THE DEVIL’S BRIDE

by April Lust

  At the top of my list was taking Clara to her apartment tonight so we could start sorting her things out for the move. I was going to ask her to move in with me later, once we had some time alone, and I was pretty sure she was going to say yes.

  Chapter 29

  Clara

  While Mason was downstairs breaking all of the bad news to other members, mothers, widows, and former old ladies, I found myself back in the second-floor bathroom. It was nice to see the shower curtain had been put back on the rod over the tub, and the linen cabinet had been restocked.

  I stared at my ratty hair and tired eyes in the bathroom mirror. I wanted nothing more than to crash in one of the bedrooms along the hallway, but I needed to patch myself up from all the glass and clean myself up from the grass and dirt along the side of the road. It had been a long night, and my body could still feel every minute of it.

  I ached from head to toe. Muscles I didn’t know I had were in sheer agony. I alternated between hot and cold water on my face to stay awake. I couldn’t imagine what Mason was going through downstairs, having to tell everyone their friends, sons, husbands, and lovers were dead.

  I stripped down and turned on the hot water for the shower, getting it as hot as it would go. Once steam started to fill the bathroom, I knew it was hot enough to get in and wash the long night away. I had to keep moving. If I stopped moving, even to lie down after my shower, I knew there were things that happened overnight that would haunt me. I wasn’t ready to face those things.

  Knowing I’d almost met my fate, the hot shower felt that much better. It was the first shower I’d taken alone in a while, but I needed to take this one alone. I needed to make sure I was all right before I tried to connect with anyone, especially the man who shot the only father I’d ever known, the father who was planning on killing me.

  I leaned against the tile and breathed in the steam, letting the heat cure my insides the way it was my skin and muscles. I considered standing in the tub until Mason came to check on me, but after washing and rinsing my hair, I realized it could take him a while to finish with the people downstairs.

  I cut the water and listened to it drip in the tub as I grabbed a towel to dry off and wrap myself with. The silence in the bathroom was like the silence in the night. It quickly became deafening. Unable to take it, I opened the bathroom door and wandered to one of the rooms where I could lie down for a while and relax.

  I kept the towel on. I had no clothes. I hadn’t planned on coming back to HQ after leaving Mason’s apartment with Skull and his goons. I was supposed to be picking up a new assignment.

  In reality, I was supposed to be dead.

  I didn’t lie down. I just sat at the edge of one of the bed and stared at the hardwood floor under my feet. The room didn’t feel real anymore. Nothing did. Everything was so quiet all of a sudden. None of the energy I normally felt in this place was present. There was no excitement, no sexual tension, no intrigue. It was quiet in every sense.

  I stared at the door and waited for Mason to come up, prayed for Mason to come up. I needed something I knew was real beyond a shadow of a doubt. I had to have something to cling to until I could find my way back to the real world from wherever my brain and heart had gone after the shootings last night.

  Alec hadn’t even come up to check on me, and he was usually my caretaker in this place. He was the one who got stuck babysitting. I wasn’t going to run this time. I wasn’t going to pull one over on him again. I had to admit, though, it had been pretty funny fooling that gullible kid.

  I laughed to myself, bringing back some of my energy to the room. It felt good to laugh. I started really laughing. It wasn’t that pulling one over on Alec had been that funny. It was amusing, but it wasn’t hilarious. I was cackling. My body and soul needed the release, and I gave into it, realizing it was either laughing or crying.

  Or both, as my hysterical laughter turned to sobs. I buried my face in my hands and sobbed, letting out all of the fear, and anger, and sorrow, and fucking disappointment that had been growing for far longer than the last twenty-four hours. The disappointment had been there for years, I realized.

  So many things had gone wrong to lead me there. I didn’t even know where it started anymore. I just knew it was okay to cry now because I was finally at the end of it. Finally, after all the years of physical and emotional self-abuse just to try to make a life out of what I was doing, I could let it all go.

  It was fitting, I thought, that I was letting it go by myself, alone, in a strange room in a strange building, where a man I had just met was handling his criminal organization downstairs while I poured my emotions out into my hands and onto his floor. Some things would never change. My independence was one of them, and that had probably been the main thing that had led me out of the house and into the streets.

  I wondered if I was going to be giving up my independence by letting Mason take me out of this life. It was a strange, sudden thought to appear in my head. Was I settling by letting him take care of me? Was I going to be missing out on anything? Was my past suddenly going to be in vain?

  God, I wished he would come through that door. I needed to run my concerns by him. I needed to know everything was okay. I needed to know I was still here and not stuck in some purgatory somewhere waiting on the rest of my life to begin even though it never would.

