“Causing mayhem and chaos since 1986,” I muttered under my breath, laughing when she grinned at me.
“You remember my birthdate.”
I arched a brow at her. “As if I could forget.”
When we grinned at each other, Nyx muttered, “Less of the powwow. Mav, what the fuck?”
I rolled my eyes. “Don’t be dense. You can’t be mad at her. It’s impossible. Especially when you know the fucker deserved to be crying like a pig.”
He grunted. “Lodestar, you’re fucking lucky that I’m the one dealing with you and not Rex.”
She shrugged. “I could handle him.”
She could too.
Remember that whole deceptive thing I was talking about?
She might look like she was angelic, but she definitely wasn’t.
That was what the secret training we’d gone through did to a person. Made you look normal when, really, you were armed without carrying a single weapon.
And I wasn’t even talking Krav Maga shit. Our training went deeper.
It was one of the reasons why my back was fucked up, that was the extent of the somersaults we’d been pulling with the shit we’d been trained to do. Evidently, she’d had some extra lessons because even I was in the dark as to what she’d done to make Lancaster respond that way.
I rubbed my chin as I muttered, “Lodestar always has a plan, Nyx. You know that.”
“I know that you sound like you’re admiring her.”
My lips twitched. “I don’t not admire her,” I countered.
“Yeah, well, she broke rank. That’s out of order.”
Lodestar heaved a sigh, like she was bored with the conversation.
She probably was.
Me and her could have a chat without uttering a word. We could just look at each other, like we’d been doing for the past forty minutes, and somehow, an entire argument could go down.
Once upon a time, I’d felt sure she was the woman for me. Life had changed us both, though, the war had fucked us over, and even if we’d been right together back then, we weren’t right now. Essentially because we were both fucked up in the head, and while some types of crazy fit well together—as was the case with Nyx and Giulia—me and Star?
Nope.
“What did you find out?” Nyx asked, after heaving a sigh and sitting on the edge of Rex’s desk.
He folded his arms across his chest as he stared at her, totally expecting her to reply.
Dumbass.
My lips twitched as I rocked back in my wheelchair, just waiting on the show that would be her stonewalling him.
I was curious if he’d get anything out of her, or if she’d share whatever her reason for being here was.
Sure, she’d been on the hunt for Ghost ever since Katina had come into her life, but how exactly Katina had come to her awareness was another matter entirely.
She hadn’t told me, so I doubted she’d tell Nyx.
Of course, that was when you knew she’d always surprise you because she explained.
Fully.
“About eight years ago, I came across a circle of men who were into buying men and women.”
“Men and women?” Nyx echoed. “Like with Ghost?”
She dipped her chin.
“How did you come across them?” I questioned, not trusting her tone.
“I was one of them.” Her lips twisted, but her face, her eyes remained blank. “A mission went bad, I was sent offshore, and my contact screwed me over. Suddenly, I was in a worse hell than before. I’d have preferred to be in the fucking sandbox, getting my ass blown up over what I went through, but I eventually got sold, and that was how I escaped.”
Nyx’s eyes flared wide, but that was nothing compared to the crushing pain in my chest at her easy acceptance of what had happened to her.
“Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”
“What was the point? By the time I could get in touch with you, I was out and free to move again. There’s no point in dwelling on it, Mav. That’s something you never figured out how to do. Shut shit off.”
“You really shut shit off,” I mocked, “didn’t you? You’re still coming after them, even if you don’t focus on the why.”
She shrugged. “I had to make them pay. Not for what I went through.” She lifted her head, the move loaded with pride that wasn’t feigned. “I’m a soldier. I was born to deal with worse. But the women there? They weren’t. Women like Ghost, Tatána, and Amara…easily broken. Easily sold and forgotten and left behind.
“They fucked up when they took me though. I wasn’t the average captive, and I made them pay for that mistake.”
“You killed the man who bought you?”
