I’m shaking now, my fingernails digging into the edge of the table. I can’t believe Cat made me put the ring back on. Grey sees it, his eyes shifting to the diamond on my finger with an impassiveness that scares me. What was the point of wearing it in the first place?
“You can tell him to go fuck himself,” Cat says with a gruff, angry sort of laugh. He clamps a huge hand over my shoulder, leashing me. “Ain’t none of that shit is ever going to happen, son.”
Here. Here is where it would be prudent for Grey to tell the truth, that I saved him and stole a bike, that I’m a snake in the grass.
Only … he doesn’t. And that tells me something about this whole situation.
“That’s unfortunate,” Grey says, and then he’s reaching down and grabbing a handful of something red. With a vicious yank, he drags a girl into view of the camera, and I realize that … that …
My mind empties, and my heart goes completely numb.
No.
Nopleasenodeargodnopleasepleaseplease.
Reba.
That’s Reba that Grey’s jerking around like a puppet, dragging her up to her knees as she gasps and chokes, blood running down the front of her face. She’s barely recognizable, as swollen and bruised as she is. Grey looks right at me as he holds out his hand and someone places a revolver in it.
He puts the barrel to Reba’s head.
I’m the only person in that room that cares, and I think that’s part of the point.
“We’ve already gotten started for you,” he tells me, holding his finger over the trigger. “We’ll count this as one. Forty-five more people. For every day that you delay, we destroy something. Every day, we add another person to the tally.” He pauses again, and an explosion sounds, echoing across the compound like a bomb going off. “Don’t make us polish off all those pretty families of yours.”
And then the video call cuts out, and men are scrambling for the door as Cat shouts orders.
“Come with me,” a voice whispers in my ear, and then Sin is dragging me from the room and heading for a side door that used to lead to a gazebo. I mean, it still leads to a gazebo, but this isn’t the same one that was here before. The Daybreakers dismantled the old, rotting one, buried some men who did ‘em wrong, and poured a new patio. Then, they built the new gazebo, the one that stands here now.
Sin drags me underneath it, vines tickling my face, the scent of jasmine so overpowering that I almost choke.
He takes me around the back of the house, to where the basement entrance is, and we crawl in together. Hunkered down. Protected. But what about Reba? Reba is not protected. It occurs to me that she might already be dead, that Grey might’ve shot her in the head after ending the video call.
No, no, Gidge, think! Think hard.
I’ve always been good at reading people, ever since I was a kid. Comes with the territory, I think. My sisters and I were always surrounded by monsters, but ones flying our banner, our colors. We had to look carefully, through the leather and the beards and the tattoos, to the hearts underneath.
Grey … there’s a heart there. I’ve seen it. He wouldn’t have declared his love for me after our capture if he didn’t have one. There were a million and one easier, much simpler ways for him to get out of being labelled a rat. Pretending to be head over heels for the daughter of a motorcycle club president who slaughtered his own brother for the very same reason … not the easiest. But, since it was the only way to save me, he did it.
There’s a similar thread here.
“They drove a van of explosives into the front gate,” Sin tells me after checking his phone. His silver eyes—so similar in color yet so different in composition when compared to Grey’s—zero in on me. “Never in my life have I wished so hard for you to be gone,” he adds, surprising me.
The abrupt change in subject makes me blink back at him in shock. All the while, my mind is spinning, desperately searching for ways to save my best friend’s life from … my other best friend? Ugh. Goddamn you, Grey. But if he picked Reba, then he did it for a reason. Likely, the Don had his people look into me. It wouldn’t take much digging to see that I have few friends, that Reba is one of the only constants in my crazy life.
“What?” I blurt, stepping back and hitting my knees against the edge of an old bench. I end up sitting down hard on its dusty surface. The basement, as such an obvious space to begin a search of any kind, is clean. And by clean, I simply mean that there aren’t any bodies in it, just a shit ton of my grandmother’s crap. Antique mirrors that reflect Sin and me back a million times over, bouncing our image from the back corner to the cracked glass near the stairs to the huge dressing mirror against the far wall.
