by Eve R. Hart
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
A Little Note
Prologue
Nearly Three Years Ago
-1- This Is The Life
-2- Don't Get Too Excited
-3- Isn't That Just Sad
-4- The Reasons Why
-5- A Way In
-6- What Now?
-7- Something's Up With The Girl
-8- I Need Some Fucking Answers
-9- I'm About To Break
-10- Keep Her Talking
-11- Shit Just Got Real
-12- Don't Panic
-13- The Siren's Call
-14- Weird Fucking Night
-15- If I could, I would
-16- I Wish Circumstances Were Different
-17- Why Deny How I Feel?
-18- For The First Time, I Hate My Job
-19- The Day The World Exploded
-20- I Am Home
-21- Home Is Where He Is
-22- No, This Is The Life
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Find Her
Other Works
Clean Hack
(The Tainted Saints)
(Book 1)
By Eve R. Hart
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 Eve R. Hart
All right reserved.
The scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without permission of publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. This book or any portion thereof my not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for brief quotations used in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writers imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is purely coincidental.
Warning: This book is intended for readers 18 years and older. This book contains violence, harsh language, and explicit sex scenes.
Cover design by HeyChloe
Cover image credit Shutterstock.com- Alex Tihonovs
Olga Salt
whiteMocca
Dedication
To everyone that has joined me in this journey and stood by my side.
To the new friends that I’ve made this past year.
To all of you that have taken the time out
to tell me what you love and hated.
Thank you for giving me the courage to go on.
To push the next one out.
And to have the strength
to do just one
more.
A Little Note
The events in this book take place over the course of the first four Steel Paragons MC, Moon Hill chapter books. Loch, Diesel, Tank, Axe. This book contains spoilers to events that happen in those four books. While this can be read as a standalone, reading the Moon Hill books will give you a better understanding of the people in this book. Thank you.
Prologue
Lucy
Three dead bodies.
I looked around the shitty motel room and even though I blinked my eyes several times, there were still three dead bodies there. Three men, all of them very much not alive.
I need to shut the door.
My brain tried to keep me focused but I couldn’t seem to get up from my position in the corner of the room. My shaky hands still had a death grip on the bat that I’d used to defend myself at one point. Oh, and there was a knife too, but that was lost somewhere on the other side of the room. Pretty sure it went under the bed, but my head was quite fuzzy at the moment from everything that just happened to recall where it had ended up. Truth was, I had been a bit too busy trying to keep myself alive so that when the damn thing got knocked out of my hand, I couldn’t exactly follow the path to where it might have landed.
I should find it. I need to get this place cleaned up.
I didn’t have the first clue what to do now. Not with the bodies. Not with the blood that was splattered all around the room. And not even with myself.
You shouldn’t have left your apartment.
“Yes, I know,” I snapped at the rational side of my brain.
Shit, now I was talking to myself. This was a lot to handle, for anyone, let alone me. I shouldn’t have left the security of my home. I shouldn’t have come here. But I did, and then this happened, and well, there was no going back now.
There were reasons that I never left my place—that I never stepped outside my front door, and the funny thing was, those were the same reasons that I ended up leaving.
After Allison was taken, I shut down. She was like a sister to me and well, I felt completely lost after she was gone. I would never forget that night as long as I lived, in fact, it haunted me every time I closed my eyes.
I had been there that night. I’d just hoisted myself up and into her window when I heard the yelling from the front of the house. And in a flash, my happy, excited mood of spending time with my best friend celebrating her seventeenth birthday eating junk food on her bed and watching movies, was gone. As I made my way out into the hall and saw the strange man take a hold of a panic-stricken Allison like he was never going to let her go, I knew that the best thing in my life was gone too.
I was about ready to lunge forward, to try and save her, when her father shut the front door behind them as the man dragged Allison away. The door closed with a soft clink that turned my gut. He let this happen. He let that man take his daughter away. And I knew right then that I couldn’t ever let him know that I’d seen it all.
So I left, back the way I came, unsure of how I was going to handle all of this. I sent a text to Allison’s phone. The message said I was really sick and sadly wasn’t going to be able to make it that night. But I promised I would make it up to her. I knew she’d probably never get that message. That was the point after all. Though the whole message had been a setup, I vowed to keep that promise I’d made to her. We would celebrate her birthday later. I would make it up to her.
Seven years later, I was still trying to keep that promise.
Phone. I needed to find my phone. There was one person I could call. One person that I knew would be able to get me out of this situation and make it look like nothing had ever happened in this room. As much as I knew he could take care of this, I was hesitant to call him. I’d been watching him for years now, calling him behind a disguise and pointing him in the direction I had a good guess would be his next job.
