by J Bree
The Viper insists on having his information in person.
It was bad enough getting stuck at the Dive with D’Ardo, but now being called into his strip club… couldn’t get any fucking worse.
I leave Odie happily cooking and singing under her breath, paint still streaking her arms and her hair. She looks fucking edible and as soon as I have this job out of the way I can focus on her, namely getting her comfortable with being under me because I need to worship her skin with my tongue, eat her out until she’s screaming my name, and then squeezing my cock with her pussy as she comes all over me.
That’s exactly what I fucking need.
The strip joint is called New Blood and it’s the only one on the south side. D’Ardo has put the other two out of business earlier. He took out the owners and every time someone thinks about opening a new one he takes them out too.
The moment I step into the darkened building and smell the desperation in the air I want to fucking leave. I’d rather take on the entire Chaos Demons MC than watch these girls shake their asses on stage. A new song starts and the fresh meat saunters out on stage, her body is amazing but the dead look in her eye is fucking telling. I wonder how much coke D’Ardo has her on to get her to swing her hips on stage like that, I wonder just how much it takes to keep the girls pliable and blank at all times.
He's mastered the dosage.
"Johnny-boy, take a seat and join us."
I shouldn't have fucking come.
I’m about to rearrange his face all-the-fuck-over again. The Viper lifts a glass at me from where he’s getting a lap dance… no, wait, the stripper is naked and bouncing on his dick. There are private rooms for that shit but I suppose it’s a night for pissing me the fuck off. D’Ardo is sitting at the other end of the booth and, fuck me, the kid is tucked in next to him.
I fucking hate him.
I’m going to fucking kill him for bringing her here. For wanting to be the king of the Bay so fucking bad he’s willing to sell his soul and our friendship.
I never had those ambitions. I just want to be left alone to drink, fuck, and kill how I want. I want a bank account that's fat enough that I never have to think about money again.
I want the French siren at home tucked up in my bed to belong to me forever because I feel like she's branded my fucking soul without asking for my permission and I need to know I have the same hold over her.
I don't want to be sitting here in some fucking strip club with a posing dickhead who wants to push all my fucking buttons to try to get me to snap.
If I snap I'm going to hack him into pieces.
I can’t get the kid mixed up in that shit.
I sit, raise my hand for a glass of whiskey then change my mind and ask for two, sliding one over to the kid with a look. She takes it with a nod, not looking my way. No, couldn’t do that with D’Ardo right there. He’d happily break her open right now if he thought I was trying to get in his way.
The Viper grunts and gets the girl off of his lap, zipping his dick away with the kid sitting right the fuck there. Pisses me off more than it probably should but I think this is as close as I’ll get to a sister and she’s, what, fourteen?
Fucking dickhead, the lot of them.
“I heard you have my information, Butcher. Took you long enough.”
I turn my head, very slowly, until I’m looking at him. “You wanna rephrase that? I’m not in the best mood.”
The Viper grins at me, completely unfazed. Maybe when he nutted in that stripper his brain went with it. “I heard you’re not getting any action from that whore. Must be rough, going all in for one chick is a bad idea.”
My eyes flick over to D’Ardo and he shrugs at me. “If you don’t want the Bay knowing about her you probably shouldn’t kick down every fucking cartel door. A lot of people are pissed off at you, man.”
I clench my jaw, trying to decide just how far I’m willing to go tonight. The kid finishes the drink and pushes the glass away from herself. Her hand goes down to rest in her pocket, she’s signaling she’s ready for when I kick off.
I’m not doing it with her here.
“If you want the Demons out of the Bay you need to go to the Boar. Half his men are jumping ship. You’ll never be clear unless he cleans house. That’s it. That’s all you’re getting from me. Wolf, I’ll drive you home. Go get in the Mustang.”
D’Ardo’s eyes flare at me but the kid follows my lead, grabbing the keys from my outstretched hand without a word. I ignore him completely, my attention on the Viper.
