My brain whirred as I tried to figure out what was going on, but fatigue and lack of sleep weren’t helping me. All I knew was that if the scumbag’s family could bring in cops of their own, something wasn’t right. And if we couldn’t rely on the pigs on our payroll, then shit was more than in the wind—we’d have to take steps to make sure we didn’t get caught in the spray.
“Are you okay?” Rachel’s concerned question had me flinching and turning my attention to Giulia. Where it should have been all along. But fuck, breaking the habit of a lifetime of putting club business first was hard to stop. Didn’t mean I wasn’t going to keep on goddamn trying though.
“I’ve been better,” she mumbled, and I strode over to her, grabbing a firm hold of her good hand.
“They’ll be sending you out soon,” Rex informed her with a small smile, but I saw his gaze drift to our hands, and I dared him, with my glare, to utter a fucking word on the subject.
“Good.” She blew out a breath. “Are you going to introduce me?”
Rachel flushed. “Sorry. I learned quickly to attack first where the Sinners and the cops are concerned.” She stepped closer to the bed and held out her right hand so Giulia, once I relinquished my hold on her, could shake hers with her left. “I really hope you get better soon.”
“Thanks.” She gnawed on her split bottom lip, not seeming to care that her skin was broken. “Will I need your help?”
“You shouldn’t. It was self-defense, and everything about your current status backs that up, but the Lancasters are rich and powerful, so we’re just evening the odds.” She patted Giulia’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. Please. Just concentrate on getting better.”
Her smile was wan, and I couldn’t blame her. This was bullshit. Total and utter bullshit. But as much as we owned the police, there was a difference between slipping through with a smuggling charge and a carrying without a license charge and murder.
“I-I don’t know if I can afford a lawyer,” she admitted, and I could hear how badly that stung her pride.
Rex sniffed. “You’re a Sinner, Giulia. We look after our own.”
She cut him a look, and I hated how her mouth quivered, knew she was holding back tears, but she managed to control them before she nodded and choked out, “Thank you.”
“No thanks needed,” he rebuffed. “We’ll deal with this shit, and make sure the Lancasters are tied up in knots over it. You did good taking out the trash, Giulia. Well done.”
She frowned, but her head tipped down to the side as she asked, “My phone?”
Rachel cleared her throat. “I don’t think I need to hear this.”
“No one does,” Rex stated grimly. “But we’ll deal with it later. I’ll see you out, Rachel.” He cut me a look. “We’ll talk when you’re back at the compound.”
I nodded, but I’d admit that I wasn’t as curious as Giulia evidently was.
I wondered if she knew how at the very center of my focus she was.
At that moment, all I could see, hear, and breathe was her.
I wasn’t sure if she was ready for that intensity, didn’t know if she’d be able to deal with it in the aftermath, so when the door swung shut behind Rex and the club’s attorney, I moved to the armchair that made an Iron Maiden looked comfortable, and sat myself in it. Tilting my head back, I closed my eyes and tried to relax.
She tutted. “How can you sleep when he left it like that?” Giulia muttered.
“Nothing we can do until we’re home.”
She bit her lip. “Home.”
I let my lids open a sliver. “Yeah. Home.”
Her head bobbed for a second, then she whispered, a little more firmly, “Home.”
And though I couldn’t say I was cheerful, not exactly, that went a million miles closer to making me feel a helluva lot better.
Eleven
Giulia
THE SCREAM WOKE me up first. Then I realized why I was screaming.
A nightmare.
Dammit.
I hated nightmares. I mean, I guessed they weren’t anyone’s idea of a good time, but still, they were a weakness, and I...
God, I hated being weak. Being weak got you nowhere fast, but the bitch about your subconscious was that you couldn’t exactly control it, could you?
When the bed beside me shifted, I stopped rubbing my eyes, and peered over at the poor bastard who’d been woken up every night this past week. He was armed, a sight I was getting accustomed to, and he was concerned—a sight I wasn’t.
