I cared for Shooter, but my heart belonged to Mikey.
“I fuckin’ rue the day I met you,” he snarled, his hand reaching out to grab me by the chin. He gripped it tight, his hand like steel around my jaw as he leaned in and pressed an ugly kiss to my lips and then shoved me back from him with a single hard thrust. I stumbled back, shocked and saddened, surprised by his total disdain for me. “I gave you everythin’,” he bit out.
Mikey was back up on his feet, Backtrack and Gauge circling him like wolves. Dead bodies hung from the ceiling, blood dripping from their still warm bodies. This place was covered in gore and death everywhere I looked. It was a nightmare, a devilish horror movie in the making, and the final scene would be the death of either Mikey or Shooter.
“Stop it!” O’Donnell screamed as she ran into the room, her panicked gaze taking everything in. It made no difference though and she ran to my side, hate on her face for me. “What did you do?”
There was so much hate in this place. So much hate and death and anger. I felt dizzy with it. Sick to my stomach of the killing. Of the deaders. Of the Savages. Of man against man and woman against woman. I needed it to stop.
I looked behind me and saw Highlander, Battle, Aiken, Aimee, Linc, Texas, SJ, and some other faces I knew but didn’t know the names of. All of their despair and anger was directed at me. Or so it felt. And I felt utterly alone and totally helpless.
“Shooter,” I said, the words a plea on my lips. I stepped closer to him. “Don’t kill him, please, I’m begging you.” I reached out, placing my hand on the side of his face. “You’ll kill me.” He jerked back from my touch, but I recovered myself and moved closer, pressing my hand to his cheek again, seeing the pain behind his anger again. “You’ll kill me, Shooter. I’m begging you not to do this.”
“You’re killin’ me too, Nina,” he choked out, tears shimmering in his eyes.
I’d never seen Shooter cry, or even come close to it in our time together. I’d seen him lose brothers and have to rebuild his home and his clubhouse. I’d seen him build a future and destroy the past. I’d seen him make good choices and bad, and I’d seen him choose good over bad repeatedly. I’d seen the guilt eat him up and I’d held him when the guilt got too much. But I’d never seen him cry.
“You’re fuckin’ killin’ me, Nina.” He leaned into my touch, the rough bristles of his beard pressing against the palm of my hand, and I let out a sob of grief.
“Please don’t hurt him,” I begged, knowing I was hurting him but having no choice. “Please, don’t do this, Shooter.”
Shooter had to listen. He had to. Because if he didn’t, the only move I had left was to kill him. And I would without hesitation if it meant saving Mikey.
37.
Mikey
She was there.
Nina was right there.
I wasn’t imagining it. She was really there, and I couldn’t get to her because those goddamn idiots wouldn’t get out of my way. Two of the bikers circled me, and to one side I saw Shooter, the bearded asshole who’d confronted me so angrily outside. And now I knew why. Or at least I thought I did.
Nina was there.
She was alive.
Alive…
And she’d been with that guy.
I looked across the room, seeing other familiar faces. Seeing Aiken and Aimee and O’Donnell. O’Donnell…from the horror in her expression, had known all along that Nina was alive, and so had everyone else.
“What the hell is going on?” I yelled, frustrated and pissed off. “Get out of my way.” I tried to get past the two men in front of me again, but they shoved me backwards, keeping me away from Shooter. Away from Nina.
If I could just get to Nina and talk to her, things would be okay. I could make sense of all of it. But the more I thought about it, the more I knew there was no sense to be made of any of it. Aiken had purposefully tried to keep me away from her. So had O’Donnell. The only explanation was that they had known Nina was alive and hadn’t wanted me to find out. From the looks on their faces, I knew I was right. Neither of them looked shocked or surprised. They looked guilty as sin and anxious about what was going to happen next.
Grief and panic and pain grew inside me and I threw my machete to the ground and opened my arms wide, because fuck it. I was done with this bullshit. I was done with being lied to. Was there no one left in this godforsaken world that I could trust?
