by Paula Cox
But the thing is, when she comes into the room, I’ve never seen her better. Thinking about her father dying just that morning, and the kidnapping just a few weeks ago and I thought she’d come in all meek, weak, and broken, which wasn’t at all the case.
She dumped her little bouquet of flowers on my chest and pecked me on both cheeks, and sat down in the visitor’s chair. Her hair was gold and shining, and she was wearing this bouncy yellow dress you’d expect on a girl at Eastertime when it was green, sunny, and not in Maine right in the middle of winter.
“Oh, Quinn.” She smiled. “Didn’t they tell you I was coming to see you?”
“They did. Sure.”
“And they couldn’t give you a haircut at least? Are you already done trying to impress me? And your ear! Should I go ahead and assume this is the point in the relationship where everything just goes downhill, and we spend Saturday nights in sweatpants watching reruns of Gossip Girl?”
“Next to taking bullets for you that doesn’t sound too bad.”
“Pft. You can’t call that taking bullets for me. They have to literally be shooting at me for that to happen.”
“So in the future maybe I should just leave you alone?”
“I never said that now, did I?’
“You haven’t said much of anything except for what I should have done.”
“Well, you sure need someone to watch out for you if this is where you end up, making all your own decisions. And your Stitches—honestly I don’t know why you chose that name because it only makes you guys sound like a bunch of, like, deadbeat Harley-riders with gross beards and bad tattoos—they sure aren’t doing you any favors.”
“Aside from saving my life.”
“You just need to watch them, Q. They’re gonna try holding that one over your head forever and ever.”
The silk of her dress was the softest thing I’ve ever felt, next to her skin. We had an hour before the doctors came in for their checkup, just to lie there, she in my arms, her cheek against mine. Sharing our breaths.
“I’m sorry about your father. He was a good man, in the end.”
Maya didn’t say anything, but I felt her body tense against mine. It was still so new; too new for her to process. She needed her time, and I would be happy giving it to her. I’d be happy giving her as much time as she needed: her time and mine. There was nowhere neither of us had to be.
“Palmer let me know you’re paying my medical bills.”
“He’s such a tattler. Like I said. New friends.”
“Thank you.”
Then she turned to me and looked at me seriously. Really seriously, for the first time in months. “For what?”
“Saving me.”
“Oh. Well, then consider us even.”
***
Another month of doctors, tests, and physical therapy - working my leg back into daily routines and getting over the fear I’d developed of putting any weight on it. Slowly, steadily, like a wall being built back up after someone’s knocked it apart with a hammer, my body builds back up until I’m at least a little like I was before everything happened.
Maya visited every day I was in the hospital. Sometimes to stay and talk, sometimes to deliver something, sometimes just to run in and deliver the news. About the Family. The staff. Her father’s will. The plans she made to go to Vermont back when she thought she was leaving home for good. Her dream or the dream she’d chosen for herself of becoming a world-famous designer. A little miniature Maya brought to the foot of my hospital bed like a new magazine every day.
And then we get to here. To today. No more hospital beds, hospital foods or hospital TV. No more changing bandages or physical therapy exercise, though I’ve got a prescription to see a local specialist three times a week for another four months. No more middle life. No more old.
Palmer’s dropped off some keys to Ava, which is a crappy old station wagon that’s been in the Clubhouse garage ever since I can remember. No one knows why it’s gotten that name but just try changing its name and you’d spark a riot. The thing is as ugly as a bruise, but it’s got an engine that will probably outlast most of us.
We drive out, Ava and I, for the first time in four months. There’s still snow on the ground, but it’s the ugly mushy stuff you always bet before spring kicks in. And seeing as how I’ve missed most of winter, being holed up inside, I don’t mind getting a last burst of the cold. We’ll have what amounts to a summer, soon enough. I’m not in any special hurry to get there.
I drive carefully, keeping an eye on my leg to make sure it holds steady. After ten minutes I’m pretty self-assured: I turn out onto the highway and speed down, down, until I reach my exit.
We’re still a long way from summer weather so even though this is a Saturday the docks aren’t crowded. Just a few families, milling around and sipping hot chocolate from thermoses and paper cups. I park, get out, and find a bench that isn’t too wet with melted snow where I can rest. Walking without a support equals falling, and since there’s no way I’m going to be seen limping around town with a cane, this is my best option now.
“You know, I’ve lived here my whole life but the only two times I’ve ever come here have been with you.” Maya sits down next to me. Her hair’s tucked into a green hat, and she’s wearing a coat that’s probably worth a quarter of my current income.
“Then you need to get out more. You’ve said so yourself.”
“Getting out.” She lifts one hand, flat, palm-up, and then makes a balance with the other. “And business. And getting a job. And being responsible.” The ‘getting out’ hand goes down like a sinking ship.
