by Stasia Black
Drea looked away again. She didn’t know if Sophia was asking what happened as far as her dad being a bad guy or how Drea responded. The first she wasn’t about to get into. The second…
Drea shook her head. “I—” She breathed out, closing her eyes. “I confronted him when I found out who he really was. The things he’d done. The things he was continuing to do.”
She’d wanted so badly for him to say he had no idea. That it was his VP, not him, doing it behind his back. That he’d go back down to the docks with her and help her free all those women.
Instead, “He threatened me. Told me if I knew what was good for me I’d stop asking questions I didn’t want the answers too. That it was time for me to grow up and do what women in our world always did.”
Drea opened her eyes and met Sophia’s. “Look the other way. Get married. Have some babies. Spend the money he worked so hard for.” Drea’s mouth went hard. “The blood money.”
Sophia’s features twisted in sympathy and she looked like she wanted to reach out to comfort Drea. Luckily, she checked the impulse. Drea could only stand so fucking much.
“The thing was, before I found out what he did, that was all I wanted.”
She needed Sophia to understand this. She didn’t know why it was suddenly so important, but it was. “It was all I thought about, day in, day out. What kind of wedding dress I’d wear. What my boyfriend’s and my children would look like. If they’d have my blonde hair or his brown eyes.” Even thinking about it now sent a shudder of revulsion down her spine. God, how could she have been so stupid? So fucking blind?
“But of course he was in the same shit Dad was. Neck fucking deep.” Drea’s mouth twisted in disgust. “He set me up to find out about it all. I thought he was trying to help me. To show me the truth. But he was just manipulating me.”
Sophia gasped. “No. Are you sure? Maybe he—”
But Drea shook her head in one violent motion. “Thomas knew me. He knew what I would do. Or at least suspected. I was Daddy’s Princess. But I was also stubborn. So when my dad issued his proclamation that I needed to go be the good little daughter and stick my head in the sand about everything I’d learned, I went up to my bedroom. And then, in the middle of the night, I snuck out to a pay phone and called the cops telling them exactly where they could find Dad’s…” she swallowed, unable to finish the sentence.
Even now, she couldn’t admit what he’d done. One time over the phone to the cops, that was the only time she’d ever said out loud what she’d seen in the warehouse that day.
“So your dad got arrested?”
Drea let out a short, humorless laugh. “Of course not. Dad bankrolled the cops in that town. I was such a fucking idiot.”
“So what happened?”
“Dad found out, of course. Someone had narc’d on the warehouse. Didn’t take a genius to figure out who. Problem was, Dad didn’t work alone and he wasn’t the only one who found out about my call. The cops gave them the recording. All Dad’s, well, his ‘business partners’ knew my voice. And with the kind of shit he was into, the absolute worst thing you can do is be a narc. They’re also not the kind of people who give second chances.”
Cueball, Thomas’s dad, had dragged her out of bed by her hair. He was the MC’s Sergeant at Arms, their enforcer, and he’d always enjoyed his job a little too much.
It was the only time she’d ever been in the room where they convened church.
They were all there, the men she’d grown up with her whole life, standing there in judgement of her.
Some she might have expected. Crow was VP and everyone knew he was gunning for Dad’s spot. Handlebar was a big mean bastard who had always scared her, and she’d never much liked Tweeker.
But Tex-Mex? And Ragu, and Smokey? Those men had been as much fathers to her as her own dad. Yet there they all sat, some looking uncomfortable, but not a single one stood up in her defense.
Except Dad.
“Yes, she fucked up,” Dad said. “But we kept her out of club business all this time. It’s just cause her ma took off that she’s been around the clubhouse so much the past few years. Now that’s on me. I shoulda took better care to keep her separate.”
“She still knows the code,” Cueball said. “She betrayed us and traitors end up six feet under. That’s the way it is.”
Drea had been scared before, but it wasn’t until that moment that it hit her. She was here because they were deciding whether to kill her or not. This was her tribunal. These men would be her judge, jury, and if they deemed that she deserved it, her executioners.
She scrambled to her feet and tried to make a run for it.
Stupid, considering the circumstances, where she was, and who surrounded her.
Cueball grabbed her by her hair—always the fucking hair with that one—and slammed her back to the ground.
As blood ran from her forehead down into her eyes, she looked around frantically for Thomas. He stood at the back of the crowd. As a prospect, it was unusual that he’d even been allowed in for church. But he was there.
She kept waiting for him to send some sort of secret signal—something letting her know that he’d get her out of there. That it would be all right.
More stupidity.
Even then she couldn’t see.
This was the very moment he’d been hoping to orchestrate.
“They would have killed me. Then and there.”
Sophia’s eyebrows shot up. “So how’d you escape?”
“I didn’t.” Drea’s voice was barely a whisper. “My dad, he—” Her voice broke and she took a long, deep breath. “He was a bad man but he still loved me.” A truth she still didn’t know how to reconcile. “He stood up to them for me. Said I was family and family came first.” Before business. Before money. Before club.
“And when he saw nothing he said was going to change their minds, he did the only thing left.”
