Extreme Curves (Dangerous Curves Book 7)

by James,Marysol

  “Ladies,” Dallas said, extending his hand. “You’re safe. C’mon now.”

  Tank was on the other side of the vehicle, also offering a helping hand. The women climbed out, knees shaking from shock, barely noticing the falling-down building that they were being ushered into. Dallas slammed the sliding steel door, then stood right in front of it, peering through a small window to one side. He looked at Tank, gave him a thumbs-up.

  “OK,” Val said once they were inside, gesturing at the circle of chairs. “Everyone sit. Take a few deep breaths.”

  Sarah, Naomi and Gabi joined Mirrie and Maria, who were both holding what looked like untouched cups of coffee. They all looked at each other now, saw the same look of numb terror and stupid incomprehension that they were sure they were wearing.

  “So.” Val sighed. “King told us to move you.”

  “They found us?” Mirrie repeated her question from almost thirty minutes earlier. “The Fallen Angels?”

  Just then, Tank’s phone rang. He answered, and everyone watched as his face turned gray with anger. He turned his broad back on the group, walked away, kept his voice low, then disconnected. When he turned back again and looked at the other bodyguards, they just knew.

  “Aw, shit,” Curtis muttered. “Fuck those assholes.”

  “What?” Sarah said, noticing that Val, Curtis, and Dallas all looked weary and resigned. “What’s happened?”

  “It was the other one?” Dallas said quietly, but the women knew that it wasn’t a question. That Dallas was already light-years ahead of them, and that he knew what had gone done. “How bad is it?”

  “Oui,” Tank replied. “It was the other safe house, not us. And it’s pretty fucking bad.”

  **

  Spider lay sprawled out on the hard, freezing-cold ground, his face in the snow, dimly listening to Jack’s cell phone insistently ringing. He had his hands over his ears, his eyes shut tight. It was hard to breathe, partly because he’d just seen Honey, Jack, and Tex shot right in front of him; partly because Ace was covering him with his own body. A huge, strong hand pulled his own hand off one ear, and he shuddered as the ringing finally stopped.

  “You OK?” Ace whispered harshly, his breath hot on Spider’s cold cheek. “Talk to me, sweetheart.”

  “I’m…” Spider turned his head slightly to look into those dark eyes. “I’m OK. You? Are you hit?”

  “No.”

  “But the others… Tex…”

  “I know.” Ace was grim but calm. Shoot-outs were nothing new for him, after all, and he was already plotting, planning, weighing the odds. “It looks bad.”

  “Can we help them?”

  “We need to get out of here,” Ace said, thinking about the fact that the gunshots had come from the direction of the woods, wondering if they had any choice but to cross that open field to the road. Surely King and his people would be coming from that direction. “We need to try, at least.”

  Spider turned his head the other way now, to look at Honey and Jack and Tex. They were all unconscious – at least Spider hoped they were – but Tex was by far the worst off. He’d been shot in the face, and even though he was still breathing, he clearly needed help, and damn fast. Jack was also bleeding heavily, and if Honey was, Spider couldn’t see it. But she’d been hit, that much was for sure. She’d been hit first, actually, just as she’d reached the driver’s side of the SUV, and Spider had watched from less than five feet away as she’d gone down.

  Jack and Tex had been shot seconds later and almost simultaneously, just as they’d been sprinting towards Spider and Ace, shouting at them to return to the safety of the farmhouse. Spider knew that for the rest of his life, he’d remember Tex’s gorgeous face disappearing in an explosion of red, Jack’s large body falling to the icy ground as if every bone had just been sucked out of it.

  “Liam?” Ace was pushing himself up and off him now, and as always when he did that, Spider’s body missed his hot, hard weight. “You ready to run, baby?”

  “I guess.” Spider sat up, amazed that he wasn’t even slightly injured from Ace’s wild, almost violent tackle to the unyielding, unforgiving ground. “But which way?”

  “Yeah, Cuddy… which way?”

