“Bitch!” he hollered.
Accurate as that might be, I didn’t mind slugging him in the mouth as I went by.
He dropped immediately. Gasps and shouts of alarm rang out, bringing Josie’s head back around. She got so caught up in marveling at the man on the ground that she darted out into traffic.
I hollered her name at the same time a yellow cab clipped her side, sending her tumbling to the ground.
Traffic swerved around her, horns blaring, and my heart stopped beating.
From the corner of my eye, I saw a semi baring down.
Brakes squealed, the sound so loud I thought my eardrums would burst.
But the truck wasn’t stopping, not fast enough.
Pouring on more speed than I knew I was capable of, I tuned out everything. The onlookers. The other vehicles.
I was only aware of my woman laying on the road, struggling to get her legs beneath her and failing.
Then I was in the street, lunging without a second thought. Softness filled my hands and I tucked Josie against my body as best as I could while we rolled over pavement. A giant whoosh of air flew past us and we were jolted to a stop by my back hitting the curb on the side of the road.
People surrounded us in the next second. They hardly registered beyond being an annoyance I was tempted to swat. Then a ragged sob reached me, sounding like it had been torn straight from Josie’s throat.
A shockwave went through my soul; she never made sounds like that.
“Shhh,” I whispered as her whole body began to tremble. “I’ve got you.”
My body protested as I got to my feet and shoved through the crowd. I glanced around quickly, searching for a place that would offer some privacy from the concerned voices. When my gaze landed on three buildings situated side by side, and the tattoo parlor on the far corner, I made a break for it.
Getting the door open with her in my arms was a struggle. Then we were through, stepping into a lobby that reminded me more of a cave with all the red and black splashed around inside the interior.
“What the fuck?” an angry voice muttered.
My head swiveled. A man was sitting in a recliner, feet kicked up on the table in front of him, dark eyes peering out from beneath the brown hair blocking some of his face. Axle, another Sinner, looked both bored and aggravated by our presence as he stubbed out a cigarette.
“Oh.” He gave me a quick up and down, stopping to sneer at the woman barely holding it together in my arms. “It’s you and the stray.”
My lips curled back from my teeth, but I didn’t have time to address his bullshit or explain who she was to me. Fuck, I hadn’t even decided myself. The only thing that mattered was that Josie was coming apart at the seams.
She had too much pride to allow it to happen in front of someone else. As it was, she would likely hate me for being witness to her having a moment of weakness.
Still, I wasn’t willing to let Axle be the roadblock right then.
“Room,” I grunted, clutching my bundle tighter to my chest.
He rolled his eyes and threw a thumb over his shoulder.
“Fucking Christ,” he complained as I went around him. “I’m so fucking sick of y’all and all this damn drama. It’s like a soap opera around here. First person that shows up and puts a camera in my face is eating it.”
Flipping him off would’ve felt amazing and I wished for an extra hand to do it with. I settled for turning long enough to shoot him a hard glare as I disappeared into a private booth with Josie. Carefully, I set her down on the table in the middle of the room before locking the door behind us.
Only once I tugged on the door and made sure we were as secure as things could get did I return to her side.
My fingers brushed stray hairs into place, drifting down to her cheek to turn her face my way. Her eyes glistened with fat tears and her jaw was clenched so tight I worried she was going to crack a tooth.
“Let it go, pussycat.” I swiped a thumb against the corner of her eye. “No one else is here.”
Josie looked at me. Nodded at the door.
I shook my head. “I’m not going anywhere.” My voice turned gruff as I crouched down, putting us eye to eye. “You almost fucking died, woman. If you think I’m letting you out of my sight anytime soon, you’d be wrong. Fucking crazy ass.”
She held on for another couple of seconds.
When the first tear finally broke through the wall she was propping up through sheer will, the rest of it collapsed.
“Y-you’re such a d-dick,” she stammered as the floodgates released the load they were holding back.
Josie reached out and clutched the edge of my shirt as tears fell down her face in earnest, soaking the cushion beneath her head.
Each little noise roughly pulled from her throat was a needle sliding under my skin, burning me from the inside out. I dropped to my knees so I could be closer to her and clutched the hand she had extended.
I held it even tighter when she tried to pull away.
She cried for what felt like hours, but couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. The sniffling started coming more than the tears. I knew she was recovering when I reached out to dab at the streaks going down the sides of her face and she batted my hand away.
“This is your fault,” she whispered hoarsely, staring at the ceiling.
“For chasing you?” I squeezed her hand in mine. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been doing that since day one.”
Josie shivered, goosebumps breaking out across her skin. The surge of adrenaline was leaving, taking her body heat with it. I went to reach for my jacket and found it missing. Must have lost the damn thing when I was chasing her somehow.
“What are you doing?” she asked when I started climbing onto the table. Metal groaned beneath us, protesting to the added weight. Her red-rimmed eyes went wide. “This thing was not made for two people, Monster.”
