MALICE (A HOUNDS OF HELL MOTORCYCLE CLUB ROMANCE)

by Nikki Wild

  It felt like I was walking that infamous green mile, like every step took me a little closer to the gallows. I couldn’t see a goddamn thing ahead of or around me, and that made my guts coil. There are few things worse than being surrounded by enemies and not having one good goddamn clue what their intentions might be. Bonus points if you can’t even take a deep breath because between your hubris and their cruelty, you’ve been brutalized beyond functioning.

  “Keep it movin’,” one of the deputies rasped in my ear. Every cell of my body wanted to rebel, to shake off this hood and these ties and make it my business to rip every single one of these punks a new asshole or two. But I wasn’t in any position to do much more than shuffle along and hope they didn’t let me run into anything. I was completely at their mercy. I was utterly helpless.

  Rarely had I ever known such impotent rage and despair. This was how I’d felt on my way here before I’d crashed my bike: like there was so much that was beyond my control. Like I’d been tossed around by fate and fortune and had come out all the worse for it. Maybe I was supposed to die that night in the middle of the road—it would’ve been a fitting way for a biker to go out—and maybe this humiliation, all the suffering I’d endured since then, had been the price I had to pay for cheating death. Maybe my survival hadn’t made anything better, not for me, and sure as hell not for Lucy. Maybe I’d fucked up even further back than that—maybe I should’ve never come here at all.

  Dark thoughts. And in my heart, I knew none of them were true—knew that if I hadn’t come for Lulu, she’d still be pining away at the window, Delfino’s every move serving to extinguish the light she held inside her. But she’d be alive, wouldn’t she? And wasn’t that better? God only knew if that was still the case now…

  A hard shove on my back caught me off-guard and I pitched forward, just barely maintaining my footing. My face collided with a wall, stunning me something fierce as two men grabbed hold of me and sat me down on what felt like a wooden chair. My arms were flung over the back of it in a way that made my shoulders feel like they were on fire, and someone linked one end a pair of handcuffs between the zip-ties and my hands, clasping it shut, while the other snapped closed around one of the slats on the back of the chair. Immediately I tried to stand up, but the chair wouldn’t budge. It must’ve been bolted to the floor, which meant I was well and truly stuck.

  Shit. This can’t be good.

  Sheriff Rigby ripped the hood off my head. Even though the lights in this cell—that’s what it was, a holding cell—were ancient, flickering, and dim, looking at them felt like I was staring into the sun. I blinked, hard, and squinted up at him. Without the sack sticking to my face, I could feel my nose was bleeding.

  “What a sorry sight,” he murmured, shaking his head with a pitying look that made me want to gouge his fucking eyes out. “I mean really, boy. You should see yourself. You look a right mess.”

  I spat at his feet in reply. There was no point in talking to this fucker. He wasn’t even worth the time it would take for me to say “fuck you.” Blood bloomed on the concrete floor—I must’ve split my lip, too, but right now I was too furious to feel it. I ran my tongue over my teeth to make sure they were all still there. Adrenaline and rage can do funny things to a man, even divorce him from his own body. Right now, my anger had me feeling like I was filling up the room, a cloud of black smoke that could smother these motherfuckers if I could just get my hands free. I knew that wasn’t gonna happen, though. No, they’d got the drop on me. I was on their turf now.

  Rigby spared a glance at his buddies, a group that just barely looked like they were competent enough to be called deputies. Sure, they all had that ballsy swagger, that same head-up-my-own-ass stance as all cops do, but there was something green about them, too. I didn’t imagine Pleasant Lakes was a town that saw much action. And yet here these assholes were, all decked out in their utility belts and mirrored shades, looking like the cats who’d got into the cream. Pretty damn pleased with themselves, they were. Like one lone wolf biker was some kind of score.

  My lip curled. I couldn’t help it. Guys like this disgusted me—the ones who’d never held power before, but had always craved it. Piss-baby psychopaths, made brave by a shiny gold badge. I glowered at them all from beneath my brow.

