Cruz : A Dark MC Romance (A Dark and Dirty Sinners’ MC Book 5)

by Serena Akeroyd

  "I'm ready."

  Exactly for what, I wasn't sure, but this man had liberated me, so perhaps I could do the same for him.

  Cruz

  When the needle hit my stomach, penetrating one of the only parts of my body that wasn't covered in ink, I didn't flinch. The pain was there, acute as always, but I liked it. I almost found solace in it.

  With my hands behind my head, arms flexed at either side a little stiffly thanks to my ribs, I let her work. A part of that was hesitation over sharing the truth, but mostly, it was because she was freestyling this, and I knew she needed to at least draw the outline before I wrecked her composure.

  I had plans, of that I wouldn't lie.

  I'd asked her to make this a nude drawing. In the future, when we had kids, if that was even possible in tonight's aftermath, I would ask her to cover up her tits and pussy with a bikini or something.

  As it stood, this was for our eyes only. A visual reminder of what I could do to her, of how I could make her feel, and the trust inherent in that.

  It would run low. So that her head and shoulders, her arms too, peeked above the waistband of any pants I wore. Then, along my hip and down to my thigh, that was where all the good shit would hide behind clothing, because no one else would see her like that again if I had my way.

  Unfortunately for me, few men had pasts like my own. A past that a woman like Indy might understand, but, common sense would have her running for the hills.

  I wouldn't blame her if she did, if she treated me like I had the plague, and that was the God's honest truth.

  I'd been living with this for what felt like a lifetime, but regrets tended to fade as regular life took over everything else.

  It was dangerous to hope, and that was what she'd made me do.

  I'd never walked into this relationship intending on being branded. I'd never walked into it thinking there was a potential for more.

  A man like me couldn't have more.

  I knew that, and was foolish to think she'd be understanding. That she'd let me have a future with her at all.

  A shaky breath escaped her, and I could feel her relief and knew that the outline was done.

  I trusted her though, trusted in her so I didn't even peer down to look at what she'd drawn so far.

  I just cast her a glance, and watched as she turned off the ink gun, and stretched her hand.

  "Cramping?"

  She winced. "I think I was more stressed doing that than I was the first time I tattooed somebody." She huffed. "Why you wouldn't let me draw it on paper first I'll never know."

  "Because this is original, just like you."

  "To look at you, you'd never realize you were a charmer."

  I smiled up at the ceiling, my attention on that now and not on her. "Only for you."

  "See?"

  "Is that a complaint?"

  "No, not exactly, but it is when I'm nervous and want to get this right. So don't get me wet.” Then she tacked on, grumbling, “Again.”

  Despite myself, despite the situation and how nervous I actually was, I choked out a laugh, hard enough that I sat up to let it loose, uncaring that it fucked with my ribs, just joyful at her sass. I saw her eyes were twinkling though, and took heart from that.

  "Did you ever imagine you'd be grumbling over that?" I queried dryly.

  "Nope, but a girl can grumble when she wants, and this is one of those moments. I don't need arousal to fuck with my head. And again, I never imagined I'd ever say that either.” She smirked at me. "The best kind of first world problems."

  I shared the smirk with her, before I settled back down, focused on the ceiling again, and said, "I'm ready."

  "Tough, because I'm not. My hand is still aching—"

  "No," I interrupted, "I meant I'm ready to tell you..."

  "Your secrets? Good. I'm ready to hear them. You know everything about me, or at least it feels that way. Everything that matters, everything that made me me, so while I know what counts, I think it's only fair that you share whatever it is that’s making you all gloomy tonight.”

  Gloomy. Right.

  "I agree, otherwise we wouldn't be here. Doing this," I reminded her, wanting her to know that I could have evaded this conversation for a lifetime. But she deserved more. And I wanted to give her that.

  More...

  She bowed her head in agreement, and murmured, "You can't look at me when you tell me this, can you?"

  That she picked up on that shouldn't have surprised me. She was detail-oriented, after all.