I paused, giving her a look filled with finality. “I didn’t pull your ass out of traffic so you could catch the flu or something and die on me anyway. Your body is crashing, and you’re going to be freezing in a second.”
Her mouth opened.
I bulldozed ahead, cutting her off. “Either I’m coming up there to you, or you’re coming down on the floor with me. Choose, before I decide for you.”
Josie wiped at her face with torn sleeves. She didn’t quite manage to hide the eye roll. “Floor, you insufferable prick.”
“That might be the nicest thing you’ve said to me today.”
Her cheeks twitched.
An overwhelming urge to bang my chest with pride hit me. I had no idea where it was coming from.
What the hell was I even doing?
Less than seventy-two hours ago, I’d decided I was done with this woman.
She stole from me.
Insulted the people I cared about.
Tried to injure me, multiple times now.
So why did seeing her features pale from the lack of body heat make all of that seem pointless?
Why was carefully cradling her in my arms to avoid anywhere she might be hurting infinitely more important than grilling her on the things I was supposed to be concerned with?
Moving with slow precision, I let my back hit the wall before sliding down to the floor. My own aches and pains had me gritting my teeth, but I powered through. Later, I could worry about myself. A small tumble wasn’t enough to keep me down.
And it definitely wasn’t going to be enough to keep me from making sure Josie would be all right.
“Talk to me, pussycat.” I turned her sideways in my lap so that her head rested against my chest.
She seemed so much bigger when she was in the ring or otherwise swaggering around, giving the world her ass to kiss. Now? It was plain to see how small she really was. How much she was hurting.
What I didn’t know was why?
“This is your fault,” she said again.
“Are you going to elaborate? Or did you bump your
head on the way down?”
Josie tipped her head back to look at me. I barely swallowed the curse on the tip of my tongue. The fiery determination in her eyes was almost gone—holding on by a thread. She looked up at me like she was already stuck in a whirlpool she didn’t have the strength to swim out of.
Slowly, the heat returned, replacing that emptiness. And even though the fury kindling in the depths of those dark, green eyes was directed at me, I would take her fighting me over having no fight at all.
Because I knew what happened to those without fight.
They became prey in a world full of predators.
Yet I also knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I would crush the whole world in my own two hands if it meant keeping her safe.
Josie gripped my shirt collar in her hands, pulling me closer as she bared her teeth. “You wasted time chasing the wrong person. If something happens to her, it’ll be because you were too worried about getting your dick wet to do what you should’ve done in the beginning.”
My focus sharpened, dread crawling up my spine with too many slimy limbs. There was only one her Josie would care enough about to mention. Someone so important she’d been willing to walk miles in the cold to reach. “Tell me everything.”
“Why should I?” She went to sit up, but my hand on her chest held her down. “Get—”
“I wasn’t asking.” I kept my eyes on hers. “Either you give me what I need to know now, or I’ll stash you somewhere and find out on my own.”
“You can’t! You’ll ruin everything more than you already have.”
The gut-punch landed, and I did my best not to show it. “Have it your way.” I looked around the room. “I’m sure Axle has a spare set of handcuffs in here somewhere…”
“Fine,” she huffed, throwing her hands up. “God. You are beyond frustrating.”
And you’re mine, so I’ll make this right no matter what it costs me.
But all I said was, “Start from the beginning.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Josie
Plan-making and I hadn’t gotten along too well over the last couple of weeks, so I didn’t have high hopes about those odds increasing as I paced around the tattoo parlor, surrounded by some of the scariest people I had ever seen in one room.
After I told Monster about how I’d returned to the nursing home and found Mom’s room empty except for a smiling Nikolai, he’d gotten on the phone.
The tattoo covering most of his chest wasn’t just for show, because within a half-hour, undiluted testosterone and power had filled the room nearly to bursting.
Honestly, it was becoming a little hard to breathe in here with all the manly posturing choking the air.
Propped against a wall with his head back like he would rather be anywhere else was the brown-haired Sinner we walked past initially. Axle, I remembered one of them saying.
And yes, I was completely ignoring the circumstances that had brought us to the scowling man’s doorstep. For good reason, too.
Running away from Monster had been a great idea when I realized he’d found me. Even more so when I realized how easy it would be to collapse into his arms and make this whole thing go away.
But like I said.
Plans and I were being complete shits to each other.
Which was why I’d almost become roadkill.
Would it have been so much to ask that I made a daring escape by the skin of my teeth? That always worked for people in movies. They would round a corner, slow to a walk, and blend in with the crowd.
The only blending I’d done was against the pavement when I fell.
My continuous pacing from one side of the shop to the other wasn’t helping the blossoming bruise on my hip or the pain radiating from that area. But I couldn’t stop either.
Stopping meant thinking about the clusterfuck I’d gotten myself into.
Thinking about the clusterfuck meant coming to terms with the fact that I could’ve already handled this issue. The money I needed to pay Nikolai was technically in my possession already. Thing was, it wasn’t in the form of currency just yet.