  The voice came from their left, hidden behind the high roof of the SUV, and both men spun on their knees to face its owner. Ace’s heart stopped dead in his chest when the group of five men came around both sides of the vehicle, surrounding them, holding guns – and it started up triple-time when he saw who was standing at the front of the group of three men on the left, as the leader.

  Oh, shit, oh, no. Not Joker Fucking Kane. Anyone but him, please God. Even Nails is a better choice.

  “So,” Joker hissed. “Which way, you cocksucker?”

  “Joker.” Ace forced himself to his feet, forced a note of calm into his voice. “Please, man… just me, OK?”

  “Just you what?”

  “Take just me.” Ace held up his hands in a gesture of submission and compliance, and stepped between Liam and Joker. “Take me, do whatever the hell you want to me. Do your worst, and do it until you feel like you’ve got whatever you need from me, and it’s all out of your systems. But leave Liam alone. Let him go.”

  “You really think we’ll do that?”

  “Yeah.” Ace stepped a bit closer to Joker, covering Spider a bit more. “I really do.”

  “Why do you think that, Cuddy?” Joker said, and he sounded genuinely interested in the answer. “Why do you think for one fucking second that we’d spare your little fag friend here?”

  “Because you know that nothing would hurt me more than knowing that he’s out here, alone and scared and worrying for me. You also know that he’s not the point, and he never has been.” Ace cocked his dark head at his ex-brother. “Your beef is with me, and you got some bad shit planned for me, and I know that damn good and well. You really going to let yourselves be distracted from all the fun you got waiting for me by some random guy that you don’t know, and don’t give a damn about?”

  “You’re not wrong.” Another voice came from behind him, and Ace spun the other way now, shoving Liam behind him again when he saw Nails. “It might have been fun to slap your bitch around a little bit, no doubt about that… but as you said, that’s a distraction and a delay to what we really want to do.”

  “So let’s get on with it,” Ace growled. “I’m ready.”

  “No,” Spider said now, his voice trembling. “No, Ace…”

  “It’s OK, sweetheart,” Ace said gently, and every Fallen Angel winced in disgust at the endearment, not that he gave a flying fuck what these morons thought. This was going to be the last time that he spoke to Liam, that he knew as sure as he knew Liam’s breath in the dark, and he was going to say everything that had to be said, homophobic MC dickheads be damned. “I’ve always known that it was going to come to this, no matter how well I hid, or how many of King’s people were standing around me. This is my fate, Liam, you get me? It’s how it has to be, and even though I’ve fought damn hard to put it off this long, the clock has run out on me. It’s all been borrowed time, and now I’ve got to face the music for betraying the men that I considered my family.”

  He gestured around them, remembering a time when the men now intent on killing him had killed for him.

  “These men, Liam. They took me in when I was eighteen and broke and homeless and robbing corner stores for food money. They let me patch in, they gave me work, they had my back. After years and years of support and loyalty, they gave me authority and they trusted me to lead – and I fucked them over, over and over again. I made a mockery of almost twenty-five years of being a part of the Fallen Angels family, and the bill has come due on that. I’ve been waiting for this day for a long, long time, and I’m ready.”

  “Oh, no, you’re not,” Nails said quietly. “No way you can be ready for what’s go
ing to go down.”

  “Oh, God.” Spider was shaking like a leaf, imagining Ace’s body broken into a hundred pieces. “Ace…”

  “Nah, baby,” Ace said, and his smile was almost peaceful. “It’s OK.”

  “How can you say that?” Spider’s voice rose. “How is it fucking ‘OK’?”

  “Because of what I’ve done with the borrowed time that King gave me.” Ace reached for Spider’s hand. “I’ve used my extra time to get a second chance with you. To make it right with you. To apologize to you, and make you happy. You think I’m going to regret that, even for one second?”

  “I –” Spider began, but Ace cut him off. He had one last thing to say before he was taken away forever.

