Point of Redemption

by Stacey Lynn

  “Don’t move.”

  I stilled at the deep voice. It sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it until I closed my eyes and remembered the cabin with the gunshots and the men… Erik and Gio.

  I turned my head and saw Erik sitting on the side of another bed next to me. Between us sat a night stand with an old-school corded phone.

  I was in a hotel room. A nice one. Nicer than any place I’d ever worked, anyway.

  “Where am I?” I asked, my throat dry but better than before. Somehow, Erik sitting on the edge of the bed and seeing me almost completely naked didn’t bother me. He kept his eyes on my face as I shifted. Trying to turn to face him, the sheet drifted below my breasts.

  My legs and back protested against the slow movement.

  “Hotel in Minneapolis.”

  I narrowed my eyes. What in the hell was I doing here? “I thought you said you were taking me to Ryker.”

  He glanced at his watched. A thick, black leather band with diamonds surrounding the edges of the face. At least it was something that sparkled. Regardless, the man was in another black suit and looked immaculate.

  “He’ll be here any minute.”

  My body warmed. My blood began to pulse in my veins. I glanced down to see my naked body barely wrapped in a white, soft sheet and panic filled me. Dirt and sweat covered my skin and my fingers nails were almost black. I didn’t want to inhale my own scent knowing how much I had to stink.

  Tears stung my eyes at the thought of Ryker seeing me like this.

  I couldn’t let him see me like this. No one could ever see me like this.

  “I don’t…” I started to speak and shut my mouth. I couldn’t explain to a man I didn’t know that I didn’t want to see the man who had apparently been looking for me. “I need a shower.”

  Erik stood up and walked toward my side of the bed. I watched him, my eyes refusing to blink, unsure of what he had planned. But when he reached me, he simply handed me a white, button up shirt. “This is all I have for you to wear.”

  I draped the clean fabric over my hunched shoulders and picked at the dirt under my fingernails.

  “The bathroom’s right down the hall if you want to get cleaned up.”

  I nodded but said nothing. A thank you bounced on the tip of my tongue, but I still didn’t know who the man was. Regardless, no way was I seeing Ryker or anyone else half naked.

  I stood up, my legs aching with the movement and the weight of my body. When I reached the hallway, I turned to Erik, unable to help needing to know who had saved me. “Who are you?”

  Erik glanced away. “An ally. As long as your man does what he’s told.”

  I tilted my head to the side. “I don’t understand.”

  Erik had moved to the desk chair and sat with his elbows propped on his knees, leaning toward me.

  “Nordic Lords made a deal with us. We helped them complete it and you are our way of ensuring they fulfill their end of the promise.”

  A chess piece. Gratefulness that he had saved me was immediately quenched and replaced with indignation. Would I ever exist in a world when I didn’t belong to someone else? Or easily used by someone for their own manipulative purposes?

  I looked around the room. Dark woodwork, luscious sheets and bedcoverings over the two enormous beds. There was a sitting area at the far end with a small kitchenette area. A vase of fresh flowers filled the small eating table.

  My lips pursed as I tried to fight the anger, but it couldn’t be helped. I shrugged. “At least this jail is nicer.”

  I heard Erik let loose a low but brief chuckle of amusement on my behalf, but I chose to ignore him.

  Instead I focused on leaving him alone and taking a shower. The warm water stung my back and I moaned under the spray. Not only from the pain, but also because it felt incredible to be getting clean. Two weeks with barely moving and the stress of not knowing what was going to happen next had done a number on me.

  I needed a massage once I healed. Maybe a manicure, I thought, as I used the washcloth and tried in vain to dig and scrub all the dirt from under my nails and off my body.

  And I willed my mind to stop racing from the memories of the last two weeks, but it couldn’t be helped. Salty tears lined my cheeks as I scrubbed my face and then massaged shampoo into my hair. I had never understood why Cain hated me so much. Why he was harder on me than anyone else that walked through the doors of Penny’s.

