by Cat Porter
“Santiago!”
He stilled. My trembling body squeezed around his immobile form. My eyes fluttered open and snagged on his. Hard glass, impenetrable. Not windows to the soul. Opaque barriers.
His hands released their grip on me, and he slid away. He sat back on the sofa, his gaze averted. A slicing ache replaced the fullness.
Shit. Shit. What just happened?
I wasn’t sure, but it was as if a switch had been turned off. An alarm had sounded, and he was on edge, upset even.
I sat up, pulling my skirt down and lifting my top over my bare chest. “Bone?”
The barrier had seeped from his eyes and hardened down his face. The ridge of his dark brows was tight, giving him a forbidding severity. The playfulness, the raw sensuality were gone.
“Boner, did I—”
“It’s nothing.” He wiped at the edge of his mouth with his thumb and planted a kiss on my forehead. “I should go. I’ve got a run tomorrow to the chapter in North Dakota anyway. Got an early start.”
He rose from the sofa, kernels of popcorn tumbling down his leg. “I’ll be spending the night up there. I’ll call you.” He brushed my cheek with his hand as he headed for the front door.
“Boner, wait—” I followed him.
His long strides and heavy footfalls pounded out an unmistakable beat—reject, retreat, get me the fuck out of here.
He left.
I locked the door after him and peeked through the side curtain. He didn’t glance up at the house as he swung on his bike. He took off, and his powerful engine droned right through my shaky heart, leaving only acrid fumes behind.
“WHAT THE FUCK?”
The case was empty. It was gone.
Dig’s Python .357 was missing.
The cherry wood case with the glass top I’d picked out myself was splayed out like a plundered treasure chest in a corner of the meeting room where a number of knives, skull sculptures, local awards, framed photos, and other club memorabilia were on display.
“We had the Howl last night, and people were roaming everywhere,” muttered Kicker. “Could’ve been anybody.”
I’d been at our North Dakota chapter the past two days, and I’d stayed an extra night. I hadn’t wanted to be back here for the Full Moon Howl, as we’d tagged the party years ago. After the last time I’d seen Jill, I’d needed…fuck, I wasn’t sure what I’d needed. But a club party was no answer.
My heart thundered against my ribs at the sight of the empty case.
It was exactly that—a treasure plundered.
Dig’s favorite gun since he’d first won it in a knife fight with a drunk cocksucker on a winter run to Daytona in the early ‘90s.
The gun he’d used to kill Jill’s kidnapper.
The gun Grace had used to shoot his killer.
Fucking gone.
After his death, that gun had become a symbol of the man who’d dedicated his life and energy to the One-Eyed Jacks, who’d striven to move the club forward and make it strong.
My eyes darted to a photo of us hanging on the wall. Dig and me and Wreck exhausted on the side of a highway after Jump had wiped out on the way to Idaho. Another one of Dig flashing the finger, his face full of cocky bravado, as he sped off on his ’67 Panhead.
Sour bile rose in the back of my throat.
That gun was fucking sacred, holy.
I gnashed my teeth. “Who the fuck took it?”
“Someone who’s got balls. Someone who knows how to hit where it hurts when he wants to make a point,” rose Kicker’s voice behind me.
“How the hell—?” My voice roared, and I reined it in. “How did this happen?”
Here, in our meeting room, where our traditions were observed and celebrated, our decisions made, secrets shared, and ambitions forged. Here, under the witness of photographs of our chapter’s members, past and present. Here, under our very roof, under our fucking noses.
“I don’t know, man,” Kicker muttered.
“You’d better work on changing that answer. This door’s always locked during a party,” I said.
“Well, yeah.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
Kicker shifted his weight. “Jump was in here.”
“’Course he was. He’s the goddamn prez.”
“I mean, with women. Alicia’s been gone for over a week now, visiting family in Texas.”
I rubbed a hand across my chin.