“What?” Sophia asked, rapt.
“He offered himself in my place.”
Drea looked up then, meeting Sophia’s eyes for the first time since she’d begun her story. The tears that shone there made Drea’s stomach hurt. Too soft. The girl was too soft for what this world would do to her.
“And they killed him?” Sophia cried, a tear spilling down her cheek.
Drea swallowed back her own emotion, embarrassed now to have revealed so much. “Of course they killed him. It was what all of it was for in the first place. Leaking the location to me. Knowing I’d do something stupid. Thomas and his father relied on me being a naïve, stupid, weak little girl, and I lived up to their every expectation. Dad was murdered in front of me and the—” Drea’s jaw worked. “The evil fucking shit his partners were into continued on unchecked.”
It still kept her up at night—those women in that warehouse. She’d been there. Right there. She already had the bolt-cutters. Why hadn’t she just gone in and cut them out of those fucking cages?
But noooooo, instead she’d gone running to Daddy. And when that didn’t work, she’d called the police.
Stupid. So fucking stupid.
“It wasn’t your fault—”
“Don’t.” Drea held up a finger. “Just. Don’t.”
All those women spent the rest of their lives in sex slavery because she was— God, she couldn’t even think of a word for what she’d been. Naïve and ignorant weren’t strong enough words because she should have known better. She should have asked questions sooner. A better person would have.
A big part of her must not have wanted to know. How many women had come in and out of that warehouse during all the years she’d spent blissfully happy playing dolls and running track, performing in school plays and smiling out at her dad in the crowd. Daddy’s little girl.
“I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to make up for the sins of my father.”
“Drea,” Sophia shook her head. “You—”
“I said, don’t.”
Sophia huffed out a breath but
then nodded. “Fine. I won’t. But I’m sorry about your dad. About all of it.”
Drea shrugged her words off. “Anyway, all of that to say, I saw how blindly devoted to your father you were and it, I don’t know, I guess it triggered some shit for me. So I’m sorry. I apologize. And it would really mean a lot to your dad if you were at the wedding later tonight.”
Sophia’s eyes widened and the sympathetic expression on her face evaporated. “Tonight?” she squeaked.
Oh shit, had Drea just stepped in it again?
“Look, I know it’s fast—”
“Ya think?” Sophia crossed her arms over her chest again. “Just tell me one thing.”
Drea held up her hands. “Anything. I’m an open book.”
Sophia narrowed her eyes. “Do you love him?”
Fuck my life.
“Sophia, it’s more complicated than that.”
“No, it’s really not. Do. You. Love. Him?”
“I respect him. I value his opinions. I’ll always consider his feelings and will do everything I can to make him happy and comfortable, as much as it’s in my power.”
Sophia didn’t even try to mask her disappointment. “But you don’t love him.”
“I— I—” Drea broke off, holding up her hands again, this time in a helpless gesture. “I don’t know if I’m capable of the kind of love you’re talking about. I could lie to you and give you the answer you want. But I just—” She shook her head. “I don’t know.” And as she said it, she realized it was true.
She genuinely didn’t know if she was capable of loving anyone. She didn’t know if Dad and Thomas’s betrayal had broken her.
“That’s not good enough,” Sophia said, turning and walking away.
Drea wanted to stop her, but to say what?
She couldn’t change the past. She couldn’t change what it had all done to her.
After Dad said he’d take her place, everything moved fast. Cueball came and no matter how much she screamed, it didn’t matter. Thomas came and joined the men holding her back while Cueball lifted the Colt 45 and put a bullet through her father’s brain.
Then they yanked a black bag over her head and Drea was driven to the coast.
When the black bag came off, only Thomas was there.
Thomas, her Thomas. The boy she’d lost her virginity to. The boy she’d promised her forever. In her heart if not out loud.
He’d betrayed her.
She saw it then.
How he’d led her to the warehouse.
How he’d played her like she was a marionette on his string.
“You fucking bastard!”
She flew at him, half blind from her tears but determined to hurt him just as badly as he’d hurt her—to fucking kill him. But he just caught both her wrists in one hand, easily subduing her. Because she was weak. Because she was a fucking child.
He yanked her arms behind her back and then pulled her chest to his chest. She spit in his face and he slapped her.
She blinked, stunned.
Until that moment, she realized some part of her had been waiting for him to tell her that she had it all wrong, that he’d only been playing a part in front of the MC, that he hadn’t been able to stop what happened to her dad but he’d saved her and now they’d run away together.
But he’d just hit her.
He must have seen the shock on her face because he laughed. It was the mean laugh and now she saw it for what it was—his true face. Cruel. The laugh of someone who inflicted pain and liked it.
She turned her head to the side and threw up.
“Jesus Christ.” Thomas let go of her and she stumbled backwards, landing hard on her ass and scraping her elbows. “You’re a fucking mess.” He wiped his hands on his shirt like she was something diseased.
“You’re a monster,” she whispered.
He rolled his eyes. “You should be on your knees kissing my feet. It’s only because of me that you aren’t in a container ship on your way to South America as we speak. They pay big for blondes there.”