  But kidnapping me for weeks was a new low. Even as I cleaned the disgust from my body, I felt a darkness creep into the edges of my soul. A hatred for a man I knew I would kill willingly if he ever put his hands on me again.

  A man who had used my body and done as much as he could to destroy my heart and my spirit.

  I refused to give him the victory.

  He could have my mom, the waste of space who hadn’t been a mom to me since I was a young girl.

  I was done with all of it. I wanted to find a home and plant a garden and sit outside in the sun in the summers and drive snowmobiles through the forests in the winter.

  I wanted a simple life where no one could ever tell me what to do ever again, where no man would ever think he had the power to control me or touch me in any way I didn’t want.

  And I would have it.

  Somehow, I would find a way to have every damn thing I’d ever wanted.

  A loud pounding knock on the door to the room startled me in the shower, and I quickly turned off the water. Armed with new determination, I quickly dried off, squeezed the excess water from my hair, and threw on the shirt Erik had loaned me.

  I opened the door to the bathroom and heard a feral growl from a man who I had missed and dreamed and hoped would come for me.

  This time, it wasn’t a naïve hope that ended in broken hearts.

  “Where the fuck is she, Sporelli?”

  Angelo’s younger brother, Erik, stood in the doorway to the hotel room where Daemon and I were told Faith would be after we made our first drop for him.

  A part of me still wanted to pound in my little brother’s head for making such a deal. From what I knew, Nordic Lords had worked their asses off to clean up Jasper Bay and prevent drugs from coming into the ports and the state. Now, Nordic Lords were in the damn middle of it all over again.

  The other part of me—the stronger part—was so fucking glad we had found Faith.

  “Let me in,” I growled again at the man. My hands were balled into fists and I didn’t give a shit that the man in front of me easily held a gun at his side. With the same hand, he waved Daemon and I into the room.

  “She’s hurt,” he reminded us. Daemon was at my back and cursed. The anger I heard in Erik’s tone over seeing Faith was the only thing that stopped me from slamming him into the wall.

  I growled as I shoved past him into the room. They had used her just like Black Death. I hated them for it even if I understood.

  Collateral.

  Jesus fucking Christ.

  Faith wasn’t a damn pawn.

  Daemon, sensing my rage and the loose hold on my temper, grabbed my shoulder and hissed quietly, “Get Faith and let’s get out. We’ll leave the other shit alone for now.”

  I nodded and didn’t stop moving until I turned the short hallway from the hotel room and saw her.

  It fucking felt like someone struck me in the chest with a frying pan. It was painful seeing Faith standing in the doorway to the bathroom with only a dress shirt on. Her skin was white as snow, and it highlighted the small red cracks on her lips along with the yellow bruise that covered the right side of her face.

  Someone had hit her. Hard. The fact that it was healing didn’t settle the heat that pressed against my chest.

  “Faith,” I said and took a step toward her. But the way her eyes widened and her lips parted on a quick inhale had me freezing in my feet. I had no idea if I could touch her or if she’d talk to me, but I definitely knew that I needed her.

  In my arms.

  In my life.

&
nbsp; “Hey,” she said softly. And I swear, that one soft, shaky word escaped her lips and went straight to chest, soothing my anger, and then down to my dick, hardening it.

  She wasn’t pissed.

  “You came.”

  She ran her hand through her hair until it loosely fell over the font of the white, buttoned up shirt she had on.

  I closed the distance between us, and without thinking, I cupped her cheek in my hand and ran my thumb over her bruise. I stared at it as if I had laser powers that could make it disappear. Her skin had been marred enough. She didn’t need more damage.

  Finally, I pulled my eyes from the bruise to her watchful blue eyes. She looked directly at me, and then pulled her bottom lip in between her teeth. Something sparked between us. I knew what it was. It was the same thing I always felt whenever I had looked at Faith when we were kids, when we got engaged, and when I first saw her at Penny’s only weeks ago.

  Love.

  Need.

  This time… she felt it, too.

