What sort of girl steals a motorcycle from outlaws?
What sort of girl blooms in the face of danger, like a rose with thorns?
I’m the queen to a dirty throne of men and mania, a dissenter that’s supposed to be a quiet accomplice to the Death by Daybreak Motorcycle Club. The four wicked men I’ve summoned are like the Horsemen of the Apocalypse—albeit dressed in leather and riding chrome stallions—and I’m the last judgement, bringing the end of the world as the club knows it. Only, it’s with my own hands bathed in blood and betrayal.
They’ve always been wrong for me.
But every motorcycle club has its secrets.
These guys … they’re owned by one.
They’re owned by me.
Table of Contents Table of Contents
Front Matter Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Signup for my Newsletter
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Back Matter I Will Revel in Glory Cover
Alpha Wolves Motorcycle Club Cover
Havoc at Prescott High Cover
Stepbrother Inked Cover
Keep Up With The Fun
More Books By C.M. Stunich
About the Author
I Am Dressed in Sin
I Am Dressed in Sin © C.M. Stunich 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
The For information address Sarian Royal Indie Publishing, 89365 Old Mohawk Rd, Springfield, OR 97478.
www.cmstunich.com
Cover art and design © Amanda Carroll and Sarian Royal
The The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, businesses, or locales is coincidental and is not intended by the author.
this book is dedicated to
the estranged
if we were friends once, we could be still.
come find me.
if we were family, I have your back.
let’s talk.
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I’ve never been a stranger to pain.
In all reality, I don’t know who I am without it. That constant sting inside my heart, those shadows in my soul, the incessant soliloquy inside my brain, that’s what I’m used to. Without it, I’m just … Gidget, an outlaw’s daughter, a broken girl with no hope for a future.
So when I wake up in agony, I’m not surprised. After all, I flipped Crown’s bike and smashed it into a mafia-owned Cadillac. Good for me. Hope I killed one of the bastards in the process.
With a groan, I try to turn on my side, and find that I’m already sitting up. I’m not in a bed, like I first thought. Instead, I’m strapped to a chair inside a dark room with stained-glass windows and a ceiling that’s easily fifty feet high, rafters decorated with pigeons. Their dark eyes watch me as I come to, blinking away cobwebs of memory.
“Good morning,” a feminine voice calls out, drawing my attention over to a dark-haired woman in a red velvet chair, her long legs crossed at the knee, her eyes sparkling as she takes me in. “You must be Gidget Kesselring.” She stands up, her black dress slit all the way up to the hip, her long, elegant fingers dressed in glittering rings. Who the fuck is this? I wonder, searching my brain for memories of those pictures that Cat showed me, an entire catalogue of the Grey Wolfe Mafia. There were no women in that list. Then again, from what I know of organized crime, the wives are usually just as involved though not in any official capacity.
I don’t bother to respond or ask where I am, or what’s going to happen to me.
I know what’s going to happen to me.
My heart thunders and cold chills take over my skin. I am so fucked, even more so than I’d have been at home. Cat might’ve put a bullet through my brain, but … I’m looking at a long session of torture and death here, probably rape, too. The wounds I sustained in the accident haven’t been tended, and I can taste dried blood on my mouth when I run my tongue across my lips. My right shoulder, the one that absorbed most of the impact from the fall, is completely numb. Dislocated, probably, considering that I can’t move the fingers of my right hand.
It takes me three tries to make words happen; my mouth is dry, and I don’t recognize the sound of my own voice. It’s breathy, broken, and far too quiet. There is, however, a characteristic bite to my words that seems to give my glamorous captor pause.
“Did they send you in to talk to me?” I ask, lifting my heavy head up to meet her eyes. It takes a lot of effort, but I’m proud of myself for managing it. One of my lids is swollen so bad I can’t quite see out of it, focusing on the woman with my left eye instead. “Because I don’t have anything to tell you. If you know anything about club culture, you’ll know I’m not privy to shit.”
The woman smiles, her lipstick as red as the blood leaking from my leg. I must’ve been out for a while because the wound in my thigh looks … infected. Like maybe I’ve been passed out here for days. Feels like I just blinked and ended up here, whisked out of the rain and off the road into this sanctuary, wherever it is.
The club might know, depending on how much information they managed to wrangle out of Grey.
“Giulia Wolfe,” the woman says, touching her fingers to her chest in introduction.
Ah. The Don’s wife. This should be fun.
“This is for Kian.” Those words interrupt my thoughts, and I almost choke, wondering how the hell things got to this point, how the world could go from bad to worse in an instant. My life was never perfect, but it was mine, and I may not have had loving parents, but I had my sisters. That was just as good. No, it was better. And now … now Queenie’s sacrifice is going down the fucking toilet. I won’t be walking out of this room, mark my words.