“At least you’ve got your priorities straight.”
“That’s just like something somebody clueless with absolutely no idea what it’s like managing a mob man’s estate would say.”
“So you don’t think you’re cut out to be a mob boss?” I put on a frown. “I was getting used to the name ‘Kirill Maya.’ ”
“Then I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to disappoint you.”
“So that’s it then?” I say, more serious. “No more Family? What about the staff and the estate?”
“No more Family. Sold the estate. Pensioned the staff. Not a bad price to pay for your freedom, is it? And no guilt over job loss—most of them turned right around and became Ceallaighs. They’ve got a guy who came down from New York to run it. An old friend of Mattias’s, from the sounds of it.”
I look at her, and she looks back. Really looks at me, with that fierce, penetrating, intense look certain people just have.
“I didn’t think you’d ever do it,” I say. “I thought you’d go around with this monkey on your back for the rest of your life. Congratulations, Maya.”
She takes the hand I’ve put out and gives it two shakes like we’ve just settled our investments. “Thank you. It is a pretty big leap, isn’t it?”
“Especially for a show dog like you.”
“Now, Quinn. You’ve gone and turned something nice into something rude. And for absolutely no reason.”
We turn back to the docks. A trawler is moving out into the bay. The first of the new season. Soon the whole place will be crowded with them, and it’ll be nose to hull. The gates begin to move. They make a churning, low noise and start to lower.
“And you’re still planning on relocating?”
“Soon as everything squared away here. Although to be really honest with you, I still don’t know where. I’d be bored to death in Vermont. And it’s cold! I need to get out of this for a while. Head south. Drive along a beach and have nothing in my face but sun and sea and breeze.”
“Sounds pretty boring to me.”
“I don’t give a damn how it sounds to you. I never asked for your opinion. And with no Family, you’re back to scraping gutters for the scum of the city, Mr. Big Shot. No more service for you.” She gives me a playful punch to my side—not the one with the bullet wound in it. “It’s a shame, really. I could have used you. But yo
u’re too much animal and not enough gentleman. A girl likes having both, and a switch that controls what she has and when.”
“I’m sorry to disappoint. I don’t think I have any switches.”
“Oh, yes you do. You just don’t know where they are. You just haven’t been explored properly yet.” Back to me: her eyes fixed and still yet somehow, moving; slow moving, like a frozen waterfall. And with me trapped inside.
“And I guess I’m supposed to think you’re the one for the job?”
The trawler crawls through the crack in the water. The cameras go up. Fathers tug on the sleeves of their daughters and point to the large ships drifting through.
“Maybe,” she says. “Maybe you ought to consider this my job application. What would you think?”
“You want to know the truth?”
“I always want to know the truth about you, Quinn. You really should know better by now. You’ve tried keeping it from me before and almost got yourself killed.”
“Then, honestly speaking, I’m worried that you’re too much of a pampered pooch to know that if you keep being curious and not careful, you’re gonna be facing a speeding car with no one to yank you back to safety.”
Maya winds her arm back for another playful punch, but I catch it. Her fingers dissolve in mine. Then her lips. Her body. The thump-thump, thump-thump of her heart pounding like mad against my own, screaming out with all its got, and both of us begging for more and more of each other; more and more from this small cold world that’s tried so hard to take us out. And it’ll keep on being that way. I’ve got no delusions. No fantasies. No false promises. I know it, like Maya knows it. There won’t be any rest for us—not until the day our bodies are in the ground. The hitman and the mob boss’s daughter. Two against danger. Two against the world.
THE END
Read on for your FREE bonus book – CLAIMED BY THE BAD BOY
CLAIMED BY THE BAD BOY: The Road Rage MC
By Paula Cox
DADDY’S LITTLE GIRL IS ALL GROWN UP.
My president’s daughter isn’t the little squirt I remembered.
She’s grown up now. Sexy. Tempting.
I’ve been gone for a long time…
But now that I’m back, I’m about to make her mine.
Bri the Brat had a crush on me forever.
She was just a little girl then.
Not to mention, as the MC prez’s daughter…
Strictly off limits.
But that was then.
Things are different now.
I spent two years being tortured and caged by my enemies.
My own brothers thought I was as good as dead.
But I made it out, against all odds.
I should be happy.
I’m alive, after all.
Pulled back from death’s doorstep.
But I’m not happy.
Far from it.
I’m mad as hell.
Because I find out that Bri has been keeping secrets from me.
She’s got my baby in her belly…
So I’m coming to take what’s mine.