  My head was all kinds of jacked up. Mason represented something solid and grounded that I could wrap my head around, putting everything else back in place for me.

  “Hey, everything okay up…” Mason started as he poked his head in the room, stopping himself when he saw what I was wearing. “You didn’t bring any clothes.”

  “Yes, and no,” I told him, laughing again. This time it was a real laugh, a healthy laugh.

  “Well, I’m glad you’re okay,” he said tenderly as he came into the room and closed the door behind him.

  I could see in his green eyes that he was troubled despite his attempt at covering it up. It must have been hard to break that kind of news to that many people at once, but when MC members didn’t come home, it made sense that there would be questions.

  He sat down on the bed and took me in his arms, pulling me against his chest.

  “I’m sorry,” he said above me. “I’m sorry for using you to get to Skull, and I’m sorry things went the way they did last night.”

  I touched a finger to his lips. “No, you were right the whole time. I’m the one who should be apologizing. I’m sorry I alerted Skull to your plan to approach him at his hideout. I should have let you go through with that, without expecting anything different from what you were planning on doing anyway. He was going to kill me, Mason,” I told him.

  “I know. That’s what I was trying to tell you.”

  “I saw that when three more men in black suits hopped out of his car to pick me up at your apartment, but by then it was too late. And he told me all about his plan to murder me once he got me to the cabin,” I explained to him.

  “I’m sorry, Clara,” Mason said, and I could feel his sympathy in the way he held me. “The reason we followed you was so he wouldn’t have the chance to do it. It was pretty obvious when he sent them after you at the park that he was going to try to kill you. I couldn’t let that happen.”

  “I know,” I said with a thin smile. “Thank you, Mason, for standing by your word and protecting me.”

  “Don’t thank me, baby,” he said. “I’d do it all over again. I’d try to do it differently,” he chuckled, “but I’d do it all over if I had to.”

  I hugged him tightly and buried my face against the dirty, sweaty t-shirt he was wearing.

  “We need to get you home so you can get a shower,” I teased.

  “And so you can put some clothes on,” he played along.

  I grabbed the top of my towel and pulled it open, letting it fall around me on the bed.

  “You mean you don’t want me to walk around like this?” I asked.

  “No, I don’t mind t
hat at all. I just figured you wouldn’t want everyone here at HQ to see you like that.”

  “You’re probably right, but I don’t mind if you see it.” I put my arms back around him and kissed him.

  While our lips and tongues worked together, I ran a hand along his strong jawline, and he pulled me down to the bed with him. We lay together like that for an eternity, our lips locked, our bodies close, our hands touching each other gently, softly.

  He caressed my back lightly, careful not to hurt any of my bruises or tender spots.

  Our lips slowly parted, but I wasn’t ready to be done kissing him. I could still feel his mouth against mine as we moved back from each other.

  “Mason,” I called to him. My voice sounded like it was coming through a dream.

  “Yes, baby.” His hand rested along the small of my back.

  “I need to tell you something.” I opened my eyes and met his already staring at me.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “I love you,” I told him.

  His body tensed for a moment. He stared at me without saying anything, and I knew I’d just screwed up. I’d just gone and told him too soon how I felt. Now he was going to run, and I was going to be alone again. It didn’t even feel like he was breathing.

  “Say it again,” he finally said.

  “I love you, Mason,” I repeated.

  He kissed me deeply and held me close to him. “I love you, too, Clara,” he said as he pulled back from our kiss.

  “I’ve been wanting to say it, but I didn’t think you would have believed me,” I confessed clumsily, like a schoolgirl.

  “Me, too,” he said sweetly. “I was convinced you wouldn’t believe me if I had told you.”

  “You had every reason to be suspicious of me,” I told him.

  “Me, too, baby. Me, too,” he added. “I had my eyes so set on getting Skull that I almost missed you altogether,” he confessed to me. He ran a hand along my cheek.

  “You didn’t miss me. I promise. I’m right here, and I’m not going anywhere ever again.”

  Chapter 30

  Mason

  Back at my apartment, Clara threw on one of my dress shirts and sat outside on the balcony with a glass of whiskey while I climbed into the shower. She insisted I needed to take this one alone. She told me how helpful it had been for her to wash away everything that had just happened alone and said I wouldn’t regret it.

  She was right. The heat eased my sore muscles and unlocked all the tension in my shoulders and back from fighting with Skull and his goons the night before. It eased some of the tension from having to tell so many people that their friends and loved ones hadn’t made it back.

  People didn’t seem to mind that their loved ones were involved in criminal organizations when the money was coming in, but as soon as something happened, we became the worst people on the face of the planet. Yes, what we did was dangerous. It was dangerous every day. And it was illegal, so there wasn’t a whole lot we could about it when things went south. We could take revenge, but there was only so much revenge to be had. For twenty of my men, ten of Skull’s men died, including Skull himself.

