But a bit. A bit she could do.

  So agreeing to a drink with Saint over at Satan’s was Zoe removing one more brick from the wall that she’d been built around herself. One more little good faith gesture for the MC guys that she’d started off fearing. One more step forward, like a tiny trust exercise that she was taking part in, though she was the only participant.