Those watches could pay my debt three times over.
They could also turn Monster against me irrevocably.
See? Clusterfuck.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” a low voice drawled, belonging to the Sinner with milk-chocolate skin that had shown up last.
He called himself Tone. Where they got these nicknames, I had no clue.
Tone said, “When the shit hits the fan, it certainly goes everywhere doesn’t it?”
“Is that a rhetorical question?” Axle asked.
Tone scoffed. “Do you even know what that word means? Wait. Don’t answer that. I’d hate to see your head explode from doing so much thinking.”
“Ha-fucking-ha.” Axle raised two middle fingers in the air. “I didn’t know this was open mic night at the comedy club. If I did, I would’ve flushed my tickets down the drain.”
They’re goofing around instead of helping.
My fingernails bit into the meat of my palms as my blood pressure rose.
Screaming at hardened criminals was probably a bad idea.
I was on the verge of doing it anyway.
Overly aware of me, the same way he always was, Monster cleared his throat and cut in. “Time is wasting,” he reminded them. “Hostages aren’t good for anyone. The longer they hold onto her, the faster their patience is going to unravel.”
Tone looked at me, flashing a smile that was there and gone so fast I thought I’d imagined it. “Do you know what they want?”
I tried not to let the heat seep into my voice. Whether I was successful or not was another matter. “The same thing every criminal wants when they know they need to put some distance between themselves and the people coming after them. Money.”
Monster’s head whipped sideways, his sea-blue stare burning. I’d managed to avoid mentioning what they wanted beforehand. My excuse was that I didn’t want to go over the story multiple times.
In reality, I’d been buying time, trying to keep the clues from coming to the surface.
His eyes narrowed. I could almost hear the gears inside his head turning. Grinding away at everything I’d said so far. Searching for whatever might’ve been left out.
So I decided to drop the other pocket nuke I was carrying instead of letting him find the trail.
“Or…” I waited until all eyes were on me, smiling nastily at Axle in particular because he rubbed me the wrong way. “They’ll take a Sinner instead. Any of you will do.”
My smile slipped by degrees as the explosion I was waiting for never occurred. For what it was worth, Axle did stop leaning against the wall, letting the entirety of his hateful stare fall on me. Except all it took to keep him and Monster from responding was for Tone to raise a hand in the air.
Everything stopped for a moment, and I gained an all-new respect for the seemingly easy-going Sinner.
To so calmly exert his control like that said more about him than anything else. This was a reminder I needed. What Monster said about them being family made sense. Even though they’d never officially met before today, it only took one phone call to get him here. And he’d arrived willing to listen to what I had to say.
But behind the smiles and curses and leather jackets, they were killers.
Every single one of them.
Someone with sense or morals would’ve run the other way, enlisted the help of the actual police instead of men who would end lives without blinking an eye.
Then again, was I really in a position to complain?
For years now, I’d played with fire in every city I passed through. Associating with various gangs. Rubbing shoulders with criminals and drug dealers as long as their profits benefited me.
It was a miracle that my luck lasted this long.
And if I was being honest—instead of holding my current predicament against the man who hadn’t taken his eyes off me since he saved my life...again—it
was a miracle I’d made it to Oakdale and come across him.
No one else would’ve given a damn.
I hadn’t even been able to reach Micah to try and get an update on how Mom was doing. I’d hoped that maybe he would be the voice of reason among them. The thought of her waking up in some foreign place with men who didn’t give a single fuck about being nice or decent had cold sweat gathering at the base of my spine.
She was all I had.
If something happened to her…
“I’ll go,” Monster said out of nowhere. “I’ll make the trade and get Josie’s mom out of there.”
“What?” I screeched, stalking across the floor. My hands met the wall of his chest as I pushed him backward.
Okay, that was a lie. I shoved at him. He didn’t actually go anywhere.
My outrage only increased.
Monster folded his arms. I couldn’t miss the red welts covering his skin from rolling across the pavement with me. If they hurt, he hadn’t said anything about it. In fact, the only times he brought up the result of my little stunt was when he saw me stand up from the table earlier and wince when my sore legs hit the floor.
No one said anything, so I took that as a reason to keep going. “No one is going to point out how stupid that is? The only reason they would want one of you is for payback. If you go, they’re going to kill you.”
Losing him…
My gut clenched so hard it took everything in me not to double over and fall to the ground.
As it was, the possibility stole my breath.
I tried to tell myself that I was being ridiculous. That we were already over with before we even started. That didn’t stop me from remembering how much I enjoyed his arms wrapping around me.
How peacefully I slept with his body pressed to mine.
How whole I felt whenever that intense gaze sought me out.
He made me feel more alive than I could remember being before my life went to shit. Being responsible for him losing his life was unacceptable. There had to be another way.
One that wouldn’t end with me broken and pretending I wasn’t.
Monster stared down at me, eyes unreadable. I wasn’t going to get anywhere arguing with him.
Monster: A Seven Sinners Novel Page 19