  “You got something to say, boy?” Rigby asked me. The lilt in his voice was confident, amused. “Well, go on, then. Out with it.” He snapped his fingers. “Hey, I know—you can tell us what you want carved on your headstone.” A rolling tide of laughter spilled over the small crowd of spectators both inside and outside the cell. “Not that you’re getting a headstone, of course.”

  There was a lot I could have said. A lot that I wanted to say. Most of those things involved obscenities in some form or fashion, some real creative cursing, and liberal use of the term “shit gibbon.” But it occurred to me that would get me nowhere. What could I do to back up my tough talk, really? Throw a kick or two? They had the upper hand, and I got the feeling these pricks were just looking for an excuse to start beating on me.

  Yeah. They had all the power, and they knew it. But what they didn’t know was what to do with it. I had them pegged back when I said they’d never had any power, but had always wanted it. They were inexperienced. Wet behind the ears. And, if their loyalty to Delfino was any indicator, easily manipulated.

  So instead of snarling out a few choice phrases—as cathartic as that might prove, right before the rain of batons against my bones started—I lifted my chin defiantly and leaned back against the chair. “You’re not gonna kill me.”

  This gave Rigby pause. He lifted his brows. “That so?” Another snicker, though this time, his minions sounded less certain.

  I shrugged. “If you were gonna kill me, you’d have done it by now. You had the means—I was just as helpless in the back of that cruiser as I am cuffed to this chair here—and the opportunity. But you didn’t take it. Instead, you’ve got me sitting here in a cell. That tells me you’re waiting on something. What, does Delfino want to do it himself?”

  Rigby snorted. I knew that sound. I’d heard it come from my dad every time he realized he didn’t have me cornered the way he’d thought—every time he realized he wasn’t the smartest man in the room. Guys like Rigby, these cops… nothing was more sacred to them than being able to dominate other people. The idea that they couldn’t made them see red. And I knew, intimately, just how stupid pride could make a man.

  “You’re a smartass, aren’t you?” Rigby said. Empty words—the kind of shit someone says when they ain’t got nothing else.

  I stared impassively at him. “Just stating the facts, officer.”

  “Sheriff,” he corrected, as I knew he would. “You blind, boy? Look at the badge.” He pointed out his star-shaped shield. “That look like the kind of thing a deputy wears to you?”

  I smiled. “All you pigs look alike to me.” Before he could rear back and deck me, I added, “You’re just mad ‘cause I figured it out, aren’t you? Maybe you country folk aren’t a whole hell of a lot smarter than us city boys, after all.”

  It was a gamble, sure. I was toeing the line between baiting and antagonizing, and one misstep could land me in a world of pain. Men like this were all about ego. It was their soft underbellies, the masks beneath which lurked a bunch of scared little boys who probably wet the bed until they were sixteen. If there was anything I’d learned from dear old Dad, it was how to play that weakness like a fiddle. How to exploit their need to be the center of the universe—the guys with the upper hand.

  If I was right, Rigby would scowl and strut and make it out to be a plan a simpleton could’ve seen through. If I was wrong, he’d lord it over me like I was a particularly slow child. Either way, I’d have some idea of what was in store for me, which was a hell of a lot better than having no fucking clue.

  Rigby’s eyes went cold, but his face turned strawberry red. I could see a few of his buddies weren’t taking so kindly to my line of dialogue, either. A fe
w had their hands on their belts, silently threatening to pull out their batons or their mace and teach me a lesson in “civility.” But most of them were looking at the sheriff, either for guidance or out of a sense of keen interest in what the hell he was going to do. He was the alpha male here, after all. Whatever he did next could make or break him.

  “Nah,” he said slowly, “you’re still a fuckin’ idiot. And guys like me and Delfino? We don’t waste our time on pissants like you.”

  Then he leaned close, his eyes roaming up and down my body, sizing me up. Even bound to this chair, I was a bigger and badder man than he was, and he knew it. There was a hollowness in his voice when he whispered, “You ain’t shit, Richards. You were born wanting. You lived wanting. And soon, you’re gonna die wanting. Christ, I don’t think there’s one damn thing you’ve ever done that you did right. Coming back here was sure as hell a mistake.” His gaze flicked up to meet mine at last. “What do you think, boy? You think you’ve ever done something worthwhile? Do you have what it takes to pull something off that’d make even your whore momma proud?”