When a tap sounded at my bedroom door, I grimaced, because that alone was further proof that things were still weird.
I screamed, and usually, my brothers ignored me.
Now when I screamed, they came to check up on me, to make sure that I was okay.
Well, I was okay, but I was just having a few issues with some things, and I really didn’t need them to be on tenterhooks around me. That just reminded me that things were strange.
Eying the glint of metal that came from Nyx’s piece—real hardware, not just of the genital variety—I huffed, “It’s okay, guys. Just a bad dream.”
“Okay. Get some sleep,” Hawk called out.
“I’m trying,” I muttered. “Asswipe.” Sheesh, even when he was trying to be nice, he pissed me off.
Flopping back onto the mattress, I watched as Nyx, as silent as ever, maneuvered around on the bed and placed his gun under his pillow.
It comforted me to know it was loaded. But it comforted me more having him here in bed beside me, having him there ready to shoot the second I screamed out in the middle of the night.
Without a word, I turned on my side, and he hauled me against his chest. He pressed a kiss to my shoulder and, like every other night so far, he stayed quiet and began to rest.
I liked that he didn’t want to talk. I liked that he was okay with letting me process things the way I needed to. Of course, it fit that tonight, I didn’t want that. Tonight, I wanted to explain. Had to.
Six nights of successive nightmares? It was starting to look like a pattern was forming, and even if it was, I needed him to know that it wasn’t a regular pattern. I wasn’t loaded with regret, didn’t feel shame or guilt. That was why the nightmares didn’t make sense. I felt none of that shit.
And I refused to believe it could be fear. Fear that someone else had shown me how precarious my security was. Fear that, once again, someone could overpower me and—
That train of thought was taking me nowhere. Fast. So I blurted out, “I don’t feel guilty.”
Technically, I had no reason to. But I didn’t want him to know that, did I? Not the specifics, anyway.
“Nor should you,” he assured me softly, his voice telling me that he was wide awake, even if he’d been going through the motions of falling asleep again.
It made me wonder if, every other night, he’d done the same. As I’d rested, he’d stood guard, and if that wasn’t enough to make any woman’s heart melt, then said woman’s heart was just plain mean.
I was talking Cruella de-fucking-Vil mean.
“I just didn’t want you to think I felt bad.”
“I didn’t,” he denied, sounding so calm that I believed him.
“Good.” I gnawed on my bottom lip, then muttered, “I tortured him.”
He tensed. “How?”
I could hear his surprise, not his disgust. “I needed the passcode to his phone. I twisted the knife in his chest to make him give it to me.”
A soft snicker escaped him, and it had pride winging its way through me at the sound. “Good girl.”
“I was rather proud of myself too,” I admitted wryly, then I swallowed, and asked about something I was desperate to know more of. “Why won’t you tell me what was on the phone?”
He didn’t have to move a muscle for me to feel the tension in his body. A tension that appeared every time I broached the subject.
A part of me, and God, I knew how stupid this was, but I felt sure that was why I couldn’t sett
le. That, and the fact that the cops were still investigating Lancaster’s death.
Rachel assured me there’d be no repercussions, not with the injuries I sustained, but it was like a shadow was hanging over me.
The investigation was just adding insult to injury, literally, and I’d be glad when I could just shove everything behind me. Lawyers weren’t always right, and I really didn’t want to be spending time in jail for a murder I hadn’t actually committed, but for a man who’d been on the brink of harming me more than just by rape.
I wasn’t sure what Lancaster’s intent had been that night, but I just knew it wasn’t only rape.
How I knew that, I couldn’t say. And instinct wasn’t something you could hand over to a lawyer and expect them to get you off the hook with. It didn’t help that Nyx was uneasy about the investigation. When I’d seen him almost cocksure about every other aspect of his life, in this, he was hesitant. Specifically around the cops, and I knew it was because he wasn’t sure whose pockets they were in anymore.