“How are you going to explain it?” I say.
He frowns at me. “Explain what? I’ll tell the Boar to sort his MC out. You did good work, the money is in the bag.”
“No, I meant how are you going to explain your missing fingers?”
He frowns at me but the cleaver is already out of it’s sheath on my thigh and I feel nothing but pure fucking satisfaction as I take off the last two fingers on his hand. He screams and snatches his hand away, leaving behind the ring finger and the pinky I’ve just removed for him.
I lean over and grab the digits, dropping them into my pocket, and then swoop under the table to grab my payment. “These are mine now. If you ever talk about my woman like that again, I will take on the entire institution of the Twelve just for the satisfaction of gutting you like the cunt you are. Are we clear?”
The Viper is sweating and muttering curses about me under his breath but I ignore it entirely. Like I give a fuck about this piece of shit.
I turn and walk out. He calls out to me, “You’ll never fight in my cages again, Butcher. Fucking never.”
I raise a finger at him, just so he’s really clear on how much I do not give a fuck about his cage fights, and head outside to take the kid home. I get my money into the trunk of my car before I’m hit in the head with a baseball bat.
It’s a decent strike and I’m dazed but my height works in my favor and I’m not knocked out, just falling onto the back of my car. I manage to catch myself but I’m going to fucking feel that later.
I push myself up and turn to find D’Ardo grinning at me, though it slides right off when he sees me still standing. Yeah, fucker. Even with a baseball bat you can’t fucking take me.
“You spineless little fuck!”
He rushes at me and I let him take the first swing, clearly I'm feeling fucking charitable, but the second one doesn't land. He might have won the Game to become the Jackal but none of the men he faced were anything like me.
I have him flat on the ground in under a minute.
I only stop strangling the little fuck because the kid opens the car door and knocks me out of my rage.
“You know it’ll be all sort of hell to pay if you kill him, right? Curfew is in ten minutes.”
I land one last punch, feeling his jaw snap under my fist. I stand and think about curb-stomping the cunt but something stops me. Call it nostalgia but I just fucking hesitate, then I turn away and head back to my car.
Matteo hacks up a lung, spitting blood on the sidewalk. "Just remember, if she wasn't born in the Bay, then she doesn't understand this life. How could an outsider ever really get the Butcher?"
I smirk at him, the utter fucking dickhead. He has no idea how sharp my baby girl's teeth really are or how perfect she is for me. Fuck, if I were a man who entertained the idea of religion I'd think she was made just for me.
If there is a god, he isn't welcome in the Bay.
I drop the kid off at the group home, watching as she walks in as if she actually needs me to. My phone starts going off in my pocket, a shrill screeching noise until my ringtone, and my stomach drops.
The alarm.
Someone is in my fucking house with Odie.
Chapter Nineteen
Odie
I decide to paint Illi.
Maybe it’s curiosity, maybe it’s infatuation, but I can’t stop thinking about his lips when he grins at me, or his eyes when he watches me so intently while we eat together, o
r the little tattoo he has under his eye. There’s so much of him that I’m curious about, I feel as though I’m standing on the edge of… something. Something important, something that will change who I am as a person. I don’t know if I’m ready for that yet, but painting him seems like the best way to work through those feelings. I lose myself in the strokes, mixing colors and working up the layers over and over until he starts to come off of the canvas, a monster that owns the parts of me only I can give away.
I’m so engrossed in what I’m doing that I don’t hear a thing until the front door opens and the alarm stops beeping and starts wailing like a siren.
It’s not mon monstre.
It’s not Lips or the doctor.
I stumble away from my canvas, knocking it to the ground as I scramble away. I know nothing about how to protect myself physically. Except then I remember the gun.
The gun.
