Rich Dirty Dangerous

by Julie Kriss

  “You were eighteen,” I said. God, I had done so many stupid things at eighteen. Tried stupid drugs, taken stupid dares, let stupid boys put their hands down my pants. “You were eighteen, and you had no parents, no guardian, no help. Your mother was murdered. How were you supposed to know what to do? It was over ten years ago, Cavan. You’re not an eighteen-year-old boy anymore.”

  “I ditched everything,” Cavan said. “I gave up. I hitchhiked for a while, and I ended up in a tattoo shop, and the guy there let me learn. And then one day, one of the Black Dogs walked in. The rest was history. I was no one for ten years. I was nobody. I had no life, no ambition, no purpose. And then you walked in and asked me to save you. And I looked at you, and I looked at McMurphy, and I could see the fucking future. I could see it like a fucking map.”

  I remembered it with perfect detail, that moment when I’d sat in his chair. Cavan’s careful expression, the way he’d looked at McMurphy. The way he’d looked at me.

  Always, the way he’d looked at me. Seeing everything. Seeing me.

  “It turned out I had one purpose in life,” Cavan said. “Exactly one. I was born to do one thing, and that was get you the fuck away from him. So that’s what I did. It’s what I’m still doing, Dani, and I’m not going to leave the job undone this time.”

  I closed my eyes. The tears were easing, though the hurt wasn’t. “I love you so much,” I said.

  “That wasn’t part of the plan,” my husband said. “I was just supposed to put you in the car and hit the gas, like I should have done when I was eighteen. Just go. But I love you more than anything, do you understand? More than fucking anything. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you. You need to be safe, I’ll make you safe. You need to erase him, I’ll try my fucking best. I can’t stop it, Dani. I never could.”

  He loved me. He loved me. Then why did this hurt so much? “Please don’t get hurt,” I told him. “I’m your wife. I want to be married to you for more than one night.”

  “You’re insane,” he said. “I have to go.”

  When we hung up I still sat there for a long minute. I was still naked, and I was shaking. My thoughts were wild, scrambling.

  I could go after him—there was that. I had a car, the keys, money. He was right, he wasn’t the boss of me. That meant I could go to Arizona, just like he could.

  But suddenly, I had a better idea.

  There were two of us in this marriage. And despite its less than stellar beginning—and the fact that my husband had just left me—it was a marriage. Or it would be. Cavan had no idea how determined I could be.

  Maybe I needed saving, but so did he.

  And I knew exactly how to do it.

  Twenty-Three

  Cavan

  Pesos, Arizona, didn’t have much in it, but it was not far off the interstate and it had a bar. I called McMurphy and set up a meeting, and then I sat in a dark booth next to the window to the parking lot and ordered a beer and a sandwich. Someday, I thought while I watched the cars and trucks pull in and out, I’d be done with hotels and diners. Today was not that day.

  It turns out a guilty conscience can keep you untethered for a long time.

  It wouldn’t take McMurphy long to get here, I figured. I didn’t know where he was when I called him, but he’d been on the road, not back at the club house. On his way to Vegas, maybe, to kill me—I didn’t know, and I didn’t care. I just wanted this over with, for me and Dani both.

  It was time to stop running. So I told McMurphy where I was, and I settled in to wait.

  It hadn’t been easy to tell her what I did, but I felt better now. I’d held it in for ten years, never telling anyone, thinking about it only when I lay awake in the early hours of the morning, unable to stop the memories from coming. Maybe it was true that confession was good for the soul. It didn’t take away what had happened, but maybe now that Dani knew the truth I’d lie awake a little less.

  But I’d lie awake alone, just like I always had.

  What would she do? I didn’t know; I couldn’t predict. Follow me, or curse me, or divorce me, or forget about me—it could be any one of those things. I’d rolled the dice, and the only thing to do was see where they landed. You can’t do much with dice once they’re in the air.