Which, of course, put me at even more risk.
Yay!
“You don’t want to know.”
His words were so long in coming, I almost forgot what I’d asked him. Because he was pivotal in my pre-sleep schedule, I didn’t kick him off the bed and send him to the couch in the living room. Instead, I muttered, “Ever think that I need to know enough that it’s messing with my head?”
“What I saw really would be fucking with your head, Giulia. You don’t need that on top of all this other shit you’ve got going on.”
“Shouldn’t I be the one to make that decision?” I kind of liked that statement. I’d been using it a lot since the hospital, and as he’d done then, he conceded with a long-suffering sigh.
“Yeah, you’re the one who should be making that decision, and normally, I’d have no problem with it. It’s not like this is club business, but you have to trust me, baby girl. I’m doing this for you.”
Because I was touched, I wriggled around until I was facing him. “I know you are, and that’s why I’m not getting mad.”
He snorted. “You’re all heart.”
“I know.” My wry tone had him barking out a laugh. And the sound made something inside me settle, because those laughs were few and far between, but they were making more and more of an appearance, even with the aftermath of the episode at the bar.
“Please?” I whispered, pressing my forehead into his chest, and letting the few whorls of hair tickle me there.
He hesitated, long enough for me to think he wouldn’t answer, then he stated, “He had videos on there.”
My heart plummeted, sinking through my stomach and just plopping right onto the fucking bed. It didn’t take a mind reader to know what kind of videos a sick fuck like the Lancaster prick would have on his phone.
With my mind feeling like it had been in a Vitamix, I whispered, “Want to know something weird?”
“Sure?”
“I had to use his cell to call the cops. That was why I needed his passcode, and I changed it to all the zeros. But the second that I had it in my hand, it felt like that was why I’d gone through what I had. So I could get my hands on his cellphone. Strange, huh?”
“Maybe, maybe not.” He cleared his throat. “The videos were of what he’d done to other women.”
“What he’d have done to me if he could?”
“Yeah.” He grunted as his arm squeezed tighter about my waist. “You had more of an escape than you even know, Giulia.”
“Trust me, I’m grateful,” I said softly. Then, I pushed my forehead harder into his chest and whispered, “Come on, hit me with it. What aren’t you telling me?”
“W-We think...”
“You think what?” I prompted, when his voice broke off.
“Fuck. We more than just think. We know he was holding two women somewhere. We’re trying to find them.”
He sounded so stoic, but I knew that staunch tone was hiding a multitude of emotions. Emotions that were probably cutting him up inside, thanks to his past.
“So, it did happen for a reason,” I stated bluntly.
“That you can even think of it that way pisses me off,” he grated out.
“I’d prefer for you to be pissed off and for you to know there are two women being held hostage somewhere, in a prison that... God, it’s been six days since he died, Nyx. That’s at least six days they’ve been without food.” I swallowed, and any sense of peace I’d found in his arms abated as I surged upright. “They’ll die soon.”
“Maybe.”
His wooden tone told me exactly how bad the footage he’d seen was. It also told me that he was dying inside too. My Nyx was a protector, and he’d not only failed to save me, but there were another two women out there who might die soon, two women who would lose their lives, even though our attacker was beyond us all.
Back bowed, I slumped over so I could press my face into my hands. What I’d gone through was nothing in comparison to what those women were enduring now, what they’d endured.
The thought of them just rotting away...
I scampered to my feet and pounded on the floor as I rushed to the bathroom. The second my head was over the bowl, I purged my stomach. The act was violent, and my body ached with the dry heaves that came after, but it wasn’t anything likened to the poison still flooding my veins.
A gentle hand collected my hair into his fist, and I felt him comb it off my sticky forehead, making sure I didn’t get it in the bowl as I carried on heaving long after my belly was emptied.
When, eventually, I put down the lid and cautiously reached for the flush, I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and whispered, “I want you to do me a favor, Nyx.”