I sat behind those screens watching, observing, mapping patterns and categorizing situations. Yeah, seemed sad and pathetic. But in a way, I knew most of those people better than they knew themselves.
With no other option left, I unfolded my body and slowly crawled on my hands and knees to the door. I quickly scanned the area to make sure that there weren’t any more surprises lingering outside. Then I shut and locked the door, not even rising to my feet. And because I felt shaky, I turned around and crawled to where my phone had been knocked to the floor. My blood-spattered hand shook as I reached out for it.
With quick fingers, I unlocked the screen and hit the programmed number before I could change my mind.
“Hello.”
It wasn’t a surprise that he answered on the second ring. He always did for me.
I sucked in a deep breath.
“Sea Breeze Motel. Room 213. Wilmington,” I whispered out, feeling vulnerable and exposed without my disguise. I couldn’t stay in the dark anymore. And I knew it was a matter of time before
I’d be face-to-face with the man I tried so hard to hide from.
Then I hung up. He had the address, he would come. I had no doubt about that.
It felt like an eternity that I sat there. So long that my legs became numb and the sweat started to dry on my skin. But I was hardly aware of anything beyond the constant pounding of my heart.
Then the door busted in. My eyes looked up, my body not moving from its tucked away position in the far corner. Only, the man that was standing there holding a gun and clearly ready to shoot wasn’t the one I was expecting. And I knew I was completely screwed now.
Three Years Earlier…
-1-
This Is The Life
Clean
Another day.
Another job.
Another crime scene scrubbed clean and a body disappeared like it had never even been there.
Not typical for most people, but it was for me. This was my life, my work. Moving from one job to the next, never knowing where my truck or van would stop next. Never knowing if I’d ever get a week off or even a day. Hell, sometimes I was lucky to get a few hours. There were times in my line of work that it came more like a hail storm rather than a sporadic sprinkle. Days I would wish for nothing more than a shower and a cold beer.
But I wasn’t about to complain about shit. I didn’t mind my job. I was good at it and that was why I always had calls coming in.
I had my ways of doing things. Baking soda. Yeah, that stuff you probably have hanging out in your kitchen or in the back of your fridge. I used that to soak up the blood, making it easier to clean up. A tarp and shit-ton of that white power and I was sure not to have any spillage. I wasn’t one of those fuckers that used acid or lye and barrels. No, not my thing. I was a break down and bury kind of guy. Or toss in some body of water, preferably one that was inundated with gators, they sure made my job a hell of a lot easier.
I wasn’t really a religious sort of man, I mean, it wasn’t like I really could be. I did the end part of some fucked up shit. I knew that. I wasn’t about to argue for one second about it. But there was a part of me that felt like they needed to be returned to nature. I think that deep down, that was why I did things the way I did them. Did that shit make any kind of sense? No, probably not. Only thing I could say, was it made me feel a little less crappy about what I had to do. Maybe. Sure, we’ll go with that.
I wasn’t blind and I knew the kind of trash I cleaned up. I knew the people I worked for, which was why I took those jobs. The kind of people that ended up on my tarp were the kind of evil that needed to be taken out of the world. I truly believed that it was a better place without them. Rapists. Skin traders. Murderers. That last one was a little cringy considering I worked for murderers. But these people were the ones that didn’t care about the kind of lives they were taking. The beautiful, the innocent. They took lives that needed to remain here. People that would have and did make the world a better place, no matter if it was for one person or for an entire population.
Me, myself, I’d never actually killed anyone. Did I know how to use a gun? Yes, because you never knew when you might need to protect yourself. Did I know how to kill a man with my bare hands? Yes. Or where to stab him so he would bleed out in a matter of minutes? Yep. I knew how and what to do to kill someone. That said, I’d done my best to never have to use any of that.
I wasn’t a killer.
I was a cleaner.
And I liked it that way.
Today, I could admit that I was tired. Days like this often led me to wonder if I was maybe getting too old for all of this. But that was a joke. Retirement was still a ways off. I was only thirty-six, I shouldn’t be dragging like this quite yet. No, I refused to entertain the idea that I was getting old and I knew I wouldn’t be slowing down anytime soon. Besides, it wasn’t like I had anything else I could do.
I made my way back to the crash pad I owned in Florida. I wouldn’t really call it a home because it wasn’t one. None of the places I owned really were. Sure, they were semi-furnished and the electricity was always kept on. But they were just a place for me to rest my head and catch my breath in between jobs.
To me, home implied a place that held something in my heart. A place that I couldn’t wait to get to at the end of the day. None of the ones I owned had that feeling and I knew it had more to do with me than the lack of décor and matching end tables. Or whatever one might think of when they envision making a home.
