I gritted my teeth. “I can take more rests—”
“Yes. You will take more rests,” Alessa intoned from the doorway, the hint of Slav in her voice making my dick stir even though the throbbing in my head should have done away with any and all functioning of my cock. “You shouldn’t even be looking at the screen. The doctor advised against it.”
“Rules were made to be broken,” Star murmured, but she was smirking as she spoke, her gaze drifting over lines of code that made her face gleam green in its illumination.
“Certain ones for sure. Not when it means the difference between being unconscious and conscious from a headache,” was Alessa’s waspish retort.
I wasn’t sure why everyone was calling her that and not Ghost, but I liked it. I’d always loved her name. Since the day I’d heard her say, “I do.”
Reaching out for her, I sighed a little as she slipped her hand into mine. “Any joy? Did you find anything in my personal effects?”
“No. Nothing.”
I frowned. “Wonder if the council has something in their possession. They could have checked my stuff before they brought it back here.”
She cupped the back of my neck. “There’s time to think about this later. It’s barely eleven AM and you must need to rest.”
There was no hiding that my brain felt like it had been shoved into a Vitamix on high, but I knew there were things I had to do. Though it had been beyond my control, I’d wasted a lot of goddamn time. Whispers of memories of the past weeks merged into my consciousness, but mostly all I was aware of was the gaping great hole where Ghost should be. I remembered the gnawing ache of Nic’s loss, of the grief I’d experienced, but I could also feel how I’d been pushing her away…
It was no wonder the weight I’d worked hard to encourage her to gain had begun to drop off. She looked drawn, too, but maybe not as drawn as I could have expected.
What was it Star had said? She’d grown some balls?
Intrigued despite myself, I tugged her closer, pulling her down onto my lap. “I’ll go get some rest soon,” I promised. “But first, I need to catch up.”
Star peered at the phone in her lap, and a sigh escaped her as she flashed me the screen.
Rex: Wait for me outside. All’s well in here. I’m in no danger.
Nyx: The fuck were you even thinking?
Link: He wasn’t thinking—
The council began bickering, blowing up Rex’s phone with messages which he clearly ignored as he didn’t reply, but all three of us relaxed a little, knowing he was safe and well. He’d never have sent that text if he wasn’t.
I read a couple more lines of the text convo between my brothers before looking back at Star’s screen. With a couple of flourishes, she muttered, “There, that got the bastard off my computer for another day,” before she switched onto another program.
Frowning, I studied the frames on the screen and asked, “CCTV footage?”
“Of the night of the blast,” she confirmed, lips pursed. “I’m going to fast forward a lot of this shit because I’ve been bored enough weeding through it without having to watch it all again.”
There were four screens on the top, in the middle, and at the bottom.
“Going to show them to you in sequential order.” She tapped the middle screen. “Clubhouse. The party starts. The gates open forty minutes later.”
My eyes flared wide when she zoomed into the screen, revealing a hooded figure who kept their shoulders hunched. They knew where the cameras were, because they kept their body twisted away from them, and I watched as they opened the gates, allowing a small truck with no plates to ride into the opening of the drive.
The passenger door opened, the hooded figure climbed in, and that was where Lodestar froze the screen. In flashing increments that made me feel like I was at a disco because the strobe effect fucked with my senses, I saw a slither of a face revealed inch by inch.
“Christ, it’s Tink!” I blurted out.
“Tink? The clubwhore?” Alessa sputtered, peering into the screen to get a better look.
“How long have you been sitting on this?” I snapped at Star, who shrugged.
“A couple of hours. I wasn’t lying when I said it’s been taking me a lot more time to get shit done, and this wasn’t a priority.”
“Getting a play-by-play of the night’s events wasn’t a priority?” I snapped, and when her eyes shifted to the screen, I hissed out a snarl. “When will I remember that you put your goals first?”
Her jaw tightened, but she pointed to the screen again. “Look, they veer off the drive and head to the location I gave you.”
