Rogue (Dead Man's Ink #2)

by Callie Hart

  She wants to ask me to go away. She’s trying to ask that of me, but she can’t seem to finish the sentence. I should be a gentleman and give her what she wants. Walk right back out the door, lock it again, and give her the space she craves. But I can’t. Instead, I open the shower door and I climb right in there with her, fully clothed. T-shirt, hoody, jeans, sneakers. I leave it all on. Me stripping off my clothes would be a shitty idea, even though I have zero intention of trying anything on with her.

  I’m soaked the instant the stream of boiling water hits me. Sophia looks up at me, arms wrapped tightly around her body, knees drawn up to her chest, and I can tell there are tears running down her face in amongst the beads of water from the shower head. “What are you doing?” she mumbles.

  I smile sadly down at her. My throat feels like it’s swelling fucking closed. She looks so small. So vulnerable. She stabbed Raphael eleven times before she drove those scissors into his neck, but to look at her now you wouldn’t think she was capable. I’m really fucking glad she was.

  “Just checking in,” I say softly. She doesn’t reply. She leans her forehead against her braced arms, her body shuddering. Fuck. I’ve never felt like this before. I’ve never felt this…useless. Even when Laura went missing, I still felt like I had a purpose: Find her. Bring her home. Apologize. Sophia’s sitting right in front of me, though. I haven’t lost her in the same way I lost Laura. Bringing Sophia home is a different task altogether.

  I lean against the wall and slowly slide down it, not making any sudden movements, until I’m sitting on the floor next to her. I don’t touch her. She must hate me. She must blame me. She has every right to. I told her everything would be okay, and it was anything but.

  We sit there in silence for a long time, the water feeling hotter and hotter with every passing moment. The skin across Sophia’s shoulder blades turns from a violent scarlet to a bruised looking purple. She doesn’t seem to notice when I slowly adjust the temperature of the water from blisteringly hot to something a little more manageable.

  We sit some more.

  Eventually, I feel the need to break the silence. “I’m going to drive you home tomorrow,” I say slowly. “I’ll drive you myself.” She doesn’t look at me, but I can feel her tensing, though; I know she must have heard me. “It’s…for the best. I don’t want anything else happening to you. Not because of me. I can’t—I can’t tell you how sorr—”

  “You don’t want me anymore.”

  I stop talking, turning my head to fully look at her properly. “What?”

  “You’re sending me away. You don’t want me anymore,” she says. It’s really hard to hear her over the constant battery of the water against the slate tiles, but I can just about make out what she’s saying.

  “No…no, of course I want you, Sophia. Fuck, I…” My heart feels like it’s being stomped on repeatedly every time it beats. How can she think that? How can she honestly think I don’t want her anymore?

  “I probably disgust you,” she says.

  Oh, god. Being stabbed at Ramirez’s place hurt. Being tasered by Lowell was breathtakingly painful. But this pain? This pain makes me feel like I’m dying. I would hurt less right now if someone took a knife, slammed it into my chest, and twisted with all their might. “You’re crazy if you think that, sugar. You have no idea. I…I am so fucking proud of you.”

  Slowly, she raises her head, peering at me sideways, a blank look on her face. Her hair is plastered down her cheeks, her neck, her back in dark, wet streamers. “How? How can you be proud of me? He nearly…”

  “Because you defended yourself. You didn’t give in. And he didn’t get what he wanted from you, Soph. You didn’t let him. It takes so much strength to do what you did.” I mean every word. Since I started buying these women from the skin traders, I’ve come across so many girls who were overcome by the dark places they found themselves in. A lot of the time, giving up felt safer than standing their ground. That was how they coped, how they stayed alive. I’m pretty sure giving up wasn’t something that even crossed Sophia’s mind.

  “I’m not strong,” she whimpers. “I’m not.”

  I want to smash my fists into the wall, but that won’t help her. More violence is the last thing Sophia needs in her life, and so I wrap my arm around her shoulders instead, pulling her to me. “You are the strongest fucking person I know, okay. Don’t you ever fucking doubt that. And you do not disgust me. I fucking love you, okay? I fucking love you.”