It wasn’t something I was really worried about. One day, I’d retire. I’d do the old man thing and fish and bird watch and whatever the fuck else they did. I’d have my log cabin in the middle of the woods or a place on the beach where I could watch the sun rise every morning. Or something along those lines. I’d sit around watching news channels in the morning, drinking cheap as shit coffee and cursing the world around me. And at night I’d settle down in some ugly brown recliner watching some kind of game show for entertainment. If I wanted to keep my wits about me, it would end up being something like Jeopardy or Wheel of Fortune. And I’d yell out all the answers and grumble about how some people were just dumb fucks.
Oh, I had an amazing future ahead of me, I knew that much. Honestly, it didn’t sound so bad to me. It sounded relaxing and maybe a little lonely. Which was alright, sure, because I wasn’t a huge fan of people in the first place.
Maybe I should take up woodcarving or something. Hmm, I bet I’d be good at that. I could even start now. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea to keep my hands busy in my spare time.
Wow, it seemed that I really did need some kind of hobby. I was perhaps already starting to get that grumpy old man thing going on. Which made my head start to wonder why that was. I’d never really been an angry or surly kind of person. I had always been pretty even-tempered. I may have gotten picked on at a younger age and hated my life, but I quickly learned how to let things roll off my back. To take the higher road. And always believe in myself even if I was the only one that did. I grew a thick skin at a young age and I think that helped me out immensely through my life. I didn’t get depressed as a teenager. I didn’t have suicidal thoughts because I didn’t fit in. I never had the urge to self-harm or self-destruct in any sort of way. I think it helped me even now, when I did things that most would call questionable and wrong. Some might even call me mad and wish me to be locked away while I was fed copious amounts of medication to keep me from ever functioning normally again.
My eyes were burning and heavy by the time I pulled into the small town. There wasn’t much here and the houses seemed to have more swap between them than anything else. They weren’t close together, and no one ever bothered their neighbors. This was a town for people like me. People that wanted a slice of the quiet life but didn’t want to feel too detached. If you felt like having some human interaction, you’d go into town. If you didn’t, then you simply stayed home. And everyone understood that was how things worked around here.
I stopped by the burger joint and ordered myself a double patty with the works and a side of sweet potato fries. As I waited, my eyes scanned the place. It hadn’t changed even a little in the ten years I’d been coming in and out of here. Same could be said for the rest of the town. It had that sense of old familiarity that I loved. It was a good place to go to rest the soul for a few days.
“There ya go, sweetie,” Matilda said as she plopped the already grease soaked bag down in front of me. “You stickin’ ‘round here long this time?” She flashed me her sweet grandmotherly smile as she took my money.
“Not sure, I’ll probably see you again before I leave.”
I may not have been close with the people here, but they did know me. And this was the kind of town where people treated you like family whether they knew you all that well or not. I knew everyone knew of me. Most of them had seen me coming and going throughout the years. And while I may not have known how many grandchildren they had or their favorite fishing lures, I always made a point to be friendly. I’d wave. Say my hellos. And even
stop to chit-chat about the weather. I wasn’t an asshole and these were good people.
“I’ll hold you to that,” she replied with a smile as I slid off the stool and headed for the door.
I needed to pick up a few things to tide me over for the next few days, but that could wait. I was just ready to get there, change the more than likely dust covered sheets, and get some rest.
As I sat there on the edge of the lumpy, worn couch with my food spread out on the coffee table that had seen better days, I wondered if this was it for me. You know, finding odd comforts in cheap food while I contemplated my next move. While I could pick out the different spices that flavored the meat to the point that it felt like some sort of warm homey feeling, it didn’t mean that was what it was to me. It just so happened that I knew exactly what to expect when I bit into my burger. I knew the amount of lettuce that would sit atop a thickly sliced tomato and mushed under an unhealthy spread of mayonnaise. I knew the fries would have the lightest dusting of brown sugar that would have melted by the time I pulled them out, making the fries almost stick together. I convinced myself it was because it was all familiar that made it shoot warm fuzzy feelings through my body.
It wasn’t like I knew the people here. Or that they knew me. It wasn’t like they knew when to expect to see me next or that I knew I’d be welcomed with pies and casseroles at my return. Because there wasn’t any of those things. Oddly, it was more like some strange false illusion every time my tires crossed over the town limits.
But even with all that said, maybe I was just sad enough to smile at the simple things. Like the massive enjoyment I got with every bite that filled my mouth.
Maybe my life was a sad excuse for such a thing. I could even agree with that without any kind of protest. But it wasn’t like I could really change how it was. Forget the fact that I wasn’t a fan of people, I couldn’t really reach out and make those types of connections. I realized long ago that the type of life I led would be a lonely path. I had known that diving in. Even if I felt the need or want to change that there was no way I could. I was never in the same place for very long and it would sometimes be months before I’d return.