  “I love you,” Ace said, almost harshly. “I’ve always loved you… I loved you before I fucking knew you, sweetheart. Before I saw you in that bar drinking alone, before that night at the lake, before we watched all those sunsets and moonrises and shooting stars, all curled up in the same bed. You’re the best, most amazing thing that has ever happened to me, and promise me that you’ll never ever forget that. Thank you for giving me all that you did – you made me a better man, Liam.”

  “I love you too,” Spider said, clutching Ace’s hand. “I –”

  “Alright, enough,” Joker snarled, totally done here. “Jesus fuck, you really think we wanna listen to this shit? You’re fucking disgusting, both of you faggots.”

  “Yeah, Joker’s right.” Nails lifted his chin, and the circle of men tightened. “I’ve been lenient because I have to admit, this had a certain entertainment value, but now I’m fucking grossed out. You going to come quietly, Cuddy, or do we have to drag you?”

  “No.” Ace shook his head. “No trouble from me.”

  He started to pull his hand away from Spider’s, but there was no earthly way that the other man was letting go. Panic made Spider’s grip painful, and Ace knew that they’d only be separated by force – and force was the one thing that he didn’t want to happen tonight. Not to the man that he loved.

  “Please, baby,” he whispered. “Please let me go.”

  “I can’t,” Spider said, his throat closing with grief and pain. “I can’t.”

  “You have to,” Ace told him. “Don’t give them any reason to hurt you. Please. I can’t see that, Liam. I can take anything they do to me… but I can’t watch anything happen to you. Don’t ask me to.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Nails grated out, jerking Spider back and away painfully. “Let the fuck go, dick-sucker.”

  “No!” Spider cried as Ace started to walk unforced and unassisted towards the van in the distance, close to the woods. “Ace! Ace!”

  “Shut up,” Joker said to him viciously. “Shut up, or I’ll saw off his cock first thing, instead of last. You want that?”

  Right away, Spider’s voice died in his throat. Of all the things that he’d thought these men would do, that hadn’t even crossed his mind, and suddenly all he saw were years and years of nightmares in front of him. Years and years of wondering what the man that he loved had gone through before finally being given the blessed release of death.

  Spider fell to his knees now, watched as Ace climbed into the back of a black van calmly. Spider did nothing when the van started up, nothing when it pulled away, nothing when one by one, the MC members disappeared into the distance.

  There was nothing he could do to stop any of it. It was over.

  The man that he loved was walking to his death with dignity and courage, and all Spider could do was kneel in the snow and watch.

  Watch and be proud of Ace.

  In the sudden deafening silence, Spider looked up at the blue sky, just for a few seconds. That was when Tex began seizing, twisting and jerking in violent convulsions and spasms on the ground. Spider gathered his strength and went to him, noting that Honey was faintly stirring and opening her eyes, and that Jack seemed to be shot in the upper arm and nowhere else.

  “Honey,” Spider said as he started compressions on Tex’s heaving chest. “Honey, call King. Now, Honey.”

  She looked around and sat up, then swore fluently and impressively.

  “Honey, call King.” Spider wiped the blood from Tex’s face, lowered his mouth to Tex’s. “Do it.”

  She finally did, but already, they heard engines in the distance roaring closer, coming from the direction of the road. She crawled over to Jack and applied pressure to his shoulder, hard enough that he groaned and started to come to.

  No, there was nothing at all to be done for Ace… but maybe nobody else had to die that day.

  Spider would be damned if he didn’t at least try to stop anybody else from dying.

  He wanted Ace to be proud of him too… even if Ace never knew.

  **

  “OK, asshole,” Nails growled from the front seat of the van. “It’s just us, so you can drop the forgiving and understanding act now.”

  “No act to drop,” Ace said. “I meant everything that I said out there, because I really do get it. If I were in your position, I’d do the same, and I know it. You do what you need to do.”

  “Fuck, man,” Nails said, greatly amused now. “You running for sainthood or something?”

  “Saint Ace,” Joker sneered. “That’s what you’re after?”

  Ace said nothing.

  “Hey, Joker,” Nails said. “Know what I remember about most saints from my Catholic school days?”

  “Nuh-uh,” Joker said. “What?”