“Come on then, kill me if that’s what you want.”
“Mikey, no!” O’Donnell cried out, rushing forward, tears staining her dirty cheeks.
“Stay away from me!” I yelled back, fury tainting my voice into something unrecognizable. “Stay the hell away from me.”
“Mikey,” O’Donnell cried out, stopping in her tracks. My name on her lips was a sin and my fury grew from small embers into a roaring fire.
“Did you know?” I asked, but I already knew the answer to my question. In truth, I guess I’d always known, because it was obvious all along that she was keeping something from me. I’d just never questioned what. I’d assumed it was something about the day she’d found me half dead on that road, but now I knew it wasn’t anything like that at all. It was that she knew Nina was alive and she didn’t want me to find out because she knew I’d leave.
She’d watched me be in pain all that time.
She’d let me stay with her, knowing that I didn’t love her.
She’d guilt-tripped me into being with her, knowing I didn’t want to let anyone else down. Knowing the remorse I’d felt for letting Nina go back into the mall and get herself killed to protect me. We’d talked about it. I’d told her about my shame and my grief, the guilt that killed me daily. And she’d used it against me to keep me with her.
There was a pounding in my ears and my throat felt dry and scratchy as I tried to control my breathing, hands fisting and unfisting at my sides as I focused on not losing it.
“I love you,” she whined, her gaze pitiful.
I shook my head at her as I dragged my hands through my hair. O’Donnell took another step toward me and I held up a hand. “Stay away from me,” I snarled between clenched teeth. It wasn’t love what she felt, it couldn’t be. Because if you loved someone you didn’t watch them be in pain, knowing that you could ease that. You gave up everything for them, no matter the personal cost. O’Donnell had kept me from Nina. She’d taken my choice away. That wasn’t love. That was obsession or infatuation or just plain greed, and I didn’t want her anywhere near me. Not now, not ever again. She’d lied to me for all that time, and the pain of that doused my lie-stained soul in bleach.
I looked over, seeing Nina with her hand on Shooter’s face, her beautiful face looking tortured as she spoke softly to him. I felt even more infuriated by that. By her touching him. Talking to him. Being near him. That bastard that had kept her from me for all that time. I was going to fucking kill him.
“Let him go,” Shooter finally said. He took Nina’s hand in his and pulled it away from his face, and then he leaned over and wrapped his arms around her, pulling her close to his body. I watched them intently, not giving a shit as Gauge and the other guy backed away from me.
Shooter released Nina and stepped away from her, his expression filled with grief and pain, and I felt a pang of pity for him, for what he was going through, because I’d been there and I knew that pain. The rawness of it. It spread like cancer through your body and devoured every inch of happiness that you might have. The light of the world going out at the loss of her.
He glanced over at me, hate and loathing in his gaze. His neck corded as he tried to restrain himself. I had no doubt that he wanted to come over and take my head, but he wouldn’t. He couldn’t…because of Nina.
“Prez?” Gauge said, looking somewhat relieved.
“Did I stutter, motherfucker?” Shooter glared at Gauge. “We need to go. There’s still a war going on and I want every one of these bitches in the ground before sunset.”
And then he turned and
left. Gauge and the other biker gave me a quick glance, looking half relieved that it hadn’t gone any further, and then they left too.
But I wasn’t watching them anymore. I was watching Nina. My sole focus was her.
She turned to me…
Walked to me…
Pushed between the other people to get to me.
And then she was there, like she’d never been anywhere else.
Nina was in front of me, her beautiful scarred face tipped up to look at me. Her dark eyes were ringed with deep purple shadows like she hadn’t slept in years. The soft lines around her mouth from smiling were deeper, but they weren’t smile lines anymore—they were frown lines. Sadness lines. Grief lines. I reached out to her, needing to feel her beneath my fingertips to prove to myself that she was real. That I wasn’t imagining her. I wondered what things she had endured while we had been apart. What things she had seen and lived through. Nightmares and horrors, no doubt, but hopefully some good too.