  I smiled and leaned in, brushing my lips against her bruise and back to her ear. “Always, Faith. I will always come for you.”

  Her head dropped to my chest right as her shoulders began to shake. Her sobs racked my body as hard as if they were coming from my own chest. My hands instinctively went to wrap around her waist, but when I did, her pained cry stopped me.

  “What is it?” I asked, my hands freezing on her lower back. I didn’t need her to answer. As I caught the reflection of her back in the bathroom’s mirror, small red stripes of blood showed through the back of her shirt.

  My teeth clenched together as I slowly lifted her shirt.

  She tensed beneath me.

  “Shush,” I told her. “Let me see.”

  Through a quieted sob, she gave me her permission.

  The flash of red I saw in my eyes as my anger rolled through my body was darker than the blood that lined her back. Lifting the shirt only halfway up her back, I couldn’t bare to see any more.

  Holy shit.

  “He’ll bleed,” I hissed in her ear low enough so Daemon and Erik couldn’t hear me. “I will make him fucking pay for this.”

  “I know,” she whispered. My chest was wet with her tears as she lifted her face to mine. “You came for me.”

  I stared down at her, wanting to reassure her again, but I couldn’t. My fury over her back and her skin made me flinch, and I looked away, too afraid I’d snap and scare her. She’d been scared enough.

  “Shit,” Daemon hissed from behind me. I heard Erik begin cataloging all of her injuries. I stopped listening when he rambled off a list longer than anything I’d heard before.

  “Come on,” I said, dropping the shirt and lighting wrapping a hand around her waist. “Let’s get you home.”

  Her eyes snapped to mine. There was a hopefulness, and yet fearful look in them. “No,” she rasped through a dried throat.

  “The clubhouse, Faith. We need to have Doc take care of you.”

  Slowly, she nodded. I reached for a bottled water Erik held out for me and gently placed it in Faith’s free hand.

  “Thanks for taking care of her,” Daemon said. Ever the professional. Hell—the President, now.

  As we hit the doorway to the hotel, Faith looked back and flashed a small, pathetic smile to Sporelli. He raised a hand in a wave and closed the door behind us.

  Once we got her settled in the back of Daemon’s truck, I cupped her cheeks in my hands. Without thinking, I leaned down and pressed my lips against her temple. She gasped in a quick, quiet breath that told me she was not unaffected by my touch. “You’ll never be alone again.”

  I now knew that Meg was beautiful and Brayden was as handsome as Ryker. I knew this because every time I woke up and opened my eyes for the first two days, I immediately stared at a picture of the three of them. Ryker’s arms were around the both of them. The photo was framed and propped up on his dresser directly across from the bed. No matter where I looked in the room, I felt their happy, easy smiles mocking me.

  Even after I threw a towel across the room, which knocked the photo over and covered it up, I could still feel his family’s happy smiles staring at me all hours of every day.

  What hurt worse was that I hadn’t seen Ryker since he brought me to his room at the club. Every morning I woke up with decreasing hope that he’d be lying next to me, an arm wrapped around me like he first did as soon as he showed up at the hotel. But that had all changed when he saw the blood on my back. The way he flinched and looked away from me.

  He hadn’t looked me in the eyes since.

  He was avoiding me and the only thing I could figure out was that he might have saved me, but he had his own family. All I was to him was someone to save. A friend of Liv’s that he’d been able to help. That was it.

  Gone were his promises of always coming for me. Unless he meant that only in the if-you-need-your-life-saved way.

  I wanted to get the hell out of Ryker’s room except I had nowhere else to go. The only other option was Daemon’s house where Olivia now lived with him, but I also knew Ryker was staying there until he found his own place.

  I couldn’t go anywhere to escape.

  So I tortured myself in Ryker’s room—smelling his cologne on his sheets and bathroom towels. I tortured myself by mentally taking an exacto knife to the picture I could no longer see and erasing Ryker’s woman from his bedroom and his memory.

