“Just Ghost. The others don’t want me around.”
“Could you…”
When he broke off, I prompted, “Could I what?”
“Talk to them about speaking with the sheriff’s department?”
“Why’s that necessary? If you have video footage I mean.” I scowled, and I knew it was dark with anger. “You know their situation is precarious.”
“I do, but I’m going with my gut here.”
“What, oh great leader, does your gut say?”
“That if there’s a woman on the stands, the jury will send his ass to jail forever.”
“And they won’t if…” My voice trailed off when I remembered Ghost was here, sitting and listening to me talk.
“I don’t know. Money talks. Ninety billion has a way of greasing people’s palms and getting them to do someone else’s wishes. But if a woman is there, crying on the stands, telling the truth? Jurors would listen.”
“That’s weak ass logic.”
“I’m speaking with my gut.”
“That’s why all I hear are verbal farts.”
Rex growled down the line. “Fuck, Mav. Just for once in your life could you do as I goddamn ask?”
“If you were talking logically I would.”
Another growl. “Ever thought maybe the women would want the chance to face their attacker in court? To see them burn on the stands?” Another growl. “Get the damn bunkhouse ready for guests.”
Then he hung up.
I scowled at the screen before I slipped it back into my pocket, and when Ghost asked, “Is everything okay?” I wasn’t sure how to answer.
Figuring the truth wasn’t a bad place to start, I muttered, “No, not really.”
I rubbed my chin as I thought about Rex’s logic. If they had video footage, then I didn’t get why they’d need one of the victims to come forth… Especially when all these women were illegal. What he was asking didn’t make much sense. At least, not in my opinion.
Pursing my lips for a second, I stared at Ghost and saw that she didn’t dart her gaze away the second I looked at her for once, and sighed. “You heard, didn’t you?”
“I did.” She tipped her chin to the side. “I can hear well now.”
“Superhearing is your new superpower. At least you got something out of that fucking episode.”
“That and I can see well in the dark.” She leaned back against the pillows, and the tray on her lap jostled some as she did. The level of milk in her glass hadn’t altered much, but the sandwich had been nibbled, even if it hadn’t been a lot.
“You were angry,” she observed simply. “Why?”
“Because what he wants doesn’t make sense.”
“I have met with your president. He seems like a very sensible man.” Her lips curved in a smile. “I think I would like to sit in a stand and see one of the men who hurt me in chains.” Her chin tilted up. “I did nothing wrong. He did.”
“I know, but—”
“If I get sent back, I get sent back.” She shrugged. “My sister would…” Ghost winced. “Has Link spoken of her? I asked him to find her.”
“Link is brilliant at finding people. So am I. If he hasn’t found her, then I’ll give it a shot, okay?”
“Thank you.” She studied me for a second, then murmured, “It is strange, isn’t it?”
“What is?”
“I have known you a few days, yet I look forward to you coming and sitting with me. I don’t know you, you don’t know me, but I feel like I do.”
Because I felt the same fucking way, and because I was just as confused by it, I beamed at her. “Yeah, it’s weird as fuck.”
“Maybe then you will understand why I would be willing to return to my country, even if it meant putting my sister’s future in jeopardy just to see that man suffer.”
“He wouldn’t suffer as you did.”
“Men like that are used to too many freedoms,” she countered. “Being chained and restrained would be a satisfying sight.”
“Babe, I don’t even know if things would get that far. Half the clubhouse wants to take down his son.”
“But Luke’s already dead.”
“Yeah, but he’s still got a body and he hasn’t been interred yet.”
“Interred?”
I waved a hand. “Buried.” I grimaced. “Got so many men wanting to defile that corpse of his, he’d—”
“What? Get something he deserved?”
I grinned at her, liking this savage side that was coming out. “If we stole the body, would you like to—”
“You could steal it?” Her brows rose. “That is strange.”
“We have friends everywhere. What would you do?”
“Everything he did to me.” She cleared her throat. “Well, some of the things he did to me.”
“Would that make you feel better?”
“No.”
“Would seeing the older Lancaster in court make you feel better?”
“Not really. But I’d feel better than if he just carried on living his life.”
“That makes sense.” I pursed my lips. “Your sister…where is she?”
“I think you call them orphanages.”
“Child services, huh? That’s shit. What happened to your folks?”
Ghost pulled a face. “My mother was what you call a ‘Russian bride.’ Her husband paid to have her brought over. She left me with my grandmother. We didn’t know my father.”
“That sucks.”
She nodded. “It does. She died, leaving my half-sister behind. She was fine until her father died in a car crash. Before my mother passed, she had put us in contact with one another. Her father didn’t want us to associate, but when he died and she reached out to me, I promised I’d come for her.” She blinked fast enough to tell me she was hiding tears. “That did not work out.”
Those broken pieces of me began to throb, vibrate with the need to collide with hers.
I sucked in a breath as I rolled forward, needing to connect with her, needing to touch her.
I’d only dared venture in here since a couple of days after they’d arrived. Something in me had wanted to avoid the bunkhouse. Knowing that Stone had turned it into a temporary medical unit wouldn’t have brought back happy memories for me.