  I released a shaky breath and muttered, "I'm about to tell you something that is the exact opposite of my finest hour."

  She didn't say a word, but the humming of the ink gun began, and I was grateful for the out.

  "I was always an introvert," I started roughly, "always with my nose in a book, learning stuff because it was easier to do that than make friends. Surprise surprise, I didn't have many, and it made it easy to get through high school pretty fast. I had so many AP classes that getting into college at sixteen was easy.

  "I took two majors at the same time, completed them in five years, drifted onto a doctorate, after my Masters, and all before I was twenty-five.

  "It was then, when I was studying Chemical Engineering, that I met Dean. Back then, I considered him my first and only friend, because you can't exactly count goldfish, and until then, Goldie was pretty much it for me."

  A laugh rumbled from her, surprising me from the story. "Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, but Goldie? You weren't very imaginative, were you?"

  I smiled a little. "Chemistry, Structural Engineering then on to Chemical Engineering… What about that path in college tells you that I was imaginative?"

  She snickered, and her amusement lightened the stress I was under. Of course, I hadn't gotten to any of the bad stuff yet, so she wouldn't be laughing soon, but still, it made the deep breath I inhaled flow a little easier.

  "Anyway, I thought Dean was like me. Just interested in learning. I was starting to turn into a career student, because I was whizzing through my doctorate, and intended on taking some classes afterward instead of heading into the real world.

  "I never did well in the real world, it's probably why I do well with the Sinners. I don't feel like that world is real either. It's brutal, so in that sense the reality is hard to avoid, but it's not regular."

  She smoothed her hand along the other side of my waist, as she whispered, "I know what you mean, it's okay."

  It was only then I realized my throat was a little thick. Not from emotions, but from memories.

  Memories of betrayal.

  My betrayal hadn't been as bad as hers, there was no competition, but mine had led me down a path where there was no repentance.

  "Dean and I started to hang out, we got friendly, bonded over a love of science, of cold logic and reason. I thought he was like me, but he wasn't." I swallowed nervously. "We used to sit in a local Starbucks for hours, discussing the most random shit.

  "The craziest thing is that some days, I actually miss him. I miss those conversations. Nobody else my age ever gave enough of a crap about me to want to discuss anything that I was interested in, and as much as I love the brothers, the shit that got my juices flowing, well, it was just more than many could understand.” I thought about how elitist that sounded, and grumbled, "I don't mean to sound like a prick."

  "I get it. You're intelligent, that comes with a price. I, just, I'm not like that either, Cruz. I don't want you to feel like I'm dumb or something."

  I grunted. "Don't make me spank you when you're tattooing me." She snorted out a laugh. "This was Darren, Indy. I'm not him anymore."

  "You're not a split personality, and you have his brain."

  "That brain got me into trouble, and what sucks the hardest, is that what I'm most ashamed of, the council wants me to repeat."

  She paused at that, the needle no longer digging into my skin, creating trenches of color that would last a lifetime, but still wou
ldn't last as long as what I felt for her.

  "You're not supposed to talk about club business with me," she whispered.

  "I know I'm not, but this is me, the real me, and I..." I reached up to cover my eyes where an ache was starting to brew. "They want me to make some bombs, Indy."

  "Retaliation?" she asked shakily.

  "Yeah. Multiplied by three."

  "So many?"

  "There must be three targets." I shrugged. "I have no idea, and I don't really want to know, but I don't have much of a choice. What happened to us was wrong, but I just don't know if I can do it again."

  She froze, I could feel the air around us beginning to chill, the temperature dropping dramatically as she processed my words.

  "Again?"

  My jaw tensed. "Yeah."

  "Why?" Then she grunted. "Of course, Dean."

  "He made me what I am today."

  She pressed the flat of her hand to my stomach again. "What is that?"

  "A mass murderer."

  The choked breath escaped her. "Explain," she demanded, and because I needed to, I did.

