I Am Dressed in Sin: A Reverse Harem Age Gap Romance (Death By Daybreak Motorcycle Club Book 2)

by C. M. Stunich

  People like me.

  “I believe you,” he tells me finally and then he, too, turns and heads for the door. He pauses with his hand on the knob and glances back at me. “I’m glad you’re back, Gidge. Things were weird around here without you.”

  Sin leaves the room, and I’m left alone with my thoughts.

  Those four cocksuckers … they’re lying for me.

  Lying to the club. Lying to Cat. Lying to their brothers.

  For me. Because of me.

  As I’d always suspected and, at times, feared, there’s something here.

  Something that I can’t ignore, no matter how much I wish that I could.

  After another nap, I wake up and spend several minutes trying to find my feet. I’m like a fresh-born foal, splay-legged and stumbling. With a curse, I end up falling against the stone edge of the fireplace. I must’ve lost a fuck-ton of blood. Must’ve had a transfusion of some sort. All of which would’ve taken place … here.

  I wonder whose blood is in me? Every person in the club—and their wives and children—are tested, and records are kept for this very purpose. It isn’t prudent to go running to the hospital every time there’s a shooting.

  Eventually, I get myself together enough to open the door, staring down a hallway with wood floors and a faded runner in burgundy with cream accents. The colors remind me of the ones back at the mafia palace, and I shudder. Ever heard the term pretty poison? That’s what they’re talking about, those writers with their fancy metaphors and purple prose bullshit. Sometimes, the gleam of sunlight on the edge of a guillotine is beautiful, just before it takes your head off. Sometimes, blood is beautiful, the color of rubies, even as it streams from your dead sister’s body.

  I make myself move forward, using the walls on either side of me for balance. The stairs are another matter altogether. Even though it stings my pride a bit, I sit on my ass and scoot down them, like I did as a child, when Queenie and Posey were beside me. Queenie walked down the stairs with her head held high, hand on the banister, frowning at Posey who always slid down it recklessly enough that she was covered in scrapes and bruises.

  I shove the memories back where they belong, into the shadows of my heart, and stand up, moving through the cavernous old house toward the kitchen. Someone is cooking. I have my guess as to who it is, but it’s still weird to walk around the corner and see my mother bent over the stove, tasting a spoonful of something steamy and sweet-smelling.

  She doesn’t hear me at first, so I take advantage of that, leaning my shoulder against the doorjamb and watching as she moves over to the cupboard, taking down two bowls that used to belong to my grandmother. More specifically, Cat’s mother. I always found that a bit weird, that Cat had a mother at all. Like, wasn’t he just birthed into existence in hellfire and brimstone? The idea that he came out of a woman’s body is disturbing.

  Nellie’s thin, weak frame scares me. I mean, she’s always been skinny as hell. Mostly from the coke and the occasional meth, the drinking and partying, and all the fucking. When she gave that up—after her daughters died—she started cooking all our meals at home and put on a bit of weight. Not much, just enough so that she lost that bony, druggy look.

  She looks like a skeleton right now. I can see the blades of the bones in her shoulders, sharp enough to cut.

  “Nellie.”

  I say her name softly, so as not to startle her.

  It does anyway, and she drops one of the bowls. It shatters on the floor as she clutches the other to her chest, spinning to face me. Already, there are tears on her cheeks. I don’t know how to respond to that. I’ve spent years hating Nellie, wishing she were dead, curling my lip at her and murmuring the worst possible insults I could come up with.

  Now …

  “Gidget,” she whispers, setting the bowl down on the counter and approaching me with this eagerness that makes me shift uncomfortably. My eyes slide to the side, searching for an escape from the emotional tornado that this woman has become. “Oh, my baby. My sweet baby.”

  I look back at her just in time to wince in anticipation of a hug. Well, the start of one anyway. She lifts her arms and then pauses, like she can sense my hesitation.

  “I thought I was never going to see you again,” she tells me, dropping one arm by her side and clutching at her elbow with the other. “I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat …” She trails off as I do my best to process the implications of that. “I fell off the wagon.” Here she pauses to lift up both hands in surrender. “But I stopped a few weeks ago.”