Her lips parted, a small gasp escaping as my fingertips brushed against the skin on her arm. I looked down, seeing her fingers curled into a fist, soft tremors traveling beneath her skin. I looked up from where our skin was connected, up to her shoulder, across her pale throat and down the other side of her body.
She was wearing some sort of leather holder that was strapped across her shoulder and moved down her arm, and when I followed the leather lines of the holder I noticed that at the end of it was a machete. It took me a moment to work out what I was seeing, and then I looked up into her face, recognition and realization in my eyes.
“Who did that?” I asked, nodding toward her missing arm.
“Scar,” she replied, her voice so perfect. Like a fucking dream come true.
“He dead?” I asked, because I didn’t know who Scar was, but if he wasn’t already dead he would be soon.
She smirked, her apprehension fading momentarily. “What do you think?”
A smile tugged at the corner of my mouth. “Little badass still, huh?”
In the dim light, with dead bodies surrounding us, I saw her blush, and despite the horrific surroundings it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
“You know me.” She shrugged. Her smile fell and I swallowed, suddenly unsure of everything. “Mikey…” she began, and I shook my head and scowled, silencing whatever words she was going to say next.
“Later, Nina,” I said. “Right now I just want to enjoy the fact that you’re alive. That you’re here…that I didn’t lose you.”
We stared at one another in silence, letting the world outside fade away, letting the horror hellhole we were in vanish until it was just her and me and nothing more and nothing less. Because that was all that I needed: just her.
The room had gone silent
She looked around us and I followed her gaze, realizing that everyone was leaving. I wanted to kiss her and hold her. I wanted to meld my mouth and body to hers and never let her go again. But this place was hell and our first kiss after all this time wouldn’t be in hell.
“I don’t understand how you’re here,” I choked out the words.
“I’ll explain everything,” she promised, and I nodded, because I needed to know, to understand, but right then I was just so damn grateful that she was there at all.
“We should get out of here,” I said, and she nodded that time. “Place brings back memories,” I said, glancing around me at the death but realizing I wasn’t scared of it anymore. I didn’t fear that place like I had. I wasn’t sure if it was because Aife was dead and gone now, or because Nina was alive and here.
I took her hand in mine, pleasure threading through my muscles as our hands connected and secured us together, and we headed out of that hellhole and away from the worst year of my life.
As we walked I continued to glance sideways at her, not quite believing that it was happening, that she could really be there, alive! It was a dream, a nightmare, and everything in between. But right then I didn’t care. I’d go through the past year again just to have her back with me. I’d go through anything and everything to have her with me.
As we neared the exit I heard the telltale growls of the dead and fighting beyond the exit. I shook my head free from where it was at, needing to focus so we didn’t die in that place. We were a long way off from being safe, that was for certain. The Savages, at least a good portion of them, might have been killed, but this was far from over.
Deaders swarmed the entrance, some walking right on by, content in hunting down the people outside, but a handful of them headed in toward us.
“Get behind me,” I said, pushing her out of harm’s way.
I could hear people fighting outside. Knives clashing against knives. Growls of the dead and grunts of the living that fought them.
“Mikey, I can handle myself,” she scoffed, pushing my hand away.
She snapped out a long knife from a sheath attached to her thigh and raised both that and the other arm, and as a zombie came close she stabbed and sliced and killed it and another that was right behind it. She was strong, perhaps stronger than she’d ever been, but she didn’t understand that I couldn’t lose her again. Not ever again. This time it would kill me.
“I know you can,” I grunted, pushing in front of her to kill another that came toward us with its arms outstretched.
“Then stop trying to protect me.” She shoved past me and stabbed it through the forehead.
I grinned, my heart growing bigger by the second. “But you’re just a woman, Nina, you need protecting,” I replied casually as I slammed the last deader against the mine wall and stabbed my machete through its head. “You need my protection.”
