by Jamie Magee
Within a beat of her heart she reached back and pulled her weapon. “You listen to me. I’m no fucking prisoner.”
Instead of cowering, or even lifting his hands in a show of peace, a slow, sultry smile emerged across Scorpio’s lips. “Prisoner?”
“Yes, a fucking prisoner. I’ve tried to leave this Boneyard every single fucking day and no one will let me—you guys fucked my bike and my scooter. If I walk, I get picked up before I hit the gate. You have done everything but handcuff me to the fucking stripper poles. I have a business, clients that count on me. When this bullshit is over the real world is going to be waiting on me and I have to feed myself.”
Scorpio lifted his brow. “If you want to leave you’re going in the wrong direction.”
Adair gripped her gun and glared. “I’m not some ignorant fuck, that son of a bitch in the Cage knows something—he was there when I saw Talley last. I’m not sitting around bullshitting with the rest of you like I don’t have a care in the world.”
Scorpio’s bright, emerald stare eased down Adair, then up again. “If he knew something I would’ve figured it out by now.”
“Kinda hard to figure out anything when you’re chilling in the lounge eye fucking me.”
Scorpio drew his head back in mock shock. “Lot of hours in the day, princess. Even sick fucks have to sleep sometimes.” He stepped forward as if the forty-five aimed at him was a water gun. “You got no business anywhere near a man like that,” he said with a nod to the dark swamp house that was barely twenty feet from where Adair stood.
Adair smirked. “You got no business telling me what I can and can’t fucking do.” She went to turn but he gripped her arm, halting her. “What?”
“Why do you always have to knock on the devil’s door?”
Adair slowly turned to face him, her stare wide with confusion. For days she had tried to talk to him, get his attention. And more than once he had blatantly walked away from her.
Of all the Sons who were lingering around the Boneyard he was the one she wanted to speak to. She recognized him instantly, felt knots coil deep in her gut, adrenaline coursed through her veins—a rush she had always felt when she was around past lovers.
For the past four nights she had used every additional sense she had on him. Her goal was to see into his mind, see his memories, and hopefully find a new memory of her own.
What she saw inside him was terrifying. His men respected him, and rightly so. As long as they had ridden with him he had defended and led them brutally. He’d killed without thought, he’d taunted evil just the same, and all the while carried a cool carefree smile. One that told you how he lived his life was the only way he knew how.
She’d yet to find herself in his mind, but just then, those words he said sparked something close to what she’d heard his voice say in her locked past. “Why are you knocking on the devil’s door, princess?”
Adair’s cheeks turned crimson as more than words came to life in her mind. She remembered him saying that as his hands rushed down her sides, gently easing her away from him, away from the slow kiss she was lathering across his neck just outside the lounge on a dark night.
“I know you,” Adair breathed.
Scorpio let her arm go, his jade stare turning colder. “The Boneyard is big, but it ain’t that big, princess. You’ve served me drinks this whole week.”
Misery washed over Adair. She’d had conversations like this for days. It was as if this entire place was trying to make her insane, make her doubt who she was and shred her convictions.
Scorpio glanced away not able to look at her and say the lie Reveca had sworn them all to uphold. “I know you’re in a messed up place—we’re all pretty fucked by this deal, but hauling off half-cocked just because you have to feel like you’re doing something is not the way to go ‘bout it.”
“And what is?” Adair asked, lifting her chin. “Am I to sit here and let the men do their job? Wait for the mystery to unfold then go back to my own personal drama in my life?”
“That’d be a start,” he said, meeting her stare once more.
Adair stepped up to him, rage and grief waving over her. “You vow to me on your honor as a Son that this Club did not hurt Talley, that they do not intend to do so now, and I will go back to my room like a good little prisoner. Read my books and play with the haunts that lurk.”
Scorpio went to speak but she raised her hand. “I swear to fucking God if you say it wasn’t Talley who died but what possessed him…if you say it was for his own good, that stripping me from my right to remember my own life was best, I will fucking rip your heart out.”