“How can I help you, Giulia?” I ask, the tiniest spark of my anger in those words. There’s not a lot left in me, but it’s also not in me to give up, no matter how impossible the odds. I’ll fight to the last moment, scream through the last breath, hope and dream and wish until it’s all over. What good does giving up ever do?
With a sigh, the Don’s wife looks down at me, eyes darkening for a moment.
“I wanted to ask you about my son,” she says, and my heart contracts. I don’t know anything about Kian, I think, nothing except that my sister loved him enough to immortalize their feelings with a knife. “Grey is …” she continues, pausing again and looking
over my shoulder. I realize then that I can hear breathing behind me, harsh and ragged but steady. “He’s always been rebellious, but after Kian was murdered”—there’s a harsh pause here, and we both know the unspoken words she’s not saying—“it got so much worse. And now, I hear that he’s a snitch.”
She circles around me, presumably to look at her son.
They’ve stuck us in here together, their own child with their enemy’s.
How messed up is that?
“I didn’t rat anyone out, Mom,” Grey coughs, his voice ragged but much better than it was when I pulled him out of the cabin. I wonder if this is all a scare tactic for him, if the mafia is actually treating his injuries? That’d be something Cat would do, leave me in a torture chamber just to teach me a lesson. Guess it depends on how much they love Grey … or if they love him at all. “I already told you: Gidget and I knew each other from before, when Kian and Queenie were together.” He coughs again, and when he starts speaking, his voice is dark with determination. “We fell in love, just like they did. I’ve explained this a hundred times.”
My heart thunders in my chest, but I’m not stupid enough to say a word.
Instead, I sit there with my eyes closed, hating how the feeling in my body is returning slowly, in little slices of agony. Look at how much that toe hurts, and that one. I can’t wait to feel my legs again. Getting skinned alive by high-speed pavement, not a good thing. When I open my eyes again, I can barely stand to look at the pink fleshy patches.
“In love?” Giulia asks, her voice soft and pleasant, but threaded with steel. This is not a woman who’s easily manipulated. “You expect me to believe that?”
“Gidget and I were hiding out in a cabin when they found us. I was only with the club for a few days, and I don’t break that easily.” Grey holds onto this story of his, and I listen carefully. He’s giving me details that I need to memorize. My life depends on it.
If the Grey Wolfe Mafia thinks I helped spring their heir, I might not die here today.
“Why haven’t we seen a doctor yet?” I ask, trying to play the part. “Grey needs one.”
“He’s seen a doctor,” Giulia continues, still circling us, studying our faces and trying to determine what, exactly, it is that’s going on here. “But we don’t generally waste time on prisoners. You think you’re worthy of care?”
“I love your son,” I lie, my voice thick with conviction, “and I risked my own life to save him. The club will kill me when they find me.” There’s a tremor of fear in my voice that I don’t bother to hide, that I don’t need to fake. That, that’s one hundred percent the truth.
“When?” Giulia asks, clearly amused. She pauses in front of me and folds an arm under her breasts, resting the elbow of her other arm in the palm of her hand. A laugh escapes me, bitter and broken. Now that I’ve actually done it, made my big break from the club, I feel like a lone sailor floating in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Nobody knows I’m here. Nobody cares. No one is coming.
“It’s never an if with the club, it’s a when,” I tell her, and I can’t hide the small streak of pride in my voice. After seeing Queenie’s name on that baseboard, with the flowers on her Qs and Is, I don’t know what I believe anymore. Cat must’ve known the truth; she had to have told him her feelings for Kian. “They’ll find us eventually. And then they’ll kill your last remaining son and bury me alive in the same unmarked grave.”
Giulia doesn’t look fazed. Why should she be? She’s married to the Don of the West Coast’s most powerful crime family. I’m sure she’s heard—and seen—much worse.
“Mom,” Grey whispers, his voice softening. “All I did was fall in love.”
“All you did was go to the casino with a rowdy group of your asshole friends. And now look at you, sitting tied to a chair next to the club’s last, little princess. It’s a fitting punishment.” Giulia reaches out and touches a strand of my hair before letting her mouth stretch into a tight smile. When she turns and leaves the room, there’s a tangible difference in the air pressure. That woman is a tour de force.
“You know they just put us in here together, so we’d talk,” Grey says with a sigh, shifting in his chair. I can’t see him, but I can feel his movements as he struggles to find some iota of comfort. Me, I’m already too far gone to even consider it. And as the shock wears off, and the pain comes rushing in, I realize that I’m in serious trouble, too.
“About our torrid love affair?” I ask, closing my eyes and wondering how the fuck my life managed to get worse. I lost my sisters, pushed my best friend away, poisoned my classmates, got my dog’s leg shot off, managed to get a girl killed, had a gun pointed at my head by my own father, and now … this. It really is the icing on top of the cake, huh? “There’s nothing to talk about. We’re both going to die here, Grey.”