She smiled, and that smile would have sent shivers down my spine if I was an ordinary man.
Luckily for her, Nyx wasn’t ordinary either, and we both just stared at her, aghast and captivated by the story she was telling.
Not because it was a nice one, but because we were finally getting answers.
She’d been here a little over a month, but when you dealt with someone like her, someone with her skills, not knowing their motives was a weakness in our defenses.
That was how she’d gotten to Lancaster before us.
We didn’t know her motivations, so we didn’t know how to predict her movements.
Some people you could figure it out, but as she’d already said, Lodestar wasn’t ‘some people.’
“He paid, don’t you worry, but it wasn’t enough. I was very angry toward the end,” she murmured, like it was a shopping trip that had gone awry. “I needed to make them all suffer, so I started doing some digging—”
“How?”
Her lips twisted into a grin that held no humor. “I had a fortune by that point.”
I knew she’d earned a lot of money with her hacking, but the way she smiled revealed a secret she wasn’t sharing yet.
“I used every cent to figure out how to dismantle the ring, and to break it apart from the inside out, I needed to annihilate the major players. I’m so close, guys. So fucking close.” She released a breath, and when she stared at us, she was alive with a vibrant energy that made me feel like she was the sun beaming at me.
“I convinced my buyer to marry me,” she continued, and on anyone else, I wouldn’t have believed it, but with Lodestar, I could totally see it happening. “When he died, accidentally, I inherited it all. When it put me into some circles that would enable me to figure out who ran things, Donavan Lancaster’s name kept popping up, and I was left with no alternative other than to find him.
“When I did, I came across the Fieris, then a son, and all these women’s names of purchases they’d made along the way. I figured that the Fieri Famiglia were the ones behind the ring, a circle that spanned the globe, and I knew I needed to get closer.” She scrubbed a hand over her face. “When I was still hunting down names, I found out I’d been looking in the wrong area, and it tripped some wires that brought me here.”
“How did you find Katina?” Nyx asked.
She nodded at me. “Already shared that with the class. Through her mom. She was like me. One of the lucky ones.”
I wasn’t sure how being married to your purchaser made you lucky, but if she hadn’t been stored in the pit that gave Ghost nightmares, I could easily accept how a woman might consider herself fortunate.
Pondering her words, I inquired, “What did Lancaster tell you?”
“Essentially, that the Fieris are behind the ring. I have confirmation at long last.”
“What’s the end game?”
“Making them burn, and everyone who’s associated with their skin trade.”
“I can dig that,” I rasped. “I’ll help too.”
She smirked at me. “You have been helping, you just didn’t know it.”
I grinned. “True.”
Nyx shook his head. “Why not tell us that from the start?”
“Because your interests and mine aren’t aligned. Sure
, you want the Famiglia gone, but when I came here, I had to see for myself that you weren’t allied with them. It’s only a quirk of fate that you’re friendly with the Five Points and not the Fieris, after all.”
“She has a point,” I conceded.
Nyx shuddered. “We’d never be a part of anything that involves the skin trade.”
“True, but she couldn’t know that, could she?”
Nyx sniffed. “Lodestar, do you know about the tattoos on my back?”
She beamed at him. “I do, and I think they’re the best part about you.”
He twisted around to arch a brow at me. “There you go—she should have known all along we’d never be involved in anything like that.
“Lodestar, I’ll share this with Rex, and it will make him soften up on you, but if you want to speak with Donavan again, then you need to wait until Rex okays it.”
“Of course. But don’t worry about it,” she replied calmly, her shoulder hitching. “I got what I needed, and anything you find out, I know I’ll be able to access—”
“How will you be able to do that?”
She waved a hand. “I figured out the key to Mav’s coding a long time ago.”
I scoffed at her arrogant statement. “What if I upgraded shit a year or two ago?”
She smiled at me, but it was a beatific one, not even smug, almost loving. “Oh, Mav, don’t be silly.”
