THE DEVIL’S BRIDE

by April Lust

  Ace shook his head. “No one,” he whispered.

  Pulling on his pants as quietly as he could, Ace went to the door and peered through the peephole. It looked like a hotel worker, but he wouldn’t put it past Alexei to use a decoy. Ace reached into his jacket hanging on a nearby chair and pulled his gun from the inner pocket.

  Fiona anxiously hugged the sheets to her chest as she watched Ace open the door a crack, leaving the chain bolted.

  “Can I help you?” he asked aggressively.

  The man on the other side of the door was more of a boy, all acne and gangly limbs that barely filled out his hotel uniform. Seeing Ace’s menacing face and his towering figure, the boy took an involuntary step back.

  “I, uh,” he stammered, “there have been some, um, complaints,” he finally said.

  “And?” Ace said expectantly.

  “Well, the office asked me to, uh, to let you know that if-if you can’t keep your, um, ‘activities’”—he used air quotes—“down to a more reasonable volume, then, well, we’re going to have to, uh, ask you to, uh, leave,” the boy finished lamely, clearly terrified of Ace, who was a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than him.

  “Look…Bobby,” Ace said, squinting at the kid’s nametag. “I appreciate you got a job to do, but I’m not going anywhere tonight, and I’ll make as much noise as I goddamn please, understand?”

  Bobby looked like he was going to faint.

  “Ace!” Fiona called from inside the room. “Don’t cuss at him,” she scolded, coming around the corner still wrapped in her sheet. “Ignore him,” she told Bobby. “You can tell your boss we’ll be quieter; I promise,” she said, smiling.

  Bobby stared at the beautiful woman who was clearly incredibly naked underneath the white sheet. If he looked hard enough, he could see her nipples poking through the thin fabric. His hormones sprang to life and he instantly got hard. “Oh, uh, th-thank you, ma’am.”

  Bobby was stumbling over his words pretty badly at this point, staring so hard at Fiona Ace thought his eyes were going to fall out of his head. The kid’s probably sixteen and never seen a set of tits in real life before. He chuckled to himself.

  “Sorry about the noise, kid,” Ace said as he reached into his back pocket to pull out a fifty-dollar bill. “We’ll keep it down.” He handed the cash to the awkward youngster, who reminded Ace of himself, back before everything had turned to shit.

  He stared at the fifty bucks in his hands, then at Fiona, then at Ace, apparently too dumb-struck to even say thank you.

  Ace shut the door and joined Fiona back in bed. Amazingly, within seconds, she had fallen asleep. He smiled to himself. They hadn’t even gotten the opportunity to talk about plans. Ace was going to tell her how The Hell Brothers were planning to attack Alexei, but it looked like that would have to wait until morning.

  Morning… Ace thought to himself. What happens tomorrow morning? She stays here and I go back to headquarters to get things ready with the gang? What about after that? Let’s say this thing with Alexei miraculously turns out okay and we all live. What then? Fiona comes and lives with me at the house? He snorted skeptically. Yeah, right. I saw her face when she walked into the place—she thought it was a dump, and she’s right. Even if Katie didn’t murder her within the week, Fiona deserves a better place than what I’ve got.

  So your plan is to, what? a second voice chimed in, mocking him. Go to her place instead? Yeah, right. If she deserves better than the house, then she definitely deserves better than you. She wouldn’t want you to come back with her, anyway. She might have enjoyed fucking you, but she doesn’t want to be with you. Come on, Acey! You’re smarter than that. He stared at Fiona’s sleeping form, knowing the voice was right. She would never want to be with him. She wanted someone safe, someone she could count on—someone like Ash, probably, he angrily assumed.

  He slid down in the bed to lay next to Fiona. Tomorrow morning Ace would inject a little professionalism into their relationship, that was what he would do. If not for his own good, then for hers.

  ***

  The next morning, Fiona awoke to an empty bed.

  “Oh, you gotta be fucking kidding me,” she muttered angrily. “Ace!” Fiona shouted. “Ace, you’d better be in here, goddammit!”

  Once, I can forgive, Fiona reasoned, but twice? If that motherfucker abandoned me again, I swear to god.

  The bathroom door flew open and Ace barreled out into the room, looking around frantically. “What?” he panicked. “Who’s here? Are you okay?”

  Fiona let out a sigh of relief. “Oh, thank god. I thought you…y’know, ran off again.”

  “Oh,” Ace said, relaxing. “Sorry about that other time. Something came up and I just had to run,” he lied. Yeah, run away from your feelings, the self-deprecating side of him added.

  “You’re getting dressed?” Fiona said questioningly, pointing at his outfit of a shirt and a pair of boxers.

  “We didn’t get much of a chance to talk about it last night—” Ace started to say.

  “Gee, I wonder why not?” Fiona said, cutting him off with a lustful grin.

  Ace laughed nervously. He stepped back, putting some distance between him and Fiona. “Well, anyway,” he continued, “Alexei thinks I’m handing you over to him today, so it’s important that you stay here and don’t answer the door for anyone, okay?”

