“It was?”
Our eyes clashed and held. “It was.”
A soft smile played around my lips. “Good.”
Sixteen
Hawk
The hangover from hell had me moaning as I flopped off the bed in an effort to go for a piss. When I face planted, I didn’t even groan, just crawled on my hands and knees to the john before somehow managing to get to my feet so I could use the bathroom.
Head banging all the while, I didn’t even manage to regret the amount of tequila I’d consumed at the bar last night. The Sinner-owned establishment had seen a lot of my ass since the bombing, and it’d be seeing a fuck ton more before this whole mess was over.
I didn’t have it in me to be ashamed about that.
Dad was dead.
North, the fucker, had run off with our stepmother.
Giulia was pregnant.
The clubhouse was gone.
I’d nearly died too.
Five facts. Each of them, on their own, difficult to handle, but en masse was just more than anyone could deal with.
The least worrisome was Giulia, but fuck, as a mom? I wasn’t sure how that was going to roll, especially not with Nyx as the baby daddy. Should I expect Junior as a nephew? The ultimate problem child? Or would things somehow turn out for the best like I hoped they would for her sake?
Then there was North. My twin. The one person I’d shared everything with, yet the cunt didn’t even tell me he was boning Dad’s Old Lady, and he didn’t even say good-fucking-bye when he went AWOL.
I hated that my eyes welled up at that. Christ, such a pussy, but North was my shadow. And I was his. We were a team. His dumbass got us into shit, but he was the charmer. I was the fixer. We worked well together, always had and, I’d thought, always would.
Acting as a single entity was harder than I could say, and I was struggling. So if I drank more tequila than was wise, so fucking be it.
When I’d finished in the bathroom, I didn’t return to bed. Jonesing for something to drink, I trudged out of my borrowed bedroom and into the hall.
We were staying at the club’s lawyer’s place. I was pretty sure that wasn’t a part of her retainer, but there was something funky going on between her and Rex anyway.
I remembered Rachel from when I was a kid, from when I’d lived here before Mom had taken us away from Dad. She’d been a scrawny thing then, all big eyes and bitter smiles. Even though I was younger than her, she was still smaller than me, and I knew that was because she’d been malnourished as a little girl.
To this day, she was small-boned, but fuck, it looked good on her. If the Prez wasn’t boning her, he really fucking should.
Scratching my balls as I strolled into the kitchen, I came face-to-face with a scenario that had me jerking to a halt.
Christ, my defenses were way too down if I hadn’t registered this clusterfuck.
My baby sis was standing by the counter, wearing an evil smirk as she watched Ghost, whose face was stern with resolve and whose hands were fisted in Amara’s hair, slam Amara into the kitchen table. Beside Giulia, Lily hovered, her nerves plain to see even if she wasn’t stopping this…
I frowned, then barked, “What the fuck is going on here? Giules?”
They all froze, whipping around to stare at me, and, no word of a fucking lie, I came across one of the most surreal moments of my life.
In the country farmhouse kitchen, complete with scrubbed oak beams that I’d no idea where they’d come from in the middle of fucking West Orange, a matching table that looked ancient, and a dresser loaded down with china dishes, as well as a host of counter space and cupboards, it was like watching a Sons of Anarchy episode in an Architectural Digest photoshoot.
“I’m too hungover for this,” I muttered under my breath, regretting the bottle of tequila I’d had because I should have had twice as much. When dealing with Giulia, it was always wise to go in with double the recommended dose of anything.
Rubbing the back of my neck, I headed deeper into the kitchen as my sister muttered, “Carry on, Alessa, you’ve got some extracting to do.”
To punctuate that, Ghost immediately obeyed by slamming Amara’s face into the table once more.
My brows rose. “Extracting? You don’t need to do shit. Link already talked to her yesterday.” Then, as an afterthought, I asked, “Who the fuck is Alessa?”
“Me,” said Ghost.