The game we’d once played, the back-and-forth of smartass remarks, was just like it used to be. Like our time apart hadn’t ever happened.
“You’re such an…”
I cut her off by grabbing her and pulling her body close to mine. Her machete hung by her side and it nicked the side of my leg as I dragged her closer, but I didn’t feel a thing and I didn’t care. Instead I focused on placing my mouth on hers and kissing her like she was the air I’d been missing for the past year.
The kiss lasted seconds before we had to pull apart and fight again, but it felt like my lungs had been inflated and my heart was thumping harder, my body more alive than it had been in years.
We were together again, at last. Just like we always should have been.
And this time I wasn’t letting her go anywhere without me ever again.
*
“I need to go there without you,” Nina said, her eyes pleading with me to understand. “If he sees you it’s all going to start again. He’ll probably kill you. Besides, you need to go and speak to O’Donnell.”
I shook my head. “No.”
There was no room for discussion on this. None at all.
“Mikey, stop being so unreasonable.”
I snorted. “Nina, the last time I let you out of my sight…”
“I know, I know, but this won’t be like that, I promise.”
I stared off into the trees. Everything was so right and so wrong all at the same time. The Savages were dead. Nina was alive. We’d killed hundreds of deaders. Put over thirty innocent people out of their misery. I should have felt total unequivocal happiness, but all I felt was anxious at the thought of her leaving. Of all the things that could happen to her while we were apart. No. Nina had to stay here by my side where I knew she would stay real. Where I could touch her skin and stroke her hair and stare into her battle tired eyes and know that she wasn’t dead at all. But alive, and here, with me.
“You need to go speak to O’Donnell,” she said tentatively.
I swung back to look at her, being struck again by her beauty. By the sharp angles of her jaw and cheekbones and the soft lines of her mouth.
“I have nothing to say to her,” I said, the words bitter in my mouth.
“If you hate her then you have to hate me,” she pressed, and I scowled. “
This was my idea as much as it was hers.”
“It’s not the same,” I replied with a shake of my head.
“It is.”
“It’s not!” I yelled. “It’s not the same. I hate that you didn’t come and get me. That you let me believe you were dead. I hate that, but I hate that she knew you were alive more. That she allowed me to…” I shook my head and dragged a hand down my face, feeling sick. I couldn’t say what I wanted to say. I couldn’t bring myself to let her know about all the times O’Donnell had asked me to make love to her and I had, every touch of my hand on her body a betrayal. I’d felt like I owed it to her because she’d saved my life, but all along she’d been slowly taking mine. Stealing the air from my lungs as my heart withered.
“It’s not the same, Nina,” I said, my words choked. “And you’re not going back there to him without me by your side.” I grabbed her with both hands, my grip tight on her biceps. “I can’t lose you again, Nina.”
Nina threw herself at me, her arms going around me to hold me tight, and I held her back, breathing her in, kissing her head, feeling her beneath my lips and fingers.
She was here. My God how was she here? The realization kept on hitting me over and over.
“Okay,” she finally said. “Together or not at all.”
I pulled back to look at her, the first genuine smile on my face in years. “Agreed.”
She looked around, her dark eyes taking in the death and destruction of that place, and she looked sad and uncertain.
After the dead had been killed and the Savages slain, our groups had dissipated, leaving with barely a second glance. I wasn’t sure if they wanted to get away from me and my questions, or this place and its evil. Maybe it was a little of both. Aiken had been the only one to speak to me, letting me know that he’d leave one of the cars some of our people had arrived in so we could head back.
Head back where? I’d wondered. Where did I belong now they truth was out?
They’d loaded up our dead, and our casualties, not leaving any of them behind, and he’d looked like he wanted to say more to me but had thought better of it. I was glad. We all needed to gather our thoughts and prepare for what came next. I had a thousand questions and accusations, but there was only ever going to be one outcome to them.
The Dead Saga | Book 7 | Odium 7 Page 29
