by Zoey Parker
“Pull the trigger, James,” I said.
He grimaced. Three shots fired.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Carmen
I heard a howling shriek and saw blood erupt from my father’s leg. To either side of me, his two henchmen collapsed. They were dead before they hit the ground.
I screamed as I fell, cowering into the dirt, shielding my head and eyes and praying I didn’t get shot.
I peeked out between my hands. From across the yard came two massive, shaven-headed men wearing tactical gear with big sniper rifles strapped across their shoulders.
They pushed James onto his back, then one of them reached a hand down to help Ben up. He took it and struggled to my feet.
“Are you okay, friend?” said a voice behind me.
I turned and saw a man walking towards where I stood. He was wearing a tracksuit and looking as casual as could be. But I saw the glimmer in his eyes and knew he was brewing with anger.
“I’m okay,” Ben said.
I didn’t know what was going on, but somehow, I’d made it through unhurt.
The man nodded sagely. “It seems our timing was appropriate. I am glad,” he said with a Russian accent.
“You don’t even know the half of it, Ivan, my brother.” Ben and the man clasped hands, then turned as one to look at James where he was lying in the dirt.
“So this is the motherfucker, eh?” he asked.
“This is him,” Ben replied.
Daddy sat up on his elbows, breathing in heavily through his mouth. His eyes were wild with animal fear.
“That is a nasty wound,” Ivan said, pointing at my father’s leg. “You ought to go to a hospital. You are very likely to bleed out if you do not.”
Dad kept breathing, not saying a word. Off to my right, I saw the crumpled bodies of his henchmen. Each of them bore a clean bullet hole right through the forehead.
“Tell me, James,” he continued, “why did you hurt my friend, Olaf? And your wife? That is a very disgraceful thing to do, friend.”
“I didn’t do shit,” he spat.
Ivan clucked and shook his head. “I know very well what you did. Do you think you are the only one who is friends with the police?” He pulled a cell phone out of his pocket, crouched, and waggled it in front of James’s face. “There was video, wasn’t there? You knew this. They had you on camera! Very sloppy, very sloppy, indeed. You are not so good at this job. Perhaps it is best that you do not do it anymore.”
Daddy paled. I felt my stomach drop.
“Let us watch together, shall we?” Ivan announced. He hit play and held the phone so Daddy could see. As each second ticked by, the pallor in my dad’s face whitened further. By the end of it, he looked like a corpse.
The desert was silent when the video ended. Ivan stood up. “Tell your daughter what you did,” he said. His voice was icy cold, barely human. When Daddy stayed silent, he nudged a toe against his ruined leg, eliciting a bone-chilling scream. The howl echoed in the night. “Tell her,” he repeated. “Now.”
Daddy closed his eyes and started to speak, but Ivan interrupted again. “No, you must look at her. Like a man. Explain what you did and why.”
My father looked at me and the whole world shrank down to just his voice. I couldn’t see anything else, hear anything else, couldn’t even breathe as he spoke. His eyes were quivering. “It was me,” he said in a near-whisper. “I did it.”
I shook my head vigorously. “No, you didn’t, Daddy. You couldn’t have.”
“He did it, Carmen,” Ben said softly.
Tears pearled at the corners of my eyes. I heard a hollow, rushing noise, like the blood in my head had begun to stream faster and faster through my veins. My heart in my chest was fluttering at top speed.
“Daddy, why? Why would you kill Mom?”
His face twisted into a violent snarl as he erupted suddenly. “Because she was a fucking whore!” he thundered. “A nasty, cheating slut!”
I shrank in fear at the sudden outburst. Who was this man lying across from me, telling me he’d murdered my mother, calling her a whore, a slut? It was night and day. Just moments ago, I’d felt like I was reunited with him, like I had my father back and everything was falling back into place. But there was one more sudden jerk of the world left in store, it seemed, one more dizzying wrench before I could get a bearing on my life. Just moments ago, he’d seemed so innocent. This didn’t seem possible.
But then I remembered the day with the broken vase, when I’d seen the beast in my father come roaring out as he bellowed at my mother. Tell me who it was! He’d been a monster then. Maybe he’d always been a monster.
“She was sleeping with that fucking filth I found her with. She didn’t have to tell me; I knew it. They were together, just like I knew they’d be. I found them, and I did what had to be done. I don’t regret it. She died like she should have—like a whore.”
The Russian man, Ivan, tilted his head to the side. “She was not cheating on you, James. Olaf was her friend. They had known each other for a long time. He told me often that a friend of his was in trouble, that she was trying to run away from an abusive husband. But he did not say it was you. Perhaps she made him swear to keep her secret safe; I do not know for certain. But I do know you killed an innocent man. One who deserved better than to die at the hands of a pig like you.”