  She used again for the first time in years … because I left? Because she missed me? Was worried about me?

  I’m annoyed with her, but only a little.

  “What are you cooking?” I ask, because I’m not going to lie: I have intimacy issues. Enough emotional problems to choke an elephant. Do you blame me? But … I’m trying here. And I have no idea why. I don’t owe Nellie a damn thing. I don’t owe Cat. I don’t owe his awful, awful officers and their lies.

  This though … this is me trying.

  “Oh,” Nellie says, blinking through big, wide, blue eyes at me. The eyes of my sisters. Meanwhile, here I stand, cursed with Cat’s eyes, the color of dried blood, rust-red and flaky. “I’m making borscht. I thought you might be hungry …” She trails off again, the question evident.

  “Sure, I could eat,” I say, and then my stomach growls so loudly that my cheeks actually flush. Damn it. Why is it that the brain can lie—even to itself—but the body always knows? The body always fucking knows. It knows when it’s turned on by men it should hate. It knows when it’s hungry even if the last thing in the world you want to do is eat.

  Nellie smiles at me, ignoring the broken glass on the floor to fill two bowls, and then leading me into the solarium. Yeah, my grandma was that sorta rich. Of course, she lost all her money to bad investments just after I was born, but the house was paid off, so she got to keep that. She lived like a pauper in a prince’s castle.

  I sit down across from my mother at the small table, glancing at the array of tropical plants clustered in pots around the edges of the room. I frown at that. Gram had a green thumb, but Cat’s is undeniably black and bleeding. Last I was here, everything was dead.

  “Oh,” Nellie says, looking around at the foliage. “Sin’s been taking care of the plants and the garden up here. Looks good, don’t it?”

  I pause with the spoon halfway to my mouth, putting it down with the clink of metal on porcelain.

  “Sin?” I choke out, my brain refusing to connect the dots. “Sin takes care of plants?”

  Nellie nods at me eagerly, clearly enjoying our conversation. To be fair, this is the longest conversation we’ve had in years. Years. Since before my sisters died, definitely.

  “If I were ten years younger,” she murmurs and then pauses again, lifting her eyes up to look at me. I’m staring down at the borscht, wondering what the fuck it even is, and trying to piece together the idea of Sin taking care of plants. Also, of my mother complimenting a guy I’m into.

  People can change, but they don’t morph into completely different humans.

  Eventually, my hunger wins out and I dip my spoon back into the bowl. My hand shakes as I lift it to my lips, but that can’t be helped. I’ve been through some shit recently.

  “Your father told me about the wedding,” Nellie starts, her own voice quavering slightly. It occurs to me that she’s afraid of me. Whether she’s afraid of me in the way that she’s afraid of Gaz, or if she’s just worried she’ll offend me to the point of cutting her off permanently, I’m not sure.

  “Which wedding?” I clarify, tasting the soup and deciding that it isn’t as bad as it looks. Nellie’s cooking has certainly improved from the last time I tried it. “The one to the mafia kid or the one to Beast?”

  My mother hesitates, her own spoon resting in midair.

  “If you’re worried about the mafia one, don’t. We didn’t actually get through the ceremony or consummate
the marriage.” Instead, I consummated it with Grainger of all people. I take another bite of my food. It’s warm, with a sweet and sour kind of taste, like a vegetable stew or something. “If you’re worried about the one to Beast—”

  Nellie sets her spoon down and sits up, drawing my attention to her thin, tired face. Once upon a time, she was the belle of the ball, the most beautiful woman in club history. I still hear snippets of old-timers talking about her in awe. But when you live a hard life, it rides you into the ground.

  “I like the idea of him for you,” Nellie starts, and this time, when I go stone-still, she actually shivers. Guess it’s the same sort of fear she has for Gaz. Do I deserve that? I’ve never hit her. Her son, however, is wrong in ways that can never be fixed. Do I have that same sort of wrongness inside of me? “He’s a good man.” She picks up her spoon again as I continue to stare at her.