  Mostly, I tortured myself by trying to put myself in his room like I actually belonged. If five years ago he had come inside my house when he saw Cain mauling me with his mouth and beat the shit out of him instead of turning tail and fleeing town, everything would have been different.

  I hated him for not being smart enough to know I would never turn my back on him.

  Yet knowing what must have been going through his mind that night, I couldn’t blame him either.

  And none of it changed the fact that as much as I wanted Ryker, as much as I wanted his arms around me, soothing me, and telling me that everything would be okay and that I would eventually move passed the horrific memories that flooded my mind, I knew that some other woman owned that spot now.

  My head snapped up as the door slammed open and banged against the wall behind it.

  The walls shook and rattled as Ryker stomped inside his room, bloodied and battered, a shredded shirt in his fist. All my earlier anger with him vanished instantly as I threw back the sheet covering me.

  I gasped. “Are you okay?” I twisted myself on the bed, placing my feet on the floor, and curled one arm around my ribs as I stood up.

  “Fucking fantastic.” He stood in the doorway, chest heaving with blood everywhere, and kept his eyes trained on me. We stood across the room from one another, one bed and ten feet of space between us as we stared at each other. It felt like the space of the Grand Canyon.

  Tension prickled the air. I expected him to yell at me, to shake me into finally speaking to him. My hands itched to clean the blood off him, to inspect his cuts and gashes and bruises like he had done to me when he helped Doc stitch me up.

  But my feet felt paralyzed, too afraid to move and make the first step to him. Too afraid of what it would mean to put myself on the line like that—even as small as that step would be—and be rejected all over again once Meg and his kid came into the picture.

  He stalked across the room, grabbing a clean shirt out of his dresser on the way, and then slammed the door to the bathroom shut.

  My legs collapsed, and I plopped back down onto the edge of the bed as I heard the water running in the bathroom. My fingers fiddled with the edges of the bed as I tried to wrap my head around what possibly could have happened to him to leave him such a wreck. He was strong—the well-defined chest that I couldn’t have possibly missed as he stalked across the room before was a visual testament to his strength.

  He was more beautiful than he had been when we were simply teenagers.

  “Faith.” My head jerked behind me—my c
heeks instantly heated as if I’d been caught with my hand in a cookie jar.

  Lost in my revere of Ryker’s half-naked body, I hadn’t heard Daemon enter the room.

  He stood in the doorway, his arms crossed and his shoulder propped on the frame. “Talk to him.”

  I almost smiled, seeing him standing there, looking so powerful and strong. Daemon’s goatee needed a trim. When I had said that to Live earlier, she had smiled and laughed, but it didn’t reach her eye. Somehow I knew she was simply laughing for my sake, and both of us knew Daemon wouldn’t do anything he was told to do.

  “There’s nothing for us to say to one another.”

  Daemon laughed once. It was deep and his frustration with me showed. Everyone’s frustration with me showed clearly on their faces when I refused to tell them what had happened to me. I figured the scars and bruised ribs said it all.

  “You two have a boatload of shit to figure out. Do it before the dumbass gets his brains bashed in the next time he steps into the ring.” He left, leaving me staring after him with my jaw dropped to my chest, shutting the door behind him.

  I flung my head around back to the bathroom that was now quiet. Ryker came out with a towel wrapped around his waist and a white shirt on. One hand gripped the towel as the steam from his shower followed him into the room.

  He glanced at me once before turning to his dresser and pulling out a pair of jeans. He didn’t look at me again when he went back to the bathroom to finish dressing or when he came back out to the bedroom, flung his new leather cut over his shoulders, and loaded up his pockets with his wallet and change.

  Red scratches, lined with blood, covered the area above his eyebrows and his cheekbones. Daemon’s words bounced in my head. The thought that Ryker had that happen to him—because he was pissed something happened to me—filled me with a mixture of emotions I couldn’t place.

  “Who did that to you?”

  His back straightened at the first words I spoke to him in days. Not because I hadn’t wanted to, but because I didn’t know what to say. What was there to say when he didn’t want me… not in that way, at least.