  “Wait, where are you going to be?” Fiona asked.

  “I have to get things set up for when we launch our assault,” Ace explained. He wasn’t supposed to meet the gang for another two hours, but he didn’t want Fiona to know that.

  “What if I get hungry?” Fiona looked around the room.

  Ace mentally cursed himself for his lack of foresight. Striding over to the room phone, he picked it up out of the cradle and dialed the front desk. A minute later, he put the phone back, and started to pull on his pants. “Call room service for whatever you want and have them charge it to the room,” he said as he laced up his boots. “I told them to send Bobby up with whatever you order.”

  “Uh-oh,” Fiona said, grinning wickedly at him. “You won’t be jealous of me and Bobby here all alone?” she teased. Fiona hadn’t missed the way the boy looked at her last night.

  Ace raised an eyebrow at her. “I think my ego can handle it,” he said evenly.

  Fiona’s smile faltered a little. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he answered shortly. “I’m fine. I just…I’ve got a lot on my mind.” Ace grabbed his jacket quickly, putting it on as he walked out the door. “Don’t leave,” he repeated, giving Fiona a pointed stare before closing the door behind him.

  “Sit, Fiona! Stay!” she said to herself, falling back onto the bed.

  She rifled through the nightstand drawer until she found the hotel’s room service menu. She dialed the kitchen and ordered a stack of waffles with strawberries and blueberries, as well as two orders of bacon, some yogurt, and an extra-large glass of orange juice.

  She got dressed just in time to hear a knock at the door. Looking through the peephole, she saw Bobby standing next to a cart full of food, looking incredibly nervous.

  “Hey, Bobby!” Fiona said, opening the door. “Come on in.”

  He wheeled the cart into the room, carefully looking around.

  Understanding his apprehension, Fiona told him, “He had to leave for the day. It’s just me.” She suppressed a giggle upon seeing Bobby’s obvious relief. “You can just put the food over by the bed.”

  He pushed the trolley to the far side of the bed. “Is there anything else you need?” Bobby asked.

  “Nope,” Fiona said, shaking her head. She thought about the long day ahead of her. “Do you have a lot of work today, Bobby?” she asked.

  “Not really,” he said. “I was actually supposed to be off today, but your husband told my boss he’d give her a thousand dollars if she called me in to be a waiter today. So, here I am.”

  Fiona winced. Ace wasn’t her husband, but
she didn’t see the point of correcting the boy. Besides, it was kind of fun to imagine Ace as a well-to-do husband, coming home at five sharp, just in time for the meatloaf to finish cooking in the oven.

  “Well,” Fiona said, “since you’re not busy, would you like to keep me company? I have a lot of waffles here, and access to some decent pay-per-view,” she pointed out.

  Bobby shuffled his feet. “Won’t your husband mind?” he asked.

  “Ace is not…” Fiona stopped herself. “It’ll be fine—as long as you don’t try to hit on me or anything,” she warned him jokingly.

  Bobby laughed with her, and the two began to dig into the waffles, Fiona grateful for the distraction.

  ***

  Ace opened up the throttle on his motorcycle, relishing in the engine’s powerful response. He wanted to be like that—a machine—with nothing to worry about except the fuel in its tank.

  If a machine broke, there was a way to fix it. It had a manual that came with it that told you what part to replace, or how to repair it.

  That’s the problem with people, Ace thought as he sped down the highway, there’s no manual. If something inside you is broken, you can’t replace it, and there’s no way to know how to fix it, or even if it can be fixed.

  Something inside him was broken, Ace knew that. And he knew it was that kind of broken that ended up breaking everything else around it. That was why he joined The Hell Brothers. It was full of other broken people, people you didn’t have to worry about hurting because they were like him—too damaged to feel it anymore.

  I never should have made that deal with her! Ace berated himself. He could see it already, in how they acted together, in how light she made him feel. She’s gonna fall in love with me, and I’m going to ruin her, because that’s what I do. I can’t ever love her back the way she wants—the way she deserves—and it’s going to ruin her.

  He hoped it wasn’t too late. He hoped that maybe, if he never touched her like that again, she would be able to move on without too much pain. It would already be too late for him. He just didn’t know if he could make that promise to himself and keep it.

  The sex with Fiona hadn’t just been sex, Ace realized. He’d had sex before—lots of it—and none of it had ever been anything close to what he’d experienced last night. When he’d looked into her pale blue eyes, he felt a sense of peace he’d felt only once before, as a very young boy.

  When he was about six or seven, he’d stayed over at a friend’s house for the night. He was old enough to know that his family was different from others, but he’d never had the opportunity to examine a family other than his own until then.

  It had been fairly similar to his own on a good day, until it was time for bed. His friend’s mom had helped them get ready, something his own mother did, but once they were all tucked it, something unusual happened.

  His friend’s dad walked in with a thick book called The Fellowship of the Ring, and sat down on the edge of the bed, while his friend’s mom squeezed in between the two young boys and wrapped one arm around each of them, pulling them close.