I blinked. “Oh.” I mean, it didn’t take a fucking genius to realize that Ghost wasn’t her real goddamn name. Still, in my hungover state, it felt like a massive leap.
Dumbly, I peered at Amara who, I noticed, wasn’t struggling.
“She wouldn’t betray us,” I rumbled easily, before striding over to the fridge where there was OJ I badly needed to consume.
“How the fuck do you know that?” Giulia groused. “You a mind reader or something?”
I flipped her the bird because it was either that or get mad about her sass. Fucking women—I swear, we only bred them insane in my family. Mom was just as bad… Hard to believe I missed her.
This year had been the shittiest of my life.
Mom dead, Dad dead, North gone…
How were Giulia and I the only ones left standing?
Blowing out a breath at the thought, I muttered, “She’s got a crush on you, ain’t she? Why would she jeopardize that?” And what a tragedy that was.
Amara had the finest tits a man could wish for in a fuck buddy. I’d seen pornstars with smaller racks than hers. They’d been unimpressive when she’d first arrived, but that was what happened when you starved a woman, I guessed—their tits disappeared first.
After all this time with the Sinners, she’d filled out again, and she’d filled out fine. It wasn’t the first time I’d noticed either.
She and that bitch, Tatána, always scurried around the place like frightened mice. That was why we were all reeling from the fact that Tatána had betrayed us with that cunt David—the prick who’d worked for Nyx’s sister at her tattoo parlor.
When had shit become so complicated?
Had it always been that way or was there some author out there, some divine being that was deciding to fuck with our lives?
Talk about goddamn cruel.
I grunted at the thought, mentally flipped that unknown being the bird as well because they deserved it as much as Giulia did, and ground out, “You can’t be serious? Sure as hell I’m not the only one who noticed it.”
As tragic as it was that Amara was gay because those tits were wasted on another woman, it fit. I knew the ‘girls’ had all been through things that Satanists would consider cruel, so why wouldn’t they be anti-men?
Alessa/Ghost whispered something in Ukrainian, the hand she had in Amara’s hair tightening to the point where her knuckles bled white. I winced in preparation for the woman’s face being slammed into the table yet again, but even I jolted in surprise when Alessa dragged her back and tipped her so she was peering up at her, her head perpendicular to the floor.
Amara squealed before quickly gushing, “Tak!” I didn’t have to speak the language to hear the misery in her voice. And now that I thought about it, Amara wasn’t even scared by the firm grip Alessa had on her hair or the way her face was being smashed into the table.
I frowned at that because even though I knew what they’d gone through, how bad did it have to be if this kind of treatment didn’t illicit much of a response?
Uneasily, I stared at the scene once more. Giulia was a sicko, so I disregarded her reaction, Lily was definitely nervous which told me she knew they shouldn’t be doing this as it appertained to club business. As for Alessa, she was calm. So was Amara.
Weird.
With a carton of juice in my hand, I leaned back against the fridge and said, “Leave her alone. She didn’t do shit.”
“You didn’t think Tatána did either, and this isn’t Old Man business,” was all Giulia said, but her eyes were mean. “This is Old Lady business.”
“Since I became an Old goddamn Lady.” Her chin jutted out, and I got the feeling that if I’d been nearer, she’d have gladly head-butted me.
Wouldn’t be the first fucking time.
“If you think I’m gonna be like Ma and am gonna let you fuckers treat me like I’m a walking pussy and womb, you’ve got another thing coming.”
I rolled my eyes. “As if anyone would even dare.”
She smirked. “That’s how it’s gonna stay. Bitches deal with bitches. How it should be.”
Staring at Alessa whose hand was still firmly clasped in Amara’s hair as they muttered shit to each other in Ukrainian, or was it Russian? I didn’t have a fucking clue. To be honest, it was kind of hot though. All those guttural sounds, the way Alessa held her, how Amara submitted…
Shit, now was not the time to get a boner. Mostly because I needed all the blood in my brain to deal with Giulia.
“She ain’t scared,” I pointed out. “How you going to get anything out of her?”