  "He was anti-war, to the point where he was almost rabid with it. Some days, I felt like it was the only thing that fired him. We morphed from discussions on Asimov and the Three Laws of Robotics and dark matter, to the internal politics of a peacekeeping solution in Afghanistan and Iraq."

  I hadn't realized, at the time, just how our conversations had changed.

  They'd gone from rousing debates on theoretical principles to hardcore anti-war diatribes.

  Like a fool, I never said anything, too enamored by the idea of having a friend at long last that I let myself get swept up in a shower of bullshit.

  "After Dean, I promised myself, and I know this sounds stupid, but I promised myself I'd never have friends again."

  "But... The brothers?"

  I shook my head. "Exactly. They're not friends. They're brothers. It's completely different. They're family by choice, and they're family that has never, ever let me down.

  "Mom and Dad divorced when I was fourteen, and though I didn't blame him because she's a psycho, he moved to New Mexico when my stepmom got pregnant. My life was in the city, that was where I was going to college so I was left with her.

  "Friends, blood relatives, they do that to people. They use that connection because they want something from you, and when they get it, they leave you in the lurch."

  She hissed under her breath. "Cruz, I won't believe that. What Stone has done for me, and what I've done for her, that's what true friendship is. Dean wasn't a friend. I'm not sure how he made you do whatever you did, but that isn't friendship."

  "Isn't it? Or maybe what you and Stone have is sisterhood?”

  "Synonyms," she argued.

  "My experience is different than yours, but I know that I'd go to war for every single brother in the clubhouse, and that's why I'm about to do something that I swore I'd never do again."

  She pulled the ink gun back, and it switched off. Her voice was hushed as she whispered, "You're going to build them for them?"

  "I have no choice. They've done so much for me, how can I let them down when this is something only I can do? Especially when it's such a dangerous job! At least I'm trained to do it. Anybody else will end up blowing their fingers or hands off. I can't have that on my conscience as well."

  "And what about the people your creations kill? What about them? Can you bear to have them on your conscience?" An explosive sigh escaped her. "Goddammit, this is why I hate the MC. This. You guys do shit for one another, and sure, at the start, it seems like a fucking family day trip to Disneyland. That's how Caleb got involved. He saw the camaraderie, he saw the family dynamic, had grown up with the different leadership, accepted that was the price he had to pay to be a part of it, and look at his ass now. Stuck in a fucking jail cell with hardened criminals just because of the color of his skin and a racist judge." She flung the tray of inks she'd mixed up on the floor, where the metal clashed against the tiles I'd only recently scrubbed free of blood. "Goddammit, I hate this. I fucking hate it.

  "They're asking you to do something that nobody should have to do, especially not out of loyalty. If you make that piece of shit, just because you're scared of the council, then Cruz, you're not the man I think you are."

  Lowering my arms, I lay there in the throbbing silence, aware she was right, but feeling like a fucking pussy because I had no idea how to break away from the MC protocol without losing my lifeline to them.

  "It's not as easy as that."

  "Isn't it? We lost a lot of good people, and I'm pretty sure the Italians deserve their ass kicking, but for as many foot soldiers as you take out, how many innocents will there be?" She growled under her breath, more fiery than I'd seen her in a long time. "Cruz, I—"

  "Don't, Indy. Just don't."

  "This is why the guys don't discuss club business with their women, because you guys are all fucked in the head. Women are the only ones who are capable of rational thought. I swear to God if that's the council's solution to what happened to the clubhouse, then they're crazy."

  "You said it yourself, we lost a lot of lives—those people need to be avenged."

  "Maybe they do, but surely there's a better way to do it? For God's sake, your mom is in law enforcement. Can't she get involved? Stone told me that the FBI was sniffing around the clubhouse, that they were investigating. Leave this to them."

  When I started to shake my head, she grabbed my hands, and said, "Cruz, you're better than this."

  "Am I? I've already done it twice, God help me. What's another time?"

  Expecting her to move away from me in disgust, to fling me aside like the human trash I was, she didn't. Her fingers tightened around mine to the point of pain, as she whispered, "What happened?"