“The entire club is pooling all our resources to find them, Giulia. You don’t have to worry about that.” He sighed. “We don’t know if we can trust the cops. The detectives sniffing around you are dirty as fuck, and I don’t know what lengths they’re willing to go to in order to cover up for the Lancasters—”
Before he could say another word, I interrupted, “I wasn’t worrying. I already knew you would be doing everything you could to get to them before it was too late.”
I blew out a breath as I shifted on the floor, my knees protesting as they rubbed harder into the tiles before I managed to get to my feet. When I washed my hands, I bent down to rinse my mouth out, then I looked at him through the mirror and whispered, “My favor has nothing to do with Lancaster…” With our eyes locked on one another, I stated, “Don’t you ever call yourself evil again.”
He reared back. “What?”
“You heard me,” I said, aware that I sounded fervent, but that was because I was.
He wasn’t evil.
I knew evil now.
It had touched me.
Been inside me.
And Nyx? He was twisted, sure, but he wasn’t that.
I let him process my words while I reached for the mouthwash. Wanting to bathe in the stuff, I rinsed out my mouth again, then began to wash my face.
After, and feeling marginally better, I held out my hand for his and tugged him from the room, back toward the bed.
As we climbed atop the mattress once more, I muttered, “I’m ready to get back to my regular schedule in the morning.”
“It’s too soon—”
“I know what’s too soon for me, Nyx, and I want to be normal again. I’m a little bruised, some stuff is sprained, but he didn’t break me. I’m okay.” I grunted. “I put my alarm on for seven-thirty.”
He snorted. “So, this is a courtesy conversation?”
I smiled into the pillow as he pressed his hand to my belly and hauled me back against him. “Exactly. You know me too well.”
And that wasn’t a lie.
For two people who’d only been around one another for just over a month, he knew me better than even my brothers, because while there was a history we hadn’t shared, two separate lives we hadn’t had a chance to reveal
to one another, deep inside, I got him, and he got me.
His demons were mine, and mine were his.
And that?
Fuck, that signified more of a union than a wedding ring could ever dream of.
The next day, with him glowering at me from the counter, I began to cook breakfast. It wasn’t that hard, but cracking eggs was, and he had to help me out.
Because I wanted to go easy on myself, I decided to make omelets. If the guys wanted to grumble, then they could grumble, and they could swivel on the birds I’d send them as they complained.
It felt good to get back to my regular routine. Sure, I hated cooking, but it was nice to hate something normal again. Just to be bitching at ungrateful bikers and stoves that didn’t get hot enough was a joy because it was bland, and sweet Lord, bland tasted mighty damn good right about now.
Yeah, my arm ached, my wrist felt like it had been twisted off entirely at the joint—which wasn’t the case—and my body was one big bruise. The constant headaches I’d been dealing with had only just stopped being as strong as migraines, and my concussion was something I was going to have to be careful with for the next month or so, but… I was alive.
I was free.
I was able to make breakfast for a bunch of badass bikers who cared more for the plight of victims than the authorities did.
Nyx was, I realized, right.
The compound was home, he was home, and this was my place—bitching over bacon fat that spattered me while grunting at Nyx as he told me to take it easy and to come and sit down if I got too tired.
Did I look like I was about to turn ninety-five?
“Can I help?”
The voice intruded upon our bickering over my taking a quick break, and when I peered at the door and saw Cammie of all fucking people hovering there, I wasn’t sure what stunned me more. The fact that she was the one offering to help, or the fact she was wearing clothes that actually covered her body.
In fact, scratch that, it was definitely the latter that surprised me the most.
Of all the clubwhores, ironically enough, she was the only one I hadn’t gotten violent with, and now Nyx and I were unofficially together, something the clubhouse couldn’t not know, considering he was like my goddamn shadow, I’d expected there’d be bad blood between us. So her offering to help made me wonder if she was a Trojan Horse.
Forgotten & Found: A Dark & Dirty Sinners' MC Boxset Page 26