He doesn’t respond which I’m grateful for. I’m too tired to play the charade of melancholic lover.
For the first time ever, I think my body’s just as wounded, just as broken as my soul.
And neither of them looks like they’ll be put back together anytime soon.
Ticktock, Gidget, looks like your time is finally up.
When I next open my eyes, I’m not tied to a chair anymore. Instead, I’m lying on a bed in a small, dark room with a low ceiling. There’s a single lamp on in the corner, but it hardly illuminates the shadows in the room. Anyone could be hiding there.
I’m so damn tired, it’d be so easy to just close my eyes again and never wake up, but I need to get a handle on the situation. If I’d known I was actually falling asleep in the chair, I’d have put a stop to it. Passing out here, in this den of wolves, is not the best of ideas.
Trying to sit up doesn’t get me anywhere; I’m chained to the bed.
But my legs don’t hurt anymore, and there are clearly bandages on my hands. I feel lightheaded, too, and there’s an IV in my arm that I can only guess is filled with painkillers.
Is the mafia healing me to hurt me?
The only place I have to go when I close my eyes, is into my memories.
One and a Half Years Ago …
After that night, the one where I partied and fucked, the one that I couldn’t forget if I tried, I learned some valuable lessons about myself.
The club life … is not my life.
In fact, I don’t want anything to do with it.
Gidget Kesselring is getting the hell out of Dodge, first opportunity she gets.
Leaning against the side of the house, I keep the grocery bag clutched in my right hand. With the other, I smoke a cigarette. Had to steal a pack from the front seat of some guy’s old Mercury Cougar while he was inside the convenience store paying for gas. I’m too young to buy them for myself, and lately, there’s been nobody around to bum them off of.
I frown with purple-painted lips, the bruise-like color staining my cig as I study the gray smoke billowing from the end of it. I’ve decided that the harder stuff—the cocaine, the LSD, the meth that flows like water on the compound—is not for me. But while I’ve recently sworn off most vices, I need a little something here or there to get me through the day. Life is just too stressful otherwise. So, a cigarette every now and again, some light drinking, and that’s it.
Inside the grocery bag is a pregnancy test. I need it because I let Beast screw me without a condom. More aptly, I encouraged him to. I squeezed my thighs around him and held him in place, and I loved every second of it.
I once read a quote from some long-dead dude named Robert G. Ingersoll. It said, “In nature, there are neither rewards nor punishments—there are consequences.”
This is a consequence of my actions.
With a groan, I tap my knuckles against my forehead, sending ash scattering into the wind.
I knew better than to take four devils into my bed, my body, my heart. This is where it’s gotten me, on the edge of ruin and teetering. It isn’t that I regret what we did, that I didn’t enjoy it, that I didn’t revel
in the feel of being worshipped by skilled but nefarious hands.
It’s the aftermath that I regret.
It’s been an endless cycle of prospects at the house instead of those four asshole officers. When I dared mention it to Cat, his response was cutting. “You think they don’t got more important things to do?”
More important than me? Apparently, since I only see them in passing, coming and going from the house only when they have business with Cat.
I chew on my lip, smearing purple across my teeth.
The sound of a motorcycle engine makes my heart thunder, just as it always has. When I was young, it was in excitement to see Daddy. When I got older, it was out of dread. Then … then there was passion and want and longing. Now I don’t know what to think, so I just stand there and wait.
It’s one of them. I fight back the urge to hiss, maintaining a cool, detached sort of demeanor that is quite literally the embodiment of a lie. There is nothing cool about me at all, just a raging fire tearing through my soul and turning what’s left of the old Gidge into ash.
“Hello, Gidget,” Sin says after pulling into the driveway on his bike and removing his helmet. It’s a strange bit of déjà vu, like we’re flashing back to that night. A night that was only three weeks ago but feels like forever.
I’ve changed a lot since then.
And the guys?
Well, you know what they say? Can’t teach old dogs new tricks. That’s what they are to me: mutts.
Crown’s words ring in my head each and every time I see him: “Go to your room, Gidget, and keep your mouth shut.” He said that after making love to me, and he hasn’t spoken to me since. At this point, his mere presence is like a knife to my heart, each word he doesn’t say to me a twist of the blade.
And Cade Grainger? Well. Fuck Grainger. He’s been a walking, talking dickhead, hissing things under his breath at me that make me grit my teeth in rage. Even then, I can’t see him and not think about the way he looked at me that night, with possession burning in his gaze.
I Am Dressed in Sin: A Reverse Harem Age Gap Romance (Death By Daybreak Motorcycle Club Book 2) Page 1