  It didn’t seem just, but that was the best ending we could have hoped for. Skull had to die.

  Shit like that made people step down from their posts. The thought kept occurring to me, which bothered me a lot. I wasn’t about to step down from being the president of Storm’s Angels. The president before me hadn’t been worth mentioning. He had been happy to sell a little dope here and there, trade and sell some guns that had been scrubbed clean, and start as many bar fights as he possibly could. I had turned Storm’s Angels into a legitimate organization, and with Skull’s death, we were about to expand. It was going to be a major expansion in our business to take on what he left behind.

  I couldn’t walk away from that. The expansion was my responsibility. I had brought us to that point, and I was going to oversee taking us all the way through it.

  The most stressful aspect of dealing with losses like we had just sustained was having to slow down in the process. I had to take it easy because we’d just faced a major setback while also experiencing a huge gain. If I didn’t proceed carefully, I would lose it all.

  I calmed my nerves so I could go join the beautiful, sexy woman waiting for me on my balcony. As the last little bit of work left my tired, beaten body, I shut off the shower and listened to the water dripping in the tub.

  The dripping seemed to cover a profound silence, the dark silence on the side of the interstate in the middle of the night when we’d stopped shooting at each other. That silence seemed to be following me. It wanted to be addressed, but I couldn’t remember anything about it other than the fact that there were places in my memory where it seemed to steal the sound and the voices from me.

  I tucked it away. I figured it was one of those things I had to handle on my own, alone, like Clara had said, but I wasn’t alone right now. I had a guest to entertain.

  I grabbed a pair of boxers from my dresser and pulled them on over me before walking into the kitchen to fix my own glass of whiskey. Then, I joined the beautiful Clara Burton on my balcony.

  It was already the afternoon. The day was moving quickly past us. I sat down with her at the table and looked out over the city with her while we sipped our drinks.

  “You need to catch up,” she said playfully. “I’m already on my second one.”

  “Well, I can make that happen,” I told her, taking mine down in one gulp. I set the bottle on the table and poured another glass.

  “You came prepared, I see.”

  “I did,” I told her, turning to look back out over my city. “I figured we would want more.”

  “Yeah, I think the word is need. We’ll need more.”

  I nodded, drinking to her assessment.

  We sat in silence and sipped after that. Neither one of was wanted to talk. It was enough to just be there together. We’d gone through so much together that there was no point in using words just then anyway.

  The golden afternoon light reflected off some of the glass towers standing in town. We were above most of the worst glares. We watched as birds flew by in clouds beneath us. Up where we sat, we couldn’t hear the streets below. The city seemed vacant, quiet, and peaceful. It was a great escape from everything.

  “It’s a beautiful view,” Clara finally said after a few minutes of silence.

  “It really is, isn’t it?” I agreed. “I love it.”

  “I do, too, Mason. I really do. The city is gorgeous from up here,” she continued.

  I took a deep breath and long drink from my glass, letting any apprehension I had burn off as the whiskey flowed down my throat. “How would you like to have this view every day?” I asked her.

  “Who’s to say the view from my apartment isn’t better?” she asked.

  “I’m serious, Clara.”

  “I am, too, Mason. You haven’t even seen my apartment,” she teased, but I hadn’t.

  We had spent all of our time here in my apartment. There had never been any discussion of going to her place. It might have been nice to give it a shot, I found myself thinking. “We should go to your apartment some time,” I told her.

  “Only to get my things,” she said flatly.

  I shot her a puzzled look.

  “Yeah, I was just kidding. Your apartment is way cooler. You’ve got a much better view than I do. I’m sandwiched between two old apartment buildings, so when I walk outside, I get to see my neighbors across the street.” She laughed.

  “My neighbors are at the tops of other buildings,” I told her, holding my hands out over my city. It really was going to be my city once we started consolidating after Skull’s collapse.

  “You know what I would really like?” she asked abruptly.

  “What’s that?” I poured myself another glass.

  “A house,” she said.

  I almost choked on my drink.

  “Or not,” she added, laughing a
t me.

  “A house?” I asked.

  “Yes, a house, Mason. Something we could call our own. Something our kids could inherit from us.”

  “What’s all this 'we,' 'our,' 'kids' stuff?” I asked.

  “Oh, am I moving too fast for you, Mason?” she asked with a sly smile on her face.

  “Not really, but it may be a little abrupt, I think,” I admitted.

  “Oh, well, I guess we’ll talk about it some other time,” she said dismissively, turning to enjoy her whiskey and look over the edge of the balcony again.