I couldn’t keep everything straight. Revelations were being tossed around casually, but each one was exploding in my head like a hand grenade. My mother was a cheater—no, she was just scared. Ben had killed her—no, my own father had. I didn’t know what to think, how to feel. It was all too much. I felt dizzy and nauseating. And all this blood around me wasn’t helping.
“What are you going to do to me?” Daddy asked. “Take me to the police?”
Ben shook his head grimly. “Whatever Ivan has in store for you will be far, far worse than jail, James. I’d say, may God have mercy on your soul, but I don’t believe in the big man upstairs, and even if I did, I don’t think he gives a damn about you.”
Ivan’s men bent down and each took one of my father’s arms in their grasp. They began dragging him off to the side of the house, where a truck sat idling. Ivan looked at Ben once, nodded brusquely, then turned and followed his men to the car. They tossed my father into the backseat and climbed in after him. Then they shut the door. The car turned and disappeared around the bend in the road.
Ben turned to face me. I was still lying in the dirt. He walked over and reached down to help me up, brushing off dirt from my clothing as I stood. I felt weak and numb everywhere, like I could barely support my own weight.
He looked down at me, his eyes steely and soft at the same time, boiling with some inscrutable mix of love and distance, of fire, of glaciers. All of the things that made him who he was, they were visible in one way or another, or maybe I was just going delusional from all of the emotional stress.
“I don’t know what to say,” I said.
“I know.”
“Is it true?”
He took a moment before nodding. “I’m sorry, Carmen. It’s a horrible thing to hear.”
I bit my lip, then fell into his chest. He wrapped his arms around me and for the first time in a long time, I felt safe, protected. Like the wildly pinwheeling world had finally come into balance and I could start trusting the things around me again. There would be a lot of time needed to recover. It wasn’t going to be easy to come to terms with the fact that my father had killed my mother, that he’d lied to me, that he’d used me as bait to lure his enemy here and try to kill him. I was an eighteen-year-old girl, not a war-hardened biker like Ben.
But somehow, being close to him made me feel like I’d find a way to make sense of everything. To find my feet again. I felt strong. Do you trust me? he’d asked when I stood on top of the rock and looked down at the branches hiding him from sight below me. I’d said yes, and I jumped. Wasn’t this just more of the same?
In the midst of the
dizziness swirling through my head, I began to feel centered and calm. His arms around me were so solid; there was no way in hell I could doubt them. His breath was so steady, so easy to rely on. It was mind-boggling how quickly he had become my everything. In a world that refused to sit still for me, he never budged. Ben was a rock. My rock.
I leaned back and looked up at him and said the only thing I knew I could say in the moment. “I love you, Ben.”
He brushed his lips against mine. “I love you, too, Carmen.”
And, at long last, the world stopped spinning. My world stopped spinning, at least. I had everything I needed. Right here. Right now.
Epilogue
Ben
Four Months Later
Carmen was squeezing the living daylights out of my hand. “Jesus, you’re stronger than I would’ve guessed,” I said.
She glared at me. Her hair was slicked over her forehead with sweat, and both cheeks were flushed bright red.
“Not the time,” snapped a nurse to my right. “Move.”
I shuffled out of the way as the woman went over to check the IV bag on a stand next to the hospital bed. It was chaos in the room. Doctors and nurses were swirling around, Carmen was moaning in pain with each contraction, and the air was filled with beeps and clicks of a thousand different machines. But goddamn, the girl could really grip. I’d lost all feeling in my fingertips.
“Push,” ordered the doctor, crouching between her legs.
“Come on, baby,” I said encouragingly. “You got this. I’m right here with you.”
A piercing wail broke the air and my heart stopped in place. Carmen’s face scrunched up, then she slumped back in exhaustion. The doctor at the foot of the bed rose with a grime-covered infant in his hands. I looked at it in amazement. It was my son.
“Carmen, baby, look,” I said, stroking her forearm gently. “Look at him. We made him. That’s ours.”
Her eyes fluttered open. The doctor brought me over to snip the umbilical cord before gently sponging away the slickness covering his skin. When he’d been dried off, he brought the baby over to Carmen and laid him in her arms. I crouched over the head of the bed, my fingers resting on her shoulder, as I stared at my son. Words failed me. That was happening too often lately, but then again, this was never a direction I’d expected my life to go in. I was in a hospital room with my wife and son. Now there was a sentence I never thought I’d say.