I had to laugh, even if she pissed me off by dismissing my skills. Nyx’s brow furrowed at me, and I rolled my eyes.
“Mav’s coding is solid,” she assured Nyx, sensing his doubt, “but I just know him too well, that’s all. It will be more than sufficient to defend against some of the best hackers in the world.”
“But you’re the best, huh?” Nyx queried drolly.
She beamed a smile at him. “Yes. I am.”
“Until someone whooped your ass and sent you running,” I pointed out smugly—hey, even if she wasn’t, didn’t mean I couldn’t be.
She blew a raspberry at me, but that alone told me I was speaking true.
I let it go, let her go, in fact, and when she drifted out of the office, leaving Nyx and me to discuss what he had to say, I arched a brow at him when he muttered, “She’s not lying, is she?”
“No. Lodestar rarely lies. She’ll hedge, but never outright lie.”
He snorted. “She’s a tricky bitch.”
I shrugged, because that wasn’t a lie.
“I wish she had been lying,” Nyx rumbled, his mouth tightening.
“Honestly, I wish so too, but she wasn’t. She just processes things differently. She can switch stuff off in a way I’ve never come across before.”
“She’s probably a psychopath,” Nyx muttered, which made me laugh.
“Well, she’s in the right place then, isn’t she?”
His lips formed a reluctant smile. “Did you secure Lancaster?”
I nodded. “Of course. Had a couple of brothers go over the Fridge with a fine-tooth comb, made sure he was caged in nice and neat.”
“Good. I have no desire to go there tonight.” He stood up, stretched, then rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s been a fucking bastard of a few days, Mav.”
“When ain’t it that way?”
He rolled his eyes. “True.”
When he yawned, I told him, “You should get some rest. Things will start early in the morning.”
“What kind of things?”
“The screams.”
My words had him tensing. “Huh?”
I shrugged. “Whatever she did to him, it doesn’t stop. Every now and then, he bursts into sporadic screams, so after a long night of being left on his lonesome, it will only get worse.”
Nyx frowned. “Can they hear him on the road?”
I shook my head. “No. I checked. But if anyone goes behind the cabin, maybe they can.”
“That’s our land too though.”
I nodded. “Yeah, they’d be trespassing.”
“And trespassers will be shot,” he muttered on a low growl.
“Exactly. I’m not worried.” I laughed when he sniffed. “But yeah, get some rest because the fun will start again in the morning.”
He sighed, then muttered, “Night, brother. It’s good to be home.”
As he made it to the door, I asked, “Any updates?”
“Would have told you if there were any.”
I let him go, accepting that answer, even as I pulled out my phone and scanned the records that were being updated into the system at the hospital where Stone and Steel were being treated.
He wasn’t wrong.
Nothing had been updated in the past forty minutes, and I’d been checking since I’d learned that Steel was stable and that Stone’s emergency surgery was about to begin.
I tensed up, hating the lack of news, and instead of getting mad like I was inclined, I sighed and decided to do as I’d told Nyx—get some rest.
It wasn’t that late, only eleven, but our days and nights were all fucked up here. We slept when we could, got the rest when we needed it, and right now, I needed it.
After rubbing my eyes, I stuck my hands on the wheels and rolled out from behind the desk and toward the door.
I yanked it open, irritated as always that Rex hadn’t replaced it with a swing door years ago, but it hit me then that I hadn’t been using my crutches for a good long while.
Hell, I didn’t even know where the fuckers were.
Pondering their fate, I made it into the hall, only scraping two of my knuckles rather than all of them like usual, and made my way to the ramp that led down to the basement.
It was long, about the length of the building, but it was the only way I could access that part of the clubhouse. I slept in the attic, which I reached through the elevator that had been installed in the basement.
By the time I was there, my heart was pumping because it was like a fucking maze.
I knew the brothers had done it on purpose, trying to force me into moving, into rehab, but I was a stubborn bastard and I did what I wanted when I wanted it.