  “Well,” Nails said. “Most saints were disfigured in some way, or tortured, or they were missing limbs, or whatever the hell. The whole point of being a saint, see, is to suffer. To suffer way more than most people ever do, and to suffer in silence and with stoicism. So, the thing is, Joker… nobody can be a saint if they’ve got it easy.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “I do say.” Nails grinned at his VP. “Now, I do believe that I owe you a reward.”

  “You do?” Joker said, perplexed. “For what?”

  “For keeping the faith when I wasn’t really forthcoming about what I was up to. I know you were straining at the lead, man, and dying to mete out some vengeance. But you held on and held back, and you respected your President. So now you get a reward.”

  “Which is?”

  “What do you think?” Nails indicated at Ace. “You get to draw first blood.”

  Joker’s breath hissed out. “When?”

  “Right now.”

  Without one second of hesitation, Joker said to Bear, who was sitting on Ace’s other side, and Cruz, who was in the back on a mattress. “Hold him down.”

  The massive men shoved Ace down to the van floor, and he went, unresisting. Joker reached into his pocket and pulled out his beloved signature knife, flicked it open. This knife had slit the throats of six women for fun, and countless rivals for club honor.

  Now it was going to make a painful point with Saint Ace.

  Ace lay still, his arms and legs pinned down by Bear and Cruz. Joker knelt next to him, smiling widely.

  “You know, Nails,” Joker said now. “I never went to Catholic school, and I don’t know much religious shit, but I do know one thing from the Bible.”

  “Yeah?” Nails watched as the knife moved closer and closer to Ace’s pale face, lazily hovered over Ace’s left cheek. “What’s that?”

  “An eye for an eye.”

  And the knife glittered beautiful, sacrificial silver as it lowered, then plunged, then twisted.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Please help him, King.” Spider’s eyes were wide with terror. “Please… please don’t just leave him to the MC. Even if you hate him, even if you think he’s pond scum, even if you think he deserves it… please don’t. Bring him back to me, and I’ll get us both out of Denver forever, I promise. You’ll never even need to think of Ace
Cuddy again for the whole rest of your life. I swear it.”

  “Spider,” King said patiently, for about the ninth time. “I’m not abandoning Ace. OK?”

  “But…” Spider looked around the E.R., saw that every member of King’s Men was still there with them, since the guys from Dangerous Curves and Dallas Foreman’s team were guarding the women in a new, secure location. “But everyone’s here, King, or protecting the ladies. Nobody’s out looking for Ace. Nobody.”

  “Liam,” King said, and the use of his real name commanded Spider’s full attention. “I am working on it. I promise you, I am.”

  Just then, King’s eyes snapped to the door, and when he saw the dark-haired man in the long white coat, he moved towards him.

  Doctor Sam Innis had seen the E.R. waiting room full of large, terrifying, scowling men and fierce, take-no-prisoners, kick-ass women before, of course. Denver had its fair share of MC members and ex-military types and ex-cons and skiing accidents and horse-related accidents, and he’d learned early on in his trauma specialization to ignore who these people were when they were outside the hospital, because when they were standing in it, they were way off their own turf, and they were lost and worried and out of control. They were on Sam’s turf – and he was the one with the information that they wanted.

  That put him in a position of power; that also put him in the direct line of fire.

  He walked into the room, and sure enough, a dozen people launched themselves at him. His dark eyes fell on one man, though, and he smiled in recognition.

  “King, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah. Hey, doc.” King looked startled. “You remember me from that night we brought in Sarah Matthews?”

  “I sure do,” Sam Innis said. “I wasn’t with you guys for long before Dr. Shane MacIntyre took over, but I kept an eye on Sarah’s case, met her Mom and brother.”

  King nodded, relaxed a fraction. He knew that this guy was young – Dr. Innis was maybe all of thirty-two – but Mac had spoken of the guy in glowing terms. Sam Innis had been amazing with Annie, Sarah’s mother, and Noah, her autistic twin brother. If he was the one taking care of Tex, Honey, and Jack, then they were in excellent hands.