“He’s beautiful,” she whispered.
I kissed her on the forehead. “You are, too.”
She looked up at me and smiled. She looked dead tired, like she’d just fought a war, but there was so much beauty and power in those gray eyes of hers. Those otherworldly gray eyes, the ones that had caught my attention so long ago, sticking out of a crowd and demanding that I walk over and into her world. It meant so little at first. Now, it meant everything.
# # #
I pushed the wheelchair carefully through the double doors into the waiting room on the other side. Carmen was seated in it, with our swaddled son nestled in the crook of her elbow. I kept glancing down at him. That skin was so perfect. He’d fallen asleep and I marveled at how calm and still he was, how flawless. I didn’t know what to call the emotions I was feeling.
As soon as we walked in, we were swarmed. Jay, Slick, Duncan, and Spark were there, lingering on the back edge of the crowd, looking ridiculously out of place with their tattoos and leathers in the middle of this pristine white hospital. In front of them, Carmen’s friend Lori had swooped to her knees in front of my wife and was clutching her arm and cooing at the baby.
I leaned down and planted a soft kiss on top of Carmen’s head before walking over to my men. Jay shook my hand. “Congratulations, prez,” he said with a grin. “Now you’re really in for it.”
“Don’t remind me,” I said.
“You ready to be a poppa?” Duncan asked.
“I don’t think anyone’s ever ready, but being around you idiots has definitely given me experience in the dealing with children department.”
We all chuckled. Then I felt a soft touch on my shoulder. I turned around to see Dina. She was smiling, but her eyes were wet with emotion. “I just want to say thank you, Ben,” she said.
“I’ve told you a million times, Dina, you don’t need to thank me.”
“Without you, I would have no closure. I needed that.” She paused before correcting herself. “We needed that.” I looked down and saw her son, standing wobbly on two feet with her hand clasping his.
“He looks so big,” I said.
“He is going to be very strong and handsome. Just like his father.”
I laid my hand on her shoulder. “Without a doubt.”
She smiled again. “Congratulations on your son, Ben. I’ll let you get back to your wife.” Leaning down, she scooped up her son in her arms and kissed him on the cheek before strolling away.
I walked back over to Carmen and crouched at her side. “You look exhausted,” I said.
She groaned. “My whole body hurts. I want to sleep forever.”
“Ready to go?”
Her smile made my chest do that funny twinge, the one it had done the first time I’d seen Carmen, and every time since. It didn’t show any signs of stopping. “Take me home, Ben.”
“As you wish, princess. Let’s go home.”
I stood up and pushed through the crowd, out the doors, and away into a future that looked as bright and pure as my son’s skin. I was a bastard and an outlaw, always had been. But maybe a little grit was what made my wife and child seem so shining and perfect in my eyes. There was redemption for everyone, I supposed. Even for a man like me.
THE END
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Books by Zoey Parker
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GIFT FROM THE BAD BOY: Dark Knights MC
The bad boy took everything from me.
He came into my world and snatched it all away.
My innocence, my purity, my sense of right and wrong.
But he left me one special, special gift:
A baby in my womb.
I couldn’t resist the temptation.
Just one night.
I’d allow myself just one night of freedom.
I never thought one mistake would haunt me like this.
But how could I have said no?
The bad boy was like something out of a romance novel.
Tall, dark, and handsome was just scratching the surface.
He was something else, too.
He was powerful.
He made me want to give him everything.
And he wasn’t about to take no for an answer.
But after he’d finished with me, I thought that would be the end of things.
I didn’t know it yet, but I was dead freakin’ wrong.
I found that out the hard way, a little while later…
When I felt the first kick of the baby in my belly.
The bad boy had left me a present I never asked for.
And that’s just where our story begins.
KILLIAN: The O'Donnell Mafia
I was forbidden to see him. But he still put a baby in my belly.
My father said to stay away.
But that didn’t stop him from hunting me down.
When he did, there was fire – hunger – passion.
And when it was over, the bad boy had gotten me pregnant.
My father did his best to keep me away from the mob life.
But the underworld has a way of dragging you down to its depths.
I wasn’t smart enough to get out bef
ore it was too late.
I wouldn’t have done it even if I could have, though.
I had fallen for the bad boy.
He claimed me, savored me, made me his…
And then he died.
But not before putting a baby in my belly.
Now, I have nowhere to go.
Nowhere except for Niall’s brother, Killian.
He’s Niall times a thousand – darker, hungrier, angrier.
He sees right through me.
He knows what I’m feeling…
He knows I want him.
I can’t help it:
