There were Swords overseas, and they’d look for her as well—that was what he told himself. He knew he was just a selfish son of a bitch and he was keeping her because no way in hell, after seeing her like this, could he let go of her twice.
“We’ll get him back.” He poured confidence into his voice because he believed it. He moved to the edge of the bed, every step slow and deliberate, his boots making a whisper of sound on the floor. He didn’t want her to reject him. He needed her in that moment. Zane was his child as well. He might not have known about him, but that connection was already there—through Breezy. Now, someone had his son, his worst nightmare coming true.
She sat up, moving until her back was against the wall, pulled her knees up and held her legs tightly to her chest. There were tear tracks on her face. He sank down on the edge of the bed close to her and reached out to brush wet strands of hair from her face.
“It’s what we do, Bree. We’re good at it.”
She blinked at him, her long lashes fanning her cheeks. “I don’t understand.”
“We hunt pedophiles and we get the children back. Your father may not be a pedophile, but he kidnapped a child. We’ve been hunting since we were little kids, so for all of our lives. We’ll find Zane and we’ll bring him home.”
She wiped at her face. “I still don’t understand.”
“The man who was the international president of the Swords ran the largest human trafficking ring in the world. He had what we referred to as ‘snuff’ ships. He took women, men and children onto the ships with his very wealthy and sick clients and gave those chosen to them. They used them, got their kinks satisfied and killed them. The bodies went overboard.”
He’d told her all of it before but in an offhand way, as if he was making excuses for himself—and he had been. This time he wanted her to know what Torpedo Ink was capable of because he would never stop until he had their son back, and neither would any of his brothers and sisters.
“Czar joined the Swords and worked his way up to enforcer. He joined that particular chapter because it had been the chapter of the international president. Czar knew if the man came back, it would be to that chapter.”
Breezy lifted her head and looked at him. Met his eyes. It was the first time since he’d last seen her that she really looked at him without anger or hurt. She studied his face for a long time and then frowned. He’d fallen hard for that little frown. He’d traced it with his fingertips more than once just to memorize it.
“You’re MC,” she said with conviction. There was distaste in her voice.
He was. He was Torpedo Ink, and he lived and died for those colors and his brothers. He nodded slowly, sensing he was on very shaky ground. “Yes. Torpedo Ink is my club. I’m VP. We’ve always been Torpedo Ink and we always will.”
“You can’t hide the MC in a man.” The distaste had deepened to revulsion.
He couldn’t blame her for disliking clubs. She’d been born into the Swords club, and they hadn’t treated any of their women with respect. They saw them as assets to be used. Even the old ladies. “Not all clubs are alike, Breezy.”
“It doesn’t matter as long as you get Zane back. I swear to you, Steele, he’s your son. I wouldn’t lie about that.”
“I know that. I wasn’t the one asking.” He hadn’t been. It hadn’t occurred to him that Breezy would lie to him about the child. Apparently it had occurred to the others, and they’d made certain the boy was his by using Absinthe, their own lie detector. “It wouldn’t have mattered though, Bree. We would have gone after him no matter what.”
She rubbed her chin on top of her knees. There was a scant four inches between his fingers and her ankle. He was acutely aware of that short distance. He could touch her, she was that close. Feel her skin. Feel what had always belonged to him.
“As soon as we get him back, I’ll be gone. You won’t have to worry that I’ll ask you for anything. I’m working now, and I’ve been able to support us. I have most of the money you gave me, and I’ve been saving a little bit here and there in order to pay it back. To get started, I needed some of it, but I was careful. I’ll have all of it.”
He heard the pride in her voice, but it didn’t matter. Anger swept through him. “I gave you that money to give you a good start, Bree. That was me taking care of you.”
She drew back. He felt that withdrawal, although she had nowhere to go. Their conversation was so careful, so stilted, when they’d always laughed together and talked so easily about everything. Or had they? He tried to think back to the nights they lay in bed together chatting. They’d been comfortable, but he’d done most of the talking, not Breezy. If she spoke, it was to tell him about her day, about some of the children she supervised. Sometimes it was her worries for the girls. They hadn’t felt distant from each other, not like this.
She laughed easily, that was one of the things he remembered most. Her laughter. The sound of it. The way she turned everything bad into something good. It didn’t matter how he was feeling, and often it wasn’t good. He had nightmares and woke up dripping in sweat. He’d sit on the edge of the bed and she’d wrap her arms around him, and the next thing he knew he wasn’t thinking, only feeling. She could drive away every one of his demons so easily.
“It’s important to me to pay you back, Steele,” she said. “I never want to feel like that again, the way I did when you set me straight. It was hard to hear, but I know I had to learn to stand on my own two feet.”
He shook his head. “I was full of shit, baby. I wanted you safe and I said whatever I could to drive you away.”
She sent him a false smile when there had never been anything false about Breezy. “I appreciate you saying that, Steele, but you had plenty of time to look for me. If that’s what you do, find people, you could have found me. You didn’t. And that’s okay,” she added hastily. “I’m fine now. I needed to learn about myself and my own strength. I knew Zane was coming and I figured it out.”
“Baby . . .”