“Fucking hell, Gidget,” he groans, putting his head in his hand. “This isn’t the life that I wanted for you.”
He’s the first one to say it. Nellie wants me here. Cat does. Even Beast and Crown and Grainger, they want me here, might even think this is the best place for me. But not Sin. Never Sin.
“Take me to Reba’s house,” I blurt back, but he just laughs at me, this twisted, awful sort of sound.
“Not on my life,” he growls right back, and I can see that he’s going to get stubborn with me. Sometimes, I forget that even though Sin is the youngest of these assholes, that he’s just as dangerous. You do not get to be an officer—even if it’s ‘just’ a road captain—in your early twenties unless you know how to play the right games, make the right allies, please the right old-timers.
When I said ‘Road Captain’ was like travel agent, I was being cheeky. Road captain is more like being a fixer, someone who watches political lines and is very, very careful not to cross them. Sin’s job is to scout routes for the club to travel on, ways to get to rallies, ways to meet with potential clients or negotiations with enemies. He picks what roads they ride on, what hotels they sleep in, even what bars they drink in.
In our world, if you visit the wrong bar or you fly colors on the wrong street, it can be akin to a declaration of war. It can get people killed. It can destroy allegiances. Don’t park in front of the wrong clubhouse, don’t travel on the wrong road after dark, don’t piss anybody off. That’s his job. It requires an attention to detail that’s staggering.
“Please,” I beg, because I know that if Grey left me a message, it’ll be there. Only I’ll understand it. Only I should see it. Besides, Fem … I can’t stop thinking about my damn dog. It makes me realize yet again how terribly weakening love can be. It’s this soft spot in your shell, this gentle place that answers the question what is the point of life? but also leaves you vulnerable in a way that aches.
That’s me, to these men. So if I have to kick them in the soft spot to get them to move, I’ll do it.
“You don’t understand—” I begin as I rise to my feet, but apparently, that was the absolute wrong thing to say. The sweet, gentle Sin that hugged me from behind the other day, he’s gone. He’s absolutely furious with me.
He storms across the room in a sea of dust and snatches my chin in his hand, making me grit my teeth in frustration.
“We’re at war now, Gidget. You thought we were before, but this is something entirely different. This isn’t sniping in the dark; this is guns and blood and bodies.” He squeezes my chin even harder, but I let him. He’s pissed, and I need his help. Desperately. “Why did you have to do it? Look at that kid now. Look at him, Gidget. Was it worth it?”
“It was,” I tell him, and this time, it’s Sin’s turn to grit his teeth at me. “Grey has my back, Sin. He’s trying to send me a message, but I need to figure out what it is.” He’s already shaking his head at me. He releases me abruptly, turning away and raking his fingers over that blue faux hawk that I like so much. His earrings catch a bit of stray sunlight from outside, dust motes swirling like dark spirits, watching over this interaction with interest. “If he wanted to tell Cat the truth, he could have. He could’ve ended the five of us right then and there. He’s different. Just like Kian was different.”
That does it.
The name of Queenie’s lover shakes Sin to his core, and he turns to look at me with an expression of pure and absolute rage.
“What do you really know about Queenie and Kian?” he snaps at me, breathless but bristling. Sin turns suddenly and comes stomping toward me, pausing so close that I have to crane my head back to look up at him. He’s shaking now, his silver eyes going cold with memories. “She came to me, you know. She told me what was happening between the two of them. I … encouraged her to tell Cat.”
That gives me pause. Here’s a part of the story that I never expected to see.
It’s not that I didn’t know Sin and Queenie were sort of friends; we were all sort of friends with Sin. She was his age, not much of a gap there. But she confided in him, too? How have I never known this?
He reaches up and rubs his thumbs along my cheekbones, staring down at me with this faraway look on his face. Sin knew that Kian never raped Queenie; Beast knew; what about Crown and Grainger?