“He’s right,” Lily said softly.
“Tells you what they’ve been through, doesn’t it?” Giulia retorted, but her cheeks were pinched, and in her eyes I saw the shadows Nyx had mostly chased away.
Boggled my mind that the club’s enforcer turned VP had done that.
Trust Giulia to find comfort in a psychopath’s arms. Ma’d be proud.
Not.
“It does,” Lily agreed, her tone sad.
We all knew she’d been through as much shit as the girls. Not that it was a competition. Although, where the women had been stored was a thousand times worse than the mansion Lily lived in, but gilded cages still required the prisoner shit and piss in them, didn’t they? From what I’d heard, though, the girls had literally had to do that.
Link had told me once that they’d been covered in it. Mostly it fucked with my mind that the girl we’d buried, on the same day as my father, had been left to die in her cage, while Amara, Alessa, and the now dead Tatána had lived alongside her.
Shuddering at the thought and deciding I really needed to watch SpongeBob after this, I muttered, “What does she say, Alessa? Does she know what Tatána was doing?”
At my words, she took a step back and relinquished her hold on the other woman’s hair. I had no idea why my question was the trigger, but she muttered, her tone still thick with an accent I wasn’t used to hearing from her, “She says she knew Tatána was sneaking around.”
I frowned. “Why didn’t you say something?”
Amara didn’t move from her place at the table. She rolled her head on her forehead though, so she was face down against it. Her hands, neat and tidy things, with clean, short nails, were pressed on either side of her. It was kind of like looking at a drunk mime artist.
“Tatána said she was looking for her own Maverick. What was I supposed to say?”
My brows rose at that, and I cast my sister a look. “She was screwing around with a biker?”
Amara shook her head, rocking it from side to side against the oak table. I wished she’d stop, to be honest. It was weird, and if I said that, then it really goddamn was.
“No,” Alessa translated for her. “I didn’t think so. But I wasn’t sure. The bikers scared her, but she was jealous of Alessa. Said she wanted that kind of security.”
“She was the kind of woman who coveted,” Alessa concurred, but a flash of grief splashed across her features, settling in to darken her eyes, making her mouth turn down at the corners. Who the fuck could blame her?
Tatána had coveted what she had, and now it was clear to see from her devastation that Alessa coveted what Ghost had.
I’d never really known Maverick that well, what with him practically being glued to the attic and my being a prospect, so I had all the shit jobs in the clubhouse. But I knew enough to see a man in love, to see that he was head over heels for his girl…
I couldn’t even imagine what Alessa was going through, and though I was sure she wouldn’t want it, she had my sympathy. Loss like that was impossible to get over especially if what I’d overheard Nyx telling Rex was true—the doctors didn’t know if he’d ever regain his memory.
How fucked up was that?
“Are you gonna bring out the corkscrews now?” I asked warily. “Dig ‘em under her nails, make sure you squeezed all the information out of her?”
Giulia huffed. “We’re not the Spanish Inquisition.”
“No? Just looks like it to me then, huh?” I strolled over to the table, dumped the juice on there and gently, carefully, so I didn’t scare the shit out of her, rested my hand on Amara’s shoulder. She jolted like my fingers were connected to a live wire, then she sat up, her gaze darting to mine.
It was my turn to react like there was a live wire connecting me to her.
Jesus.
Those fucking eyes.
How had I never noticed them before?
How had I never goddamn seen them?
They were like ice. Smoky gray with hints of white, making the black of her pupils pierce me like a knife to the goddamn gut.
The flashbang had me rearing back like she’d shocked me with a cattle prod, and I twisted away from her and snarled at my sister, “Whether this is bitches’ business or not, leave her the fuck alone. The council vetted her.” And then, though I wanted to storm off, to return to my bed, to fall back into the misery of my hangover, I couldn’t. I knew those fucking eyes would haunt me.
I had a feeling they always goddamn would.