She winced. Visibly. “Please, don’t call me that. We’re not . . .” She trailed off, waving her fingers in the air as if that said everything. “It’s best if we keep this as impersonal as possible. Once we find Zane, I’ll leave, but if you want to stay in touch with him, of course that’s all right.”
His temper kicked in. He’d thought he’d mastered that long ago, but his woman had forgotten who she belonged to. If nothing else, she should have remembered who he belonged to. It was written on her skin, right where he’d had Ink tatt it.
“Impersonal?” He nearly roared the word at her. He leapt up and paced across the room to keep from hitting the wall just beside her head. “There’s nothing impersonal about us. You may have forgotten what it was like when I was moving inside you, but I sure as hell haven’t. I’ll call you anything I damn well please, and yes, we are . . .” He waved his fingers in the air just as she had done. “You aren’t leaving when we find Zane.”
She regarded him as if he’d grown two heads. He realized she’d never really seen him lose his temper. In all the time he’d been with her, he hadn’t raised his voice. They weren’t that kind of couple. He’d always led, and she’d always followed. Breezy didn’t do things to upset him. Clearly, that had changed.
“You can’t tell me what I can and can’t do anymore, Steele,” she said quietly. “You threw me away and made it very clear what you thought of me—”
“That’s bullshit, and you know it. You had to leave. I told you that you had to leave, and you wouldn’t. You refused. I knew war was coming. It was too damned dangerous for you to stick around. I had to get you out of there.”
“You could have come with me.”
“I had to back Czar up.”
She shook her head. “Czar had everyone else to back him up, Steele. I had no one. You chose to stay with your club, and you threw me out, knowing I didn’t have a clue how t
o take care of myself.”
He wished she would yell back or cry. She did neither. More, there was truth in what she said. It hadn’t occurred to him to leave the others. They were whole together. Safe. Had he tried to point out that logic she would simply counter that she hadn’t been safe or whole without him. Now she was. Now she was complete without him.
“There are eighteen of us, Bree.” He made an effort to drop his voice down to the level of hers. Quiet. Calm. “We were outnumbered and didn’t expect to walk away from that battle.”
Her eyes were on his face, moving over it, focusing completely on him in the way he remembered. He’d always loved that look, yet at the same time he had always found it disconcerting. He’d often turned away from her, afraid she’d see into him. Afraid she’d see what a fuckup he was. How damaged. Still, he had liked that she nearly always gave him her complete attention.
“You went against how many Swords with eighteen men?”
Steele wanted to curse, and he did—in his own language so she wouldn’t know what he was saying. Yeah, there were eighteen members of Torpedo Ink, but they hadn’t fought that fight alone. There had been others working with them, including Jackson Deveau, the deputy sheriff. If he told her that, came clean and was honest, it would negate everything he’d said.
He took a breath. It was important to tell her the truth no matter the cost. He wanted a relationship. A partnership. He had to treat Breezy with the respect he gave his club, even if the price was that he looked bad to her. “It wasn’t just Torpedo Ink. There were others, men and women Evan Shackler and the Swords had done things to. We were still very much outnumbered, but there were others with us.” She would never know just how hard it was to tell her the truth.
Those green eyes hadn’t moved from his face. He felt a little bit like she was seeing inside, into those dark, ugly places he didn’t want her to know about. The tip of her tongue darted out to moisten her lower lip, reminding him of all the times that tongue had moved over his body, taking him straight to paradise.
“You chose the club, Steele,” she said quietly. “Don’t lie to yourself or me. That isn’t going to do us any good.”
There was something about the new version of Breezy that appealed to him even more than before. In that moment, he realized his woman had lived the same life he had. Not, obviously, with sexual predators when she was a child, but as a teenager. She’d still been beaten while she’d been young. She’d learned survival skills, just as he had. She knew when to go silent. She knew when to keep her head down. She knew how to make a drug deal and keep from getting killed.
She had done all that, but she’d never learned social skills or how to survive in the outside world—in a completely different environment. But Breezy had adapted because she was a survivor, and she’d done it on her own, needing to provide for a baby. She was quiet still, not belligerent, not accusing, just stating the facts. And they were facts—as she saw them. He had chosen the club, but he hadn’t not chosen her.
“That’s true from one point of view, Bree,” he conceded. “But I wanted you. I had no business keeping you when I knew all hell was going to break loose. I had to protect you.”
Her gaze never left his face, as if she could see straight through to his twisted way of thinking. “Then why didn’t we have a plan to meet up later?”
That was a fair question. He didn’t want to answer that one either. The rules of their club were very simple. Respect. No lies. Have one another’s backs at all times. If he wanted Breezy in his life, those rules had to extend to her, no matter how painful the telling was.
“We have a code we follow. It’s what we live by. It’s how we survived. Being with you broke that code. You were underage. I had no idea. None. Not one clue, Bree. You have to understand, that’s a sacred rule. By being with you, I fucked up worse than you could possibly imagine. It was wrong.”