“A bomb’s just gone off outside, and the mafia is threatening us, and here I am, talking about people long dead and buried.” He curses and exhales, but I remain where I am. I need him to talk. Then I need to use whatever he says against him to get to Reba’s house as soon as I possibly can. “Did you know that a few weeks before they died, Cat gave me a choice? Be head of his family’s security team or become road captain.”
This … I did not know.
The information knocks the air out of me, and I find myself lifting my hands to cover Sin’s. Our fingers somehow end up tangled together in the process.
“I chose road captain because the thought of being near you all the time, that just about killed me.”
He pauses again at the sound of gunfire, lifting his head up to listen. Sin removes one of his hands to check the phone in his pocket. Even with chaos unfolding around us, he has complete faith in the club. This is a hiccup, nothing more. We’re not in anymore danger right this moment than we are on a regular day. He puts the phone back and looks at me.
“Blame for Queenie’s and Posey’s deaths is on my shoulders.” He says this with such conviction, I can tell that he actually believes it. “And I will not allow you to end up in the same position.”
Sin’s words are like a strike; I can feel the force of them. As bright as the flames that I imagine are licking at the sky near the front gate. He isn’t going to let me go to Reba’s, I realize with a shock of wild fear. If he doesn’t let me go, I won’t understand what Grey’s trying to tell me, and everything will fall apart.
My hands go for Sin’s shoulders, but he pushes them away from him, turning his head to one side. His eyes are closed tight, like he’s fighting an instinct that he knows he shouldn’t have.
“No, Gidget,” he tells me, emphasizing the T at the end of my name in a way that’s infuriating. “You can’t fuck your way out of this one.”
That does it. I feel so triggered I could scream.
“Is that what you think it was all about, you idiot?” I yell back at him, frustrated to the point of hitting him. I almost do it, too, balling my hands into fists at my sides. Sin doesn’t seem concerned by my outburst, watching me from eyes the color of gravestones. Right now, they seem just as cold and dead which we both know is a lie. He’s trying too hard to hate me, and it isn’t working. “All four of you are so … so self-righteous.” I choke the word out like a curse. “You’re too young, Gidge. We shouldn’t do this or that. I’m staying away from you. We took advantage of you that night.” My eyes flash with violence. I know because I can see them, reflected back all around me, a repeating imagery that goes on for eternity, from one mirror to another to another. Never stopping. Just an endless stream of my rage. “Well, guess what? That’s taking my agency away, acting like I wasn’t a part of everything. I made those choices, too, Sin.” I stare him down as his pulse races; I can see it throbbing in the side of his neck, a metronome to my own racing heart. “I’m not some naïve suburban brat with a mommy and daddy who dote on her and guard her from the world.”
He opens his mouth to reply, but I’m not done. I’ve needed to say this for a while. Not just to him either. To all of them. Everyone. The world.
“I’ve been through things that people three or four times my age have never seen, that they wouldn’t understand. I’m not saying it makes any of this right, but what in this world is? We all can’t measure up to the same rubric. Every person has a different threshold.” I shake my head, squeezing my hands so hard that my knuckles begin to ache. “I grew up a long, long time ago. Maybe when my sisters died. Maybe before that. Whatever. Call what you did wrong if that assuages your conscious, but that’s not how I see it.”
Sin is quiet for a long while, checking his phone again, putting it back, staring at me.
“You’re not leaving this building,” he tells me, and that just does it. I throw a punch at his face, and it connects. He curses at me as I stumble back, turning and heading for the stairs. I’m about halfway up them when he grabs me from behind, yanking me away from the door as I yowl like the very animal my father is named for, the one that purrs and mewls when it wants something, and kills for the fun of it. “Gidge,” he snarls at me, his mouth pressed right up against my ear. “No.”
“If you don’t let me go, Reba dies,” I scream back at him, struggling hard, clawing at his hands and making him bleed. Hot, sticky liquid drips onto my shoulder, slithering between my breasts. The cleavage in this dress is off the charts, but the pale skin of my chest is marred by Sin’s blood. I stop struggling just long enough to glance over my shoulder.