  “He kills people for a living,” I say, even though I know what she means. Beast doesn’t hurt women or children. He kills people who fuck with the club, people who threaten him and his. Maybe he’s not a good man by societal standards, but by club standards he’s basically a saint. A very, very scary saint.

  “He’s strong enough for you,” she continues, her gaze on her food and not on me. “He won’t try to hold you down or keep you back.”

  “Keep me back from what?” I ask dryly. “The club life hasn’t been kind to you, Nellie. You know as well as I do that there’s nowhere to go in here. It’s a void where good things go to die.”

  She throws her spoon into her bowl, splattering liquid everywhere.

  “The life is what I made of it,” she says proudly, lifting her chin and reminding me that she does command a certain level of respect amongst the men. “Did I make bad choices? I did. I should’ve …” Here her voice wavers and breaks, and I know she’s thinking about my sisters. “I should’ve spent more time with you kids when you were young. I’ll regret that for the rest of my life. But you know that my mother was a prostitute, right? She worked day and night, fucking awful men for pennies. There were years in my life where we were homeless, when we starved.”

  I just keep staring at her because I have never heard this story before.

  Nellie sniffles and reaches up to gather her blond hair into a ponytail. I forget sometimes that she’s only in her forties. Right now, she looks simultaneously so much older and so much younger, all at once.

  “The day I met your father, I was considering selling myself to help pay the bills.” Nellie drops her hands back into her lap. “I was sixteen; he was thirty-one. But you know what? He treated me with respect. He paid my mother’s bills, and he bought my younger siblings food, and he took care of me. Maybe it ain’t right to some people, but I loved him. And he loved me. Still does.” She smiles in a way that makes me shudder. This is Cat we’re talking about. Leroy. The president of the Death by Daybreak Motorcycle Club. He put a gun to my head, shot my dog’s leg off, tried to make me kill a kid. I just … I can’t reconcile my mother’s expression with my father’s evil.

  “The drugs and the partying …” I start, and Nellie gives me a sharp look, like I’m smart enough to know better.

  “Your father has never made me do a damn thing I didn’t want to do. Did we both fuck up as parents? We did. So many times I don’t care to count. But it’s the life that I chose to live. I had that at least, choice.” She looks away, out the window toward the garden area. I haven’t even been outside yet. The thought of going out into the sun makes me feel queasy. “What I’m trying to say is, I know this life isn’t perfect. But you think other people’s daughters don’t die? You think upstanding citizens with money in the bank and nice cars and respectable jobs don’t lose people to violence?” She looks back at me. “Maybe it’s my fault for not telling you any of this sooner, but you need to stop being so damn angry all the time.”

  I set my spoon down and sit up.

  “You are aware that I was trapped in the mafia’s palace for three months, right?” I query, but Nellie’s hard look doesn’t soften at all. In fact, I hardly recognize the person who’s staring back at me.

  “You’re right: the club does some fucked-up shit, but I like my place in it. I benefit from it without doing any of the dirty work. I never wanted to.” She hesitates briefly before lifting her bowl and draining the last of the soup from it. She sets it down hard and then adds, almost as an afterthought: “yeah, Beast will be good for you. Everyone in the club is afraid of him, you know?”

  I do know.

  Everyone is afraid of him … except for me. Never have been.

  If a woman were interested in doing some of the dirty work, of sidestepping the club’s bullshit, Beast would be the hammer you’d bring down on their traditions.

  “Finish your damn soup.” Nellie pushes the bowl closer to me and then stands up from her chair. “I’ll get you some water to wash it down. When you’re done, get your ass back in bed and I’ll bring you some tea.”

  My mother takes off without waiting for me to reply.

  Frankly, I’m so stunned by her words that I don’t quite know what to do.

  I end up doing exactly what she says, my mind spinning, gears and cogs ticking away.

  It’s another three days before I see any of the men again.

  When I do finally encounter one of them, it just so happens to be Sin.

  He’s watering plants with a hose and singing under his breath. I hesitate in the doorway, wearing cut-off shorts and a crop top that I found in the bag Nellie brought me. She’s given me a week’s worth of clothes, at least, which is interesting. What’s also interesting is that the clothing inside the bag was … Posey’s.