  I ate my sandwich, and I drank my beer. Then another, nursing them slowly. The sky turned to dusk, the purple unbearably beautiful over the desert. I was watching a man and a woman smoke cigarettes in the parking lot—he was obviously trying to charm her, and it wasn’t working—when someone slid into the booth across from me. I turned, and stopped breathing.

  Not Dani. Not even McMurphy.

  My brother. Devon fucking Wilder.

  He was wearing jeans, a white t-shirt. He had black scruff on his jaw and his hair was mussed. He looked at me from green eyes beneath his dark slashes of brows, and for a second I couldn’t speak. I just stared at him like I was in a dream.

  “Afternoon, brother,” Devon said.

  Ten years. I hadn’t seen him in ten years. He didn’t look the same as when he was sixteen—no one did. And even though I’d seen a photo of him, it was different seeing him in person. Watching the contained ripple of emotion behind his green eyes. Seeing the tic in the muscle of his jaw and the faint lines around his eyes. He’d got those lines, maybe, from doing two years in prison. I’d never know.

  “How did you find me?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. “I have a lot of money,” he said. “Money finds people, especially when those people are checking into hotels and getting married under their own names. The car threw me off this morning, though.”

  It should have. I’d left my car with Dani, then taken a cab to a garage on the outskirts of town. I’d talked to the owner, who referred me to a guy, who referred me to another guy who had an old Civic to sell. I paid him cash, took over his plates, and drove off in a matter of two hours. I was discovering that, like Devon said, surprising things can get done when you have a lot of money.

  “My investigators caught up with you in Vegas,” Devon said, watching me carefully. “You and your new wife. But by the time they got there, she was alone. You were in the wind again.” He narrowed his gaze on me. “You left her?”

  He could accuse me of that. Of course he could. I’d left him, too. “I had to,” I said.

  My brother seemed skeptical. “That so?”

  I scrubbed a hand over my face. Fuck, I was happy and in wretched pain at the same time. I felt like a cloth being wrung hard from both sides. “Devon,” I said, reaching deep to explain, because I owed it to him. “Do you have a woman?”

  He didn’t say anything—my brother was a man of few words, like me—but his green gaze went dangerously dark. I could read that look; it meant yes, he did, and she was very fucking important.

  “So if her biker ex-boyfriend wanted to kill both of you,” I said, “what would you do?”

  Still Devon didn’t speak. But I saw him think about it.

  “You’d deal with him one on one,” I said, knowing full well I was right, based only on the look of murder on Devon’s face. “But first, you’d get her out of harm’s way. You’d put her somewhere he couldn’t get to her.”

  My brother blinked once, his sign of comprehension. “In a hotel room in Vegas, in Lake of Fire territory, with your name on her legally.”

  “Yes,” I said. “And then you’d turn around and go find the fucker and tell him to do whatever the hell he thinks he’s going to do.”

  “Maybe,” Devon said, which meant yes.

  “You told me how you tracked me to Vegas,” I said. “You didn’t tell me how you tracked me here.”

  He shrugged, the motion so familiar I could be looking in the mirror. He was just like me, except my brother was darker, broodier. He was a good-looking motherfucker, too. He’d been good-looking at sixteen, and he was better-looking now. I wondered who his woman was. It would take a hell of a strong woman to handle my brother; we Wilders weren’t easy on people.
>
  “My lawyer,” Devon said. “He’s done a lot of work for the Lake of Fire over the years. They were kind of his specialty until I came along. The Lake knows where you are, and Ben told the Lake to give him an update. We got a call this morning, and here we are.”

  I looked around. “I don’t see any lawyer,” I said. I pictured a bald, fat guy in an expensive suit, but there was no one like that in the diner.

  “He’s outside,” Devon said. “Ben decided to give us a little privacy for this brotherly reunion.”

  “Why the hell do you have a lawyer who works for bikers when you’re a billionaire?” Couldn’t he hire some thousand-dollar-an-hour guy? A guy who worked for Goldman Sachs?

