by Sybil Bartel
I’D HEARD THE SICK STORIES of how Stephens fucked every woman in his compound. I’d heard how he’d then hand them over to the other men to be used as pound toys. I knew he was a fucking pendejo. But her biological father?
Rage boiled in my veins, except I didn’t suck in a breath or tense my fucking muscles. I didn’t let her feel an ounce of the raw anger festering because I had her talking, and I needed her to keep it up. I needed every single piece of information she’d throw at me about River Stephens and his fucking cult, because, regardless if he was her father, I was going after him.
“Stephens is your father?” I asked as casually as possible.
She half snorted, half smirked, but she didn’t answer.
I switched tactics. “You never told me what your madre looks like.” I rubber her thigh once then put my hand back on the handlebars. “She got dark hair like yours?” I didn’t even know if her hair was naturally dark or dyed.
“I know what you’re doing.” She shifted against my back. “I’m not that easily manipulated.”
“Who says I’m trying to manipulate you, chica?” That’s exactly what the hell I was doing.
“You want information.”
Damn. I smiled when I answered so she’d hear it in my tone. “Am I that transparent?”
“No, you’re that alpha.”
“You think so?” She had no idea how alpha I could be.
She inhaled as I sped up and passed a few cars. “This is going to be a long fucking ride if you plan on bullshitting me the whole way.”
“Maybe I want a long ride with you, chica.”
She stiffened, and her reply came out mechanical. “That’s not going to happen.”
I didn’t throw words out. I didn’t say shit to women I didn’t absolutely mean. But this woman with her arms around me, the past she was running from, I didn’t have a game plan for this shit. I only knew I wasn’t gonna dick around with her.
“Because you don’t want it to happen?” I asked. “Or because you think it won’t happen?” I wanted her to clarify the distinction.
She didn’t answer.
“I’m not gonna let you slide on this one, chica,” I warned.
“It’s not like you have a choice. You can’t force me to answer your questions.”
I didn’t take offense at her sharp tone. She was a fucking rock star in my book for keeping it together as well as she was. Knowing what’d happened to her, I wouldn’t begrudge her a little attitude. But I would call her on it. “You don’t think I deserve an answer?”
“No one deserves anything in life, simple fact.”
“Not gonna lie, chica. That hurts to hear you say something like that.” I fought for eight years for my country because every single citizen deserved freedom.
She scoffed. “Don’t play the sensitive, enlightened marine for my part.”
“You think I’m not sensitive?” My trigger finger would argue differently.
“I think you’re full of shit as you try to talk your way around to the information you think I’m holding back from you.”
“Dios mio.” What the hell was I supposed to say to that?
“Do you think it’s less offensive when you take the Lord’s name in vain in Spanish?” Her tone completely void of sarcasm, she asked the question like she was one hundred percent curious.
It threw me so hard, my hand on the throttle slipped before I regained composure. I knew I shouldn’t go there, but I did it anyway. “You believe in God?”
“I believe in death. It’s inevitable, unchangeable, and absolute in its finality. That’s why no one deserves anything in this life. You were born. That’s the gift. Life is fleeting, and it’s up to you to make it count. There’s no room for egotistical justifications of what you should or shouldn’t be given. If you’re breathing, you’re lucky. Anyone who doesn’t realize that is an asshole.”
Jesucristo. I shook my head once.
“What?” she demanded.
“Nothing, chica,” I hedged. “Just never thought I’d be having a conversation like this with you.”
Defensiveness bled into her tone. “You asked.”
“I’m not saying I don’t enjoy it.” She was fascinating. Like a beautiful creature so unattainable and broken, you wanted to pick up the pieces but feared breaking it further if you touched it.
“You suck at lying.”
“I haven’t lied to you once.” Unlike her.
“Give it time.”
“I’d like to.” That was the point. “And you still owe me an answer.”
“I don’t owe you shit.”
I didn’t serve my country to garner gratitude. I didn’t go into personal security to get kickbacks. My business wasn’t about some fucked-up high I got from risking my life. And I didn’t live my life thinking I was owed a damn thing. I did what I did because if you could help someone, you fucking stepped up.
But this woman on my bike? She wasn’t gonna understand that. Not now, maybe not ever. Her scarred arm around me, she came from a different world. So I spoke in a language she’d understand. “You’re on my bike. You’re under my protection, and it’s my life you’re risking by standing next to me. You don’t think that deserves an answer to one damn question?”
“You could’ve walked out of Candle’s house. You choose not to. You choose to carry his kill inside his garage and get in my car. But that’s what you do, isn’t it? You help people. That’s your driving force.”
Damn. “I think I underestimated you, chica.”
“Most people do.”
I had to ask. “Does Candle?”
She didn’t hesitate. “No. He knows my limitation.”
“Singular?” I should be so fucking lucky.
“Yes,” she said simply.
“What is it?” I didn’t expect her to answer, but I was quickly learning that expectation with her was a loaded weapon.
“A weakness,” she stated, as if that explained fuck all.
“Which is?”
“My father.”
Alarm and dread edging in, I kept my voice carefully even. “How is he your weakness?”