He bit his lip, moved his gaze over her, swearing he could feel her pain, wanting to take all this away—turn back the clock. “What is so hard about believing that?”
A pissed smirk came to Adair. “What drives you?”
A furrow of his brow was the only response she received.
“You’re lethal,” Adair said. “You make decisions within a breath, yet they’re calculated just the same. You’re defensive, and you’re loyal. You’re driven. Where did all that come from?” She stepped up to him when he kept his silence. “It comes from the pain of your past. It comes from the first moment you were hurt, and betrayed. The first time you felt your world rip apart. The agony did not make you weak—it made you unstoppable. It molded you into the leader that is respected. When you’re afraid you pull from the pain you endured. You pull from the desire to never be hurt again.”
Tears welled in her eyes. “Now imagine not remembering the pain, but feeling it all the same. Imagine not knowing if you were a coward or a hero when your family needed you the most. Imagine not learning from the mistakes you made so you could protect yourself from what is surely to come again.” She looked him up and down. “That is what this Club robbed me of, obviously moments after they turned their back on my family and destroyed the damaged Son.”
Tense silence lingered between them for a seamlessly never-ending moment before he spoke. “I wasn’t there, Adair. I didn’t see the end.” Anger darkened his eyes. “And it’s a damn good thing I didn’t.”
“Why?” she snapped.
Scorpio glanced down her body, to where he knew her scars were. “We’ve already established I’m lethal, princess.”
Adair stepped back, not willing to repeat once again there was nothing she couldn’t forgive Talley for. “You’re all the same.”
“Not even close,” Scorpio said in a low tone, meaning every word. The Sons may ride together, have common interests, shared battle stories, but they all arrived where they are from a different path, a path that shaped them, one they hold on to when they’re all alone in the quiet of the night.
Adair shook her head denying his words. “I may not have all my memories, may not have a fucking clue what spells were laid on me, but I do know it is not in me to sit around and wait to die. I’m a fighter, not a prisoner. I have shit to do.”
“Yeah, you’re right about that,” he said. Against his better judgment he spoke his next words. “Come inside, I’ll pour you a drink.”
“Why?” Adair asked as her gaze moved down his chest. “You worried I’m going to remember hooking up with you—what will that do for your little culture here? I hear I’m still ‘claimed.’ Or are you just going to call someone to come and haul me back to my room so you can go on pretending that I don’t fucking know you.”
“If we hooked up, you’d remember it.”
“Cocky bastard.”
Scorpio looked away, doing his best to hold his stoic stance, to ensure she didn’t see that she was one of his few regrets.
The second Adair saw she had gotten to him, that he was more focused on guarding himself than her from the Cage in the distance behind her she took off and sprinted toward her target.
Ten feet before she reached the house an invisible wall shocked the hell out of her and sent a nauseating pain through her entire body, disorienting her. Every bone in her body was vibrating. Sh
e was gasping for breath as she landed flat on her back.
She heard haunting roars, and an evil chuckle, then she heard Mystic’s protective bark and saw a dark figure looming over her. In a justifiable reaction she fired her weapon.
The jolt shocked the odd haze from Adair and allowed her to focus, and when she did she saw that she’d hit Scorpio—center mass. Blood was gushing from him and dripping down on her.
“Mother fucker,” Scorpio grunted.
“Oh shit! Oh shit!” Adair said, making it to her feet. She was sure she was as good as dead just then—no one hurt a Son and lived to tell about it.
Chapter Four
The wind howled through the trees. Every creature of the night seemed to scream all at once, yet their cries could not mask the evil chuckle Adair was sure she could hear just beyond the wails of nature, beyond the grunts of Scorpio who was standing, but leaning forward, in obvious pain.
Adair was frozen, unsure what to do next or how to do it—Scorpio needed help, no doubt, but if the evil she felt approached it wouldn’t matter, they’d both be gone.