Then, I’d heard about Amara almost dying and Tatána trying to kill herself, and…I’d wanted to come by. Wanted to see if I could do anything.
I knew what it felt like to have nothing to live for. I knew what it felt like to feel as though you were living without hope.
Then I’d seen Ghost. Suddenly, twice daily visits were the norm, and if I could get her to forget about the fact she needed to eat what Giulia put in front of her, I considered that a good goal to have crushed.
I barely knew her. The length of time we’d been aware of each other could be calculated in hours… Yet I had no compunction in saying, “I think we can get you your justice while making sure your sister grows up knowing you.”
She frowned. “This isn’t possible.”
I grinned at her, baring my teeth. “Impossible is my favorite word, Ghost.” I rolled closer to her. “I can give you what you want.”
“How?” she asked, her voice whisper soft as usual, but forceful enough then to tell me she wanted to know.
She wanted justice.
She wanted her sister.
And she deserved to have both.
“Marry me.”
Ten
Lily
I was used to men’s offices. I’d spent a lot of time in my father’s and, before he died, my grandfather’s too. Then, there were the occasions where Tiffany pleaded with her father for something and she’d hauled me in to wait for her until she was done, and then the headmaster’s at the academy we’d attended.
But no office was like this one.
It was clean, cleaner than I’d expected, to be honest. Lots of wood paneling, a big, wide desk that was surprisingly neat, a banker’s light on one corne
r that created a warm glow, and a full drink tray on a dresser that was calling to me like you wouldn’t believe.
There was a dining table in a nook where a ‘council’ had gathered, and behind the desk, there were a couple of Japanese prints that were actually pretty damned nice. Worth a second look, at any rate.
Well, if you didn’t look at the men in the corner first, of course.
Bikers were supposed to be rough and coarse. Which these were, I guessed, but no one had told me how gorgeous they were. All of them. Link was in good company, and if I was ever going to have a wet dream, then all of them would be in it, because, yikes.
In my world, handsome men wore suits and had eight-hundred-dollar cufflinks on their wrists. They dared to be brave by going without socks in their hand-tooled Italian leather loafers, and bucked trends by not gelling their hair.
They were as sleek as the women they had on their arms…
Nothing about these guys was sleek.
And that made them all the more beautiful for it.
Link? Somehow he glowed among them, like the sun rising from behind a mountain. I felt the heat of his energy regardless of the distance between us, even if he hadn’t looked at me since he’d half dragged me in here.
It had been an eventful afternoon.
I’d been involved in a shootout when Link had stuffed me into a very nice Mercedes SUV that the men called a ‘cage’ for some reason, a move my guards hadn’t appreciated.
I’d been entangled in a tussle when said highly paid guards had followed me to the clubhouse, and…well, that was what it had taken to get me here. To the clubhouse.
I wasn’t sure if the guards had been protecting me or the computer Link had been carrying, because knowing my father the way I did, I’d put nothing past him. But, equally, the bastard would surely have destroyed Luke’s computer the second he could, if he’d known there was video evidence that could put him behind bars.
Arrogance made a fool out of a lot of people, my father included, but this much of a fool?
I wasn’t sure.
Still wasn’t.
What I was sure of was that I was about to explode from a surfeit of energy if Link didn’t do something.
I was antsy and felt like I had something on my to-do list, something major, and also, I felt like I’d dropped the ball. My dad would know soon that my charade had been a lie.
All my mom’s money gone.
Forever.
I blew out a breath.
So many plans. So many things I’d intended on doing with it. All down the toilet—
“Babe?”
I blinked, then jerked back when I noticed Link was crouching down in front of me. That I hadn’t realized he’d moved told me how far down the rabbit hole my brain had taken me.
He cocked a brow at my jolt of surprise, and I shot him a sheepish smile. “Sorry.”
“Thinking bad shit?” He patted my knee. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll get him.”
“He’s still in Hong Kong,” I reminded him, as I’d been reminding him since he and his brothers had arrived at my father’s estate. “He’s ripe for fleeing to a non-extradition country.”
Rex grunted. “We got this sorted, Lily.”
I frowned at him. “If you underestimate my father, he will make you pay for it. Trust me, I’ve been there before.”
“You’ll never be there again,” Link ground out, his eyes flashing as he slipped his hands around my waist from his crouched position. The move put us really close together, like, super close, and a quick glance at the men behind us showed me that this was atypical behavior for Link, because they looked perplexed by his affection.
That didn’t bode well, did it?
Having walked into this clubhouse that was ‘womanned’ by naked ladies called sweetbutts, I’d had a horrendous realization earlier…
Every time Link had come to me and he’d given me pleasure that he hadn’t received in turn, he’d probably gone to one of those women with his blue balls.
They were mine. Mine, dammit. I wanted to be the one he slaked his lust on. Not some random ho who eked out a living on their backs.
I bit my bottom lip to contain the emotion that was pulling me in two ways—one, cry. Two, scream and pull out Link’s hair, if he really had been fucking around with those women instead of doing something with me.