  Then again, this was my brother. He’d grown up like I had. “I trust Ben,” Devon said. “He was my lawyer when I was driving, barely scraping by. He was my lawyer when I went inside, and he got me the best deal he could. And he’s my lawyer now. The difference is, now I can actually pay him.”

  I shook my head. No one in this diner would know Devon was a billionaire; no one would know I was, either. We were two dusty, road-stained guys in jeans and t-shirts, one dark, one lighter. We could be on our way to our factory jobs, or truckers taking a break. Except for the fact that we were obviously brothers.

  Jesus, this was my brother. My brother. Sitting right here, across from me, with ten years of wasted time running between us like a muddy stream. Ten years of things I didn’t know.

  So I started at the beginning. “Fill me in,” I said. “We had a grandfather?”

  “Surprise, isn’t it?” Devon said. “I didn’t know either until he died. He was Dad’s father.” He scratched his stubble. “Dad is dead, by the way. Years ago. Cancer.”

  I’d read that in the newspaper story, and it left me as cold then as it did now. Dad had walked out when I was four and Devon was two, and we’d never heard from him again. Dani and I were almost equivalent in the shitty-father department—though hers won by being in prison for murder.

  “Okay,” I said. “So Dad is dead, and our grandfather, who was rich, never bothered to give us a fucking phone call.”

  “We come from a line of assholes,” Devon said. “But good old Granddad knew we existed. We’re both listed by name in the will, which is one hundred percent legit. He also knew you’d disappeared, because it says in the will that you have to un-disappear before you get your money.”

  Even my grandfather, who I never met, knew what an irresponsible asshole I was. I had my brother here; it was time to face this, or never. “Devon,” I said, “I know I left you. I was a fucking coward.”

  The depths of his green eyes showed a flicker of surprise. “You think I’m mad about that?” he said.

  “You should be.”

  “Put away the guilt, Cavan,” he said. “No one expected you to stay home and play Leave it to Beaver, least of all me. You were eighteen, and Mom was butchered. You left. You think I don’t know why?”

  “It was more complicated than that,” I said.

  “Because you argued with Mom about leaving Patrick hours before he killed her?” Devon replied.

  I stared at him in shock. “How the fuck did you know that?”

  “Patrick’s murder trial.” Devon’s face was hard as marble, but I knew him. Even after ten years, I knew my brother. The harder he looked, the more he was clamping down control. “The neighbors heard you and Mom arguing. It was evidence at the trial that he was abusing her, that we were afraid he would hurt her. The pattern. The cause. The evidence was clear, but that argument played its part in putting Patrick away.”

  I swallowed hard. I hadn’t even stuck around for the murder trial; I had no idea that the argument that dogged my life for ten years had been part of the evidence. None at all.

  “I just felt like I should have done something,” I said. “Done more. That Mom would be alive if I’d done more.”

  “Maybe she would,” Devon said harshly. “And maybe she wouldn’t. She had a pattern. You know that, and I know that. Maybe you would have rescued her that day, only to have her go back to him one or two days down the road. Maybe we both could have rescued Mom from Patrick, and she would have found someone else exactly the same.” Devon put his hands on the table, palms down, and leaned forward. “I’ve thought about it for the past ten years as much as you have. You think I haven’t? You think I haven’t wondered what I could have done, what I should have done? How it could have been different? I wonder it every day. But we were kids, and we had no help, no one to turn to. It was all on us, and we failed.”

  “I’m older than you,” I said. “I should have known more. Done more.”

  Devon shook his head. “I think there was no way we could have won,” he told me. “I think the deck was stacked against us from the day we were born, and all you and I could do was fight for one more day, and another.”

  I looked down at his hands on the table. His left hand had an elaborate tattoo inked on the back that said No Time.