“I’m not sayin’ that—”
“I get it. Contact all our pawnshop buddies—and I mean, all of them—and not by email. Get them on the phone, personally, and put them on the lookout for the Python. This includes all our other friends in the gun trade—on and off the grid.”
“Right. On it.”
“Hey, you finally back?” Butler stood in the open doorway, his jawline a harsh, blunt edge. “What the hell is going on?”
“Somebody stole Dig’s Python. Broke the case.”
“What the fuck?” He strode into the room, filling it with a wave of emotion. “Anything else gone?”
“So far, no,” I replied.
He held my gaze. “That piece ain’t worth shit to anyone else. Yeah, it’s a collectible. It’s worth a few bills, but—”
“But it’s priceless to us, and whoever took it knew that. They’re making a point. A fucking ballsy point. I’m gonna get it back and then cut his fucking balls off.” I eyed him. “Led knew about this gun. Now he’s gone.”
“Yeah. Him and those two other Flames from Ohio came back here for the Howl,” said Butler.
“I thought they’d all left together a while back?”
“They did. All three of them took off to do the usual touristy shit—Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse, Sturgis. But they all came back last night for the Howl, partied, and then left for Ohio first thing this morning.”
My pulse throbbed in my neck. I hoped to hell it was Catch and the Flames jerking our chain. The alternative sent an icy claw ripping up my spine.
Alejandro’s threat from years ago remained fresh in my mind: “I will find you, wherever you go, and you will suffer. I will find ways to make you pay...One day, I will take it all away from you. I promise you.”
I was losing my mind.
Inès had disappeared without a word after we’d fought about going to LA. My friend Julio told me he’d heard she was with the Calderone brothers, our fucking bosses.
Julio and I were two of their many soldiers. We rarely actually saw them though. The Calderones would come to you. You didn’t find them. I’d usually get my orders through a fine line of other worker bees unless it was a special assignment, those they handed down personally. And there were plenty of special assignments for me.
After a success, I’d be invited to hang with them at one of their infamous parties. I was their prized discovery, their exceptional apprentice in the dark arts of vengeance and terror, and I enjoyed being singled out. I’d drink from their wine. I’d eat from their table. I’d take Inès, and we’d have ourselves a taste of the good life, their high life.
The fucking crazy life.
Big mistake.
Over two weeks after she’d taken off, I caught them at our place. I noticed their shiny hot rod double-parked outside our building that afternoon. No one double-parked in my neighborhood and lived to tell about it.
The moment I opened the door, I heard the moaning and the low guttural Spanish, the seething tone of a male voice. Slaps and hard smacks on flesh and heavy panting. My hand released my knife from my lower leg, and I prowled silently through the dark narrow hallway of our shabby apartment, my pulse racing.
I reached the end of the hall, and my brain stuttered. My eyes burned.
Inès was on all fours on the rug on the floor, sucking off Felipe Calderone, while his brother, Alejandro, held her hips up high in a tight grip and drilled his dick inside her. Inès’s small tits jiggled, her whole body bouncing with the force of Alejandro’s fucking.
I bit down on
my lip, and the metallic flow of blood filled my mouth. My heart pumped so hard that I thought it would explode, yet an eerie cold oil slimed through my veins.
They were saying ugly things to her and to each other, and it drove them faster, harder. Their faces were scrunched in intense concentration. They were blitzed on an acid high. The large muscles of the brothers’ legs, their arms, their asses bulged and bunched up under the strain.
Felipe’s pelvis thrust in her face, his long dick plunging in and out of her mouth. She stared up at him like he was a god who held all the secret answers to her life. Both his hands were fisted in her mass of dark hair, keeping her facing up at him. Moans warbled from her throat, saliva dripping from her lips. He came with a loud growl, and she swallowed.
Felipe pulled his wet dick out of her mouth. “You like that, don’t you, mi perla negra?”
Black pearl? What the fuck? He already had a pet name for her?
“I love it,” Ines replied. “I love you.”
Obviously inspired, Alejandro fucked her harder from behind. Felipe held onto her, muttering to her in Spanish, swatting at her tits.