Her mouth dropped open but she had no words except one. “Why?”
He shrugged. “Sometimes you were a good fuck.”
Her whole body shuddered in revulsion. “No. Why are you doing this? Why did you—” Her voice broke. Images of her father’s body falling to the floor flashed in her head and her hand went to her forehead. She felt faint with dizziness.
Thomas laughed. “Christ, you really don’t know me at all, do you? I’m going to be President of the Black Skulls. And not twenty years from now when I’m a wrinkled old fuck. I’m on a two-year track, Princess.”
Drea’s mouth dropped open again though she didn’t know how she still had the capacity for surprise at this point. Then she shook her head and laughed. “Crow will kill you the second you try to make a move on him. You’re nothing but an arrogant little boy whose own dad couldn’t give two shits about him.”
Thomas sprang quick as lightning. One second he was standing over her, the next he was crouched, his hand at her throat, squeezing until she was gasping helplessly for breath.
He leaned over until she could smell the cigarettes on his breath. “The only reason I’m not going to kill you right here, right now, is because I want you to suffer knowing that you were fucking the man who got your father killed. In love with the man who got your father killed. The way you groaned when you sucked my dick, mmm baby, I never had it so good.”
Drea screamed in rage but it barely made a noise with his hand cinched tight around her throat.
“You were boring as fuck in bed but you could suck cock like a pro, I’ll give you that. And I’d just go fuck one of the club whores or better yet, one of the warehouse girls, when I really needed to get my rocks off.” He squeezed even tighter. “See, nothing gets me off like a little pain with my pleasure.”
He moved until he was whispering in her ear, pinning her in place no matter how much she struggled to get out from under him. “I like it when they scream. I’ve always wondered what you would sound like when you scream, Princess. Will you scream for me?”
Over the next twenty minutes, she did scream. He hurt her, violated her, and she screamed, begging for someone, anyone to hear and come rescue her.
But life was not a fairytale.
There were no white knights.
And when he left her there, broken on a dirty, abandoned beach in the middle of winter, she thought she would die. She wanted to die. But just like everything else that night, she didn’t get what she wanted.
She woke to the sunrise, battered, bruised, and in so much pain she wasn’t sure she’d be able to move.
But she did anyway. Because what did pain matter? She dragged herself across the beach to the brown waters of the Texas Gulf and gritted her teeth against the sting of the salt water on all her cuts and lacerations.
She fought the temptation to crawl further in and let the tide take her out to sea.
No, she’d never take the easy way out again.
She had penance to pay for her father’s many sins.
And if it was the last thing she ever did on this earth, she would put every last Black Skull, and Thomas Tillerman in particular, in the ground.
Chapter Twenty-Two
ERIC
“I now pronounce you men and wife,” Jonas said, holding his hands out and smiling widely. “You may kiss the bride.”
All six of them, plus Jonas, stood in the tiny cavern their clan had claimed. The few witnesses spilled out into the hallway beyond—Audrey, Shay, Vanessa, a few others.
Not Sophia.
It hurt that she wasn’t here but at the same time Eric knew the idea of him and Drea might take some time for her to get used to.
And as much as he worried over his daughter, there were more pressing matters on his mind as Jonas spoke the words to the familiar ceremony Eric had literally heard hundreds of times. But of course, none of those times had he been the one making the vows. And Drea had never befo
re been the bride.
Eric couldn’t take his eyes off her. And she couldn’t take her eyes off of… the floor.
She moved quickly around the half circle, giving each of them the most perfunctory kiss her lips were just a brush of warmth against Eric’s before her mouth was gone again. Eric fought the urge to reach after her and draw her back to him as she moved on to Garrett.
Why was she doing this? Really? Why invite the two strangers in? Wasn’t she the same woman who swore marriage was an outdated convention created by the patriarchy to oppress women? So why had she changed her tune all the sudden? Just because she thought it was the only way to sway General Cruz and his Lieutenant Colonel to their side?
Eric felt like he was going to crawl out of his fucking skin as the pastor thanked the guests and one by one, they filed out of the small cavern. Drea excused herself to slip behind the tiny curtained off corner in the back of the cave to change and Eric could only stare after, not caring if he was being a bad host.
If only she would have heard him out. They could have just left in the middle of the night and gone without the General’s blessing. If they’d redirected the satellites, it wasn’t like he’d say, no, I won’t use the benefits of this thing you’ve done. Of course he would. They’d achieve their goal and their clan could stay as it was.
It was bad enough having to share her with two other men.
But four?
You’re a hypocrite. You marry women off to five men like it’s nothing all the time. But now that the shoe’s on the other foot?
He squeezed his eyes shut. Goddammit. He was never supposed to be in this position. Hypothetically, he’d always assumed that, sure, of course he’d be fine with it if he ever got married again. But that was never going to be a reality for him. He’d decided that a long time ago, so it was a pretty damn easy assertion to make.
But now here he was. No matter how upset he’d been, the thought of backing out and not going through with the marriage… well he’d considered it for about point zero three seconds. But everything in him rebelled at the thought.