Wounded (Dogs of War MC Book One)

by Rossi, Monica

  That was a lie, his dad smoked like a freight train but would never have done any drugs and he also hated anyone who might be considered a hippie. Going to Burning Man and taking peyote would have been as out of character as a preacher’s wife giving him a blowjob while praising Gaia. It could happen, but it was highly unlikely.

  He nodded to let her know he understood, his mom was one annoying bitch but she was smarter than Satan, “You going to make you one of these?”

  “Nah, it’s too late to eat, I’m watching my girlish figure. Besides I gotta get some rest, I have an appointment to get my hair done in the morning. If I go in with bags under my eyes the other ladies will want to know what I've been up to.”

  “You could have waited until in the morning to come see me.”

  “You’ll be at the shop right? Yeah, no.” She hated going into the shop, even though she’d helped his dad open it in the early 80s. “I’ve seen enough pussy to last a lifetime, and if I forget what one looks like I’ll pull out my compact.”

  “Alright then.”

  She picked up her oversized purse and put a hand on his shoulder before she smacked a loud his on the top of his head, “You should send that vet lady flowers or chocolates or something with a nice thank you card. Men like you don’t get rescued very often, you should appreciate it when it happens.”

  Sidney’s head was going to explode. She was going to die and she hoped it would be soon. “Fran, could you please make that dog shut up? Like right this instant,” she called out from her office.

  “What’s your issue?” Fran popped her head into the room.

  “I just have a really really bad headache. Is there anything else that has to be done today or can it be pushed to tomorrow?”

  “Well Mrs. Turner is coming to pick her cat up and you still need to sign his paperwork. But nothing else that I can think of… Oh and you have a delivery sitting on the front desk.” Her mouth turned down in distaste.

  “Good, I’ll take care of that and then I’m out of here.” The whole day had been a pile of steaming shit and she couldn’t wait to get home and into bed. She wanted to figure out what was happening to her but her brain physically hurt. It would be nice if she could just forget the last week had ever happened. No saving superwolves who turned into sexy ripped men in her kitchen, no phone call from David, and definitely no drinking wine until she passed out. She wasn’t sure if any of it had happened, it was entirely possible that she was having a break from reality. The stress of moving to a new place after having walked in on your fiancé banging another woman coupled with the loneliness she’d been feeling could lead to some sort of mental breakdown. Wolves that big don’t even exist, that should have been the tip-off that something wonky was going on with her brain. Nor do they understand and obey humans and then morph into naked men. It just didn’t happen.

  She walked down the hall to the front desk and picked up Fluffy Turner’s paperwork. That done she saw her delivery, it was a huge basket with a bottle of wine, some gourmet cheese and crackers and an envelope. Her hands trembled as she reached for it, the last thing she needed was another apology from David, she had hoped he’d gotten the message on the phone the other night but obviously not.

  The trembling intensified as she read the note:

  I noticed you were a little low on wine when I left, try not to drink all of this in one sitting though. I’ll be by to pick you up on Friday at 8. Just taking you out for a bite to eat to say thanks for saving my life. Don’t wear nothing fancy, this town hasn’t got any fancy restaurants to take you to.

  “Red”

  She dropped the note on the ground. Could this be real? Really real like as in, reality? No, it couldn’t, she just couldn’t accept it.

  “Hey, you dropped this,” Fran handed her the note.

  “Read it.”

  “What?”

  “Read it and tell me what it says.”

  Fran read the note back to her, the same words she had just read, so unless her hallucination was painfully complex, someone had really sent this to her. “Whose life did you save?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” she turned around went back into her office, shutting the door with a loud click, she was going to need time to process this. Time and lots and lots of wine.

  The day just wouldn’t end fast enough. He’d had bitches yapping in his ear constantly since he’d walked into work that morning. So and so did this, so and so did that. If there was one piece of advice he’d pass onto his son, if he ever had one, it’d be this: Don’t go into the prostitution business. Everybody wanted a piece of him. The girls, the manager, the accountant, everybody wanted to talk to him about something and he just wanted to leave.

  Since his father had started the business, running it had inevitably passed to him when his dad realized his mental capabilities were slipping. They had a storefront called Pawn & Poon that was a front for the real business, a popular whorehouse that employed over 20 girls of all races, ages, sizes, and specialty. And business was good. His father had told him once that the reason he’d gotten into that line of work was simple, “Only the worst business man in the world could fail at selling pussy. It’s in constant demand and short supply.” He’d been right, at least about that. Not only was the whorehouse doing well, since they had expanded the “poon” half of the shop to include adult toys and lingerie modeling it had been raking in the cash too. The Club took a large cut of the profits, but as ‘owner’ he got thirty five percent of everything. Money wasn’t an issue he had to worry about. Whores though, whores he had to worry about.

  “Red! Red, stop,” He guessed that name was going to stick. Sindy, a tall leggy Asian and one of his most profitable girls, was running down the hall towards his office. He’d been trying to wrap everything up so he could leave, he had shit to do.

  “Yeah, what is it Sindy?”

  “Marisol didn’t want to come to you with this but I told her that you needed to know.”