  I understood those two fucking words. As clearly as if I’d inked them onto my own skin. All those years tattooing other people, and this was the first tattoo I’d truly understood from the inside out. That feeling of wanting something to show on your skin that you felt in your bones every waking moment.

  Mom had no time. No one gets much time. When it comes down to it, the moment is all you’ve got.

  It was why I’d rescued Dani. Why I’d married her. Why I was sitting here now.

  “We survived the best we could,” Devon continued. “You ended up with the Black Dog, and I drove for a bunch of assholes who paid me not to ask what I was delivering, and why, until I finally got caught. We kept it together every day for ten years with spit and string. I even did a two-year stretch. And then our grandfather died and handed us a new chance. Here we are, you and me, still alive, right now, in this minute. We have what we need. The question is, what are we gonna do with it?”

  I looked into his eyes, and I knew the answer. He was right; I’d been given a chance, just like he had. I didn’t know much about what he’d done with his chance, but I knew two things: he had a woman who mattered to him, and he’d come to find me. Those were two things Devon had done with the gift he’d been given.

  Me? I had my own ideas. I’d start by un-disappearing and claiming my money, like I was supposed to. I’d get my brother back. I’d get Dani back, even if she hated me now. I wouldn’t stop until I was done, because there was no one to stop me. Not anymore.

  The door of the bar opened and a man walked in. He was in his thirties, with dirty blond hair worn slightly long. He wore jeans, motorcycle boots, a white shirt unbuttoned at the throat, and a black sport jacket. He arrowed toward us, his gaze on our table.

  “Devon,” he said. “We have a problem.”

  “Ben,” Devon said. He nodded at me. “This is my brother, Cavan. Cavan, this is my lawyer, Ben.”

  I felt my eyebrows rise. This was the lawyer? Then again, he’d been a biker lawyer. He pretty much looked the part—like a guy who could either sue you or kick your teeth in, or maybe both.

  “Hey,” I said.

  Ben’s gray-green eyes fixed on me with a mixture of amusement and suspicion. “We’ve been looking for you,” he said. “You’re not easy to find. I had no idea you ended up with the Black Dog, or I’d have found you months ago.”

  I shrugged. “I stayed off the radar for a while. It wasn’t a big deal.”

  “Sure,” Ben said. “No big deal, until you took off with the president’s woman, who happens to be Robert Preston’s daughter, and married her. When you come out from under the radar, you sure know how to do it. You knock her up, too, or is it too soon to know?”

  “Ben,” Devon warned.

  The lawyer sighed. “Devon here is a romantic—unlike me. He takes this shit serious. You know he’s marrying Olivia, right?”

  “We hadn’t gotten that far,” Devon said.

  Olivia, I thought. My brother’s soon-to-be wife is na
med Olivia.

  “You’re just like him,” Ben said to me. “I can tell already. You didn’t marry this woman just to piss people off, or out of spite, Preston or no Preston. I’m looking at your face, and I can tell. Am I right?”

  “You haven’t seen her,” I argued.

  “Fair enough. When Wilder boys fall, they really fall, I guess. I was just curious, because you’re about to get your ass handed to you by a bunch of bikers, and I hope she’s worth it. That’s why I came in here, because they’re coming off the highway now. I thought I’d let you know.” He slapped me on the shoulder. “I hope she still thinks you’re pretty when they’re done with you. Good luck.” He turned and left, taking his phone from his pocket and putting it to his ear.

  I turned and looked at Devon.

  “You see why I hire him,” my brother said, deadpan.

  There was the unmistakable roar of motorcycle engines, and outside the window of the bar, five bikes pulled in to the darkening parking lot. I recognized McMurphy’s big, ugly figure in the lead.

  We have what we need, Devon had said. The question is, what are we gonna do with it?

  I slid out of the booth and stood up. “I want all of it,” I said to Devon. “Everything you said. But this is my old life, and I have to finish it before I can do anything else.”

  My brother’s green eyes were crystal clear with understanding. “I get it,” he said to me. “Go.”