“We saw no car tracks,” Alessa murmured softly.
“They must have set up the nest on foot.”
“Tink left recently, didn’t she?” I muttered to myself. “She was—” The memory was there, just a little vaguer than I’d like. I wasn’t sure if that was the CTE or if it was just attic theory. I rarely let anything the clubwhores did penetrate my brain too much.
I had more important shit to think about than those pains in the asses.
“She attacked Stone,” Alessa prompted. “The night of Sarah’s funeral.”
“That’s right,” I whispered, the memory coming to me. “I wonder if she—”
“I haven’t been able to ascertain the identity of the sniper,” Star told me. “I don’t know if they were working together long before this or if Tink decided to get some revenge on the Sinners by teaming up with a mutual enemy.” She cleared her throat. “That’s the last time we see the truck because the cameras were destroyed in the blast—”
“Bullshit,” I snapped. “You and I both know you set something up somewhere else.”
She sneered at me. “Like you haven’t?”
I arched a brow at her. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”
A sigh heaved from her. “Okay, but I’ve already been through the footage on my cameras.” Grumpily, she tapped the keyboard and three more frames made an appearance.
“Why must you always lie?” Alessa remarked, sounding perplexed, and I couldn’t blame her.
“Because treachery is my middle name?” was Star’s mocking retort.
“She learned not to trust along the way,” I countered, unwilling to accept her bullshit reply. When my ex’s cheeks turned pink, I knew I’d scored a hit.
Grunting, she set the cameras rolling again. “See, I’m setting up on the roof—just there.”
I nodded, still pissed at her over that.
It was strange how it felt as though our conversation in the hospital seemed a mere handful of hours ago when I knew it was weeks past…
Like the reminder was a prompt, a shard of pain sliced over my nerve endings, making my vision turn black for a few seconds. When Star spoke, it felt as though my head was buried in sand and then, out of nowhere, Alessa’s hand began to rub the back of my neck, gently palpating the skin. A shaky breath escaped me, whispering from my lips as the pain edged away from sharp enough to make me wish for sleep to allowing me to concentrate just a little.
I shot her a look, saw a strange resolve in her eyes, one that warred with disapproval, but before I could say a word, Star snapped, “Am I talking to myself here?”
“No,” Alessa answered for me. “But he needs to rest. You need to hurry up if you want to clue him in on what you’ve learned.”
Lodestar grunted. “Key him in on weeks’ worth of information in a handful of minutes? Yeah, that doesn’t sound impossible, does it?” she groused under her breath. “Okay, double time.” As she spoke, she tapped the screen. “I set up here, then I saw the sniper, there.
“A few minutes later, Bear rolls up the drive, he climbs off the bike, the sniper targets his hog, triggering a detonation.” She hummed a little. “Not enough to trigger red mist but enough to slice off a couple of limbs. Most of the damage to the clubhouse came from the gas tanks in the hogs parked outside.” Her brow puckered. “Interesting, that. Like a warning s
hot almost.”
“Why would anyone do that?” Alessa whispered, her voice loaded with horror.
Star and I shared a look, but she answered, “He’s a Trojan horse.”
I nodded. “They wanted Bear out of the picture and with maximum damage.”
“Which means Bear knows more than they’d like.” She frowned at the footage. “They didn’t want the job to look like a hit. That’s clear to see.”
“No, they wanted it to be an outright assault on us.”
“Why send the sniper at all? Why didn’t they just shoot Bear if he was the target?” she ground out. “Why not just set a bomb off if attacking the clubhouse was their aim?”
“None of this makes any sense,” I said with a sigh as tension clawed at my temples. “It feels like two MOs.”
“Or one body of people trying to misdirect shit,” she said grimly.
I worked my jaw, shaking my head at Star as I knew where she was going with this. “Not that hokey theory again.”
She sniffed. “It’s not a theory.”
“Whether it is or isn’t, can someone please explain?” was my wife’s brisk retort.