  “We’re already a little ways into the book, but it’s a good scene,” the father had said.

  And it was. Ace enjoyed the fantastic tale quite a bit, even to go so far as to imagine he, too, would one day embark on an epic quest to do what was right. But what Ace remembered most was this strange sort of calm that fell over him as he listened to the heartbeat of the mother in his left ear, and the cool, strong voice of the father in his right.

  It was love, of the unconditional variety. And he had felt that again last night when he had been with Fiona.

  So? Who cares if you think you might be in love? Ace asked himself angrily as he sped through traffic. You could never show her the right way—you’d just fuck it up. If you really love her, you’ll break her heart a little now so you don’t break it a lot later.

  He knew he should go back home to the Brothers, but right now, Ace just wanted time to himself.

  ***

  There were at least a dozen extra bikes outside of the house when Ace got home the next day. He turned off the engine and pulled off his helmet as Katie and Diego stepped outside, Smalls, Riley, and Lucky following them out quickly.

  “Hey, guys,” Ace said cautiously. “What’s going on?” he gestured to all the bikes around him.

  He noticed Lucky, Smalls, and, strangely enough, Diego all seemed to have been crying.

  “They blew up The Crabtree,” Katie said flatly.

  Ace dropped his helmet in the grass. “What?” he whispered.

  “Alexei and his guys,” Smalls said, his voice quavering. “They wired the place up and lit the spark.”

  “Did anyone get hurt?” he asked. “Any of us?”

  “No,” Katie said. “Everyone was here for our monthly meeting—which you also missed.”

  “The bar was closed anyway,” Riley said quietly. “Not many lives were lost.”

  “Blake’s was,” Lucky said with a small hiccup. Fresh tears began to stream down her face. “Blake lived at the bar, and now…” She broke into a sob and Riley wrapped an arm around her shoulders, pulling her into a hug.

  “Blake’s dead?” Ace said.

  “Yeah,” Katie said shortly. “And you would have found out about it along with the rest of us if you’d fucking been here.”

  “Where were you, Ace?” Diego finally spoke up. “We needed you. We needed our leader.” He turned around and went back inside, the rest of the gang following him.

  Ace hesitantly went in after them. There was an impromptu wake going on for Blake. She had been well liked by every gang in town. Most of the gangs were gone now, but the remaining members, all stragglers who’d managed to avoid Alexei’s wrath, were gathered in the living room to pay their respects.

  That explains the bikes outside, Ace thought miserably.

  If he thought that he had felt like shit before, it was nothing compared to now. Blake had been a friend of his for a long time. She had been a staple in the biker community. If The Crabtree wasn’t there to go to anymore…where would the gangs meet? What gangs are left, anyway.

  Ace slid a hand over his face. Was there even any point in sticking around here anymore? Everything he and The Hell Brothers once loved was now gone. Maybe I should take Alexei’s offer to leave, figure out how to sneak Fiona away from him. I don’t think I could handle another death on my conscience.

  Katie was right. I should have been here. Instead, I was with Fiona, or off by myself because of Fiona—because I think I love her or some bullshit. Ace knew he was never going to be able to have a future with her, so why was he wasting time with her when the people in his life were in danger?

  This was why he didn’t get close to people—they made you weak. I’m no better than the sap right now. I’m worse. At least when he makes a fool of himself, no one gets hurt!

  Ace took one night to enjoy himself, to enjoy what he felt for Fiona, and look what happened. He lost focus, and now one of his closest friends was dead.

  Smaller voices in Ace’s head told him that there was no way he could have possibly predicted this, that even if he had been at the meeting like he was supposed to have been, Blake would still be dead, but he didn’t care. He was too busy blaming himself for allowing Alexei to catch him off guard.

  He stepped into the living room where Lianna and Lucky were setting up coolers full of beers for the mourners. There was a big board filled with pictures of Blake. Ace spotted himself in quite a few of the photos, and he hated himself more than ever.

  His chest felt like it was suddenly four sizes too small as he struggled for air. Black spots appeared in front of his eyes and he heard ringing in his ears.

  “Are you gonna get that?”

  Ace looked over, startled. His vision zoomed in on an older woman with heavy black eyeliner.

  “What?”

  “I said, are you gonna get that?” she repeated, annoyed. “Your phone? It’s only been ringing f
or the last five minutes.”

  Ace dazedly reached into his pocket and pulled out his phone. Fiona. Not now. He ignored the call, muting the phone as he shoved it back where it came from. Looking around the room, he saw a dozen pairs of eyes all staring back at him. I have to get out of here, he panicked.

  He turned abruptly and walked out of the house. A small voice reminded him that in a couple of hours, Alexei and his men would know Ace wasn’t planning on turning Fiona over to them. If they had blown up The Crabtree with no provocation, there was no telling how Alexei’s mob would react to a direct insult like this.

  What Ace wanted to do right now was throw caution to the wind and storm Alexei’s all by himself, but he knew that would be a suicide mission, and he refused to abandon The Hell Brothers in their hour of need…not again.