  It’s as though she finally gives in and breaks all at once. She’s stiff as a board one second, resisting me, and the next she’s crumpling, falling slack, and then climbing into my lap, throwing her arms around my neck, clinging onto me as though her very life depends on it.

  Since I raced up to the cabin yesterday, my heart trying to climb up and out of my mouth, I haven’t been able to touch her properly. She’s flinched every time I’ve gone near her. Seems that her reluctance to have any sort of physical contact with me has passed now, though, and I am so fucking relieved I could cry.

  “It’s okay, Soph. It’s okay.” I gently stroke my hand over her hair, my eyes clenched tightly shut, and she cries into my soaking wet clothing, fisting my t-shirt in both her hands. When she stops crying and just breathes against me, I turn off the water and wrap a towel around her body, and then I carry her back to the bedroom.

  Sleep takes hold of her.

  When she wakes up, it’s dark and I tell her I have a job for her. Confusion clouds her face as she looks at the pair of heavy-duty gloves I’m holding out to her.

  “Why are you giving me those?” she asks.

  “Because digging’s hard work. I doubt your hands are already covered in calluses, sugar.” She doesn’t ask me why she’s going to be digging. She gives me what can only be described as a baleful look, but then takes the gloves and gets dressed in the jeans and sweater I brought down from the cabin for her.

  Outside in the courtyard, a huge bonfire is blazing, cracking, spitting, sending burning hot red and orange embers spinning upward into the black night. Cade took a chainsaw to the hanging tree. I couldn’t do it, so he stepped up and got it done. A small crowd of Widow Makers, Brassic included, stand around the fire with beers in their hands. They watch with silent respect as Sophia and I walk by. When she first came here, the guys were dubious of her. New people, especially pretty young women, are always cause for suspicion around these parts. But now she’s not the girl who lead Ramirez back to New Mexico, to our doorstep; she’s the girl who killed Raphael Dela Vega. That will forever earn her kudos with my guys. Even Shay nods her head as we pass. There’s no anger in her eyes tonight. She just looks weary, and I kind of get it. Being as angry and as confrontational as Shay is twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, must be exhausting.

  Soph and I climb up into the Humvee, and she doesn’t mention it but she must know I have Dela Vega’s body in the back, out of sight. I drive thirty minutes south, heading in the opposite direction from the spot where we buried Bron yesterday. Lowell hasn’t paid us a visit yet but there’s every chance she’s having the compound watched, so I don’t turn on the car’s headlights. I just drive in a straight line, my eyes accustomed to the dark, and Sophia stares out of the window, her thoughts clearly weighing heavily on her mind.

  When we stop and get out of the car, the night air smells weirdly like eucalyptus and something else. Something sweet that I can’t put my finger on. The dark shadow of Sophia’s form moves quietly around the car, where she opens the rear passenger door and takes out the two heavy shovels I put there before we set off.

  “How many times have you done this?” she asks me. Her eyes shine brightly, full of pain and sadness, but they’re dry. I get the feeling I won’t see her crying over Raphael Dela Vega again; the firm set of her jaw and her ramrod straight posture speak volumes.

  I want to lie to her and tell her I’m new to this. That I haven’t been burying people out here in the desert for years now. But I can’t
. What would be the point in deceiving her? She’s a smart girl—maybe too smart for her own good—and she must already know the truth. I want her to know me, dark, evil things included, and telling her otherwise would only be misleading her. “Too many times to count, beautiful girl.”

  “Were they…were they all men like Raphael?”

  Nodding, I drive the point of my shovel into the ground. “And worse. Far, far worse.”

  She seems to think about this for a long moment, the sweet smelling breeze lifting tendrils of her dark hair about her face, and then she nods. “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “Yes. If they were worse than Raphael, then they deserve to be here. I get it.”

  I’m not prepared for her acceptance of this knowledge, so I don’t have anything to say at first.