Chapter One
Slick
When you come home after a long time away, you expect everything to be the same. Two years I was away, a prisoner, and all that time I would picture the Road Rage clubhouse in my mind. But not just that; I would picture it in my mind how it was when I last saw it. I’d left for the job in the afternoon. It was supposed to take a couple of weeks and ended up taking years; now, in the early morning, the place seems changed. An extra wing has been built onto the side, a dormitory for the growing membership. There’s still the red, neon letters above the garage area, spelling out the MC’s name. But the motorcycles are no longer kick-standing outside on the dirt like before. A car park has been built, smooth grey granite, and the bikes are there instead. Small changes, and yet it just tells me that life has moved on without me.
I bring the bike to a stop in the garage area. My body is aching from the long ride, Seattle to Denver in one twenty-hour slog. The garage is about the same, even if there are a few more fancy toys now; the calendar with pictures of naked women is the same, though now it reads 2017 and not 2015, and the smell of oil and metal hasn’t changed. The office off to the side is closed—it’s still early—so I leave my bike in the middle and go and take a seat at the back of the room, watching my bike and, beyond it, the road. Then I look down at my hands, knuckles scarred, and will them not to shake. I’m not there anymore, I remind myself. I’m not under the thumb of the Masked Man, who really wasn’t one man but many, those psycho fucks at the Flaming Skull taking turns to torture the prisoners. I remember once when—
I close my eyes, take a deep breath. Old and new scars clash all over my body: my arms, my legs, my back. Most of them are not deep, just surface, harmless fightin’ marks. Most of them are products of beatings and fights. But a couple of them are deep brutal scars left over from when the Masked Man would go into a rage, grab a whip or a machete or a pistol. I squeeze one hand with the other, trying to squeeze hard enough so the pain distracts me from the memories. Two years I was kept fuckin’ prisoner up there in Seattle, all ’cause a gun deal for one of my courier missions went south, and they decided the best response was to take a patched man hostage. Word was Grizzly thought I was dead, but when he found out he sent for me, and spent a damn long year negotiating for my release. Him and Clint.
Clint, the new VP, though new isn’t exactly the word considering my dad has been dead for a long time now. Still, I don’t trust Clint much, don’t like the way he looked when he and Grizzly and a few others came up to Seattle once for a talk with the Flaming Skulls. I was there, locked in back with the other prisoners, watching. And Clint looked like he couldn’t give a shit whether I was set free. I even saw the bastard laugh and clap one of the Flaming Skulls on the back like they were pals.
Sitting against the garage’s back wall, my eyelids are drooping, my head sagging. I yawn, stand up, begin to walk around the garage. Somebody should be here pretty soon. I think about going into the clubhouse, but after two years of being locked up with nowhere to go, I want to make sure my bike is tuned up . . . I’ll always have an escape route, now. I’ll never be left stranded like that again. That’s the only reason those pricks got me in the first place, a goddamn malfunction with my bike. Dumb luck.
I was wrong about the garage being the same. There are new pictures on the wall. There are pictures of me with the men, standing there with a dumb smile on my face. This was before I really got the fire in my belly. This was before I realized that a man needs real power if he is ever going to feel content with his life. This was before I realized that being a courier is fine but I need more; I need to be VP. I need to follow in my dad’s footsteps and I need to oust that Clint fucker and show the club what I’m made of. I study the picture, all of us from two years ago, me with that smile on my face, hating it. The past me, the me before I was put through the gauntlet with the Masked Man and the torturers and the fights and the spit. The me before the world took its pound of flesh.
Perhaps I shouldn’t care, but it pisses me off when I see the following pictures, the ones taken when I was a captive. All smiling, just the same . . . but I’m sure Clint is smiling a little more. Grizzly just looks the same, but then Grizzly has been like a dad to me since my real dad died, all those years ago. What’s it been? Two decades? Goddamn.
I return to my chair, getting impatient now. I need sleep, but I won’t leave my bike before she’s been seen to. If that makes me paranoid, then I’m paranoid, but I reckon that’s understandable considering even now when I catch a shadow the wrong way I see the Masked Man, watching, sometimes giggling as me and another prisoner take chunks out of each other.
“I’m just the messenger,” I’d told the Masked Man, dozens of times, always telling him no matter which him I was dealing with. At first, anyway, I told him a lot. But then I came to understand that in this life, the messenger is in just as much d
anger as the gunner, or the VP . . . and if you’re going to have as much danger as the VP, I reckon you should have the same power, too. I remember Dad, efficient, cold, powerful, and whisper to myself, “It’s time to prove myself to Grizzly. It’s time to prove myself VP material.”
I’m rambling; sleep hovers at the periphery of my consciousness. I lean forward and massage my eyelids, trying to work some life into them.
“Long night?” Her voice comes to me across the length of the garage, from the entrance. I open my eyes, lean up. She’s young, maybe around twenty, with tan skin and coppery hair which curls around her chin. She smiles, and I see that her teeth are dazzling and perfectly white. As she approaches me, she takes a hairband from her pocket and begins securing her hair in a little, flaring ponytail.
“You could say that,” I respond.