  “Ok.” He was impatient to leave and he didn’t want to spend time sorting out hooker squabbles.

  “While you were gone Trainz came in and said he was going to help run the place until they figured out who was going to take over for you,” she paused, biting her lip.

  “Yeah… and?”

  “Well, we were trying to tell him a few things,” she meant they were yapping at him, “and he hit a few of the girls and told them not to back talk. Chastity still has a black eye.”

  She paused again, sensing she had his full attention now, “Is there more?”

  “Yeah,” she looked down.

  “Jesus, spit it out, you know I’m not going to hit you.”

  “He… he fucked Marisol, even after she said no, and he didn’t pay her for it.”

  Cold fury spread through Red’s belly. “Raped, you mean her raped Marisol.”

  “Yes, he raped her. Right there in front of all of us. She was crying and fighting and everything.”

  “Where is she?”

  “In her room, she’s not going to be able to work for a few days. She says she sore and pretty ripped up.”

  “I’ll take care of it,” she nodded at him and started to leave, “and Sindy. Nobody touches you or any of the girls without your permission. Not one of the guys, not me, not a customer, not anybody. You did the right thing by telling me.”

  He pulled his phone out of the pocket on his shirt and dialed, impatiently listening to the voicemail message, “Donny-O, I need to talk to you ASAP. We’ve got some shit to work out.”

  The assault on Marisol was almost worse than the attack on him. He, at least, had a chance to defend himself. Marisol didn’t have that same opportunity, she was a tiny thing, compared to Trainz it was like a fly battling a grizzly bear. He was going to have to figure out this bullshit and figure it out fast before he did something stupid out of anger.

  But it would have to wait, at least until tomorrow. Tonight he had plans

  Red realized he had spent a lot of the time he sho
uld have been concentrating on work thinking about a certain woman and he was pretty sure he knew what it was drew him to her, other than the very obvious physical appeal. It was her courage. How many women alone would have attempted to save the life of a wolf that was more than twice as big as they were? None that he knew. Not one of these hard as nails women in the pack, who would take a man out at the knees with a baseball bat if the need arose, would have done something like that. She hadn’t had a clue that he was really a man and still she’d risked her life to save an injured creature. Ballsy as fuck, that one.

  He had to admit he also loved her humor, her honest innocent self-deprecating humor. Sure all of his friends and family liked to laugh and have a good time, but this was different. It was her automatic response to find the hilarious in any situation. Even when that asshole had called her and she’d dissolved into broken tears, she’d managed to make him laugh. He also loved that she had talked to, poured herself completely out to, what she thought was a wolf.

  Seeing her like that over some dude, some other dude, had really pissed him off. He knew what the guy had done and the thought finding out who he was and paying him a visit had been rolling around in brain ever since.

  He adjusted his cut in the mirror, the plaid shirt underneath was the best one he owned, and he didn’t have anything other than blue jeans so that’s what he was wearing. He’d started to go buy new clothes to take her out in but had decided against it. He had been too busy with work and so he figured that if she was going to be his old lady she was going to have to get used to holey blue jeans and leather. And she would be his, body and soul, she just didn’t know it yet.

  Sidney had managed to abstain from drinking all the wine in existence and had instead spent her free time on the internet searching for werewolf lore. She was, after all, a scientist at heart and she’d have to test the theory that she wasn’t crazy and someone had actually altered their entire physical DNA and had morphed from oversized canine to human form in her kitchen. She, of course, began her exploration into this conundrum with Google.

  From posters of Jacob to people who held exotic rituals to connect to their inner spirit animal to some frankly disturbing Japanese cartoons she hadn’t found one shred of evidence that werewolves were anything other than a myth. No blurry pictures, no out of focus youtube videos with lots of accompanying capitalized text, nothing.

  She did, however, find one forum on a conspiracy website where people claimed to have seen or been in the presence the creatures. One woman even went so far as to claim she was a werewolf brood mother and that she’d given birth to more than 50 pups in her lifetime. Sidney, had serious doubts about the woman’s integrity, twenty pups she would have believed but fifty? That was just ludicrous.

  She jotted down notes as she browsed, hoping something, anything, would pop out at her. She didn’t know exactly what she wanted to find, she was hoping something that would say with a large blinking red arrow would say, ‘THIS IS WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR’ and then proceed to answer all of her questions.

  Like, ‘How is that physically possible?’ The sheer improbability of it was making her doubt herself all over again. She shut her laptop, she wasn’t getting anywhere anyway, just becoming more frustrated by the minute. The clock said 5:32. She still had to get home and take a shower on the off chance her hallucination did show up to take her out to eat. She’d stop and grab a burger just to be on the safe side.

  “So Sidney… about that basket you got yesterday…”

  “Yeah?” Fran rarely started conversations with her that didn’t pertain to one of their patients, but obviously Miss New In Town Social Pariah getting a gift was just too much for her to handle without an explanation.

  “Who was it from?”

  A hot guy named Red who is can turn into a wolf, “Just a friend.”

  “Oh, is it anyone I might know?”

  So now that I don’t want to talk to you, you decide we’re going to be buds and talk about relationships, “Uh, no I don’t think so.”