  The two of us start digging; it’s not long before Sophia sheds her sweater, stripping down to the thin t-shirt I gave her to wear, and I’m naked from the waist up. We’re both sweating and breathing heavily by the time the hole is deep enough to dispose of Raphael’s body.

  I purposefully haven’t covered him up. He’s all blood and horror and loose-limbed madness as I heave him out of the back of the Humvee and drag him under his arms to the grave we’ve prepared for him. His skin a strange mottled purple color, apart from where he’s covered in his own dried blood, which has turned the color of rust and dirt.

  “Are…are his eyes meant to look like that?” Sophia asks softly. She’s glancing at Raphael’s already decaying body out of the corner of her eye, as though, if she only manages to glimpse him in small snapshots, she’ll be spared the true horror of what she’s done. That won’t do her any good, though. That’s why I left him uncovered. She needs to see him. She needs to come to terms with the fact that she killed him.

  “Yeah.” I drop Raphael on the ground, and then go to stand beside her. Taking her hand, I draw her to my side, trying to stem the body-wide shivering that seems to be taking her over. “That always happens.”

  Her fingers feel icy and cold in mine. “Do you know why?” she asks.

  “It’s the potassium breaking down in his red blood cells. Makes the eyes go cloudy.”

  “He looks…looks like he has cataracts. He doesn’t look real anymore.” Taking a deep breath, she finally looks at him properly. “I get why you’re making me do this,” she whispers.

  “Tell me.”

  “Because you want me to have closure. You want me to be the one who buries him. You want me to be the one who shovels dirt onto his body and sends him away forever. You want me to understand he’s never coming back, and he’s never going to hurt me again. That’s why.”

  I don’t say anything. I don’t need to. She’s hit the nail on the head; without this sort of closure, she’ll only ever remember him with his hands on her, trying to force himself on her. He would always seem stronger than her in her mind. More dangerous. He would forever haunt her. Now, like this, broken, just a slowly degrading husk, he has no power. Yes, he looks terrifying, covered in all that blood, staring up at the star speckled night sky with his mouth yawning open in surprise, but he also looks small. Weak. Incapable of causing her any more pain.

  I nuzzle my face into her hair, breathing her in, trying to transfer some of my strength to her. She’s already so damn strong, but that’s irrelevant. If I could carry this burden for her, I would. If I could have been the one to kill him, I would have. I should have. I don’t ever want her to hurt or suffer any more than she has to. “Do you want me to help you?” I whisper.

  She squeezes her hand in mine, taking a deep breath. “No. No, it’s all right. I can do this.”

  She gets to work. Even after she’s pulled on the gloves I gave to her at the clubhouse, I can tell she doesn’t want to touch Raphael. She has to in order to get his body into the hole, though, so she steels herself and then grabs him under the arms, the same way I did when I dragged him from the car.

  Raphael was a big guy, and Soph is nowhere near as strong as me, so it’s not as easy for her to maneuver him to the side of the grave. She doesn’t give up, though. She positions his body directly beside the gaping hole in the ground and then she straightens, staring down at the man who’s plagued her dreams since that night back in Seattle.

  “You were a vile piece of shit in life, Raphael. And you’re a vile piece of shit now. Fuck you.” She trembles as she spits on his body. Trembles as she uses her foot to shove him roughly into his final resting place. He lands face down, which feels highly appropriate. A strange sense of pride washes over me as my girl tosses the first shovel-load of dirt into the hole.

  “My father would have a fit if he knew I was doing this,” she says.

  “Burying the man who assaulted you?”

  “Burying him like this, face down, with no blessing and no prayer for his soul.”

  “Your father’s religious?”

  She remains quiet for a second. I know it’s hard for her—she still hasn’t given me her real name, and I haven’t pushed for it. I know her last name is Romera, or at least her father’s last name is, but even that wasn’t information she volunteered. I heard him say it when she called him on that payphone back in Alabama. She still feels conflicted about parting with information that might endanger her family, and I get that… But she has to get that I am not a danger to her family. She must know that. The main threat to her family is now being covered with the dirt she’s letting fall from her shovel.