I’ve really hurt him.
He throws me onto the old couch that’s shoved up against the wall, and then he pins me there. Hands on my wrists, muscular thighs straddling me. He’s panting hard, bleeding everywhere.
“You’re lucky you’re a woman,” he chokes out, turning his head to the side and spitting blood. “Or I would’ve hit you back.”
“Oh, don’t hold back just because I have a pussy,” I warn him, thrusting my pelvis up enough that my hips graze his body. He makes a face at me, a sneer that’s all the more terrifying for the blood running down his chin. “That’s right, I said it: pussy.”
Sin laughs at me then. But he doesn’t let me go. That’s the important part of this equation.
“You tricked me once, Gidge. It isn’t happening today.” He leans down and puts his mouth dangerously close to the side of my neck. I don’t expect him to lick me, but it happens anyway, and I shudder. “You’re not getting the keys to the kingdom this time.”
I’m breathing hard, my muscles quivering with the need to run, to go find Reba. To save her. Because if she dies, then this whole scenario is all for naught. I didn’t rescue Grey to see another person that I love die. No, I … I’m not sure that I’d survive that, and I’m a scrappy bitch.
“You said you wish that I’d chosen you,” I say softly, so much so that I’m not sure he’s heard me at first. Not over the panting and the frantic heartbeats and the creak of the old sofa springs. “Why say that if you really wanted me gone?”
“If you were mine, I would send you away,” he tells me, pulling back just enough to look at me. “Like Cruce’s wife.” As it usually does, it takes me a minute to match the name to the man behind it. Cruce, one of the old-timers with a wife half his age. Cue my eyeroll. Not that I can’t admit that I have a bit of a fetish for older men, but I still scoff at everyone else. Because the world is gross; even the slice I’ve taken for myself is wicked pretty. Also, if I didn’t scoff and sneer at everything, I wouldn’t be Gidget Kesselring anymore.
“Cruce’s wife is going to school in southern California,” I say absently, thinking about the possibility of that, of actually having a life while still being married to the club. It excites me in the strangest of ways. At this point, I’m still on the mafia’s hitlist, but this war can really only have two possible conclusions.
We win, and I’m as saf
e as I’ll ever be.
Or we lose, and I die.
My hips come up to brush against Sin’s, and he shoves my wrists down hard against the back of the couch.
“Stop doing that.” He licks his lips, trying to clear the blood away. It works. Sort of. But he’s still bleeding. “If you were going to marry into the club, yeah, I wanted it to be me.” He laughs again, a sound too bitter for someone so young. We’re both dressed in it now, that sin that he wears as a nametag. “But really, I just wanted you to go. I wanted you free from all of this crap. Why do you think I took you home all those nights, why I stayed and watched over you? More than anything, I wanted you to run.”
We both stop talking, but still, he keeps me pinned. He keeps me, for the moment, as his. It’s what he really wants, even if he won’t quite admit it to himself.
“There were no guards that day because you said no?” I ask, not with the intention of being angry, but for the understanding I’ll finally, finally, finally fucking get. After all these years, all this wondering, these twisted daydreams that read more like nightmares.
“I said no to being the head of security for your family,” Sin clarifies, adjusting himself. It’s impossible to ignore the bulge in the front of his tight jeans. They’re tailored just perfectly for his body, sculpted over his ass, his strong thighs, his muscular calves, before diving into his riding boots. “There were guards posted that day—even if you don’t remember them.”
“Were there?” I snap back, straining against his hold on me. But it’s impossible. Much as I hate, hate, hate to admit it, there are distinct biological differences between men and women. Sin is undeniably stronger than I am right now. Particularly because I’m not too acquainted with the concept of working out. “I don’t remember them. Don’t you think that I would? That maybe I would’ve heard or seen something before the mafia shot my pregnant sister in the head?”
I Am Dressed in Sin: A Reverse Harem Age Gap Romance (Death By Daybreak Motorcycle Club Book 2) Page 17