  “Cause there are some guys around here you just don’t want to mess with.”

  Well, how about wolves? Are there some werewolves around here you’d like to warn me about? “Yeah, there are men like that everywhere.”

  Fran wavered, she seemed like she wanted to say something else but wasn’t sure how to say it. “Ok. So… uh. Just be careful ok?”

  Well, wasn’t that sweet of her? I’ll be sure to be very careful with the figment of my imagination that I’m going on a date with tonight, “Thanks I will.”

  Sidney’s drive home had actually been pretty pleasant. Since she had adopted the attitude of, ‘I may be nutso or I may not be, so screw it, I’ll just go with it’ she’d felt much better about things. She was even able to laugh when Pandora chose Howl by Florence and the Machine for her. Maybe she was also beginning to anticipate the night a little bit, she’d at least know, one way or another, whether or not the gorgeous man who’d been kissing her in her alcohol induced haze had been real or not. But she wasn’t sure which one she was hoping for. On the one hand he’s real and he’s drop dead gorgeous and he seemed to be interested in her but it also meant that everything she’s thought was a myth might actually be true… and he’d already seen her in every embarrassing position possible. Even sobbing like a heartbroken teenager after the phone call from David. On the other hand he could be imaginary and she didn’t have to worry about werewolves in dark corners but she was crazy and had had an entire week filled with delusional apparitions due to the fact she really needed a BFF. It was win/lose either way.

  Pulling into the driveway she leaned back against the seat for a moment before getting out. It was all downhill from here. All she had to do was get ready.

  Which turned out to be harder than she had expected. The note had said not to dress up, but did that mean they were going to order pizza and eat in their pajama pants while watching movies or was she going to have to actually go out in public? She hovered around her closet, pulling out one thing and then another, finally settling on a long black and white striped maxi dress that she could couple with a sweater if they went out, since it was a little cool out. A summer dress was one of those things that could almost transcend all occasions.

  Showering and primping wasn’t going to take her very long she decided and she hastily dried her hair, she was too pent up to worry about maximizing the highlights on her cheekbones anyway.

  She stopped the hairdryer when she thought she heard a noise outside and checked the clock. Seven o’clock. Too early for him to be there yet, so she dismissed it as a raccoon or possum. Since it was a new subdivision that had clear cut a forest, there were a lot of those around. Sometimes they enjoyed wreaking havoc on her trash can, or scampering across the roof so she’d learned to dismiss noises pretty easily.

  Then the doorbell rang. She looked down at the towel tucked snugly around her and cursed. If he was going to demand a date and give her a specific time to be ready, even going so far as to tell her what to wear, he could have the common decency not to show up early.

  “Hold on just a minute,” she called out, hoping the sound would carry all the way through the door. She tugged her clothes on and spent no more than half a second checking the mirror, half wet hair, no make-up, and a wrinkled dress. Damn the man. Wolf.

  She plastered a smile on her face and took a steadying breath before she opened the door, hoping there wouldn’t be anyone there and she could start planning her recovery… a week at a spa retreat might be in order. Maybe even two.

  Two men she’d never seen before stood there, smiling back at her.

  “Hello darlin’.”

  “Hi, who are – “ one of them grabbed her and spun her around holding her hands behind her back and used a zip tie to keep them there, the other quickly tied a piece of fabric around her mouth, successfully cutting off any other questions she might have had.

  They dragged her kicking to an old beat up blue van that was parked by the
road, her screams muffled against the gag. She fought with everything she had, twisting and writhing, kicking out when she could, but it wasn’t much use. They opened the back sliding door and threw her in.

  A third man was sitting there waiting to catch her. “Nice to meet you Sidney, my name is Checkers, we’re going to have a little talk. And he was the last thing she saw before a black fabric bag was shoved down over her face.

  Red walked up to Sidney’s front door and rang the doorbell. He knew she never used the front door and always went in through the side door, but he thought he’d be on his best behavior during their first date. He wanted her to know that he was a man, not just a dog pawing at the kitchen door to be let in.

  No one came to the door. He waited a few more minutes and rang the doorbell again. Still no answer.

  Maybe she hadn’t liked being told what to do. Maybe he should have called and asked instead. He wasn’t used to dating girls like her, he might have to change up his methods.

  Still, she should be home. Her Jeep was parked in the driveway. He looked in the window beside the front door. Her purse was sitting in the chair, where she normally threw it when she came home.

  Maybe she’d fallen asleep; he walked around to her bedroom window, still open so the breeze could blow through the screen. She wasn’t sleeping, but he could see clothes thrown on the floor, and a towel lying on her bed. That was weird, she was normally very neat, particularly about her clothes. Something wasn’t right.

  He walked back around to the front door and tried the knob, it wasn’t locked. Something was definitely not right. He rushed through the house calling her name but she just wasn’t there.

  She couldn’t have just disappeared. He started pulling his clothes off to shift when he saw the note he’d written her on her bedside table. She’d obviously started getting ready for him when something had happened. Hurrying now he shed the last of his clothes, shifting almost before he got his shirt completely off.