  I don’t think she’s going to answer me, but then she speaks after all, talking in muted, quiet tones. “Yeah. He’s a preacher for all intents and purposes. My family are pretty devout Christians.”

  I had no idea about this, but it fits. When I first met her, she had that uptight air about her that spoke of a sheltered, strict upbringing. That’s gone now, lost to the four winds. Now, she seems like an entirely different person.

  I sit on the ground by the graveside and watch as she labors to fill it in. The work is backbreaking but she doesn’t complain and she doesn’t ask me to do it for her. With every load of dirt she piles on top of Raphael Dela Vega’s body, she seems to become more and more confident, her back straightening, her eyes flashing with determination. When it’s done, Sophia drops the shovel to the ground, rips off the gloves I gave her, and sinks to the ground beside me. My arm finds its way around her shoulders instinctively, and she folds into me, resting her head on my shoulder.

  “About what you said before,” she says.

  “Which part?”

  “The part about you driving me back to Seattle.”

  I cringe at the words. “Yes.” It’s going to hurt like a motherfucker taking her back home, but it’s the right thing to do. What I should have done weeks ago instead of dragging her further and further into this mess.

  “I don’t want you to drive me back,” Sophia whispers.

  Hearing her say that is like a punch to the gut. I understand. I don’t like it, but I will respect her wishes. “Okay. Public transport’s out of the question, though. I need to know you’ve walked back through your front door okay. I’m sure Cade won’t mind taking you if you pref—”

  “No, that’s not what I mean.” She looks up at me, frowning slightly. “I mean, I don’t want to go. I mean I want to stay here. I want…I want to be with you.”

  I’ve known pretty much from the beginning that she was attracted to me. It was fairly obvious from the way she acted around me and how often I caught her staring. I was hardly shy about the fact that I was into her, too, though. This, however, is a huge surprise. She looks a little stunned herself.

  “I thought you’d jump at the chance to get out of here, Soph. Don’t you want to go home? See your parents? Your sister?” I stroke my hand over her wild, wavy hair, dreading whatever she’s going to say next. I want her to be safe. I want her to be a million miles away from Ramirez and his men, even if Raphael is no longer a concern. But I also want her in my line of sight at all times, close enough that I can touch… />
  “I’m going to call my dad,” she says. “I want them to know that I’m okay. And I want them to know that…that I’m not coming home.”

  “Perhaps you should think about this before you make any rash decisions.”

  “I have. It’s all I’ve been thinking about for days. I don’t think I can go back to who I was before, Jamie. I’m not…I not the person I used to be.”

  When she calls me Jamie, I feel like I could be the person I used to be, if I tried really hard. That would mean giving up this whole enterprise, though. It would mean admitting that Cade’s sister is gone and that we’re never going to find her. After so long, I think I’ve already come to terms with that fact anyway. Admitting it is hard, though. Admitting it to Cade would be fucking impossible. We barely talk about her anymore. He must have come to the same conclusion that I have, but she’s his blood. He won’t stop looking until he’s found out what happened to her one way or another. And I won’t abandon him.

  “This club is intense, Soph. Being here means you’re going to be more and more involved in the way we live our lives. Is that something you can put up with?”

  “Yes. I want to. I—” She turns to face me, eyes about as wide as I’ve ever seen them. She’s so fucking beautiful. I want to wrap her in cotton wool and keep her safe. Forever. “I want to be a part of it,” she whispers.

  “Be a part of the club?” This…this is guaranteed the very last thing I ever expected her to say. I still don’t think I’ve understood her correctly. “You want to be a part of the club?”

  “Yes. I want to do what Carnie did. I want to prospect.”

  “No. Fucking. Way.” She’s gone mad. I shouldn’t have made her bury Raphael. It must have caused severe trauma to her brain.

  “Why not?”

  “Come on. Let’s get in the car.” I help her to her feet, and then I’m half guiding, half dragging her back to the Humvee. She doesn’t make a sound when I open up the passenger door for her and usher her inside. Slamming the door closed, I hope the loud noise will be an end to the crazy conversation, but Sophia’s ready and waiting for me.