Inès was their possession, their slave, their drug, and they were addicted.
And so was she.
That tiny room reeked of sweat and sex and betrayal, choking me, flattening me. The blue-and-pink Indian rug we’d found in a flea market together, the huge beaded pillows she insisted on keeping on the floor, the shimmering curtains we’d created out of brightly colored fabric samples and scarves—everything now defiled, everything foul, everything melded with the shadows.
You are ours. You are nothing. They had told me as much from the beginning, and it was true, wasn’t it?
I slid and stumbled back down the hallway and out the door, vomiting the minute I rounded the building, my head spinning.
I waited and waited, sweat running down my enflamed chest. Laughter, muffled words, and the roll, scrape, and bump-bump of a suitcase burst out the door and down the broken cement steps.
She was leaving—with them.
I was a raging bull, nostrils flaring with smoke and fire. My neck craned toward them.
“What are you doing, motherfuckers?” I yelled.
Both Felipe and Alejandro stopped and turned, throwing me a casual glance, as they put the suitcase into the trunk of their hopped-up Dodge Coronet.
Felipe’s black cat eyes narrowed. “She’s ours now.” His voice was so fucking relaxed, so fucking confident.
“The fuck you say! Inès! What the hell are you doing?”
She only glared at me from a curtain of straightened glossy hair, her face still flushed. “I’ve had enough. Okay?”
“Okay?” I shouted. “Okay?” I stalked toward her, my limbs made of molten iron. I would singe her, burn her, make smoke and ash of her.
Smash her.
Hands shoved me back. “Hey, hey, hey.” Alejandro towered over me. “Stand down, hermano. She came to us, wanted to be our bitch straight off. Felipe and I have what she needs.” He palmed his crotch over his loose low-slung jeans, his tatted arm taut with the action, his jaw jutting out. “How can you compare yourself to the two of us?” He shoved his fingers in my face, grinning. “No way, boy, you can’t.”
But Alejandro was wrong.
Inès wasn’t just my hole, just the girl I shared a crib with, had on my arm at parties, or hung with around the hood. She was my mission. She was a part of me.
“She’s with us now. You understand what that means?” Alejandro said, his head slanting, dark eyes glinting.
Felipe leaned over and licked Inès’s willing lips with a disgusting flutter of his tongue as Alejandro wrapped a hand around her ass and rubbed.
“Time for you to try a gringa, El Hueso. I’m telling you, they come to us like flies.” Alejandro winked. “Wild side, papi.”
I stared at the three of them, my heart chugging in my chest.
Felipe’s eyes narrowed as he threw an arm around my neck. “She’s your cousin, man. You’re not supposed to be fucking your cousin. We saved your soul from purgatorio, for sure, eh?”
They both laughed, but Inès stood still, her hands gripping a leather handbag I didn’t recognize.
I pushed Felipe off me. “You know she’s barely sixteen, right?” I spit out.
Felipe only glared at me, his jaw rigid. But the gleam in Alejandro’s eyes was unmistakable, his tongue dipping against his lower lip. “Sweetest pussy ever.”
Inès raised a well-groomed eyebrow as she leaned her body into his.
The weeks of worrying about her, wondering what she was up to, who she was with, if she had lost it and was wandering the streets or had gotten raped and was trapped somewhere, her head chopped off, or…
But this? With them?
Felipe and Alejandro constantly dangled the carrots of more money, more responsibility, more advancement, more prestige, yet never delivered because they would hoard it all for themselves and enjoy the power of denial they lorded over the rest of us.
Inès was throwing me away for a joyride with these two? This was what she needed, what made her happy?
What about us?
All the bloodletting, all the beatings, the burning, the carvings, the cleaning—I’d done it all for them. The smell of acid, bleach, and charred flesh filled my nostrils as I gulped for air. All for her, for us. At the end of every single cliff I’d hung from every day, I’d clung to her.