She was silent. Then, “I’m not going to deny him again.”
My fucking stomach bottomed out, and I didn’t want to ask. “Again?”
Her breathing sounded in my headset. Her hands gripped my waist, and her thighs against my hips flexed. Then she exhaled. “I’m going to give River Stephens exactly what he wants.”
HE DOWNSHIFTED AND IMMEDIATELY CUT across two lanes of traffic, barely making an exit we’d almost passed.
My hands tightened around his waist. “What are you doing?”
He didn’t answer. He sped down the exit ramp, blew through a light, and pulled into the nearest parking lot. Speeding around the side of an office building, he braked at the last minute between a dumpster and a storage shed.
Cutting the engine, throwing the kickstand down, he got off the bike like a man on a mission. I wasn’t alarmed until he yanked his helmet off and haphazardly hung it on the handlebars. Anger contorting his features, he whipped my helmet off and hung it on the opposite handlebars.
Taking my face in his hands, he shifted his legs into a wide stance. “Tell me,” he demanded.
I swallowed past the sudden dryness in my throat. “Tell you what?”
As if he was trying to control his temper, his jaw clenched. “You’re River Stephens’s biological daughter?” He ground out the word biological.
“Yes.” I never had specific confirmation, but I didn’t need to. I looked just like him. Hazel eyes, and my natural hair color, which was a shade of amber brown just like his, was hard to mistake. I was his daughter. If not for the simple fact that I resembled him, then for the fact that I didn’t look anything like any other man in the compound. River was careful that way. He’d never recruited any men who even vaguely resembled him. And if he fathered a son, they were kicked out before their thirteenth birthday. There was no doubt in my mind. I
didn’t need a damn DNA test. I was the offspring of River Fucking Stephens.
André sucked in a breath, then another. “I’ve heard what he does.”
I’d learned a long time ago that people loved to gossip about the infamous south Florida cult terrorizing the Everglades. The Feds couldn’t fully dismantle them and the local authorities kept a healthy distance. Everyone who listened to any kind of news had an opinion about the militia cult that had a stronghold ten times larger than Waco. “So.”
His chest heaved and the muscles in his jaw ticked. Then he ground his teeth together as he unleashed utter shit on me. “He take you?”
It was as if someone kicked me in the chest.
A memory I kept buried deep, so the hatred didn’t consume me, surfaced.
“Are you okay?” His finger traced the branding on my back as his question whispered across my skin.
The flesh between my legs no longer mine, my soul shook. “Yes.” To tell him otherwise would have been cruel.
His exhale confirmed my affirmation. “I tried to—” He stopped midsentence and sat up as if he’d heard something. A second later he was on his feet, pulling his pants on. “Stay,” he whispered in a harsh bark.
Before I could draw the threadbare blanket up to my chest, he was out the door.
“Hunter,” Father’s voice boomed. “Is it done?”
“Yes,” he ground out.
“Then step aside.”
Fear cascaded through my blood like a winter chill. I waited for the door to open but nothing happened.
“Are you denying me access to your quarters?” Father barked.
No response.
An eerie calm descended over Father’s voice. “Brother, you best look at me.”
The thud of a full-grown male dropping to his knees sounded from the small, two-step porch, but still, he spoke no words.
“You think supplication is going to redeem you, hunter?”
Silence, then a slap rang out through the night.
“No answer?”
The sound of flesh hitting flesh and bone, over and over, was unmistakable as a grunt interrupted the nighttime symphony of cicadas.
“Is that how you are going to play this, hunter?”
A muffled thump, and a body fell against the door, rattling it on its hinges.
I cowered on the bed.
“You think not fighting back makes you just?” Father panted. “You think you have the right to deny divine intervention and take for yourself?”
“I claim nothing.” He finally spoke, his voice pained.
A sick laugh carried from the outside. It filled the wood cabin and twisted my stomach. “Yet you stand blocking my entrance, denying my God-given commandment to proliferate this commune.”
Silence.
The sound of a boot connecting with flesh, one, two, three times, made tears drip down my cheeks.
“Answer me!” the holy one demanded.
“I invoke….” His cough was wet. “I invoke my one passage toward you, holy one.” His breath wheezed from his lungs, then his voice came out strong. “I deny you access.”
“You deny me access to my own creation?” Father roared.
“Yes.”
A shocked breath filled my lungs, then the unmistakably brutal connection of heavy boot against vulnerable cartilage made a sickening crunch.
I bit my hand to keep from crying out as I furiously wiped away tears.
“Your one passage is used, hunter. Never again.”
A minute later the door swung open and banged on its frame. His head down, one arm bent awkwardly across his ribs, the usually tall hunter stumbled into his quarters and made for the bathroom as he dripped blood across the floor.
I rose to help him.
His voice cut across the small room. “Leave, Decima.”
“Chica,” André demanded.
Guilt ripped through me, bringing me back from the past and the only defense I had spilled out of my mouth like poison. “Go fuck yourself, Luna.” I swung off the bike.
My feet didn’t even hit the ground before I was locked in strong arms.