Sure, I wasn’t ready for what he needed, but there had to be things we could do together, right?
He could have taught me how to give him a damn blowjob, for God’s sake, couldn’t he?
“Lily!” Link shook me slightly. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
I blinked at him, aware my thoughts had drifted once more. Oops. Clearing my throat, I muttered, “Long day.”
Maverick wheeled forward. Of them all, he was probably the leanest of the lot, but a picture above the drinks tray had revealed a younger Maverick. A god-like Maverick, who made Thor look like an average six out of ten.
“You did good finding that footage.” He jerked his chin up. “I’ll nail that son of a bitch’s ass to a cross. Don’t you worry about it.”
“I’m not worried,” I immediately discounted. “Mostly because I don’t think he’ll ever return to the States.”
Silence fell in the office, and Link’s hands tightened around me. Not to the point of discomfort, just a reminder that he was there.
I liked that.
I liked the feeling that I wasn’t alone, and Link gave me that in more ways than one. In more ways than he probably knew, to be fair.
“What do you mean?” Nyx rumbled. He was an easy face to remember too. The guy looked like sin and chocolate combined into one devastating package.
I sighed as I tried to get my thoughts together. “We’ve got the evidence to take him down, sure, but you don’t get to where he is without having contacts. The second you give this information to the police is the second he’ll make plans to escape arrest.”
Link frowned. “I don’t get it, Lily. You were so psyched earlier. Why, if—”
I reached down and grabbed his hand. “Because what I found released me from my prison. He will never return to the States again.” My eyes fluttered to a close on their own volition. “I’ll never see him again.” A shudder whispered through my frame. “He’ll never touch me again.”
My eyes were closed, but that didn’t mean I didn’t feel the way the tension in the room crept up at that.
“He hurt you?”
Nyx.
I forced myself to look at him. “Yes. And though I want him to rot in jail, I’ll be quite happy for him never to return home. He’s a racist, anti-everything that isn’t American. He loves this country. Being barred from it will drive him nuts.”
“He deserves a worse punishment,” Maverick growled, his face white from rage. Did he care that much that my father had hurt me?
I frowned at the thought, then stared at him a little longer…no, there was something personal there. Something that drove him.
Even as I wondered what, he grunted and said, “I’ll dig up what I can from Lancaster’s files. Let’s see if there’s something more we can pin on him. Something the courts will fight over him for. He’s not due back for a while, so we can wait to go to the police when he returns—”
“The second you took me off the estate with that computer, he’ll know to change his plans.” I tipped my chin up. “I told you to leave me there.”
Rex slammed his hands down on the table. “What? Like a sacrificial lamb?”
“I’ve done it before. I could do it again.”
“If that isn’t the most disturbing thing I’ve heard all day,” a man I knew was called Steel grumbled.
A hiss escaped Rex, then he muttered, “Maverick, call in Lodestar.”
“Oh, fuck. Why?”
“Because she can help us.” Rex firmed his lips. “I know you can trawl through that shit and find stuff, but we need to drain accounts.” Rex caught my eye. “Let’s hit Donavan Lancast
er where he really hurts.”
My lips twitched. “The wallet.”
“Exactly. Prisons don’t always come with bars.”
“They just come without Fendi ties and million-dollar estates.” A smile formed out of nowhere. “I approve of this plan.”
Rex laughed. “Good to know, sweet pea. Now, I got Maverick to set you up in one of the bunkhouses.”
My hand tightened around Link’s. “Aren’t you staying with me?”
The immediacy of his answer filled me with relief. “Damn straight I am.” Link cut Rex a look. “Which bunkhouse?”
“Three.”
He hauled himself onto his feet, then for my ears only, muttered, “Come on, sugar tits. Let’s get you some fresh air.”
I stared up at him, a little wide-eyed from his words, then was routinely hauled onto my feet too. When my body collided with his, I released a sigh. The desire to slide my arms around his waist, to hold him tight, was something I fought with. Men were the source of my problems, always had been and always would be, but there was something about Link…something safe. God help me.
I wasn’t sure what that said about me. Didn’t know if that meant I was weak or pathetic, but if it did, I’d take it. Two men had made me feel unsafe for the entirety of my life, and I wasn’t about to complain if Link could undo all that with not only his proximity, but the fact he could call on only God knew how many bikers to stand at our backs as well…
He grabbed my hand and tucked me into his side. The move had most of the council frowning at our joined hands then darting up to peer at Link’s face. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure out that this wasn’t Link’s regular behavior.
Just by sight alone, I knew what he was—a manwhore. Hell, if I looked like him, I’d be taking advantage of it too. But I took the fact he was acting strangely around me as a good sign.
I didn’t really envisage this going far, him and me, even if the notion saddened me. We were too different, and not just in how we’d been raised either. But the way he made me feel was coming to be addictive.
The thought that once my usefulness was over—even if, in the long run, I hadn’t been that useful—he might move on, had me clinging to his hand a little tighter. He looked down at me, and what he saw had him frowning, and muttering, “Time to roll.”
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