I bolt into the bedroom, my heart in my throat and my hands a shaking mess, but I get a hold of the gun and whirl around, expecting the man to be chasing me but he isn’t there. I creep forward, realizing too late that I’ve left my phone behind and praying Illi is on his way home to me. I make it to the door, the gun aimed out and my arm only trembling a little. I’m not scared of shooting the intruder. I’m scared I’ll miss.
The man is still standing at the front door, swaying a little but a scowl of his face.
I do not recognize him but he’s covered in blood and wounds, definitely the result of torture. He looks me over, and my throat closes over as the dread settles over me.
I’ll turn the gun on myself before I’ll let him take me.
The sway gets worse until he stumbles forward and has to catch himself on the kitchen counter. I raise the gun a little higher, aiming for his chest.
He puts one hand up. “Where’s the Butcher? Is this his place?”
I shake my head, words too much for me right now. The alarm is still loud in our ears and I edge along the wall until I can get to my phone.
His eyes drop down to the phone as I grab it. “Look, I just want to get out of here. Are you… have you been kidnapped? I can get you out of here.”
I dial Illi’s phone number and he picks up instantly, “Tell me you have your gun, baby girl. Tell me you’ve got it and the door is locked.”
“I have it. There’s a man here and he’s covered in blood. I can… shoot him?” I don’t know why but I need him to tell me to do it.
He swears viciously down the phone. “Keep your gun raised and if he takes a step towards you fill him with lead, baby girl. I’m three minutes away. Stay on the phone, tell Chance I’ll gut him if he tries anything.”
The man watches me carefully, his eyes shrewd as he searches me. I’m wearing one of Illi’s shirts with a bigger neckline than usual, and a pair of his sweatpants, the waistband pulled in tight and the legs rolled up so I don’t trip on them.
My arms are bare and the burn marks are visible.
I forget they’re there now most of the time. Illi doesn’t ever look at them or comment, he treats me like a queen. It’s hard to be reminded like this about how visible my damage really is.
“Fuck, what has he done to you? Everyone in this fucking city is a rapist psychopath. I’ll get you out of here, find you a shelter or something, in another city that isn’t Mounts fucking Bay. What’s your name?”
My arm falters a little and the phone slips away from my ear. “You think it’s the Butcher? No. He saved me. He is good to me. A good man.”
He chokes on his laugh and sweeps a hand down the front of his body. “Would a good man do this, sweetheart? He’s paid to make people bleed for information. He takes money to cut people up. He didn’t become the Butcher for rescuing women.”
But I already know all of this and my life has taught me an important lesson; trust those who treat you well, not those who are supposed to love you.
Illi speaks in my ear and I lift the phone up. “Don’t stop him from leaving, baby girl. Just keep your ass in the apartment and that gun in your hand. I’ll hunt him down later. Let him go.”
Stupidly, I nod. Then I catch myself and say to Chance, “The Butcher is on his way home and he’s not happy that you are speaking to me. He knows I do not want to speak to any man other than him ever again.”
He nods and keeps his hands up, backing out slowly. Once the door is shut behind him I force myself to stand and watch the security screen until he’s off of the property. It’s only a matter of seconds between him leaving and Illi arriving back home.
He doesn’t chase after his escaping prisoner.
No.
He tears out of his car and takes to the staircase with such speed that I think his feet only touch the ground twice between the ground floor and the landing outside the apartment door. He screams out my name as the door nearly comes off of it’s hinges as he bursts into the room.
“Did he touch you? I’m going after him right now, tell me what he did to you?” He says as he bundles me into his arms roughly.
He doesn’t usually touch me with such urgency and now he’s pressing me into every line of his hard body. I can’t breathe but I’m not scared.
“He didn’t touch me. He was in a lot of pain and disoriented. I think he was looking for you and when he saw me he thought you were keeping me here against my will. He tried to talk me into leaving with him.”
His arms tighten around me. “Fucking piece of shit, I’ll gut him.”
I wrap my arms around his waist and stop him from moving away. “No, he was trying to help me. He offered to get me out of the Bay, to some other city. He thought you had done… this.”