“She’s got it in her head there’s this cabal of officials who—”
Lodestar scowled at me. “I’m telling you this is a cover up. Or a frame job. The Sparrows exist.” She cut Alessa a look. “They’re everywhere. The alphabet agencies, the army, the navy, the fucking Green Berets,” she sniped. “The courts, prisons, goddamn town halls, even the fucking Italian mafia… when I say everywhere, I mean it. Their network’s reach is insane.” She pointed to the screen. “This is the New World Sparrows’ handiwork, I’m telling you.”
I just shook my head. “More like it’s a Sinners’ enemy wanting to weaken us.”
“They wouldn’t target Bear, would they? He isn’t a brother anymore,” Alessa pointed out weakly.
“He’s a Sinner, even if he’s not active. He was only allowed to roam because of who he is. Otherwise, we’re tied in for life,” I explained gruffly, patting her hand when I saw she looked peaky.
Alessa cleared her throat. “Star?”
My ex looked at my wife, her brow arched. “What?”
“Horobchyk.”
Lodestar shrugged. “No idea what that means.”
“It’s what we call the people who bring us to America,” she whispered, her eyes wide with fear. “Sparrows.”
Star tensed. “Jesus.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. Christ, when South Americans want to cross into the States, they call them coyotes. Doesn’t mean Wile E.—”
“Maverick, get your head out of your ass,” Star snapped. “I told you a long time ago about the New World Sparrows, but you wouldn’t believe me. Well, they’ve come to your fucking door and blown it to hell so it’s time you started fucking listening.” Her mouth tightened and she went back to tapping the screen. “After the blast, the truck returns and barrels down the drive and out onto the road. A handful of seconds later, close enough to make me wonder if she saw the driver, Rachel makes an appearance.”
“She’d have said if she had,” I argued.
“She isn’t exactly pro-Sinners,” Star pointed out.
“She works for us,” I grumbled.
“So?” Lodestar huffed. “Too fucking trusting. That’s always been your problem.”
I grunted under my breath, but didn’t have the chance to say anything as I watched the scene unfold from a distance. It was a lot different from when you were in the middle of the chaos.
“How did any of us survive?” Alessa rasped, her fear clear, and I wrapped my arms around her waist and tugged her close.
“Because they wanted us to,” Lodestar rumbled softly. “They wanted to cause havoc, wanted to tell us we weren’t safe even in our own HQ, and that they can get to us whenever they want, wherever they want.”
A part of me wanted to scoff at that, wanted to tell her she was crazy, and I knew to some extent, she was nuts. But the Sparrows were something she’d been talking about for a long time. Before she’d gone to ground—or, at least, what I’d thought was her going to ground, and what I’d recently learned was…
I gritted my jaw. “You think the Sparrows were who sold you, don’t you?”
Alessa tensed. “Sold you?”
Star shot her a look. “You’re not the only ex-slave sitting at the table,” she mumbled, but her chin tipped up and she glared at me. “I told you, years ago, they existed. That’s why they tried to shut me up.”
“Why didn't they kill you?” Alessa whispered. “Back where I’m from, we all know the Sparrows are deadly.”
“They should have picked a different fucking bird, shouldn’t they? What’s scary about a sparrow?”
Alessa gulped. “You’d be surprised.”
“Yeah, you would,” Lodestar concurred. “And the reason they didn’t kill me is because white women sell for a pretty penny in the Middle East.” Her top lip quirked into a sneer. “Maverick, you ask me why I don’t trust and why I do shit my own way, why I don’t share things with the club… this is why. Because you think it’s penny-ante cops and robbers shit.
“It ain’t, Jameson. It ain’t.” She gritted her teeth. “This has been going on for a long ass time, but I’m going to be the one who ends them. Do you hear me?
“They put me through hell, and I got out by the skin of my fucking teeth—I won’t let them take me again. I’ll die first, but I’m going no-fucking-where until I take them out with me. I’m the most expensive mistake they ever goddamn made, and I’ll make them die regretting that they let me live.”