Pulling me to his chest, André wrapped both arms around my shoulders and held the back of my head. “Dios mio, chica.” He tightened his grip. “Jesucristo.” A string of rapid-fire Spanish filled my head, but all I caught was I’m sorry, over and over.
My arms at my sides, an overwhelming feeling of shame churning my stomach, I lost my shit. “He didn’t fucking touch me!”
His entire chest deflated with relief as huge hands threaded into my hair. “Pobrecita, I’m so fucking sorry you were born into this shit, but I’m not gonna let you die because of it.”
I shoved him away. “I don’t need your sympathy.” I didn’t deserve it.
His hands at his sides, looking at me like I was a broken china doll, his nostrils flared. “Then how about my rage, chica? Because I have plenty of that.”
He didn’t know rage. I grabbed my helmet in an attempt to derail the conversation. “It’s hot as hell, and my ass is already sore from your rice rocket excuse of a bike. I want to get back on the road.”
His fingers wrapped around my arm before I could put the helmet back on. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?” It wasn’t a question. It was a fucking dare.
His only answer was to stare at me.
My blood boiled and guilt threatened to drown me. “You think I’m going to crack? You think I’m going to fucking fall apart and beg you to take it all away?” Every word got more venomous. “You think I want you to exact my revenge?” I was practically spitting. “Fuck you and your misplaced fucking sympathy. I didn’t grow up weak. I know my fucking place. I know my goddamn purpose. You think I need fixing?” Hatred spilled out from the dark recesses of my brainwashed youth and exposed me for what I was.
Expression stoic, André just stood there.
“That’s what I fucking thought. If you think I’m so goddamn dysfunctional and broken, then you can go fucking fuck yourself. You have no goddamn clue what you’re apologizing for.” My anger and anxiety took on the three-day bender I’d tried to drown myself in, and left me with nothing but venom. Words I had no business saying spilled out of my mouth like this stranger in front of me was the Holy Grail of an audience. Because that was the only thing missing from my complete and utter humiliation of a breakdown. A fucking audience.
“You don’t know the first thing about River Ranch,” I accused. “You don’t know what family is until you live with a hundred people you call brother. Where every woman is your mother, sacrifice is your lover, and you only want one thing besides your assigned duty. You want his attention. One smile, one nod, one second of validation.” I was spitting the words out, unable to stop. “You work your hands to the bone and pray from sunup to sundown that once, just once”—my finger shot up—“he’ll fucking acknowledge you!”
André’s nostrils flared.
“And do you know what happens when he does?” Bitter hatred soured my stomach that a hunter had both condemned me and saved me.
André’s jaw clenched.
“Everyone lavishes you with attention.” Twisted memories of being the one woman River Stephens never got his hands on gripped my soul. I was glad, so fucking glad, but that distinction had come with a price. “It’s your day. You’re the queen. You hold the power. You rise above.” My hands outstretched, my arms went up—with programming, with genetics—with the very fiber of the earth I stood on, because no matter what name you called me, I was River Ranch.
I was River Stephens’s flesh and blood.
I had risen above.
I had the power to make him pay.
I was his weakness, his damnation and his madness. I was the culmination of his single pardon rule he granted every hunter and his blind hatred of any loss of control. River Stephens was going to lose two million dollars, and no one was going to take that away from me.
Not a Cuban, not a dead LC, and not a vanquis
hed brother who couldn’t follow the rules. None of them could undo who I was.
“Chica,” he said quietly.
“Don’t you fucking call me chica. I’m not your pet. You don’t know who I am, and you couldn’t begin to fathom what I’m about.” I wouldn’t be on his goddamn Ducati if he did. “I’m humoring you by going along with your stupid escape plan, letting you think you can save me. I know what you do. I fucking see you. You live to play hero.” I spat every vicious word out because I’d already had a hero and it didn’t save me. “I don’t want to be saved. I don’t need it. I didn’t ask for it, and there’s not a goddamn thing wrong with me. If you think for one second I want River Stephens dead, you’re delusional.”
His chest rose with a sharp inhale.
“That’s right.” I got off on the sweet perversion of every ounce of his shock. “I don’t want you to kill him. I don’t want Candle to kill him. I don’t want a damn thing to happen to him. I want my father coherent and breathing when my head’s brought to him because then my life will be worth something.” Two million somethings. “Two goddamn million dollars that my psychotic, deranged, piece-of-shit sperm donor will have to pay. For me. And that, more than anything in this goddamn world, is perfect fucking justice.”
I threw my helmet back on.
JESU-FUCKING-CRISTO.
I straddled the Streetfighter and put my helmet back on because I didn’t have a fucking clue what to say.
Without a word, she got back on the bike, and her arms came around my waist.
I took zero pleasure in her hands on me. My head fucked, my chest feeling like I took a damn IED blast, I didn’t even know where to go with someone like her. She was so fucking broken, a thousand Hail Marys wouldn’t touch her.
Starting the engine, taking the entrance ramp to 95 South too fast, I thought about every word she’d spewed, but I couldn’t wrap my head around any of it. This woman wasn’t a victim. Despite the injustices she’d suffered, she was a fucking survivor. So why wasn’t she looking for another out? And why the fuck hadn’t Candle killed Stephens?