She was silent for a long time. A flush slid up her face and her chin rose a fraction of an inch. “I see. Well, you don’t have to worry. I understand completely. No one wants a reminder around that they’re a complete fuckup because they were in a relationship with someone. Or a semi-relationship, whatever you want to call what we had. Well, we know what to call it—your worst fuckup.”
“Damn it, Bree, you’re twisting everything I say into what you want to hear.” Steele raked both hands through his hair in an effort to keep his hands off of her. She had always been amenable, eager to please him, to do whatever he asked. The worst was, he could see why she would think that way. He’d certainly led her to believe he didn’t want her or value the time they had together.
A faint smile touched her mouth—that mouth he fantasized over. “If you think that, Steele, you don’t know me at all. The last thing I want to hear from you is that you think being with me was the ultimate fuckup.” She rubbed the top of her knees with her chin. “This doesn’t matter anyway. The only thing that matters is getting Zane back. If you think you can do that, and the rest of your club backs you up, then we’re good.”
“It matters, Bree, because you’re going to stay here with the baby and we’re going to parent him together. In order to do that, we have to straighten things out between us.”
Her eyes flashed at him, that vivid green crackling, like a flame that might consume him. His cock jerked hard and something inside him that had been held tight and closed since he was a child broke open. Shattered. Left him vulnerable and exposed.
Steele clenched his fists at his sides, breathing hard as he tried to work off the panic and adrenaline. Self-preservation had kicked in, and he stayed as far from her as possible. He’d always known she had the potential of crawling inside him—she had found a way to steal his heart. But this was so much more.
Now he was aware of the difference in her in a big way. Before, he’d taken care of her. Looked out for her. Made certain she was safe. He’d been the dominant in their relationship. It hadn’t been a true partnership because she had no way of knowing any kind of life outside the Swords community, and she’d stayed quiet and followed his lead. She’d been so young, and yet he’d expected her to be grown-up. By staying quiet and observing, she’d done what was expected of her, but she hadn’t participated as a partner—because she couldn’t.
He’d never been in a relationship before. He didn’t even know what one was until he’d met Czar’s Blythe. Breezy had a valiant spirit. He had seen so many children succumb to death because they just couldn’t—or wouldn’t—fight back. Breezy would have survived the horrors of the school Torpedo Ink had endured. So many others didn’t have what she had. He recognized it because he’d seen so many die. He’d held them in his arms. He’d cried so many tears he was certain he didn’t have any left.
He leaned against the door, dragging in deep breaths, realizing that his woman would take more than he’d ever thought he had it in him to give. When he could finally look at her again, the anger was gone from her face and in its place were concern and speculation. She saw things in him he didn’t even allow his brothers to see. He’d had to be so careful, always guarding every emotion, never letting on, even to the other children, staying very low-key and calm for his brothers and sisters, never sharing the turmoil and chaos that could rise unexpectedly. She seemed to see that in him, no matter how much he tried to hide it.
He turned away from her, knowing by her expression it was already too late. He needed to lash out, to save himself. He opened his mouth.
She got there first. “Zane is a beautiful little boy,” she said, unexpectedly, as if giving him a gift.
He reached behind him for the door. For the knob. He could take all kinds of punishment. Fists. Whips. You name it, he’d managed. But she undid him in ways he hadn’t expected and had no idea how to handle. He realized she believed she was giving him a gift, and she’d done it to soothe him, the way she’d done with all the women she’d taken care of after they’d been beat
en or used cruelly. The way she’d done with the children when they were frightened. It was ingrained in her. Deep. A part of her character in the same way it was ingrained in him.
“He’s very much like you already. His personality, I mean. He’s already thinking he needs to look after his mommy. He tries to feed me with his spoon and he always shares with me. Once I tripped and fell down. Of course I protected him, but he was so upset and kept trying to make the ‘boo-boo’ better.” She smiled at the memory.
He couldn’t respond. His chest hurt. His gut twisted. His woman. That was so like her, to try to turn things around for him. She did that for everyone. It sucked that her man was the one needing her instead of the other way around.
“I’ve got pictures of him on my phone. It’s in the pocket of my jeans if you’d like to see him. He’s absolutely beautiful, Steele.”
It was a gift she was giving him. He took the opportunity to turn away from her and find her jeans on the chair. She’d always done that, placed everything so carefully. Once she realized it was important to him to keep his room and things clean—not just clean, nearly sterile—she’d done so. He’d bet any amount of money she kept wherever she was living the same way.
Her phone wasn’t the most up-to-date one, but it had a decent camera on it. He turned it over. The case was one of the ones that was shatterproof, so she protected it. He stole a glance at her. The tension in the room had gone up slowly again. She didn’t like her phone in his hands and that annoyed him.
“What’s your passcode?”
She held out her hand. “I’ll do it and get his pictures for you.”
He kept the phone. “You got another man in here or something? You been cheating on me?” The moment he said it he knew he’d screwed up again. He was totally sabotaging himself. Was he that afraid she’d discover what he was inside? He shook his head. “God, baby, pretend I didn’t say that. I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with me. I know who the screwup is, and it isn’t you.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose and then pressed his fingers to the corners of his eyes. “I need another chance here, Bree. Would you mind giving me your passcode?”
Vengeance Road Page 8