  "Do you remember that scandal back in 2013? When thousands of documents about the war in Iraq were leaked to the press?"

  She blinked. "Should I?"

  "I guess not." Ironic that something which had derailed my whole future hadn't even been a blip on her horizon. "We leaked those documents."

  Her eyes flared wide. "Holy shit."

  "Yeah, holy shit," I agreed sourly. "It was a coordinated effort between the US, UK, and German newspapers. Dean insisted that they receive all the documents at the same time, but could only publish the information on a certain date."

  "Why a certain date?"

  "Because that was the day he was going to flee to Ecuador, but he left a fuck ton of evidence pointing in my direction. Don't get me wrong, what I did was wrong—"

  Infuriated, she slammed to her feet and started storming back and forth, ranting, "Son of a bitch! No wonder you have such a shitty view of friendship. He dragged you into this when it wasn't even your passion project. Motherfucker!"

  Her anger, on my behalf, took me aback. I hadn't expected that. Had never thought she'd be mad for me, but then, she didn't know the half of it.

  "You were arrested?"

  "Yeah, by Mom. But she pulled some strings, made some moves that had some key evidence disappearing. I owed her, and she made me fucking pay every cent back to her."

  "That's why you joined the Sinners?" she asked shakily.

  I nodded. "But I wasn't, and never have been, a complete moron. Dean made me question that for a while, but I registered what I was. I was too young to do half of what I did, it's no justification, but going to college early, it messes with you. You never really get used to not being with your own age group.

  "I was in class with kids who could drink and vote when I didn't even have a full beard. Christ, you should have seen me back then. Talk about wet behind the fucking ears."

  "Don't be so hard on yourself. We all looked like dweebs when we were sixteen."

  "Maybe." I shrugged. “The only people who got me through were a professor and his wife. I’d gotten close to them and I swear, I’d have topped myself if they hadn’t been in my life.” Her shocked gasp said it all, and I peered
at her, feeling ashamed for being so fucking weak. “One day, I’d like you to meet them—I’m still friends with them.” ‘If we’re still together’ went unsaid.

  She swallowed. “What happened after?”

  “Fool me once... I became a Prospect after I told Rex who I was, and why Mom wanted me there. I wasn’t about to get my ass killed for her even if she had saved me from prison.”

  "The council has known from the beginning that you were a rat?" She winced. "Supposed to be a rat, I mean."

  I grimaced. "Yeah." Sitting up, I held out my hand, gesturing at her to take it. She'd moved away, just like I'd feared she would, but she moved back toward me at my gesture, only frowning when I turned her hand palm up, before directing it at my throat.

  The scars were barely there now, faded by time and care on my part. I'd had a full beard for the first few years, but even though they should be lumpy, where the tissue fused back together in a messy way, I was lucky. With the negative tattoo, the artist behind them had worked cleverly to shield the scars from view.

  I directed her to where the big ones were, and at first, she frowned, before she finally felt what I was showing her, what I carefully shaved even though I was letting my beard grow out.

  "You got hurt?" she asked thickly.

  "I did. My throat, my chest, my arms and hands."

  "How?"

  "I was convinced that we needed the information the government was hiding, and Dean made sure that I was as amped up for the job as he was. But something went wrong."

  It was too easy to go back to that night, the night when everything had gone fucking wrong. I could remember how I'd felt drugged, so high on adrenaline I was flying.

  "The building we needed to break into was supposed to be empty, with remote security in a kind of watchtower. One bomb was set to go off to open up one of the exits, and then there was another door that had to be rigged to break through to the databanks. The area wasn’t supposed to be manned by guards,” I whispered, misery gracing my tone.

  "But it was," she guessed sadly, her gaze softening as she looked at me.

  "It was. There were about ten more security guards than we expected, or at least, than I expected. That was indicative of what they were guarding. What we released to the public needed to be exposed, but I never wanted anyone to get hurt. Ever.