She felt like she had been electrocuted. She could feel charged energy swimming through her veins. Even though she felt Scorpio’s hot blood pouring over her hands as she clasped his, her fingertips felt like ice once more. How or why Talley had that effect on her was lost in her mindset and definitely not something she could understand just then.
She peered forward into the swamp house, known as the Cage. In the window she saw the grimy bastard. A cold grin spread across his lips, framing a toothless smile. His stare moved from Adair to the distance, to the exact place she heard the near manic laugh—to where Mystic was aiming her protective bark as she did her best to herd Adair and Scorpio back.
Scorpio straightened all at once. His entire body tensed, prepared to defend Adair.
Adair squinted her eyes closed and in a hushed tone repeated a protection spell, one that called forth all of nature to defend who had spoken the words.
The distant laugh stopped instantly. The grin on the grimy man in the window vanished. A second later the wind died, and the only sound was the water lapping on the distant bank and the owls speaking through the darkness.
The strife, the standoff with evil, had only lasted seconds, and seemed secondary at best to the drama Adair had brought down on herself. “We gotta get help,” she said, looking in every direction, ensuring the other dangers were null and void.
If Miriam had kept her word she was only a mile down the road, but there was no promise that she had. Adair had no service on her phone to make sure she was there before she dragged a bleeding man in that direction.
Her only other option was running back to the heart of the Boneyard that was miles in the other direction. No matter which way she ran she seriously doubted with the wound Scorpio had he would be alive by the time she got back.
Before she could ask him if his bike was close Scorpio gripped her arm, pulling her toward the other house. “You Goddamn crazy ass bitch. Rush wasn’t fucking joking when he said you were trigger happy these days.”
Anger overrode the shock Adair was feeling as he pulled her forward. She even mentally told herself she must have only grazed Scorpio, seen the wound the wrong way. “Trigger happy my ass! I was attacked!”
“Some witch you are. Isn’t it witch 101 to recognize a protective field?”
“A do what?”
Scorpio shook his head as he pulled her onward toward the house that he had all but claimed as his. “Do you honestly think a man who attacked you would be in a shack strapped to a chair or some shit—no. Reveca Beauregard has the most kick ass spell there is in place around the shack—you’re lucky that shit didn’t kill you.”
“A spell,” Adair said, barely letting dismay hit her gaze. She had felt powerful spells before, but that one took the cake. The spell was not what was throwing her right then, it was the fact that there was something out there, more than likely Talley, and Scorpio had to have sensed it and he was ignoring it—ignoring the fact that she had just ended the confrontation with a mere few words.
Would it kill him to acknowledge my kick ass witch skills? For some reason it burned her that everyone at the Boneyard deemed her as weak.
More importantly he was ignoring the fact that blood was pouring from his gut.
“Ah fuck, it messed with your head didn’t it? You know your name and shit?” Scorpio asked, pulling her up the back stairs of the house then through the kitchen.
“My head is plenty fucked but it didn’t come from—from whatever that was! That is way more than a boundary spell.”
Scorpio gripped her hips, lifted her and sat her on the counter. “Look at me,” he said, trying to look at her eyes to see how dilated they were.
Adair jerked her head back, then glanced down at him, realizing she had not grazed him but delivered a mortal wound. “Shit,” she said, trying to get past him so she could find something to stop the bleeding.
At first Scorpio fought her but then a pissed breath escaped him and he stepped aside. She was already marked up bad enough, the last thing he wanted to do was add bruises to her flesh from holding her in place—if there was one thing Scorpio knew about himself it was that he didn’t know how to be gentle.
“You need to stop moving ‘round. The Cage always has a force field around it, but when they put that fuck in there Reveca reinforced it. She flat out said it would kill a mortal if they attempted to push through it.”
A mortal? Before she could consider his odd words or the fact he made it seem as if ‘mortals’ were in the minority around here, she shook off her curiosity and grasped her anger.