When I motion at the burns on my arms he grunts out a reply that is more displeased sounds than actual words. I rub my face on his chest, taking in the masculine scent of him and happy until I smell the liquor.
I lurch backwards, slapping a hand over my mouth but the bile doesn’t stop coming and I have to scramble to the kitchen sink to empty my stomach.
Illi doesn’t offer any help, just stands there looking at me like I’ve punched him. “I’m sorry.”
He shakes his head and turns on his heel. “Fuck, don’t apologize. You can’t help that my touch makes you sick. We’ll get past it.”
The way he won’t show me his face has me questioning if he even believes himself, but I have to fix it. I have to set him straight. “It’s not your touch. It’s the alcohol. I can’t- I can’t smell the alcohol on your breath. It was… it was always present when they would… come to me.”
He swears viciously under his breath and stalks off into the bedroom. I hear the shower start and then I move to close the apartment door, keying in the alarm code to reset it. The last thing this night needs is that man coming back to try to ‘rescue me’ or kill Illi and actually catching us off-guard.
I wonder if we’ll ever live here without being on alert.
I wonder if Illi would ever move.
I don’t want to go back to France though. I can’t imagine ever taking this man back there and showing him the hollow pretense that was my life. He lives an honest life. What you see is what you get.
My parents had always played pretend. Pretend they’re rich and not rotten to the core. Pretend they were of fine breeding when really they were drug dealers and pretenders. Pretending they loved me.
Pretending they even cared a little.
I move over to where my easel is on the ground and find my painting ruined… worse, there’s paint all over the rug and the pristine, polished floor. My lip trembles and I do my best not to cry but the adrenaline leaves me in a rush and I fall to my knees in the paint and sob.
“Baby girl, you need to stop crying because I’m about to go bleed out half the Bay for you. I’ll find that biker piece of shit and carve him up.”
I look up and find Illi crouched over me, his sleep shorts on and no shirt covering his impressive chest. “I don’t want you to find him. He wasn’t bad, he wanted to help me.”
; He scoffs, grabbing one of my elbows to pick me up out of the mess of paint and tears I’m in. He sits me on the couch, not caring at all that I’m ruining the leather, and moves to the kitchen to grab me a wet cloth. The thought that I’m destroying his house and all of the lovely furniture he’s picked out… it makes the tears come all over again.
“You need to stop crying. I can’t control myself when you start up and if you don’t want me chasing after Chance right the fuck now, you need to stop.”
I take the wet cloth and scrub at my face with it, spreading the paint around some more. “I can’t help it. I was… I was scared that he might want to take me. Then I saw my painting and it just- it pushed me over the edge of my control. Maybe I was due for a cry. Girls need it sometimes.”
He nods and walks over to the mess of my canvas, the image no longer recognizable, and picks it up. He holds it out, moving it a little this way and that, before putting it back on the easel. “Was this me? Were you painting me, baby girl?”
I clear my throat and swipe the cloth over my face one last time. “Yes. I paint things to work through feelings. I’ll need to paint you all over again now I have to work through this too.”
He turns on his heel. “What about this? The part where I told you to shoot the dickhead if he touched you? The part where I came home smelling like the cartel did? Which part?”
I hold his eyes, no matter how much I’d like to look away. “The part where you locked a man in your basement and tortured him. The part where that's not something a good man would do and yet I don’t care. I trust you did it for the right reasons.“
His eyes flash, his spine snapping straight as he stalks back over to the couch. I do my best not to cower under his height and the sheer size of him. I roll my shoulders back and meet his eye, the pride there shining through. It makes no sense but nothing about this man ever does.
"I never once said I'm not a bad man, baby girl. I do a lot of bad things but when I said I'll never hurt you, that you never have to fear me, I meant it. I'm a good man to you and you alone. I don't give a fuck about anyone else."