  When I first opened it up, I could smell her.

  I ended up sitting there, holding one of her pink t-shirts, and wishing for Grey with my eyes closed. Where the fuck is he? All I can say is, he better be safe.

  “What are you doing?” I ask finally, and Sin pauses, glancing over his shoulder at me. He seems annoyed that he was caught singing which doesn’t surprise me. I’ve thought for a long time that he had a beautiful voice, one that was wasted on the club, but now that I’ve heard it for myself, I wonder if it isn’t too pretty for the world.

  I could capture that voice in a jar and keep it for myself, like a firefly.

  “What does it look like I’m doing?” he snaps back at me. We have the same defense mechanisms, me and Sin, so his gruff tone doesn’t bother me. “I’m watering.”

  I pop out a hip and rest my fist on it, watching as Sin’s eyes rake over my body and then pause on my ruined legs. My palms took a similar beating during the fall, but they’ve healed up nicely, just a bit of shiny white scar here and there. My legs, on the other hand, didn’t fare so well …

  He lifts his silver eyes back up to my face.

  I wait for the disappointment, or the disgust, but I find neither of those things. The heat that’s always been between us flares brightly, a cosmic flicker in his eyes before he turns away. Shame fills his expression, like he’s tasted the taboo all over again. Like I’m fifteen and he’s twenty-three, and we’re kissing in the cemetery.

  “I’m eighteen now,” I tell him with a dry, caustic tone. I move over to stand beside him, watching as he chucks the hose into the grass and turns to face me again. “You don’t have to look at me like a forbidden fruit anymore.”

  Sin reaches up to rub a tattooed hand against an equally tattooed throat. He’s frowning at me now with that sharp mouth of his. I’m tempted to reach up and trace his scar with my thumb, but I have a feeling that if I did, he’d bat my hand away.

  “You’re engaged to Beast,” he tells me, and I can’t help but laugh. The sound seems to infuriate him, and he lifts the edge of his scarred lip up in a growl. “It might not mean anything to you, but I’ve broken enough covenants lately that the ones that remain have become sacred. I won’t look at my brother’s old lady like—” He cuts himself off and turns away, marching through the grass in his boots
as I trail behind.

  “You’re angry with me?” I ask him as he squats low and turns off the spigot, cutting the flow of water. For a minute there, he doesn’t answer me, just remains as he is in a crouched position.

  “Of course I’m angry with you,” he says finally, standing up and turning to look at me. We’re far too close. No normal people stand this close to one another unless they’re lovers. I suppose, in a sense, we are. Or maybe we were just fuck-buddies? I’m not sure. “You stole that kid—”

  “You know why I had to do it,” I whisper harshly, and Sin sighs, the sound as heavy as my aching heart.

  “Not only that, but …” He trails off for a moment as he studies me with a guarded expression. “I can’t let myself entertain the sort of thoughts that come to mind when I look at you.”

  He bends down, putting his mouth next to my ear. My eyes close of their own accord as his warm breath brushes against my skin, stirring my hair and making me wish he’d touch me with those sexy hands of his.

  “They’re bad thoughts, Gidge. Horrible ones. When I look at your scars, all I can think about is how they’d taste, how it might feel if I ran my tongue across them.” He draws back and away from me, continuing deeper into the garden as I follow.

  He lets me get into the shadows of a tunnel, created by carefully twisting tree limbs together, and then puts out an arm to stop me from going any further.

  “There are things beyond this point you don’t need to see.” Sin turns to look at me, and even though his face is bathed in shadow, I can still see the silver of his eyes. They remind me of Grey in a way. In another way, they’re not like Grey’s at all. Grey couldn’t get me twisted up like this. Grey couldn’t make me wonder what might happen if I wrapped my arms around his neck and ground my pelvis into him. Would Sin lose himself and fuck me the way he did outside the cabin? Or would he find the strength to resist?

  “Why are you taking care of the plants?” I ask him, and he cocks a brow at me.