When I was in my room, I hauled my ass out of the chair and onto my bed.
The room was hot, but then it always was, thanks to the many computers I had running. Even constant AC didn’t do shit, but I was used to it. I even liked it.
As much as I liked the glow from the screens as they ran their tests, constantly processing, so that the hum of the machines was as much of a lullaby to me as a song from my mother’s lips.
Not that she’d sang for me often, but when she had? I’d always drifted off to sleep as restful as I ever had been.
The memory of her, that long blonde hair that had always made me think she was an angel, the blue eyes that always seemed to know when I was lying, the smile that could make my heart quicken with happiness, I felt my eyes drift closed, happy, for once, as I realized that my mom and Ghost were kind of similar in appearance.
Not in a way that was creepy, just in that angelic way.
Looking at Ghost was like looking at someone with a pure soul. Just touching her made me feel like I was staining her, but she never seemed to mind, and I wasn’t about to argue with her over it. I never pushed shit, never would, because I didn’t need to, but hell, I loved just holding her hand, letting my fingers clasp her wrist.
The touches were innocent, but each one was proof of a growing trust between us, and that meant more to me than her spreading her legs.
After I fell asleep, a while later, the slight crick of my door opening warned me that someone had come in.
I always slept light, had ever since my time overseas, and though I tensed up, I played opossum, wanting to know who’d sneaked in before I let my anger loose.
All the snatch knew to stay out of my room. At first, when I’d made it back home, they’d all thought they could cure my PTSD with fucking blowjobs, and it had been a rough time in getting them to realize that sex did not heal mental breakdowns.
So, that someone w
as stealing into my room, sneaking into my space when they knew they were supposed to back the fuck off?
Well, it didn’t make me a happy man. Let’s put it that fucking way.
I waited to see what they were doing, wondered even if they were going to try and check out the work I had open on my computer, then I felt the whisper of a hand on the bed sheets, and the scent hit me square in the nose.
Ghost.
I wanted to tense up, wanted to ask her what the fuck she was doing, but my heart was pounding with excitement.
This was the first time she’d come to me, ever, at night, and even though I knew not to get excited, my dick started to ache.
For a second, I didn’t even recognize that burn of need.
It had been so long since I’d felt it, and even though it came in sporadic waves when she did something that managed to break through the fog that disconnected me from my sexuality, this time?
It hurt.
So badly that it stole my breath away.
My heart pounded, roughly and unevenly, making me feel like I’d been working out, and how I managed not to utter a sound, I’d never fucking know, but I did it.
I managed it.
Then she was there.
Her body lying against mine.
She moved as softly as a church mouse, drifting against me in a way that, with any other man, they’d never have known that she’d sneaked into their room, but I wasn’t a regular man.
I was anything but ordinary.
When her hand came to rest on my belly, I felt my cock twitch into an erection that, again, hurt so badly, it was more painful than pleasurable.
I gulped when she settled into me, her body relaxing against mine in a way that told me she was trying to see if she could do this. Testing if she could be near me.
When her breathing evened out, I figured her nerves had died, even if she wasn’t asleep yet.
“Why are you here, Ghost?” I inquired softly, so softly that it rivaled even her whispery voice.
She didn’t tense, which told me she knew I’d awoken at her arrival, but she mumbled tiredly, “I didn’t want to be alone tonight.”
I wasn’t averse to being used as a mattress, but I needed answers. Sometimes, making her talk was the only way I knew how to bridge the gap between us. A little like with Lodestar, I could look at her, communicate with her without having to utter a word, but I didn’t know her as well as Star. I hadn’t served with her overseas, seen her broken, seen her victorious with a mission’s success. I didn’t know all her weaknesses and her strengths, didn’t know how to balance those with my own flaws and qualities.
Steel: A Dark MC Romance (A Dark and Dirty Sinners’ MC Book 4) Page 19