White light exploded in my eyes, and a rush of adrenaline surged from my feet through my middle, boiling in my chest, pounding in my head. I charged through the air, screaming, yelling. Blows of pain shot through me, the smash of cement against my back, a sudden blinding, throbbing sting all through my middle. I gasped for air, and my eyes flared open.
Everything stopped.
Inès leaned over me, her knife in her hand—the one I had bought her, the one I had taught her how to use.
Now, it had my blood on it.
My bleary eyes drowned in her dark pools looming over me.
“Look what you’ve done, Santi! Leave me alone! Why can’t you just leave me alone?”
The blare of sirens rose down the street. Inès pulled her lips together and wiped her knife clean on my ripped shirt. Clutching the blade to her chest, she tumbled into the Calderones’ car, a figure pressing in after her.
A pointy boot end kicked me hard in the ribs, and I coughed up blood and vomit on the pavement, my body coiling at the pain shooting through me. Another boot jammed into my lower back, and my head knocked against the cement.
Suddenly, my body was jerked up, and Alejandro’s voice thundered in my ear. “Don’t you dare come near her again, or I’ll kill you. You will fucking regret the day you were born. I will find you, wherever you go, and you will suffer. I will find ways to make you pay.”
My body slammed into the cement once again, flopping open like a tossed puppet.
Car doors banged, an engine roared, rubber screeched.
A whirlpool of glaring sun and stifling heat enflamed the reek of garbage on the cement where I lay. My blood simmered on the pavement before me. My arms were heavy and wet, glued to my body.
I tried to focus through the daze.
My hands fell from my stomach, and a long slash of torn flesh branded my middle, blood everywhere.
Inès had left her mark on me.
Nothing came out of my mouth, but I screamed.
“Hey, Boner.”
Butler’s voice brought me back to Earth, to the club meeting room, to the empty gun case.
“What do you want to do about this?”
I rubbed a hand across my prickly scar. “Need to find out who took it and why,” I replied.
I have to be sure.
“Let’s do it.”
“Get ready. I got to go home, change clothes, change bikes, then I’ll meet you back here in an hour. We’re gonna pay the Flames in Nebraska a visit.”
Butler’s blue eyes flashed at me. “Right behind you, brothe
r.”
“HI.” Jill was perched on my front steps, halfway up and halfway down. Her eyes skidded over me, and my stomach clenched. I’d done that—planted that hesitation, that doubt in her.
“Hey.”
“Um, I’m not bothering you, am I?” Jill gestured back to her car. “I can go—”
“No, you’re not bothering me. I just got out of the shower.” I rubbed a hand down my bare chest, and her eyes followed the movement. Her cheeks flushed, and she quickly averted her gaze.
She wouldn’t have done that before. Before, she would’ve grinned at me and made a flirtatious comment or made a move on me. Now, this fence of fucking propriety had shot up between us. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like a barrier between me and Jill, especially one I couldn’t see or climb or tear down with my hands.
“Get in here.” I held open my door for her.
She climbed up the last steps and shrank through the doorway, as if she were entering a portal to the dreaded realm of the unknown.
Her gaze spun over my living room furniture, the U-shaped open kitchen, the huge front bay window I had fixed up with a custom cushioned seat that doubled as storage. Her eyes finally landed over the fireplace on Lock’s huge charcoal drawing of me on my Harley. The piece was a blur of movement, thrill, and self-determination that he and Grace had framed for me last Christmas.
“That’s you, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Yeah, Lock drew it.”
“He’s so talented.”
“He is.”
Jill licked her lips. “You said you’d be back from North Dakota this morning, and I just dropped Becca off at her Aunt Penny’s, so I thought I’d stop by.”
“Glad you did.”
“I like your house,” she said, rooted to her spot in the middle of the entry way.
“Thanks. Got it on a foreclosure about seven years ago. Been fixing it up here and there.”
She took in the polished wood, her eyes widening, as if she’d suddenly realized she was stuck in the center of an iced-over lake. “It’s beautiful. You don’t see this much anymore.”