“Talley is out there,” Adair said as she pulled her shoulders back, not believing that even with him shot he was still willing to make her feel insane.
Scorpio held his hand up telling her to stay put. Then texted his first in command and told him what went down. He knew he was sending his boys on a wild goose chase. For days something close to this had happened around the Cage, or the boundary just past where Adair was. When it was investigated nothing was found but dead foliage. The very real theory Reveca had was Talley was indeed hunting Adair, and would not stop until he had her.
The idea of her being a lure was not one that any Son would stomach well, which was why Talon and the others were seeking a better way to trap Talley or whomever was controlling him, while Reveca searched for a way to kill the demon within. Each of those processes took time, time Adair was apparently not willing to give.
One thing was for sure, if Adair left the boundaries of the Boneyard, she’d be attacked. Which was why her little escapade tonight was not only dangerous, but suicidal.
“Talley or no Talley, he can’t come in here.”
Adair grunted as she pushed past him. “As soon as I know you’re going to live I’m going to him, enough is enough.”
She found a towel in the drawer and soaked it in the sink. When she reached to put it on his skin her hands were shaking. She was silently cussing herself. She knew she was seconds away from completely losing her shit. This was all too much, she had slipped too deep into the dark pit of her emotions and now she could have very well killed a man—a Pentacle Son. If Scorpio died, Adair knew she was done for; assault was unforgivable, accident or not.
Calmly Scorpio’s hand landed on top of hers. “You all right, princess?” his voice rasped.
“I’m sorry,” Adair said, swallowing her panic, her fear. “Can you hold this here? I’m going to get help.” She nodded to his phone. “You have a signal? Where’s your bike?”
“I’m fine.”
“No,” her voice trembled. “You’re in shock.”
“I think you are. Tell me how bad the protection field hurt you,” he said, glancing over her once more seeing the burns flaming up on her forehead.
“It didn’t. I’m fine.”
“Bullshit,” he said, reaching his other hand to her forehead. Adair sucked in a sharp breath feeling the sti
ng. “That’s going to be awesome to explain,” Scorpio grumbled.
“Like a gaping hole in your gut is going to be a piece of cake,” she said, reaching for his phone.
Scorpio gripped her wrist. “I’m fine,” he said as he looked at the palm of her hands not sure if the red there was his blood or a burn. When he moved to rinse them in the sink she struggled to get away, knowing every second counted.
Scorpio easily won the fight but lost the towel over his wound. Once the water moved across her palms he figured out she was burned there, too. He was trying to remember the fastest way to aid a mortal right when he heard her gasp. When he looked up she was staring down at his gut, wide-eyed. One glance told him what she saw, his wound almost closed. It would keep opening, though, until he got the bullet out.
“I heal fast,” he said.
With wide eyes Adair moved back, shock in her stare, fear daring to flame within, and she started to shake.
Scorpio clenched his jaw then moved forward, calm peace filling his eyes. “It’s okay. I promise, princess, you’re going to be fine. I’m not going to let anything hurt you.” When he reached her he pulled her into his arms and let her shake for a minute.
He squeezed her a bit tighter when he felt her warm, silent tears landing on his shoulders.
“You’re a Phoenix,” she said in a shaky whisper.
Scorpio bit his lip before he leaned back and looked down at her. He was a Phoenix; he was also what some called a first generation vampire, one that could read emotions so well that most assumed he was a seer as well. “We all rise from the ashes, princess. I’m nothing special.”
He tasted her fear then—seeing it, most of it was empty. What he saw was how the city in general saw the Club from the outside looking in. He watched as others had whispered warnings about not only the Sons but also Reveca to Adair. He heard her friend Miriam warn Adair often over the last few days to not trust a soul, to stay out of trouble.
The more he focused on Adair the more he understood why she saw this ordeal the way she did, why she had little to no trust, and seemed so lost and defensive.