Twenty-Nine
Alessa
I woke up with a storm of heat at my back. All down my spine, along my legs, even the soles of my feet were cocooned in warmth.
It wasn’t the kind of heat that came from a blanket, even one of those electric heating pads my babusya, my grandmother, had sworn by during the final years of her life. It was Maverick.
Any sense of sleepiness soon disappeared as I recognized what was happening.
Whenever I’d gone to sleep with Maverick and had woken up with him, I’d been curled around him. I’d warmed him.
That he was warming me was a reminder.
It hadn’t been a dream.
This was real.
He was back.
The tears that refused to fall made my eyes ache, and I turned my face into the pillow, burrowing into it, adoring that everywhere smelled of him, that everywhere smelled safe again. I felt like an unripe orange being squeezed for juice, but my eyes burned as the tears longed to fall and when a slight trickle of moisture escaped, the relief was almost as powerful as knowing Maverick was behind me.
My Maverick.
Not Nic’s.
I bit my lip at the uncharitable thought.
I hadn’t known it was possible to be jealous of a dead man, but I’d admit to growing that way over the past few weeks. The strength of his memory in Maverick’s mind had overtaken everything else, overwhelmed his world until I was erased from existence.
Was it strange that it was only now when I could accept how angry I was about that?
Like a lost puppy, I’d accepted every kick Maverick had hurt me with, every blow, but now that he was back, I knew something had to change. Something had to give.
Nic was gone. But I wasn’t.
I was here.
I didn’t begrudge Nic Maverick’s love. I just resented the foothold he had on his damaged mind, and I knew I had to do something to mark my place in his head because I wasn’t a fool. As quickly as his memory had resurfaced, there was no saying that it wouldn’t disappear in a flash again when something stressful happened.
I was well aware my husband was a ticking time bomb, but I wasn’t a coward. I’d stay by his side, uncaring if it was with his permission or not—I just needed to make sure he wouldn’t forget me again.
I needed to be his link. A tangible connection that bound him to the present.
<
br /> It sounded impossible, improbable. Unscientific and probably ridiculous. But a woman didn’t endure what I had, and a man didn’t survive what Maverick had, to come out, find one another, and for them not to fit together like two puzzle pieces.
We called it dolya in Ukrainian. Fate.
That was Maverick and me.
We were fated to love and to hurt and to lose and to remember. To endure… that was our destiny.
Tragic, perhaps. But less so when we were together.
My eyes flickered open when I heard a slight creak in the door, and when I saw Kati standing there, peering at us through the crack she’d made, I frowned at her.
A part of me wanted to shoo her away because I knew Maverick was still resting, had been ever since he’d allowed himself to relax after we’d heard news Rex was returning to Jersey in one piece, and there was no way I was going to let him wake up yet when he needed as much rest as possible. But she was my baby sister. Wild hair, what looked like soup down her shirt, and odd socks on her feet and all.
So instead of shooing her away, I raised a hand and beckoned her forward. She stunned me by complying. I fully expected her to dart off, to run away, but she didn’t. She drifted forward on whispered steps, carefully pressed one knee to the mattress, then with a care I didn’t think she was capable of, rolled herself against me.
“Is he really back?” she whispered, the words almost noiseless.
Rather than reply, I tucked an arm over her waist, and nodded. She huddled into me and stunned me further by relaxing. Kati, my overactive, loudmouth sister, relaxed. Actually calmed down, stayed quiet, and didn’t even fidget.
She fell asleep too, only when I next woke up, she’d gone. Maverick hadn’t though. He was still there. A bastion of heat.
That I’d needed the rest was a given. That he needed it was a foregone conclusion. Even knowing that, the desire to wake him was heady. I wanted to make sure he remembered me. His body appeared to, but did his mind?
For several minutes, I lay there, worrying. Then he mumbled, “Love you, ‘Lessa,” and I felt like sagging into the mattress.
Maverick: A Dark MC Romance (A Dark & Dirty Sinners' MC Series Book 6) Page 23