So, crouching in front of her, taking note of how she watched me warily, her lack of trust evident despite the fact I’d just ordered the other women to leave her the hell alone, I pressed a hand to the back of her head, ignoring her wince as I gently stroked my fingers through the tangled locks of her hair. She blinked at me, those snowy eyes of hers shielded by sooty lashes that were so thick I had to wonder what they’d feel like whispering against my skin if she kissed me, and I asked, “Let’s get some peas for your forehead.”
Her brow furrowed. “Peas?” she asked thickly, repeating my words and vocalizing them like a child would.
“Frozen ones. For the swelling.” I knew she didn’t speak English, but this close, with her eyes pinned on mine, I got a different feeling.
Did she understand more than she let on?
Who could blame her for trying to find security in hiding how much of our language she spoke?
I cut Ghost a look, annoyed at her for having put Amara through this. Christ, after what they’d both been through, how could she have done that to her?
Then, as shitty as it was, I recognized what she’d done was actually good for the club. She cared about the Sinners’ interests, and that mattered. It mattered a hell of a lot, especially in the face of their ‘sister’s’ betrayal.
“Translate for me.”
If Alessa recognized my irritation, she ignored it and did as I asked. The look in Amara’s eyes didn’t change, and I knew that a ‘look’ was something that could easily be interpreted. How did anyone show an emotion through the striations in a pupil? But I just knew… call it some sixth goddamn fucking sense, but she understood me.
She didn’t need the translation.
I surged to my feet once more, retreating to the freezer where I grabbed two bags of frozen carrots as there were no peas to be found, and I returned and pressed it to the back of her head even though she’d taken the cautious step of sitting up. Pushing the other against the goose egg on her forehead, I murmured, “It’s okay to settle back as you were. I’ll make sure they don’t hurt you.”
Giulia snorted at that, so I shot her a glower. Her quirked brow had my scowl darkening, but there was no frightening Giulia. She hadn’t been born with the necessary brain cells to find fear in dangerous men—if she did, she wouldn’t be Nyx’s Old Lady.
Giving her up as a lost cause, I graced Lily and Alessa with a gimlet stare. When it didn’t wor
k on either of them, I had to give the fuck up.
Trouble was… much as I hated what Alessa had done here, what my sister and Lily had been involved in, each of them was a victim. They knew what it meant to be on the other side of a man’s fist, but Lily and Giulia, Ghost until recently, were secure in the protection of their men’s arms.
Even as it impeded my ability to threaten them into compliance, I couldn’t be anything other than glad for them and sad for Amara.
Seventeen
Alessa
I should probably feel bad for hurting Amara the way I did, but I didn’t.
The feel of her hair in my grip, the rush of power as I forced her to talk was intoxicating. But for all that, it wasn’t something I could do again.
I’d done it this time because only I could comprehend what Amara had been through, only I knew how to get to her. Violence wasn’t the way, domination was, and I knew the brothers would never understand that. How could they? Link still hesitated to put his hand on my shoulder whenever he approached me. Even when they were mad, when they were furious, reeling from the devastating blow that had been dealt them, I knew they’d never really take things to another level.
Not without outright proof that she’d done something wrong anyway.
She’d thought we weren’t being serious at first, that was when I’d grabbed her by the hair, forced her to take a seat, and slammed her face into the table. That was as aggressive as I’d been, but it was plenty enough.
I wouldn’t want to repeat the action, but would for Maverick.
He needed to know the truth? Needed to know who was conspiring against his MC? Well, I’d help him with that endeavor.
Hearing him tell a friend he’d served with that was the only thing he had to get up for in the morning, I realized I had to act. Once the threat was neutralized, perhaps he’d make an attempt on his life. Before that happened, I needed to prove to him that he had more than the MC to live for.
He had me.
Hearing Amara say that Tatána was jealous of me, that she’d wanted what I had with Maverick, had reminded me of the keening loss I was dealing with.
Maverick: A Dark MC Romance (A Dark & Dirty Sinners' MC Series Book 6) Page 15