  My grin spanned from ear to ear as I leaned in close to Rigby’s face, close enough I could smell his fear. It smelled an awful lot like buck-fifty aftershave and delusions of grandeur. “Let me out of these cuffs and we’ll find out.”

  He made a fist. Threw a hook I knew was nothing more than a feint. When I didn’t flinch and he didn’t connect, I thought he might actually try to hit me. Instead we held eyes a long time, a variety of micro-expressions flickering over his face, ranging from outright hate to pseudo-apathy. Oh, he cared all right. Cared a whole lot that he’d been made a fool of in front of his peers. Cared that, for some reason he had yet to reveal to me, there wasn’t a whole lot he could do about it.

  “What’s up, Rigby?” I asked, cocking my head. “You gonna kiss me, or what?”

  Rigby stood up and stepped away, mouth pulled into a thin grimace. The room was silent now in an oppressive way, the kind that made you want to scuff your foot against the ground just to hear the echo. The deputies were staring at Rigby, and he was staring at me, and I was staring back at all of them, trying to lead the sheriff into another trap that would force him to spill his guts.

  But before I could, one of the deputies outside the room pushed forward and came to stand beside Rigby. In a hushed, but easily audible tone, he murmured, “Sir… he’s here.”

  Rigby looked over at him. “Where?”

  “Right out front, sir. He just pulled up.”

  I glanced between them. He? If we weren’t talking about Delfino, then who the hell was he?

  A smirk slowly bloomed on the sheriff’s face. Just like that, the tension in the room dissolved. I didn’t like that, the way it all just came crashing down—the way the deputies let out their breath and relaxed, returning to their self-assured demeanors instantaneously.

  “Good,” Rigby said. “Send him on in.”

  The deputy slipped back out through the door as the rest of them dispersed, filtering out into the hall amid a sea of giddy laughter and whispers. Christ, they were like schoolboys who just got told the principal had come to work with a hangover—like there was some hot mess on the horizon that everybody wanted to see.

  The sheriff turned to me, smiling with all his teeth. He too looked far calmer than I would have liked and way more at ease. Some burden had just been lifted off his shoulders. I wasn’t sure what it was, but whatever the case, there was no way in hell that meant anything good for me.

  “You might wanna ask your new visitor for a kiss instead of me,” he said, beginning to move out of the room himself. “ ‘Cause I’m pretty sure you’re about to get well and truly fucked.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him, tracking his retreat with less satisfaction than I’d anticipated. “Yeah? And who the hell is he?”

  Sheriff Rigby glanced down the hall. His smile widened. “Let’s just call him an old flame of yours.” Then he tipped his hat at me in what I could only assume was a gesture of final regards and strode down the hall, whistling Sympathy for the Devil. Because of course he was.

  Even as the shrill of his song faded, the beat was taken up by a pair of boots treading toward my cell. And then the tune, too, began to waft toward me again, whistled through a different pair of lips. I listened hard, trying to find something—anything—distinctive. The boots sounded leather, but plenty were. The voice was a man’s, but I’d already known that it would be. There was a slight jangle that sounded a bit like spurs, which struck me as not just odd, but oddly familiar. But it wasn’t until the whistling became singing that I realized who I was dealing with.

  My blood froze in my veins. Even the trickle of it still trailing down my face seemed to grow colder with the stranger’s approach. Only he wasn’t a stranger, was he? I knew exactly who this man was. Exactly what he was capable of.

  When he turned the corner and appeared in front of my cell, he grinned at me like a wolf who’d finally caught up to his long-awaited prey. Every tooth was showing, an array of gleaming white—and a single platinum-coated canine—that made my chest tighten with equal parts dread and the compulsion to inflict violence. My very blood cells demanded it, screaming through my veins with a whiskey burn as I struggled against my bonds in fits and starts, every thrash only making that animal smile in front of me grow wider, fiercer.

  “Pleased to meet you,” he crowed, opening his arms wide as if expecting a warm reception or—God forbid—an embrace. “Hope you guessed my name!”

  Oh, I knew his name. I wouldn’t ever forget it. That single word had been my downfall, had separated me from my brothers and brought me nothing but ruin ever since.

  “Jackal,” I hissed. “I’ll kill you, you bastard. This time, I won’t just beat your ugly fucking face in. This time, I swear to God I will finish the job.”

  “Should’ve done that to begin with, Leo,” he said, easing his way into my cell and pulling the bars closed behind him. “But you didn’t have the balls.”

  I couldn’t help but agree with him there. And unlike the song he’d been singing would suggest, I was not at all puzzled by the nature of Jackal’s game. I knew exactly what he was here for.

  Twenty

  Lucy

  I had never been so terrified of nothing in all my life.

  I was sitting across from Delfino in the living room, he on one couch and me on another, nothing but the coffee table between us. In a rare, and utterly odd, gesture he had made us both cups of tea. Mine sat untouched, the string still attached to the bag wound tight around the handle of my mug. He hadn’t put down a coaster, and I was sure the heat was leaving a ring on the wood.

  That was also disturbingly unlike him. Delfino was all about rules. Regulations. Patterns. In many ways, he was predictable. So often, that predictability was all that kept me holding it together.

  Maybe I had no idea what he was capable of, but the thought that there were some behaviors I could anticipate—and therefore avoid or control—was a comforting one. Seeing him cast off these constants I’d come to rely upon as though he was a reptile just shedding its summer skin… it disquieted me. Unnerved me. Made me want to scream, cry, and run far, far away from him.

  It served as a confirmation of what I’d been dreading to one day learn: that I really didn’t have the first clue about what kind of man he was or what he might do, to me or in any other situation. Certainly, I’d no idea what he’d do in this one.

  And that scared the crap out of me.

  Everything I’d thought I knew about Delfino was proving to be just another act. One by one, he had stripped the layers of his façade, showing me without saying a word that he was beyond my comprehension. It made me shamefaced, made me feel like a fool to know that all these years, he’d conned me just as well as he had everyone else. That even in the privacy of our own home, Delfino had never given up anything of himself.

  It was hard to quantify why, exactly, that felt like a betrayal. Delfino and I were not friend
s. There was nothing about our relationship that would suggest any kind of intimacy was exchanged, least of all on his end. But we had shared living arrangements. He’d seen me sick and sweating. He’d seen me shaking after a nightmare. He’d seen me aching with loneliness and he’d seen me cry. Without meaning to, without any intention of doing so—in a way, without my consent—I had let him glimpse very private aspects of myself, let him into my life in a way few others could claim. In return, he’d given me nothing but lies.

  “Delfino,” I murmured, the first word I’d spoken since he’d shown up at the church. “Dominic Delfino.” He answered with the barest incline of his head, raising his storm-gray eyes to meet mine. I swallowed. “Is that even your real name?”

  He held my gaze a moment. Then he reached down, picked up his mug, and blew across the steaming surface of its contents. It was the only answer he gave.

  I leaned back against the couch cushions, holding myself. I knew it wasn’t particularly cold in the house, but I felt chilled all the same. Obviously, I had been alone with Delfino before—and on many occasions—but this felt different. This felt far more dangerous, and it was killing me that I didn’t know why.

  But it was clear Delfino wasn’t going to tell me, just like he wasn’t going to let on where he’d had his men take Leo. I could only assume the worst, and it struck me that that was the point. By remaining silent, Delfino didn’t have to torture me in any other way. My imagination would do his dirty work for him just fine.

  All I had were vague pieces of a puzzle. I knew Delfino planned on killing Leo. I knew that I was meant to distract Leo from interfering with that. What I didn’t know was how, or why. What was the point of all this? Why was it so damn important to him that Leo Richards must die? What had he ever done to deserve this?